At the beginning of his Stern der Erlösung (Star of Redemption) Franz Rosenzweig describes three “meta-” fields, which together encompass certain “irrationalities” in life that correspond to irrational numbers in mathematics: the meta-physical, which concerns God; the meta-logical, which is a matter of the world; and the meta-ethical, which revolves around the isolated human being. Nowhere, however, does Rosenzweig so much as suggest that there is something like the “meta-political”— and this despite the fact that the Star of Redemption can be described as meta-political in a philologically exact sense, for, just as an enigmatic treatise in the Aristotelean corpus acquired the title of Metaphysics simply because it came after the one entitled The Physics, so Rosenzweig’s magnum opus appeared shortly after the publication of his Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State), which, for its part, was a long adieu to the very idea of rational political thought. In a crucial passage of Hegel and the State, Rosenzweig evokes an affinity between the self-division Hegel experienced circa 1796 and the self-division Hölderlin attributed to Hyperion, the “hermit” in modern Germany. In light of the present work by Anthony Adler, it is now possible to provide an exact formula for what Rosenzweig fails to see when he compares Hegel with Hyperion: he overlooks the metapolitical and replaces it with the meta-ethical, which consists in the eremitic condition par excellence —life beyond the ethos of any given community. And the reason Rosenzweig misses the metapolitical? This can be attributed to the fact that he finds in Hyperion as a whole little more than a resonant evocation of a desperately self-divided character that he identifies now with Hegel, now with Hölderlin, and also probably with himself.

Adler uses the term “metapolitical” only in a single paragraph, where he outlines the movement of his argument from the second to the third chapter and likewise indicates how the third chapter issues into the fourth, which revolves around the “politics of life”: “The ‘happenings’ of the novel no longer take place within the horizon of a certain conception of action …