System and fragment. The speculative poetics of early German romanticism

The paper deals with the conception of a theoretical foundation, starting from early German Romanticism (Fruhromantik), concerning the awareness of a conflicting truth that manifests itself historically. This foundation contrasts with the concept of theory in modern science and attempts to recover some features of the ancient notion (beyond the subject-object dichotomy). This implies the recognition of a certain performativity of theory and thus of poetics, which shows the ineffectiveness of the conceptions employed in modernity, and particularly shows the shortcomings of the concept of literary theory. We then analyse the problem through the conception of the speculative poetics of Romanticism, studying the tension between fragmentary discourse and the singular idea of system in Romantic thought.