Gewalt und Grazie: Heinrich von Kleists Poetik der Gegensätzlichkeit by Rüdiger Görner (review)

The title of the study sums up the author’s intention to define Kleist’s poetic modus operandi as a calculated arc of suspense between the poles of Gewalt (in the various meanings of power, violence, and force) and Grazie (grace, gracefulness). Dichotomy as a central aspect of Kleist’s aesthetics and biography is a long-held truism and descriptions of the Kleistian Doppelanlage are ubiquitous (Curt Hohoff’s monograph Heinrich von Kleist in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddo kumenten from 1958 comes to mind).

Görner’s breezy, lettered style, free of any theoretical jargon, displays an impressive learnedness that roams freely from Aristotle to Adorno and shows great familiarity with Kleist’s oeuvre and life. That comprehensive knowledge is fruitfully employed in the use of countless relevant citations but also for many chattery details and speculative asides. Oscillating between broad-stroke generalities and minute details, Görner’s study nevertheless presupposes that its readers have a fair amount of previous knowledge of late eighteenth-century aesthetic debates.

While the structural conceit of the study—its partition into three parts/acts with an introductory proscenium—seems to gesture toward a dialectical resolution (reinforced by the term Auflösungen in the title of the third part/act), this “intellectual staging” can mostly be viewed as an organizational model for the study. The first part (Erster Teil/Akt 1), entitled “Aesthetic Constellations,” embeds the development of Kleist’s aesthetic thinking in the greater context of the contemporary aesthetic-philosophical debate, with special attention to Kant, Schiller, Wieland, and Adam Müller. Müller’s universal conception of contrariety (Lehre vom Gegensatz) is presented as the philosophical equivalent to Kleist’s poetics. Görner’s account is able to trace a few direct influences on Kleist’s thinking and poetic method from Kant’s theory of the sublime, exemplified by the concept of negative representation, and from Schiller’s variations on Kantian concepts, but Kleist’s willfully independent and often idiosyncratic transfer of purported intellectual influences makes it hard to determine their exact import. Still, the recourse to figures like Schiller and Wieland, combined with an astute depiction of the rapidly changing political landscape of early eighteenth-century Prussia, help illuminate central features of Kleist’s literary-political project. Wieland’s graceful sublation of antagonisms into a cosmopolitan aestheticism demonstrated how gracefulness (Grazie) could serve as a secularized aesthetic equivalent to the theologically tinged-grace (Gnade). For Kleist, both aspects continued to figure prominently in his work even after Napoleon’s victories over Austria and Prussia turned him into a “theoretician of war” (F. Kittler) and propagandist of total partisan warfare.

Much criticism has lately focused on Kleist’s semiotics. The prevalence of metonymy and substitution in Kleist’s writings reveals a logic of supplementation that points to the impossibility of representational fixity. In this respect, Görner’s discussion of the importance of the Generalbass (thoroughbass or figured bass) for Kleist’s aesthetic theory is very instructive. It convincingly shows how the already anachronistic notation system of the thoroughbass ideally corresponds to Kleistian semiotics: just as the continuo is left to the discretion of the player and improvised in performance, Kleist’s language yields to a contextual unfolding of meaning developed in the process of writing, speaking, or reading, a form of calculated improvisational art (kalkulierte Improvisationskunst). Calculating improvisation is not merely “the creative response to contingent events” (in Edgar Landgraf’s words), as exemplified in the famous essay “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” but, together with the paradoxical, a core principle of Kleist’s poetics. Music, with its affinity to mathematics and its sensual nature, is for Kleist the paradigmatic art form, the root of all other arts. The relational concept of identity at the heart of Adam Müller’s Lehre vom Gegensatz, the idea that only the dialectical interaction of opposites, their Wechselwirkung, can overcome the...