Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant by Timothy J. Mehigan (review)

With two exceptions, the eleven chapters of this volume are updated (and in some cases newly translated) versions of previously published essays by the author. Its three sections center around the general topics of “Reason,” “Agreement,” and “Inference and Judgment.” While each section is dedicated to a different theme, together they also reflect changes in methodology that are symptomatic for developments in Mehigan’s work and in the field of Kleist studies at large.

The first part of the book on reason provides an in-depth analysis of the philosophical background that informs Kleist’s hermeneutic skepticism. The focus is not only on Kant but also on Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, Fichte, and others who come to define the Enlightenment rationalities that Kleist adopts “with a view to questioning and critically examining [their] validity within the ambit of literature” (57). Mehigan’s main strength is his ability to provide concise, lucid, and highly accessible summaries of the philosophical traditions relevant for Kleist and make them productive for the interpretation of his narratives. Thus, the first part of the book establishes the philosophical context for Kleist’s questioning of self-consciousness in “Über das Marionettentheater,” for his critique of a rationally ordered universe in “Der Findling,” for the “anthropology of fragility” that drives Penthesilea, and for the radicalization of Rousseau’s contractualist position in “Michael Kohlhaas.”

The second part of the book investigates the proliferation of judicial, political, and ethical contracts (and contract complications) in Kleist. Mehigan relates the contractual structures he finds on the level of the story to what is recognized as the unspoken contract between text and reader. That is, Mehigan explores the metanarrative dimensions of Kleist’s texts, how the constant problems of reading and writing, of miscommunication, of misrecognition, of broken promises, and so on come to affect the reader, confronting her with the very hermeneutic, cognitive, and aesthetic challenges that the characters in Kleist’s narratives encounter. Ultimately, Mehigan reads the inclusion of the reader as a reflection on the limits of narrative and the production of meaning itself. “Die heilige Cäcilie“ and “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” reveal how “[r]eal meaning, if it can be said to exist, is the portrayal of the inability to convey it” (120), and at the end of “Michael Kohlhaas” we find “the narrator to refer his readership to a renewed activity of reading that will reinvest a new written contract with life” (161).

While the essays of the first two parts of the book for the most part remain committed to a more traditional examination of the philosophical, aesthetic, and political contexts of Kleist’s writing, the essays of the third part on “Inference and Judgment” turn to contemporary theories and observational practices that go beyond questions of influence and historical circumstance. Drawing on game theory, systems theory, and contemporary notions of inductive reasoning, Mehigan explores a vocabulary that enables him to describe the particularity of Kleist’s rationality independently of the philosophical schools of his day. As a consequence, he challenges dominant critical opinion that reads Kleist’s rationality ex negativo, stylizing him as a “metaphysical ironist” (Bernd Fischer) or as an irrational pessimist who recognized, but saw no escape from, the philosophical and political aporias of his time. Mehigan instead notes an increasingly pragmatic dimension in Kleist’s thought, following what Mehigan identifies as a second philosophical turning point in Kleist’s life around 1805/6. Whatever linguistic or contractual aporias Kleist’s texts continue to invoke, in this period Kleist develops a more constructive (compared to the famous Kant crisis of 1801) relationship to Kant and begins to progress toward what Mehigan calls an “inter-subjective outlook” (179). Expanding on recent works by Bernhard Greiner and Dominik Paß, Mehigan finds rationality not abandoned, but tested in pragmatic situations that are recognized in terms of their game structure. Subsequently, Mehigan presents us a Kleist “who was less haunted by life’s inherently tragic nature than...