Novalis's Fragments Published in New French Edition by Allia

Éditions Allia has released "Le monde doit être romantisé," a new collection of philosophical fragments by Novalis, translated and edited by Olivier Schefer. The volume expands on earlier selections published by Aubier in a bilingual edition. Schefer's translation preserves the original's fervor with its anacolutha, dashes, abbreviations, elliptical formulas, erasures, and incompleteness. First published posthumously in 1802, these fragments do not form a system; Novalis acknowledged that "incomplete appears most tolerable in fragment form." They draw heavily on the philosophy of Fichte and Schlegel and are described as "starting points for interesting chains of ideas" and "texts from which to think." Influenced by the spirit of Romantic wit (Witz), the fragments demonstrate how the unfinished can be accomplished. Novalis presents a program of writing and self-invention that abolishes boundaries between art and life, overturns hierarchies in art, and crosses disciplines. For him, aesthetics is conversion, translation, crossings, exchanges, and passages. This program anticipates modernity, containing seeds of gestures from dandyism to performance that remain relevant today. The edition includes a critical apparatus by Christophe Kihm.