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Chapter 2 Sentimentalities Coming out of these discontents with Kant, a name that for better or for worse came to stand in for philosophy’s striving for clarity of conceptual thinking, Kleist and Melville devised in their writings an approach to thinking and knowledge that takes the “complex web of life”—its contingencies and obscurities, the preliminarity and precariousness of all judgments taken under its conditions—into account. This is certainly an endeavor of modern literature at large, if we think of Caygill’s list of para-philosophical reactions to the epistemological shifts around the time of 1800.1 What, then, is specific to Kleist and Melville? I would like to suggest here that it is precisely their figures of simplicity, and the mode of thinking they are asking us to consider and explore. They ask how, without the yardstick of Enlightenment reason that had vouched for or at least held out the promise of certainty, clarity, and last grounds, and when being immersed in the uncertainties and contingencies that emerge as a result of this, how (and what) we can know. What is a mode of thinking adjusted to the uncertainties of life? Kleist and Melville pursue this question in the tests to which they put their protagonists, in the experiments they conduct with the latters’ capacities to assess a situation and their ability to operate on the basis of that assessment. The compelling aspect of these experiments is not so much their outcome— they do not really deliver “positive” results and reliable insights. At times, we see them fail in their endeavors to figure out the situation. Circumstances get in the way, or their own rashness. At other times we sense that they do succeed, but in a way that we might call success only with great reserve. To what extent do Michael Kohlhaas or Billy Budd succeed, given their death at the end? Or can we even say that knowledge is a concern of theirs at all? Certainly not, if we understand by knowledge a graspable and perhaps even generalizable body of acquired certainties and verified facts. What is compelling is rather how all of these textual experiments pursue the processes that go into assessing a situation : how they dissect the registration of minute impressions and the turns taken by the protagonists to preliminarily evaluate what they find themselves 27 Figures of Simplicity immersed in. What is compelling is how they put the affective dimensions of these impressions and turns to the fore. We might suggest at this point— something that is to be tested throughout the next three chapters—that Kleist and Melville deliver an argument, in literary garment, on the subterranean processes that go into that which surfaces as “thinking.” They display with great textual care the minute observations, the bodily twitches, the incalculable turns of bodies and events that guide their figures’ conduct, their “conclusions” and their“reasoning.”In thatsense,theirtextsareconsideredhere asaseriesof études on consciousness, knowledge production, and thinking. Within a post-Kantian epistemological framework, fully affirming contingency and epistemological uncertainty as modern conditions, Kleist and Melville ask after the relation between affectivity and thinking and implicitly respond to the aesthetic debates we considered in the last chapter on the relation between affectivity and rationality . What is specific to their positions within these debates is that their texts demonstrate the epistemological operations of affectivity, rather than merely expose the instabilities of rationally acquired understanding. On the one hand, these operations are shown to be bound to a complex web of infinitely small perceptions, to which the figures are exposed when situated within a widely ramified network of coincidences; a network that continuously branches out and diversifies, and incessantly complicates and redefines the situations they are in. On the other hand, the texts also present the figures as maneuvering these situations, as responding to these pressing situations with lesser or greater efficiency and success. The figures operate—to a lesser or greater degree, as we will see in the preliminary (and somewhat ironic)“classification”of three“types”of simplicity—with a state of mind, or a mode of understanding that I suggest be called affective or sensate thinking.2 In a letter to his sister Ulrike, Kleist suggests that life is such a difficult thing, because “incessantly and always again anew one has to draw a card without knowing which is trump;…incessantly and always again anew one has to act without knowing what...

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