Reading the ‘So-Called’: The Beautiful Soul, Hysteria, and Affect

ABSTRACT This essay turns towards the figure of the Beautiful Soul in German Classicism and contemporary critical theory. I will first examine its appearance as an aside in a 2018 interview with the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, and explore the Beautiful Soul’s relationship to hysteria as first identified by Jacques Lacan in his reading of Freud’s Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse (1905). Then, I will turn to some passages from Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), read with and against Book vi of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). I will conclude with a brief reading of the Beautiful Soul through the lens of affect theory, with reference to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rita Felski. In my readings, I am looking for modes of interpretation that pay attention to how the terms of the material, historical world incapacitate certain subjects, maybe so-called Beautiful Souls, to fully occupy their place in the ethical relations of embodied life.