This study argues that Schiller’s essentially romantic essay Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1797) lays the groundwork for postmodernism’s hyperaestheticized concepts of self. It demonstrates the deliberately “contranatural” and “insane” character of Schiller’s “sentimental” or “modern” sensibility, showing that the nonrational concept of the self that this sensibility implies corresponds closely to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s, Jacques Derrida’s and other poststructualist accounts of postmodern personal identity.

self, demonic, postmodem, madness, sublime, hyperbole, romantic, unmeaning, reflection, sentimental