Goethe’s Faust, widely considered the birth of German poetry, is an epic concerned with what it means to sell your soul. This project traces how the play renders Faust’s desire and its various implications of pedagogy, semiotics, cliché, ideology, economics, and rhetoric. It draws on a rich history of Goethe scholarship and contributions from literary studies, linguistics, history, and media studies.
Faust’s desire is symbolic: it orbits language. The wager he makes with Mephistopheles in Part I is predicated on a lifelong frustration with “rummaging in words” [in Worten kramen], a pessimism that there exists no symbol that unifies its signifier, signified, and referent in one. Words for Faust are empty, devoid of any promised knowledge regarding their objects. His identity as an educator, in turn, is predicated on the lie that instruction does not merely “lead my students up and down, across and crooked, by the nose” [Herauf, herab und quer und krumm,/Meine Schüler an der Nase herum]. Come Part II, desire whisks Faust through an adventure across European time and space—introducing paper money to the Holy Roman Empire, touring Classical Greece, and seducing Helen of Troy in Sparta before resolving to reclaim land from the ocean to construct a colony of polders along the coastline. Desire throughout remains symbolic, underlining the semiotic logic of capital; the rhetorical and ideological underpinnings of colonialism; and the indispensability of language as a medium of representation.