Woyzeck's body: linguaggio e realtà dopo Hegel

Abstract

The distinction between Leib and Körper, when subjected to accurate scrutiny, turns out to prevent a full consideration of the physicality of the body, denoted by the concept of Körper. In German Aesthetics of the 1830s, and in particular in Georg Büchner’s works, this distinction is overstepped to recognize and to fully express the physicality of the body, without however giving in to reductionistic (e.g. materialistic) approaches: the overcoming of this distinction imposes to revise the encyclopaedia of the sciences, including art that should return to reality and abandon its “idealistic” pretensions. This paper shows how Büchner’s Woyzeck rigorously applies these assumptions and represents one of the first examples of anti-romantic “de-artisation” of art.