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

The main body of Andreas Gailus's book is a set of three essays on the three authors cited in the title. These essays are framed by an introduction and conclusion that place the argument in a theoretical context focusing ultimately upon Gailus's notion of performative language embodied in the "energetic sign." This idea evolved out of the discourse on performativity that began with J.L. Austin and has been elaborated by the work of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Shoshana Felman. Austin's initial formulation has been transformed—radically altered, one might say—into a theory that is concerned rather less with the philosophy of language and considerably more with notions of sexuality. Gailus tries to reassert the centrality of language while at the same time maintaining the recent interest in the bodily, indeed libidinal, component in acts of speaking. At the center of his argument is the claim that "every sign incorporates in its structure the energetic cycle of its own production," which means in particular that, because language "has aims of its own," the discourse of individuals "becomes performative—modifies reality—when it succeeds [. . .] in aligning the extra-individual passions generated by the communicative exchange with the impersonal force sedimented in the sign" (14).

This is rather heavy-going, and it takes a pass through the whole book to get a handle on what Gailus is after. It may not be possible to summarize it properly in a brief compass. The complicated point the book makes involves the interaction of the conventional, extra-personal relationships that make linguistic signs useful as a means of communication with the particular, very local and physical circumstances in which such communicative acts are embedded. That requires balancing the linguistic / philosophical concerns foregrounded early on by Austin and Derrida with the attention to gendered corporeality that resides at the center of Butler's and Felman's interest.

Gailus investigates this theoretical constellation in the historical context of German reactions to the French Revolution. That is not to say that he limits himself to interrogating texts that explicitly address the revolution itself, though some such do appear. Rather, he wants to look at important texts produced in the post-revolutionary period that address what one might call revolutionary issues. Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas comes under discussion for this second reason. Although the story is set long before the Bastille fell, it depicts revolutionary actions and attempts to deal with the problem of the relation of the allegedly freely acting individual to the structure of social and political authority to which such individuals are subject. As Gailus reads texts like Kohlhaas, the political question of how one can actually change the world merges with the philosophical / linguistic theoretical question of how one can succeed in doing things with words. The paradigmatic political-linguistic gesture becomes Kohlhaas's act of swallowing the paper containing the gypsy-woman's prophecy, a deed that has more long-term political effect than any of the horse dealer's radical deeds of revolutionary violence.

In addition to the essay on Kleist, there are investigations of Goethe's Conversations of German Refugees and of Kant's philosophy of history as exemplified in The Conflict of the Faculties, two texts that more directly address issues arising out of the French Revolution. All of this, it should be added, is interwoven with a meditation on the novella genre and its important place in any history of the discourse of rupture. For me, the discussion of the novella was perhaps the most interesting part of the whole enterprise, drawing out certain implications of the genre's history that I had only begun to wonder about in the past. Although not connected to any revolutionary political movement at the time of its early development, the novella is indeed, as Gailus suggests, nearly the perfect literary form for the depiction of revolutionary ideas and events, insisting as it does...