The Man Without Qualities in a Universe Full of Quantities

Having as a starting point Robert Musil’s masterpiece The Man Without Qualities, the tension between Enlightenment and Humanism is under discussion and examination. This tension is articulated as a linguistic clash between scientific and literary discourse and is inscribed onto the ec-centric character of modern subjectivity and the experience of “void” within the context of modern capitalist society. However, this ec-centricity is not merely subjective, but it is an objective characteristic of modern science and art, and a structural feature of the crisis of representation in both fields, as the historicalization of the crisis shows.