Ideas from All Sciences, Shuffled Together Like Cards: Encyclopedic Wit and the Game of Chance in Jean Paul

This article examines the comparison Jean Paul draws between his notetaking practices and a game of cards in an often-cited footnote to the Vorschule der Ästhetik ( Preschool of Aesthetics ). Setting out from the knowledge that the footnote’s description of a “collection of notes” that could be shuffled together like cards does not reflect the material reality of Jean Paul’s literary estate, the article reads the passage instead as a hypothetical reflection on the roles of chance and witty combinatorics in the author’s work. It does so by setting its focus on a series of intertexts, including Hegel’s critique of Jean Paul, Lessing’s accounts of the role of chance in his bibliographic and literary work, and a parallel description of note-taking in Jean Paul’s own short text “Die Taschenbibliothek.” These texts, which focus in various ways on the relationship between information management and the aleatoric, pave the way for an appraisal of Jean Paul’s poetics as a playful yet risky way of engaging with the overwhelming amount of information made available by industrial modes of production—a problem that has only increased in relevance in the centuries since Jean Paul.