Effetti di corpo e teologia della carne in Morte di Danton di Georg Büchner

The present contribution aims at highlighting the political, social and private intertwinings of Georg Büchner’s first play, written when he was a twenty-one year old German student of anatomy engaged in revolutionary events. Between rhetorical figures and the economics of libido Danton’s Death investigates the limits of sovereignty in Western societies as heritage of the French Revolution and its excesses. Body incarnates its own effects by means of paradoxical situations, wit and ambivalence. Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis yields useful clues to investigate the semiotic value of the flesh as well as revolutionary rhetoric and semantic denial. Robespierre’s fantasy of purity nourishes a Sadian-sadistic innocence. The condensation of low and high, purity and filth, discipline and disorder, theological and scatological elements, denounces a scattered social order dominated by perversion, ravaged by deception, exploitation and betrayal. Büchner’s clinical clear-eyed, autoptic analysis reaches beyond the idea of sovereignty to a perverted desire of mastery breaking out into violence and fanaticism. Considering the overabundant flesh the body becomes the very protagonist of the drama: the place of possession and exclusion, idolatry and cannibalism. What dominates is a pure, wasteful expenditure; autonomous and unlinking acts reject the Oedipal conflict. This entails the substitution of a personal law for the collective one thus suggesting that the history of the Western onto-theological tradition is the history of the sequestration of the life of the body into fetishes and the disavowal of creatureliness, as Paul Celan argues in The Meridian. Celan draws attention to the ethical questions raised by Lucile as a way of relating to otherness, i. e. to poetry as the very voice of each single creature.