On the ambivalence of boredom in the 1850s:: J.E.!Erdmann and Langeweile as Kainszeichen der Bildung

Informed by recent sociohistorical and discourse-analytical approaches to boredom, this essay examines the hermeneutics and rhetoric of Johann Eduard Erdmann's 1852 speech Ueber die Langeweile. Framing the issue as a problem of Bildung, interestedness, and holistic individuality, the post-Hegelian philosopher grapples with boredom's normative ambivalence as a sign of both moral weakness and cultural superiority. This quandary, I argue, is instructive in several ways. It substantiates the thesis that in the 1850s the discourse on boredom underwent a process of reconfiguration and complexification. Second, the uneasy nexus the lecture perceives between boredom and Bildung is indicative of the discrepancy between the humanist ideal of bourgeois subjectivity and its everyday experience. Third, the text deflects this discrepancy by turning boredom into a disciplinary category, resulting tacitly in a restrictive notion of Bildung and identity.