La follia di Hölderlin

Hölderlin’s life is divided exactly in half: the 36 years from 1770 to 1806, and the 36 years from 1807 to 1843, which the great poet spent like a madman in the house of the carpenter Zimmer. During the first half, even though he feared he was too distant from everyday life, Hölderlin lived in the world and participated as best he could in the events of his time. But the second half of his existence was spent outside the world, as though, despite the occasional visits he received, a wall separated him from any contact with external events. Hölderlin decided to obliterate all historical aspects from the actions and gestures of his life. It can only be the object of a chronicle, not a historical investigation and even less a clinical analysis. In Hölderlin, Giorgio Agamben sees an inhabitant life that neutralizes the opposition between active and passive, public and private, reason and madness, power and action, comic and tragic, and that represents the specifically political legacy that Hölderlin has consigned to western thought. An inhabitant life is a poetical life; it poetically inhabits mankind on earth, in a way that cannot be decided or commanded. A life that accepts failure as the sole destiny, in every art and study, including life itself.