Vivisections: Scripting Life in Holderlin's "Das Belebende"

In Das Belebende, the last of his Pindar-Fragmente, Friedrich Holderlin retraces a scene of genesis without generation, in an unheard of combination of verse and prose, which may initially appear to be written in German, but which, upon closer examination, shows itself to be composed in multiple languages at once. Throughout his text, the limits of a national language, as well as nature, as they may conventionally be understood, are broken through, revealing instead a force of language that belongs to none, but opens new possibilities for the articulation of life, one of the most prevalent topoi of Romantic poetics and science. Against the sedimentation of sense that one might call semantics, drawing upon the etymological derivation of the word from sigma n, or burial mound, the course that Das Belebende cuts through an originally pathless earth opens insights into the life that may be at stake in writing per se.