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Goethe’s Archaeology of the Modern Curse (Orest, Faust, Manfred)

Today the curse has disappeared from epistemological memory. We curse people and things without an institution that would guarantee its success. Because of this, curses also cannot fail; instead, they have degenerated into profanities and insults. The curse has become historical. The current interdisciplinary ensemble of cultural studies has explored an archaeology of the curse based on speech-act theory.1 In this context, there has primarily been an interest in pre-modern literature and especially for Shakespeare’s royal dramas, in which the institutions of the curse serve as the background.2 But even Johann Wolfgang Goethe—the Enlightenment humanist and classicist—can impart significant insights into the archaeology of the curse since his dramas show how the institutions constitutive of the curse have changed. After (I) elucidating the theoretical background of the curse, we will describe (II) the paradigmatic structures of the curse in Iphigenie auf Tauris: Ein Schauspiel (1787) and (III) its syntagmatic variations in both Faust: Eine Tragödie (1808) and Goethe’s partial translation (1823) of Lord Byron’s Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1817).