Ausnahmezustand der Literatur. Neue Lektüren zu Heinrich von Kleist (review)

Carl Schmitt writes in Politische Theologie that exceptions are more interesting than rules because the rule depends on the exception and cannot be understood without it. Given the frequency with which Kleist depicts extreme, exceptional situations in his fiction, it is an interest he apparently shares. The fourteen essays in this volume, which appeared in 201l to mark the 200^th anniversary of Kleist's death, analyze a wide swath of the author's oeuvre and explore his fascination with states of exception. As Nicolas Pethes explains in the foreword, the collection offers new readings of Kleist's often-interpreted texts by connecting them to theories of sovereignty, decisionism, and biopolitics as they are found in the works of Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben.

A critical response to this approach might complain that it makes Kleist relevant by making his texts conform to currently fashionable theoretical models, by paraphrasing his fiction in a new conceptual vocabulary. Pethes, to his credit, addresses this potential critique at the outset and makes a strong case for reading Kleist in conjunction with theorists of sovereignty and biopower. For one thing, it is undeniable that Kleist's texts frequently and emphatically portray political, legal, and biological states of exception. Furthermore, Kleist himself occupies an exceptional position in German literature; one cannot easily assign him to any of the epochal categories that structure literary history around 1800. Finally, from the reader's perspective, the focus on states of exception is advantageous because it lends the book a welcome degree of methodological continuity, one often lacking in edited collections. These essays cohere not merely because they all deal with Kleist's texts but rather because they interpret those texts from a shared theoretical perspective.

The volume contains three sections—Krieg, Recht, and Leben—that organize the exceptional situations found in Kleist's work. Under Krieg, for instance, Thorsten Hahn investigates the biopolitical crisis that emerges in Robert Guiskard when a plague outbreak threatens to overturn authority and order, while Niels Werber and Friedrich Balke both read Die Hermannsschlacht alongside Schmitt's Theorie des Partisanen as a treatise on guerilla warfare. This piece of Kriegstheater is an historical allegory calling for total mobilization against Napoleon as well as a compelling example of the friend-enemy division and the state of exception that results from suspending the distinction between soldiers and civilians.

In the section on Recht, the best essays draw attention to Kleist's penchant for depicting the limits of juridical legitimacy. Maximilian Bergengruen shows how Der Zweikampf confronts the medieval trial by ordeal with contemporaneous evidentiary norms, and he concludes that both divine judgment and legal evidence present the same problem: they are ambiguous, "interpretationsbedürftig" (163), and thus susceptible to misreading. Other highlights include Ethel Matala de Mazza's contribution, which shows how the court in Der zerbrochene Krug undermines the foundations of its own legitimacy, while Stephan Kraft examines via Amphitryon how Kleist casts the paradox of sovereignty through the genre of dramatic comedy.

In the final section on Leben, Schmitt recedes somewhat into the background as the authors tend to rely more heavily on Agamben and especially Foucault. Johannes Lehmann demonstrates, for example, that Agamben's notion of "bare life" is useful for understanding Kleist's depictions of catastrophes and political states of exception. Like several authors, he notes that Kleist lived and wrote during the historical turning point in which Foucault identifies a new kind of power over human life. Through readings of Die Marquise von O . . . and other texts, he shows that Kleist's exceptional situations establish authority through the power to rescue bare life. Davide Giuriato takes up similar themes of rescue and biopower in his essay on Michael Kohlhaas. In his view, the novella dramatizes how a life stripped of legal protections exists in a zone of indistinction between human and animal.

Not every contribution hews as closely to the conceptual framework of sovereignty, exception, and biopolitics. For instance, Michael...