The Politics of Pointing: Lessing's Fingerzeig and the Limits of Figural Reading

Lessing's Fingerzeig— a “pointer” that guides without determining judgment—has often been treated as a stylistic habit rather than a hermeneutic principle. This essay reconstructs it as an ethics of interpretation, a gesture that orients without completing and leaves judgment to whoever follows. Reading the Erziehung alongside the Fragmentenstreit and images of pointing, from Caravaggio's doubting Thomas to Tauber's 1755 portrait of Luther, the essay sets the Fingerzeig beside Auerbach's figura to show what each makes visible in the other. Both arrange history into epochs. Only figural reading orders those epochs toward fulfillment. The Fingerzeig withholds that fulfillment, and the withholding is its vulnerability. A pointing hand can be closed by interpretation or by seizure, and only the first requires a reader. Lessing built provisionality into the Fingerzeig and could not build in its observance, a limitation with political consequences that outlived the eighteenth century.