The Poetics of the Middle in Kleist's “Michael Kohlhaas”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9854719 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zachary Sng (John Brown University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 85 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 171-188 |
| Publication date | 2010-09-24 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8890 • E-ISSN: 1930-6962 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00168890.2010.504435 |
| OpenAlex | W2090432533 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
Heinrich von Kleist's story, “Michael Kohlhaas,” has been often read as a demonstration of literature's ability to cross over and intervene in a sphere other than its own. Kleist's text is, however, replete with instances of thwarted crossing, impassable borders, and diversion into errancy. I argue that this tension points to Kleist's profound ambivalence toward the logic of mediation and his doubts about whether language can function as a medium for the transportation and direction of force. I read the text as an exploration of a poetics of the middle and explore (via a brief discussion of Walter Benjamin's “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”) the implications of such a reading for claims about the its performative efficacy. Keywords: Walter BenjaminHeinrich von Kleistlawmediationperformativityviolence Notes Aristotle, Poetics 2: 2–7. The most prominent among the few literary scholars who have engaged with the “middle” at length is probably Samuel Weber. See, for example, his Theatricality as Medium and Benjamin's -Abilities. Kleist draws considerably, as is well known, from the “Nachricht von Hans Kohlhasen,” which was published in Christian Schöttgen and George Christoph Kreysig, Diplomatische und curieuse Nachlese der Historie von Ober-Sachsen und angrentzenden Ländern (Dresden and Leipzig, 1731). Miller is, in fact, another critic who has called our attention to the unfairly neglected space of the middle in narrative; see, for example, the essays collected in Reading Narrative. This earlier work on narrative middles does not really feature prominently, however, in his reading of “Michael Kohlhaas.” Some prominent examples are the Kohlhaasisches Mandat that he issues as a general call to the people, warning them against sheltering the Junker with whom he is involved in a just war (34) and a second mandate in which he declares himself “einen Reichs- und Weltfreien, Gott allein unterworfenen Herrn” and denounces the Junker as an “allgemeinen Feind aller Christen” (36). For an account of the situation facing typical German cities and states in the period because of mediatization, see Facius; Rowe; and Schmid and Unger. See also the essays in Müller, Flachenecker, and Kammerl, and Gollwitzer, for a general overview of the topic. Niklas Luhmann, one of the most prominent modern thinkers of the medium, has pointed out that media are characterized by “their high degree of dissolubility together with the receptive capacity for fixations of shape” (216). This emphasis on dissolution and receptivity make up the demand that has been historically posed to the form of the mediating middle that Kleist's text so effectively renders inoperative. In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant points out that the seeming autonomy of aesthetic judgment should more accurately be called a “heautonomy,” because in it, “judgment legislates neither to nature nor to freedom, but solely to itself” (414). Miller's insistence on the ultimate success of this self-legislative positing is perhaps the most significant difference between his account of performativity and the one given by Derrida in “Force of Law.” Derrida's critique is aimed at exposing the positing claims of performative language as untenable in general. This point is made more explicit in his later essay, “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come,” in which he states that the perfomative “cannot avoid neutralizing, indeed annulling, the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce” (43). The primary gestures that come to dominate Derrida's later work, such as the gift, forgiveness, hospitality, or what he refers to in this essay as “the awaiting without horizon of a messianicity without messianism” (44), are all indications of mediate relationships that remain persistently open. This postponement of an arrival or resolution that would be underwritten by instrumentality or teleology is consistent with the perpetual deferral of the middle (in both senses of the genitive) that I am highlighting here. The medical consensus at the time was that apoplexy was caused by excessive bleeding in the brain due to a number of causes, but it is unclear whether Fluß refers to the normal vital flows that are stopped by the stroke, resulting in rigor or immobility, or to the excessive flow of blood that is released in the brain and that blocks normal vital functions. For more on the history of medical knowledge about apoplexy, see Storey. As is well known, this phrase is employed with astounding frequency in “Michael Kohlhaas” and in Kleist's works in general. For a good summary of some of the key usages in the story, see Gailus 136. Gailus rightly acknowledges that this phrase invokes a “rhetoric of the impersonal,” but his insistence that this impersonality can be recuperated as a conduit of energy under the rubric of “impersonal energetic speech” is less persuasive (137). The German Gewalt is rendered by Benjamin's translators as both “violence” and “force,” depending on the context. I will be referring to Gewalt as “force” throughout. As Hamacher has pointed out (119), Benjamin uses the term schlagend a number of times in connection with divine force. He describes it as schlagend rather than drohend (the latter being associated with mythic violence) and illustrates this with the case of the Levites: divine force strikes them “unangekündigt, ohne Drohung, schlagend und macht nicht Halt vor der Vernichtung” (199). He also states that divine force manifests itself not in miracles but rather “jene Momente des unblutigen, schlagenden, entsühnenden Vollzuges” (200). Benjamin himself suggests such a connection in his remark that the “reine Mittel der Politik” (as instantiated by the proletarian general strike) is an analog to “den friedlichen Umgang zwischen Privatpersonen,” of which the proper sphere is language (192–93). I have elsewhere explored the trope of thirdness in another text by Kleist, the tragedy Penthesilea; see Sng. This has been pointed out by Reuß's discussion of the opening sentence (29–32). Hamacher connects this negative potentiality of language to its Mitteilbarkeit or “impartability”—not its ability to communicate content, but its tendency to impart nothing but itself. “Means,” as he puts it, “are pure as long as nothing imparts itself in them but themselves, their own mediacy” (114). This figure of Mitteilbarkeit has recently been explored at length by Weber in Benjamin's -Abilities (see esp. 40–47 and 197–98). Gailus, for example, reads the tree's transformation into a tollgate as a disastrous “alteration from a natural into a cultural object, from tree to sign” that heralds the destruction of an “organic notion” of the “lived unity” of justice (115). Lacan 117
Art · Epistemology · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Performative utterance · Poetics · Poetry · Reading (process · German Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |