This talk will discuss how the obsessive taxonomizing of intellectual currents as systems in European intellectual history emerges in the eighteenth century and continues to the present day. Despite their overt antagonism, German Idealist and Marxist historiographies prove complicit with one another in this respect. This talk will make the case that Heinrich Heine’s literary and political activity in the diaspora underlies a specifically poetic intervention that explains the continuity between Idealist and Marxist historiographies while offering a veritable alternative to them. Against thinking in systems, Heine’s attention to the decisive role of contingency and materiality in the developments of the supposedly spiritual domains of literature and philosophy offers a history of conflictual tendencies, conjuncturally constituted and materially modified. This talk will place Heine’s intervention in a greater tradition of dissident historiographies, spanning from the materialism of Spinoza and Marx to literary theory today.
