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This essay explores post-Kantian challenges to the Aristotelian proposition and the rationalist model of proof. The first part focuses on Friedrich Schlegel’s efforts to develop a discourse that could reconcile the demand to speak freely with the demand to speak the truth. The second part shows how Edgar Allan Poe and Stéphane Mallarmé continue Schlegel’s project as they grapple with Romantic ideas about wit and the autonomy of poetic language.
But what would happen if I had to talk?
–Novalis,Monologue
In a deceptively simple pronouncement that succinctly encapsulates the Enlightenment understanding of language, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
declares: “every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas. It seems that one ought to begin by composing
this language, but people begin by speaking and writing and the language remains to be composed” (
In this essay, I argue that Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of language emerges within the economy of surrogate tongues that Condillac
describes. As is well known, Schlegel finds in Kant the inspiration for an account of poetry as an unconditionally autonomous discourse.
What is less often observed is that Schlegel, like his contemporary Hegel, works to unsettle the hegemony of the Aristotelian proposition
(
Hegel goes further, explicitly rejecting traditional propositional thinking in which the subject is a stable element to which various
predicates can be added or subtracted in order to fashion statements of truth or falsity. In his doctrine of the “speculative sentence,” it
is not simply that the distinction between subject and predicate is erased or that they are melded together into some “higher” unity.
To analyze a speculative sentence is not to follow a linear trajectory from start to finish. The path is alternately a circle, an
oscillation forward and backward, and a series of nearly discontinuous starts and stops. Throughout, the constitutive incompleteness and
instability of any given sentence is glaringly on display. No individual formulation can be entirely self-determining, establish itself as
the definitive iteration of a series, or have the final word. To the extent that the transitional elements of a speculative sentence do
harmonize with one another, any equilibrium is short-lived, and the distinction between subject and predicate reasserts itself in a new
statement whose substance is incompatible with the previous one. For Hegel, a sentence is understood “speculatively” precisely insofar as we
recognize that it is one of many sentences, or if you like, there are speculative sentence
Although Schlegel may appear to go in the opposite direction with his account of an unconditionally autonomous utterance, I intend to show
that he shares Hegel’s skepticism about the stability of the sentential form. To begin, I will describe Schlegel’s reconceptualization of
the traditional proposition, focusing on his notions of wit and linguistic arbitrariness (
What does it mean for an argument to be invested in its “own” terms rather than in words it has borrowed, as Condillac would have it, from somewhere else? In the course of questioning the hegemony of the proposition, Schlegel challenges the authority of established philosophical terminology, as well. Playing with the vocabularies of his predecessors, he repeatedly casts doubt on the internal consistency and completeness of the nomenclatural schemes from which they emerge. This considerably complicates the discussion, as Schlegel’s texts often seem to lurch back and forth between arguments about words and arguments about syntax and predication, without making it clear whether these analyses are mutually illuminating or incompatible. Schlegel does not simply present words as the “building blocks” of propositions or the parts that make up a whole. At the same time, his critiques of terminological and propositional thinking do appear to be intimately interrelated.
At the beginning of There is a kind of poetry whose
essence lies in the relation between ideal and real, and which therefore, by analogy to philosophical jargon, should be called
transcendental poetry. It begins as satire in the absolute difference of ideal and real, hovers in between as elegy, and ends as idyll
with the absolute identity of the two. But just as we wouldn’t think much of an uncritical transcendental philosophy that doesn’t
represent the producer along with the product and contain at the same time within the system of transcendental thoughts a description of
transcendental thinking: so too this sort of poetry should unite the transcendental raw materials and preliminaries of a theory of
poetic creativity—often met with in modern poets—with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring that is present in Pindar, in
the lyric fragments of the Greeks, in the classical elegy, and, among the moderns, in Goethe. In all its descriptions, this poetry
should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry. (
Es
gibt eine Poesie, deren eins und alles das Verhältnis des Idealen und des Realen ist, und die also nach der Analogie der philosophischen
Kunstsprache Transzendentalpoesie heißen müßte. Sie beginnt als Satire mit der absoluten Verschiedenheit des Idealen und Realen, schwebt
als Elegie in der Mitte, und endigt als Idylle mit der absoluten Identität beider. So wie man aber wenig Wert auf eine
Transzendentalphilosophie legen würde, die nicht kritisch wäre, nicht auch das Produzierende mit dem Produkt darstellte, und im System
der transzendentalen Gedanken zugleich eine Charakteristik des transzendentalen Denkens enthielte: so sollte wohl auch jene Poesie die
in modernen Dichtern nicht seltnen transzendentalen Materialien und Vorübungen zu einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtungsvermögens mit
der künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung, die sich im Pindar, den lyrischen Fragmenten der Griechen, und der alten
Elegie, unter den Neuern aber in Goethe findet, vereinigen, und in jeder ihrer Darstellungen sich selbst mit darstellen, und überall
zugleich Poesie und Poesie der Poesie sein. (
In
The violence of precisely this form of argument is a central concern in The demonstrations of philosophy are precisely demonstrations in the sense of military jargon. The deductions are no better than political
ones; even in the sciences [
Schlegel characterizes philosophy’s demonstrations as displays of power, or as he writes in another fragment, “According to the way many
philosophers think, a regiment of soldiers The demonstrations of philosophy are precisely
demonstrations in the sense of military jargon. The deductions are no better than political ones; even in the sciences
[
Die Demonstrationen der Philosophie sind eben Demonstrationen im Sinne der militärischen
Kunstsprache. Mit den Deduktionen steht es auch nicht besser wie mit den politischen; auch in den Wissenschaften besetzt man erst ein
Terrain, und beweist dann hinterdrein sein Recht daran. Auf die Definitionen läßt sich anwenden, was Chamfort von den Freunden sagte,
die man so in der Welt hat. Es gibt drei Arten von Erklärungen in der Wissenschaft: Erklärungen, die uns ein Licht oder einen Wink
geben; Erklärungen, die nichts erklären; und Erklärungen, die alles verdunkeln. Die rechten Definitionen lassen sich gar nicht aus dem
Stegreife machen, sondern müssen einem von selbst kommen; eine Definition die nicht witzig ist, taugt nichts, und von jedem Individuum
gibt es doch unendlich viele reale Definitionen. Die notwendigen Förmlichkeiten der Kunstphilosophie arten aus in Etikette und Luxus.
Als Legitimation und Probe der Virtuosität haben sie ihren Zweck und Wert, wie die Bravourarien der Sänger, und das Lateinschreiben der
Philologen. Auch machen sie nicht wenig rhetorischen Effekt. Die Hauptsache aber bleibt doch immer, daß man etwas weiß, und daß man es
sagt. Es beweisen oder gar erklären wollen, ist in den meisten Fällen herzlich überflüssig. Der kategorische Styl der Gesetze der zwölf
Tafeln, und die thetische Methode, wo die reinen Fakta der Reflexion ohne Verhüllung, Verdünnung und künstliche Verstellung wie Texte
für das Studium oder die Symphilosophie da stehen, bleibt der gebildeten Naturphilosophie die angemessenste. Soll beides gleich gut
gemacht werden, so ist es unstreitig viel schwerer behaupten, als beweisen. Es gibt Demonstrationen die Menge, die der Form nach
vortrefflich sind, für schiefe und platte Sätze. Leibniz behauptete, und Wolff bewies. Das ist genug gesagt. (
Introduced in the first sentence of
If the distinction between necessary and contingent propositions proves less stable than Leibniz implies, truths of reason may periodically
give rise to demonstrations that flounder in a “nexus of terms” rather than crystallizing into expressions of equivalence or contradiction.
This may not be a terribly destabilizing prospect, for in such cases the discourse will still be grounded in its core definitions, which
ought to be exempt from the demonstrations required of propositions. “By definition,” a definition should be a reliably bounded utterance, a
sentence or proto-sentence that begins where a demonstration of a truth of reason leaves off, with the affirmation of an identity or
equivalence. Schlegel’s concern is that any definition is potentially under suspicion of being an arbitrary alignment of terms disguised as
a proposition. On this account, a definition would be a military demonstration that makes no effort to dissimulate its martial character—the
first step is the last, and vice versa. This is close to Hume’s critique of rationalist thought, which maintains that the very distinction
between definitions and propositions is a fiction, since the latter are analytic in nature and thus constitute covert instantiations of the
former.
In exploring these questions, Schlegel makes no attempt to define definition; in another nod to military jargon, he instead “deploys” a
quip from the eighteenth-century aphorist Nicolas Chamfort in order to set out the various types of definitions, explaining the genus by
enumerating its species: “To [philosophy’s] definitions one could apply what Chamfort says in remarking upon the sort of friends one has in
worldly life. There are three kinds of explanations in science: explanations that give us an illumination or an inkling of something;
explanations that explain nothing; and explanations that obscure everything” (
As it turns out, any skepticism we may muster proves irrelevant, for we have to make the alignment work if we want to follow Schlegel’s
“demonstration.” In a perfect example of the military operation described at the fragment’s outset, we have no choice but to act as if the
comparison between types of friends and types of definitions were illuminating. The juxtaposition of elements comes first, and we fill in
the connections afterward, as if the substance of the links had been the driving force behind the coordination of the elements in the first
place. If in
The significance of these claims for propositions about contingent individuals becomes clearer as Schlegel’s fragment introduces more
Leibnizian terminology: “Correct definitions cannot be improvisational but have to come of themselves; a definition that isn’t witty is
worthless, and there are an infinite number of real definitions for every individual” (
Schlegel’s claim that there are an infinite number of real definitions of an individual may appear to be consistent with Leibniz’s claim
that contingently existing individuals are infinitely complex.
However witty a philosophical demonstration may be, it is always at risk of degenerating into formulaic patterns that remain rhetorically
powerful but predictable, or worse, become mere “etiquette.” Whereas Condillac cautions that we are unlikely to outfit our new ideas with a
new language, Schlegel warns that the more convincing our proofs become, the more mechanical—and unremarkable—they will seem. This leads him
to the bold conclusion of The main point is that one knows something and that one says it. To want to prove or even explain it is in most cases wholly unnecessary.
The categorical style of the laws of the twelve tablets and the thetical method, where we find set down the pure facts of reflection without
concealment, adulteration, or artificial distortion, like texts for the study of symphilosophy, are still the most appropriate for a studied
natural philosophy. In a case where one has both to propose and prove something, it’s indisputably more difficult to propose than to prove.
There are lots of formally splendid proofs for perverse and platitudinous propositions. Leibniz proposed and Wolff proved. Need one say
more? [
Propositions that call out for the proofs required to validate or refute them betray their own incompleteness. Taking his cue from Kant’s
categorical imperative and Fichte’s thetic judgment, Schlegel enjoins us to state what we know without any trace of a desire to explain,
much less to prove, what we are saying—indeed with no concern for being understood at all. This is an utterance that makes no demands; it
asks for nothing, expects nothing, and is in no way reliant on the anticipation, much less the fact, of a response. Only such a proposition,
possibly an impossible proposition, says something rather than implicitly or explicitly laying the groundwork for something that will be
articulated in a final form in a future statement. Only such a proposition makes a claim that belongs to it alone rather than being the
premise or instigation for remarks to follow.
Such an utterance must be witty. As Schlegel writes in another fragment, wit “is like someone who should perform his social duties
according to the rules, but instead simply
Read with the sentence that precedes it—“Leibniz proposed and Wolff proved”—the final sentence of
“The main point is that one knows something and that one says it.” Is the distinction between knowing and saying sustainable, or is the
very need to express oneself, to say what one knows, itself restrictive, amounting to an acknowledgement, however minimal, that what is
being said is dependent on at least the possibility of a supplementary explanation or proof that would validate it? In another fragment,
Schlegel describes a truly unconstrained discourse that unfolds such that a commitment to continue is never in force. He writes, “Even a
friendly conversation that cannot freely break off at any moment, completely arbitrarily [
Insofar as each and every verbal element is to be distinguished by the fact that it need never have been expressed because the speaker might have broken off at the previous moment, no utterance can constitute a promise that there is more to come. No instance of a truly free language submits itself to a regulation that would require that it be followed by more language. Syntax and grammar, the norms of narrative, or the logic of philosophical demonstrations—none of these paradigms will necessarily be violated or compromised, but they are all subordinated to the possibility that the discourse may stop at any point for reasons that have nothing to do with grammatical, narrative, or logical dictates.
Informed neither by an internal nor an external compulsion on the basis of which its appearance might be legitimated, this is a language of
pure choice (
According to Schlegel, a truly autonomous sentence simultaneously says “enough said” and “this might not have been said since the
discourse could have arbitrarily broken off the sentence before.” This is not simply a language in a perpetual state of becoming, forever
nearing the ideal of submitting itself exclusively to the laws it fashions for itself, as Schlegel’s “progressive universal poetry” is often
characterized. While Schlegel’s willingness to borrow from Kant and Fichte invites us to gloss his claims in terms of imperatives, promises,
and language’s paradoxical positing of its own ground, each of these dynamics risks becoming another form of “illiberality” that compromises
the autonomy of an utterance. Similarly, Schlegel cannot be content with Hegel’s insight that any proposition will inevitably generate new
statements that counter it, since this ties a statement’s meaningfulness to something other than what it says
In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various authors grapple with Schlegel’s pure linguistic
Poe’s first-person narrative relates the story of a man who commits a crime to considerable financial advantage and gets off scot-free,
leaving everyone convinced that his victim died from natural causes. A few years later, a mysterious impulse drives the narrator to confess,
and he recounts his experiences to the reader from his cell only hours before his execution. Prior to revealing his fate, the bulk of the
text unfolds as a treatise on philosophical psychology with an almost parodic indulgence in terminological excess and speculative
reflections on a “radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment” that is universal to our species, “an innate [. . .] principle of human action,
a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term” (827).
The narrator insists that the power of this drive that he settles on terming “perverse” has never been recognized because it serves no need
or goal. So strong is our allegiance to utility that if something’s usefulness cannot be identified, we are prone to overlook its existence
altogether, however influential it may be.
As the blind spot of human self-understanding, such perversity is not simply difficult to talk about—it defines the ways in which people
use and abuse language. From the Latin
Emerging where linguistic self-reflexivity becomes linguistic self-diremption, perversity inevitably confounds the discourse on perversity. This is why the narrator’s prime example of being beset by the imp of the perverse involves a “usually curt, precise, and clear” individual who gives in to the desire to “tantalize a listener by circumlocution” (828). Unsurprisingly, this is precisely what the narrator does to his reader, discoursing repetitively about this perverse impulse from as many different perspectives as possible before finally making it clear that he has fallen victim to this primitive, irreducible sentiment not once but twice, first in confessing to his perfect crime and then in trying to tell us about it. Perverse words beget more perverse words and deeds, and it quickly becomes uncertain if there is any other kind.
When Poe’s narrator says that he “settles” on “perversion” as his jargon of choice, he indirectly acknowledges that “perversion” is exactly the right word for his discussion, because what is at issue is the always-already-perverted quality of terminology, which inevitably confronts us as the product of one turn too few or too many and therefore as overly transparent or inordinately obscure. A discourse may lay claim to its own words, but only insofar as it abuses them. This is why the narrator, having explicitly questioned the suitability of the word “perversion,” nonetheless has to embrace it, his tale building to the title’s sole appearance in the body of the text as he grandly names himself “one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse” (830). If this right-wrong word was selected “for want of a more characteristic term,” the narrator adds insult to injury by showcasing it via its instantiation in the figure of the imp who ostensibly embodies this uncharacteristic character trait.
“The main point is that one knows something and that one says it.” That the unavoidable consequence of this injunction is the perversion
of the most fundamental language of the self becomes clear when Poe’s narrator recounts the circumstances of his downfall as he went about
town enjoying the fact that he had killed with impunity:
I would perpetually catch myself pondering upon my security, and repeating, in a low undertone, the phrase, “I am safe.” One day, whilst
sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud, these customary syllables. In a fit of petulance, I
remodeled them thus; “I am safe—I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!” No sooner had I spoken these words, than I
felt an icy chill creep to my heart. (831)
Syntactically, grammatically, and rhetorically, “I am safe” is a straightforward, even banal utterance. However, the moment the narrator is
struck by perversity and starts to elucidate its logic, if only to himself, the proposition begins to do strange things. The punctuation
marks between the different iterations of the three-word sentence and the accompanying exclamations (“I am safe—I am safe—yes—if . . .”)
prove to be more
In the course of Poe’s story, Schlegel’s
As a number of scholars have noted, “The Demon of Analogy” is a close reading of Poe’s story. While it is not immediately obvious why analogy as such is perverse, its transformative powers are on exhibit in every sentence of Mallarmé’s poem. In a tribute to—or parody of—Baudelaire, symbolic correspondences proliferate in the text to the point that almost any alignment of two terms becomes potentially meaningful. Various sensory and intelligible orders stand in for one another metonymically and metaphorically, ensuring that the dynamics of perception, memory, and language become hopelessly intertwined.
From the first words of Mallarmé’s prose poem, we are also dealing with a ghostly, if not a monstrous, sentence, and the poet’s trials and
tribulations will focus on trying to reconcile sentential and analogical powers:
Have unknown words ever played about your lips, the haunting and accursed fragments of an absurd sentence? I went out of my apartment with the distinct sensation of a wing sliding along the strings of some instrument, languid and light, which was
replaced by a voice that, with a downward intonation, pronounced the words: “The Penultimate is dead,” in such a way such that
ended one line and
broke off from the fateful suspension more uselessly in the void of signification. I took a few steps down the street and recognized in the
“nul” sound the tight string of a forgotten musical instrument . . . (17)
In contrast to Poe’s narrator, for whom the “absurdity” of the statement “I am safe” was not immediately evident, Mallarmé’s poet starts
out from this judgment. Virtually every commentator on the poem has followed the speaker in agreeing that “The Penultimate is dead” is a
mysterious and probably nonsensical sentence. This rush to judgment is surprising given that the word “penultimate” is not in itself
especially unusual, particularly in this context. As the poet himself helpfully explains, the penultimate “is a lexical term signifying the
next-to-last syllable of a word”; “its appearance,” he adds, “[is] merely the unwanted residue of the linguistic labor through which my
noble poetic faculty daily sobs to see itself interrupted” (18). In these terms, the appearance of a ghostly sentence is an ordinary feature
of the psychopathology of everyday life, unconscious detritus that drifts into the consciousness of a writer who cannot put his work aside
as he strolls around the city—a writer who clearly cannot break off at any moment, completely arbitrarily.
Like “I am safe,” there is nothing grammatically or syntactically puzzling about “the Penultimate is dead.” However, if this proposition
is first presented to the reader as a compact four-word statement, this is decidedly not how it initially manifests itself to the poet. He
describes the mysterious voice that articulates these words as pronouncing them such that they are part of two distinct lines of a poem; or
rather, based on the intonation, the first two words constitute the end of a line of verse, then the turn (
For better or worse, building a word with which to comment on the vexingly meaningful instances of meaninglessness with which he is
confronted does not help the poet escape the utterance that stalks him and the incomprehensibility that it evidently brings with it:
[T]he sentence came back, a virtual reality, detached from any previous stroke of plumes or palms, heard henceforth only through the voice,
until finally it articulated itself all alone, animated by its own personality. I walked along (no longer contenting myself with mere
perception), reading it at the end of a line, and, having once adapted it as an experiment to my voice, soon pronounced it with a pause
after “Penultimate,” in which I felt a painful pleasure: “The Penultimate,” then the taut forgotten string, stretched over the
Although he can rationalize why the word “penultimate” belongs to him, the poet continues to be tormented by this sentence that is not his
own. At the same time, he does gradually appear to be able to exert some control over the language, moving from “perceiving” the line to
“reading it” to pronouncing it as he sees fit, thereby ostensibly co-opting the articulation of the utterance at the very moment that it
confronts him as autonomous. To be sure, the authority the poet gains over the line by repeating it only goes so far, since he is not, like
Schlegel’s free conversationalist, able to break off whenever he likes. If Mallarmé’s poet can pause between the first and the last two
words, he must finish the sentence, the mechanics of his speech becoming interwoven with the physical logic of the string motif that runs
throughout the text. Like Poe’s narrator, he is beset by linguistic compulsion.
As a sentence that is not quite a sentence, a section of two lines of a poem that is not quite a section of two lines of a poem, an utterance with straightforward grammar comprising four eminently definable words whose literal and metaphorical meanings are nonetheless mysterious, “the Penultimate is dead” begs for exegesis. Mallarmé’s poet, however, is content to recite it and then reword it, as if this will somehow neutralize the insistent haunting: “I resolved to let the sad words wander on my lips, and I walked on, murmuring comfortingly, as it offered condolences, ‘The Penultimate is dead, she is dead, really dead, the poor desperate Penultimate,’ thinking that . . . by expanding the speech, I might bury her once and for all” (18). “Enough said” has been said, but the ghostly sentence is not listening. If anything, it is the simplicity and compactness of the spectral formulation that must be combatted, as if the Penultimate will never truly be dead and buried if all one can say about it is that it is dead and buried. This is why melancholia comes to the fore in the final line of the text, as the poet declares that despite his best efforts to come to terms with this linguistic phantom, he is “condemned forever to wear mourning for the inexplicable Penultimate” (18).
Perhaps the mistake lies in treating the Penultimate as an autonomous unit, since by definition it is subordinate to an ordering logic that
it does not control. Considered in isolation, as a self-same term, the “next-to-last” inevitably appears as a sort of ghost, an apparition
that hints at a larger series that may be invisible or lost. Having raised this problem in the form of a sentence that comes out of nowhere,
Mallarmé’s prose poem closes with the “Penultimate” as its last rather than its second-to-last word, which could be read as the poem’s
attempt to kill the penultimate by transforming it into the ultimate. The logic, however, cuts both ways, since the gesture to close with
the next-to-last risks negating the authority of the poem’s last word as “last.” If the last word is no longer final but merely almost
final, then there must be more to come, if only in ghostly form, in which case the false conclusion of the text would affirm the continued
supremacy of the Penultimate’s haunting.
We might surmise that it is imperative that the Penultimate not have the last word, even if it is the last word of the poem and if this last word concludes a pithy pronouncement of the Penultimate’s death. In fact, this does not turn out to be the central concern. As the poet tells it, the truly shocking aspect of the experience is not the prospect of interminable mourning, with which he associates sadness or resignation rather than surprise or dread. The real horror is the moment in the penultimate paragraph of the poem at which the poet realizes that the voice that has been autonomously articulating the sentence plaguing him is actually his own. This uncanny instance of linguistic self-recognition as self-alienation is followed by a second shock in the final paragraph when the poet notices that he is standing outside a shop selling string instruments. A complex web of wing, plumage, and string motifs runs throughout the text and is repeatedly perverted into all manner of sensible and intelligible forms. When this forest of symbols is suddenly instantiated in a collection of physical objects in the shop window, the poet is confronted with a signifying field in which analogism has been generalized to such a degree that it elides the very distinctions that make comparisons possible, and resemblances lose their capacity to signify. If the sentence “the Penultimate is dead” is powerful, it is because it stands outside of the field of correspondences structuring the poet’s experience of it. The ghostly utterance marks a limit at which the demon of analogy and the perversity of pure linguistic arbitrariness are at once most similar and dissimilar.
Schlegel asks us to envision a discourse in which every word or syllable is completely informed by and yet utterly indifferent to the fact that it may be the last word or syllable. The spontaneity of expression, or silence, is thereby pitted against the sentential paradigms of syntax, grammar, and logical predication. In Poe, the authority of the sentence persists, but in a perverted dynamic, turned not simply against the formal and semantic features that underwrite its constation or performance, but against linguistic iterability itself. The narrator’s stutter, “I am safe—I am safe,” is a Schlegelian witticism, its second instance emerging out of nowhere at the same time as it both dutifully repeats what has come before it and negates it. No matter how short or simple, a perverted sentence can never account for the connections, or the lack thereof, between its terms. In the end, “I am safe” is more terrifying than comforting because it cannot guarantee that this “I” has any relationship with “am” or “safe.”
In Mallarmé’s reading of Poe’s perversion of Schlegel’s language of
Read together, Schlegel, Poe, and Mallarmé present us with an eccentric cousin of Hegel’s speculative sentence that I have termed the “Romantic sentence.” On the one hand, such an utterance stridently gives voice to its own limitations, laying the groundwork for new sentential formations to come. On the other hand, it implies that the syntactic and semantic dynamics it comprises are singularly powerful and not easily superseded. According to Condillac, systematic inquiry never takes the time to fashion a “special language” for its ideas, instead contenting itself with discursive stand-ins. When the Romantic sentence becomes one such surrogate, it proves to be far from benign, perversely rendering the assumptions and goals of its would-be speaker all but unrecognizable.