Hoffmann's Terrestrial Realism: Spectral Sensing and the Afterlife of History

Abstract: This article explores E.T.A. Hoffmann's philosophical and poetic engagement with the planet as a site of historical and metabolic exchange. Throughout The Serapion Brethren , Hoffmann unearths a spectral mode of sensing which mediates between forms of biological life, geological processes of decay, and historical time. Of particular importance are how stories like "Saint Serapion" and "The Mines of Falun" interrogate new divisions between geology and geography which emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. While scientists like James Hutton and Abraham Gottlob Werner traced the temporal contours of the planet's history and material formation, naturalists like Herder and Humboldt turned to the diversity of life across its surface. Examining these modes of exchange through many of the questions regarding sensing and aesthetic mediation raised by Kantian philosophy and early romanticism, Hoffmann's cycle uncovers a grotesque kind of planetary thinking that is surprisingly aligned with what György Lukács will later call his "spectral sense of nature." Faced with the collapse of vitalist ontology, this spectral form of sensing offers an ongoing connection between the Earth and human life, a link serving to highlight the stubborn persistence of historical time and experience in the Anthropocene.