“Il romantico non va cercato nell’oggetto”. Letteratura e mediazione

Abstract

This article revisits the legacy of German Romanticism in order to rethink the relationship between literature, philosophy, and political theory. Against twentieth-century interpretations–especially those of Schmitt and Lukács–which reduced Romanticism to a form of subjective withdrawal incapable of engaging with reality, the essay reconstructs a different genealogy of the romantic novel as a space where conflict between subject and world is not dissolved but structurally mediated. Through the works of Jean Paul, the Schlegel brothers, and Novalis, and in dialogue with later thinkers such as Benjamin and Blumenberg, the paper argues that Romanticism sought to articulate new forms of collective narration capable of preserving both the dynamism of modern subjectivity and the resistance of external reality. Rather than identifying the revolutionary force of literature solely with its capacity to expose or exacerbate conflict, the Romantic tradition reveals the possibility of shaping conflict into form. This perspective challenges entrenched oppositions–order versus critique, philosophy versus literature, subject versus object–opening the way for a renewed theory of the novel as a site of mediation rather than dissolution.