Robert Musil known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker was committed to aesthetics
as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted above all to
be a creative writer and he obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and
metaphoric possibilities in his novel project The Man without Qualities. This lifelong process
of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating
de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's
concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition Living and Dead Words Specific and Non-Specific
Emotions Word Magic and the Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil it
concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail
but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. The first study to utilize
the Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt edition) of Musil's literary remains (a searchable
annotated text) The World as Metaphor offers a close reading of variations and text genesis
shedding light not only on Musil's novel but also on larger questions about the modernist
artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world.
