On patheme: affective shifts and Gustavian culture

ABSTRACT

Despite the attention that the affective sphere has reached in the last decades, affectivity has generally been supposed to be a consequence of historical processes, not changing their direction. This article argues instead that affectivity can be a driving force in historical change, and it establishes the concept of “patheme” in relation to Michel Foucault’s “episteme”, Martin Heidegger’s “history of being” and the notion of regime in William Reddy, Jacques Rancière and Peter de Bolla. What is described as a pathemic change took place in the thoroughgoing affective transformation of European culture during the 18th century, a cultural change that in Sweden was condensed into much more compressed shifts during the Gustav III’s reign (1772–92). This latter period is bestowed an investigation grounded in an understanding of historical processes that considers the interplay between layers such as power relations, social conditions and modes of scientific thought along with affectivity. The interplay is described in terms of polyphony.

Keywords:

• Patheme
• affectivity
• historical processes
• episteme
• emotional regimes
• 18th-century culture

Introduction

The series of both cultural and political events that took place in Sweden during the two decades of Gustav III’s reign (1771–92) is highly compressed. What in the beginning of these years was still a culture of sensibilité dominated by the nobility turned into a culture of sentimentality related to the emerging bourgeoisie. The English landscape garden was introduced and spread among those wealthy enough to arrange gardens of such dimensions.¹ Nature was discovered in pictorial art as sceneries in their own right, and at the same time the idea of selling works of art on a market instead of finding royal or noble patrons was tried out.² The leading poets of the nobility (with names such as Gustaf Philip Creutz and Gustaf Fredrik Gyllenborg) were challenged by a new generation from lower strata of society (represented by Johan Henric Kellgren, Thomas Thorild and Bengt Lidner), turning sensibility to sentimentalism. German composers were invited by Gustav III or saw their future in that cold but culturally active country and changed the musical life of Sweden dramatically, with the introduction of musical Sturm und Drang as well as the establishment of the people’s voice on the scene of grand opera. Just as in Paris, the audience wept when listening to the emotionally stirring new opera repertoire—a habitude which had been impossible in the middle of the century.³

Politically, Gustav III started as an enlightened ruler—acclaimed by French philosophes – and positioned himself as no more (but also no less) than the first among equals. The king’s grip on power tightened, however; he led the country to war against Russia and played off the lower estates against the nobility. Culture was a vital part of his politics. With an expression taken from the foremost scholar of Gustavian music, Bertil van Boer, the king accomplished a “Cultural Revolution in its most positive sense” with opera as his vehicle.⁴ He made Swedish into the language of the theatre scenes (instead of French and Italian), he formed the Swedish Academy (1786) with its mission to raise the Swedish language to cultural heights and he established the both royal and national scenes for opera (1773) and theatre (1788). What he had in mind was to restore Sweden to its great past: during its imperial 17th century Sweden had been an important military power, but most of the 18th century a geopolitical dwarf. That was to be accomplished through a new national feeling including the whole population.

These cultural and political changes are the counterpart to the transformation taking place in the leading countries of Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th century. England and France were the dominant cultural powers of this period, influencing Russia, Austria, the German lands and other regions. When Sweden, placed in the periphery of Europe, experienced these changes, the time scale was reduced. It is true that the so-called “Era of Freedom” (Frihetstiden) 1719–72 demonstrated a parliamentarism which was even more thoroughgoing than England’s, but on the other fields mentioned above, it was during the reign of Gustav III that the counterpart to the European transformation can be discerned, but then as a shift followed by yet another sudden change, now as a reaction. This difference is illuminating since a more condensed process allows a study of greater precision than that of a slow transformation, which is much harder to fathom.

The great European transformation has been studied intensely. During the last three decades it has, for instance, been treated in the history of emotions by William M. Reddy, in aesthetic theory by Jacques Rancière, in theatre history by Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, in the field of musical listening music by James H. Johnson and concerning aesthetic seeing by Peter de Bolla—just to mention five authors of importance to the present article.⁵ The transformation impinged on politics, society and culture as well as on ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving. A harbinger was the political change in England that came with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when absolute monarchy was replaced by parliamentary monarchy. Another early sign was the emergence of a culture of sensibility with its roots in France, anticipated by Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel Clélie, histoire romaine (1654–60).⁶ But England is the country where most early manifestations of the transformation can be found: it was here that sentiment became vital for the discussion on morality in Shaftesbury’s thinking; it was here that the English landscape garden made a new relation between humans and nature visible⁷; it was here that the aristocratic French sensibilité was transformed into the middle-class sentimentality with its eminent expression in the novels by Richardson. If sensibilité was something for the highest strata of society, the sentimental culture was open for anyone with a tender heart, at least if they could afford to buy a novel or a theatre ticket.

A straightforward way to understand the parallel between the general European transformation and the shifts in Sweden would be to say that it is all a matter of influences or, to make this alternative more attractive, of cultural transfer. Such an investigation may uncover an intricate network of relations between cultural agents.⁸ However, the circumstance that there is a logic common for both changes—the movement from sensibilité to sentimentality, the eyes that start to see nature and naturalness as exemplary for art and not the other way around, the emerging sensitivity for atmospheric characters instead of well-defined affects, the political unrest that either leads to a revolution or to a strengthened regime—suggests that we have to do with transformations that goes deeper than an exchange of cultural goods, behaviours and attitudes. What I propose in this article is that the changes took place in the worldhood, in the relation between humans and world. Just as Foucault has described the change between different kinds of knowledge systems as one between epistemes, I intend to discuss affective change in terms of patheme.⁹ This train of thought leads from Michel Foucault’s concept of épistémè back to Martin Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte, the latter in many ways anticipating Foucault’s view on the history of knowledge during the 1960s. My readings of Foucault and Heidegger are nothing but orientations, pointing forward to the formulation of patheme as a concept. But before turning to patheme, we need to take a closer look at some of the paradigmatic changes that took place in Sweden, calling for an elucidation in affective terms.¹⁰ The investigation will be carried out in a dialogue with the already mentioned Reddy, Rancière and de Bolla, all of them using different kinds of regimes (emotional, aesthetic and visual respectively) in their in many ways convincing arguments on the European transformation, but where I uncover a theoretical void. This is where I inscribe the concept of patheme, to be developed and elaborated with the detected historical patterns taken in consideration, and leading to a conception of change understood as the interplay between different layers—affective, social, economic, technological, epistemic—that is, polyphonically.

The two changes: from sensibility to sentimentality and the ensuing grand style

William Reddy has suggested that the period 1660–1789 in France be called the era of sentimentalism. He points out four features of this period. First, Louis XIV established during the latter half of the 17th century an aristocratic code of honour in such thorough manner that, second, emotional refuges emerged such as salons and masonic lodges. In these small communities, a strong confidence in both common reason and natural sentiment led to a new optimism concerning human nature—a third characteristic. The fourth feature is that new models of such emotional refuges were disseminated in the arts: in novels, at the theatres, in paintings.¹¹

It is certainly true that Gustav III introduced a new code of conduct for the court after a French model, but even if the noblemen complained, they were not disciplined to an extent comparable to that during Louis XIV’s rule. Yet, the salons and the masonic lodges thrived—with the king himself and his brother, Duke Charles, as two prolific masons. Reason was praised by the king, who was regarded as an exemplary enlightened ruler during the earlier years of his reign. Therefore, the emotional or sentimental sphere cannot be said to be a refuge in Sweden; instead, it was a mode of feeling that was well integrated into the higher strata of society. It is, however, the fourth feature in Reddy’s account that is the most conspicuous one concerning this period in Sweden: the creation of new emotional models within the arts, which were spread to an audience that also included the third and even the fourth estate.

As already mentioned, opera became the vehicle for the king’s cultural revolution. It was the first step to establishing Swedish as a language for the stage, since French dominated the spoken theatre and Italian the operatic scene. As the former director of the new Swedish Opera, Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd, famously described it in his memoirs, the ears were to be accustomed to the hard Swedish tongue and the language itself would develop when put to music.¹² The operas were also intended to unite the people, in one case even to prepare the Swedes for warfare: the premiere 1786 of Johann Gottlieb Naumann’s opera Gustaf Wasa was scheduled as to fit into the plans of attacking the arch-enemy Denmark, and the response from the audience was so exuberant that there were voices heard shouting “Slå på! Slå på!” (“Hit’em! Hit ”em!’) when the Swedish forces on stage liberated Stockholm from the Danes.¹³ The king himself had made the plans for the opera, as he did to almost all great Gustavian operas, changing the text according to the political function he had in mind.¹⁴

Another trait was that common people were portraited in serious opera, not only as a crowd hailing the ruler: now they were individualised. This happened in Georg Joseph Vogler’s opera Gustav Adolph och Ebba Brahe (1788), again with the king behind the plan of the work. The second act takes place in a small village on the island of Öland in the Baltic Sea, where a wedding is prepared. In the beginning of the act, the young woman Maria sings a song in which she complains about being left alone on the day of her marriage. A specific tone is established, easily identifiable for a modern listener to be in folk-tone, but without any identifiable source. Vogler chooses a punctuated siciliano rhythm in 6/8, which blends perfectly into the style for a modern ear, but that rhythm was not customary in the folk music of those days, let alone folk songs. Gustav Adolph och Ebba Brahe succeeded quite well. It was performed 23 times during the years 1788–94 after its premiere on Gustav III’s birthday 24 January 1788,¹⁵ but it was among the merchants and the wealthier parts of the third estate that the opera was most appreciated. Within the court and aristocracy, it was described in contemptuous words.

Opera made it possible for young Swedish poets to climb the Parnassus. It started already during the first year of the Swedish Opera: in 1773, an author from the intellectual sphere complained that it seemed to be the case that “everybody” wanted to write or translate a libretto.¹⁶ The poets were most often nobles to begin with, but their interest decreased. Kellgren, son of a provincial priest, wrote the most important libretti, but after having reached a leading position in the Gustavian literary circles, he finally despaired over the transformation of Gustav III’s detailed plans, written in prose, to verse. Others were not successful. Thomas Thorild tried to convince the composer Joseph Martin Kraus, by then kapellmeister of the Opera, to work with him. Lidner did a similar attempt with a libretto on Medea, a character of his who was definitely in search of a composer. They did not have any commission and the king was not involved, so nothing happened. In many ways, opera had the same function in Sweden these years as it had in Louis XIV’s France. But there was one vital difference. In late 17th-century France the king was at the centre and almost deified in the operas, both directly through the tributes made to him in the long prologues and indirectly through the deus-ex-machina solutions of the plot that totally subscribed to political absolutism. In late 18th-century Sweden the reverence for the king was only indicated in the main works,¹⁷ but the role of the people and the fortunes of the nation became obligatory elements.

The discord between monarchic loyalty and strong sympathies for the people becomes evident in the writings of Thorild and of Lidner, both ardent supporters of the monarchy in periods, but also revolutionary minds with complicated relations to the political system. In his breakthrough poem “The Year 1783”, Lidner epitomises the most important events of that year (the end of the Great Siege of Gibraltar, the Treaty of Paris that acknowledged the United States as a sovereign country and the Calabrian earthquakes that devasted Messina), but also the famine in Sweden. Beside the overwhelming sentimentality of the long poem, formulating an idea of all-inclusive humanity and commending the readership to have a tender heart and be prepared for shedding tears, the poet opens a political space where the people liberate themselves (“Oh People! The horror of tyrants! Ye glory of humanity”¹⁸) but also where the king at the end is hailed as a prosperous autocrat of a Roman stature (“If of yore, great king! proud Rome had seen thee,/Cato, counsel and people would have given thee the sceptre of the sovereign”¹⁹). At this moment, it was possible for the poet to see the revolutionary forces of the people as a support to a supreme ruler; freedom and autocracy were not irreconcilable. In 1789, the king implemented the Union and Security Act, which notably decreased the power of the nobility, made most offices open for all regardless of rank and allowed all estates to acquire land—but which also gave the king the sole power over declaring war. In a way, that was exactly what Lidner had longed for.

Yet another paradigmatic change of these years came with the establishment of the sentimental English landscape garden in Sweden, replacing the French formal garden. It was the king himself—always the leading capacity in cultural affairs—who together with architects and gardeners shaped the two most important landscape gardens, the Haga park north of Stockholm and the landscape garden outside Drottningholm Palace. Jacques Rancière has recently placed the landscape garden at the centre of the establishment of “the aesthetic regime” within the arts, following upon the “representational regime” which had begun already with Aristotle. With the aesthetic regime the system of the arts and their representational function is replaced by a new reality where art (in singular) takes their place and where the opposition between art and life is abolished. But it is not only something of the artworld: the regime is decisive for how the sensible is shared and distributed among people. The aesthetic regime opens a space where the sensible is not just for the leisure class; it has been democratised. What Rancière has in his mind is a general break that concerns both thinking and relating to the world, “the experience of a form of unity in sensible diversity capable of changing configuration of modes of perception and objects of thought that had existed until then”.²⁰ This change happens, according to Rancière, at the same time as the great moment of political modernity takes place with the French revolution. In his earlier writings he specifies 1764 to be the first year when this modern era could be discerned, namely in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso in The History of Ancient Art.²¹ Yet, pace Rancière, we must look much further back in history, and what I suggest is that if any revolution should be pointed out, it is the Glorious Revolution which led to the establishment of the parliamentary monarchy in England.

Another aesthetician who goes to the 1760s to find a historical breaking point is Peter de Bolla. 1760 is the year when the first public exhibition with living artists takes place in England, and thereby a new “scopic regime” for both the visual arts, the gardens and the landscape begins to be established according to de Bolla. It provides for “the envelope within which practices of looking play out their variations; it gives shape and form to aesthetic productions, orders the relations between the artwork and the viewer, and gives definition to the subjects who look”.²² The change that takes place is from a “regime of the picture” to the “regime of the eye”, allowing for something he calls “the sentimental look”.²³ Whereas the pictorial attitude refers to that which is seen and its faithfulness to reality, the sentimental look is grounded in feeling and open for anybody who could feel. Every eye is educated to see, but what the eye sees and how it sees differ. Just as is the case in Rancière, de Bolla contrasts an earlier conception of the landscape garden with a later; yet, he contends that “the entire project of the English landscape garden is counternaturalistic; the point, indeed, is to construct an alternative vision of the real, to legislate and control the look of things in order to maximize the efficiency with which landscape reflects and represents what we desire most to see: ourselves as citizens in the demos of culture”.²⁴

In Sweden, the first public exhibition took place 1784, when students at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture were given the opportunity to show their works. The artist who would introduce pictorial art to a wider audience was however Elias Martin, coming back from England in 1780 with great plans to establish himself on a free market with pictures made from the whole country—not only towns, but also from the provinces and from nature. In his well-informed book on Elias, Mikael Ahlund shows how the artist would use different techniques, including engraving, in order to offer affordable pictures.²⁵ Ahlund can even exemplify how Elias took part in that which de Bolla calls the new “education of the eye” in the painting View of Drottningholm, where a guide points at the beauties of the nature, instead of the palace and its formal garden.²⁶

If all these examples are signs of an emancipation that release forces from below, another cultural-affective change took place during the 1780s, in Sweden often associated with Gustav III’s journey to Italy and France in 1783–84. The sentimental culture came to an end, replaced by a neoclassical turn. There is an emblematic example of this shift in two closely related symphonies by Joseph Martin Kraus who before an extended journey through Europe 1782–86 (sent out by the king to chart the latest developments within opera), composed one of the most pronounced Sturm und Drang symphonies there is. The German Kraus had as a student associated himself with members of the Göttingen Hainbund, and he wrote a pamphlet where he transferred the poetics of Sturm und Drang to music. There he stressed that there should be no system for composing, no recipes for affects according to the old Affektenlehre, only an outpouring of subjectivity: “a matter that truly belongs to the heart”.²⁷ During his great European journey, however, he recomposed his symphony in C-sharp minor from 1782 into the great C-minor symphony: quirky elements from the earlier symphony were deleted, the form became much tighter and the curious minuet (composed with the second reprise al roviesco, a mirror reversal of the first) was omitted. This is an important instance of the grand style, which forces deviating tendencies to be harmonised by a strict form.²⁸ On a much greater scale, within architecture, the projected palace in Stockholm’s Haga park would have been the ultimate expression of grandeur with its colossal format in a neoclassical style. Gustav III and the architect Louis Jean Desprez planned it for the English landscape garden—but only the foundation had been laid when the king was shot in 1792, and the project was aborted.

Politically, the second shift was expressed in the radical change where the king practically reinstituted the absolutistic rule, but where the bourgeoisie and the peasants became his foremost support. In this way, Gustav III tried to modulate a political situation which in France led to the great revolution. This is a counterpart, moderated from above, to that which Reddy has given a very convincing treatment, namely the reaction to the emotional turmoil of the years of terror in France, where the whole nation seemed to become an emotional refuge, without limits. In the aftermath of the terror, after the execution of Robespierre, sobriety ruled, and the emotional excesses disappeared.

What Reddy describes is a shift of emotional regimes. These regimes delimit what is possible to express and how to express it. Key to these possibilities is his notion of emotives, “instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful”.²⁹ The emotives show what is possible to express, but that which is convenient to utter in a society is decided by a general order: “Any enduring regime must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions, an ‘emotional regime.’”³⁰ Reddy’s own main example is precisely the change of emotional regime from the sentimentalist regime, which culminated during the Reign of Terror, to the liberal “Romantic management regime” stabilised in 1815. Whereas no opposition between reason and emotions was to be found in sentimentalism, the sobered mind of the new regime made a such distinction.³¹

From episteme to patheme

“Regime” is the keyword in the theoretical perspectives presented by Reddy, Rancière and de Bolla. The regime determines and delimits how we feel, think and see at a specific point in history. Yet, even if they all contribute to the understanding of the historical changes I have discussed, their perspectives also have their limitations and inconveniences. Reddy’s concept is restricted to emotions and their expression, which is only a narrow sector of the affective sphere and bound to a historically specific kind of affectivity. When de Bolla analyses the scopic regimes, his point of departure is that different systems legislate and control the visual appearance of things, meaning that one kind of heteronomy is followed by another one—as if a new system were installed through an authoritative decision. In the case of Rancière, there is an ideological distortion that makes him blind to the aesthetic import of the earlier phases of the English landscape garden: according to him, they only demonstrated a substitution of the rectilinearity of the French formal gardens with the curved line and therefore did not change anything in terms of political repression. The stars align only when the aesthetic regime has a parallel in the French revolution.

Even if we have to do with different conceptions of regimes, regulating different fields (emotions, visuality and the arts), there is a common denominator to be found among them—a figure of thought used by Foucault in his reflection upon epistemic orders: the figure of historically conditioning structures. Much criticism has been levelled at Foucault’s concept of episteme, starting already with his mentor Georges Canguilhem’s review of The Order of Things³² and, not the least, continuing with Foucault’s own transformation of his method into the later genealogy and the investigations of power. But instead of just dismissing Foucault’s concept of episteme as a false path, I intend to go back into its configuration and reconfigure it through a step further back into a thinking that preceded Foucault’s formulation, namely to Heidegger’s “history of being”. This step back also opens for a step forward in a new direction which allows for both affectivity and plurality—to the patheme.

“Patheme” sounds very much like an affective counterpart to Michel Foucault’s concept of “episteme” (the association is wilfully put into play on my part, but as we shall see there are also good reasons to separate them clearly from each other). The words seem to be constructed in the same way. But if we take a closer look at them, then we see that the Ancient Greek word to which “episteme” goes back, epistēmē, combines the prefix epi- derived from the preposition epí (“upon”) and the verb hístēmi (“make to stand” or “set up”), which would give something like “that which makes something stand” or “that which sets up”, whereas “Patheme” comes from páthēma which combines páskhō (“to suffer”) with the suffix -ma, indicating the affective result of an action. The last syllable corresponds however to the modern English suffix -eme, which is often used in linguistics, standing for a fundamental element or the smallest contrastive unit. In other words, etymologically the three letters e-m-e do not indicate the same. In the case of “episteme”, they are a part of a verb; in the case of “Patheme”, they are a suffix in a word that in Ancient Greek means “that which befalls someone”, “suffering” or “misfortune”.³³

In Aristotle, páthēmata tēs psychēs are “affections or impressions of the soul”.³⁴ When conceptualised in the present article, however, I orient myself in the direction of the first meaning just mentioned, “that which befalls one”, and the relation to the event character indicated by the Greek suffix -ma is therefore kept. Patheme has to do with event, but what kind of event and what relation it has to that event we do not yet know. However, I also allow the parallel to episteme—with its character of setting up or institute—to make itself noticed, drawing on the concealment of the etymological differences of e-m-e in modern English.

If we turn to Foucault to see what he did with the word epistēmē in The Order of Things (1966), then we find that his épistémè is not a counterpart to the French word connaissance, “knowledge”, but that upon which knowledge is grounded in the sense of being given its conditions of possibility. Exactly this Kantian expression – Bedingungen der Möglichkeit in German—is an impediment for discursive change, which mirrors Foucault’s reluctance to discuss how it comes that one episteme can be followed by another one. It is true that he establishes his episteme as a historical a priori,³⁵ not as the transcendental condition a priori that Kant introduced, but this allows only differences between epistemic regimes to be established, not any notion of the transition from one regime to another. There are only frontiers, no no man’s land, a circumstance that makes epistemes unapt for a historical study investigating historical change itself.

At face value, the most obvious difference between episteme and patheme ought to be that the episteme concerns cognitive matters whereas the patheme has to do with affectivity. The affective sphere can of course be a part of Foucault’s investigation of epistemes, but then as a field of knowledge, open for theoretical or scientific investigation circumscribed by the epistemological limits of these sciences or modes of thought. But it is in the empirically and historically grounded investigations leading to the theoretical work The Order of Things – where Foucault introduces the concept of episteme—that affectivity is treated at length. In History of Madness (1961), Foucault establishes that passion was historically the meeting ground between the passive body and the active soul, forming them into a unity. So it was in the “medicine of humours” (in which the unity was primarily a reciprocal interaction)³⁶ as well in the “medicine of animal spirits” (in which the unity was granted by a mechanical transmission of movements).³⁷ But with the “medicine of solids and fluids”, which according to Foucault dominated the 18th century, “the entire system becomes a unity in which body and soul communicates immediately in the symbolic values of common qualities”.³⁸ Here, passion is not the meeting ground between body and soul anymore, but the region where both unity and distinction are instituted. Madness is made possible by the movement of passion which turns against itself and therefore against the unity of body and soul, bringing disorder into the unity—a disorder in which unreason threatens the system of reason. During the classical age, madness articulates its nature through a delirious language, moving away from the path of reason. That is Foucault’s archaeological perspective on madness, described in discourses made possible by the episteme of the classical age.

These circumstances draw us closer to another conception of history and knowledge, namely Heidegger’s history of being in which being is given or refused in different ways through history with altering concepts of truth. The research on the relation between Foucault and Heidegger goes back to the 1980s with preliminaries afforded by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982)³⁹ and Jürgen Habermas’s comparison between episteme and the history of being when holding a series of lectures on the philosophical discourse of modernity in 1983–84.⁴⁰ Foucault acknowledged his debts to Heidegger at a late stage, for instance in an interview from 1984, when he said: “My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger”.⁴¹ The parallels to be found between the eras of different epistemes and the eras of truth are obvious. Both outlooks differentiate between that which could be thought under the specific historical conditions and that which was unthinkable or left unthought.

A trait that falls outside the parallel, being of great importance to my elaboration of patheme, is that Heidegger’s history of being has a salient affective feature. Instead of treating affectivity as a possible field of research as Foucault does during his epistemic phase, Heidegger claims that the relation to being is dependent on moods or attunements (Stimmungen). The essential thinkers (as well as poets, politicians and founders of religion) have according to Heidegger responded to being’s voice,⁴² having been able to attune themselves to that call. In his lecture What is Philosophy?, he affords his listeners with a short overview of the history of attunements. Philosophy was born in Ancient Greece in the mood of astonishment. Early modern thinking was a thinking characterised by doubt leading to certainty, as in Descartes. Heidegger then refrains from pointing out any changes of the mood of philosophy until the late modern “fear and anxiety” mingled with “hope and confidence”.⁴³ In Contributions to Philosophy, he suggests a “reservedness” that encompasses the guiding-attunements “fright” and “awe” for the times in which he lives.⁴⁴ That means that there is an attunement (sometimes two or even three) common for being’s call and the answer to that call. This relation is not one of correspondence, but of resonance. It determines in which mode true thinking is possible.

What, then, is the affectivity of Heidegger’s response or resonance to being’s voice? It is such that without it, the thinking is empty: All essential thinking demands that its thoughts and utterances be newly extracted each time, like an ore, out of the basic attunement. If the basic attunement is lacking, then everything is a forced clatter of concepts and of the mere shells of words.⁴⁵ In the “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’”, he further says that his lecture had been attentive to “the voice of being” and that any discussion on anxiety made without such attention would lead to “a familiar assortment of psychic states observed by psychology”.⁴⁶

The affective sphere is thereby opened. It cannot be reduced to observable psychic states and their expression; instead, it has to do with the relation to the world and with meaningfulness. It is involved when those systems of thought have been developed which have been decisive for the knowledge production, such as the investigations of the relation between soul and body within early medicine and today’s neuroscientific perspectives on the function of the brain. Its configuration changes through history, with the consequence that conceptions of thinking (as the activity of the soul, psyche or mind), of the body (as something that is governed by thought, something of one’s own or something that is the material necessity for the mind) and of the world (a blunt outer world of objects or a meaningful whole) are changed and interrelated in new ways. The episteme is circumscribed and the affective sphere of the patheme has been inscribed.

World and patheme

According to the etymological discussion above, patheme should not be understood as the basic element, not the smallest contrastive unit of affectivity, that is, not some kind of atom of feeling or emotion. It is neither the discursive conditions of passions, nor an emotional signifier in speech or the opposite to matheme—all three usages that can be found today, in semiotics, in rhetoric, in philosophy.⁴⁷ Instead, I want to go back to the meaning of páthēma in Ancient Greek, “that which befalls someone”. That which befalls could here be circumstances in life, it could be fate (or any other powerful order). My intention is not to clarify what “patheme” should mean according to its etymology, yet I am interested in the etymologically extracted directionality “from … to … ”, the notion that something takes place that is decisive for the person, the subject, the human being; that he or she, a group of people or a major part of society, undergoes something. It is more primordial than the notion of an emotional state allows, the scope is wider than the presentation of a model of affectivity, and it takes place before any division between emotion and cognition.

The “that” in “that which befalls someone”, my preferred understanding of páthēma, that “that” is something of the world. Accordingly, “world” does not mean the outer world, with its objects and beings; instead, it is the relational whole that we are born into. Here, I am quite close to Heidegger’s understanding of the world concept, but since there are many conceptions of the world in his thinking, I should point out that my main reference is to his thesis “The Origin of the Work of Art”. That does not exclude his exposition of “world” in Being and Time, that is, his fundamental-ontological understanding, but the historical aspects are less clear there or even absent. If we turn to his artwork thesis, we find the well-known passage on the Ancient Greek temple:

[The temple] structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny. The all-governing expanse of these open relations is the world of this historical people. From and within this expanse the people first returns to itself for the completion of its vocation.⁴⁸

For a contemporary mind, I suppose that some problems arise from a couple of words here, especially from the “historical people” that returns to itself in order to complete “its vocation”. But this notion of the historical vocation of a people is not dead. It can be found today in China and Russia; sometimes it is heard from the United States, too, as well as from countries around in Europe. However, a more modest outlook is to be preferred. I would therefore like to diminish the dimensions, from a people to a community, and “world” should emphatically be put in the plural, “worlds”. Then we have different communities living in different worlds, understood as governing expanses of open relations.

A community shares something, and this something is a world. But how does a community share this world? Every world is disclosed in an attunement, in a mood. So Heidegger said in Being in Time: “Mood has always already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes possible directing oneself towards something.”⁴⁹ He developed his thought in different lecture-courses during the 1930s. The political stakes are quite high when we have reached this point, I know that very well, but I think that his analysis of the conditions for any community is valid, and we will have to handle the task of the negative consequences of attuned communities.

We should instead take a closer look at the attunemental aspects of the worlding world. The attunement of the world affects the community, it tunes it; it is a matter of affectivity. That is where patheme is inscribed. Patheme is decisive for how human beings relate to what surrounds them, it conditions human reflection and action, it is decisive for the relation between human beings. In other words, patheme is decisive for the world. Further: it manifests itself in the relation between people (both as individuals and as communities), but also in the relation between human beings and other beings, be they alive or not.

Is then patheme after all not just another model of affectivity, such as those of the Stoa, in Descartes, or, let’s say, in Paul Ekman? It is true that affective models can influence the way we feel and relate, but they should rather be seen as the systematisation of actual modes of affectivity, grounded both in the episteme and the patheme, that is, how knowledge is created and how relations are set up. What concerns patheme in this context, it is accordingly not a model of affectivity; instead, it is the ground of worldhood, or more precisely, at this stage of the investigation, it is the ground of the affectivity in the worlds that world.

Again, I chose “world” in the plural, “worlds”. One reason to do so could have been that we today do find many different theories of affectivity, spanning from Ekman’s theory with its tenets going back to not only Darwin but also Descartes, to that of Deleuze and the advocates of the “affective turn” with a manifold of pre-personal intensities and the tenets going back to Spinoza. (Or might it be the case that Deleuze touches upon a new breaking point?) However, according to the train of thought in this article, they are all related to the patheme of the modern era, being different configurations of the same patheme that began with the early modern philosophies of Spinoza and Descartes and has had its most recent instances in the combination of on the one hand calculation and neuroscience, on the other hand excessive emotionality and experiencing. Experience is nowadays calculated to an extremely high degree. So, since I would argue that we have not left the modern patheme behind us, at least not completely, that cannot be the reason why I use “world” in plural. Yet, there are shifts within the suggested patheme, shifts that do not totally break with that which has been, but form new configurations or new permutations. It is these different configurations that allow us to not only be in the world in different ways, but also to be in different worlds.

A specific affective theory, such as Ekman’s theory of emotions or Deleuze’s theory of the affects, is not a new creation that organises the affective sphere in a new way, but it is grounded in the patheme and the episteme. Whereas the episteme makes it impossible to create knowledge outside the epistemic limits, the patheme enables ways of relating and feeling. Further, I would even suggest that episteme is partly dependent on patheme, since patheme implement the relations between that which appears in the world; it is decisive for the way of appearing of that which appears in the world.

Change, for instance the change that can be acknowledged when new theories are developed, is then dependent not on a thought system, but, instead, on when the relations between things and between phenomena are changed: when they appear in new ways. Their way of appearing together, with this “together” as an expressly relational term, brings us into not an ontology of things but a changing ontology of relations. Theory, just as the word indicates, makes us see in a specific direction, it makes us aware of how things appear, their way of appearing together—it does not construct their way of appearing.

With patheme we may ask questions that exceeds such limitations, namely to relations between human beings and non-human beings, between humans and environment, between humans and their worlds. The patheme is decisive for the emotives, but not restricted to them; it is related to the episteme, but not determined by it. Instead of being a condition of possibility or of appearance, it is the ground of affectivity. It does not show itself in any other way than in the disposition for relations to other men, to the world and to things as well as other beings. The term “disposition” should not be confused with Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit, which is sometimes translated with precisely “disposition”,⁵⁰ since it is not related to a human being who finds itself in a world but rather one who is pre-disposed for something—like the glass that could be broken in a specific situation, but still being whole.

It must further be emphasised that patheme is not the same as the affective disposition itself. Instead, it is the disposing-configuring (both verbs in the active form of present participle) grounding (with the noun being active) of affectivity. It is not something that can be reached and pointed out, but it manifests itself as dispositions without being present, but at the same time not being absent, since the absence would make it possible to make it present.

Layers in polyphonic textures

To bring the three main positions on history discussed here together: the monolithic character of Foucault’s epistemic eras, of Heidegger’s being-historical epochs and of regimatic thinking such as Reddy’s are troublesome. All of them allow for irregularities—Foucault has the madman who thinks outside the order of reason, Heidegger embraces those who he calls “the future ones” in the midst of modern machination,⁵¹ Reddy observes those who defy the emotional regime—but these are only exceptions. Obviously, a notion such as patheme runs the risk of repeating the one-sided character of these alternatives. But patheme is conceived as neither an affective counterpart to episteme nor a less pretentious name for the attunement to the voice of being in Heidegger or a regime that allows for a limited scope of expressions as in Reddy.

Being faithful to my investigations of historical change during the 18th century, but open for a broad application on different phases of history, I can neither reduce it to power relations or social transformations. Instead, I think that different layers—be they power relations, social conditions, economic structures or modes of scientific thought—may have a higher impact than the others for a historical process, but the role of affectivity has too often been blended out or been reduced to a secondary or even tertiary role, being a consequence of things that really matter.⁵²

Are there any modes for such a thinking of interrelations between layers? There are concepts that seldom have been used in the understanding of historical processes, namely those with a background in music. Heidegger obviously comes close since he relies on Stimmung in the attunement of world and thinking to the voice of being (“voice” is in German Stimme; “to put in tune” stimmen, “attunement” Stimmung) in a historical moment. But he declares again and again that music has nothing to do with his thinking. However, music allows for exactly an interplay between different layers that I have called for, namely a mode of understanding that allows for polyphony.⁵³ One voice in this polyphony may be the main voice, but there are counter-voices, too. When a counter-voice is formed, it should have its own identity, but the relation to the main voice is still there, it can be traced in the configuration of the main voice. Any rendering of the historical processes that we are taking into account here should be characterised by polyphony. Such a thinking also allows a sensibilisation for change, transition and transformation. It is exactly the process between points in time, between different states, between events that is given attention.

Patheme, understood from this point of view, elucidates the parallels between the cultural transformation of European culture during the whole 18th century and that of Gustavian culture during two decades. Different layers are put in interplay. A culture of sensibility within the nobility is transformed to a bourgeoise sentimentality, which in its turn is followed by a new, forceful classicism in the great style. The bourgeoisie is rising and both the power over politics and aesthetics are dislocated in their direction; the political transformation unleashes forces that threatens the order or destroys it, but afterwards comes a restauration. The system of royal or nobiliary patronage within the arts begins to give way to the market, where exhibitions and concerts are opened for a wider audience, allowing the third estate to both take part of and reconfigure the artistic creativity. For a moment, the disintegrated system gives free reign to subcutaneous forces that leads to a new formation.

The timespans differ, but the logic is the same. When power relations, social conditions, economic structures and modes of scientific thought change, a new world emerges in which the things, relations and phenomena appear in new ways. This means that a change within the patheme has occurred, and it is only afterwards that the counterpoint behind the change can be discerned. The compressed transformation that took place in Sweden makes it a suitable object of research for a pathemic investigation. It appeared in many different guises: besides music in gardening, in writing, in acting, in politics, in thinking, in social relations. They all shared a kind of affectivity that obliterated definitions, systems and limits. They all placed feeling at the centre, even for ethical questions and political considerations. This is one instance of a shift in the configuration of the patheme, soon followed by another shift, manifested in a grand style both aesthetically and politically.

Acknowledgments

In its earliest form, this article was presented as a paper held at a conference of The European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions in 2018. The article was also discussed at the Higher Seminar in Aesthetics at Uppsala University in 2021, to which I was kindly invited by Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann. Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Åsa Arketeg have made important remarks thereafter, and useful advices came from two anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Riksbankens jubileumsfond, Sweden, under Grant P17-0625:1

Notes

1. Cf. Magnus Olausson, Den engelska parken i Sverige under gustaviansk tid (Stockholm: Byggförlaget, Olausson 1993).

2. Cf. Mikael Ahlund, Landskapets röster: Studier i Elias Martins bildvärld (Stockholm: Atlantis, Ahlund 2011) and Gunnar Berefelt, Svensk landskapskonst från renässans till romantik (Stockholm: Norstedt, Berefelt 1965).

3. Cf. Johan Henric Kellgren, letter to Abraham Niclas Clewberg 2 Mar. 1781, in Samlade skrifter, vol. 6 (Stockholm: Bonnier, Kellgren 1923), 99–103 and Erik Wallrup, “Känslosamheter—Om den sentimentala parken, salongen och operasalongen”, in Vingslag över Haga, ed. by Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, Wallrup 2019), 16–20.

4. Bertil van Boer, “Gustavian Opera: An Overview”, in Gustavian Opera: Swedish Opera, Dance and Theatre 1771–1809, ed. Inger Mattsson (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music,1991, 159.

5. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reddy 2001); Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, Rancière 2013) and “The Distribution of the Sensible”, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, Rancière 2004, 2023); Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Zärtlichkeit: Höfische Galanterie als Ursprung der bürgerlichen Empfindsamkeit (Munich: Fink, Meyer-Sickendiek 2016); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, Johnson 1995; Rancière 2023); Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). The list of works could of course be multiplied several times, covering literature within fields such as the studies of the arts, history, the history of emotions and the history of ideas; taking the different language areas into account the number of titles would rise exponentially.

6. I here follow Meyer-Sickendiek. An important reference of his is to Delphine Denis’s article “Les Inventions de Tendre”, Intermédialités 4 (2004Denis 2004; Rancière 2023): 45–66.

7. Rancière has recently discussed the English landscape garden in relation to the aesthetic regime, but he states that the radical change came only with its later advocates such as Uvedale Price, William Gilpin and Richard Payne Knight. Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Time of the Landscape: On the Origins of the Aesthetic Revolution, trans. Emiliano Battista (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023).

8. An investigation of this period in terms of cultural transfer and histoire croissée has been made by me in “An Academy of Academies: The Cultural Transfer of the ‘Academy of Music’ to Sweden”, in Courts, Colonies, and Cosmopolitan Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Music: Selected Papers from the Ninth Biennial Conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, Stockholm and Zoom, 6–14 August 2021, ed. Beverly Wilcox (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Steglein Publishing, forthcoming).

9. The concept was introduced by me in the article “Turning an Occasion into an Event: Patheme, Mood and Atmosphere at the Funeral of Gustav III”, in Resounding Spaces: Approaching Musical Atmospheres, ed. Federica Scassilo (Milano: Mimesis International, 2020). It is also referred to in my article “Music’s Attunement: Stimmung, Mood, Atmosphere”, in The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, eds Jonathan De Souza, Benjamin Steege and Jessica Wiskus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

10. The treatment of this period can only take some of the most exemplary cases into account. An extensive rendering awaits in a monography planned as the final result of my project “The Affective Shift of Music in the Gustavian Era”, financed by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden.

11. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 145–146.

12. Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd, Dagboksanteckningar förda vid Gustaf III:s hov af friherre Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd: Första delen, Journal för åren 1776 och 1779 samt berättelse om Svenska Teaterns uppkomst (Stockholm: Norstedt, Ehrensvärd 1878), 216.

13. Birgitta Schyberg, “‘Gustaf Wasa’ as Theatre Propaganda”, in Mattsson (ed.), Gustavian Opera, 320.

14. Cf. Schyberg, “‘Gustaf Wasa’ as Theatre Propaganda”, 300.

15. Fredrik August Dahlgren, Anteckningar om Stockholms Theatrar (Stockholm: Norstedt, Dahlgren 1866), 233.

16. Johan Fischerström, En gustaviansk dagbok: Johan Fischerströms anteckningar för året 1773 (Stockholm: Bröderna Lagerström, Fischerström 1951), 110: “hvar och en”. My translation. All translations from Swedish are made by me if not indicated by the translator’s name.

17. Overt references for the king could be made in prologues, though: that was for instance the case with Gudmund Jöran Adlerbeth’s translation of Antoine Léonard Thomas’s libretto to the opéra-ballet Amphion, set to music by Naumann (1778). However, the prologue was written for the occasion of Gustav III’s birthday.

18. Bengt Lidner, “Året 1783”, in Samlade skrifter (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1878), 62: “O folk! Tyranners skräck! Du mänsklighetens ära!”.

19. Lidner, “Året 1783”, 79: “Om fordom, store kung! det stolta Rom dig sett,/Dig Cato, råd och folk en envåldspira gett”.

20. Rancière, The Time of the Landscape, x.

21. Rancière, Aisthesis, 1–2.

22. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 16.

23. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 6.

24. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 148.

25. Cf. Ahlund, Landskapets röster, 116–117.

26. Ahlund, Landskapets röster, 286.

27. Joseph Martin Kraus, Etwas von und über Musik fürs Jahr 1777, facsimile of the 1778 original (Munich and Salzburg: Katzbichler, Kraus 1977, 1977), 6: “eine eigentliche Sache fürs Herz”. This musical sentimentality would find an echo in the musical discussions in the Musical Society of the university town of Åbo (Turku) during the last decade of the century, described in Jukka Sarjala’s Music, Morals, and the Body: An Academic Issue in Turku 1653–1808 (Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society, Sarjala 2001), 184–229. In this fine study, Sarjala shows the affective change from affectus understood as movement (within the body and music) of the first half of the 18th century to the sensibility of the second half with a self heard in tones, grounded in sympathy.

28. The “Germanic strength” of the symphony has been traced in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—an overt example of music in the grand style—by the musicologist A. Peter Brown in “Stylistic Maturity and Regional Influence: Joseph Martin Kraus’s Symphonies in C# Minor (Stockholm, 1782) and C Minor (Vienna, 1783?)”, in Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in honor of Jan LaRue, eds Eugene K. Wolf and Edward H. Roesner (Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1990), 413–414.

29. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 105.

30. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124.

31. Cf. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 216.

32. The review, published in Critique 1967, is focused on episteme, and Canguilhem asks if it is really “something more than an intellectual construct” and that it is “what the person talking about it says it is”. Georges Canguilhem, “The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito?”, trans. Catherine Porter, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Canguilhem 1994), 81.

33. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English lexicon, 9. ed., rev. and augm. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Liddell et al. 1996), 1285.

34. Aristotle, On Interpretation, in: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 115 [I. 16a5].

35. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences(New York: Random House, 1971), xxii.

36. Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy (London and New York: Routledge, Foucault 2006), 226.

37. Foucault, The History of Madness, 226.

38. Foucault, The History of Madness, 227.

39. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982).

40. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, Habermas 1984). The English translation was published in 1987 as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987).

41. Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York and London: Routledge, Foucault 1990), 250. Michael Schwartz shows with great care that Foucault’s main reference was Heidegger’s two-volume work Nietzsche, published for the first time 1961. Cf. Michael Schwartz, “Epistemes and the History of Being”, in Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, eds Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota University Press, Schwartz 2003), 164.

42. The expression “voice of being” appears in Heidegger’s philosophy of the event (Ereignis) during the late 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. Responding to the silent voice of being is a way of relating to being (das Seyn, as Heidegger spells non-metaphysical being).

43. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (London: Vision, Heidegger 1958), 77–91, cit. 91.

44. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Heidegger 1999), 277.

45. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 19.

46. Martin Heidegger, “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’”, in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Heidegger 1998), 233–234.

47. In semiotics, patheme has been defined as “l’ensemble des conditions discursives nécessaire à la manifestation d’une passion-effet de sens”. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Jacques Fontanille, Sémiotique des passions: Des états de choses aux états d’âme (Paris: Seuil, Greimas and Fontanille 1991), 85. William Mosley-Jensen defines patheme as a rhetorical device: “A patheme is an emotionally full signifier that works by transferring a powerful sentiment through language and people.” William Mosley-Jensen “Argumentative Dimensions of Pathos: The Patheme in Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address”, in Disturbing Argument: Selected Works from the 18th NCA/AFA Alta Conference of Argumentation, ed. Catherine H. Palczewski (London and New York: Routledge, Mosley-Jensen 2015), 274. In philosophy, the role of mathematics in Alain Badiou’s thinking has been contrasted to affectivity in Michel Henry, a polarisation between mathemes and pathemes. Cf. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, Foucault 2006), 125–134.

48. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of art”, in Off the Beaten Track, trans. and eds Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Heidegger 2002), 20–21.

49. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, Heidegger 1996), 129. Italics in the original.

50. For instance in Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kiesel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, Heidegger 1992).

51. Heidegger devotes a section of Contributions to Philosophy to “the ones to come”, who are “attuned” and therefore “destined by the last god”, in contrast to everybody else in the modern world. Heidegger, “VI. The Ones to Come”, Contribution to Philosophy, 275–281, cit. 278.

52. Here, I am in line with the historian of emotions Rob Boddice, when he writes that “the affective life of humans is as much a moving force as anything else, and in fact is not distinguishable from political, economic or rational dynamics”. Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, Boddice 2019), 15.

53. Strangely enough, the structure of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy can be said to be fugal (cf. Iain Thomson (2003), ‘The Philosophical Fugue: Understanding the Structure and Goal of Heidegger’s Beiträge, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 34, no. 1, 2003: 57–73), even if it must be noted that Heidegger uses Fügungen (jointures) for the different sections of that work. The notion of “polyphony” or “counterpoint” in relation to thought and different modes of analysis is often nothing but a metaphor or a figure of speech. Among the contributors to a non-trivial understanding of such polyphony, we find Friedrich Nietzsche, Mikhail Bachtin and Edward Said.