The Silence of Ritter's Symbol ⊗

The focus of this essay is on the poetic function of the symbol ⊗ in the fragments of Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the way it is deeply imbedded in processes of construction. I argue that, through connections to materiality, this symbol functions as a nodal point that implicates the reader of Ritter's fragment project within the same operations of constructing both symbols and ideas that inform the text. This approach entails a significant departure from the scholarship of the past decade or two, where Ritter's ⊗ has been understood almost exclusively as a phenomenon of acoustics and self-writing.