The Infectious Performative: Contagion between Bacteriology and Literature

Abstract

The following reading of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Robert Koch's writings on tuberculosis analyzes varying conceptions of infection in the discursive interface of literature and medicine. What is infectious proves to be fundamentally linked to methodological questions: just as Robert Koch works with isolating the bacillus and the cultivation of "pure cultures," the problem of infection within The Magic Mountain is influenced by poetological reflections. An approach based in theory of the performative is suitable for analyzing the poetology of the infectious developed in The Magic Mountain insofar as it leads to a decisively new treatment of the relation between language and body. Against this foil, literary stagings of infection can be theoretically related to the process of writing, which shifts toward the infectious performative, in which the sick body intersects with the matter of language. As I shall argue, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain stages language as infectious material. The literary and theoretical stakes of infectious illness's treatement in literary modernity lie in the figuration of the act of writing as infectious performative. The epistemological implications of the literary-infectious performative will be worked out in a final constellation that includes Koch's bacteriological notion of infection.