Abstract

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s fragment ›Ledwina‹, like its homonymous protagonist, has a primarily medial, and therefore transmissive, profile. This profiling is based on Ledwina’s suffering which at the same time provides the material for overcoming it. Assuming a – tentatively formulated – poetics of decrescence, this specific constellation can be traced insofar as the dwindling but not completely disappearing (text) body is concerned with its epistemic-poetological potential. A potential which allows for the aesthetic and human pathological approaches to (literary) figures of suffering to be reconfigured. The concept of trans-corporeality (S. Alaimo) clarifies this reconfiguration. From this perspective, the text opens up to an ethics of vulnerability and puts the impositions of a standardizing health episteme up for discussion.