On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not

my knowledge never been attended to explicitly. What should be obvious is that if the fragment, or rather its notion, is to bring out the radical atotality of writing, or the text, it must be a notion of fragment thoroughly distinct from its (historically) prevailing notion(s). A concept of the fragment that merely emphasizes incompletion, residualness, detachment, or brokenness will not serve here. A piece struck by incompletion, a detached piece, a piece left over from a broken whole, or even an erratic piece, is structurally linked with the whole or totality of which it would have been, or of which it has been, a part. (Gasché 1991: vii).

[…] it is well established that Friedrich Schlegel introduced the form of the frag-ment into German literature after the strong impression he received from the publication in 1795 of Chamfort’s Pensées, maximes et anecdotes—the Roman-tic fragment is not a pensée, maxim, saying, opinion, anecdote, or remark, all of which are marked by only relative incompletion, and which receive their unity from the subject who has authored them [and this is a solution Beckett has resisted throughout his creative career]. Although Friedrich Schlegel refers to it as the “Chamfortian form,” the Romantic fragment is, as Philippe Lacoue­Labarthe and Jean­Luc Nancy have shown, “a determinate and deliberate statement, assuming or transfiguring the accidental and involuntary aspects of fragmentation.” The Romantic fragment “aims at fragmentation for its own sake.” (Gasché 1991: viii).

The fragment is among the most characteristic figures of the Romantic move-ment. Although it has predecessors in writers like Chamfort (and earlier in the aphoristic styles of moralists like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld), the fragment as employed by Schlegel and the Romantics is distinctive in both its form (as a collection of pieces by several different authors) and its purpose. For Schlegel, a fragment as a particular has a certain unity (“[a] fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog,” Athenaeumsfragment 206), but remains nonethe-less fragmentary in the perspective it opens up and in its opposition to other fragments. Its “unity” thus reflects Schlegel’s view of the whole of things not as a totality but rather as a “chaotic universality” of infinite opposing stances (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/)