Making Sense: Hands, Faces & Creation in Rilke's Auguste Rodin and Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

Readers of Rilke's writings on Rodin may well be surprised to find them just as full of isolated body parts as is his notoriously fragmentary novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Here they are not gruesome, but part of an aesthetic mereology (system of parts and wholes) that governs, at least according to Rilke, the metaphysics of the artwork. Not only are these body parts separable from the whole work, or person, but the sensory interactions between them seem also to obey their own laws: in Rodin, they help bring about and maintain what is called the 'Kunst-Ding' as a differentiated object belonging in, but not to, the world of everyday things; in Malte, in the faces that don't fit and hands that don't follow orders, grotesque sensory misidentifications stymie the desire to be 'wirklich', and recognition is a verbal, not visual, matter. The two texts are drawn together in their shared project of positing a theory of aesthetic creation in which the senses are used by both creator and viewer to bring about the art-work as a wholly unique and self-governed entity - and the problems of this project are exposed.