The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant 9780804768269

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The Equivocation ofReason

The Equivocation of Reason KLEIST

READING

KANT

]ames Phillips

STANFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillips, James, 1970The equivocation of reason : Kleist reading Kant I James Phillips. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-5587-0 (cloth : alk. paper) r. Kleist, Heinrich von, 1777-r8n-Philosophy. 2. Kant, Immanuel, I724-r8o4-Influence. 3· Philosophy, German-19th century. I. Tide. PT2379·Z5P55 2007 838' .609-dc22 Typeset by Classic Typography in II/14 Adobe Garamond

For my friend and mentor Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction I.

Penthesilea and the Law Before Oedipus

26

2.

A Universal Sublime Conclusion

73 II2

Notes

!27

Index

139

Preface

In the usual interpretation of Kleist's reading of Kant, there is a contradiction that is either glibly explained away or not explained at all. Kleist, recognized as a proto-modern writer, nevertheless offers a pre-modern reading of Kant. Of course, this contradiction can be resolved by observing that the Kleist who was traumatized by his encounter with Kantian philosophy in March 1801 is not the Kleist who in the ensuing decade, until his suicide on the shore of the Wannsee, liberated literature from the imperative of edification and the settlement of ambiguities, from Christian and bourgeois interiority, and other so-called markers of literary pre-modernity. But this manner of resolving the contradiction is reactionary, because it makes of Kleist's Kant crisis a psychopathological no-man's-land between the dogmatic metaphysical conceptions of the eighteenth century and the experimentalism of modern art: it maintains the compartmentalization of the disciplines by preempting the question of their essence. In I80I, Kleist misread Kant, and out of disillusionment with his previous ideals of Bildung, he committed himself to literature. This makes for a very neat account, but what is thereby lost is any possibility of addressing the interrelations and continuities between the Enlightenment and modern literature. To reject this account is to take issue, not simply with an interpretation of an episode in Kleist's biography, bur rather with the myth of the mutual exclusiveness of thought and art. Even if it is just to assert that in Kleist's Kant crisis, as in an emblematic event, metaphysical dogmatism, philosophical modernity, and literary modernity go their separate ways, it is for that reason equally plausible to note in the crisis a convergence, a point of indifference and undecidability. This blind spot, owing to its structural importance in delimiting disciplines, cannot be left a blind spot. Kleist's reading of Kant is still and no longer dogmatic metaphysics, already and not yet literature. Philosophy and literature

X

PREFACE

do not form that spurious opposition within which the philosophy ofHegel's

Aesthetics cannot bur espy in the definiteness of "literature" its own power to define. AB the moment when Kant's philosophical modernity, Kleist's literary modernity, and the dogmatic metaphysics of the preceding age declare their irreconcilability, and thus as a point when their irreconcilability was not taken to be self-evident, the crisis appears to pulsate with the active and counteractive forces shaping the modern before their ossification into organizational elements. Kleist's reading of Kant is contemporaneous with Schelling's philosophical privileging of art and the program advocated by the Jena romantics of a fusion of literature and philosophy. That Kleist, unlike Schlegel and Novalis, does not enunciate a philosophy of art and an art of philosophy is not grounds enough to uproot his interpretation ofKant from the problematic of romanticism and, by the criteria of an age with a more entrenched division of intellectuallabor, to judge it a misreading. Kleist's Kant crisis is not merely a matter for his biographers and literary critics. The evidence for the charge that Kleist misread Kant is, at first glance, indisputable. In his fixation on the thing in itself, Kleist seems not to notice that Kant has changed the rules of the game: the burden of the Critique of Pure Reason is an account of the transcendental structures of cognition, rather than a quest for things as they truly are. As far as epistemology is concerned, Kant's critical revolution was to formulate knowledge in terms of appearance and the universal conditions of appearance, instead of in terms of appearance and its particular essence. As science after science was infused with the Kantian spirit, the important linkages in a body of knowledge came to be seen to lie in a different direction. Linguistics, for example, arises by resigning the concern with the essence of a word to the "mysticism" of poets and focusing attention on the structural interrelations between words. Henceforth, to a large degree, a system stands or falls depending on whether its components fit together or not, on whether it "works": externality, wherever practicable, ceases to anchor the system. This receives political corroboration and provides epistemological corroboration of political changes. For its part, the immanence of modern civil society asserts its timeliness in opposition to the transcendence of sovereignty. The social contract that is made among free, equal individuals is the bond of society, according to Locke: the sovereign, continuing to exist in a state of nature, need be tolerated only so far, since as soon as the sovereign declares open war on society, the higher right to refashion the commonwealth can be invoked. On the basis of no more than a structural analogy between society and the new sciences, the imperi-

PREFACE

XI

alist discourse of the West pronounced the indigenous political structures of its colonized peoples to be superannuated. With the disavowal of the exteriority of the sovereign-a disavowal that is more than rhetorical and less than consummate-there also comes a disavowal of the exteriority of foreign peoples: state-sanctioned regicide at home is the concomitant of European imperialism. Even if the suggestion of a consistency to a given historical constellation is open to dispute as a tic of modern historiography, its Kantian credentials are not open to dispute. What begins with Descartes and his modeling of a general method on the coherence of mathematics-the founding gesture of philosophical modernity-becomes entrenched with Kant by means of the greater flexibility of his philosophy in relation to the natural sciences. In one sense, Kant is the proper name of capitalism. He is the thinker who, in effect, if of course not explicitly, convinces the sciences that their legitimacy lies in maximizing their resemblance to the world coordinated by the mechanisms of exchange. The essence surrenders its role in determining the truth of an appearance to the universal conditions of appearance, just as the value of an object is determined not by the object as such but by the totality of values. With his aspiration to know things in themselves, Kleist comes across as the lost sheep of modern epistemology. Failing to make the transition to modernity, he rushes after the essence as it retreats into philosophy's past. Yet to interpret Kleist's despair and eventual suicide as a cautionary tale, as a dramatization of the perils of an epistemological interregnum, is to trivialize both Kleist and Kant. Kleist's despair is not without a resonance in Kant, since even if he ushers in the age of the coherence theory of truth, Kant himself vacillates within the interregnum between conflicting understandings of truth. Kant consolidates modernity, but his thought is not reducible to coherence. Kleist's despair, which has been attributed to the pre-modern conceptions he brings to his reading of Kant, informs the modernity of the literary works whose contestation of the notions of totality and coherence can itself be said to be Kantian. Whatever would like to close in upon itself and state its own truth is to be broken open. Kant (i.e., the corpus and reception bound to his name) has more than the one project. The question of essence, which, on the one hand, lapses in the exposition of the subjective conditions of appearance and the corresponding consistency of all phenomena, on the other, itself assumes a critical function. The essence of a thing is the unassimilable x that totality must exclude in order to demarcate itself as totality and whose exclusion is simultaneously the disproof of totality.

Xll

PREFACE

Insofar as Kleist's reading ofKant fastens on the unassimilability of things in themselves, it can be argued that it is critical rather than obscurantist: it asks more of a body of knowledge than internal consistency. If immanence is the keyword of philosophical modernity, the contestation of immanence is seemingly the keyword of the literary modernity that comes into its strength in the nineteenth century. And given that, crudely speaking, philosophical modernity predates literary modernity by two centuries, "modernity'' in its two uses here does not even have the same chronological extension. But this does not entail that the two regimes do not communicate. One program of philosophical modernity, namely, the criticallabor of the Enlightenment, is discernible in Kleist's literary works. This should not be a surprising thesis. Kleist's works can be summarized as a declaration of the insolvency of the Enlightenment only on the basis of a thoroughly anodyne conception of the thought of the eighteenth century. The Age of Reason that comes to an end in the person of Kleist is simply the age in which the equivocal nature of Reason went untheorized. Kant's Critique ofPure Reason, implicitly yet unmistakably, delineates incompatible significations of "Reason." The friction between Reason as the prudence of the self-sufficient bourgeois individual and Reason as the transcendental in its intractability to the old and new dogmas of Church and state (for example, Kant's objection in "The Paralogisms of Pure Reason" to the immortality of the soul is that the individual soul is not genuinely transcendental) is aggravated virtually to the point of hostility. It falls to Kleist to bring this hostility into the open. The promise of the Enlightenment, and for Kant the Enlightenment was a promise and not an actuality, not only still sounds in Kleist but also sounds with an intensity and purity wholly missing from the "rationalism'' that has always known how to pass off its accommodation to political, social, and economic interests as the autonomous recognition of what is. Kleist continues the Enlightenment's struggle against dogmatism, taking it up against the dogmas that the Enlightenment harbored within itself. That which is premodern in Kleist's reading of Kant and belongs to dogmatic metaphysics is inseparable from his modernity and its critique of the dogmas by which the modern age succumbs to obscurantism.

The Equivocation ofReason

Introduction

THE

CRISIS

OF

EVIDENCE AND

MARCH

r8or:

RECEPTION

Two extant letters furnish the evidence of the Kant crisis that has generated such varied responses in the literature on Kleist. This famous reading has been extolled as paradigmatic of an affective hermeneutics 1 and construed as the displacement of a frustrated homosexual desire. 2 Commentators less concerned with pathology have taken discovering the text that Kleist is paraphrasing as a challenge: Ernst Cassirer has argued for Fichte, 3 Ludwig Muth for the Critique ofthe Power ofjudgrnent, 4 and Ulrich Gall for Reinhold's Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation ( Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermogens). 5 But insofar as "the Kantian philosophy" 6 to which Kleist attributes his misfortune in the one letter is supplanted in the other by "the more recent so-called Kantian philosophy,"7 the search for a text or even a concordant body of texts behind the crisis endeavors to settle a question left open by Kleist. To be sure, Kant himself could not be dubbed a so-called Kantian, and Cassirer and Gall accordingly have grounds for directing their search among Kant's apostates.

2

INTRODUCTION

But given that the letters express despair over the attainment of knowledge, it cannot be ruled out that "so-called" does not qualifY "Kantian" but rather the "philosophy'' that, on Kleist's reading, amounts to a misology. In the light of the reservations that hedge any answer to the question "What is this a reading of?" Emmanuel Terray has suggested that the crisis was less a simple reaction than a dramatic mise-en-scene marking the end of a long, complex evolution. 8 A commentary might more fruitfully apply itself to the question that Kleist appears to have been asking himself: "What can this reading do?" That an aspect of Kant's philosophy receives in the crisis a reformulation as rigorous as it is violent is scarcely ever suggested in the secondary literature. True, Carol Jacobs is "tempted, rather, to call this confrontation Kant's Kleist crisis," 9 yet it is a remark made only in passing. Tim Mehigan even denies that Kleist is offering anything apart from a straight paraphrase of Kant. 10 Martha B. Heifer is neither blind nor unsympathetic to the departures in Kleist's interpretation ofKant, but what she discerns as a literary critique ofKant's transcendental project 11 is better understood as a radical reinvention and restitution of that project and its Enlightenment program, as will be argued in the course of this study. The task of reading Kleist out from under orthodox Kantianism, of thinking through an exegesis too often condemned or rehabilitated, as preparatory to developing a number of concepts by which the works of the two could be examined productively (and by which the notion of Kant's influence would already imply a Kleistian Kant) remains to be done. Of the two letters to which I refer, the one dated 22 March 1801 and addressed to Kleist's betrothed, Wilhelmine von Zenge (the future wife of WT. Krug, the successor to Kant's chair in Konigsberg and, like Kleist, a butt of Hegel's contempt) and the other to Kleist's half-sister, Ulrike, dated the following day, the earlier is the more expansive: I recently became familiar with the more recent so-called Kantian philosophy, and I may impart one of its leading ideas to you without fear of its shattering you as deeply, as painfully as it has me. Then too, you are not versed enough in the whole matter to grasp the import completely. I shall therefore speak as clearly as possible. If everyone saw the world through green glasses, they would be forced to judge that everything they saw was green, and could never be sure whether their eyes saw things as they really are, or did not add something of their own to what they saw. And so it is with our understanding. We cannot decide

INTRODUCTION

3

whether that which we call truth truly is truth or whether it merely appears so to us. If the latter, then the truth that we acquire here is not truth after our death, and it is all a vain striving for a possession that may never follow us into the grave. Ah, Wilhelmine, if the point of this thought does not strike you to your heart, do not smile at one who feels himself wounded by it to his most sacred inner being. My one, my highest goal has sunk from sight, and I have no other. Since coming to the realization in my soul that truth is nowhere to be known here on earth, I have not touched another book. I have paced idly in my room, I have sat by the open window, I have run from the house, an inner unrest at last drove me to taverns and coffee houses, I have gone to plays and concerts for distraction, and, to find some relief, I have even committed a folly which I would rather you learned about from Cad; and still my one thought, which my soul, with this tumult all around it, kept belaboring with burning anxiety, was this: your only, your highest goal has sunk from sight. 12 One might well believe that what Kleist takes away from the critical philosophy is not so much Kantian as Cartesian, namely, the skeptical hypothesis that we are being deluded by an evil demon, with no possibility of correction. In a move familiar to readers of Kleist's fiction, a proposition is here swept up by affects: the thought of the second paragraph quoted belongs at once to a physiology. With the image of the green glasses and the lament over the deceptiveness of the phenomenal world, the distinction between appearance (Erscheinung) and illusion (Schein), fundamental to the critical philosophy as its security against both dogmatism and skepticism, is elided. On its own, a failure to note this distinction is unremarkable: Kleist's text does not thereby distinguish itself from numerous early misreadings of Kant. Overlooking the rationale for Kant's theory of appearance, Kleist is thrown into despair. Kleist's question is not how a priori synthetic judgments are possible (the revolutionary inspiration given for the Critique of Pure Reason), but what a thing is in itself. With the traditional question of knowledge, he can no longer make any headway in the face of the Kantian philosophy, and he nonetheless does not take up the critical question in its place. Leaving himself with nothing, Kleist falls through the gap between two epistemic arrangements. If he escapes down a path of no return, the ostensible naivete and conventionality of his interpretation ofKant should not be taken to imply that this path is a dead end. Kleist is an epistemic traditionalist, inasmuch as he pursues a knowledge of things in themselves; he eschews a knowledge of appearances and yet endorses Kant's definition of

4

INTRODUCTION

things in themselves as unknowable. The old and the new definitions of truth enter into conflict, and the understanding is unable to decide between their claims: "We cannot decide whether that which we call truth truly is truth or whether it merely appears so to us." It would be supercilious to dismiss Kleist's reading of Kant on the assumption that what the thing in itself is for Kleist is self-evident. Kleist is not a dogmatic realist left shamefaced by Kantianism. The proof of this is Kleist's literary corpus. Between the necessity and universality of dogmatism and the necessity and universality of the critical philosophy there is a gap, and it is the contingencies and singularities of this gap that Kleist's literary works make their element. In his letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, Kleist laments the uncertainty of our understanding of things as they truly are, that is, independently of the mediation of the apparatus of human cognition. This uncertainty, needless to say, is the destructive preliminary of the critical philosophy. What a thing really is, what it is in itself, is immaterial to the critical claims to necessity and universality. By means of the first Critique's doctrine of things in themselves, Kant plays on the inability of his predecessors to establish the a priori, since any concepts derived from things in themselves would be "merely empirical, not a priori." 13 Necessity and universality rest with appearances and the mediation of sensibility, understanding, imagination, and Reason within the original synthetic unity of apperception. It follows that, for Kant, things in themselves are flightier than appearances. In Hegel's words, they lie "behind the phenomena like wild beasts lurking in the bushes of appearances." 14 The critical philosophy, as it were, dethrones the Platonic Idea and transforms it into a brigand. Of course, the allusion to Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas in the preceding sentence does not at all contribute to the argument in defense of the cogency of Kleist's interpretation of the thing in itself. What follows here is accordingly a reading of Kant that prepares the way for a number of claims relating to Kleist.

CROSSING

THE

LIMIT

The Critique ofPure Reason places the thing in itself under a theoretical ban. It is not above time and space in dignity but outside of them in unknowability. Its proscription is the inaugural act of the critical philosophy. It is relegated to the past and nevertheless assigned a structural role precisely as a

INTRODUCTION

5

relic. Jaakko Hintikka has queried whether the thing in itself is anything more than a "fas;on de parler, an oblique illustration of the necessity of considering the objects of our knowledge qua objects of the operations which we use in gaining information of them." 15 This assessment is in line with Norman Kemp Smith's claim that the thing in itself, ultimately senseless in the context ofKant's phenomenalism, is a "pre-Critical or semi-Critical survival."16 But Hintikka and Smith thereby make light of the explicit role that the thing in itself plays in demarcating the field of experience. Kant calls the thing in itself a limit concept (Grenzbegriff). 17 Sensibility, as the defining mark of finitude, must come up against a limit, and that limit is, for Kant, the thing in itself. Finitude stands in need of the unattainability of the thing in itself in order to preserve sensuous intuition's traditional distinctness from the intellectual intuition of the infinite being that is God. The finite being, as it does not create things, knows them not as they are but as they are received through the sensibility. In his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, Kant writes: "God cognizes all things as they are in themselves immediately and a priori through an intuition of the understanding; for he is the being of all beings and every possibility has its ground in him." 18 God's understanding is immediate; there is nothing that intrudes between it and the object as their mediation. The universal, which mediates between particular objects, has no place in the divine understanding. Human understanding, however, cannot dispense with the universal without simultaneously forgoing any claim to knowledge. In order to know anything at all, it must paradoxically turn its back on things as they are, or, more precisely and without any suggestion of paradox, it must renounce its always unfounded claim to immediate knowledge. The understanding mediates the sensibility, and the sensibility mediates the understanding, while the thing in itself is reserved for God. Kant's God, like the God of Leibniz, manifests his omnipotence in the always absolute creativity that invests each thing with the immediacy of the singular. The lawfulness that human understanding discovers in the repetitions of phenomena cannot be ascribed to things in themselves without impugning God's creativity. Nevertheless, the anarchy that empiricism discovers in human perceptions cannot, by means of an exposition of the irrelevance of universals to the divine understanding, be presented as a "fact" of the world of our experience without overlooking the composite and thus self-mediating nature of human cognition. God's faculty of cognition is indivisible, because the passivity of sensibility is inappropriate to an absolutely necessary and

6

INTRODUCTION

hence independent being. The concept of the thing in itself is Kant's security against a Promethean uprising of sensibility. It is not so much an unknowable thing as the concept of the unknowable. It is the limit that human knowledge requires in order to be itself (otherwise it would lose itself in indeterminacy), just as it is also that which our knowledge can never come up against, being humanly unknowable. As that which cannot be experienced, the thing in itself is the non-experience in relation to which experience acquires its distinctness and manageability as a field for the application of principles. It is the non-experience that informs every experience. Such a proposition recalls the stalled dialectic of deconstruction, but more is involved in Kant's doctrine of the thing in itself as a limit concept than the constitutive contamination of opposites. What is at stake is Kant's privileging of the complete, the integral, and the bounded. Kant's modernity appears at times to be very Greek. The classical world's horror of the infinite, which flares up in a final exaggerated act of self-assertion in Origen's thesis of the finitude of God, has a legatee in Kant. Breaking with the Aristotelian and scholastic orthodoxy that defined the applicability of the method of a given science by its domain, Descartes initiates philosophical modernity through the unchecked "imperialism'' of his mathematicism. The historical ambiguity of Kant's move-its classicism and modernity-is that he adheres to the infinite sway of mathematicism and nonetheless expounds it too as a domain. Transcendental philosophy arises with a thought of the limit, venturing its step beyond the empirical only into a domain whose completeness secures its amenability to law. In response to Hume's critique of the legitimacy of the a priori, Kant denies experience of things in themselves. Universality and necessity are not merely the constructions of habit imposed on the congeries of our perceptions, since whatever we perceive is always mediated in advance by the universality and necessity of our a priori intuitions of time and space. Kant repudiates the nominalist thesis that only particulars exist, because the irreducibly particular has no verifiable existence within the field of experience opened for us by our a priori intuitions of time and space: the spatiality and temporality of our perceptions already win the latter over for universality. The thing in itself, which is defined by its absolute independence of our means of perception, is the snark for which empiricism has been hunting in vain: it is the nonsensical particular that empiricism imagined it could discriminate from the universals of our cognitive apparatus. The thing in itself is unknowable. For Kant, its existence is its unknowability. Kant refutes nom-

INTRODUCTION

7

inalism by means of his exposition of the universality and necessity of time and space in the "Transcendental Aesthetic," but he nonetheless proceeds to reward nominalism for its very defeat. It is as though nominalism is granted a higher order of truth in Kant's philosophy-the task of circumscribing the entire domain of knowledge-precisely because it is wrong. Notwithstanding its unintelligibility as an insoluble particular, Kant does not dispense with the concept of the thing in itself, but instead commissions its error to admonish thought to keep within bounds. Our knowledge is knowledge only so long as it is bound. Hegel's critique turns, of course, on the spuriousness of the Karitian limit (Grenze). A limit is posited and at once transgressed, since it cannot be traced without brushing up against that which is excluded. On the one hand, Kant wants to pass off his discourse of the limit as bare description, and on the other hand, he does not restrict himself to answering the question quidfoeti, but goes beyond description to ask quid juris with respect to the limit. What is the nature of the discourse of the limit? Are Kant's propositions concerning the limit of experience analytic or synthetic judgments? If analytic, what bearing can they have on the experience that they are to delimit? If synthetic, how can they adopt the independent position .in relation to experience from which to impose a limit on experience? A Hegelian would here leap to Kant's defense, pointing out that philosophical propositions cannot be made to conform to the Procrustean bed of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. This rejoinder, however, does not disambiguate the Kantian notion of experience-quite the contrary, since its gist is the unsuitability of Kant's terminology to the central problem of defining experience. The touchstone that experience provides for knowledge according to Kant is necessarily missing when it comes to a knowledge of experience and its limits. Furthermore, the delimiting criterion of experience that sensuousness is to furnish in the critical philosophy is undermined by Kant's expanded definition of sensibility to include space and time: for Kant, in the guise of temporality the sensuous-and experience with it-reaches into all synthetic applications of the law of contradiction. The temporal indices of an abstract thought retrieve it, in defiance of the empiricists, for experience by marking it with a sensuousness that belies its claim to empirical neutrality. With Kant, sensuousness itself achieves a power of abstraction. The universal is an abstraction not from sense but of sense. The a priori intuitions cannot be

8

INTRODUCTION

considered empirically neutral; they are the very domain of experience, which, in the universality and necessity of time and space, is already abstract. The non-experiential character of the thing in itself is not as straightforward as Kant sometimes makes out. That which is outside the sway of the categories of the understanding is, in its very recognizability as outside the sway of the categories, already categorized and recovered for the experience of conceptual thought. The limit that Kant traces around experience is, for the unlimited conceptualism of Hegel, an act of aggressive and indefensible modesty. In the first Critique, experience furnishes concepts with that which, in its independence, can corroborate them. But this assertion of independence does not square with Kant's point against Hume that experience can never be thought apart from concepts: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." 19 For Kant, experience is, as it were, always dissolving into thought, whereas, for Hegel, it has always already dissolved into thought. Hegel does not set a limit on thought; on the contrary, he makes thought the power of limitation itself For Hegel, Kant's philosophy is not properly at home in the transcendental, inasmuch as it displays a passivity before limits that is alien to what Hegel considers the freedom of thought. Kant is unable to persevere in the audacity with which he broke with his predecessors' naive conception of the relations between thought and the world. Thought ceases to be passive with respect to experience but invents a new passivity with respect to the limit. What is Kant's inspiration for his understanding of the role of the limit? What does the introduction of a limit to experience bring about? Kant is clear: the terra firma of experience has to be demarcated from the surrounding fog banks of illusion. But the limit (Grenze) that is to render experience whole necessarily differs from the limit (Schranke) that maps out the domain proper to a particular science, since while geometry can be assured of the geometrical and its amenability to principles by means of its distinction from the positive content of the other sciences, that which is not experience, that which lies beyond the Grenze, only is at all inasmuch as it is experienced in some way. Paradoxically, on condition that it is transgressed, that nonexperience is experienced and presents itself as that against which experience can be defined, the limit has a sense. The disciplinary role of the limit, from which Kant expects the restoration and proper foundation of metaphysics, is therefore compromised. Metaphysics, as the queen of all the sciences, is re-

INTRODUCTION

9

duced to aping its subjects with their positively determinate domains for the sake of a comparable legitimacy. Yet perhaps this lese-majeste on Kant's part originates in his keeping his eye too closely, not so much on the model of the limit in the particular sciences, as on the model of political sovereignty. Is Kant's choice of the word Grenze for the limit of the entire body of knowledge (whereas he reserves the Latinate Schranke for the limits between one body of knowledge and another) swayed by an analogy? Grenze denotes "limit" in the sense of a territorial border and derives from the Slavic granitsa. The Grenze of a state that is not a nation-state need not be taken as the expression of the homogeneity of what it bounds. In this regard, Grenze and Schranke are not convertible. In the absence of the historical contingencies of territorial wars, colonization, and exile as determinants of the border, the arbitrariness of a sovereign decision announces itself in Kant's Grenze. Kant, who in Konigsberg lived on the eastern border of the German-speaking world, more strictly, in the cosmopolitan enclave of East Prussia, maps the limits of human experience in order to safeguard it against anarchy. Human experience becomes a territory and the lawfulness of the sciences as a whole rests on the integrity of its borders. Does the doctrine of the Grenze therefore express Kant's hesitation before the freedom of the transcendental? In short, has an empirical model been smuggled into the transcendental? To what extent is the lawfulness of the sciences truly dependent on the integrality of human experience (for, to be sure, the analogy with the territorial groundedness of the laws of existing states does not amount to a philosophical rejoinder to Hume)? At the same time that he tears the thing in itself away from empiricism and declares it to be transcendent (unexperienceable), Kant betrays the transcendental (the necessary and universal conditions of experience) by submitting it to the empirical model of the jurisdiction of territorial states. The thing in itself seems intended to evoke the incomprehensible barbarian, the mute who lives beyond the Grenze. In the "Transcendental Doctrine of Method," Kant renounces the metaphysical ambition of a Tower of Babel, yet what he sets out to build in its place is not, as he says, a modest dwelling-house, 20 but rather the epistemological equivalent of the Great Wall of China. The Grenze, however, exposes knowledge as much as it binds it. "What is knowledge?" Kant asks, and in order to avoid the answer of a reductive pragmatism, he defines it against the unknowable rather than by means and ends. The Grenze abducts the debate with Hume over the status of the a priori, because, from the outset, it brings knowledge face to face with that

IO

IN T R 0 DUCT I 0 N

which is inaccessible to the senses. Mishaps and deficiencies cease to orient the definition of knowledge. In its defining exposure to the unknowable, knowledge for Kant has no truck with the tests and procedures of that which Heidegger was later to denounce as technicism. Getting things done is not the causa finalis of knowledge. This also means that Kant's securing of a space for moral action is not an afterthought in his philosophy: the suspension of so-called instrumental rationality is central to the first Critique and the confrontation with empiricism. Ethics is grounded in metaphysics, or, more precisely, the universality and necessity of metaphysics are grounded in the freedom, that is, the suspension of the rationality of means and ends, indispensable to ethical action. The Grenze is not won for ethics to the detriment of the sciences, since the sciences can only come into their own as rigorous disciplines through the intervention of the Grenze and its rebuff to the pragmatism of instrumental rationality. Even ifKant is more explicit regarding the check that the Grenze offers to dogmatism, the confrontation with Hume's legacy informs this aspect of the critical philosophy as well. The Grenze does not place a ceiling on the progress of the sciences; rather, it marks out the territory in which progress is possible. This is the territory of the dialogue with the wonder of the Greeks, since the Kantian Grenze revives the possibility of an open encounter with the unknowable. In his treatment of the question of the unknown common root of the Kantian faculties, Dieter Henrich makes a decision on the status of the unknowable that denies its constitutive role in the understanding of knowledge: "the unknown is for Kanr not, as Heidegger would have it, that which presses in on us as something disquieting in the known, but something entirely closed to us, which can disquiet us only as long as we are not certain of its unknowability."21 Such resignation is possible provided one has another means of defining knowledge than against the unknowable. In that case, however, nothing fundamental is determined at the Grenze, a notion that then appears to be a fifth wheel in the apparatus of the Critique ofPure Reason. Henrich leaves the unknown as a kind of trivial fact, where Kant's immediate successors were provoked into action by it. But to cross the Grenze is not to enrich knowledge, because to do so is to rob knowledge of the dialogue with the unknowable and thereby of its insusceptibility to the pragmatist reduction. Skepticism crosses the Grenze no less than dogmatism: the skeptic abandons the relation between knowledge and the unknowable by assigning knowledge to the unknowable. Hegel, who discerns in the critical

INTRODUCTION

II

philosophy a transcendence of the Grenze in the very adoption of a standpoint from which the Grenze can first be demarcated, has little interest in the tension between knowledge and the unknowable. Hegel's Absolute Knowledge is the blind spot in his dialectics and the moment where his thought enters into uncanny and admittedly tortuous exchanges with positivism and instrumental rationality. The voluntaristic obscurantism of the positing of the Grenze (merely arbitrary from the perspective of Absolute Knowledge) and the ostensibly sterile verbalism of defining knowledge by its opposite-in other words, the philosophical insufficiencies of Kant's doctrine of the thing in itself-have to be weighed against the philosophical insupportableness of an understanding of knowledge structured by the myths of everyday pragmatism. The objective of the Critique ofPure Reason is to show that Reason goes too far. Kant's work takes for itself the name of critique because it shows up this excess, not because it checks it. Reason calls for critique because it transcends what is experientially verifiable. The revelation of the critique is the meeting in Reason of the unknowable (the transcendent) and the knowable (experience). Reason goes too far, but it is Reason on both sides of the Grenze. Experience goes to the Grenze along with Reason, and what experience knows, it knows in the thick of unknowability. The rationality of experience is inseparable from this limit on knowability.

KLEIST's

NON-INTEGRAL

EXPERIENCE

In seeming defiance of the Kantian ban on transgressions of the limit, Kleist continues to aspire to a knowledge of things in themselves. Yet in what sense should knowledge be understood here? The dialogue with the unknowable demands that the ban be both respected and defied. Unlike Hegel, Kleist does not simply ignore the Grenze. Kleist is unable to make out the unifying Grenze that is to reinvest experience with the epistemological legitimacy that knowledge of the world could claim under God in medieval theology. The Kleistian Grenze is constantly shifting; it does not testify to the birth of Man and the reconstruction of the sciences on the foundation of human finitude and the integrality of experience. Where epistemological modernity opposes finitude and immanence to the infinitude and transcendence of the God of scholasticism, the formula ofKleist's modernity is "finitude without . " Immanence.

12

I NTR0 D UCT I0 N

Certainly, Kleist is at odds with the modernity of coherence and immanence, but there is more than the one way to break with medieval thought. Modernity structures knowledge by means of coherence and immanence, dispensing as far as possible with the authorizing power of a transcendent Creator. This breach in the way knowledge is structured (the passage from an anchoring externality to the cohesiveness of interrelations) nonetheless points up the continuity in the conviction that knowledge is structured. In Kleist's version of modernity, the imperative of a structure to knowledge is contested. This sometimes involves striking a very pre-modern note: contingencies, which coherence and the privileging of the systematic cannot tolerate, but which the correspondence theory of truth (with its ground in the externality of the transcendent Creator) is able to pick up, are given free rein. Kleist's work is the account of an exposure to contingencies. Although Kleist shares with the skeptic a despair over knowledge of the world, where the skeptic's despair attributes insubstantiality to the world, the despair of Kleist's characters attributes insubstantiality to the knower. These characters have no doubt whatsoever that the world is to be taken seriously. It is not a question of how to bridge the gap between the knower and the world. Here the skepticism concerns the problem of how the knower might resist the world. For without resistance, without some distance between the knower and the world, how are truth and error to be distinguished? Kleist dwells on the convertibility of truth and error. Again and again his characters are caught out in a misconstruction of events. Error, so long as it is containable, bears witness to the difference between the self and the world. Knowledge, which is what it is because it is distinguished from error, is not the erasure of this difference but the declaration of its manageability. Where error becomes uncontainable, the world ceases to be that of which true statements are made. It expands, becoming also that of which false statements are made. The world, for the Kleistian self, is unknowable, not through the skeptic's traditional lack of exposure to it, but rather through an excess of exposure: the Kleistian self misses the independent vantage point from which it can know the world as it is in distinction from the errors traceable to the self's endemic cognitive vices. The non-integrality of the self translates into the non-integrality of the body of knowledge as a whole. Kleist's non-integral experience is not the non-integral experience in which, according to the correspondence theory

INTRODUCTION

0

of truth, thought is open to the world. Scholasticism has no investment in the integrality of experience: relying on the goodwill of a transcendent Creator, thought can remain open to an independently existing world. For Kleist, contingency passes from being the expression of a world divinely created in independence of our thoughts and with which our thoughts, on the basis of a common external provenance, can enter into correspondence. Contingency becomes the expression of the insubstantiality of the knower. Another pre-modern note is the unmistakably crude dogmatism in Kleist's despair that the conditions on which we acquire knowledge as living beings may prevent the transference of this knowledge beyond the grave. For such dogmatism, knowledge is the direct reception of things as they are. But what becomes of this immediacy after the Kant crisis? Kleist does not relinquish the dogmatism of the immediate. He has, however, been chastened by the Kantian critique and no longer takes it for granted. The thing in itself, as the immediate of dogmatism, has to be sought on the run before it is overtaken by the ordering, identifYing, and coordinating procedures of Kant's epistemological apparatus. The pace and frenzy of Kleist's works are explicable in terms of the need to rescue the thing in itself from beneath the Kantian juggernaut, to snatch at it before its integration into the totality of human experience, to live the Grenze as the site of an encounter with the unknowability of things in themselves rather than as the point at which the sciences are permitted to turn in upon themselves. For Kleist, the phenomenal realm as a whole is the site of this encounter. In this he remains faithful to the logic ofKant's argument, if not to the ostensible meaning of his terms. The Grenze, by playing a constitutive role in setting up the phenomenal realm, is ontologically essential and hence ubiquitous, rather than marginal: its marginality is its ubiquitousness. It is to Kant's credit, as Theodor Adorno suggests, that he acknowledges the Grenze and does not pass over the thing in itself in silence: "What survives in Kant, in the alleged mistake of his apologia for the thing-in-itself-the mistake which the logic of consistency from [Solomon] Maimon on could so triumphantly demonstrate-is the memory of the element which balks at that logic: the memory of nonidentity." 22 Kant's "inconsistency" lies in the theorization of that which is purportedly outside theory. Far from representing a lapse, this "inconsistency'' is the moment when Kant escapes the dilemma of thought's self-contradictory determination and rigidification as either active (in the absence of an outside) or passive (in the face of a world

14

I N TR0 D U CT I0 N

on which it simply reflects). The pure activity of thought, which Kant's German idealist successors upheld against him, is not the assertion of the freedom of thought but its closure, since thought discovers its freedom in selfinterrogation before the decision between determining itself as either active or passive. Kant retains a memory of the non-metaphysical that is necessarily incomprehensible within the metaphysics of purely active thought. The inexorability of Kant's drive to metaphysics and his unshakable commitment to the securing of the a priori is often censured, but this vehemence, which Kant shares with Plato, cannot be fully or fairly understood apart from the still vital confrontation with the non-metaphysical that is enacted in the Critique, as in the Socratic dialogues. In the Critique ofPure Reason, Kant both rejects and affirms the thing in itself It is the non-necessary and non-universal that balks at the logic of consistency. It marks out the domain of this logic and likewise files a caveat against its claim to absolute hegemony. Hegel, who makes do without the analogy with the groundedness of the laws cif a territorially bounded state, sees no need to recognize an outside where Adorno's non-identity could cling to existence. Skulking along the Grenze, Kleist is a denizen of the shadows of Kantianism, and in his intolerance of these shadows unillumined by the light of metaphysics, Hegel is intolerant of Kleist. Where Hegel is the thinker of absolute mediation, Kleist is the thinker of the immediate. His works flicker with haecceities, singularities, and contingencies. Mter the Kant crisis, the dogmatist's adherence to things in themselves persists, but what a thing is in itself has undergone a transformation: to know the thing in itself is not to know something in its immutability, in the non-sensuousness of that which can follow us beyond the grave, but rather to be exposed to the surprises of the non-identical, the resolutely phenomenal, the transitory, and the abnormal. In the adherence to things in themselves, there is thus a nominal continuity between the young Kleist's Platonism and the sensualism of Kleist the writer. How nominal the continuity is can be ascertained from the different relations to finitude. In his literary works, Kleist, as it were, takes up the Kantian affirmation of finitude, although as a stratagem with respect to Plato, Kleist's affirmation of finitude is the reverse of Kant's. Kant turns away from things in themselves and grounds the necessity and universality of knowledge in finitude. As Kant's uncanny double, Kleist turns away from the necessity and universality of what Kant calls knowledge and, unlike Plato, makes of finitude the

INTRODUCTION

15

site of the encounter with things in themselves. For Kant, sensibility is invested with a dignity unimaginable in Platonism, but this affirmation of finitude in the epistemological task assigned the senses extends rather than vitiates the rule of metaphysics. Kant does not stand Plato on his head by affirming finitude, since he sees to it that the sensibility he affirms is already a priori. The stability of the Platonic Ideas survives in the stability of the Kantian a priori. All Kant's attention to the extraconceptual, to existence in distinction from essence, is subservient to his stated aim of shoring up the necessity and universality of synthetic a priori judgments. In its role as the authority of individual determinations, finitude (the Kantian Grenze) has simply taken the place of the infinite in Kant's early argument for the existence of God and in the scholasticism of a thinker such as Henry of Ghent. The God of medieval philosophy is the point of mediation of things in themselves and the ground of necessity and universality. Seemingly axiomatic for the critical philosophy is the godlessness, in this sense, of the world of things in themselves and the corresponding urgency of founding the a priori anew in finitude and its world of appearances. Kleist follows Kant in making finitude his home, but he follows Plato in his understanding of finitude: it is the arena of the chaos of the senses.

AN

ART

OF

THINGS

IN

THEMSELVES

To read Kleist's literary works beside the Critique of Pure Reason is to be struck, inevitably, by discrepancies, reversals, and distortions. But the guiding question of the first Critique is not the only question that Kant poses. Kleist's fixation on the conceptually intractable admits a Kantian genealogy. In his treatment of free beauty in the third Critique, Kant's defense in the Critique ofPure Reason of the applicability of general concepts to individual intuitions is put aside. Kant is not insensitive to the singular; indeed, it can be said that romanticism owes its suspicion of the general concept to his "Analytic of the Beautiful." In our judgments of free beauty, the subsumption of the object under a general concept does not identify the object as beautiful, since beauty is not an isolable property that the beautiful object shares with other beautiful objects. For romanticism, since the beauty of the beautiful often seems to consist in the display of the limitations of conceptuality, it is the duty of art and not of metaphysics to save phenomena, that

16

INTRODUCTION

is, to save them in the individuality by which they announce themselves as phenomena (and not general concepts). In his letters "On the Aesthetic Education of Man," Schiller, for instance, writes of the "philosopher": "In order to seize the fleeting appearance he must bind it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair body into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a sorry skeleton of words. Is it any wonder if natural feeling does not recognize itself in such a likeness, and if truth appears in the analyst's report as paradox?" 23 Consolidating Johann Georg Hamann's break with normative objective aesthetics in Aesthetica in nuce, the critical philosophy will have led to the curious result that art becomes the refuge of a dogmatist such as Kleist. 24 What a thing is in itself it is in its beauty, and it is aesthetic judgment rather than the general concept that is capable of addressing it. Aesthetic judgment is closer to truth, that is, to truth in the dogmatist's definition as adequation to things in themselves, because it concerns itself with the object in its singularity and not with its subsumability under a general concept. The truthfulness of art, its attractiveness for a post-Kantian dogmatist, is its intuitiveness, its immediate apprehension of phenomena by means of the senses. Kleist's art will be an art of intuitions. He will attempt to grasp the intuition on its own by outrunning the concept, for, as Kant writes, "the former relates immediately to the object and is single, the latter refers to it mediately by means of a feature which several things may have in common." 25 The Kantian marriage of intuition and concept was to be brief: Kleist sets intuition free at the same time that Hegel inaugurates the autonomy of the concept.

TRUTH AFTER THE THING

IN

ITSELF

This autonomy of the concept is at its most conspicuous in Hegel's redefinition of truth. The Hegelian concept's claim to truth is not dependent on anything outside of it. For Kleist truth is that which is wholly outside the concept. The correspondence theory of truth, which still maintains a fitful existence in Kant, is abandoned. If Kant represents a crisis in the history of the understanding of truth, it is because he problematizes the correspondence theory of truth without offering an alternative. Kant renders suspect the independence of the objects to which our concepts are to be adequate, according to the correspondence theory of truth: that which is truly inde-

INTRODUCTION

I7

pendent of our concepts, that which is untouched by the otherwise ubiquitous mediation of the faculty of understanding, namely, the thing in itself, likewise defies any correspondence with them. In its secular form, the correspondence theory of truth has no way of explaining how thought and thing can simultaneously be independent and in relation to one another: the possibility of correspondence has to be taken as given. Even as he exposes the correspondence theory of truth to the charge of petitio principii, Kant himself invokes the presupposed extraconceptual character of existence in his refutation of the ontological argument for the existence of God from the concept of the supremely perfect being: a concept, even the concept of God, must have something outside of it if it is to be true. The popular success of this section of the Critique ofPure Reason illustrates how little we appreciate the problems and solutions of medieval philosophy. Kant appeals to the correspondence theory of truth in a refutation of the ontological proof of the existence of God, when correspondence is intelligible solely in a universe where objects and concepts have a common external foundation, for instance, in the creative act of the divine being. What is consistent in Aquinas becomes inconsistent in Kant. Correspondence, as a theological doctrine, is not an option available to a thinking that claims to draw the sense of the world from human finitude. Aquinas, who is the most lucid, that is, most lucidly mystical, thinker of the correspondence theory of truth, is correct-by the inspiration of his philosophy-in excluding the ontological argument from his proofs of the existence of God. If Aquinas does not raise objections to the correspondence theory of truth, it is because his thought is grounded in the conviction that object and concept can maintain their constitutional independence from one another and yet, in their common subordination to the Creator, admit the possibility of correspondence. The concept is distinct from existence, but it is not cut off from it. From a Thomist point of view, what is wrong with the ontological argument is that it blurs the distinction between concept and existence, even if it nevertheless reasserts the distinction in its pretensions to be more than a "miserable tautology'' 26 (the argument, after all, wants to say that the object to which the concept, viz., the concept of the supremely perfect being, refers exists and not just that concepts have their own way of being, e.g., the being of thinkability). What is problematic, from a Thomist point of view, with Kant's refutation is that the distinction

I NT R0 D U CT I 0 N

18

between concept and existence is absolutized. And having absolutized the distinction, Kant nevertheless resorts to the correspondence theory of truth in order to clinch his refutation.

THE

EQUIVOCATION

OF

REASON

Without managing to extricate himself from the scholasticism of the correspondence theory of truth and appearing to skirt negative theology through his doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves, Kant suspends judgment on the nature of truth. Elsewhere in the first Critique, Kant even appears to presage the equation of truth and consensus: But truth depends upon agreement with the object, and in respect of it the judgments of each and every understanding must therefore be in agreement with each other (consentientia uni tertio consentiunt inter se). The touchstone whereby we decide whether our holding a thing to be true is conviction or mere persuasion is therefore external, namely, the possibility of communicating it and finding it to be valid for all human reasonY Kant's consensus here is immune to certain abuses (e.g., ideological manipulation) because it is Reason, and not the scarcely accountable totality of human beings, that is to acknowledge the agreement with the object. But who, in fact, and in what way, meets Kant's definition of rationality and is thus able to be a party to this consensus? How firmly does Kant's new touchstone for truth rest on the definition of Reason in the first Critique? The universality that Kant ascribes to Reason, he ascribes to Reason in a specific sense. A clarification of this sense may serve to signal the Kantianism that comes to expression in Kleist's writings. In the letter to Wilhelmine, Reason goes undiscussed: it is the understanding and its interference that Kleist deplores. Why then mention Reason at all in relation to Kleist? Kleist's conspicuous sensualism is not the sense-certainty of mere sensualism. Inasmuch as perception in his writings is forever subject to dislocation, the senses acknowledge another power. Sense-certainty does not give way to the generalities of the understanding: that to which it gives way can be identified with one aspect of Kantian Reason. As a faculty, Reason is universal, yet its universality is the correlate of its transcendental character, and as such it is oflittle assistance in determining the truth or falsity of individual empirical judg-

IN T R 0 DUCT I 0 N

19

ments. Kant installs Reason as an inalienable trait of humanity, although as a result he is unable to invest it with any discriminatory power over the contingent. This inalienable rationality, which is fundamental to the critical philosophy, rests on the transcendental ego's independence of experience. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks, the critical philosophy takes it for granted that individuals fundamentally agree in the transcendental ego: Starting from the spectacle of the world, which is that of a nature open to a plurality of thinking subjects, it looks for the conditions which make possible this unique world presented to a number of empirical selves, and finds it in a transcendental ego in which they participate without dividing it up, because it is not a Being, but a Unity or a Value. This is why the problem of the knowledge of other people is never posed in Kantian philosophy: the transcendental ego which it discusses is just as much other people's as mine, analysis is from the start located outside me, and has nothing to do but to determine the general conditions which make possible a world for an egomyself or others equally-and so it never comes up against the question: Who is thinking? 28 It is correct to say that the Kantian philosophy never comes up against the question "Who is thinking?" inasmuch as it does not furnish a concrete answer. To be fair to Kant, he does raise this question, but for him it is rhetorical, as it were: the interrogative pronoun is itself his answer, since the agent of thought is the anonymous "Who" of the transcendental ego. The transcendental ego is more anonymous than any object, but this impersonality does not at all denote the reification of the transcendental ego, its status as a "What." The essence of humanity, the difference by which humanity is distinguished as a "Who" from the realm of what is, lies in thought's power to outreach the positive. The anonymity of the transcendental ego is not something that we have in common. This is because it is not a property designating the essential homogeneity of human beings. It is not the reassuring constant among individuals, but the empty space of abstraction in which properties and their individuation first become intelligible. We are all rational beings, in the sense that Reason is the true subject, substance, and foundation. Reason's claim to universality derives from its abstractness and not from being a common predicate. To be sure, a common predicate or general concept is abstract, but its abstractness falls short of the abstractness of Reason and the transcendental ego. A predicate determines a being, while Reason is that whereby human beings step back from their determinacy. As rational

20

I N T R0 D U CT I 0 N

beings, we are not candidates for a census, because it is only in our divergence from the abstractness of Reason that we become numerable. As rational beings, but as rational beings alone, we are one. Ethical action, which involves an acknowledgement of the other person's irreducibility to the phenomenal realm, does not therefore presuppose a "generous" suspension of disbelief on the part of the agent. The evidence of a transcendental self within the agent is the evidence of a transcendental self within the other, since the transcendental self, by definition universal and necessary, cannot be privatized. When, in the previous quotation from the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant speaks of a touchstone in the possibility of communication and universal assent, he is not recommending that we undertake surveys of the entire population: Reason is in itself already communicated, already all human Reason. Furthermore, Reason cannot be converted into the determinate object that, raised above the vicissitudes of individual perception, is to be the common ground of our judgments. In more than one respect, Reason is transcendental: in medieval philosophy, a "transcendental" is higher than a genus, because it is not simply that which entities have in common. We cannot deviate from Kantian Reason, since it encompasses identity and difference, truth and error by virtue of their bare thinkability. The dignity of Reason does not provide a basis on which a judgment in relation to a given object might be pronounced either true or false. To misjudge an appearance is not to flout Reason, since the departure from the given carried out by an error of judgment is only possible within the empirically infinite domain demarcated by the Ideas of Reason. That we are all rational beings (creatures of Reason) does not imply that we judge a particular phenomenon in the same way. Reason, whose fantastic (schwarmerisch) yet inborn transgression of the limits of experience and the verification provided by correspondence necessitates the first Critique, is nevertheless called upon to put an end to the perplexities of defining truth. This is as misconceived as the attempts in 1789 to draw up a constitution for a state to be governed by Reason. Insofar as Reason is hypostasized, the above passage on truth from the Critique ofPure Reason and the French Revolution both attest to the escalating tensions in the practical program of the Enlightenment (out of adherence to the logical definition of "Reason," Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, for instance, disputed the French National Assembly's claim that its constitution articulated in its content the formal power of Reason). In making his appeal to Reason in the crisis of the understanding of truth, Kant appears to adopt the conventional usage that

INTRODUCTION

ll

conflates Reason and common sense: Reason ( Vernunft) is said in many ways in the critical philosophy that are scarcely ever compatible. The community of rational beings ends up as disputable a touchstone as the secular survival of correspondence. Of course, Kant does not press the consensus theory of truth. It is no more than a stopgap in his exposition. Kant plays the various understandings of truth off against one another. Notwithstanding the systematic interrelations in his thought, Kant is not an advocate of the coherence theory of truth. Truth remains an open wound in his philosophy. Even Hegel, who sutures together the components of the Kantian antinomies by means of their very contradiction, leaves this particular wound open. Hegel admits the coherence theory of truth no more than Kant. His dictum that the True is the Whole has nothing whatsoever to do with the stabilization of a judgment through its situation in the totality of a paradigm or Weltanschauung: the Hegelian Whole does not close in upon itself, does not draw a limit (Grenze) around itself whereby it would be rendered determinate and manageable. Truth, for Hegel, is famously a bacchanal in its lack of restraint.

AN ART AND

POLITICS

OF

ERROR

For Kleist, on the other hand, truth seems reserved for a diaspora. Frequently, his work suggests a series of measures against the possibility of consensus. Consensus, as the understanding of truth that secularization invents for itself, and by which it does not so much break with medieval philosophy as substitute the realities of political and social coercion for the mysticism at the foundation of the correspondence theory of truth, founders on his adherence to things in themselves. Kleist's dogmatism survives the Kant crisis and becomes a response to the coming dogmatisms of public opinion, ideology, common sense, and ideal speech situations. TestifYing to the transformation of contingent truth in modernity into a demonic force, Kleist turns his back on the communicable truth of appearances (Erscheinung) to make a pact with the genius of error (Schein) in the thing in itself. Where once the truths of events and individual cases signaled the integrity and independence of the human mind and the world and their correlation under the auspices of the transcendent Creator, early modernity with its attempts to reconstruct the world as a set of necessary truths finds itself diffident in the face of the continued presence of contingent truth. Kleist shares this

22

I N TR0 D UCT I0 N

diffidence and confronts his characters with the intractability of the world by means of a series of errors in interpretation. The world's goodwill toward the human mind can no longer be assumed on the basis of a common origin. For the pragmatist, truth need be no more than a provisional solution permitting us to make a further step in our activities. Error, for Kleist, marks the empty place of truth, and he clings to this emptiness rather than turn to the Church or technicism. In his letter to Wilhelmine, Kleist writes: "We can never be certain that what we call truth is really truth." The proposition is not cast in the first person singular. Maintaining the universal voice of the critical philosophy, Kleist does not retreat to the privacy of sensations in the face of his reading of Kant. Kleist's first person plural is the openness of Reason, of the transcendental. It is unable to extract empirical certainty from itself and ground the lawfulness of a science or a state. The universality of the first person plural does not convert into the universality of objectivity. Kleist's "We" is more akin to the outlaws who congregate and scatter around his Michael Kohlhaas. For Kleist, illusion is yet to be satisfactorily contained. Descartes, for his part, denies in the Meditations that error is other than privative. 29 Involved in such a denial is the conviction that our understanding of truth rests on deeper foundations. Kleist aspires to the truth that is the knowledge of things in themselves, when the contingency, lawlessness, and unrepeatability of things in themselves arouse the suspicion that here we are dealing with an illusion. It could be said that Kleist accordingly misses the entire point of the critical philosophy. The tactical nature of the thing in itself, which Kant preserves as a trophy of his victory over both empiricism and dogmatism (in their adherence to things in themselves rather than appearances, empiricism and dogmatism are alike unusable as foundations for the sciences), is overlooked. But Kleist is consequently also blind to the illegitimate conflation of Reason and common sense. Reason cannot become the new mainstay of the conventional understanding of truth because, in its inherent preoccupation with things in themselves, it concerns itself with that which can never be the stable object of consensus. Having admitted the thing in itself and thereby avoided the reduction of thought to a tautology, Kant nonetheless grows anxious and avails himself of a sleight of hand. He introduces common sense in the disguise of Reason to distract attention from the gulf between the transcendental form and em-

INT R0 DUCT I 0 N

23

pirical content of thought into which everyday judgment threatens to disappear. Although Kant does not dwell on the difficulties that the critical philosophy throws up for everyday judgment, the placidity and complaisance of phenomena, let alone of things in themselves, are not assured. The thing in itself, as that which for Kant is given, is anything but the given that can be taken for granted and whose comprehension amounts to a birthright. It is the given that is as much a fiction as a fact. Reason is a literary faculty: the truths of things in themselves, since they are corroborated neither by consensus nor the adequation between the concept and the object, fall to what is known as fiction. IfKleist's turn to literature after the Kant crisis has much more to do with his early dogmatic conception of knowledge than is generally believed, literature itself, not as an ineffectual ornament of the workaday but as a means of addressing things as they are, must likewise be seen to be consanguineous with Kantian Reason. The thing in itself is not at all the exuviae that philosophy casts off in becoming transcendental: it is the emblem of transcendental philosophy's difference from common sense. The Kleist of the literary works, no less than the Kleist of the letter to Wilhelmine, elides the distinction between illusion and appearance in the name of a truth that does not pretend to define itself over against error, but that carries error within itself as its open-ended complication. In Kleist's work, the transcendental ego starts talking in tongues. Nothing of the transcendental apparatus that Kant erects in response to Hume needs be scrapped in an interpretation ofKleist, but its claim to apologetic effectiveness as a response to the psychedelia of Hume's skepticism, which G. E. Schulze, Maimon, and others had all but immediately disputed, is harder to uphold. Contingency is not submitted to the rules of good sense, because in the blank space between the singular and the pure abstraction of the transcendental, the empirical general concept is unable to take root. Kleist's extremism-the antipathy for reservations, concessions, and qualifications that denotes his Kantianism-issues from the universalism of Reason and bears down, not on the singular and the contingent, which it much rather first gives their scope and legitimates as singular and contingent, but on the generalities of common sense. Kleist revels in the proliferation of irreconcilable perspectives, and on the rare occasions when anything like consensus could be said to reign (such as among the survivors of the earthquake in Santiago), it is as brief as it is ultimately calamitous. But Kleist is not a relativist: his work amounts to a love

24

INTRODUCTION

song, albeit anguished, to contingent truth. 30 Kleist's characters seek out the truth because it is the truth, regardless of whether or not it destroys them (in a letter to his sister from November r8oo, Kleist denies that any considerations of utility inform his search for truth). In the plays and tales, perspectives proliferate because each in turn shatters on the externality of truth, on the shimmering fragments of a world held together by neither the transcendent Creator nor the coherence of a system of knowledge. Relativism, which disavows this externality, is the bastard brother of the coherence theory of truth in philosophical modernity, resembling the latter in taking coherence as its principle (everything is relative to the subject). Kleistian Reason maintains itself in the explosion of the given by which Reason first announced itself as a historical and political force, where Kantian Reason at times speaks with the voice of mere common sense, and Hegelian Reason discovers itself actualized in the Prussian state (notwithstanding all his protestations of the freedom of thought, Hegel ultimately shackles thought once more to the given, not just analogously, but literally, to the Grenzen ofPrussia). Everything in Kleist is played out on the raw tips of nerves. His sensualism, his purported anti-intellectualism, answers to a faculty of Reason prized loose from common sense and its measure. Kleist is faithful to the moment in Kant when the transcendental has opened up as an abyss and Reason has not yet been debased, out of fear of the measurelessness of this abyss, by its appointment to the position of touchstone. What defines Kleist's Kantianism arguably becomes apparent once Kant's conventional examples, which unduly restrict the scope and disguise the radicalism of his principles, are set aside. In the Preface to the first edition of the Critique ofPure Reason, Kant lists his motives for dispensing with examples in that work. One of these motives is that these "aids to clearness, though they may be of assistance in regard to details, often interfere with our grasp of the whole." 31 In his critical reflections on the use of examples, as the definitive empirical moment in a philosophical exposition, Kant himself is at his wariest regarding the dangers of equivocation and conflation. It is therefore here that, from Kantian motives, Reason should be unseamed from prudence and common sense. Kleist's Penthesilea can take her place in a Kantian ethics no longer identifiable with the renunciatory practice of its illustrations, and the stumbling humanity of "On the Puppet Theater" can be seen to participate already in the incommensurability of the sublime without recourse to the overwhelming spectacle of mountain passes or

INTRODUCTION

25

storms. And that Kleist himself was inclined to ignore examples is an inference from his letter to Wilhelmine. Examples have no role in a knowledge of things in themselves, since what a thing is in itself it is in that by which it cannot be subsumed under a general concept and thereby rendered an example. If the aspiration to a knowledge of things in themselves is to be sustained, it is by a refusal to think in the general, to act in conformity with a code, or to limit the transport of the sublime to a preordained set of examples: three hints toward a Kleistian doubling of Kant's Critiques.

ONE

Pen thesilea and the Law Before Oedipus

AN

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

BOURGEOIS

OR AN AMAZON?

A famous remark in Freud's paper "The Economic Problem of Masochism," where the categorical imperative is designated as "the direct heir of the Oedipus complex," 1 reiterates a widespread misconception regarding Kantian ethics. Ever since the publication of the Critique ofPractical Reason and its kindred texts, Kant has been understood to place duty (the name of the Father) and the satisfaction of the instincts in an exclusive disjunction. But this, as Lewis White Beck observes, is "based upon many readers' failure to remember the polemical situation in which Kant found himself, one in which he had to separate and set apart and seem to set in opposition those things that had been confused and even identified by others. "2 In his analysis of the compound phenomenon of action, Kant isolates a transcendental moment. This transcendental moment in Kant's account of action, if it is to be properly transcendental, cannot oppose to the instincts a different empirical content, such as the prudential maxims of civilized society or the commands of the superego. From the viewpoint of Kantian ethics, a common

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objection can be made against eudaemonism, the moral sense of the British philosophers, and Freud's Oedipus complex: morality's transcendental character-its defining difference from the empirical-goes unacknowledged. The Kantian Law is not an encryption of the Oedipus complex. It is philosophically prior to the Oedipus complex, rather than its sublimation: its priority is not the fictional priority of that which has abstracted from the biological and psychological desires of the organism. The claim for the priority of the Law rests on Kant's definition of desire. The Kantian Law originates in a domain that preexists oedipalization. This is also the domain ofKleist's Penthesilea. To demonstrate that more is involved here than a play upon Freud's classicist terminology is the task of the following reading ofKantian ethics in conjunction with Kleist's pre-classical tragedy. With Kant something astonishing takes place in ethics. The rigorism and formalism that Kant brings to deontology are, strictly speaking, excessive: duty becomes so pure that it surrenders its point of contact with the empirical, and hence the possibility of exercising its disciplinary (oedipal) function. If this is not always apparent, it is because, within the confines of Kant's examples, bourgeois mores are able to carry on as though the world of traditional ethics had not been turned on its head. The universalism of Kantian ethics can be shown to enjoy very uneasy relations with the universal class of bourgeois ideology. Formulating the difference between what is and what ought to be in terms of the difference between the contingency of the particular and the necessity of the universal, Kant transmutes ethics into logic. What ought to be, accordingly, does not differ from what is simply because its time has not yet come. Otherwise, it would be merely another particular and there would be no basis in logic for morality's claim to superiority. Kant conscripts ethics into the critical campaign against empiricism, and a victim in this campaign, notwithstanding the reparations advanced in Kant's examples, is the particularism of the self-interest of the bourgeoisie. What there is of eighteenth-century bourgeois prudence in Kant's ethics belongs on the level of his examples, and hence the relationship between the principles of Kant's ethics and Penthesilea should not simply be assumed to be antagonistic. Attempts to play Kant and Kleist off against each other almost invariably entail reducing the one to a staid, bureaucratic mentality and the other to the irrationality of the coming high capitalism. To cite an example, Michel Chaouli contends that Kleist's drama amounts to an attack on Kant's Critique of the Power of]udgment. 3 For Chaouli, the cannibalism of Kleist's heroine flouts the Kantian proscription of the aesthetic presentation

28

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0 N E

of the disgusting. But what is the significance of "disgusting" in Kant's text? Kant is not the conservative that Chaouli depicts him to be. The third Critique is conceived precisely as a challenge to the normative objective aesthetics that underwrites ostensibly amoral censorship on such material as cannibalism. At issue for Kant is arguably the disgusting in the literal sense of a phenomenon private to an individual's tongue and palate. I can say of such an object that it is unpleasing to me, but I cannot in a universal voice claim that it is unpleasing. Chaouli, by contrast, employs the term "disgusting" in the figurative sense of the reprehensible deed whose worth is open to public discussion: the audience of Penthesilea may debate whether the cannibalistic finale is disgusting in this sense, but as they are not given the flesh of Achilles to taste, they cannot debate whether with a universal voice they can claim it is, in the literal sense, disgusting. As the disgusting loses its merely physiological aspect in being presented aesthetically in a work of art, that which Chaouli makes out to be a proscription of its presentation is properly the statement of a definitional impossibility. The relationship between Penthesilea and the Critiques is not so much antithetical as clarificatory: Penthesilea's act serves as a counterbalance to Kant's examples. The Critique ofPractical Reason is not to be read through its examples. In his single-minded efforts to salvage the a priori from Hume's critique, Kant fixes on what he discerns to be the transcendental moment in the fact of morality: ethics becomes another occasion to demonstrate the sway of the a priori in experience. The ethical act, if it is to fulfil the task that Kant assigns it, must attest to the intrusion of the transcendental into the empirical. In this respect, the positive content of an ethical proposition is irrelevant. At times it seems that Kant's sole concern with morality lies in its invocation of necessity. His ethical rigorism resolves into an opportunistic transcendentalism. But what act can maintain, alongside the abstraction of universality by which it is ethical in Kant's sense, the particularity of a concrete intervention by which it is an act? Clearly, it is not just a matter of looking for the right examples. There is a problem with the example as such. Kant himself concedes that there are grounds for not being taken in by his exaggeratedly ascetic examples of the denial of the particularism of self-interest: "From love of humankind I am willing to admit that even most of our actions are in conformity with duty; but if we look more closely at the intentions and aspirations in them, we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always turning up; and it is on this that their purpose is based, not on the strict command of duty, which

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29

would often require self-denial." 4 Duty requires self-denial, but there are many means of finding pleasure in accommodating the strict commands of duty. And once the "dear self" has been granted a talent for subterfuge, an inextinguishable doubt shadows the actions of the ascetic. In the light of this passage from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals, it is hence hard to know what to make of Kant's procession of supposedly illustrative abnegations. Did Kant change his mind and believe he could provide examples of self-denial in action? Why does Kant, after banishing examples from the Critique ofPure Reason, employ them in his writings on ethics? The example, as the moment when a philosophical text supposedly touches on literature, is the moment when Kant in his ethical writings is nonetheless at his furthest from Kleist. The site of their convergence must be sought elsewhere. In the first Critique, Kant says of examples: "Only seldom do they adequately fulfil the requirements of the rule (as casus in terminis). Besides, they often weaken that effort which is required of the understanding to comprehend properly the rules in their universality, in independence of the particular circumstances, and so accustom us to use rules rather as formulas than as principles." 5 In the examination of pure Reason, the example obfuscates more than it illuminates, since it substitutes picture thinking for the abstraction in which pure Reason discovers itself. AsKantian ethics is explicitly an ethics of pure Reason, it must be understood on the basis of its principles rather than its examples. Behind the smokescreen of edifYing tales of bourgeois rectitude, a practice of pure Reason is elaborated whose concern is not the preservation of the existing social order but the transgression of the positive. With Kant the ontological ambiguity of the Law-its positivity and normativity-becomes unbearable. The Law turns upon itself and denounces its own concretization as a fact. What ought to be refuses any arrangement with what is, since as soon as the Law assumes a positive content, it surrenders the purity that, for Kant, is essential to it. The moral Law aids the critical project only so long as it is a priori. If it is to be of any use in the campaign against Hume, it must render itself invulnerable to any genealogical critique. It must cease to be explicable as an agent of social repression in the service of the powers that be. When Kant speaks of the Law as "the sole fact of pure reason," 6 he is thus not speaking of the positive laws of the Prussian state. The Law is a fact because it possesses the indisputability of a fact. It is the sole fact of Reason because, whereas every other proposition of Reason is disputable and entangled in antinomies, the Law is the indisputable non-positivity of Reason

30

CHAPTER 0 NE

itself. In the purity of its non-positivity, the Law coincides with the freedom of Reason that is the precondition of every dispute. For Kant's identification of the Law with freedom to appear sinister and repressive, the absolute emptiness of the Law has first to be disregarded (it is precisely by retreating from this emptiness that Max Scheler's ethics becomes reactionary).? The emptiness of the Law is its emptiness of what Freud was to name the pleasure principle and what Kant names "the dear self." Morality is not opposed to the pleasure principle (such an opposition is quickly revealed by both Kant and Freud, in their different but not incompatible languages, as spurious); morality is instead located beyond the pleasure principle. But one might ask whether this redefinition of morality secures it against genealogical and psychological criticism or overthrows it, since with the frustration of the instincts, by which it entered into hostilities with the pleasure principle and all the same could not escape complicity with it, it loses its traditional criterion and acknowledged task. Kant himself writes: The real morality of actions, their merit or guilt, even that of our own conduct, thus remains entirely hidden from us. Our imputations can refer only to the empirical character. How much of this character is ascribable to the pure effect of freedom, how much to mere nature, that is, to faults of temperament for which there is no responsibility, or to its happy constitution (merito fortunae), can never be determined; and upon it therefore no perfectly just judgments can be passed. 8 If Kant is prepared to contemplate the loss of the recognizability of what is moral, it is because the Law has quite a different role to play in his thought than in traditional theories of practice. The inscrutability of the Kantian Law is, for many readers, belied by the conventionality of his oedipal illustrations. It is important to note that the most notorious of these illustrations, namely, the fable of a man who surrenders a friend to a murderer rather than save him by lying, does not stem from Kant himself. He takes it up in the late text "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy" 9 because the editor of the German translation of a work by Benjamin Constant had presented it as his own. Rather than denounce what he was uncertain of not having written, thereby exposing himself anew to the charge of inconsistency already leveled repeatedly at his writings, Kant decides to appropriate the fable. Yet Kant is transcribed as saying a decade earlier, in a lecture course on ethics: "If an enemy, for ex-

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ample, takes me by the throat and demands to know where my money is kept, I can hide the information here, since he means to misuse the truth. That is still no mendacium, for the other knows that I shall withhold the information, and that he also has no right whatever to demand the truth from me." 10 The widespread equation of Kantian ethics with an unyielding bureaucratic mentality cannot therefore be said to rest on the most solid of foundations. Once Kant's ethics is derived from his principles instead of from the oedipal examples to which he himself provides a check, Kleist's Penthesilea may perhaps be seen to belong to the subterranean Kantianism inaugurated in March r8or.

TOWARD A

DEFINITION

OF A MORAL ACT

What, then, is a moral act? There is a precision to Kant's answer notwithstanding the ambiguity of his examples. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals, he writes that "our concern is with actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience." 11 Certainly, such passages are not auspicious, as though here were a science with no field of study. An act is not a fit object of study for ethics, since there is always an uncertainty as to whether it belongs to the realm of freedom or the realm of necessity. Ethics must begin with the fact of freedom, not with the hypocrisy of any given, purportedly moral act. To orient an understanding of the ethical by a given act is not only to abandon the ethical to the hypocrisy of the act, it is also to invite the danger of imitation. Kant is clear: "Imitation has no place at all in matters of morality." 12 To imitate is to replace the inner obedience to the Law of the transgression of the positive with external observance and conformity to a positive model. An ethics that sought to derive morality from the data of experience would never come across the very freedom that, for Kant, is constitutive of the moral act. The moral act, which cannot be imitated morally, is not itself moral, inasmuch as it divorces itself from freedom by taking on the stability of an imitable object in the experiential realm of the necessity of cause and effect. The moral act never occurs in the purity required by the definition of morality, because on closer investigation, what seems to suggest moral freedom can be recovered for the necessities of causal sequences.

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That ethics cannot build itself up as a science on the data of action does not at all mean that it is without foundation. The moral act is a mirage. It is ambiguous because it has a foot in two camps. In laying the foundation of ethics, Kant's attention is directed to the transcendental foothold of the moral act rather than its empirical foothold. The unreliability of the moral act as a mere phenomenon is a symptom of the a priori: if one face of the agent of the moral act is "the dear self," another is the original apperception of the "I think." Every refutation of the morality of an act is accordingly at once superfluous and self-contradictory. It is superfluous because as soon as an act is addressed as an object, it is already situated in a realm where its claims to instantiate freedom are not susceptible to demonstration. And it is self-contradictory because the refutation entails logical procedures whose stringency rests on the very independence from experience that a refutation of the freedom of the moral act denies. The "I think" of transcendental apperception is the condition of possibility of the moral act. Kant's preoccupation with morality in the years after the publication of the Critique ofPure Reason is not disinterested. The fervent apostrophes to duty resolve into the central critical claim that freedom is a fact. What draws Kant to duty is not the positive content of the various prescriptive codes but the ability to abstract from the positive that is requisite for the performance of any duty. In heeding the dictates of duty, we step back from the sphere of forces determined by the causal principle. Duty is the sphere of freedom, because it is in the performance of duty that we claim to exercise our freedom from the sequence of reactions to animal stimuli. As the reference to the "dear self" in the Groundwork ofthe Metaphysics of Morals bears out, Kant is not hopelessly na"ive with regard to the pretended altruism of morality. He is not insensitive to the boutades of Helvetius. If Kantian ethics can permit itself absolute cynicism with regard to the selfinterest of the motives behind a seemingly moral act, it is because its foundations do not rest on the empirical existence of saintly individuals but on the independence of the transcendental ego. When Fichte makes practical philosophy the essence of his metaphysics, he is simply paraphrasing Kant's thesis that the essence of practical philosophy is transcendental. Unless this transformation of ethics is noted, the contiguity ofKant's cynicism and moralism becomes unintelligible. From one perspective, the performance of a duty is not in itself proof of freedom, since under the eye of an officious judiciary, the frustration, say, of one's instinctive avarice may have been merely

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at the behest of the instinct of self-preservation. From another perspective, freedom is an ineradicable accompaniment of the performance of a duty; no surrender to instinct can ever surrender the independence of the transcendental ego. For Kant, the ethical act inhabits the spheres of both necessity and freedom. But inasmuch as this can be said of any act, what is at stake ceases to be the question of whether or not the ethical act amounts to a proof of freedom. Although the kernel of freedom in the act never comes to fruition within the confines of the empirical realm, Kant insists that one act as though one were free. Unable to meet its definition, the ethical act nonetheless distinguishes itself from other acts by the attempt. It is the act that endeavors to overreach its determination in the empirical realm even as it must fall short of the humanity of a free agent. The ethical act is the shame of human beings: in the very rebuff to its claim to freedom, it attests to the transcendental ego, to that whose claim to freedom is not rebuffed. If Kant cynically wants the ethical act to be seen to fail, it is so that freedom might be grasped in its transcendental purity. This transcendental purity, from which we are excluded as empirical beings, is that which constitutes the essence of human beings, and the imperative mood of ethical propositions reflects the non-positive character of this essence. Kantian ethics is based, not on the evidence of a moral act, but on the evidence that a moral act is commanded. Nietzsche's "Become who you are!" lends itself here to a reformulation. The Kantian self exists in an open-ended process of becoming, because the empirical self, the impossibility notwithstanding, is called into line with the transcendental self. Kant is able to denounce heteronomy in ethics without denouncing ethics itself, because the non-positive character of the imperative mood can be justified in terms of the non-positive character of the transcendental self. The imperative comes from elsewhere, contradicting the realities that present themselves to the senses. But even as it refuses assimilation to everything familiar, the imperative is that which is nearest to us as the freedom of the transcendental self. Because one is not already who one is, one has no choice except to become who one is. Kantian ethics grows out of the fissure opened in the first Critique between the transcendental and the empirical self. One must become who one is, not because the fissure is an offense and must be sealed, but because the fissure itself is this becoming, this vacillation and non-positivity, this ever-thwarted divergence and convergence of the selves. Kantian ethics has not so much a goal as a vanishing point: to

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be finally who one is would destroy ethics rather than realize it. By introducing autonomy into ethics, Kant shores up the imperative. What ought to be is an affront to positivistic ontologies, and whereas heteronomous ethical principles can ultimately be recovered for such ontologies by means of an exposure of the interests they serve, the autonomous ethical principle of the fissured self cannot. An ethics of autonomy does not entail blocking one's ears to the Law, since the central point of Kant's ethics is that one heed the Law's contestation of the reductive ontology of empiricism. An autonomy that expressed itself in an unchecked pursuit of one's inclinations would be of no use for Kant's critical project. The Law finds in Kant a very strange friend. He is a friend of its spirit but an enemy of its letter. It is as though the letter of the Law were the price that Kant grudgingly pays for the revelation of the ontological modality of the imperative. The categorical imperative is Kant's attempt to retain the spirit of the Law while dispensing with its letter. In the Opus Postumum, he writes: "The Ten Commandments are altogether negative. The categorical imperative is only the principle of freedom." 13 With respect to their grammar, of course, not all of the Ten Commandments are negative. What is negative in the commandments to keep the Sabbath and to honor one's parents is the letter: the spirit of the Law opens up the space of freedom, the possibility of being otherwise than the positive, and the letter immediately closes it within the rigidity of a determinate doctrinal content. The determinate moment weakens the Law's claim to the a priori, thereby impeding the abstraction by which alone the Law can return to invest the whole of experience with the intimacy of the transcendental. Being ontologically regional, a determinate ethical code is, it seems, unworthy of a metaphysician. Kant accordingly draws, not only the traditional distinction between duty and self-interest, but also a distinction between the duty of the spirit of the Law and the duties of its letter. It is at bottom the one distinction, for Kant, couched in different terms. A plurality of duties is already a compromise with positivistic ontologies. Once duty is equated with the content of the various duties, imitation and habit come into consideration. A plurality of duties is a dereliction of that which, for Kant, is important in duty. In his commentary on Wolff and Crusius in the second Critique, Kant objects to the amoralism in any agreement with the will of God "without an antecedent practical principle independent of this idea." 14 The will of God, whenever it is believed to exhaust itself in the positive content of the Ten Commandments, is at odds with morality because, in providing action with models, it is at odds with

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freedom. To the question of a definition of the moral act, one answer would thus be that it is without a model. Kant's refutation of eudaemonism contains a second definition, which may be summarized in the following manner: the morality of an act is in no way determined by its consequences. By this, Kant wishes to distinguish what he calls practical propositions from technical propositions. An example of a technical proposition would be the instructions for the activity whose consequence is the construction of a mill. A technical proposition is thus a hypothetical imperative: if you wish to construct a mill, then follow these steps. A practical proposition, denoting an ethical act, is to have other tests than the attainment or unattainment of an end. It is on the basis of this indifference to ends that Kant speaks of practical propositions as categorical imperatives, since what is commanded is commanded with the necessity and universality of a category. In the absoluteness of the categorical imperative, action absolves itself from the empirical web of cause and effect and makes the freedom of the universal its element.

THE

STATUS

IMPERATIVE

OF THE IN

CATEGORICAL

KANT'S

ETHICS

Whether this absolution from the empirical realm can indeed take place, Kant himself of course doubts (even his own treatment of the categorical imperative admits conversion into a hypothetical imperative: if you wish to answer Hume by establishing an a priori moment to experience, then enlist the commands of morality in your campaign). It can hardly be said that in his examples Kant makes a persuasive case for the possibility of absolution from the empirical realm. It is noteworthy that every proposition to which he applies the categorical imperative only finds in his eyes the conclusive demonstration of its morality in an analysis of its consequences. The supposed ethical maxim of universalizability is curiously said to hold when nothing untoward results: Now I have a deposit in my hands, the owner of which has died and left no record of it. This is, naturally, a case for my maxim. Now I want only to know whether that maxim could also hold as a universal practical law. I therefore apply the maxim to the present case and ask whether it could indeed take the form of a law, and consequently whether I could through my maxim at the same time give such a law as this: that everyone may deny a

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deposit which no one can prove has been made. I at once become aware that such a principle, as a law, would annihilate itself since it would bring about that there would be no deposits at all. 15 In other words, no one would make a deposit without securing a receipt. The outcome that Kant foresees from a refusal to apply his maxim is not especially ominous, at least inasmuch as it has long been general practice not to leave deposits on trust. Kant is arguing at this point of the second Critique toward one of his many wordings of the categorical imperative: "So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universallaw."16 Following on from the example of the deposit, the categorical imperative sounds like little more rhan business foresight. All that Kant appears to maintain is that dishonesty motivated by avarice would, in the light of the consequences of universalization, be impolitic. As Gotdob August Tittel in his q86 polemic was perhaps the first to note, Kant's proclaimed reform of ethics can be reduced to prudence. 17 But Kant's novelty should not be overlooked simply because his examples are poorly chosen. As far as gratuitous acts are concerned-and, for Kleist, practice consists arguably of nothing but gratuitous acts-it is obvious that the categorical imperative offers no limiting condition. Against one of the most famous gratuitous acts in literature, Penthesilea's anthropophagy, Kant erects no theoretical prohibition, since at the moment of its execution, when the ego's past and future have to all appearances vanished from her mind, the thought of a multiplication to infinity seems more plausibly a spur than a check. "Immoral maxims appear to pass the universalizability test only because they ignore or obscure morally salient features of a situation," Henry Allison writes. "Thus, far from demonstrating the emptiness of the categorical imperative, this shows how the imperative can be misapplied by radically evil agents who continue to recognize its authority." 18 This is not altogether honest, on two counts. First, in an endnote, Allison refers his readers to Barbara Herman's The Practice ofMoral judgment. It is Herman, rather than Kant, who offers an account of the morally salient features that moral judgment must address: Herman acknowledges that there is not enough "evidence to show the presence of anything like rules of moral salience in any of Kant's texts," but she defends her procedure by claiming "that a Kantian account of moral judgment will not work without rules of moral salience, or some-

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37

thing very much like them." 19 Perhaps Kant's account of moral judgment does work without these rules, albeit in a way that neither Allison nor Herman is prepared to admit: it is generally the lot of theories of morality that do not conform to prevailing moral conceptions to be regarded as wrong, both descriptively and normatively. Herman's postulate that "Kant's agents are not morally na'ive" 20 structures a reading that supplements Kant's ethics with the conventional notions of morality when it is the very removal of this material that constitutes a large part of Kant's innovation. The second problem with Allison's objection is the misuse of the Kantian expression "radical evil." Radical evil does not differentiate an agent whose immoral maxims appear to pass the universalizability test. Radical evil, as Allison points out in Kant's Theory of Taste, is inextricable from what it means to be human: "Kant, like Marx after him, construed the term 'radical' in its etymological sense as indicating root. Thus, by 'radical evil' is to be understood the root of all evil, which for Kant lies in freedom (rather than mere nature)." 21 The aggressive na'ivete and worldlessness of the freedom of the Kantian agent is a throwback to Greek tragedy-and a presentiment of Kleist. What is done now pushes through to eternity. In what amounts to a reconciliation of tragedy and metaphysics, the Kantian ethical act is the point where the will of the figure of tragedy (passion) and the universal of metaphysics (knowledge) meet: the world of everyday concerns and particulars, or of rules of moral salience, gives way. To consider whether a practical proposition lies at the basis ofPenthesilea's cannibalism is not to put forward cannibalism as an ethical norm. There should be no question in a reading of Kant's ethics of uncovering new models for imitation. It is the nature of universalizability that requires investigation. Whereas a technical proposition is a question of cause and effect, a practical proposition, as defined by the categorical imperative, deals with the universalizability of a maxim. Universalizability and pleasure are not mutually exclusive. In Kant's case of the deposit, the universal maxim can be seen to work ultimately in harmony with the pleasure principle, since honesty encourages the practice of leaving deposits and favors the business from which one draws a livelihood. In Freudian terms, "universalizability" applies less readily to a maxim conforming to the pleasure principle than to a maxim conforming to the reality principle. "This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of

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a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure," Freud contends. 22 The individual who, with an eye to the odds for a long-term preponderance of pleasure over pain, renounces the gratification to be had by dishonestly holding on to a deposit for which there is no receipt, exhibits the workings of the reality principle. Here the craftiness and calculated patience of the "dear self" suggest themselves rather than the independence of the "I think." But even had Kant given examples where the ego obtains no pleasure and can have no expectation of pleasure, Freud would have been able to protest: "That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other." 23 Kant's ambition to save morality from eudaemonism cannot be left to examples.

THE

DESIRE

OF

ETHICS

What is important for ethics in universalizability is not any opposition to empirical pleasure but the logical priority of the universal over the particularity of the empirical. By limiting his examples to the irrefutable existence of the ability to tolerate unpleasure, Kant weakens the rhetorical force of his argument, but he does not weaken the argument itself, which rests upon a renewal and reinvention of the scholastic distinction between an empirical and an a priori faculty of desire, appetitus sensitivus and appetitus rationalis: Hence the difference between the laws of a nature to which the will is subject and of a nature which is subject to a will (as far as the relation of the will to its free actions is concerned) rests on this: that in the former the objects must be the causes of the representations that determine the will, whereas in the latter the will is the cause of the objects, so that its causality has its determining ground solely in the pure faculty of reason, which can therefore also be called a pure practical reason. 24 In his writings on ethics, as in his writings on speculative Reason, Kant's stated aim is a defense of the a priori. Just as the necessity and universality of the natural sciences are defended against reductions to the empirical, the disinterestedness of ethics is defended against a morphology of egotism. Ethics becomes a question of pure desire. Desire is pure when it is not determined by an empirical object whose lack it wishes to remedy. This purity

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of desire denotes the creativity rather than the end of desire. Kant's theory of a will creating its objects is discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a precursor to their own conception of desire, but, in their eyes, "it is not by chance that Kant chooses superstitious beliefs, hallucinations, and fantasies as illustrations of this definition of desire. "25 If it is not by chance, it is also ill considered. The rational faculty of the will's independence of the positive is thereby depicted as subjective eccentricity, and the morality of an act is resigned to the hypothetical existence of the "as if" (als ob): within a dearly demarcated territory it is agreed that the laws of cause and effect of the natural sciences are suspended so that Homo ludens can play at being moral. More than once in Kant's texts, a theoretical proposition is advanced whose radicalism is then vitiated by his choice of examples. With Kant, ethics ceases to be a check on desire and becomes the truth of desire. Desire, which defines itself by its difference from what is, here takes its own non-positivity to the point where it disputes its determination at the hands of the given empirical object toward which it strains. But it does not thereby recoil upon itself and, in its immanence, become positive in its turn. Desire creates and, in placing itself outside of itself, it dissipates the positivity in which it would otherwise congeal. The reductive ontologies of positivism, which if they acknowledge an anomaly in desire as lack also explain away this anomaly with a reference to the derivativeness of the privative (i.e., desire cannot challenge the positive, since it presupposes it), cannot account for the creativity of desire. Precisely because he wishes to secure the a priori foundations of the sciences, Kant touches on matters that are indigestible for the conventional understanding of knowledge. The transcendental ego is advanced as crucial to the a priori foundations of the sciences, and freedom, which defies explanation by the natural sciences, with their reliance on the laws of cause and effect, is thereby proposed as a constitutive blind spot of the sciences. Kant's ethics, which follows on from the thinking of the Critique ofPure Reason, thus finds itself in an uncomfortable position: it is a consequence of the foundation with which Kant provides the natural sciences in the first Critique, just as it frustrates the explanatory powers of the natural sciences. With his theory of the "as if" and his examples (specifically the way they collapse into accounts of calculation and prudence, of cause and effect), Kant depreciates the ambiguity of his apology of the conventional understanding of knowledge. In one respect, Kant is much closer to Hume than many believe. The myth of the goodwill of phenomena is overthrown by Hume in his critique

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of the a priori, of the goodwill in the relations between necessary truth and perceptions, and it is overthrown again by Kant in his restoration of the a priori and his understanding of pure desire. Creative desire interferes with the passive receptiveness that has paired itself up with the belief in the goodwill of phenomena. Kant's rational desire is not a desire that contents itself with ratifYing what is. Rational desire is the non-positivity of desire raised to a principle. As such it is the possibility of an ethics irreducible to the positive. According to Kant's distinction, wherever the pleasure or reality principle is uncovered as the motive of an act, it is the empirical faculty of desire that is at issue. Granted that the a priori faculty always manifests itself in the phenomenal realm in the company of the empirical faculty (putting aside the suggestions to the contrary of Kant's ascetic examples), a means of illuminating the difference between the two is thus central to Kant's argument for the definitional irrelevance of pleasure to ethics. The categorical imperative, if it is such a test, fails in this regard, because it cannot distinguish between a priori desire and universalizable desire. The alignment of the a priori with universality is, of course, one ofKant's idiosyncrasies. The possibility of a non-necessary universal is never considered, and hence a ubiquitous contingency can enjoy the status of the a priori. In the context of his ethical writings, this shows up in the identification of rational desire with the common practices dictated by the reality principle. That the categorical imperative should frequently have been taken to be the test of the rationality of a desire is doubly unfortunate. Not only is confusion thereby promoted between a priori and "civilized" desire, but the distinction between empirical and a priori desire is not thought through on the same lines as the distinction between empirical and a priori apperception. Once the distinction between original and empirical apperception has been carried over from the first Critique's "Transcendental Deduction" into ethics, those passages on the unknowability of the Law sit less uneasily beside the praises of bourgeois prudence, since their juxtaposition can be seen as merely typographical. Kantian ethics withstands Kant's own debunking of the notion of moral selflessness only if the a priori faculty of desire is endowed with the dignity of its counterpart in epistemology. We are always in the wake of desire just as much as the objects in which we take pleasure: we are always in the wake of thought just as much as the objects of our cognition. A purely formal "I desire" can accompany every representation in the same way as the purely formal "I think."

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Quid juris? What is the basis for the assertion of a rational desire accompanying every representation? The altruism of morality is accorded respect so long as the desire for pleasure is believed insufficient to account for activity as a whole. But if morality is to be rescued from its critics, this belief must be proved correct by a deduction of a priori desire. Endeavoring in the Critique ofPure Reason to verifY the claims to objective validity of a theoretical science such as mathematics, Kant proposes that an empirical mathematics, occupying itself with a space neither infinite nor finite (modes that cannot be given in experience, or, more precisely, in what Kant, begging the question, defines as experience), would be a paradox. And against such a conclusion Kant can begin by pointing to the fact of mathematics as a consistent science. Things stand very differently with ethics, because given the very different status of universality and necessity in ethics, no paradox emerges in asserting the empirical nature of many reputedly moral principles. There is perplexity already over the question Quid facti? Traditional morality merely loses its air of sanctity through being converted into a set of technical propositions, into a discreetly remunerative egotism proceeding by induction. But this is not to say that the popular belief in a principle superior to the desire for pleasure is unfounded. Whereas the spontaneous "I think," presupposed in every representation and manifesting the unity of apperception, corresponds to the universality and necessity of the existing theoretical sciences, the purely formal "I desire," without a correlate after the demotion of traditional morality, has to await the ethics appropriate to it. That desire, like thought, is spontaneous is clear from the old objection to hedonism: pleasure presumes desire rather than the reverse, since to speak of a desire for pleasure is meaningless in the primordial instance when the self-transcendence of desire cannot yet be interpreted in terms of the binary opposition between desire and the x in which it takes pleasure. Desire reaches out without knowing what it is doing, what it is seeking or even that it is seeking anything at all. Desire cannot be read off from the object as its lack, since there is always something gratuitous to the choice of object. This ignorance of the object, inherent in the first stirrings in the molecular soup, persists even in the machinations of the most reified consciousness and constitutes the universality that Kleist appears to ascribe to the gratuitous act. This gratuitousness of desire, of a relation prior to anything related, is the primordial crack between things, the non-positivity in which Kantian ethics deploys itself. The ethical act, as the movement of

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desire, is the act that both differentiates what is and pulls to itself as the element of its own non-positivity the differences between things. In its openness it is the possibility (as the non-identity in which differences communicate) and impossibility (as the negation of positivity) of the world. And if desire insists on being thought independently of reference to a motive, then Kant's point has been made and the originality, purity, and universality of desire follow therefrom to ratifY the popular respect misplaced in conventional ethics.

A

SECULAR BUT

NON-INTEGRAL ETHICS

The task Kant thus sets himself in his ethical writings is a delineation of a morality worthy of the people's regard. Regarding the attempt, Heine, however, overestimates Kant's debt to conventional morality, from which, as far as principles are concerned, he takes only its pretensions to the a priori. Heine's arrangement is accordingly too crude, even for satire, when he contrasts the Kant of the Critique ofPure Reason, whom he describes as having stormed the heavens to murder God and quench the immortality of the soul, with the paternalistic Kant of the Critique ofPractical Reason, who is made to issue a retraction out of pity for the childlike faith of his servant, Lampe, and perhaps too out of the wish to keep in with the police: "In consequence of this argument Kant distinguishes between theoretical reason and practical reason, and with the latter, as though with a magic wand, he restores to life the corpse of deism, which the theoretical reason had killed." 26 In the vast edifice of the critical philosophy Kant is supposed to clear a small room for the "as if," where Lampe may continue to perform his devotions undisturbed. It nonetheless must be asked whether it is the old God of deism that is restored to life. Between the repeated proclamations of the autonomy of the rational will and the existence of God as a postulate of pure practical reason there is no fundamental conflict. But granted that the same can be said of traditional Christian ethics, this is precisely what a critic such as Heine must condemn in Kant. Ethics has never been able to get by without freedom, on the one hand, and the object to which freedom commits itself, on the other: freedom is given only to be taken away. In this respect, Kant even appears to be more repressive, since the freedom that he attributes to the will is already the Law.

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And yet this incorporation of the Law does not of itself entail a reconciliation with God. Far from restoring God, the Critique of Practical Reason alienates God from the Law. In its pure non-positivity, the Law has become the domain of the transcendental ego, and, as the Law, it stands in judgment over everything to which freedom commits itself. The Law is internalized, not so that the applicability of a given prescriptive code might be ontologically vindicated on the basis of its identity with the subject, but so that freedom might be firmly grounded in the Law's essential distance from what is. Once the Law enters into hostility with the laws, everything positive undergoes the nihilistic fate of being devalued into values. In the face of the autonomy of the Law, even the highest Good grows timid in asserting its rights as a determining ground: "The moral law is the sole determining ground of the pure will. But since this is merely formal ... it abstracts as determining ground from all matter and so from every object of volition. Hence, though the highest good may be the whole object of a pure practical reason, that is, of a pure will, it is still not on that account to be taken as its determining ground." 27 Kant maintains the traditional distinction between the object and the determining ground of practice, but in his reformulation, the distinction attests to a tension between the Law as determining ground and the positive laws as objects of practice. Contrary to what Heine and many others have contended, it is not the case that Kantian ethics anticipates the disciplinary measures of the police. The human essence is surrendered to the Law, but in the process, the Law severs itself from the laws. Just as Spinoza in his critique of theology denounces a royal image of God because it confuses caprice with omnipotence, Kant in his critique of traditional morality denounces a comparably royal image of the moral Law. The omnipotence of the moral Law is proper to the determining ground and not to the ultimate capriciousness of the objects of practice. In certain passages in his ethical writings, Kant plays down the empirical object. Practice turns in upon itself, becoming even more abstract than theory. But by denying itself any relationship with the phenomenal realm, practice endeavors to establish a relationship with things in themselves. The thing in itself is the "object" of rational desire. That from which the natural sciences must, out of respect for their own decency, divert their gaze, is allotted to ethics as its sole object of contemplation. The world of things in themselves, which the theoretical sciences of the Middle Ages could contemplate by arrangement with a benevolent Creator, survives as the territory of the ethical act. In its suspension of the laws of nature, the ethical act is a

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descendent of the miracle. But even as it takes over elements of medieval thought, Kantian ethics does not amount to a relapse into dogmatic metaphysics. Since the concept is taken up precisely in a squaring of accounts with theology, it is a meager claim to say that the concept of the thing in itself presupposes the existence of God. 28 The more insidious claim that it ushers in an antiquated theology, impossible to defend openly, 29 fails to differentiate between the ethical response to the Kantian thing in itself and the ethical response to the medieval thing in itself. The ethicality of the Kantian response is not its agreement with the divine order but its disagreement with the regularities of the natural sciences. Kleist and Hegel have proved to be in the minority in their recognition that the function of the thing in itself cannot but change with its appropriation by an avowedly secular philosophy. Kant inscribes noli me tangere over things in themselves and nevertheless maintains that the pure will is the cause of its objects and that the objects of the pure will are things in themselves. By means of this inconsistency, Kantian ethics extricates itself from theological ethics. The response of the Kantian agent is ethical only so long as it does not assimilate the object of the response to the response itsel£ The response must miss its mark, it must hesitate before the final step to the object, it must be blocked in its final step, so that the object retains its independence and avoids being reduced to the condition of a mere means. 30 The response must thwart itself as response, since there is no Creator who otherwise ensures the object's independence within adequation. Awkwardness and timidity are not so much duties that Kant imposes on us in our relations to others as consequences of the atheism with which he thinks through the correspondence theory of truth. They are not arguments against the creativity of desire, because this creativity is the non-positivity by virtue of which desire finds itself at odds with itself, estranged from itself as a determinate entity and hence no longer estranged from itself as the transcendence of the pure relation of desireY To the extent that it is not the correspondence between an agent and an object, desire is awkward as well as productive. Wittgenstein, who does not conflate Kantian and theological ethics, nevertheless does not acknowledge the philosophical issue that Kantian ethics addresses. "It is dear that ethics cannot be put into words," he writes in the Tractatus. "Ethics is transcendental." 32 Although Kant is not unsympathetic to a disjunction between the expressible and the transcendental, he does not employ it in an apology of positivism. Ethics cannot be derived from a state of affairs, since an empirical morality would be a contradiction. For Wittgenstein,

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this independence of ethics is not credible. Practical propositions (judgments of absolute value) are merely similes of technical propositions (judgments of relative value), as he argues in a lecture on ethics: But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense. 33 Wittgenstein's argument against the independence of ethics turns on the misuse of certain words that takes them in an absolute sense whereby they lose their comprehensibility: We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and therefore it's nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. 34 By extension, no act can be meaningfully called good in itself; it can only be so in relation to something else, that is, relatively and not absolutely. But here the meaninglessness of the absolutely good has not been so much proved as assumed by Wittgenstein's positivistic frame of reference. That the absolutely good cannot be meaningfully compared with the relatively good does not imply that it is not meaningful at all. In Kantian ethics, the goodness of the absolutely good is explicitly the goodness of the absolute, of whatever absolves itself from the empirical. At bottom, Kant is not concerned with varying the syncopation between the "good" of conventional morality (the reality principle) and the "good" of technical propositions. What he wants is to heed, in its purity, the ontological contestation of the positive that issues from the transcendental, not to communicate with what is by means of similes. With Kant, the voice of conscience is more audible, if also less intelligible. In disregard of his architectonic commitments, Kant does not advance in the second Critique a schematism of practical reason to bridge the gap between pure concepts and empirical intuitions. As far as a critique of the reductive ontology of positivism is concerned, what conscience has to say, what it offers by way of content over and above the alien buzz and murmur

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of its call, is simply a distraction from the non-identity in which the transcendental ego sets itself up in opposition to the empirical ego. If Kant defends the transcendental claims of ethics against eudaemonism, it is not out of any adherence to the Mosaic conception of the Law. There is an alternative. Kant's originality in speculative philosophy, which he refused to allow Eberhard to call into question, is matched by his originality in ethical philosophy. Kant is an ethical formalist with a distaste for pharisaism. The latter is merely punctilious; it is not formal enough. The tension between the Kantian Law and laws is also not to be understood as a basis for antinomianism. Kant's opposition to pharisaism has little to do, for instance, with the inversions with which the followers of the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi responded to the tension between the Torah of atzilut, of the coming of the Messiah, and the existing Torah of beriah, of creatureliness. 35 Recognition of the difference between the Law and laws does not exhaust itself in a practice of flouting every given law. Kant contends, with Saint Paul, that "the letter kills, but the spirit gives life." 36 Conscience is to speak, but it is not a question of declaring what is to be done. Where conscience checks desire, it is not because it is other than desire but rather because it is that which in desire refuses to be assimilated to the object. Desire without a conscience is not properly desire, since it abandons the non-identity and nonpositivity in which desire and the imperative substitute for one another. Conscience is likewise without an addressee: its pronouncements on what ought to be are intelligible to neither the rational nor the sensuous self The imperative sounds as the friction and the hollow space between the selves. The sensuous self cannot heed the imperative as a practical proposition and enact its content without ceasing to be a self determined by sensuous motivations, and the rational self cannot be confronted with this content in the exotic form of an imperative because it is, by definition, already in agreement with the Law. For Kant, imperatives hold neither for the divine will nor for the brute will of animals. They are the non-communicating language of the non-self peculiar to human beings. Accordingly, to translate this language into guidelines is reprehensible. Contending that Kant's imperative is more properly a declarative, Stanley Cavell implicitly warns against such a translation: So far asKant is talking about (the logic of) action, his Categorical Imperative can be put as a Categorial Declarative (description-rule), i.e., description of what it is to act morally: When we (you) act morally, we act in a way we

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would regard as justified universally, justified no matter who had done it. (This categorial formulation does not tell us how to determine what was done; neither does Kant's categorical formulation, although, by speaking of "the" maxim of an action, it pretends to, or anyway makes it seem less problematical than it is.) Perhaps it is by now a little clearer why we are tempted to retort, "But suppose I don't want to be moral?"; and also why it would be irrelevant here. The Categorial Declarative does not tell you what you ought to do ifyou want to be moral (and hence is untouched by the feeling that no imperative can really be categorical, can bind us no matter what); it tells you (part of) what you in fact do when you are moralY Cavell's objection dwells on the questionable character ofKant's choice of the term "imperative." If this choice is defensible, it is not because the soundness of Cavell's objection is open to dispute. Cavell's categorial declarative is, so to speak, the addressee of Kant's imperative, since it is universality that is being ordered to intrude on the empirical realm. This is, to a degree, Kant's innovation in the understanding of the Law. The distinguishing direction of the ethical act has been reversed. In the face of the universal's incursion on the empirical, the empirical is to lay aside its pretensions to the universal. In The Metaphysics ofMorals, Kant makes it very clear that the spectacle of the presented unpresentability of the Law, its irony, no longer falls to the particular duty that effaces itself in its particularity through compliance to duty: That human being can be called fantastically virtuous who allows nothing to be morally indifferent (adiaphora) and strews all his steps with duties, as with mantraps; it is not indifferent to him whether I eat meat or fish, drink beer or wine, supposing that both agree with me. Fantastic virtue is a concern with petty details which, were it admitted into the doctrine of virtue, would turn the government of virtue into a tyranny. 38 By contrast, and from a certain perspective, the path trodden by the Kantian Law is unobstructed, since its universal applicability issues from a negative formula: ''Act without models." As Kleist's text "On Thinking Things Over" argues, speed is to take the place of procrastination, of the necessarily inconclusive deliberation over which particular response best answers the demands of the Law. But what is the nature of this speed? It replaces procrastination, yet not in the sense of instantaneous reaction. Surrender to the myth of the positivity of the instincts would merely replicate the Pharisaic surrender to the myth of the positivity of the Law. There may arise lengthy periods of inactivity and then

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all at once, in the freedom with which judgment dispenses with considerations of a model and a stalling reckoning of consequences, an ethical deed. The Kantian agent is at home in the blackouts and rushes ofKleist's characters. Here any calculation of the relative moral worth of a course of action, decidable only by reference to empirical indices, is automatically precluded.

THE

ORALITY OF

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LAW

Kant is not interested in answers to the question "What is to be done?" And Kleist is not even interested in the question. From the vantage point of psychoanalysis, which shares Kant's cynicism with regard to morality but not his ambition to reconstruct it, even these approaches to the question of action fail to break with the mentality of means and ends. The self-effacement of the empirical ego in Kant and Kleist can still be interpreted as a response to the oedipal question of what is to be given in place of the phallus. Whatever one relinquishes is an attempt to buy off the castrating power. As though there can be no Law before Oedipus, Kantian altruism and Kleistian catalepsy are misinterpreted as stratagems played out on the anal level. Jacques Lacan maintains: "The anal level is the locus of metaphor-one object for another, give the faeces in place of the phallus. This shows you why the anal drive is the domain of oblativity, of the gift. Where one is caught short, where one cannot, as a result of the lack, give what is to be given, one can always give something else. That is why, in his morality, man is inscribed at the anal level. "39 Here Lacan reveals that he draws no distinction between gift and exchange. He wishes to expose guile in the very notion of a moral dilemma, an ostentatious agonistics intended to stifle the genuine demand, which is for the phallus. Yet even as he employs the Freudian discourse to reduce ethics to anality, Lacan's dismissiveness of what has been claimed as peculiar to the ethical is less than total. This is because Lacan has removed himself even further than Freud from the positive science of biology. The Lacanian phallus is not the non-metaphysical biological reality that grounds a string of metaphors. The phallus here shares the ambiguity of the Kantian thing in itself: it is both inside and outside the systematic interrelations, both a dogmatic cause and a critical representation. It is an essence only in the Kleistian sense of a vector of derangement and displacement. The ethical act is characterized as a substitute for the gift of the phallus, but since the phallus is already lacking,

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since it is never simply identical with the penis, it is not the datum that can recover ethics for the positivism of biology. Anality does not make sense of Kantian ethics. The absence of the phallus names rather than explains the displacement in which the self is unable to press a claim to integrality. Castration is not the truth of ethics, just as faeces are not the first gift. In its transcendence, desire has always already given itself and its gift of itself is presupposed in any account of the gift that an implausibly once integral ego makes to threatening powers. The ethical act, in its indifference to the law of exchange, predates the anal stage. The rationality of desire is its primordiality, not its alignment with the reality principle. Desire becomes all the more rational the further back it is traced. It is the Reason of the transcendental, rather than of bourgeois prudence. What Kantian ethics contemplates is a priori desire. As a priori, desire is not determinable empirically, but as desire, it always reaches our to determination. It is pure in the sense that it is transcendental, that it is "without a why," but it is impure in the sense that as desire it is essentially non-identical. Desire is as much misunderstood when it is abstracted from objects as when it is submerged in them. Few figures in European literature navigate more adroitly between these misinterpretations than Kleist. Where Sade also eludes them, it is via an absolurization of the distance between abstraction and determination, with the determinacy of desire becoming an original malaise to be rectified by extirpation of the object in a nonetheless interminable journey toward abulia's black hole. At the end of Penthesilea, it is impossible to resolve whether desire in its determinacy or purity is uppermost. Indeed, this impossibility is there from the start. The eponymous heroines of two of Kleist's plays, Penthesilea and Kathchen von Heilbronn, fall in love a priori. The early nineteenth-century German dramatist Christian Dietrich Grabbe, in a note on Das Kiithchen von Heilbronn, considers this to be Kleist's great insight and his innovation over other poets, Shakespeare included. "The thought of physical beauty or intellectual merits ordinarily occurs only when one is already hooked," Grabbe asserts. 40 The a priori moment in love is not the memory of an earlier object that establishes a predisposition in the choice of new objects: since Penthesilea and Kathchen know exactly whom they want, without even having met them, Achilles and GrafWetter vom Strahl do not, more or less unhappily, remind them of the objects on which their desire was first fixated. The general concept is bypassed. Desire creates its objects, and nonetheless discovers in a coup de foudre-Kleist describes the bellicose

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Penthesilea suddenly dumbstruck and blushing, and Kathchen dropping a tray of food and drink and falling to the floor-that it must give itself to its objects. Desire only remains desire so long as it is confronted with the brute externality of what it has created and toward which it must notwithstanding transcend. 41 Although Penthesilea and Das Kathchen von Heilbronn share the insight into the paradoxically determinate purity of desire, it is in Penthesilea that Kleist properly abandons himself to this insight, unwriting the history of the West at the dictate of desire. In Kleist's most probable source, Benjamin Hederich's Grnndliches mythologisches Lexicon, Penthesilea kills Achilles but, at the intercession of his divine mother, restores him to life and the successful conclusion of the Trojan War. From the many ethnological studies of fairy tales, this account can be interpreted in terms of an initiation ritual. Kleist's Penthesilea, however, is not concerned with initiation into a matriarchal order: whereas Jonah is disgorged from the whale and the initiate is allowed to leave the totemic hut, Achilles simply dies. The violence of Kleist's Penthesilea is not disciplinary. It does not inscribe a socius. But nor does it negate the object. Violence is not presented as delivering desire from the empirical, returning it to an a priori at one with abulia (a blood-spattered Penthesilea, eschewing the apathy of Sade's ideal libertine, mourns over Achilles' corpse). The violence is gratuitous. It is not directed against the contingency of Penthesilea's passion. What is striking about Kleist's use of myth is that the material does not become the pretext for invocations of fate and necessity. The contingencies of realist fiction turn up, without any sense of embarrassment, in the territory of myth. Kleist's Penthesilea is not the persona of a social order. In Hederich's Lexicon (and elsewhere), the resurrected Achilles promptly slays Penthesilea, thereby asserting, according to Kaarle Hirvonen, not so much himself as the claims of the new patriarchy. 42 Siding with Priam, Penthesilea in the great number ofliterary variants of the legend, of which the first book of the late epic by Quintus Smyrnaeus is the fullest, is killed by Achilles, who in some versions then violates her dead body. In Dictys Cretensis, the Greek soldiers shout for the dying Penthesilea to be thrown to the dogs as punishment for her unwomanliness. Why in Kleist's version is it Penthesilea who with her dogs slays Achilles? The reason for Kleist's infidelity and reversals is not hard to find: nowhere in his writings is desire at once more pure and tangible.

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This claim is familiar from the secondary literature, but the arguments for it that have been offered are disputable. The purity of the desire of Kleist's heroine supposedly results in her death and a vindication of the reality principle. But Penthesilea ends in open defiance of the history and mythology of the West. Hence to read the play as a clash between instinct and duty is to read it in an all too oedipal and Western manner. 43 There is no epilogue in which the Greeks regain the stage and the Freudian prerogatives of anality are upheld and ratified by the self-destruction of orality. In distinction to the tragedies ofFriedrich Hebbel, with whom Kleist has often been superficially compared, the pathos of Penthesilea cannot be traced to the spectacle of a culture condemned by the forces of history. For Kleist, as for the exponents of the baroque Trauerspiel, history is to be stood on its head whenever requisite: anality can relapse into orality and the future of Europe can become a vagrancy of the steppes. In Penthesilea, Kleist returns to the mythical territory of Oedipus and oversees a different outcome. Is it here a question of a psychoanalytic allegory? "Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization of Greece," Freud writes. 44 Luce Irigaray asks whether Freud's simile should not be taken literally.45 In what order of temporality does Oedipus-the privileging of the phallus, the threat of castration-take hold? In the biological temporality of the individual organism? Or in the historical temporality ofWestern civilization? These orders cannot be completely distinguished from one another, as Freud's "like" assumes, without mystification and a suspension of awareness of the sociohistorical conditions of the rise of biology as a science. Kleist, furthermore, does not translate the biological sequence into the historical sequence. By means of the Amazons' victory, Greece never advances beyond its "pre-Oedipus phase." History and biology stall-and must stall-in a representation of the irrepressible primacy of a priori desire.

AN ALLEGORY OF DESIRE?

Yet the universality of desire is lost to view in such a reading if desire is made the preserve of the Amazons. Kleist's play, once it becomes the instantiation and mere representation of a philosophical schema, is moreover rendered superfluous for philosophy. Against the first charge, it is perhaps enough to

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repeat that Penthesilea is being considered here as a complement to Kant's ascetic examples, so that the universality of desire, by an accretion of diverse examples, might be intimated. With regard to the second, and more serious, charge, philosophy needs to founder on the irreducibility of the strategies of Kleist's play when, in its final scenes, by a mechanism comprehensible through an exposition of a priori desire, it undermines the laws of representation. Philosophy cannot approach art unless the latter adopts the guise of allegory and represents what is already philosophical, but if philosophy is to acquire anything from the encounter, the guise must come apart in the most concrete manner. In reading literary texts, philosophy cannot survive on anamnesis. The example, if it is not to be the moment when philosophy passes over into pedagogy, must illuminate something besides its concept. In the Meno, the founding text of anamnesis, a slave draws a triangle in the sand: for Plato, this triangle is the explicit confirmation of a schema, just as it is implicitly, in the contingency whereby it differs from its schema, a manifestation of the limits of metaphysics. The literary work must approach philosophy in order to draw attention to its distance. Penthesilea is the "allegory'' of the unrepresentable; that is to say, it is an allegory that "operates" by failing. Admitting for the moment the expedience of an allegorical construction, one may ask whether the Western civilization that delimits itself, according to Freud, by means of the repression of a pre-oedipal economy does not confront in Kleist's play the myth of its own disappearance. Certainly, given that the Freudian imaginary cannot refrain from positing connections between nomadism and the pre-oedipal the moment it exhibits the plow copulating with mother earth (the agricultural communities supposedly succeeding nomadism stage a pointedly symbolic transgression of the taboo on incest), it is not by chance that it is through an act of cannibalism that the oral Penthesilea reclaims Greece for the desert. But what does such a myth mean, if anything, for the West? A dead end that exonerates it? Once a reading ofKleist's play equates Penthesilea's anthropophagy with a self-destructive atavism as a step toward setting up a dilemma of Oedipus or death, an apology of Western history is invariably the intention: the Amazons fare no better than when repulsed from Athens as the first foreign invasion or when consigned, in book 4 ofHerodotus, to beyond the realm of Man together with the other monsters. At this point a parting of the ways presents itself: either the Amazons' victory is only apparent, with Penthesilea's suicide reinstating Oedipus on the throne of the world, or this victory is to be thought through to the imposition of a

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very different conception of the Law. Penthesilea's death is not the triumph of the Law over desire. Inasmuch as Penthesilea, whose berserker recklessness makes her such a formidable opponent, is aware of death only as a passage to another world in which to resume her pursuit of Achilles, her suicide does not imply an oedipalization of the will. Kleist's play depicts something besides the conflict between the oedipal and the pre-oedipal. Every obstacle with which Penthesilea is confronted ornaments rather than checks the path traced by desire. She never hesitates: down all at once she plunges, horse and rider, amid a rattling rain of loosened rocks, as if hellbent for Orcus, crashing down right to the bottom of the steep, and neither breaks her neck nor learns a grain of sense: only pulls herself together for another try. 46 Penthesilea's indomitability springs from an ignorance of the negative. In his "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," Freud traces this ignorance to the "deepest strata of our minds": Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. What we call our "unconscious"-the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses-knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own death, for to that we can give only a negative content. Thus there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death. This may even be the secret of heroism. The rational grounds for heroism rest on a judgement that the subject's own life cannot be so precious as certain abstract and general goods. But more frequent, in my view, is the instinctive and impulsive heroism which knows no such reasons, and flouts danger in the spirit of Anzengruber's Steinklopferhans: "Nothing can happen to me." 47 The unconscious does not, of course, enunciate its conviction that nothing bad can happen to it. It has no need to reassure itself and, in its ignorance of the negative, it does not differentiate between the psychologically admissible and inadmissible event. Penthesilea's fearlessness is not a repression of fear. She does not suspend the claims of her own existence in favor of the claims of "certain abstract and general goods." Her indomitability is the affirming power of the unconscious, of a priori desire.

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With the absence of the negative there is an absence of determination, more precisely, of an end to determination. No character of Kleist's is more impressionable or mutable: You thought the nightingale that haunts Diana's temple bore her in her nest. The oak tree rocked her in its top, she piped and sang and sang and piped through the silent night so that the traveller, arrested, felt, far off, his heart swell with emotion. 48 Odysseus, however, says of her: This palm of mine, I swear, is more expressive than her face was thenuntil she sees Pelides. All at once a hot flush burns her face, down to the throat, as if the whole world had gone up in flames around her. 49 And in the last scene another affect, another world: Gardens devastated by the lava spilling from the burning bowels of the earth and spewed out over all the flowers on its breast, look sweeter than her face. 50 Reconfigured at each moment, in turns beside herself with fury and fainting away, Penthesilea is without a stable substance. Her sequence of selves is the adoption of the practical postulate that Kant makes of immortality in the second Critique: act as though you were immortal, act as though you knew nothing of Oedipus. The "I" that can lay claim to immortality is the formal "I" of original apperception. To act as though one were already and still this "I" is to act with the freedom from determination that is peculiar to the condition of possibility of determination. Immortality is an affair of the affirmations of becoming.

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This anarchy in Kleist again and again meets with commentators who claim to have its psychological or historical measure. Whenever the manner of Penthesilea's death seems insufficient justification for oedipal readings of Kleist's work, his own suicide is invoked as evidence of the fate reserved for desire. But the wisdom that says that those who do not adapt, self-destruct, has a repressive interest in mistaking the contingent for the destined. It is a horrible hermeneutic short cut to believe that the truth of one's life is crystallized in one's death, as though because it is the final act or event, death occupies the status of solution to the life that has now taken on the reductive aspect of a mathematical problem. Kleist is even less of an essentially tragic figure than Walter Benjamin. Bad luck, as Kleist's anecdote "The New (More Fortunate) Werther" asserts, can flip over into good luck: by chance the frustrated lover's attempt at suicide turns into the guiltless murder of the obstructive husband. 51 As far as a priori desire is concerned, death has no lessons to impart. Germaine de Staellamented the senselessness of Kleist's suicide: ''And this man who wanted to die, did he not have a fatherland? Couldn't he have fought in its defense? Was there no lofty and perilous enterprise in which he could have furnished an example!" 52 For his part, Kleist's contemporary Joseph von Eichendorff believed that it was for just such "abstract and general goods," and in protest at the servility of Prussia under Napoleon, that Kleist committed suicide. Even if Kleist at one point dreamt of assassinating Napoleon, of putting "a bullet through the head of this, the world's evil," 53 he nonetheless also hoped to enlist in Napoleon's army for the invasion of England. There was more than the one Kleist, more than the one formula, and more than the one solution. In the terminology of vulgar existentialism, Kleist is inauthentic. He lacks character and integrity. He doubles himself and thereby circles the nonidentity in which the imperative articulates itsel£ Hypocrisy is both the element of ethics and the object of its constitutive disavowal. At least in its Kantian form, ethics does not privilege authenticity, since it has an ontological stake in the treachery of doubles. The empirical and transcendental selves incessantly switch places, and if this duplicity is not at all a cause of horror, it is because freedom and determinism are required to differentiate themselves and to brush up against one another. Revoking the Platonic ban, Kant makes the simulacrum the ally of ethics. Hence, it is to the very possibility ofKantian ethics that Emil Staiger objects in his commentary on "The Foundling": "If every human being, as an unrepeatable creation, does in fact

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stand immediately before God, if no soul is equal to another, how should one endure it that two faces look deceptively similar and that the highminded is not sure of being distinguished from the base?" 54 One way in which an inability to endure the duplicity of simulacra might show up is in the inability to endure the undecidability between the empirical and transcendental selves that is the precondition of the ethical imperative. In the tale by Kleist that Staiger is discussing, it is a time of plague, and the prevailing corruption is not merely physiological and "moral" but also ontological and onomastic (the villain and the saint change places: Nicolo becomes Colino). At the place of public execution, Antonio Piachi refuses to confess so that he may be damned and, once in hell, exact further vengeance on the mimicking Nicolo. Divine judgment is called upon to resolve the undecidability between simulacra, to establish beyond question the difference between Nicolo and Colino. This ontological anarchy that comes to expression in Kleist is far removed from the axiom of decidability with which National Socialism confronted beings. When Georg Lukacs aligns National Socialism with the "emotional anarchy" 55 of which he judges Kleist to be a seminal literary manifestation, he disregards the programs of control according to which Hitler's dictatorship mobilized, ordered, and destroyed populations. National Socialism fastened on romanticism's moments of fatigue when a panegyric of the state or the race is wrung from it. In r935, Georg Minde-Pouet, editor of an edition of Kleist's collected works and president of the Kleist Society, announced that Kleist had become the classic of National Socialist Germany. 56 IfKleist enjoyed favor during Hitler's dictatorship, it was chiefly Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and Die Hermannsschlacht that carried his name to the German stage. How is it then that Leni Riefenstahl, with ministry approval, was planning to make a film of Penthesilea when the war broke out? After years of preparation, all was in readiness. Backing had been organized, locations had been scouted in Libya, and casting had been settled (a French actor was to play Achilles, with Riefenstahl herself in the tide role). Riefenstahl's production notes envisage the following scene: "Introduced by a blinding flash of lightning that shatters a gigantic oak and like a signal for a final raging storm reaches the sky in a great leaping flame. The trees bend, the river overflows its banks, rocks split and throw down gigantic boulders, the horses become wild, and man stands in the raging elements, completely petrified from horror and fear. Only Penthesilea is at one with these forces." 57 From this posited

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identity between Penthesilea and nature, there issues a conception of telluric violence by no means alien to the ethos of National Socialism. Violence becomes the ratio cognoscendi of the earth (a new rootedness, a new belonging that results in an expansion of territory and an exclusion of the unnatural and the civilized). Perhaps approval for the shooting ofPenthesilea was simply a reward for Riefenstahl's earlier work for the NSDAP on Triumph ofthe Will and Olympia. Or perhaps there was a degree of calculation: the ambition of totalitarianism is to impose its own image on violence, so that at every crack in the structure, every rupture in the machine, it can be said that nothing has changed and that everything is already eo-opted. The National Socialist rhetoric of struggle and conflict is missing from Kleist's play. A conflict admits of resolution and decision, whereas derangement is unending. Gerhard Gonner observes: "The Kleistian catastrophes are no longer answers in the traditional sense. They display rather an absolute dismemberment of the interpretive concepts previously laid out and played through." 58 In Kleist's exposition, a tragic dilemma is not set forth in ever greater clarity until the moment of crisis. Instead, antitheses are no sooner established than rendered obsolete by the introduction of a third term (tertium datur). At the outset, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans is thrown out of kilter by the irruption of the Amazon horde, pouring down like a swarm of locusts. Next, the lines of engagement between the Greeks and the Amazons are disturbed when Penthesilea breaks with her own people through her monomaniac passion for Achilles (prisoners of war are supposed to be nothing but avatars of Ares for the Amazons). And once it is a dispute between Penthesilea and Achilles, the latter resolves to be the one to lose his homeland and henceforth to live in captivity in Themiscyra, only to discover that there is another alternative: Penthesilea dismembers his naked body beneath a heap of snarling dogs. The play proceeds along a transversal that, shaking the global, the national, and the individual, demolishes the possibility of consensus or conflict. The massacre at the end of the play results more from an incommensurability of forces than from their disproportion. In such circumstances, Clausewitz holds battle to be unthinkable: "The battle is a very modified duel, and its foundation is not merely in the mutual wish to fight, that is, in consent, but in the objects which are bound up with the battle: these belong always to a greater whole." 59 Penthesilea has no object that, once recognized, would situate the perimeters of a field of action. In the very first scene,

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Odysseus expresses his consternation that the Trojan War should suddenly lose its shape: As far asl

can see, in Nature there is force and counterforce and no third thing. 60 For Kleist, the third term is the element of surprise in his reinvention of the dialectic (to negate another negative Latin tag: natura focit saltum). If reconciliation and decision play no part in Kleist's work, it is on account of its creativity: ever-new configurations through a technique of qualitative addition. Kleist's play advances by deviations and not by reductions. The image of Penthesilea as a creature of instinct subordinates the flight of scenes to a gradual revelation of the truth of desire. As soon as there is a ground zeroin this case, cannibalism-desire is tied to a model and lost to ethics. The purity and rationality of desire lie in the absence of a definitive determination. Where Kant himself, running with C. G. Schiitz's reductio ad absurdum, resolves sexual intercourse within marriage into cannibalism, 61 it is arguably to make a polemical point rather than to state the "truth" of desire. The marriage partner who becomes an instrument in the satisfaction of a need is not a subject of respect. For Kant, it is not the institution of marriage that differentiates a moral from an immoral desire. If there is no proper way to desire another person, it is not because desire itself is immoral but because the empirical distinction between proper and improper is what is truly improper here. Respect is without a method. Suspending the empirical distinctions that would predestine its engagement, it gives itself up to the encounter with another as thing in itsel£ In his ethics, from one angle at least, Kant is not so much a puritan as an empiricist: the encounter is everything. Each of Penthesilea's encounters with Achilles is different. Desire must surprise itself more than its object. It cannot allow itself a method of relating to its object, since with a method, the inadequacy wherein it preserves its essential non-identity would be extinguished. Penthesilea, in her own way, is unable to read Achilles. She not only ignores the Amazon belief that the captive stands in for Ares during copulation, by eating Achilles, instead of bearing his and only his daughter (as her irreligious mother had urged in view of the benefits to be gained for their line from his particular qualities), she betrays that for her, his body was uncodified (as she does not eat him out of hunger, he does not even represent food).

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Penthesilea's desire is a riddle without an answer because it is desire. The erroneous notion of a definitive determination of desire prompts Helga Gallas to the following reflection: "The actual object of desire is not therefore direct, rather it is given in a chain of metaphors, which represent it or disguise it. But what is this IT, what is the sense of this chain?" 62 Gallas brings to the question of desire a pre-Kantian dogmatism. She wants to uncover the thing in itself that would elucidate and legitimate all the representations. If, for Kant, it is no longer the thing in itself (the essence) that elucidates and legitimates representations, for Kleist, it is no longer the affair of the thing in itself to elucidate and legitimate. The question that Gallas formulates is the very question that the Greeks, Achilles above all, never cease asking, to their cost. While Achilles is readying himself for the duel with Penthesilea (in which he intends, nonetheless, to surrender to her so that ultimately he may enjoy her sexually), a herald informs him of her approach with hounds and elephants: Oh, she's a cunning one, by the immortal gods! 63 Achilles assumes she is perpetrating a ruse as much as he is. Even as he expires, he seeks, in the most famous lines of the play, the metaphoricity whereby derangement would be returned to a model and desire fixed in an object: Whatever are you doing, Penthesilea, my bride? Is this the Feast of Roses that you promised me? 64 But Penthesilea prides herself on not speaking in metaphors: Think how often it's the case, with her arms wound around her darling's neck, a woman says she loves him, oh, so much she's ready to devour him for love. But then when it comes down to it, the poor fool finds she's had a bellyful of him already. Well, my darling, that was not my way.

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You see: when I wound my arms around your neck I did exactly that, devour you. I wasn't such a mad one as might seem. 65 A play on words in the last line is lost in the English translation. Penthesilea denies she is verruckt, a word suggestive of a movement (riicken, to proceed, to go along) that has gone astray (the prefix ver- here indicating alteration, deterioration). If to be mad (verruckt) is to say one thing and, in the end, to do another, then Penthesilea can believe herself to be sane-in the eyes of the other Amazons, a sophism at which they cry in dismay. Once metaphor is interpreted, following Freud, as a means of partially eluding repression, Penthesilea becomes the fabled creature of instinct, the one whose path is not diverted by repression. But this nostalgia for the oral stage is reactive: the more it acknowledges desire in and as transgression, the further it expels it from the social domain correspondingly understood as the frustration of desire rather than as a fantasia of a priori desire. Penthesilea is seen to consolidate the stranglehold of Oedipus as unproductive desire by becoming the very reason for metaphor the instant she declares it has none. For casting aside all models Penthesilea is paradoxically turned into the model of desire. Representation has always known how to find a proof rather than a refutation of itself in that which does not represent. Insofar as representation puts to use the immanence, immediacy, or directness against which it defines itself as a minimal deviation, the critique of representation is not automatically furthered by the discovery of that which does not represent. It could be said that sublimation is less a shift away from the immediacy of desire than the construction of the latter as the definitive determination of desire in relation to which sublimation acquires a touchstone: there is no "it" independent of representation. Where words step out of the shadow of their objects, as in Penthesilea's suicidal monologue, the break with representation does not of itself entail an end to representation. But is it a question of immediacy? Penthesilea does not in fact say that her words have become one with what they denote: For now I will descend into myself, as if into a mine, to dig a killing feeling out as cold

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as iron ore. This one, I will refine it, in the burning fire of my misery, into hard steel; then in the hot corrosive poison of remorse, steep it through and through; to hope's eternal anvil next I'll carry it, to hone and point it dagger sharp; and to this dagger now I offer up my breast: like so! and so! and so! And once again!-And now all's well. (Topples and dies) 66

Penthesilea kills herself, not with a word, but with a feeling. If the word kills because it ceases to represent the physical object known as a dagger, it is still not without non-identity. Kleist's "power of assault" does not derive, as Ilse Graham maintains, from "unspirituality and dogged immanence." 67 No more than desire can language turn in upon itself. The word continues to be non-identical, although it now names in a different way. It is no longer an abstract general concept in relation to which the reality it denotes is a particular instantiation. The monologue invests the words of which it is composed with a new sense that is nevertheless incommunicable except as the unintelligible communication of affect. Language gives itself up to its element of contingency: it says nothing but the experience at hand. Penthesilea's word does not establish its independence from what it names in the act of naming, because it is the proper name of the inalienable event of her own death. The violence that, for most of its length, the drama holds at a precarious distance by means of teichoscopy and the reports of messengers, at last overruns the stage. Someone dies in front of the audience, but it is at the hands of the violence of language. Sublimation has not been replaced by immediacy. We are not face to face with the truth of desire. An allegory of desire is impossible; there is no stable object that could organize and make sense of the substitutions and representations. Although it breaks with the positivity of the laws, the transgressive act cannot break with its own positivity and illuminate a priori desire. If Penthesilea is the allegory of the impossibility of an allegory of desire, it allies itself with the logic of schema and example only to the extent that it breaks with this logic and says the contingency that philosophy cannot say.

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It is as though Kleist is on his guard against the general concept. Language in Penthesilea arrives at tensions that the general concept cannot resolve. In order to ascertain how Kleist hereby reformulates the art of tragedy, a definition drawn by Jean-Pierre Vernant in the course of an analysis of the works of Sophocles provides a number of grounds for comparison: The function of the words used on stage is not so much to establish communication between the various characters as to indicate the blockages and barriers between them and the impermeability of their minds, to locate the points of conflict. For each protagonist, locked into his own particular world, the vocabulary that is used remains for the most part opaque. For him it has one, and only one, meaning. This one-sidedness comes into violent collision with another. The tragic irony may well consist in showing how, in the case of the drama, the hero is literally taken "at his word", a word which recoils against him, subjecting him to the bitter experience of the meaning that he has persisted in refusing to recognize. The chorus, more often than not, hesitates and oscillates, rebounding from one meaning to the other, or sometimes dimly suspecting a meaning as yet unrevealed or actually unconsciously formulating, in a play on words, an expression with a twofold meaning. 68 If, in the last scene, Penthesilea appears to install the pivot of the tragedy in conflicting readings of the declaration "she loves him, oh, so much she's ready/to devour him for love," it has to be asked, on account of the declaration's position in the text, whether this is anything more than a tardy nod to the practice of the Greek tragedians. The particular shape of the catastrophe is not foreshadowed in Penthesilea's conversations with Achilles, who seems less imprisoned within a single sense than floundering among the alternatives, here all ultimately worthless, that Vernant believes are the preserve of the chorus. At the beginning, Penthesilea is an ally against the Trojans: But with first light, imagine our astonishment, Antilochus, to see strung out before us all along a broad valley, the Trojans in pitched battle with-the Amazons! 69 But almost immediately this interpretation turns out to be false, and Achilles then believes he detects in Penthesilea the wish to yield:

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She woos me through the air with feathered messengers, so many, that whisper her desires in my ear, with deathly hiss.

It becomes simply a matter of settling the details of a tryst: I've still not found the spot That's right, a clump of bushes where, without disturbance, just as she desires, I'll draw her down on a blazing couch of bronze and there embrace her? 0 And once he learns from Penthesilea's own mouth that only as a captive in Themiscyra will he be able to gratify his passion, Achilles ventures the supposition: there's nothing she will do to me, I tell you! Her arm would sooner launch to mad attack against her own self, her own bosom, hurrahing wildly when it saw the heart'sblood streaming from it, than strike me! 71 Even though he eschews the one-sidedness of the hero of classical tragedy, Achilles is still unable to make sense of what befalls him. Insight is not reserved for an abstraction from the hermetism of a particular point of view. Here tragedy is not an argument for the general concept, a herald of philosophy. It is with a wistful despair that Achilles, stroking Penthesilea's cheek, realizes he can make neither head nor tail of his murderess. With Kleist, the spectator is no longer the participant in a tragic irony, since the darkness reigning on stage reigns in the audience as well. In this respect, it is odd that Penthesilea has ever been spoken of as a fusion of classical and modern tragedy: there is no chorus to reflect on the course of the action and there are no asides, in the manner of Shakespeare's villains, telegraphing developments. If irony invests the action of a drama with necessity, the want of irony in Kleist, his humor, has surprise follow surprise in a contingent sequence of disasters. Hence, for the spectator, resignation

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before the inevitable is never really an option. Penthesilea confesses as much for herself: Suffering, they say, refines and elevates the soul, but that's not been the case with me, dear heart. 72 The soul is denied the alienation from what befalls it and the accompanying consolation of the superiority of abstraction. No such retreat is possible for either Penthesilea or the spectator. Kleist's play does not extract from suffering the reasonableness that denotes the substitution of necessity for the horizonal openness of what Kant calls Reason. Nothing is learnt, no probabilities of consequences are established, and no necessity is imputed. Misfortune, as it functions here, is thus at cross purposes with tragic irony, since the latter, as an explanation of events by a discounting of options, works by a principle of diminution. Kleist's alleged irrationalism deploys itself against the obscurantism that comes too quickly to the regularity of a rule. Given that he dispenses with tragic irony, from, namely, that whose slow process of introjection from the spectator to the work itself Hegel charts as the history and decay of art, it is clear why Hegel should have had so little patience with a thus unclassifiable Kleist. By a rigorous disavowal of the spectator's superiority, Kleist does his best to abort the irony that recognizes, for instance, the justice of both Antigone's transgression and Creon's sentence. Hegel's criticism of certain of his contemporaries who transferred the detachment of the spectator to the dramatis personae scarcely applies to Kleist. Nothing could be further removed from Penthesilea than the beautiful soul brought to a standstill by pretensions to a vantage point from which to survey proceedings. As though reversing the line of development that Hegel follows inexorably from the tragic irony of Antigone to the static dramas of the romantics he deplores, Penthesilea belongs to a theater without spectators, a theater without abstraction. This is perhaps not the least of the reasons for the widespread belief in its unstageability: it is not a work that flatters the contemplative standpoint. According to Hegel's commentary on Antigone, the dispute in the tragedy concerning which law is higher foretells the dissolution of classical art, because it prepares the ground for a task to which only philosophy is equal. The task is an answer to the question "What is the Law?" With Kleist,

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tragedy does not call out for the general concept that would mediate between the different senses, but rather appears to make of the dislocation of sense an answer to the question "What is the Law?" Regarding the various laws of the city and the relationship of self-consciousness to these laws, Hegel writes: They are, and nothing more; this is what constitutes the awareness of its relationship to them. Thus, Sophocles' Antigone acknowledges them as the unwritten and infallible law of the gods. They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where they came from, none of us can tell. They are. If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being, and regard them as something which, for me, is perhaps true, but also is perhaps not true. Ethical disposition consists just in sticking steadfastly to what is right, and abstaining from all attempts to move or shake it, or derive it/3 The Socratic question "What is the Law?" thus initiates the decline of Greek tragedy for Hegel. In his endeavor to escape the equivocity on which the hero of tragedy founders, Socrates becomes the first romantic: "By this elevation of the spirit to itselfthe spirit wins in itself its objectivity, which hitherto it had to seek in the external and sensuous character of existence, and in this unification with itself it senses and knows itself. This spiritual elevation is the fundamental principle of romantic art." 74 Between the selfabsorption that defines it and the contingency of the raw material that has becomes its original sin, romantic art plots a shaky course, frequently coming to grief in its attempt to overcome this antithesis. What makes Kleist insufferable in Hegel's eyes is that he instead endeavors to aggravate this antithesis, stocking his works with somnambulists (beautiful souls at last adrift from the world) and any number of "trivialities. "75 To the question "What is the Law?" the beautiful soul is a very poor answer, and one that Kleist does not make. The catatonia of his characters corresponds less to the moral desperation of an infinite subjectivity than to an exposition of the Law as the anarchy of affects. The beautiful soul sees beyond

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the positivity of individual laws and thus beyond the conflicts in which the one-sidedness of the laws embroils the figures of classical tragedy. But what the beautiful soul does not see is the desire of the Law: transcendence is understood unilaterally as an abstraction from the empirical, when it is also a movement toward the empirical. There is a double movement of the Law in Hegel, but it is debatable whether the interiorization of the Law is not simply a preliminary for Hegel to its rearticulation in the modern state's purported union of the objective and the subjective. In Kleist, by contrast, there is not the charade of a retreat from positive law that then "rediscovers" positive law as its expressive empirical moment. The Law, given that as the rationality of desire it is itself a priori, does not ask of contingency that it be anything but contingent. Kleist outflanks Hegel because he is at once more abstract and more contingent. Kleist's "answer" to the question "What is the Law?" is less SocraticHegelian than Euripidean. It has often been urged against neoclassical theater that it is a revival of classical tragedy not so much in its golden age as in the period of its decadence. Yet the neoclassical predilection for Greek tragedy at the moment of the dissolution of the polis is not to be explained simply by comparisons with the stunted political life in the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: according to such a sociologically motivated interpretation, sensationalism becomes all the more vicious the more it perceives itself to be a contraction of concrete existence in the face of a retreating spirit. In such a scenario, Hegelianism always enters, like the Messiah, to spread out its maps of subterranean passages to the outside world, when arguably neoclassical dramatists invoked the authority of Euripides, not as the exemplary miniaturist of a shrinking life but as the poet of a more embracing cosmogony of desire. IfEuripides enjoys ambivalent relations with the declining mystery cults, it is because in many of his works, the catastrophe is no longer an encounter with the god-only at the last moment does Medea step back into the religious sphere to vanish in a dragon chariot. The catastrophe has ceased to be the meeting ground of the human and divine that it was in Sophocles, becoming instead the wordless abyss of atheism against whose pull the gods must intervene to save those they love. With Euripides, silence takes the place of revelation: the Law falls dumb. Desire launches Medea in transgression, having her abandon Colchis and her duties as a priestess to wander as a nomad and a fratricide in the collapse of language itself The passional and violent qualities of Euripidean

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tragedy mark less a fixation, in reaction to the loss of civic life, on that which directly rasps the nerve endings than an exploration of domains even more obscure than that of the mysteries. Bernhard Boschenstein, in a commentary on the eye of the storm that is the fifteenth scene of Penthesilea, argues that if there is secularization in Kleist's neoclassicism, it is not because the secular is any more concrete: "The images of loftiness and elevation point to the fact that each of the two protagonists occupies for the other the place that in a drama of antiquity only a god would have been allowed to fill. But this transfiguration is preceded by the deception that first of all had rendered it possible, the illusion that Achilles is Penthesilea's prisoner." 76 A tryst does not so much take the place of divine revelation as frustrate itself even as tryst in its vain attempt to do so. There are no revelations in Penthesilea, and even the word that brings death, recalling the fatal oracles of Greek tragedy, clarifies nothing. The result of this absence of revelation is that Penthesilea is completely flat: the play rushes from one situation to another rather than ascending via piecemeal disclosures to its denouement or transcendental signifier. The flatness of tragedy begins almost the instant it turns its back on the mystery cults. Unwilling to accommodate this flatness, Hegel seeks to discern within it a new transcendental signifier and has to make do with the reflective consciousness that endures as the positive falls apart. As though the decadent question "What is the Law?" were the question posed by reflective consciousness rather than by a priori desire, Hegel identifies absolute subjectivity with the Law and ascribes the latter's silence to the fact that the modern state, in which the dialectic between the Law and the laws can at last be acknowledged, is still in embryo. But it should not be assumed that the flatness of decadent tragedy corresponds to the preparatory labor ofleveling the ground for a more imposing structure. Medea and Penthesilea come from the same part of the world, the other side of the Grenze, the unmarked earth beyond the Black Sea that is a horror of the agrarian Greeks. Wherever Medea goes, the ground on which she walks reverts to anomie: it becomes slippery with blood and inhospitable, a sheet of pure space. The figures of decadent tragedy are agents, not of the Law that will oversee a new distribution of territory, but of the Law that scatters peoples and goods.7 7 Paired with this different understanding of the Law is a different understanding of the tragic catastrophe. The Law does not pass sentence in the catastrophe: it invites rather than repulses. The catastrophe ceases to be the

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sheer background against which a character defines himself or herself in an oedipal equation of self-knowledge and death (an initiation rite writ large) and marks instead a gateway to the other worlds of desubjectified affects. Friedrich Koch observes: What separates Kleist from Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller thereby becomes clear. The latter proceed from a secure world into the zone of tragedy at its borders. For them, the tragic is in this sense a limit-situation; for them, it is a question of exhibiting the tragic, of rendering visible the tragic possibility of life, but also at the same time of shielding oneself against it by an awareness of it. Kleist, on the contrary, dwells in this zone of the tragic and attempts to push forward to the plain stretching beyond it. 78 Kleist's heroine does not embark on a voyage of self-discovery that can only rebound the moment it reaches the catastrophe; Penthesilea's catastrophe is not the limit that defines her as it negates her. Even as it kills, desire is not death: it is dreaming of other worlds, pulling planes of affects out of its phantasmal (internal) limits. The tragic character, who is an expression of the substance that Deleuze and Guattari take from Spinoza and rename desire, who is a persona and flourish of desire and not one of its victims, crosses over into the catastrophe and takes up the life of the desert, the vast plain that the oedipal subject imagines to be its limit. Euripides' Medea and Kleist's Penthesilea are alike in redefining the catastrophe as something that does not befall the heroine of tragedy but rather accompanies her in her incursions into realms more sedentary than her own. Euclides da Cunha offers a description of badlands that equally describes Medea and Penthesilea: "Theirs is the centrifugal force of the desert; they repel, they disunite, they disperse. They are powerless to tie man to the nuptial bonds of the ploughed furrow." 79 It is debatable whether Antigone, despite Hegel's commentaries, could not be included here. Shrieking like an angry bird across the plains outside Thebes, Antigone serves the chthonic powers that the city is fated to supersede, in Hegel's eyes. But inasmuch as Hamon, Creon's heir, dies in her wake, it is neither the familial earth nor the city that triumphs but the blank space of the catastrophe that scrambles the poles of the conflict. In the sand with which she covers Polynices' body, Antigone comes into contact with the desert and figuratively joins the ranks of the Amazons who turned upon Dionysus once he had begun to found cities. Both Euripides and Kleist are closer to eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy than to Hegel's conception of tragedy as the conflict between equally

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just claims. Contingency plays the role of the opacity of fate. In works such as Johann Karl Wilhelm Palm's Verbrechen aus Unschuld and Johann Patzke's Virginia, the pathos of the catastrophe-the sacrifice of an innocent-is its senselessness. The desert laps at the threshold of the drawing room it no longer defines and sandstorms rattle the window frames. Violence breaks in upon the self-sufficient world of the bourgeois family, as the initiation rituals of the mystery cults are parodied in the chance encounter with an upper-class villain, whose lineage can be traced from Gryphius to the Kerle of Sturm und Drang. Benno von Wiese, accordingly, all but reduces bourgeois tragedy to a masochistic fantasy: "For the delicate spectator of the eighteenth century, precisely this inner beauty in misfortune with its moralistic complacency in suffering, its delight in tears and with its self-tormenting urge to be unhappy awakened piry-the reaction of the social milieu to the tense intermingling of virtuous weakness and passively suffered misfortune." 80 The villain in eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy presents at once a sexualization of violence and a deobjectification of sexuality. He has become the pretense for virtuoso displays of sensibility. As a member of a superannuated class, he offers the "victim" an encounter with the outside all the more naked for its being dispensed with as a means to inscribing the limits of the social field. The "victim" acquires nothing in the way of self-knowledge from the catastrophe. It remains, then, for Kleist simply to cross the threshold between bourgeois tragedy and the desert, and indeed Penthesilea appears the astonishing synthesis of a Richardson heroine and villain, a combination of unaffected modesty and remorseless cruelty (the martyr who in one scene crowns herself with nettles). Kant's ethics likewise suggests such a synthesis. The reassuring familiarity of the world of the bourgeoisie rubs up against, without any explicit announcement, the exteriority of an incorruptible abstraction. When Hartmut and Gernot Bohme, with little originality, denominate Kant "as the hero of internal colonization," 81 it is not dear how this can be true, since the Law can only accidentally, and then only briefly and superficially, coincide with any given heteronomous power. What is introjected in Kantian ethics is the desert, not the state. Kant, the Mongol of Konigsberg (to tamper with the Nietzschean apposition), hollows out the subject through a rejection of the technical propositions through which the "dear self" articulates its subordination to the reality principle and its compromises with the state. In his commentary on the sentencing and execution of monarchs, Kant, who often seems to want to disguise the radicalism of his ethics and the equivocation

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in his use of the term "Reason," nevertheless betrays his conviction that the Law and the state are not consanguineous: Like a chasm that irretrievably swallows everything, the execution of a monarch seems to be a crime from which the people cannot be absolved, for it is as if the state commits suicide. There is, accordingly, reason for assuming that the agreement to execute the monarch actually originates not from what is supposed to be a rightful principle but from fear of the state's vengeance upon the people if it revives at some future time, and that these formalities are undertaken only to give that deed the appearance of punishment, and so of a rightful procedure (such as murder would not be). But this disguising of the deed miscarries; such a presumption on the people's part is still worse than murder, since it involves a principle that would have to make it impossible to generate again a state that has been overthrown. 82 Unable to foresee a judiciary surviving the execution of the monarch (ethics cannot supply it with ordinances), Kant cuts a poor figure as the juridical theorist of modern democracies. There is even something of an antagonism between the Kantian Law and modern democracies (with their regal specters), since the latter are at pains to drown out the silence of the Law as it impressed itself in the execution of Louis XVI. Kant offers no support for the lie that modern laws originate in Reason; monarchical arbitrariness is still at the back of them in the shape of the despotic authority of common sense and its counterparts. The Kantian Law does not generate the content of norms. It delights in surprises and for that a little space is needed, with the ethical agent being defined by a condition of permanent insurrection. For the figures of tragedy, at home in what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe calls "the ruin of the imitable" and "the disappearance of models," 83 and hence paradoxically at home in the uninhabitable no-man's-land of the categorical imperative, the question of practice ceases to be a "Why?" with its search for precedents and projection of consequences. Kantian ethics is not a guide to living so much as an exhortation to the catastrophe, to the surprise. Contrary to the Sophoclean precedent, Euripides' Antigone marries Hamon and leaves for the countryside, and in similar disregard of the established version, Kleist's Penthesilea consumes Achilles. Here the question "What is the Law?" does not seek to make out the authorizing principle and source of the laws. It is an anti-authoritarian question. Toppling the Oedipus become another Sphinx, the Socrates who raises the question of the Law is less the master of irony who dies out of submission to the principle of the

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Athenian judicature than the catatonic of the expedition to Potidaea. Immured in prolonged trances or heedlessly rushing into danger, he sketches a method of humor, a self-portrait of a scatterbrain the importance of which Plato does not always play down.

THE

QUESTION

OF

THE

LAW

The question "What is the Law?" asks after the non-positivity of the Law rather than the general concept of positive laws. Abstraction, as Kant argues in the Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, is not the ally of the state: Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor any likeness either of that which is in heaven, or on the earth, or yet under the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people felt in its civilized period for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or the pride that Mohammedanism inspires. The very same thing also holds of the representation of the moral law and the predisposition to morality in us. It is utterly mistaken to worry that if it were deprived of everything that the senses can recommend it would then bring with it nothing but cold, lifeless approval and no moving force or emotion. It is exactly the reverse: for where the senses no longer see anything before them, yet the unmistakable and inextinguishable idea of morality remains, there it would be more necessary to moderate the momentum of an unbounded imagination so as not to let it reach the point of enthusiasm, rather than, from fear of the powerlessness of these ideas, to look for assistance for them in images and childish devices. That is why even governments have gladly allowed religion to be richly equipped with such supplements and thus sought to relieve the subject of the bother but at the same time also of the capacity to extend the powers of his soul beyond the limits that are arbitrarily set for him and by means of which, as merely passive, he can more easily be dealt with. 84 Kant distinguishes obedience to the Law from passivity before the powers that be. Wherever the Law is not encumbered with the trappings of religion and the state with examples and guidelines, the imagination is swept away by a revolutionary enthusiasm. And to the extent that Kant's procedure in ethics can be summarized as a dismantling of these trappings in order to arrive at a presentation of the Law in its purity, the sublime emerges as the problem of ethics and revolution as the purpose of the sublime.

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With the revocation of the reality principle that is the construct of Oedipus, anomalies proliferate. Ethics becomes a teratology, since everything that confronts it, in its irreducibility to the regularities of the natural sciences, is monstrous. Regardless of what otherwise divides them, Kant and Kleist together pursue a work of destruction, with the formulae of legal codes being unwritten line by line or all at once. The Copernican Revolution of Kant's ethical writings is the fait accompli of an intangible Law that has erupted from the technical propositions whose scope is the reality of a specifiable regime and in which the ethical had become sedimented. Kleist's procedure in Penthesilea, by contrast, is the continual dislocation of sense up until the catastrophe as the encounter with silence. In its constitutive irrecoverability for a norm, the ethical act becomes a transgression. It does not defY a norm and thereby attest to it (as in the case of antinomianism); it precedes the norm and refuses to be exhausted by it. The act is ethical on the basis neither of its conformance to a preexisting norm nor of its inauguration of a norm with which others in future must comply. Kant's is an ethics of judgment, not of norms: the Law is not the positive rule that judgment applies, but rather the freedom that judgment displays from such rules. Universal implementation of a maxim is not the heart ofKant's ethics. Wanting toestablish the a priori character of ethics, Kant resorts to his questionable alignment of universality with the a priori. The proper locomotive of Kantian ethics is rational desire. It is desire that effects a passage from the act in its singularity to the a priori. Ethics has no use for the general and that it should bypass it, leaping from the particular to pure abstraction, suggests more than an analogy with Kleist's literary style. Kleist's work is the romanticized miseen-scene of Kantian ethics: a foreground of blinding affects and the background of seething darkness from which they are propelled (a mediating middle ground of the generalities of prudence is missing). There is a dearth of effective braking mechanisms, since in both Kant and Kleist there is enunciated an active, pre-oedipal conception of the organic. The body, because desire does not come upon the negative as a check, allows itself to be carried away. Where the eighteenth-century English neurologist Jacob Johnstone claims to detect "Providence" in the ganglia's resistance to a psychogenic suicide such as Penthesilea's, a resistance Kant believes they do not offer to the potentially lethal enthusiasm of feasting, 85 Penthesilea's improvident and fateless body is all of a piece: like the marionettes of Kleist's dialogue, her vis motrix is entirely within the given movement's center of gravity.

TWO

A Universal Sublime

FROM

THE

OCCASIONAL TO

THE

ESSENTIAL

Published in four consecutive issues of the Berliner Abendblatter in December r8ro, Kleist's "Uber das Marionettentheater" ("On the Puppet Theater") is at once a vehemently anti-intellectualist tract and a reaffirmation ofKleist's early ideals of Bildung. Two lines of development are traced for the intellectual life. On the one hand, the enigmatic Herr C., the leading dancer of the local opera, brings his dialogue with the unnamed narrator to a dose with the pronouncement that intelligence condemns humanity to ungainliness: "We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme." 1 And on the other hand, after commenting on bodies distorted by spirit, he ponders whether humanity's condemnation to a reflective gracelessness could be rescinded by means of a maximization of this gracelessness itself: '"Such blunders,' he added, interrupting himself, 'are unavoidable, since we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted and the Cherub is behind us. We must make a journey around the world, to see if a back door has perhaps

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been left open.'" 2 This contradiction between the divergence of reflection and grace and reflection's ultimate recovery of grace, which runs through the text as further excerpts could show, defies both compromise and dismissal as a blunder in Kleist's reasoning; indeed, "On the Puppet Theater" demands to be read precisely as a reappraisal of error and of its subordination to the understanding and the latter's good sense. The most obvious precedent for its revisionist view of the failures of the understanding is Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime." The account of the exercise of the faculty of Reason that Kant in his ''Analytic of the Sublime" bases on accidental confrontations with the immense and the overpowering has in effect been rewritten in terms of an essential confrontation with the limits of the understanding. What needs to be addressed is the question concerning the philosophical defensibility of this reformulation. The question can be put, to begin with, in the following way: are the examples in Kant's ''Analytic of the Sublime" a makeshift for error? With its references to the Alps, the Pyramids, and the Vatican, Kant's text gropes toward a geography of error. But inasmuch as it occasionalizes the breakdowns of comprehension, attributing them to the spectacles of nature and human artifice, it lends these breakdowns a self-contradictory objective stability. The surprise of the sublime ceases to surprise once it is identifiable with the stock features of the grand tour. Kant makes a step toward a positive encounter with error but retreats with his examples. It is as though Kleist, in "On the Puppet Theater," wants to hold on to the step gained. The thesis affirming the derivativeness of error, which Descartes takes for granted and whose questionability Kant addresses in his theory of the fundamental character of transcendental illusion, is for Kleist suspect. Kleist's Kantianism, as a Kantianism of the thing in itself, attributes to error a kind of transcendental legitimacy, since error cannot be read off, extrinsically, from knowledge as its dependent negation but reaches into it through the defining of knowledge by the unknowable. "On the PuppetTheater" admits comparison with the ''Analytic of the Sublime" because in its confrontation with error Kleist's text endeavors to demonstrate that the faculty of the understanding must acknowledge a superior power, and that this acknowledgement does not at all involve a simple abdication of thought. Even though the terminology is less philosophically exacting than Kant's and the exposition colludes with the na!vete of what Hegel calls picture thinking, "On the Puppet Theater" is more universalistic-and here that

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75

means: more philosophical-because the breakdown proper to the sublime is no longer dependent on a set of encounters. Kant's travel guide is rewritten as a character sketch of the philosopher. A lesson from the history of philosophy, and one that "On the Puppet Theater" articulates with excessive sharpness, is that to break step with the understanding is to trip: having stepped out of the sphere of everyday calculation and common sense, Thales falls into a well. But for Kleist this is not simply an argument against breaking step with the understanding. The consciousness inseparable from ungainliness and ineptitude may need only to be aggravated, according to the second passage from "On the Puppet Theater" quoted above, in order for the Garden of Eden to lie once more before us. Consequently, the false step that initiated the Fall itselfleads to humanity's redemption; having stumbled out of paradise, we lurch back in. And yet, according to the first excerpt, there is no return. Error has become the path to a simultaneous salvation and damnation. On the basis of Kleist's text, it is not possible to say that the objects of salvation and damnation differ, that we are saved inasmuch as reflection falters and damned inasmuch as we reflect. As Kleist is not advocating a crude vitalism, reflection is not shut down. By the criteria at which they arrive in their common argument, Herr C. and the narrator do nothing but judge the participants of one anecdote after the other, but their verdicts on the puppets, the dancing cripples, the narcissistic mimic and the dancing bear are all rendered equivocal by the principles established in the same argument. Stupidity, having been discussed both as innocence and erring consciousness, grace and gracelessness, cannot be measured against the intelligence it has incorporated. Stupidity has become incommensurable. In order to explore the workings and ramifications of Kleist's text, a question directed to Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime," with its focus on the incommensurable, can perhaps function as a point of entry: does thought break down not because it falls short of the comprehension of God but because that is its very nature and virtue? No longer etiologically bound to the set of aesthetically overwhelming events from which Kant draws his examples, the stupefaction of the sublime is perhaps universal. In this respect, a relationship somewhat similar to that which was presented between Penthesilea and the Critique ofPractical Reason can be posited between "On the Puppet Theater" and the Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment.

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Where Kleist's play provides a counterbalance to Kant's deceptive examples, his essay arguably reappraises the empirical conditions of the sublime, on which Kant expatiates, with a view to the essence of thought as a collapse. The sublime would no longer be in the gift of a particular class of encounters just as the moral is no longer the preserve of the practitioners of a received ethical code. Strictly, this "no longer" does not carry us beyond Kant's horizon. In a passage from the Critique of the Power ofjudgment already quoted at length, Kant cites the commandment "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image." Kant, who strews his ethical writings with examples that he himself declares to be misleading, thus intimates a like caution before his illustrations of the sublime. Examples, which in the Critique ofPure Reason are termed judgment's baby walker (Gangelwagen der Urteilskraft), 3 must in time be put aside, since just as one cannot walk properly while encumbered with a walker, one cannot think in the spirit of the critical philosophy while encumbered with examples. It is a matter, then, of discovering within Kant the Kleist who, for a certain perspective, is even indistinguishable from a purer Kant, a Kant obdurate toward the one-sidedness of examples and more rigorous in the maintenance of his principles. There is, after all, no necessity that dictates to the Kleist literature that Kant be considered an obstacle to be circumvented or an irrelevance to be brusquely revived in the phrase "the so-called Kant crisis" and then dismissed. Certainly, Kleist never saw himself as the Lucretius to Kant's Epicurus. If for a time he toyed with the notion of promulgating the critical philosophy in France, it was by no means in the guise of the poet he was to become. In the event, he went to Konigsberg itself and wrote Penthesilea. But then the postulate of Kleist's Kantianism is reductive only as long as it pretends to translate the two corpora into a single discourse without residue. The Kant crisis is the gateway, as Albrecht Sieck contends, 4 but it is the gateway to a particular Kleist. It proves to be a dead end, as Sigrid Scheifele asserts, 5 but only when it is expected to offer access to everything transparent and obscure in Kleist's corpus. Kleist is, among other things, deeply Kantian: Kant's influence in the culture of the day was so pervasive, his work made so many existing debates its own, that the claim need not imply that Kleist even read Kant. Kantianism may well be the best yardstick of Kleist's originality, because where a tabula rasa cannot register deviations, Kant's philosophical apparatus couples exactitude and mobility to a remarkable degree. And to persevere in the thesis that Kleist's work constitutes an exposition of the critical philosophy is to ask of obstinacy an effective proof of this mobility.

A

U N IV E R SA L SU B L I M E

77

The a priori, the ethical, and the sublime are the three names that Kant gives in his Critiques for that which is the truth and excess of experience. The agitation of the senses and the attendant discomfiture of the understanding are elements of the sublime just as they are elements ofKleist's literary corpus. The sublimity of the ethical act, its irreducibility to the oedipalized subject, 6 is its incompatibility with the regularities of cynicism and causation. The act that is ethical is the act that presents the unpresentable, affronting the cynicism and complacency of the understanding with the impossible spectacle of freedom. Reason's independence of the senses, which for Kant is to say its freedom, manifests itsel£ It crosses the line. Etymologically, however, the term "sublime" evokes a maximum, a passage merely toward (sub) a limit and threshold (limen) rather than across it. Kant appeals to the existing discourse of the sublime, but his choice of term in German announces a discontinuity with this tradition. Kant's Erhabene (the exalted, the lofty, the solemn) is the assertion, not of the authority of the limit, but rather of the delimiting power of Reason. Refusing to stay in its place, Reason imposes itself, to the consternation of the sensibility and understanding. The sublime is an encounter with a limit. It is the moment when experience touches on its limit and is recalled to its relation to Reason, its relation, not its identity with Reason (the encounter comes about as a divergence). The sublime is the paradoxically experiential corroboration of the limit Kant traces around experience in the first Critique to distinguish it from the enthusiasms of a Reason become dogmatic. Reason, which in the Critique of Pure Reason is characterized by freedom, openly exercises its freedom only in the two later critiques, where it exhibits its freedom by transgressing on the other faculties. In the end, as Hegel had argued, Reason in its superiority cannot but play havoc with the components of the epistemological apparatus that Kant had set out as a reply to Hume and Leibniz. Ethics and the sublime, on strictly philosophical grounds, gain the upper hand. Inasmuch as the moral directive to act always in conformity with the Idea of the Law so that it may be realized on earth readily converts into the goal of a universal sublime, Penthesilea is conceivable as a violent but not unjustifiable fusion ofKantian ethics and aesthetics. With the text "On the Puppet Theater" Kleist ventures an approach that dispenses with the paradigmaticity, always ambiguous, of the catatonic Penthesilea in favor of a definition of thought as catatonic. Ideas break forth everywhere under the clu,.msiness of a humanity stumbling archly and unstoppably to an infernal paradise, while self-consciousness is debased to a

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gaffe and thought in its irremediable yet auspicious awkwardness is given up to the sublime. Having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, we understand nothing, and this incomprehension carries us off to paradise and, at the same time, out the gates. This is the voyage of the sublime. Where, for Kant, Ideas are "awakened in us by means of an object the aesthetic judging of which stretches imagination to its limit, whether that of enlargement (mathematically) or of its power over the mind (dynamically) ," 7 for Kleist there is nothing that does not give on to Ideas, since the comprehension of the understanding, requisite to Kant's thinking in areas divorced from ethics, is never granted a hearing.

INTERMINABLE

COMPREHENSION

In March I80I, in the Kant crisis, Kleist's youthful dream of knowledge of things in themselves becomes the inspiration for an abolition of the understanding. The understanding, which does not understand, which "cannot decide whether that which we call truth truly is truth or whether it merely appears so to us," is made to run amok. This project is at its most explicit in "On the Puppet Theater," which is set, as Martha B. Heifer notes, in the period of the crisis. 8 The Kantian doctrine of finitude, which, for the sake of absolute knowledge, German idealism negotiates by an assumption of responsibility for limits, is not abandoned or circumvented by Kleist; rather, it loses all propriety and becomes unserviceable as a new foundation for the sciences. Kleist remains open to the non-conceptual moment of the senses (i.e., that which a doctrine of finitude ascribes a role in the constitution of knowledge) and incites it against the understanding's labor of identification and homogenization. The epistemological and ontological crisis of March 1801 intimates a system wherein despair sloughs off its appearance of negativity, since thought depends on its immanent despair to throw it off balance and disrupt its reduction to the predictabilities of the understanding. Despair, in its failure to comprehend, is sublime; it is no longer and not yet a psychological phenomenon. As to where this may lead, with its implications for theories of consciousness and the recovery of paradise, an examination of an excerpt from §26 from Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime" may set up a few guideposts or, at least, hint at a Kantian starting point. Kant here picks out two operations in the experience of the sublime:

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79

To take up a quantum in the imagination intuitively, in order to be able to use it as a measure or a unit for the estimation of magnitude by means of numbers, involves two actions of this faculty: apprehension (apprehensio) and comprehension (comprehensio aesthetica). There is no difficulty with apprehension, because it can go on to infinity; but comprehension becomes ever more difficult the further apprehension advances, and soon reaches its maximum, namely the aesthetically greatest basic measure for the estimation of magnitude. For when apprehension has gone so far that the partial representations of the intuitions of the senses that were apprehended first already begin to fade in the imagination as the latter proceeds on to the apprehension of further ones, then it loses on one side as much as it gains on the other, and there is in the comprehension a greatest point beyond which it cannot go. 9 One cannot ask, "What is this maximum?" and expect an objective standard. This is enough to problematize the status of examples in the ''Analytic of the Sublime." As the aesthetically greatest basic measure, it relates to individuals' unequal competence as judges, to moods and to the amount of time allowed to the operation of comprehension. The maximum cannot be determined in abstraction, since what is at stake in Kant's account of the sublime is the discrepancy between the concrete human being with his or her determinate corporeal size and psychical constitution and the abstract self of transcendental apperception, which takes up the task of comprehension on the empirical ego's failure. The transcendental ego, which is at home in the infinite, does not share the empirical ego's limitations in the face of the physically overwhelming: it can comprehend where the latter cannot. JeanFrans;ois Lyotard sees Kant here reformulating the discrepancy of powers in the Cartesian example of the chiliadic polygon, which can be conceived but not imagined. 10 Under the heading "Nominal definition of the sublime" Kant writes: We call sublime that which is absolutely great. However, to be great and to be a magnitude are quite different concepts (magnitudo and quantitas). Likewise, simply (simpliciter) to say that something is great is also something entirely different from saying that it is absolutely great (absolute, non comparative magnum). The latter is that which is great beyond all comparison.-So what does the expression that something is great or small or medium-sized say? It is not a pure concept of the understanding that is thereby designated, still less an intuition of sense, and just as little a concept of reason, since it does not bring with it any principle of cognition at all. It must therefore be a concept of the power of judgment, or derive from such a concept, and be grounded in a subjective purposiveness of the representation in relation to the power of judgment. 11

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The challenge of accounting for what goes on in the sublime offers Kant the opportunity to show up, once again, the respective and complementary limitations of empiricism and rationalism. The sublime is that which is absolutely, rather than maximally great (gro.f). The absolutely big or the absolutely powerful of the Kantian sublime cannot shock the transcendental ego because its conceptions of magnitude and power are already absolute, that is, already absolved from the sensuous, and thus a priori. But the mathematical and dynamic measures of the transcendental ego of rationalism do not suffice on their own to make sense of our experiences of magnitude and power. AsKant says, an aesthetic judgment is involved that is reflective and subjective. A distance can be measured according to the metric system, but the various units of the metric system are themselves always "measured" according to the extraconceptual experience of the lived body-"in the end all estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is aesthetic (i.e., subjectively and not objectively determined)." 12 It is this extraconceptual, aesthetic experience of the lived body that makes sense of the various, universally applicable units of measure and places us, as it were, in conversation with them. For the empirical ego, the absolutely big and the absolutely powerful are the scandal that ensues when the determinate aesthetic measure it draws from its own body, and to which the magnitudes and powers of the objects of its experience are otherwise relative, fails it. The lived body surrenders its tenuously abstract position as the subjective measure of what is. It can no longer make sense of the big and the powerful because it no longer takes itself for a kind of universal of its subjective experience, mediating between given quantities. The experience of the body in the sublime is the experience of the failure of that very disavowal of the concreteness of the body which otherwise informs the infinite comprehensibility of the objective world. To put it another way, the comprehension that believes it can take in the infinity of the world suspends the inadequacy of the aesthetic measure of the lived body for such a task, and it is the experience of the sublime that reminds us that, as lived bodies, we cannot be the measure of all things. The sublime is the collision of the a priori and the human body as measures in which the a priori and the human body come into their radical difference from the Kantian faculty of the understanding. The a priori, ceasing to be the impassive universalist realm in which empirical concepts push their claims to objectivity, becomes a problem rather than a partner for the understanding. And the body, pulling its aesthetic measure away from the

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81

objective measures of the metric system, for instance, reasserts its distance from the conceptual and hence its intractability to all the so-called discourses of the body (the sublime is the birth of a world apart of flesh). Comprehension's inability to keep up with apprehension in the sublime is the luck of the a priori. From one vantage point, as shall be argued here, the sublime can be diagnosed as an affliction of the Kantian general concept. It could also be said, in opposition to Kant's ascriptions of culpability to certain objects in the natural world, that it is a congenital affliction. The Idea, as the frame of every concept, as the indeterminacy that is the horizon of determination, irrupts in the undecidability of the understanding's failed comprehension as this undecidability itsel£ This is the selfsame experience of Kleist's Kant crisis. There the trigger is said to be, rather than the immensity of a specific object in the perceptual field, the internal bankruptcy of comprehension. Since it is not a question of a maximum to be surpassed, the project of comprehension is inherently flawed. Although Kleist does not take issue with the Kantian configuration of the sublime, he does not share Kant's narrow understanding of the breakdown of comprehension. In Kant's account, the material of apprehension has already been successfully subsumed under its concept. Its incomprehensibility is made out to rest with a distinct and homogeneous quantum in advance or excess of its comprehension. What Kant means here by comprehension (Zusammenfassung or comprehensio aesthetica) is not conceptual recognition of x as such and such an entity (Verstehen) but merely an exhaustive representation of the magnitude of a previously recognized entity. Yet can this seemingly secondary comprehension (Zusammenfassung) be disentangled from primary comprehension (Verstehen)? Implicit in Kant's account is the simultaneity of successful Verstehen (comprehension as subsumption under a concept) and unsuccessful Zusammenfassung (comprehension as synthesis of apprehensions): one recognizes the object for what it is but fails to pull the parts of the object together. But Zusammenfassung can never fail on its own. To grasp parts as parts ofa whole, to identifY them as such, already involves a comprehension (Verstehen) of the whole. To be aware that one has failed to synthesize the various apprehensions of the parts also involves a comprehension (Verstehen) of the whole. In the sublime, the object frustrates aesthetic comprehension (Zusammenfassung), but inasmuch as the object that overtaxes our senses is nonetheless recognized as what it is as a physical object with the aid of our senses, the successful Verstehen presupposes a successful Zusammenfassung. No difficulty can arise for Zusammenfassung that

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is not, strictly speaking, a difficulty for Verstehen. Where our aesthetic measure fails us, the measure of the understanding fails us as well. This is why it is Reason and not the understanding that steps into the breach when comprehensio aesthetica falters. In the experience of the sublime, according to Kant, the object shows up the composite nature of the apparatus of perception. The object's magnitude plays on the weakness of aesthetic comprehension considered on its own. The short attention span of the senses is not equal to the task of an aesthetic comprehension of the object. The eye takes in water, but not the waterfall as a whole. In the Kantian theory of the sublime, the cognitive middle ground between the intuition of a particular and the transcendental structures of experience, which in the present instance would be the recognition of the waterfall as a waterfall, is insignificant beside the brute experience of the sensual perception of water and the invocation of the a priori in the absolutely great. The object presents two faces, by both of which it defies comprehension of its particular magnitude: aesthetic comprehension falls short of this magnitude, and what steps in is not a comprehension of the magnitude specific to the object in question but a comprehension of magnitude pure and simple. The comprehension of magnitude pure and simple aligns with an incomprehension, an indetermination of the object. Reason, which normally contributes to the stability of comprehension, appears in the sublime as destabilizing. The object of the sublime is thus something that is not recognized as what it is because its specific magnitude goes uncomprehended. The sublimity of the object is not objective: it is precisely the deficiency in registering the object as objective that contributes to the experience of the sublime.

THE

OXYMORONIC

OBJECT

OF

THE

SUBLIME

An object of the sublime seems to be, in Kant's definition, an oxymoron. It is thus hard to ascertain what by way of example could provoke the sublime, since it is not insofar as something admits of a concept and is recognizable as objectively great or powerful that it sets the mind reeling. The object presents something that is not its own to present. Kant writes: "We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind; for what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form." 13 Kant, who searches his library for descriptions of the Alps, St. Peter's, and the Pyramids (places whose sublimity he would have

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had to imagine and comprehend by extrapolating from his own experiences in East Prussia), was nonetheless never one for examples. It is as though Kant asked himself, "What does the understanding not look like?" and with an attentiveness to analogy sought out an answer in nature. For Kant, it is not a question of finding something to throw as an obstacle in the path of Zusammenfassung alone. The magnitude that aesthetic comprehension is unable to supply cannot be supplied by the understanding's empirical concept of the object. For Kant, the understanding (Verstehen) must also be checked so that a higher power is called in. The senses, in a snub to the empiricist account of concept-formation and the derivativeness of abstractions, are to touch on something a priori. In his search for examples, Kant surveys the natural world for the cracks through which its transcendental structure shows. The frustrations of empirical conceptuality turn up as monuments and mountain ranges in Kant's mental geography. A task that in the light of the nonsensical "sublime object" appears to be Kleist's in particular is that of endlessly enlarging the set of sublime encounters, so that fainting fit would follow fainting fit in a presentation of the broken rhythms of thought no longer governed by the single aim of empirical comprehension. In a sense, this is the task much of modern literature has inherited from Kleist. As a complement to Kant's tempests, volcanoes and hurricanes, a sentence of Celine's from journey to the End ofthe Night belongs to the development of a universal sublime that Kleist initiates in literature: "To the eye, a small sardine can lying upon the road at midday throws off so many reflections that it can take on the dimensions of an accident." 14 This car crash of a sardine tin scintillates like an Idea. To be sure, Kant does not speak of sardine tins. His lucubrations on the sublime phenomena of the natural world were conventional even at the time of their composition (Kant himself appears to acknowledge this, insofar as he more than once breaks off his descriptions with an "et cetera''). But precisely because his examples are secondhand, Kant's innovation elsewhere should be noted. The eighteenth-century topos of the sublime has become the cipher and pedagogic expedient of a new aesthetic and epistemology. Still galvanized by Hume's critique, Kant calls upon the sublime to furnish yet another manifestation of the supersensible in the world of nature: Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the

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devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature. For just as we found our own limitation in the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our capacity to adopt a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its domain, but nevertheless at the same time found in our own faculty of reason another, nonsensible standard, which has that very infinity under itself as a unit against which everything in nature is small, and thus found in our own mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability. 15 Nature reveals itself in the sublime as both absolutely immense and relatively small. This contradiction-and it is other than a case of differing empirical perspectives, as when we say that a house is immense in relation to a grain of sand and small in relation to a mountain-is not the result of a faulty approach to the phenomena in view; it is as it should be. The ]anus-faced Nature of romanticism is poorly understood if its ambivalence, its alternating moods of terror and tractability are interpreted as the subjective gloss of the poet on the unambiguous objective world. Although the Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment addresses the subjective moment of experience, what it isolates, it isolates for the sake of the intelligibility of its exposition and not in order to suggest that this subjective moment can ever be properly excised from objective judgments (the experiential sense and transparency of an objective judgment of magnitude are the result of "translation" into the subjective measure of the lived body). Under the cover of the eighteenth century's engagement with the sublimity of nature, Kant advances an argument against the notion of the self-subsistent objectivity of phenomena. That this argument involves a necessarily fluid maximum to aesthetic comprehension indicates that it is not only the stock components of inventories of the sublime that may embarrass the imagination's capacity to comprehend. Taking over the conventional discourse of the sublime, Kant draws out a note of artificiality. In the last quotation, hypocrisy can be discerned in the spectator. On the one hand, the pleasure of the sublime presupposes a secure vantage point ("as long as we find ourselves in safety''). On the other hand, what is at issue in the sublime is the invulnerability of the non-sensuous.

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From an empirical security, the Kantian spectator infers a suspect transcendental superiority. The empirical security of a belvedere, inasmuch as it pushes itself forward as a double of the invulnerability of the non-sensuous, threatens to pass off a counterfeit for the experience of the sublime. The prospect of calamities befalling our possible other empirical selves (viz., the selves that do not find themselves in safety) awakens us merely to a kind of

Schadenfteude. Elsewhere Kant formulates the fearfulness and attractiveness of the sublime in less compromised terms: "What is excessive for the imagination (to which it is driven in the apprehension of the intuition) is as it were an abyss, in which it fears to lose itself, yet for reason's idea of the supersensible to produce such an effort of the imagination is not excessive but lawful, hence it is precisely as attractive as it was repulsive for mere sensibility." 16 Whenever the imagination's ability to comprehend is overtaxed-and this may happen at almost any time, given the contingencies of the maximum-we are at once abashed and uplifted, simultaneously at sea in the world of phenomena and raised above it. The pleasure of the sublime is the assurance drawn by the empirical self that, even at its most vulnerable, it touches on something indestructible in the transcendental self, which independent of all its representations binds them together. The empirical self takes pleasure in its own humiliation, because this humiliation always comes up against a limit in the transcendental self The pleasure of the empirical selflies in identifYing with the transcendental self, with the "I think'' that it can never appropriate and whose company it likewise can never escape. A5 it is never given to the empirical self to experience the limit as such to its humiliation, the pleasure of the sublime is composed of premonitions and false starts; it is a presumptuous pleasure. According to Kant, the imagination is humbled in the sublime, but given its inherent subordination to Reason, it could be argued that it must always experience rebuffs to its claims to self-sufficiency. The imagination must always experience in some way at least the limit at which it touches Reason, because the Ideas of Reason are the indeterminate horizons that frame all its operations. There are more occasions for the sublime than Kant explicitly admits. With regard to Karit's exposition of the sublime and its problematic empirical presentation of a transcendental notion of the incommensurable (viz., the absolutely great), Derrida raises a series of questions in The Truth in Painting. Kant, who writes "That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the

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senses," 17 makes of the incommensurable something that surpasses the commensurable. Derrida suggests this involves a reductive reading of the negative prefix of "incommensurable": Why can magnitude, which is not a quantity, and not a comparable quantity in the order of phenomena, let itself be represented under the category of quantity rather than some other category? What does it have in common or analogous with that category even when it is incompatible with it? In other words, why call magnitude or "absolutely large" that which is no longer a quantity? ... why would the sublime be the absolutely large and not the absolutely small? Why would the absolute excess of dimension, or rather of quantity, be schematized on the side oflargeness and not of smallness? 18 Derrida's questions bring out the weird humor ofKant's text. The absolutely large is a solecism, but in its jarring combination of terms (how can something be large absolutely rather than in relation to other quantities?), it is in keeping with other Kantian coinages, such as the Transcendental Aesthetic and the fact of Reason. Kant's style is the transmission of jolts. The absolutely large calls for the absolutely small as its complement in absurdity. The absolutely large is not the extremely large. Its absoluteness lies in its being largeness as such, in its being dimensionality. Can dimensionality (to use another word for "magnitude," with its here unfortunate etymological predisposition toward the great, magnus) be more meaningfully called large than small? Cannot any determinate quantity become an occasion for the sublimity of an encounter with pure dimensionality? Inasmuch as absoluteness here is absolution from the intrinsic relativity of a given quantity that nonetheless does not break with quantity as such, the absolutely middlesized cannot be excluded. The middle-sized participates as well in the absoluteness of pure dimensionality. In the magnitudes of the small, the middle-sized, and the large there is something absolute, something a priori and distinct from the aesthetic comprehension of the lived body, namely, the dimensionality as such that informs all judgments of magnitude. When in the sublime, dimensionality as such appears, it appears without the company of the measure furnished by the lived body and therefore appears immeasurable. It is quantity without being quantifiable. The framing indeterminacy of the Idea of the world, which when flattened to indifference is the homogeneity of the measurable, is this unquantifiable quantity. That Kant should not be seen as imputing the capacity for disturbances solely to the colossal and the powerful, and that his examples unnecessarily

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restrict his theory of the sublime to the territory already mapped out by the Pseudo-Longinus, Addison, Burke and others, is an implication of a remark in The Conflict ofthe Faculties. It is not only the disarticulation of the faculties at the hands of the absolutely large that can make the mind reel: "If he taxes his energy by occupying himself with a specific thought when he is eating or walking, he inflicts two tasks on himself at the same time-on the head and the stomach or on the head and the feet; and in the first case this brings on hypochondria, in the second, vertigo." 19 And offering a suspect etymology in the Anthropology ftom a Pragmatic Point ofView, Kant writes of a man who stumbles "against a loose cobblestone (with his great toe, from which the word 'hallucinari' is derived)." 20 Is the vertigo that comes over Kant during his daily walks when he is absorbed in speculation and hence distracted from the task of comprehending his surroundings not more likely to be the subjective prototype of the sublime than the mountains or cathedrals he never saw? Is not the sublime, at heart, the distraction in which the contest of the faculties is pursued? Not inconceivably, in the flirtation with romanticism that the Critique of the Power ofjudgment is often considered to be, Kant lights upon the immensities of nature and architecture as presentations of his trips along the streets of Konigsberg. If Kant employs the trappings of romanticism, the tropes by which it differentiates itself, he lessens for a romantic readership the difficulties for the reception of his theory while also risking awareness of its originality. The slack jaw of the distracted becomes, with the romantic cult of nature, the pose of an aesthete absorbed in contemplation, and stupefaction is thus idealized rather than theorized. Behind the mask of the connoisseur of nature in the Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, there is something of the grinning face of the idiot. In Addison, as his reflections on the sublime suggest, the pleasures of nature lie not so much in the defeat of comprehension as in nature's challenge to our ability to comprehend: For this Reason there is nothing that more enlivens a Prospect than Rivers, Jetteaus, or Falls of Water, where the Scene is perpetually shifting, and entertaining the Sight every Moment with Something that is new. We are quickly tired with looking upon Hills and Vallies, where every thing continues fixt and settled in the same Place and Posture, but find our Thought a little agitated and relieved at the Sight of such Objects as are ever in Motion, and sliding away from beneath the Eye of the Beholder. 21

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The agitation in Addison has not yet become insupportable. Idiocy has not yet broken out and not yet raised its question concerning the well-foundedness of the understanding, of the possibility of extricating the determinacy of Verstehen from the indeterminacy of Reason. In its flight from the regulated to the outskirts of civilization, to crevasses and the edge of cliffs romanticism takes up with both idiocy and Reason. If the concept of the understanding expires, it expires for the romantics in the presence of the beauty of nature. In one respect, this is other than a simple hypostatization of the experience of the sublime. Since romanticism, it has been hard to live up to the insight that what the anarchy beneath and above the concept by rights call to mind is beauty: the idiot puts pen to paper and elicits The Prelude. Romanticism is marked by a refusal to take at face value phenomena as they are defined for the natural sciences. It is distracted before the objectivity of these phenomena, which does not at all mean that it is indifferent to the phenomenal world as such. Another sense can be attributed to Kant's denial throughout the Analytic that in the sublime a deeper knowledge is attained of the object. Even if the object as object does not give itself up to be known in the sublime, this is not grounds enough to consider the sublime a merely psychological condition. Knowledge, in the narrow sense that Kant misleadingly all but reserves for the engagement of the natural sciences with empirical objects, is frustrated, but the conditions of possibility of such knowledge are exhibited in their abyssal character. Comprehension shudders to a stop. The object, however, and by extension objectivity as such, does not remain intact in some inconceivable externality, since it is the very act of comprehension that constitutes the object. The subject does not recoil upon itself, for the world never comprehended never comes to stand over against a disengaged subject. The revelation of the non-sensuous in the sublime is the revelation of the Idea: the subject is not thrown back upon itself as though it were intrinsically worldless. On the contrary, it is brought back to the Idea of the world, to the openness and possibility of determination. The shock of the sublime is by no means an incidental friction between selfsufficient parties. It is that from which phenomena and the comprehending imagination break away, more precisely, from which they appear to break away. The ontological priority of the sublime is the basis of its universality. It is the animating principle that is never wholly extinguished in even the least contested operations of the understanding and imagination. Perhaps it is in this sense that the contradictory pairing of comprehension and incomprehension in Kant's examples of the sublime should be read. An object is

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recognized as what it is and named as such, even while it is denied that the magnitude and power specific to it are properly grasped. Comprehension goes hand in hand with incomprehension, just as in the first Critique knowledge is in an antagonistic partnership with the unknowable. Allan Lazaroff, who wishes "as Kant did not do ... to suggest that the aesthetic judgment of the sublime also tells us something about the object,"22 reinstates the objectivity of the sublime. What is distinctive for Kant in the experience of the sublime, namely, its subjective, aesthetic aspect, therefore goes missing. Lazaroff interprets the object as a herald of the noumenon. For Lazaroff, the sublime tells us about that which is behind the object, giving us an insight into the transcendent. The insight into the Idea has been replaced by the insight into the transcendent when this, of course, reclaims the Idea for the Platonism from which Kant had sought to wrest it. For Kant, the Idea is not so much behind the phenomenon as beside it, so to speak. The sublime does not tell us about the object because it pulls the object apart to confront us with the Idea of the world (the unpresentable totality of what is). In the sublime, analysis sets out for that which is peripheral but nonetheless constitutive in the transcendental totality of the Idea. Never coming up against an empirically determined limit, thought here begins to slide as it searches for its foundations. It is less the surface of things than their critical essence that is slippery, since to grasp what something is involves grasping it in its non-positivity in the totality of the Idea and taking up the inconclusive struggle with the unknowable. In the terms of "On the Puppet Theater" the less adroitness one has of negotiation and movement, the more one has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

INCOMPREHENSION AND PARADISAICAL INNOCENCE

The unexpectedness of the sublime is not an argument against its universality. The sublime's character of surprise is not a matter of statistics. The Idea cannot but surprise. Although it is that which is always presupposed and thus seemingly taken for granted, the Idea is less a simply stabilizing constant of Kantian knowledge than the intrinsic limit on which such knowledge founders, on which, more precisely, it comes to be what it is, as foundering. The knowledge of the understanding, in its subsumption of the intuition of a particular under a general concept, proceeds by gestures at exclusion that are

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ostensibly a turning aside from the Idea that is the unpresentable totality of the world. The Idea, as the "sum-total of all appearances," 23 expresses the impossibility of the homogeneity of what is. To repeat: Kant's choice of the term "transcendental" in referring to the Ideas is faithful to the medieval definition. According to the latter, a transcendental is logically higher than a genus because it takes account not merely of what is common to a class (its homogeneity) but also of the differences between its members. As it is not defined by a point of indifference, the Idea, like being, is not a genus, just as the perplexity and wonder of the Kantian sublime are the perplexity and wonder of Greek philosophy in the face of being. The Idea is the world that surprises by means of the difference it inscribes within itself as multiplicity, as indetermination. As the open totality of what is as pure dimensionality, the Idea does not negate because it cannot exclude. It confounds the understanding precisely because it does not negate: it marks the limit of limitation. There is something paradisaical in the Idea's innocence of the negative. In the sublime the understanding, which in 1801 Kleist deplores for carrying us away from a knowledge of things as they really are, fails in its abduction, hitting up against the a priori. Arguably the paradise of "On the Puppet Theater" is not the walled paradise that is lost according to the text's exclusive disjunction of grace and reflection and regained according to the text's positing of an ultimate reconciliation of grace and reflection. Kleist's paradise is the inclusiveness of the Idea that makes "sense" of his text's contradiction. What, for his part, does Kant understand by paradise? In Religion Within the Boundaries ofMere Reason he disclaims any nostalgia for the Garden of Eden, since before having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, humanity is lost to ethics and the freedom of the Law: "The moral law moved forward in the form of prohibition (Genesis II: 16-q), as befits a being who, like the human, is not pure but is tempted by inclinations." 24 Adam and Eve, as beings defined by their subordination to empirical desires, come to the Law not as their innermost truth but as a command imposed from outside. Washing away original sin will not make us pure because Adam and Eve were not pure. Although Kant adheres to the established belief that ethics presupposes original sin, he converts transgression, revelatory of the Law as an ineffective prohibition, from a debt into a credit. Only with original sin (and radical evil) does it become possible to grasp the Law's interiority to the self as freedom. In Kant's view, we are seemingly well rid of the Garden of Eden and the obstacle it presents to our purity. There are, to be sure, always obstacles to the realization of our purity. The base motives of the "dear self" of

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the Groundwork ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals intrude everywhere. But Kant's point is that the untested innocence of the Garden of Eden is disqualified by its empirical determinacy from being the truth of human purity. This purity is everywhere obscured in the empirical realm; it is unpresentably present everywhere in the inclusiveness of the a priori Idea. What Paul de Man writes at one point in his essay on "On the Puppet Theater" is thus alien to Kant's thinking: "The idea of innocence recovered at the far side and by way of experience, of paradise consciously regained after the fall into consciousness, the idea, in other words, of a teleological and apocalyptic history of consciousness is, of course, one of the most seductive, powerful, and deluded topoi of the idealist and romantic period." 25 De Man argues that Kleist's text is ultimately also irreducible to this topos. Nonetheless, Kleist does make use of it and the question that de Man fails to address is the nature of Kleist's use. The biblical paradise that Kant rejects as unethical has conspicuously little to do with Kleist's paradise inhabited by mechanical puppets. Adam and Eve's innocence with regard to good and evil is extended in Kleist to an innocence with regard to reflection as a whole. In the former, limited instance, innocence is unethical because it mistakes the Law for a technical proposition, such as a prohibition with known penalties for transgression, whereas in the latter, innocence accords with the Kantian formulation of the Law as a liberation of practice from a preoccupation with models and consequences. No doubt there is an element of aggression in Kleist's image of paradise toward the traditional one. De Man's commentary, because it emphasizes the polyvocality of "On the Puppet Theater" in order to subvert the work's status as a simple expression of romantic nostalgia, can be made to resolve into the criticism that Hilda M. Brown aims at Kleist's text: The method of argument employed by Herr C. does not impress by its logic, for what he does is to answer the implications of one mathematical law (that of inverse proportion) by calling on two other laws, one mathematical, the other physical, which suggest recurrence instead of divergence; these in turn are used to reinforce yet another mathematical principle, the path of a circle, which had been introduced at an earlier stage in the argument, bur which on its own would clearly carry too little weight to sound convincing. 26 Taking advantage of that which Brown judges here to be a loophole in Herr C.'s logic, de Man pulls Kleist's text free of the topos of a lost and recoverable paradise. But he thereby only interprets positively what Brown interprets

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negatively, namely, the inconsistency of which Kleist's text is itself a defense and whose logic-the logic of the sublime-neither acknowledges. By contrast, Synda Stern Weiss finds a clarification of the inconsistency between an argument based on divergence and an argument based on recurrence in the ideal point of non-Euclidean geometry with which she contends Kleist would have been familiar: "Non-Euclidean thinking incorporates the ideal point as a point on the continuous loop. The ideal point is made up of two coincident points at infinity." 27 The contradiction is not resolved but found to be operable. But how does this mathematical operability relate to, let alone account for its two chief terms of grace and reflection? How can they be at once opposites and identical? That Kleist's exposition proceeds by fits and starts appears to be a confession of the unanswerability of this question, but then this desultory technique of developing an argument is that which is detailed and defended for its efficacy in his short text "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking." The aim is the generation of insights. At any point in the argument, terms may be either identical or opposed, and this vacillation is not counter to a logic of indeterminate Ideas and a practice of the surprise. Is any inconsistent argument-because it is conceptually inadequate-an adequate presentation then of an Idea? The question is poorly chosen. There is no defense specific to inconsistent arguments in the theory ofldeas, since on the basis of their inadequacy with respect to the rules of ratiocination, they cannot be judged superior to a valid syllogism when the very notion of measure has revealed its questionability. An inconsistent argument is just as little and just as much a presentation of an Idea as Kant's waterfalls and tempests, just as little and just as much as a valid syllogism. What constitutes the interest of Kleist's text is rather that it is suspiciously inconsistent, for there is a divergence in the strands of the argument tellingly similar to the divergence between intention and effect noted and condemned by Herr C. and the narrator. The suspicion aroused by Kleist's text, namely, that the respective merits of consistency and inconsistency have lost any pretension to decidability, prompts its examination in terms of the Kantian doctrine of the sublime, and then not as an example but as an elaboration. "Elaboration" here can be understood in various senses. Kant offers a theoretical exposition of the experience of the sublime in the presence of nature. This experience of the sublime is the object of the investigation and is distinct from the tools and methods of the investigation itself. Inasmuch as there is an elaboration in Kleist's text, it lies in the query whether the con-

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joint frustration and success of the sublime show up also in theoretical exposition. In being carried over into the linguistic realm, the surprises of the sublime take the form of malapropisms, non sequiturs, inexpedient digressions, and so forth. There are anomalies in Kant's argument, just as there are in Kleist's. Anomalies in an argument for a redefinition of the sublime cannot simply be dismissed as laughable since, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes, the laughable is itself sublime: "Laughter exceeds judgment and beauty, it rests on the inadequacy of a presentation (and on that which would be the 'worst' of all: that which presents nothing): it is of the order of the sublime (laughter and the sublime are undecidably one and the same)." 28 Nancy's brutal equation, dwelling on the terms "excess" and "inadequacy," calls to mind Freud's theory ofhumor in jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, where laughter is analyzed as a response to the uneconomical. A spectator mentally follows through the actions of an object of his or her perception and at some clumsiness is suddenly confronted with a surplus of energy on account of the disparity between that invested in the object of perception and that in the image of the right way of doing the action in question. And this surplus energy oppresses the body until it is cast off as laughter. 29 (It can, of course, also be cast off as rage.) Kant's theory of the sublime and Freud's theory of laughter share a concern with measure and excess, and both derive pleasure from the inadequacy of a presentation. But where Freud's laughter is a release mechanism, the joy of the sublime, as it falls to the empirical ego, is its approximation to the transcendental self that it cannot possess. The Kantian empirical ego, because its joy is not a self-protecting reaction against something external but an anticipation of the harmony of the faculties, laughs when it is most nearly at one with itsel£ The empirical ego feels itself at risk of dissolving in pleasure the closer it comes to the transcendental ego that, as the unity of all its representations, is in a certain respect its true self. Strictly speaking, the pleasure of the empirical ego lies in its unfounded belief that it could so dissolve. The closer the empirical ego brings itself to the transcendental ego, the more it gives itself up to this pleasure and the impropriety and artificiality of this pleasure at an impossible identification, the more it resembles an idiot-it gives up understanding. There is a consanguinity between the Kantian aesthete in raptures occasioned by the ocean and the idiot who laughs at it because, say, a tub is already large enough to take a bath in. As startling as Nancy's equation is, it intimates a number of real questions. To begin with, why should an idiot be

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recognizable by the lack of judgment that allows everything to appear laughable? Is it because for the idiot there is always a deviation from the economical model? Perhaps the one who does not laugh bears witness, not so much to a conformance to the model as to a repression of the deviation, of the constitutive heterogeneities that the Idea brings to the composition of a given object. Laughter, for Nancy, exceeds judgment. For Freud, it is the excess that remains after energy is invested in the judgment that subsumes a particular under its concept. The laughter of the idiot precedes judgment, rather than exceeds it. It precedes it because the model, in its very determinacy, renders itself inadequate to that which it is to judge. For the idiot, the inadequacy of presentations to the Idea has become openly universal. Is it the idiot who laughs first or Freud's time-and-motion expert with his or her belief in the proper way of doing things? And did a school of aesthetes turn their faces to nature-all those figures in Caspar David Friedrich's paintings-so as not to be seen laughing? Through coupling the Kantian sublime with Freud's account of humor, Nancy is able to contest the reactivity of laughter in Freud's theory and tear open the set of sublime encounters. The contiguity of laughter and the sublime-in "On the Puppet Theater" the narrator can barely restrain his amusement before the unrecognized mimic and Herr C. reports the dancing cripples as moving every thinking person to astonishment-depends upon their common status as unforeseeable events, the broader definition of the sublime arrived at by questioning the definitional prerogative of Kant's examples. Once anything could be sublime and anything could be humorous, everything also becomes suspicious. It is nonetheless a very uncynical suspicion that Kleist introduces to the doctrine of the sublime. The idiot never quits laughing because there is no end to surprises. The thinker ofldeas is always laughing because of a suspicion directed against the temptations of the homogeneous, and this happiness without contentment is the secret of Kleist's fretful paradise.

SCHILLER:

FREEDOM AND

GRACE

Such a paradise scarcely admits comparison with Schiller's arguably definitive wording of what de Man deplores as the topos of a regained innocence. In the essay "Na"ive and Sentimental Poetry," after a description ofbirdsong and like phenomena, Schiller writes:

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They are what we were; they are what we should once again become. We were nature just as they, and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature. They are, therefore, not only the representation of our lost childhood, which eternally remains most dear to us, that is why they fill us with a certain melancholy. But they are also representations of our highest fulfilment in the ideal, thus evoking in us a sublime tenderness. 30 Schiller's tripartite schema of the history of spirit has often been applied to Kleist, but with only partial justice: the latter's employment of the law of inverse proportion is not the only aspect of "On the Puppet Theater" to militate against the comparison. Instead of deciding whether recurrence or divergence is the authoritative principle of Kleist's text, it is better to regard the work as a polemic waged against several targets, human and divine, each demanding a different approach. Alexander Weigel identifies A. W. Iffland as one target, on account of lffland's pedestrian taste, his mannered acting, his involvement in the censorship imposed on the Abendblatter's theatrical reviews, and his dictatorship of the Nationaltheater: faults whose reproof acquired for Kleist an irresistible backdrop with the government suppression of marionette performances in Berlin tavernsY Open criticism oflffland having been made impracticable, Kleist took to satire. According to Weigel, Herr C.'s objections to the art of the dancers P. and F., whose souls come to sit "in the vertebrae of the small of her back" and in the "elbow," 32 allude to Iffland's acting style, which reportedly depended upon a set of gestures so limited as to shift attention from the play to the actor and, more specifically, to that feature of the actor's person executing the gesture. An excerpt from Schiller's "Grace and Dignity" reveals how promptly a satire on Iffland can pass over to a satire on Weimar classicism: "Grace is never otherwise than beauty ofform animated into movement by free will; and the movements which belong only to physical nature could not merit the name." 33 For Kleist and many of his contemporaries, however, it is precisely Iffland's independence from his roles, his refusal to invest the physical space of the drama, that works against the grace of his performances: against Schiller and against Iffland, Kleist's use of the law of inverse proportion (the more free will, the less grace) and his consignment of grace to unreflecting materiality enter a protest. lffland corresponds to the figure of the aesthetic hypocrite to which Schiller unwittingly gives his blessing. Even though Schiller repudiates as hypocritical the ascetic examples of Kantian ethics, by conceiving of a freedom in empirical distinction from

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determinism, namely, grace at odds with mere physical nature, he fosters in his aesthetics a like hypocrisy. Kleist declares his distance from such a position in a characteristic formulation of the non-reflectiveness of grace in a letter to his friend Riihle: "Every first motion, everything spontaneous is beautiful; but gnarled and crooked as soon as it comprehends itself Oh, the understanding, the unhappy understanding!"34 The understanding is a lack of understanding, and vice versa. In an episode of "On the Puppet Theater" of great wit and charm, a bear can be at once a creature of exemplary grace (because without reflection) and superhuman intelligence (because its want of reflection augments its competence as a wily opponent). Hella Roper is thus too much taken up with Schiller when she writes of Kleist's bear: "Although reflection threatens to neutralize gracefulness, the latter is obviously not possible without a vestige of reflection. Grace is tied as an aesthetic value to the human body, as an expression of perfection in the human, not the animal world." 35 Herr C.'s travel anecdote about the fencing bear gives no grounds, by any disparagement of the bear's appearance, for this distinction. Moreover, in a move contrary to Schiller's presentation of Kantian aesthetics, Herr C. situates grace and utility in strict coordination: "It was not merely that the bear, like the world's leading fencer, parried every one of my thrusts, but to my feints he reacted not at all (a feat that no fencer anywhere could match). Eye to eye, as though he could read my very soul, he stood with his paw poised for the strike, and if my thrusts were not in earnest he simply did not move." 36 The grace of the bear, as an anti-Iffiand and an antiSchiller, is its absolute economy, its complete engagement in the situation at hand (what Bergson would later give the name of freedom). The bear does no more than what it needs to do; were it to do more, it would lessen the amazement it arouses. In a striking reworking of the sublime, it is here not excess that arouses astonishment but consummate moderation and expediency. But it is important to note that where Kleist advances a definition of grace as the absolutely economical gesture, the examples he gives are all, so to speak, unnatural: without human intervention puppets do not dance and bears do not fence. It is a deranged perfection and not the return of the adequacy of a presentation. Weimar classicism, which employs the "purposive purposelessness" of Kant's treatment of the beautiful in what amounts to a defense of surplus value, is too quickly done with Kleist's question here concerning the charac-

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ter of utility. Schiller's empirical distinction between the "beauty of form animated into movement by free will," the beauty of the inexpedient gesture, and the non-beauty of movements that belong only to physical nature constitutes politically, in relation to the Kantian, the Jacobin and the German idealist notions of freedom, a regression. This definition of beauty seemingly takes its cue from the leisure classesY Inasmuch as he does not know what is natural, what actions are allocated by nature to an agent and what actions are free, Kleist opens up the site of freedom, not only to the formerly disenfranchised masses, but also to animals and marionettes. Freedom and grace belong to the animal and the inanimate object; it is not the preserve of the beautiful soul. Talk of a Schillerian aspiration in Kleist's text "to reclaim the original paradise on a qualitatively new and higher level," 38 then, credits self-consciousness with an all too unambiguous ameliorative power. For Kleist, it is, to a greater degree than in Schiller, one and the same paradise that is lost and regained. The self-consciousness of the humanity that, according to the law of recurrence, recovers paradise cannot disentangle itself from the stupidity of the original inhabitants. It is as though, for Kleist, through the havoc he plays with the opposition of selfconsciousness and naivete, the law of inverse proportion maintains a bizarre harmony with the law of recurrence. One must imagine Kleist's humanity as being able, in its circumspect search for paradise, to pass straight through it and blithely onward out of sheer stupidity. One becomes cleverer by becoming stupider, and vice versa. One goes forward by going backward, and vice versa. As opposites, self-consciousness and naivete bear out the law of inverse proportion, and in their identity, they justifY the law of recurrence. What distinguishes Kleist from Schiller is that Kleist suggests that they are opposed and identical at the same time. Schiller is careful to skirt this disorder by speaking of a divergence of grace and reflection in the course of history followed by a recurrence that is more a reminiscence than a repetition. Schiller presses the argument that between the naivete of full self-consciousness and the naivete of nature there rules, after all, a distinction in favor of the former. For Schiller, the terror of the Fall is mitigated, even turned into exultation, by the prospect of a gradual ascent, with fresh powers, toward a new and less material paradise. The Kleistian spectator does not contemplate an initial divergence and a subsequent recurrence. In the absence of Schiller's distinction between paradises and the measure it provides for the successive stages of the history of spirit, the Kleistian spectator of the course of the world is at a loss:

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are we perhaps already in paradise? We believe we are damned and therefore we are not, because the truth of our state always eludes us on reflection. Adam and Eve did not know they were in paradise and fled willingly. Or was the Fall the knowledge itself that they were in paradise? Sensitive to the affront offered to the dignity of human consciousness by a paradise that eludes awareness, Schiller conceives of a paradise that will be the consummation rather than the renunciation of Bildung. IfKleist, on the other hand, retains the conception of an unknowable paradise, it is not for the purpose of making a crudely anti-intellectualist model out of stupidity: anti-intellectualism is another target of Kleist's text. Stupidity is revealed in "On the Puppet Theater" to be too vast to function as a model. By implicating stupidity in intelligence, Kleist tears down the walls of the innocence of the Garden of Eden and repeals its teleological authority to order human activity.

METHODOLOGY

If to go forward is to go backward, is there any step that does not launch us into paradise?-that does not, in the perplexity of comprehension before the "proper" method of achieving the paradisaical innocence of the negative, have us fall flat on the ground?-that is not simultaneously dictated by concerns of utility and, as is both moral and stupid, wholly ignorant of them? Humanity aspires to paradise out of folly, humanity is in paradise out of folly, and humanity is indifferent to paradise out of folly. The issue of undeddability is raised, some might say forcibly, 39 by de Man in his reading of a like logic in the ''Analytic of the Sublime": And are we not made to assent to the more than paradoxical but truly aporetic incompatibility between the failure of the imagination to grasp magnitude with what becomes, in the experience of the sublime, the success of this same imagination as an agent of reason, and are we not made to assent to this because of a constant, and finally bewildering alternation of the two terms, "Angemessen(heit)" and "Unangemessen(heit)", to the point where one can no longer tell them apart? 40 The success and failure of the imagination relate to different tasks in Kant's text. But these two tasks do not allow of such clear demarcation as Kant and certain of his commentators maintain. The success of the imagination in

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aesthetically comprehending a given magnitude, in making sense of it, necessarily involves, even if unacknowledged, a confrontation with the Idea, since it is the Idea that ultimately and truly comprehends the phenomenon and frames the operation of the imagination. The success of the imagination, its Angemessenheit, or adequacy to its task, therefore converges with its failure and retreat before the Idea, its Unangemessenheit. The imagination always both fails and succeeds. In both Kleist and Kant, there is a disconcerting oscillation between opposites that their respective arguments defend: intelligence blunders and displays its efficiency, the imagination's failure to comprehend is its adequacy as well as inadequacy to the sublime. Accordingly, Kant's dismissal of the innocence of the biblical paradise in Religion Within the Boundaries ofMere Reason should not be ascribed to a desiccated intellectualism. Kant does not draw back from an encounter with stupidity; rather, rejecting the innocence of Adam and Eve, he rejects unthinking valorizations of stupidity. The Schillerian paradise, with its crucially artful reprise of innocence, may on that account appear more germane to Kant's thinking than the unreflecting gracefulness ofKleist's marionettes. If it nevertheless can be said that Kleist also does not valorize stupidity, it is because in his text, the absence of reflection cannot be extricated from reflection and given a value in relation to it. Furthermore, insofar as Kleist, unlike many of his contemporaries, does not discriminate between the unreflective paradise of the past and the reflective paradise of the future, he problematizes any possible recovery of paradise: paradise loses the ontological decidability of an empirical goal of human action, and the critical project ofKantian ethics-namely, the demolition of every heteronomous practical principle-is advanced. Is Kleist susceptible only to the negative, destructive moment of Kantian ethics, its opposition to heteronomous motives? Does he faithfully eschew technical propositions-his "Letter from a Young Writer to a Young Painter," for instance, spurns all techniques in favor of rebelliousness-and yet turn a deaf ear to what Kant says of the teachability of ethics in the "Methodology" of the Critique ofPractical Reason? But if Kant speaks of a science and methodology of morals, he does so without abandoning the traditional denunciation of the soulless conformances of pharisaism. The Kantian method is not a set of technical propositions. The method of ethics is the ability to abstract from examples. The true method, as that which is truly transcendental, is the Idea and hence the most methodical thinker is not the one

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whose regularities proclaim the sway of the general concepts of the understanding, but the one who surprises. The true method, as the path to the heterogeneity of the Idea, is the method of surprise. The Law itself, if it is to remain empty, must by means of surprises confound any attempt to invest it with a determinate content. And that is to say, the Law cannot permit itself to be recognized even as pure in determinate contrast to the impure, since such recognition determines the Law and is at variance with its transcendental purity as the openness and horizon of action. The indeterminacy of the Law thus entails incursions into the phenomenal realm. The purity of the Law is the excess of Reason, the excess that opens up between thought and the positive and that can only remain open if it is always betrayed, if its determination as pure is always counteracted by its resituation in the realm of phenomena. The transcendental is at risk of hypostasization so long as its abstraction is thought as an emptiness in determinate, and hence still empirical distinction from phenomena. The rebelliousness of Kleist's young writer is similarly an abstraction from the given that is nonetheless creative of concrete works. There are thus other ways of understanding the relations between the transcendental and the empirical than the Platonic conception of the bond between the Idea and its simulacra. When Hofmannsthal mentions "On the Puppet Theater" in the same breath as Plato's dialogues, the conjunction should not be taken too seriously. 41 The maieutic enquiry by means of which Socrates slowly but surely brings his interlocutors to an acknowledgement of the dubiousness of their assumptions with respect to method is properly dialogical. Kleist's text proceeds in spurts, via self-contradiction, consternation, immediate acquiescence to the implausible, and outbursts of laughter. The speakers do not strictly argue. They are already in agreement with one another, if also in disagreement with themselves. Where Socrates and his interlocutors discuss and dismiss the claims of simulacra to an Idea such as justice, Herr C. and the narrator take it as given that the very notion of adequacy, on the basis of which the claims of any one simulacrum are judged, participates in the ignominy of consciousness as a whole. In many of the Socratic dialogues, the Idea is left in lonely splendor after the claims of various simulacra have been rejected. "On the Puppet Theater" does not, however, conclude with such a clear line of demarcation. Kleist does not contemplate Ideas and distinguish counterfeits. What he contemplates has more to do with the impropriety between the Ideas and their counterfeits.

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IOI

This impropriety, which is the horror as well as the setting of Platonism, is the impropriety of the Kantian Idea. In Kant's account of the sublime, the Idea makes its impossible appearance when the ends of the process of cognition cannot be tied together. The Idea steps in as things start to go awry. But it does not take up the task of comprehension in the same way as the imagination aims at aesthetic comprehension. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes: "Ideas, far from having as their milieu a good sense or a common sense, refer to a para-sense which determines only the communication between disjointed faculties." 42 Here communication is to be understood as friction rather than as the stable transmission of information. Having analyzed the mind into its components, Kant is unable to reassemble it in such a way that cracks do not emerge in the edifice. The fracture between the empirical and the transcendental, between aesthetic and rational measure is not acknowledged as a fault in Kant's reconstruction. The parts do not fit neatly together, but rather jangle against one another. Is it philosophical dishonesty for Kant to label this discord the sublime instead of putting it down to the deficiencies of his theory? Or is this discord the very sense of his theory rather than its deficiency? The ''Analytic of the Sublime" attempts to furnish its readers with an apparatus for recognizing the sublime when it arises, for noticing the discordant harmony prevailing among the faculties. It wants to establish a new measure for making sense of when things go awry. Put in such terms, the "Analytic of the Sublime" seems to conform to those cultural processes of fabulation and explication by means of which the alien, the hostile and the unsettling are relieved of their enchantment. Yet the sublime, as Kant sets it up, is ultimately unyielding. One cannot learn from Kant's text how to circumvent the discomfiture of the sublime, as though the ''Analytic" constituted a method for how to comport oneself in the face of the breakdown of comprehension. Defining the sublime by the failure of adequation between an event and its concept, Kant is unable to provide a model by which one might resist losing one's feet empirically in recognizing the sublime. The Platonic Idea, whose debased avatars are the abstractions and generalities by which philosophical discourse asserts itself as a guide for negotiating the phenomenal world, is a definition that nothing earthly can meet. In the ''Analytic of the Sublime," by contrast, there is an event to which no definition, no empirical concept is equal: the powers of ratiocination hit their Kleistian limit.

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CHAPTER TWO

PLACE

OF SPIRIT

In its unamenability to the Platonic process of discrimination and selection, there is a peculiar monism to "On the Puppet Theater." Herr C. is a materialist-like La Metttie, he speaks of automata-but his materialism does not involve the denial of the doctrine of the soul (it is not a mechanistic materialism). Herr C. objects to the soul's pretensions to independence: his concern, however, is with the gracefulness of movements, rather than with the so-called scientific proofs of the soul's non-existence. Immanence, which had acquired a higher epistemological value with Descattes and his mathematical remodeling of the sciences and a higher political value with the opposition to absolute monarchy, here acquires an aesthetic value. Immanence is the condition of possibility of grace. The transcendence of the soul, its exteriority to the movement, is its pernicious installation as a misruling principle. Emphatic on the gains to be made by the extinction of the ruling spirit of the puppeteer, Herr C. states his dream of a marionette from which the last fragment of spirit has been eliminated: "He smiled, saying he dared assert that if a mechanic would construct a marionette according to his specific requirements, he could, by means of it, present a dance such as no other accomplished dancer of the time, not even Vestris himself, was ever likely to achieve." 43 Herr C.'s puppet on a crank is more graceful than any human dancer and any marionette of a human puppeteer because its soul "knows" its place: "'And the advantage of such a puppet over living dancers?' 'The advantage? First of all, my good friend, a negative one: namely that it would be incapable of affectation. For affectation, as you know, appears when the soul (vis motrix) is located at any point other than the center of gravity of a movement."' 44 The soul (vis motrix) of such a puppet never leaves the center of gravity of each of its movements, since it does not distance itself therefrom in reflection. The soul that reflects withdraws from the work in hand to become its ornamentation. It is this distance from the center of gravity that, for Kleist, seemingly defines a soul as spirit and exposes it to the interlocutors' criticisms. Reflection does not make sense of a movement, let alone enhance its gracefulness. It thwarts any review by the insinuation of its own empty adornment. What is to reflect on the movement does not take up an independent position from which to draw conclusions, since its attempts at abstraction interfere with the gracefulness of the movement. The transcen-

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deuce of spirit does not endow it with a vantage point from which to survey reality as it truly is. Expelled from the center of gravity, the soul as spirit is unable to grasp the truth of movement. Kant, in his "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," discovers in Genesis the transgression of the first Critique and attributes the Fall to Reason's taste for excess and the unnatural: Reason is the faculty of luxury and the temptation of the eccentric. 45 With as much a Kantian as a Kleistian resonance, Waiter Benjamin describes the Fall as a knowledge of the useless. 46 In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, quoting a coarser German translation of Samuel Butler, Kant scoffs at the supposed metaphysical insights of that which has simply lost its place: "The sharp-sighted Hudibras would have been able to solve the riddle on his own, for his opinion was if a hypochon-

driacal wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes: if downwards, then the result is a f***; if upwards, an apparition or an heavenly inspiration. "47 Derisive of the spiritualism of Swedenborg and his like, Kant does not go so far as to suggest that consciousness as such shares its origin with flatulence. Kleist does not make such a claim either, but in its anti-intellectualism it is in keeping with the tenor of "On the Puppet Theater." If, for Kleist's interlocutors, spirit is a skin complaint from which the body has suffered since the Fall, it is, in the light of Butler's supposition, equally a symptom of the prolonged bout of indigestion that has followed eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The eccentricity that Kleist discovers in spirit, the ventriloquism by which it pretends to speak for the body, prompts Helene Cixous to observe in her commentary on the text: "The soul-wandering force-invests now this area, now that organ, weirdly fragmenting the body, which it takes apart and reorganizes around a suddenly animated fetish." 48 The soul that wanders from the center of gravity becomes spirit, acquiring an individuality that is, in effect, the restriction of its authority. It is no longer the vis motrix of the body as a whole. It animates only a part and condemns the part in question to awkwardness on account of its discord with the remainder: "His soul (in a manner fearful to behold!) actually settles in his elbow." 49 The transcendence of spirit is the soul's demotion to fetishism. Immanence, with which philosophical modernity establishes its difference from the thought of the Middle Ages and refounds the sciences on human consciousness, here sides with the body against the transcendence of spirit. Given this assessment of reflection, why is it that Kleist all the same holds out the prospect of reconciliation between spirit and matter? Herr C.

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denounces consciousness and then concludes: "So will grace, once knowledge has likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god." 50 In the interval between a puppet's non-consciousness and a god's infinite consciousness is where things go badly. But, as has already been claimed, the three conditions of consciousness do not lend themselves to so clear a differentiation as they do in Schiller. Wolf Kitder, wanting to be done with the intervening state when it is not wholly certain how that can likewise be Kleist's wish, ventures the paraphrase: "The only way is a qualitative leap: the deification of humanity."51 The notion, however, of a qualitative leap does not agree with Kleist's proposal of a circling of the world to see if paradise can be entered from behind; in short, it cannot be brought into line with the notion of quantitative progression. The poles ofKleist's argument are never as distinct as Kitder and others believe them to be. There is neither the continuity of the quantitative nor the discreteness of the qualitative: this incompatibility in the ratiocinative structure of "On the Puppet Theater" has been remarked too often for a further interpretation not to ask itself what might be at stake. One way in which this question can be formulated is in terms of the relationship between the body and spirit. Does it make sense to opt for either continuity or discreteness when speaking of the relationship between the body and spirit? Reflection understands the body of zero consciousness (the puppet) by making of it an object in keeping with its procedures, by conceptualizing it. Reflection thereby fails to understand this body's absolute difference from consciousness, because it insinuates itself, inadmissibly in this instance, into what it conceptualizes. By its own resources reflection cannot establish the body's discreteness: this failure attests, from differing perspectives, to the body's discreteness and to its continuity with spirit. For Kleist, materiality and spirit are at variance outside their synthesis in God, but this synthesis, the manifestation of the maximum in divergence, is not the Hegelian identity of conceptual opposites, in which materiality never properly asserts itself. Kleist does not share Hegel's conceptualism and he forecloses any possibility that we, in our intermediate state of understanding, could have an insight into this synthesis. Nonetheless, Kleist forbids himself the anti-intellectualism that would be simply another dogmatism. The impenetrability of the synthesis does not convert into an argument for divergence. The reflection-prompting fruit of the Tree of

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Knowledge is not exclusively poisonous; in Derrida's Platonic vocabulary, the gift of understanding is a pharmakon, both the poison of the Fall and its remedy. 52 This ambiguity, to be sure, is not foregrounded in Kleist's text. Herr C. and the narrator strip away any claim to authority on the part of the understanding by accounts of its ill-starred interventions. To understand is to blunder. More than simply a pun common to English and German, the under-standing CVer-stand) is an inability to stand, a falling short, a stumble. Yet this disaster of the understanding is also its good fortune, as it marks its return to the interminable determinability of the Idea from which it had disengaged itself, ostensibly for the sake of the intelligible. And what must also be described in this way is humanity's reentry into paradise, if we have ever left it, when we never manage to lift ourselves off the ground, despite all our efforts, and slither in like snakes, symbols of wisdom.

THE

FALL AND

THE

UPRIGHT

POSTURE

Latent in both Kant and Freud is the intimation that in paradise, humanity went about on all fours; the Fall thus marks the moment in which, paradoxically, the erect posture was adopted. In his review of a text by the Italian anatomist Moscati, Kant details the sufferings of the new posture unique to Man, "which originate from the fact that he has raised his head so proudly above his old comrades." 53 Punishment is meted out to the species for the hubris oflifting its head. With Freud, the reworking of the myth of the Fall is more overt. It is not simply a matter of a life of suffering that begins with the adoption of the erect posture; humanity also loses its innocence by rising up. Civilization and Its Discontents contains the following association of shame with the erect posture: "The genitals, too, give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual intercourse for them. Thus we should find that the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life achieved with man's erect gait against his earlier animal existence." 54 Shame is the concomitant of civilization, it shores up the primacy of the eye, which was inaugurated on the savannahs when the human head was raised for the first time above the level of the grass. A threat is registered to this primacy

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when one acknowledges and succumbs to the fascination of the smell of genitals. As far as the deepest root of sexual repression is concerned, it is as though this smell were capable of reversing the evolution of the species, the modifications of its skeleton and musculature, through a return to the behavioral patterns of quadrupeds. For Freud, as the exertions of the neck and back muscles in holding the head aloft need to be rewarded, an extra duty has been assigned to the eyes: the recording of sources of sexual excitation. It is not so much that the genitals of others are suddenly visible because of the adoption of the upright posture than that their visibility is suddenly of interest. But visual stimulation poses a danger through its permanence: in response, shame develops as a defense mechanism similar to the intermittency of olfactory stimulation before it. Shame doubles the clear air in which the species can turn to other tasks. It is an imitation as well as a deferral of animality. If animals are shameless, it is simply because, not having adopted the erect gait and its attendant danger of permanent visual stimulation, they have no need of shame. Their innocence, more precisely the unashamedness that differentiates them from fallen humanity, is a correlate of their not having raised themselves from the ground. To reach the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge Adam and Eve had to stand up. The knowledge that they acquire is the knowledge of shame: they become self-conscious. For Kleist, as Beda Allemann has argued, consciousness as a whole is essentially self-consciousness, not in the sense of the apperception of Kant and the German idealists, but rather in the English sense of embarrassment and ungainliness. 55 Where Kant opens his Anthropology with the claim that self-consciousness raises humanity infinitely above all the other beings on earth, 56 Kleist speaks less of elevation than of displacement. To reflect is to be thrown out ofkilter; it is to be expelled from the gracefulness of the center; it is to fall. Kleist's Cherub does not so much drive Adam and Eve out of paradise as simply lock and bolt the gate behind them as they obey the centrifugal law of consciousness. Fallen humanity is defined by its prostheses. Its proper territory is the impropriety of the exorbitant, the excessive and the artificial. With the inception of the erect posture, olfactory arousal is repressed and replaced by visual stimulation, which in its turn is repressed by the introduction of clothing. By means of clothing, we endeavor to bridge the gulf between the shamefulness of the visible human body and unashamed animality. But clothes, since they cannot conceal the imperative of concealment, are a makeshift

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(the man in a three-piece suit ineffectually aspires to the ingenuousness of a quadruped). More so than the nakedness as such of the body, an awareness of which is impossible without the Fall and the sudden emphasis on the visual, it is stumbling on all fours that is a recollection of paradise. Thrown into an ecstasy by the uneven paving stones in the Guermantes courtyard, Proust's narrator knows this better than anyone. The stumble, which the book of Genesis would repress by linking it to the penalty of the Fall rather than the lost paradise, is what Kleist discovers everywhere, at once condemning and saving humanity. In order to persuade Herr C. that he sympathizes with his distaste for the self-conscious body, the narrator of "On the Puppet Theater" relates an incident in which a young man after bathing pretends, in imitation of a statue, to extract a splinter from his foot. In its affectedness, the gesture, which is to restore the possibility of a regular gait, diminishes his freedom of movement and annuls the gracefulness for which the young man had become known. In the narrator's opinion, the young man stumbles through becoming conscious. Affectation, which earlier Herr C. had judged to be one with reflection, is the drawing of the young man's soul our upon his skin, where it translates into a blush and enters into correspondence with clothing, both being accessory. For the narrator, who is obviously not captivated by blushes, the grace of the young man's body disappears from view under his escalating vanity: He blushed and raised his foot a second time to prove it to me, bur the attempt, as might easily have been foreseen, did not succeed. Confused, he raised his foot a third and fourth time; he must have raised it ten times more: in vain! He was unable to produce the same movement again. And the movements that he did make had so comical an effect that I could hardly suppress my laughterY The young man's soul, which should be at the center of gravity of his movements, is eccentrically situated in the gaze of the narrator. As the reconstruction of the body as there for another, the plea for recognition is simultaneously the impossibility of recognition: the gracefulness of the statue has much to do with the reserve of the in-itself. What here pretends to be sheer physicality flickers with self-consciousness. Spirit intrudes on the spectacle of the body. In his Aesthetics, even Hegel places a check on the encroachments of spirit. Participating in the neoclassical

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debate on the role of vestments in sculpture, Hegel neatly apportions the surface of the body between spirit and clothing: For, as I remarked before in dealing with the difference between the head and the other parts of the body, it cannot in fact be denied that spiritual expression in the figure is limited to the face and the position and movement of the whole, to gestures expressed principally through the arms and hands and the position of the legs. For these members, which are active in an outward direction, serve best through their sort of position and movement to manifest an expression of spirit. Whereas the rest of the body is and remains capable of only a sensuous beauty, and the differences visible there can only be those of bodily strength, muscular development, or muscular suppleness and placidity, as well as differences of sex and of age, youth, and childhood. Therefore, so far as the expression of spirit in the figure is concerned, the nudity of these parts is a matter of indifference even from the point of beauty, and it accords with decency to cover these parts of the body if, that is to say, the preponderating thing in view is to represent the spiritual element in man. 58 In Hegel's eyes, certain parts of the body mount a threat to spirit, whereas in the eyes ofKleist's narrator, spirit mounts a threat to the body. Hegel credits the organs whose activity is directed outward (the sexual organs conspicuously excluded) with best expressing the spirit, since the eccentricity of these organs points to the abstraction from the simple identity of the in-itself But for Kleist's narrator, this abstraction and eccentricity are without appeal. Flesh has nothing to gain by resigning itself to being the medium of spirit. It is the flesh innocent of spirit whose praise "On the Puppet Theater" singsthe nude body, for instance, that parts ways with its voice in a dubbed film. Kleist's text can accordingly be read as a somewhat dissonant contribution to the neoclassical defense of unclothed figures in art. A single question from Lessing's Laokoon voices the accepted line of defense: "Necessity invented garments; and what has art in common with necessity?" 59 For Lessing, it is the essence of art to disregard necessity, to limit itself to cognizance of the prelapsarian world or, as one might say cynically, the world of the leisure classes. The neoclassical nude finds its complement, rather than its opposite, in the engageants, ruching, and circassiennes of eighteenth-century couture: what they share is a refusal to bend to the dictates of want and utility. Defining art as a distinct sphere by its innocence and playfulness, neoclassical aesthetics has at best an unwitting investment in perpetuating want: art stands in need of necessity, since art is only acknowledged to be art when it escapes necessity. However much eighteenth-century fashion gives itself up to the ar-

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tificial and useless, inventing a fully-clothed nakedness for a northern paradise, it can never dispense with the adjacency of the spectacle of want. In Being and Nothingness, in a text that one does not immediately associate with eighteenth-century aesthetics, the neoclassical convergence of the clothed and the unclothed comes to expression: Facticity then is clothed and disguised by grace; the nudity of the flesh is wholly present, but it cannot be seen. Therefore the supreme coquetry and the supreme challenge of grace is to exhibit the body unveiled with no clothing, with no veil except grace itsel£ The most graceful body is the naked body whose acts enclose it with an invisible garment while entirely disrobing its flesh, while the flesh is totally present to the eyes of the spectators. 60 For Sartre, the gracefulness of the naked body is a paradox. It conceals nothing of itself yet differs from the exhaustibly visible object: it is a mystery in broad daylight. Grace abducts the body from the natural order, from the realm of what can be seen simply as what it is. Grace humanizes, which is to say, civilizes, what might otherwise appear to be of a kind with the world of animals and objects. "In grace the body is the instrument which manifests freedom." 61 Sartre refers to a long-standing tradition according to which the human body is an instrument of that which more fundamentally defines human beings. Grace, for Sartre, is what puts the body to use for the fundamental freedom of human beings. In nakedness, the human being does not revert to animality, since the natural state of the human being, that is to say the normal state in which we survive in the world, involves clothing. One of the specific differences of the human in relation to animals is the wearing of clothes: even when clothing is removed, its expectation and the definitional significance of this expectation are not removed. Nakedness is not a revelation of the essence of a human being: in distinction from the neutrality of the essence, nudity in most cultures denotes the positive mode of the sexualization of the body. The body lays itself bare of the prostheses by which the technological being that is humanity defines itself, thereby abandoning second nature without arriving at the first nature of non-technological beings. The challenge of grace is the assertion of human freedom in nudity without recourse to technology. Grace is the technology of the body itself. If neoclassical aesthetics pays especial attention to the unclothed figure, it is because here two disparate conceptions of freedom-nudity and grace-can meet. The ideal of the neoclassical nude is the reconciliation of nature and culture.

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The graceful nude is the recovery of the body for a more general conception of the essence of human beings. Kleist disentangles grace from this more general conception and sets it in opposition to it: the graceful body is not the humanized body. Grace is an animal virtue. Adam and Eve, before they fell from grace, knew nothing, and yet eating from the Tree of Knowledge, they understood nothing.

*

The innocence of paradise, if it is to be innocence of the negative, cannot be an exclusion that negates the negative. The true paradise lies in the totality of the Idea and the experience of the sublime. Everything gains in shapes by an incomprehension that never determines its object because it can never finish determining it, because it can never fix the limit that is the infinity of the Idea. The inadequacy of a presentation becomes a cause for philosophical elation as it affords an insight into the supersensible. In the Anthropology, Kant speaks of the "holy thrill at seeing the abyss of the supersensible opening at our feet." 62 Coming to grips with the supersensible involves losing the firm ground under one's feet. Thus the disorientation that is the native element ofKleist's characters receives an endorsement from the Kantian philosophy. Kleist is just as little an epistemological defeatist as Kant, since it is only by straying from "the true path," by stumbling and surrendering one's share of bon sens, that knowledge properly comes into its own in the experience of the Idea of the world. In the Kant crisis of r8or, while German idealism (to be sure, in spite of itself) is laying the groundwork for the coherence theory of truth in the wake of Kant's demolition of traditional epistemology, Kleist professes his allegiance to things in themselves. Kleist sides with the intractable and injudicable against the whole that is coherence. Error, as the inadequacy and incoherence of a presentation, is the Idea's protest against the subreption of its openness in the operations of the understanding. Kant's ''Analytic of the Sublime" is a defense of error, and for the Kleist of "On the Puppet Theater," error is not an accident of thought but its essence. That reflection can only ever malfunction-the dancers cannot know what it is to dance, and the young man cannot know his own grace-argues that, for Kleist, the breakdown of comprehension that Kant names the sublime is less an occasional experience of the limit of thought than its proper domain. Regardless of the comprehension of general concepts, there is always the comprehending incomprehension ofldeas. This comprehending incomprehension is re-

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ally no more and no less than the key to Kleist's unwalled Garden of Eden.

An Adam for this undecidable paradise outside the judgment of God can perhaps be found in the subject of one Kleist's reviews, "Of a child who kills another child in a childlike way": a child is offered a choice between gulden and an apple to see whether it is mature enough to be held responsible for murder, and with an inscrutable laugh of naivete and guile it takes the apple and is set free.

Conclusion

THE

ENDS

OF THE

ENLIGHTENMENT

It is a commonplace to speak of Kant as the culmination and dissolution of the Enlightenment; the Critique ofPure Reason is the masterpiece that brings the genre, so to speak, to a close. Reason, whose critique neither Church nor state had proved able to withstand, is in its turn subjected to critique and shown to be incorrigibly prey to transcendental illusions. Kant does not dispute the Enlightenment's conception of Reason as the higher faculty, but he does dispute equating this superiority of Reason with the role of judge. In one respect, Reason, as the agent of the critique of institutions and beliefs, falters through turning upon its own pretensions to authority: it is no longer in the position to press its attack. Yet in another respect, that which identifies Reason as enlightened is precisely the critique by which the higher faculty opens up a distance between its transcendental dignity and the authoritarianism by which it could be reclaimed for genealogies of power, dogma, and superstition. Is it in the sense of the culmination or the dissolution of the Enlightenment that Kant's writings communicate with Kleist's literary works? It should

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not be assumed that the light of Reason could not itself be the source of the darkness that permeates Kleist's world. Given its essential aim of breaking with scholasticism, the Enlightenment comes closest to itself at the point where the goodwill of phenomena is no longer guaranteed by the Creator. The Reason that aligns itself with the natural sciences of the early modern period clandestinely pays obeisance to the God of onto-theology because it continues to adhere to the correspondence theory of truth: it is the reasonableness of the observations of the world as it is, in its independence of us. All the secular counterparts to theological doctrines constitute not so much the realization as the evasion of the Enlightenment. The secular remains bound to the sacerdotal: to substitute the authority of the social contract for the divine right of kings, common sense for the correspondence theory of truth is to proclaim the death of God without drawing the consequences. Reason need not be a humanism. If it is to break with theology, it cannot come to itself in that which obtains its outline and characteristics from its place within theology. The death of God entails, as Foucault stresses, the death of Man. By defining Man against God, it is theology that gives the human its distinctness, and hence whenever Reason makes of the human either the rule of what is or a retreat from the hostility of alien powers, it presupposes rather than breaks with theology. According to the orthodox interpretation, Kant withdraws experience from contact with the unpredictability of things in themselves. He sets up an epistemological idyll, but the distinctness it owes to its polemical relation with the earlier theological conception of knowledge (i.e., its constitutive exclusion of the things in themselves with which knowledge, under warranty from the Creator, had communicated) belies its claim to a rupture with theology. Kleist, needless to say, had no desire to settle in such a Kantian Shangrila. Instead, he carries through the atheism implicit in an abandonment of the correspondence theory of truth. This atheism cannot recoil into the self (intellectus) that is one of the terms of correspondence (adaequatio rei et intellectus). It is not immured in subjectivism as though God in medieval thought had been simply the intellect's courier with the world of things and not also its Creator. In Kleist's work there is expressed a dissolution of the world and the subject into non-negotiable contingent truths. The atheism that turns away from God to refound truth in the integrality of human experience (relativism and neo-Kantian theories of science both illustrate this move) cannot make good its claim to a break with the transcendent Creator

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unless it manages to discern a new externality against which human experience could be judged integral. And yet the subject cannot come to itself in its distinctness without this distinctness announcing the prior creative act that introduced the distinction. Kleist does not remain frozen at the moment of self-certainty with which the myth of early modernity begins. His despair is the openness with which Reason in the Enlightenment gives itself up to its own contestation, to its abstraction from any place and essence. It is the caesura to which the first Critique attests, the transition where Reason is no longer in the pay of the dogmatic metaphysics of scholasticism and not yet shackled to the vulnerable construct ofKantian experience as the common sense of judgment. It is Reason as protest, as the possibility of being otherwise, as the transcendental's reservation with respect to what is, rather than its ratification. In Kleist, the alienation of Reason from what is is not preparatory to the establishment of the generality of a rule: instead of returning to the given as its mediation in the generality of a rule, this alienation forsakes the given to contingency. Contingency, which in the medieval period was the boast of Christian philosophy as its advance into a territory arguably inaccessible to Aristotelianism, undergoes a reappraisal in early modernity. The contingency of the material world, which marks the latter's inscrutability for Plato and Aristotle, is extinguished by Descartes in his reconfiguration of matter as geometrical space. Matter too is subordinate to laws. And in pushing necessity through to the complete extinction of contingency, Spinoza carries to its uncompromising conclusion the rationalism ofDescartes. As the proper names of contrasting accounts of contingency, Spinoza and Kleist are distinguished by the seriousness with which they think through the crisis in the understanding of truth as correspondence: Spinoza's geometrical method and Kleist's athleticism of despair are two ways in which modernity lives up to its claim to a break with the transcendent Creator of the Middle Ages. Everything that has been said against the mathematical flatness of the Cartesian view of the world is philosophically irrelevant unless the motivation for this flattening and the attendant evacuation of contingency is first shown to be wanting. Descartes pushes the mechanical and the mathematical as far as he can, so that he need not deal with the contingent. The affair of philosophy, allied more than ever before with the knowledge of necessary truths, is no longer knowledge of contingent reality. For the critics of Descartes, this aversion renders philosophy unreal. But the survival of the correspondence theory of truth in everyday discourse as well as in the most

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technologically sophisticated of the natural sciences testifies to the fact that the news of the death of the transcendent God has not yet reached us. Only in such a theocentric account of the world as that offered by Aquinas does the correspondence theory of truth hold, since the agreement of thought and thing by which truth is defined in this theory is an agreement, rather than a fantasized coercion, only if each party is assured both its independence and possibility of mediation by a transcendent Creator. With God as the ultimate, if by no means immediate guarantor of truth, medieval philosophy is able to address the contingency of an independently existing world. The transcendence of God is the condition of possibility of an objective understanding of the world, but inasmuch as thought and thing enter into correspondence through the mediation of that which transcends both thought and thing, knowledge turns upon something unknowable. Heeding the rationalist imperative of a marginalization of the inscrutable, Spinoza suggests that this transcendence is an illegitimate borrowing from the political discourse of sovereignty. For Kant, the blind spot returns in a secular guise: schematism, with its central role in the synthesis of representations, is "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul." 1 Kant holds on to the blind spot, bur by situating it within the human soul rather than in the transcendence of a necessarily independent mediating party, he renders it incapable of underwriting correspondence. Hence it does not constitute a solution to the modern problem of a redefinition of truth. For Spinoza, the guarantor of truth becomes the certainty of method; the object in its old independence loses its footing. That which in the medieval period was a party to truth by virtue of its self-subsistence in relation to the knower, is now from the outset subject to the sway of the knower's method. The method of mathematics turns imperialistic; it oversteps the limits of its domain and aspires to the omnipresence of the divinity. The hubris of the methods of the modern sciences, refusing the propriety that for Aristotle and the scholastics derives from their respective domains, is a reaction to the challenge of guaranteeing truth without recourse to the Creator. Contingency passes from being the delight of philosophy to being its exasperation, since the irreducibility to law whereby contingency once bore witness to the fullest reach of truth as correspondence now falls outside the compass of truth as the certainty of method. The chaos of medieval science is not the consequence of otherworldliness; on the contrary, this chaos expresses a saturated attention to the contingencies of the world. A theocentric universe is the condition of possibility for knowing without schemata the world as it is, in distinction

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from our fantasies and deceits-the miracle is not yet an impossible exception to the rule, the mad have not yet been confined, and the streets have not yet been swept clean and made straight. With a chasm coming to separate contingent truth from necessary truth, modernity enacts itself as the decision between contingency and truth: Kleist is the modernity of contingency without truth, whereas Spinoza is the modernity of truth without contingency. The Age of Reason stretches, historically and philosophically, from Spinoza to Kleist, but it does not constitute a compromise between the alternatives they embody. How must the Enlightenment be understood (i.e., what is literal and metaphorical in its name) if the correspondence theory of truth is not to be invoked and "enlightenment" explained in terms of an illumination of the mind with respect to the way the world, behind the veil of despotic and ecclesiastical mystifications, really is? The latter interpretation of the Enlightenment is, of course, the prevailing interpretation. To this interpretation it might be objected-and the writings of the twentieth-century French Thomist Etienne Gilson offer the most eloquent and rigorous basis for the objection-that the Enlightenment cannot be taken at its word, that its posited affinity between the projects of a rational, putatively self-sufficient account of the world and atheism is untenable. Atheism stands in the way of its own claim into an insight into things as they really are, because a transcendent Creator is the condition of possibility of a world independent of our mystifications and hence also the condition of possibility of an insight into such a world. It follows from this that the presentation of Kleist as a proponent of the Enlightenment must appear strained, because what has come to define the Enlightenment in general is precisely its refusal to take its atheism literally, to "forget" its commitment to atheism as soon as the comprehension of the world is at stake. What characterizes the Enlightenment is thus, paradoxically, a lack of enlightenment concerning its own intentions. No doubt the Enlightenment was forever relapsing into dogma, but that which demarcates it as a particular epoch in cultural and intellectual history cannot be the dogmatism that it shares with other epochs. The essence of the Enlightenment is not an actuality but a possibility and a goal, namely, its intention to escape dogma. Consequently, the Enlightenment delineates itself as a particular epoch in cultural and intellectual history (the epoch in which this goal was a prevailing motto) while nevertheless resisting its exhaustion in the eighteenth century. It is the possibility of putting everything to the test.

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So long as the test of Reason is identified, however, with the tests of the natural sciences, the break with scholasticism is impracticable, since the clarity and transparency with which phenomena display themselves to the natural sciences, becoming indistinguishable from things as they really are, derive from the pervasive benevolence of the scholastic universe. Only a vulgar positivism could conceive the test of Reason in terms of an exhaustive explanation of a given phenomenon. Reason does not want so much to get to the bottom of things as to the abyss of things. What the Enlightenment seeks, at least in its Kantian guise, is the a priori. Refusing to make do with Hume's cognitive habits, it seeks the transcendental, the abstract, the infinite. The Enlightenment is distinguished by both cynicism and naivete. Everything it tests becomes superstition and fetishism. As the Enlightenment disputes any reconciliation of the transcendental and the empirical, religion cannot but bear out its cynicism. Yet this cynicism, according to Hegel's famous account in the Phenomenology ofSpirit, sees through everything only because it sees nothing for what it is. 2 Blinded by its own presuppositions concerning dogma and knowledge, the Enlightenment is able to criticize everything because it only ever confronts a parody. The Enlightenment comes to an end, at least as far as German idealism is concerned, not in a resurgence of obscurantism but in a more exacting adherence to the task of knowledge. It must nevertheless be asked whether Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment is strictly immanent. Hegel judges it against an understanding of truth that is not its own. Out of a conviction regarding the nature of truth, Hegel is conciliatory where the Enlightenment had sought to aggravate the antagonism between the transcendental and the empirical, between, for instance, the claims and pretensions of Church and state and their base political realities. Hegel collapses the distinction between the Enlightenment's cynicism and na"ivete because he conceives the drive to truth in terms of a drive to reconciliation, thereby maintaining the ideal of harmony enshrined in the correspondence theory of truth. The light by which the Enlightenment apprehends phenomena is not the divine light of theodicy or logodicy. It is the telluric illumination in which everything appears cracked, riven apart into its brute and meager factuality and the non-being of the transcendental. The seriousness with which the Enlightenment received the news of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755-in the following year, Kant devoted three texts to the discussion of earthquakeshas much to do with its willingness to suspend the naivete of the faith in the goodwill of phenomena (Werner Hamacher has dwelt on the metaphoric

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significance of earthquakes in a modernity that begins with the Cartesian quest for a fondamentum inconcussum). 3 With its sovereign decision, the earthquake punctures the mathematicism, theodicies, and so on, by means of whose coherence early modernity sought to counter the exteriority of the transcendent Creator. But as it is the dream of modernity to make sense of the world without recourse to sovereignty, no sense can be found for this decision as decision, as co-ordinating exception: Kant, for instance, refuses to acknowledge in the event a judgment on the part of God. 4 There is a return, but no rehabilitation of the repressed understanding of contingent truth. Contingent truth (the truth of singular events as distinct from the necessary truths of laws, those truths whose contradiction is impossible) becomes the power of distortion inherent in whatever is. Kleist's turn to literature after the Kant crisis is less a turn away from truth to fantasy than a turn away from necessary truth to contingent truth. To set up in crude terms the choice with which, in hindsight, Kleist can be seen to have been confronted in the crisis of March 1801: literature deals with particulars and the contingency of particulars, whereas philosophy deals with universals and the necessity of universals. The fantastic element in Kleist's works is properly the unpredictability of contingent truth. In this regard, Kleist is a son of the Enlightenment. At its utmost remove from early modernity, the Enlightenment is too "naive" to be cynical about an event and too cynical for the imperturbable, ahistorical world of theodicy and logodicy. If the Enlightenment is prone to exaggeration and underestimation, to naivete and cynicism, if it is unable to see things as they are, it is because it has a predilection for the possible. Its scrutiny is always distracted. What the Enlightenment opposes to myth and ideology is being otherwise. Giving itself up to the empirical and to history, its interest lies not so much in the lawfulness of facts as in their contingency. As Hegel notes, the Enlightenment traces tortuous and grotesque trajectories around the parousia of the concept (the Hegelian concrete universal in which the empirical and the transcendental are reconciled): this reserve is directed against the universality, necessity and timelessness that compose the concept's point of indifference with myth. In the crisis that it foments in the understanding of truth, the Enlightenment exerts the greatest polemical pressure on the dogmas of Church and state. The truths by means of which a dogma is demythologized risk becoming dogmatic in turn if the being otherwise with which they confront dogma's claims to necessity is formulated as an essence. Contingency is the motor of critique.

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But insofar as the problem of contingency is Christianity's especial contribution to Western philosophy, the doubt surfaces that with contingency nothing can be achieved in terms of a critique of Christianity. While the ordered "cosmos" of Greek thought may prove vulnerable, the scholasticism of, say, Duns Scotus prides itself on having always already gone further in contingency. The Aristotelian theory of causes, for instance, never fully comes up against the question "Why is there something and not rather nothing?" and hence does not confront the contingency that is less an argument against the notion of a transcendent Creator than its corollary. Yet the novelty of Christianity is also its condition of impossibility as an established religion. Although it is able to discover itself in the critique of dogmatism, Christianity as an established religion is unable to obviate or simply appropriate this critique. To put it differently, the death of God is not so much the event that befalls Christianity from outside as the event to which it lays claim and before which it again and again falls short. Given the intrinsic ambiguity of Christianity, the Enlightenment can hardly be held to account for the dishonesty of its relationship to faith: the Enlightenment misses its target, according to one definition of Christianity, and hits it, according to another. In the conventional sense, the Enlightenment has nothing to say. It is always seen to betray what is taken for its doctrines. Defining itself by the promise of an enlightened age, it defers its own realization and therefore the possibility of its historical exhaustion. Any definition of the Enlightenment by an actuality remains subject to review. Insofar as the task of enlightenment is open-ended, Kant measures the eighteenth century as much by the future as by its own contingency: "If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age ofenlightenment." 5 Giving itself over to the non-identity in which it adheres to the critical possibility of being otherwise, the Enlightenment is datable only by its selfbetrayals. It haunts the French Revolution as the hypocrisy of the discrepancy between the proclaimed equality and the actual inequality in the social and political conditions ofliving human beings. The Enlightenment has an intimate relation to hypocrisy: it is the non-identity, the being otherwise from which the Enlightenment draws both the possibility and betrayal of revolution. 6 In a repetition of the Enlightenment debunking of pretensions, nationalist and- racist objections to the universalism of the ideals of 1789 fasten on the unreality of these ideals. But unreality in these objections is conceived as the stumbling block of the Enlightenment rather than as its ally. The Enlightenment introduces universalism into politics (e.g., "Men are

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born and remain free and equal in rights"). The equality is limited to rights: it is not so much a realization as a legalization of equality. The Enlightenment is happy to carry over from the medieval debate between nominalism and realism the ontological undecidability of the empirical place of the universal, applying this undecidability in its two-front campaign against metaphysical dogmatism and complacent materialism. Too quick to resolve this undecidability, opponents object to the realization of the political programs of the Enlightenment that it is not the concrete individual, but his or her unreal legalistic double who is born and remains free and equal in rights (the criticism, in its separation of the empirical from the transcendental, can simultaneously profess an allegiance to the Enlightenment). From one vantage point, the Enlightenment appears to adopt ideals solely in order to betray them (e.g., although Church assets were confiscated, the French Revolution did not address property rights and the inequality resulting from the unequal distribution of property). In response to the collapse of scholasticism and the crisis of the understanding of truth, it invents a politics of betrayal. There is to be no new firm ground. All the conceptions of the political that pretend to think through the death of God by recovering authority for the state fall short of the Enlightenment's experience of the non-identity of this death. In Cad Schmitt's secular state, positive law is no longer subject to appeals to the spectral and enigmatic justice of the Enlightenment, since the legislators, admitting no higher authority, impose their decision as decision in the face of the undecidability of the crisis of truth.

CONTINGENCIES AND

SECRETS

Excluded from the truth of method, contingency is not simply false: it declares the bad faith of method and the revocability of the latter's decision in the crisis of the understanding of truth. Kleist's despair in the face of the undecidability of truth is not psychological but ontological. It is not a comportment of the subject toward what is, and it is not a reaction to the death of God, so much as this death itself in the termination of the myth of the goodwill of independently existing phenomena. It would be a mistake to interpret the activism ofKleist's despair in antiintellectualist terms. If, for both Kleist and Kant, the foundation of practice is not knowledge, its foundation is nonetheless philosophical. In a letter

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from before the crisis of March I80I, Kleist already demotes knowledge: "Dear Ulrike, it is a well-known commonplace that life is a difficult game; and why is it difficult? Because one is forever expected to throw out a new card, but without knowing what is trumps; by which I mean, one is forever expected to act but without knowing what is right. Knowledge cannot possibly be man's highest: to do is better than to know." 7 In these few lines, Kleist at first subordinates action to knowledge, albeit to a knowledge in abeyance (one cannot act without knowing what is to be done, and this is something that we do not know). And then Kleist asserts that knowledge is subordinate to action. It is though action, since one is expected to act without knowledge of what is right, achieves its autonomy from epistemology by means of moral desperation. Kleist thereby arrives at a Kantian position by an unKantian path. This primacy of practice, as Wolfgang Kriiger long ago pointed out, is not unique to Kleist: "In this reversal of the relations between action and thought, in the necessary correspondence of these two fundamental dimensions and the consequently resulting different sense of truth, we grasp the root of Kleist's personality and work. And that is also the ultimate and deepest sense of the Kantian philosophy." 8 Kleist and Kant both conceive action as overreaching knowledge in answer to an assessment of the limitations of knowledge. Kleist's despair over knowledge and his resulting activism are not matters solely for the hermetically sealed, alternative history of psychopathological receptions of philosophy. This history, in which Kleist's interpretation of Kant in March 1801 is perhaps the most famous episode, is not only to be relieved of a reading that has served as its device but also to be dismantled as a whole, since it imputes a propriety to philosophical questioning that limits the latter and converts it into a method. The isolation of Kleist's reading as a psychopathological case study draws attention away from its similarities with the readings of his contemporaries and thereby facilitates the reduction of post-Kantian philosophy to theories of science, paradigms, and Weltanschauungen. Kleist does not abandon the thing in itself for the sake of totality, but then neither is the totality into which Herder sees the old philosophical essence transform already the totality of the late nineteenth century. In his Metacritique ofthe Critique ofPure Reason, Herder writes: Take apart, for example, an onion bulb layer by layer; you await the "thing in itself," the true onion, and perhaps demand quite new senses in order to feel it, to see it. And were they given to you, you would ask for new senses in

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order to find in the newly discovered core its core, the origin, the substance, or whatever else you might name it; and what would you find there? Energy, which constitutes the whole, which lives in all parts and members, does not let itself be either felt or seen. In it a thousand forces can stream together, and these in turn manifest themselves in a thousand qualities; the organizing energy you can neither decompose nor analyse. 9 According to Herder's vitalism, one arrives at the thing in itself not by whittling away, but by endless addition to a whole that can be regarded as the organizing force of nature to the degree that its open totality resists analysis into determinate constituents (cf. the Kantian Idea of the world). Although energy, the nature of romanticism, the Absolute of German idealism supplant the individual essences toward which inquiry before Kant had directed itself, ontological decidability, which the old essence could no longer ensure in the face of the death of God, remains suspended. This is not to suggest that Kleist's personal crisis is better understood as the crisis of the age. Whether a crisis is identified with an individual or with an age, it acquires a de facto resolution, inasmuch as it is set within bounds. Even if Kleist fixes on a facet of Kant's thought that was to be relatively unimportant for the principal currents of Kantianism, it is arguable that he addresses what is fundamental in Kant and to thought as such. In his lectures on the first Critique, Adorno remarks of the thing in itself: "We are looking here at the deepest aspect ofKant, at his attempt to say what cannot be said-and his entire philosophy is actually nothing more than a form of stammering, infinitely expanded and elevated." 10 In confrontation with the unknowable, Kant's sobriety, which is not to be confused with the sobriety of the transparent, the resolved and the mastered, issues in a stammer. It is the stammer with which a priori desire frustrates the identification of its objects and the transcendental ego enunciates the "I think" traversing the fits and starts of a world of contingencies. Kleist the stutterer bears witness to that in Kant which does not consume itself in universality and necessity. The world they share is the world that desire abandons to the gratuitous. Comparing Schiller's reticence and Kleist's enthusiasm about recounting the fanciful anecdote of a soldier blown across a canal in the Dutch wars for independence, Mathieu Carriere attributes to Kleist the dream of writing a history of humanity that would be nothing but such leaps and improbable modulations. 11 "On the Puppet Theater" is the theoretical outline of this history. The return to paradise, which ought to mark the culmination of human exertions,

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might easily be overlooked in artful stupidity. Kant's critique of teleology is, characteristically, exaggerated to an abandonment of teleology. Nothing realizes itself. From an apparent dead end, a new way opens up to the side. The violence with which so many ofKleist's dramas and stories terminate is perhaps the only means by which they could be brought to an end: unless the scene is swept clean of bodies, there could not even be the suggestion of resolution. Violence in Kleist is a deus ex machina. More often than it is a conspicuously artificial denouement, it is the "Open Sesame!" by which he also escapes from one impossible situation to another. Penthesilea's cannibalism, for instance, does not involve absorption: the Achilles-Penthesilea dyad, as the formula of the drama's action, is not replaced by inert unity, since Achilles' body is itself turned into a dyad (the corpse Penthesilea mourns over and the new Achilles whom, she proclaims, she will pursue in other worlds). The play ends, but without necessity. It is hard not to notice in Kleist a program at odds with resolution. Why else does Kohlhaas die with his secret and thereby upset the narrative tidiness of his legal process and execution? At times, Kleist shows a horror of writing "well." The modernity of Kleist's work lies, in part, in the experimentalism that obtains its philosophical justification in Kant's criticisms of normative objective aesthetics, teleology, and the conventional understanding of truth. After Kant, it makes no philosophical sense to try to write "well," as the oxymoronic templates of "good taste" rei£Y the experience of the beautiful. For Kant, the beauty of a work of art cannot be grasped in an objective judgment of its properties. For Kleist, truth turns crystalline, and the transmission of information has been replaced by the children's game of Chinese whispers. Unable to appeal to objective criteria, Kant's aesthetic community finds its bond solely in such whispering. In Kleist's work, a gesture, a word are no sooner made or uttered than they enter a series of metamorphoses. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari point out: "In Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself." 12 The secret ceases to be a possession and becomes the asymmetry in the understandings of a given interaction. In "The Betrothal in Santo Domingo," Toni attempts to save her fiance by delivering him bound to the enemies of his race, and in Kleist's version of Amphitryon, Alkmene expresses her fidelity through infidelity. Kleist's characters are never able to appropriate betrayal as a method. Alkmene betrays her husband with the god unwittingly: she has much more in common with the heroines of eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy than

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with the women who, according to Seneca's lost treatise On Superstition, haunted the Capitol in the belief that Jupiter was in love with them. 13 Kleist's characters encounter one another by flying from one another. And it is these figures forever flying from one another who tally with the world of Kantian ethics far more than the inhabitants of a harmonious republic, since the Law makes itself felt not through statutes but through secrets. Kant's two definitions of the moral act-its indifference to models and its independence from its consequences-align it with the secret of untransmittability. Ethics here does not dream of reconciliation or a stable community. What it wants is the dislocation of the sublime; not the state, but the pack.

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction

Untimely Meditations, Press, 1983), 140-41. University Cambridge trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Studie pathographisch-psychologische Eine Kleist: von Heinrich Sadger, Isidor 2. 62. 1910), Bergmann, F. J. (Wiesbaden: 3· Ernst Cassirer, "Heinrich von Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie," in id., Idee und Gestalt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921). 4- Ludwig Muth, Kleist und Kant (Cologne: Kolner Universitats-Verlag, 1954). 5· Ulrich Gall, Philosophie bei Heinrich von Kleist (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1977). 6. Heinrich von Kleist, An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters ofHeinrich von Kleist, with a Selection ofEssays and Anecdotes, trans. Philip B. Miller (New York: E. P. Dutton, r. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator," in id.,

1982), 97·

7· Ibid., 95· 8. Emmanuel Terray, Une passion allemande (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 298. 9· Carol Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 186. 10. Tim Mehigan, "Kleist, Kant und die Aufklarung," in Heinrich von Kleist und die Aujklarung, ed. id. (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), 8-9. n. Martha B. Helfer, The Retreat ofRepresentation: The Concept of Darste!lung in German Critical Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 120. 12. Kleist, Abyss Deep Enough, 95-96. Translation modified. 13. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), Ar29. 14. G. W F. Hegel, "Relationship ofSkepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of its

Different Modifications and Comparison to the latest Form with the Ancient One," trans. H. S. Harris, in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of PostKantian Idealism, ed. George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 352. 15. Jaakko Hintikka, "'Dinge an sich' Revisited," Kant-Studien 75 (1974): 86.

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16. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 204. 17. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A255 B3n. r8. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, trans. Alien W Wood, in id., Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Alien W Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 390. 19. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A51 B75. 20. Ibid., A7o7 B735. 21. Dieter Henrich, "On the Unity of Subjectivity," trans. Guenter Zoeller, in id., The Unity ofReason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 33· 22. Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 290-9m. 23. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, trans. Reginald Snell (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1954), 24. 24. Johann Georg Hamann, Sokratische Denkwiirdigkeiten/Aesthetica in nuce (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968). Cf. Bernhard Greiner, Eine Art Wahnsinn: Dichtung im Horizont Kants (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1994), 86-92. Greiner, following Ludwig Muth, proposes the third Critique as the impetus for Kleist's Kant crisis and subsequent literary career: art becomes the counterweight to skepticism. Inasmuch as he discerns in the work of art (rather than in aesthetic judgment) a bond between the sensuous and the non-sensuous, Greiner presents a reading that is more Hegelian than Kantian. Furthermore, in view of what is distinctive in Kleist's art-the incommunicable secrets, the fascination with preconceptual experience, the deferral of plot resolution, etc.-the reconciliation of the sensuous and the non-sensuous is a less obvious motivation for Kleist's art than the intractable singularity of the thing in itself. 25. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A320 B377. 26. Ibid., A597 B625. 27. Ibid., A82o B848. 28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 62. 29. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy IV, trans. John Cottingham in The Philosophical Writings ofDescartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2: 37-43· 30. Cf. Anthony Stephens, Kleist: Sprache und Gewalt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1999). Stephens discerns in Kleist "a subversive playing with the presentation of absolute and concrete truths" (p. 300). Kleist's characters experience truth, however, as that which subverts them (if there is subversive play in Kleist, it is not because truth has become the toy of the absolute consciousness of a romantic narrator). Roland Reug hits on the right metaphor in '"Die Verlobung in St. Domingo'-eine Einfiihrung in Kleists Erzahlen," in Heinrich von Kleist: Neue "We>ge der Forschung, ed. Anton Philipp Knittel and lnka Kording (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 76: "The cameraman, if one might put it that way, is from now on

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!29

filmed as well." The Kleistian narrator not only does not abandon the recording of the external, concretely existing conditions of contingent truth (metaphorically, the technological passivity of the camera in the face of what is), but even falls prey to them. 31. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, Axix.

Chapter One: Penthesilea and the Law Before Oedipus I. Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," in id., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey

(London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), W 167. 2. Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique ofPractical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 120. 3· Michel Chaouli, "Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist's Penthesilea," German Quarterry 69 (1996): 125. 4· Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary]. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 62. 5· Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), Ar34 B173. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 165. 7· Max Scheler, in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics ofValues, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Fink (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), ventures a critique ofKant's formalist ethics. But as he lacks Kant's cynicism, he does not recognize the latter's inventiveness or even the call for it. Scheler's lack of cynicism is grounded philosophically in his conception of the person. For Scheler, the person must be grasped as the totality of acts and not in any reductive psychological objectification, such as Kant's "dear self." If Kant does pass impatiently from the act to a "dear self" behind it and in distinction from it, it is by means of a cynicism that wishes to raise the question of the ethical prior to its determination and neglect in values and totalizing persons. Scheler's total person cannot accommodate the irreducible otherness that Kant and indeed much of the Western tradition has attributed to the ethical: justice, for example, can never be fully integrated into the body of laws and, in its most benign form, haunts the laws as the possibility of reform (as far as the critics of the courts are concerned, justice always has an alibi). What Kant endeavors to expose to view by means of the formalism of his ethics is the raw non-positivity of the ethical. The formalism ofKantian ethics is the theorization of the very non-positivity that is the condition of possibility of action. In criticizing the non-positivity of Kantian ethics, Scheler puts himself at odds with that which his own ethics must presuppose if it is not to be, at bottom, to however small an extent, a pseudo-scientific account of the so-called laws of behavior.

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8. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A551 B579. 9· Immanuel Kant, "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy," in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 6n-15; see ibid., editorial notes, 607, for the historical background to the text's composition. IO. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1997), 203. n. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals, in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 62. 12. Ibid., 63. 13. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Fi:irster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1993), 238. 14. Kant, Critique ofPractical Reason, in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 173· 15. Ibid., 16r. 16. Ibid., 164. 17· Gottlob August Tittel, Ueber Herrn Kant's Moralreform (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Pfahler, 1786; reprint, Aetas Kantiana, 285, Brussels: Culture et civilisation, 1969). 18. Henry E. Allison, "Reflections on the Banaliry of (Radical) Evil: A Kantian Analysis," in id., Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1996), 181. 19. Barbara Herman, The Practice ofMoral judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universiry Press, 1993), 93· 20. Ibid., 75· 21. Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory ofTaste: A Reading ofthe "Critique ofAesthetic judgment" (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 2001), 230. 22. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in id., Standard Edition, 18: IO. 23. Ibid., 20. 24. Kant, Critique ofPractical Reason, in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 175· 25. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 25. 26. Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, in id., Selected Prose, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1993), 277. 27. Kant, Critique ofPractical Reason, in id., Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 227-28. 28. Harald Schi:indorf, "Setzt Kants Philosophie die Existenz Gottes voraus?" Kant-Studien 86 (1995): 180. 29. Alexandre Kojeve, Kant (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 218. 30. By contrast, F. W ]. Schelling, in "Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge," in id., The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, trans. Fritz Marti (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated Universiry Presses, 1980), 124, reformulates the Law ofKantian ethics as the demand

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that one carries out "the negation of objects." By negating the object and not just excluding the empirical object as a determining ground, Schelling moves toward the identity of German Idealism. The object, as the mark of the fall from freedom, as the otherness that constitutes a limit to human freedom (thus a limit to that which cannot be constrained if it is to be itself), is erased. But ethics thereby loses the nonidentity essential to it as a response (in its absence of an Other-to adopt one psychoanalytic interpretation-ethics converts into psychosis). 31. Jean-Luc Nancy, "System of (Kantian) Pleasure (with a Freudian Postscript)," trans. Celine Surprenant, in Kant After Derrida, ed. Philip Rothfield (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 137, speaks in similar terms, at the conclusion of an archaeology of pleasure in Kant: "a pleasure irresistibly one and diverse, identical to itself in the strangeness to itself." Kant's exclusion of pleasure, which prompts Nancy's excavation, is in alignment with his purification of desire. The resulting seemingly paradoxical conception of pure desire communicates with the conception of pleasure as diffirance that Nancy sets forth (p. 139). 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 147. 33· Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics," Philosophical Review 74 Qanuary 1965): IO. 34· Ibid., 9· 35· For a discussion of Sabbatianism, see Gershom Scholem, "Redemption Through Sin," trans. Hillel Halkin in The Messianic Idea in judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 78-141. 36. 2 Cor. 3:6. 37· Stanley Cavell, "Must We Mean What We Say?" in id., Must We Mean What We Say? A Book ofEssays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 25. 38. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 536-37. 39· Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Anarysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1986), 104. 40. Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Werke und Briefe (Darmstadt: Wisssenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960-73), 4: 204. 41. Cf. H. G. Hotho, "Besprechung von: Heinrich von Kleist, Gesammelte Schriften," in Text und Kontext: Quellen und Aufsatze zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Werke Heinrich von Kleists, ed. Klaus Kanzog (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979), 27: "For just as in Kleist's other plays some external contingency lay concealed and all depended on its discovery, so here too lies concealed that which should constitute the actual pathos of the drama, in that the characters themselves only realize from the events befalling them what composes the innermost longings of their hearts." 42. Kaarle Hirvonen, Matriarchal Survivals and Certain Trends in Homer's Female Characters (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1968). Replicating the conclusions of Bachofen's studies on Aeschylus, Hirvonen argues that a not inconsiderable amount of material in the epics is comprehensible as a remnant of a Mycenaean matriarchal tradition recoded by Homer.

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43· Since a full bibliography would be almost coextensive with the literature on

Penthesilea, a few references must suffice: Rolf Diirst, Heinrich von Kleist: Dichter zwischen Ursprung und Endzeit (Bern: Francke, 1965), wo; Hermann Reske, Traum und Wirklichkeit im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Stuttgart: W Kohlhammer, 1969), 89; and Theodor Scheufele, Die theatralische Physiognomie der Dramen Kleists (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1975), 41. 44· Sigmund Freud, "Female Sexuality," in id., Standard Edition, 21: 226. 45· Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 64. 46. Kleist, Penthesilea, in id., Five Plays, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 169. 47· Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," in id., Standard Edi-

tion, 14: 296. Kleist, Five Plays, 253. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 256. Of course, Goethe himself was not unsusceptible to the artistic appeal of the adventitious: the novella included in the second part of Elective Affinities manages to extract a wedding from a shipwreck. 52· Germaine de Stael, Rejlexions sur le suicide (Paris: Opale, 1983), 85. 53· Heinrich von Kleist, An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist, with a Selection ofEssays and Anecdotes, trans. Philip B. Miller (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), 163. 54· Emil Staiger, "Heinrich von Kleist," in Heinrich von Kleist: Vier Reden zu seinem Gediichtnis, ed. Waiter Miiller-Seidel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1962), 52. 55· Georg Lukacs, "The Tragedy ofHeinrich von Kleist," in id., German Realists in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (London: Libris, 48. 49· 50. 51.

1993), 33· 56. Quoted in Deutsche Klassiker im Nationalsozialismus: Schiller, Kleist, Holderfin, ed. Claudia Albert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994), Sr. 57· Leni Riefenstahl, "Why Am I Filming Penthesilea?" trans. John Hanhardt, Film Culture 56-57 (Spring 1973): 210. 58. Gerhard Gonner, Von "zerspaltenen Herzen" und der "gebrechlichen Einrich-

tung der Welt": Versuch einer Phiinomenologie der Gewalt bei Kleist (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), 187. 59· Carl von Clausewitz, On W0r, trans. J. J. Graham (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, 19n), 266-67. 6o. Kleist, Five Plays, 164. 6r. Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 521. The comparison figures as well in The Metaphysics ofMorals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 495· 62. Helga Gallas, Das Textbegehren des "Michael Kohlhaas" (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 87.

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63. Kleist, Five Plays, 248. 64. Ibid., 252. 6 5. Ibid., 266. 66. Ibid., 268. 67. Ilse Graham, Heinrich von Kleist: Word into Flesh: A Poet's Quest for the Symbol (Berlin: Waiter de Gruyter, 1977), 6. 68. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy," in JeanPierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981), 18. 69. Kleist, Five Plays, 161. 70. Ibid., I79· 71. Ibid., 246. 72. Ibid., 218. 73· G. W F. Hegel, Phenomenology ofSpirit, trans. A. V Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 261-62. 74· G. W F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 518. 75· Ibid., 578-79. 76. Bernhard Boschenstein, "Der 'Gott der Erde'," Kleist ]ahrbuch n (1991): qo. 77· Cf. the distinction between a sedentary and nomadic nomos in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 36. 78. Friedrich Koch, Heinrich von Kleist: Bewusstsein und Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1958), 6o. 79· Euclides da Cunha, Revolt in the Backlands, trans. Samuel Putnam (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), 37· 8o. Benno von Wiese, Die deutsche Tragodie von Lessing bis Hebbel (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1967), 32. 81. Hartmut Bohme and Gernot Bohme, Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 366. 82. Kant, The Metaphysics ofMorals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, 46465n. 83. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L'imitation des modernes: Tjpographies If (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 83. 84. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power ofjudgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, zooo), 156. Translation modified. 85. Immanuel Kant, "On Philosophers' Medicine of the Body," trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Kant's Latin Writings, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 235·

Chapter Two: A Universal Sublime I. Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Puppet Theater," in id., An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters ofHeinrich von Kleist, with a Selection ofEssays and Anecdotes, trans. Philip B. Miller (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), 216.

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2. Ibid., 213-14. 3· Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), Ar34 B173-74. 4· Albrecht Sieck, Kleists Penthesilea: Versuch einer neuen Interpretation (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1976), 359· 5· Sigrid Scheifele, Projektionen des Weiblichen: Lebensentwurfo in Kleists Penthesilea (Wiirzburg: Ki:inigshausen & Neumann, 1992), 242. 6. For an attempt to oedipalize the sublime, see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 103-6. 7· Immanuel Kant, Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151. 8. Martha B. Heifer, The Retreat ofRepresentation: The Concept ojDarstellung in German Critical Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 127. 9· Kant, Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, 135· 10. Jean-Frans:ois Lyotard, Lessons on the "Analytic of the Sublime," trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 102. n. Kant, Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, 131-32. 12. Ibid., 135. 13. Ibid., 129. 14. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, journey to the End ofthe Night, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1983), 108. Translation modified. 15. Kant, Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, 144-45. 16. Ibid., 141-42. I7· Ibid., 134. 18. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 136. 19. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in id., Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Alien W Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 322. 20. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology.from a Pragmatic Point ofView, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 125. 21. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Selections .from The Tat!er and The Spectator, ed. Robert J. Alien (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 402-3. 22. Allan Lazaroff, "The Kantian Sublime: Aesthetic Judgment and Religious Feeling," Kant-Studien 71 (1980): 218. 23. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A334 B391. 24. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries ofMere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Wood and di Giovanni, 87. 25. Paul de Man, ''Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater," in id., The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 267. 26. Hilda M. Brown, "Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater: 'Schliissel zum Werk' or 'Feuilleton'?" Oxford German Studies 3 (1968): 124-

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27. Synda Stern Weiss, "Kleist and Mathematics: The Non-Euclidean Idea in the Conclusion of the Marionettentheater Essay," in Heinrich von Kleist-Studien, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1980), 123. 28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le discours de la syncope: I Logodaedalus (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 143· 29. Sigmund Freud, jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 8: 189-95. 30. Schiller, "Naive and Sentimental Poetry" and "On the Sublime": Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 85. Translation modified. 31. Alexander Weigel, "Der Schauspieler als Maschinist," in Heinrich von Kleist: Studien zu Werk und Wirkung, ed. Dirk Grathoff (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), 264-65. 32. Kleist, "On the Puppet Theater," in Abyss Deep Enough, 213. 33· Schiller, "Grace and Dignity," in id., Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (London: Bell, 1879), 182. 34· Kleist, Abyss Deep Enough, 166. Translation modified. 35· Hella Ri:iper, Grazie und Bewusstsein bei Heinrich von Kleist (Aachen: Alano, 1990), 49· 36. Kleist, "On the Puppet Theater," in Abyss Deep Enough, 216. 37· Although Schiller expresses an awareness of the economic and political ob-

stacles to the people's intellectual and moral autonomy, he never develops a program for addressing these obstacles. See Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis ofModern German Political Thought, I790-I8oo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 103: "Schiller's failure to explore his insight into the economic conditions of enlightenment remains one of the central weaknesses of his political philosophy." 38. Michael Emmrich, Heinrich von Kleist und Adam Muller: Mythologisches Denken (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 261. 39· See, e.g., Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience ofFreedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 188-89. 40. Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Schapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 144. 41. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Deutsches Lesebuch: Vorrede des Herausgebers," in id., Gesammelte Werke: Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1952-59), 4: 138. 42. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 146. 43· Kleist, "On the Puppet Theater," in Abyss Deep Enough, 212. 44· Ibid., 213. 45· Immanuel Kant, "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," trans. Emil L. Fackenheim, in id., Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1963), 55-56.

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46. Waiter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," in id., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 327. 47· Immanuel Kant, "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics," in id., Theoretical Philosophy, I755-I770, trans. David Walford and Raif Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 336. 48. Helene Cixous, Prenoms de personne (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 136. 49· Kleist, "On the Puppet Theater," in Abyss Deep Enough, 213. 50. Ibid., 216. 51. WolfKittler, Die Geburt der Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befteiungskriege (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1987), 360. 52. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 53· Immanuel Kant, "Recension von Moscatis Schrift," in Kant's gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Waiter de Gruyter, 1900-), 2: 425. 54· Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents in id., Standard Edition, 21: 1o6n. 55· Beda Allemann, "Sinn und Unsinn von Kleists Gesprach 'Ober das Marionettentheater'," Kleistjahrbuch 2 (1981-82): 56. 56. Kant, Anthropology ftom a Pragmatic Point ofView, 9· 57· Kleist, "On the Puppet Theater," in Abyss Deep Enough, 215. 58. G. W F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 744· Translation modified. 59· Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, trans. E. C. Beasley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1908), 43· 6o. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 520. 6r. Ibid., 519. 62. Kant, Anthropology ftom a Pragmatic Point ofView, 128.

Conclusion r. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), Ar41 B180. 2. G. W F. Hegel, Phenomenology ofSpirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 328-55. 3· Werner Hamacher, "Das Beben der Darstellung," in Positionen der Literaturwissenscha.ft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists "Das Erdbeben in Chili, "ed. David E. Wellbery (Munich: Beck, 1985), 151. 4· Immanuel Kant, "Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwtirdigsten Vorfalle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen gro!Sen Theil der Erde erschtittert hat," in Kant's gesammelte Schriften, 1: 459·

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I37

5· Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" in

Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor,

21.

6. For a merely negative view of this relation to hypocrisy, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, I988), 122: "Hypocrisy was the veil which the Enlightenment continued to weave and carry and which it never managed to tear apart." Koselleck follows Hegel in deploring the rigidity of the Enlightenment's dualisms: what begins as critical becomes uncritical, hypo-critical. 7· Heinrich von Kleist, An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters ofHeinrich von Kleist, with a Selection ofEssays and Anecdotes, trans. Philip B. Miller (New York: E. P. Dutton, I982), 93· Translation modified. 8. Wolfgang Kriiger, Kleist und das Problem der Wahrheit (Konigsberg, I939), 45· 9· Johann Gottfried von Herder, Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Samtliche Werke, ed. Johan Georg Muller (Stuttgart and Tiibingen: Cotta, I852-53), 37: 183. ro. Theodor W. Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, ed. RolfTiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), q8. n. Mathieu Carriere, Fur eine Literatur des Krieges, Kleist (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, I984), r8. 12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 198?), 356. 13. Quoted in Augustine, Concerning the City of God, Against the Pagans, trans. David Knowles (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972), 250.

Index

Addison, Joseph, 87-88 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 13f, IZ2 aesthetic comprehension, 8r-84, 86, ror Allemann, Beda, ro6 Allison, Henry, 36-37 animal, 46, 96-97, 105-6, 109-10 antinomianism, 46, 72 Aquinas, Thomas, 17, n5 Aristotle, n4f Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 131n42 Beck, Lewis White, 26 Beiser, Frederick C., I35n37 Benjamin, Walter, 55, 103 Bergson, Henri, 96 Bildung, ix, 73, 98 Bohme, Gernot and Hartmut, 69 Boschenstein, Bernhard, 67 Brown, Hilda M., 9I Burke, Edmund, 87 Butler, Samuel, 103 cannibalism, 27-28, 36-37, 52, 58, I23 Carriere, Mathieu, rz2 Cassirer, Ernst, I categorical imperative, 26, 34-37, 40, 46-47, 70 Cavell, Stanley, 46-47 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 83 Chaouli, Michel, 27-28 Cixous, Helene, I03 Clausewitz, Car! von, 57 clothing, ro6-9 coherence, xi, I2, 2I, 24, no, n8 consensus, r8, 2I-23, 57 Constant, Benjamin, 30 Cretensis, Dictys, 50 Crusius, Christian August, 34 Cunha, Euclides da, 68

de Man, Paul, 9I, 94, 98 deconstruction, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 39, 68, IOI, I23, 133n77 Derrida, Jacques, 85-86, 105 Descartes, Rene, xi, 3, 6, 22, 74, 79, 102, n4, uS desire, 27, 38-6I passim, 66-68, 72, 90, 122, I3ln3I despair, xi, 2f, rzf, 78, n4, rzof Duns Scotus, John, n9 earthquakes, 23, rq-I8 Eberhard, Johann Augusrus, 46 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 55 empirical ego, 33, 46, 48, 79-80, 85, 93 empiricism, 5-7, 9-ro, 22, 27, 34, 58, So, 83 Enlightenment, ix, xii, 2, 20, n2-14, u6, rzo, I35n37, I37n6 Epicurus, 76 error, 7, 12, 2o--23, 74-75, no eudaemonism, 27, 35, 38, 46 Euripides, 66, 68, 70 examples, 24-3I passim, 35-40 passim, 52, 6r, 7I, 76-88 passim, 92-99 passim experience, 5-13 passim, I9-20, 28, 3I-35 passim, 61, 77-92 passim, no, n3-I4, rzo, I23, rz8n24 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, I, 32 finitude, 5-6, II, I4-I5, !7, 78 Foucault, Michel, n3 French Revolution, 20, n9-20 Freud, Sigmund, 26-27, 30, 37-38, 48, 5I-53, 6o, 93-94, ros-6 Friedrich, Caspar David, 94 Gall, Ulrich, I Gallas, Helga, 59 Gilson, Etienne, n6

140

INDEX

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 68, 132n51 Gonner, Gerhard, 57 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 49 grace, 73-75, 9o-no passim Graham, Ilse, 61 Greiner, Bernhard, u8n24 Grenze (border), 7-u, 13-15, 21, 24, 67 Gryphius, Andreas, 69 Guattari, Felix, 39, 68, 123 Hamacher, Werner, II7 Hamann, Johann Georg, 16 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 51 Hederich, Benjamin, 50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, x, 2-16 passim, 21, 24, 44, 64-68, 74, 77, 104, 107-8, II7-18, I28n24 Heidegger, Martin, IO Heine, Heinrich, 42-43 Heifer, Martha B., 2, 78 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 32 Henrich, Dieter, IO Henry of Ghenr, 15 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 121-22 Herman, Barbara, 36-37 Hintikka, Jaakko, 5 Hirvonen, Kaarle, 50 Hitler, Adolf, 56 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, IOO Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, I3In4I Hume, David, 6, 8-IO, 23, 28f, 35, 39, 77, 83, II7 hypocrisy, 31, 55, 84, 95-96, n9, 137n6 idiocy, 87-88, 93-94 Iffiand, August Wilhelm, 95f immanence, x, xii, n-12, 39, 6of, 102f Irigaray, Luce, 51 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 20 Jacobs, Carol, 2 Johnstone, Jacob, 72 Jonah, 50 Kant, Immanuel, I-2, 52, 59, 64, 96f; and the Enlightenment, n2-15, II7-II9; and modernity, ix-xii; on earthquakes, n7-18; on ethics, 26-49, 54£ 58, 69-72, 95, uo-21, 124; on the sublime, 24£ 71, 74-90, 92-94, 98-99,101,110,124 Kant, Immanuel (works): "Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, An," u9; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 87, w6, no; Conflict ofthe Faculties,

The, 87; "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," 103; Correspondence, 58; Critique ofthe Power ofjudgment, I, 15, 27-28, 71, 74-90, 93, 98-99, IOI, no, 123, 128n24; Critique ofPractical Reason, 26, 28-29, 34-38, 42-43, 45, 54, 75, 99; Critique of Pure Reason, x, xii, 3-25, 29f, 32f, 39-42, 76f, 89, 103, n2, II4, 122; "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer," 103; Groundwork ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals, 28-32, 91; Lectures on Ethics, 30-31; Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine ofReligion, 5; Metaphysics ofMorals, The, 47, 132n6I; "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy," 30; "On Philosophers' Medicine of the Body," 72; Opus Postumum, 34; "Recension von Moscatis Schrift," 105; Religion Within the Boundaries ofMere Reason, 90, 99 Kemp Smith, Norman, 5 Kitt!er, Wolf, 104 Kleist, Heinrich von, 29, 48, 72, 83, IOI, n2-14, u6, 120, 124; and gratuitous acts, 36, 41, 50, 122; and Hegel, 2, n, 14, 16, 44, 65-66, 74, 104; and Kant crisis, ix-xii, 1-4, u-25 passim, 76, 78, 81, IIO, II8, I2I-22, I28n24; and suicide, ix, xi, 55; and Ulrike von Kleist, 2, 24, I2I; and Wilhelmine von Zenge, 2-4, 18, 22-23, 25 Kleist, Heinrich von (works): Amphitryon, 123-24; "Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The," 123; "Foundling, The," 55-56; Hermannsschlacht, Die, 56; .Kiithchen von Heilbronn, Das, 49-50; "Letter from a Young Writer to a Painter," 99; "Michael Kohlhaas," 4, 22, 123; "Of a child who kills another child in a childlike way," m; "On the Gradual Fabrication ofThoughts While Speaking," 92; "On the Puppet Theater," 24, 73-78, 89-100, 102-8, no, 122; "On Thinking Things Over," 47; Penthesilea, 24, 27-28, 31, 36-37, 49-64, 67-70, 72, 75-77, 123; Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 56 Koch, Friedrich, 68 Koselleck, Reinhart, 137n6 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott, 2 Kriiger, Wolfgang, 121 Lacan, Jacques, 48 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 70 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, I02 Lazaroff, Allan, 89 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 5, 77

INDEX

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 68, 108 linguistics, x Locke, John, x Longinus, Pseudo-, 87 Lucretius, 76 Lulcics, Georg, 56 Lyotard, Jean-Fran