Passions of the Sign: Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe, and Kleist (review)

This book is far too short for the large and complex topics Andreas Gailus engages with so boldly and skilfully. As the title indicates, the topics lie at the intersection of semiotics, politics, history, and linguistics. Each of the central figures – Kant, Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist – also implicates an extensive discourse. In a scant 158 pages of text Gailus frequently has no room to do more than to allude, to touch and go, even with thirty-five pages of notes. This is not an introductory-level monograph. Either readers will already have to be familiar with the topics or they will have to begin by working through several of the works listed in the sixteen-page bibliography before tackling the book. Otherwise they will groan at the density and technical precision of the analyses, at the cost of appreciating Gailus's arguments.

At stake are questions that go to the very heart of our ongoing crises. What kind of an event is a revolution? Could, can, or will language ever be able to give us some relief by letting us tell each other when a revolution happened or is happening? Moreover, since the revolution is only one instance of events as such, do language and narration afford any possibility of at least being able to make some sense of what we experience? Revolution erupted in France in the late eighteenth century and exposed vast reservoirs of unreason, of violence, of raw passions in quantities the Enlightenment had hardly been able to imagine in its worst nightmares. How, if at all, could reason and its instruments restore order?

Gailus sums up the respective strategies of the three figures central to his study. For Kant, the "remedy is legalistic, the passionate embrace of principle is to be tempered by the disciplinary apparatus of the state." Goethe turned to aesthetics: "The restitution of civility and the symbolic order here falls to art and the sublimation of desire it effects: the conversion of the freedom of desire to the freedom from desire." Kleist "ultimately destroys the limits of individual subjectivity" in that "the individual, as exemplar of the particular, is sacrificed to the universal law of justice" (151). In the three main chapters the focal points are canonical texts, including Kant's Conflict of the Faculties, Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, and Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas. The introduction turns on a reading of Kleist's Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden, whereas the conclusion draws attention to a lesser known text by Kierkegaard, En literair Anmeldelse (1846). The specific readings are subtle and stimulating; even those long acquainted with the texts will gain new insights.

Of course, there are some less persuasive claims. Gailus's take on Kant's view of the French Revolution is vitiated by a lingering misapprehension of Kant's politics, one that does not recognize his profound aversion to tyranny. What concerned Kant was how to abolish tyranny, embodied in Prussia by the notorious "enlightened despot" Frederick II, while preserving sovereignty. Hence his welcome for the glimpses of the public, manifested in mass spectatorship during the revolution, offering an alternative for the embodiment of sovereignty. Conversely, the execution of Louis XVI would serve to redistribute and strengthen tyranny. Kant and Kleist should be seen as mirroring each other in their politics.

Much to be regretted is that the brilliance of Gailus's analyses is dimmed by – and I use the word technically here, not pejoratively – an avoidable provincialism. Once again a work of German theory operates within limiting borders. It is baffling that a work so open to interdisciplinarity and multivocality should lack all mention of John Locke, Edmund Burke, or David Hume and should have only glancing mentions of Spinoza, Negri, and Deleuze. Perhaps most disappointing is the absence of any reference to gothic, a genre category whose attendant secondary literature has yielded highly sophisticated accounts...