In Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's brilliant study of early German Romanticism, The Literary Absolute, the authors establish that a crucial element of the matrix of influences out of which this Romanticism developed was Kant's critical philosophy. The translators of the book write, “What The Literary Absolute demonstrates is first of all that the concept of literature arises as a response to the problems posed by Kant's critical enterprise.” Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy themselves write, “Philosophy, then, controls romanticism. In this context, and crudely translated, this means that Kant opens up the possibility of romanticism … The romantics have no predecessors. Especially not in what the eighteenth century insistently held up under the name of aesthetics. On the contrary, it is because an entirely new and unforeseeable relation between aesthetics and philosophy will be articulated in Kant that a ‘passage’ to romanticism will become possible.”

Their book traces a particular track of Romanticism as it develops in the circle associated with the journal, the Athenaeum – a track for whose importance they argue. In this chapter, I want to go back to the problematic in Kant which they identify as crucial – “the problematic of the subject unpresentable to itself” in order to clarify the issue that it presented to Hegel and to subsequent philosophers who are not a part of their sharply focused discussion of early German Romanticism. I am inclined to regard this issue involving, as it does, the relations among self, world, and representation, as, perhaps, the best around which to try to organize a view of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, but I shall not attempt any such far-reaching synthesis in this chapter.