Abstract

Asking if Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities can be read as a city novel, this paper links modern concepts of space (from the contexts of philosophical, biological, and psycho-physical theories around 1900) to Musil's prose, which is described as a praxis of “space writing”. The author presents this kind of space writing as an attempt to cope with the modern city, going beyond the classical episteme of representation. The paper concludes that modern cities constitute a dispositif for developing new concepts of space and new practices of writing.

Keywords: city, literature, man without qualities, relationalism, space, Heidegger, Musil

How to Cite: Schnödl, Gottfried. "Das relationale Apriori Wiens / Das städtische Apriori des Relationalismus: Stadt, Raum und Text in Robert Musils Mann ohne Eigenschaften." Le foucaldien 2, no. 1 (2016): 1–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.19 [Note: In 2022, Le foucaldien relaunched as Genealogy+Critique.]