The Germanic Review, 85: 171–188, 2010 Copyright c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0016-8890 DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2010.504435

The Poetics of the Middle in Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas”

Zachary Sng

Heinrich von Kleist’s story, “Michael Kohlhaas,” has been often read as a demonstration of literature’s ability to cross over and intervene in a sphere other than its own. Kleist’s text is, however, replete with instances of thwarted crossing, impassable borders, and diversion into errancy. I argue that this tension points to Kleist’s profound ambivalence toward the logic of mediation and his doubts about whether language can function as a medium for the transportation and direction of force. I read the text as an exploration of a poetics of the middle and explore (via a brief discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”) the implications of such a reading for claims about the its performative efficacy.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin, , law, mediation, performativity, vio- lence

f the three elements of a well-constructed plot that Aristotle identified in the Poetics—a O beginning (archeˆ), a middle (meson),andanend(telos)—it is telling that our attention has so ostentatiously pooled around the first and the last, leaving the middle high and dry.1 The middle seems to suffer from a twofold problem: it is on the one hand less tangible than beginnings and endings, but on the other possessed of sufficient self-evidence to dodge critical notice. We find the middle indispensable, in other words, because something has to come between beginning and end, but our expectations of it are set pretty low.2 The secondary scholarship on Heinrich von Kleist’s story “Michael Kohlhaas” certainly bears out this characterization: an attention to the paired problem of beginning and ending, with a corollary neglect of the middle, has long been a hobby horse of its criticism. This is not surprising, given the striking symmetry of the text’s opening and closing gestures. Its subtitle refers to the historical chronicle from which it draws, and its final sentences invite the reader to consult history to see how the story continues for its main characters. The literary

1Aristotle, Poetics 2: 2–7. 2The most prominent among the few literary scholars who have engaged with the “middle” at length is probably Samuel Weber. See, for example, his Theatricality as Medium and Benjamin’s -Abilities.

171 172 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010 text itself thus seems to be presented as a diverting interlude between historical book ends, an imaginative space flanked on both sides by things weightier and more concrete.3 Small wonder, then, that most readings of it are focused on its dramatic opening and closing scenes rather than on its somewhat problematic middle. The question of the middle could actually be addressed not just to the plot or narrative structure of Kleist’s text but also to its poetics. In Passions of the Sign, a study of revolutionary language in Germany around 1800, Andreas Gailus refers to the text’s opening and closing scenes as “clearly defined textual borders” that serve a double purpose: they draw a line of distinction between text and history but also act as signs of the story’s “pragmatic aspirations, the relation to the historical and political domain it aims to engage in.” From this perspective, the densely interwoven “border narratives” (107) that make up Kleist’s story reflect on how language institutes borders such as the one between literature and history, but they also reveal how it can undo those same boundaries. Through an analysis of performative force in Kleist’s writings, Gailus shows how literature’s ability to both construct and undo such borders, thus producing “change in the matter and meaning of history” (148), is a function of what he calls an “energetic dimension of speech” (141). A similar interest in the text’s performativity can be found in J. Hillis Miller’s “Laying Down the Law in Literature,” which underscores the numerous acts by which Kohlhaas the character and the text itself leave behind old jurisdictions in order to establish new ones. He reads, for example, the preposition “aus” in Kleist’s subtitle (“aus einer alten Chronik”) as a forceful launching of the text “from the safely grounded and lawful realm of history” into the realm of the literary, which is governed no longer by historical and legal realities but by “a law the story itself establishes” (86). This is the first of many crossings between history and fiction performed in and by the text, which can therefore be read as testimony to how literature can “intervene performatively into history” (102). In order for a literary text to lay down a law that is no longer confined to the literary but actually becomes “socially and historically effective” (104), however, it must bring something to a close and initiate something new, and it is in the space of the middle—the delicate threshold between ending and beginning—that this law-positing force of literature is located.4 Borders such as the ones between literature and history, language and action, writing and its effects, are drawn in order to be crossed, as these critics demonstrate with elegance. Sometimes, however, the crossing is fraught, and one is indefinitely stuck in the middle, detained at the border, redirected into a perpetual escalation and errancy that never resolves into arrival or even traversal. Such problems point to a different kind of middle being at work, emphatically dissimilar to the mediating middle that Aristotle imagines as a reliable ferryman from beginning to end, from point of departure to destination. A middle that refuses to mediate in this way acts as a disruption of directed trajectories and teleological movements

3Kleist draws considerably, as is well known, from the “Nachricht von Hans Kohlhasen,” which was published in Christian Schottgen¨ and George Christoph Kreysig, Diplomatische und curieuse Nachlese der Historie von Ober-Sachsen und angrentzenden Landern¨ ( and Leipzig, 1731). 4Miller is, in fact, another critic who has called our attention to the unfairly neglected space of the middle in narrative; see, for example, the essays collected in Reading Narrative. This earlier work on narrative middles does not really feature prominently, however, in his reading of “Michael Kohlhaas.” SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 173 and a challenge to the principles of transitivity and conductivity that define the medium. It also punctuates with an urgent question mark any claim about the ability of literature to intervene in history, politics, or any space beyond its own borders. The above-mentioned mediological complications are, in nuce, the ones that Kleist’s protagonist has to contend with. A horse-trader who travels frequently between and Brandenburg, Kohlhaas depends on border-crossings for his living, but a legally dubious detention and confiscation of his horses at the border sets into motion a string of injustices and misfortunes, and a series of violent acts of vengeance follows in their wake. This escalating madness carries the narrative toward a problematic conclusion marked by patently hollow justice and unsatisfactory resolutions. The central role that borders and crossings play in the text’s complicated choreography of movement is obvious; equally undeniable, however, is the fact that the story’s narrative and dramatic engine is driven by the thwarting of traversal rather than by its successful completion. For the bulk of the story, our would-be hero is caught in a medial nightmare: he shuttles back and forth between cities and states in a vain attempt to seek revenge and redress, writing desperate appeals for justice that are consigned to purgatorial deferral at the hands of corrupt intermediaries. What happens, then, if we read what Gailus refers to as “Kleist’s ambition to extend the reach of fiction into history” (108) and Miller as “the legislative power of a literary work” (104) as a reflection on and dramatization of certain complexities regarding the middle? This would make the frustrated crossings and delayed transport in Kleist’s text not just aberrations but symptoms of a problematic middle that will not efface itself to support acts of inauguration or closure. By remaining insistently medial, such a middle paradoxically establishes itself as both a pure medium and an absolute interruption of mediation.

THE MEDIATIZED WORLD OF MICHAEL KOHLHAAS One of the primary roles of the middle is to facilitate passage, transport, and crossing between two poles (such as beginning and end), and an unmistakable indication of its breakdown in “Michael Kohlhaas” is the unreliable and inflationary circulation of writing in the story. Kohlhaas’s early attempts to seek redress for the illegal detention and abuse of his horses are almost exclusively conducted through letters of appeal. Writing, thus, promises at the outset to function as medium of communication that is also a mechanism of correction, for Kohlhaas’s missives aim to identify and remedy the kinks that inevitably occur in the elaborate network of political decision-making that makes up the Holy Roman Empire. Unfortunately, he is compelled for a number of reasons to hand his letters over to a number of intermediaries for delivery, including his own wife, who is disastrously killed in the course of discharging this duty. None of the communications end up arriving uncompromised at their proper destination—that is to say, in the hands of an impartial court or sovereign who can judge the merits of his case. Instead, they are diverted and rendered ineffective by the intervention of corrupt officials related to the Junker whom he is accusing of a criminal act in the first place. Even after the frustrated Kohlhaas abandons such conventional channels of legal appeal and turns to a more direct and violent course of action, one thing remains the 174 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010 same: his attempts to hunt down and extract justice from the Junker continue to depend and ultimately founder on various forms of written proclamations and announcements.5 The tragedy of Kohlhaas is, in other words, precipitated by his continued reliance on a treacherous middle, one that demonstrates repeatedly and spectacularly its shortcomings as a means of conveyance. Mediated communication seems to be an integral part of the social and political structures depicted in the story, and Kohlhaas is not the only one whose actions are deeply entangled with writing and its complications. Writing’s reach extends even to , who throughout his encounter with Kohlhaas is seen surrounded by paperwork (“unter Schriften und Buchern”)¨ to which he impatiently desires to return (44). Further underscoring Luther’s connection to the mediatized domain of writing are Kohlhaas’s words of reassurance, uttered in response to the reformer’s visible fear of the violent rebel: “unter den Engeln, deren Psalmen Ihr aufschreibt, seid Ihr nicht sicherer, als bei mir” (45). Marked by the etymology of their name as “messengers,” angels are conventionally associated with the task of delivery and mediation between the divine and the human. In this case, however, the message that they convey seems only to create the need for further mediation by scribes such as Luther, who is assigned to the job of writing down their psalms. The imagery of angels has already been invoked once when Kohlhaas declared himself, in an earlier written proclamation, as a Statthalter (literally, “place-holder” or “stand-in”) of the archangel Michael (41). The name Michael is offered up as the common ground between the would-be freedom fighter and the archangel, but it merely duplicates the problem of deferral: the Hebrew mi is an interrogative and ka-el refers to “like God.” A correspondence between the human and the divine is thus not asserted but posed as a question by the name: Who is like God? Both the logic of standing-in and the principle of similarity turn out to be unreliable means to secure a ground for mediation. This becomes tragically evident when Kohlhaas himself becomes replaced by the duplicitous Nagelschmidt, who smoothly insinuates himself into the former’s vacated place by issuing written proclamations “die den Kohlhaasischen ganz ahnlich¨ waren” (66). These examples illustrate a general problem that afflicts authority and the possibility of justice in the story: any attempt to appeal to them as self-evident, originary, or absolute principles ends up producing an endless chain of stand-ins and deferrals. Diverted missives and unreliable messengers are, however, only part of a larger scheme of mediatized relationships depicted in Kleist’s text. Mediatisierung in the sense of mak- ing mediate (mittelbar) was an eminently political issue in the period around 1811, when “Michael Kohlhaas” was published. It is alluded to in Kleist’s “Katechismus der Deutschen,” one of several political pieces written in 1809. In reply to the opening question, “Wer bist Du?” the son whose national sentiments are being put to the test answers, “Ich bin ein Deutscher.” His skeptical father probes further, saying that the son was born in Meißen, which belongs to Sachsen and not Germany. The ensuing exchange indicates the confusion that prevailed at that time around issues of national identity and belonging:

5Some prominent examples are the Kohlhaasisches Mandat that he issues as a general call to the people, warning them against sheltering the Junker with whom he is involved in a just war (34) and a second mandate in which he declares himself “einen Reichs- und Weltfreien, Gott allein unterworfenen Herrn” and denounces the Junker as an “allgemeinen Feind aller Christen” (36). SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 175

A. Ich bin in Meißen geboren, und das Land, dem Meißen angehort,¨ heißt Sachsen; aber mein Vaterland, das Land dem Sachsen angehort,¨ ist Deutschland. F. Du traumst!¨ Ich kenne kein Land, dem Sachsen angehort,¨ es mußte¨ denn das rheinische Bundesland sein. Wo find’ ich es, dies Deutschland, vom dem du sprichst, und wo liegt es? A. Hier, mein Vater.—Verwirre mich nicht. F. Wo? A. Auf der Karte. F. Ja, auf der Karte!—Diese Karte is vom Jahr 1805.—Weißt du nicht, was geschehn ist, im Jahr 1805, da der Friede von Preßburg abgeschlossen war? A. Napoleon, der korsische Kaiser, hat es, nach dem Frieden, durch eine Gewalt- tat, zertrummert.¨ (350)

The political map of Europe was indeed redrawn because of the series of major territo- rial redistributions between France, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire that followed Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz in 1805. The uncertainty concerning Germany’s national identity cannot, however, be attributed simply to the violent acts of a single foreign power; rather, it is the effect of the complex political history of the German-speaking lands since the Middle Ages. Having never been unified and centralized under a single monarchy, those territories remained a patchwork of principalities and free cities in the centuries preceding Napoleon. German national identity around 1809, if there was such a thing, would certainly lie beyond the explanatory reach of political models that assumed a single, central site of sovereign authority. Instead, it would depend on a coherent account of the multiple layers of political entities that intervened and mediated between individual and empire, which would in turn require an understanding of the effects that such intermediating mechanisms had on the distribution of power. In the flurry of political mediatization that took place around 1800, many territories that had previously answered directly (that is to say, immediately or unmittelbar)toimperial authority became subsumed under other political units within the empire, and thus became more remote or mediate (mittelbar) with respect to the highest instance of sovereign power. The most comprehensive of such territorial reforms were enacted by the Reichsdeputation- shauptschluss of 1803, just a few years prior to the Treaty of Pressburg and the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806. This resolution effectively reduced the num- ber of free imperial cities—freie Reichsstadte¨ , which were under direct imperial authority and not beholden to any intermediating sovereign power—from fifty-one to six, meaning that forty-five cities became mittelbar. Frequently evoked in the resolution, the distinction between mittelbar and unmittelbar constructs a virtual cartography that is overlaid on top of the physical map of Europe. In the political entity of Germany that is thus constituted, power emanating from the center of the Empire is disseminated outwards, via mechanisms of transitivity and along lines of distribution that traverse the map with only nominal regard for geographical boundaries.6

6For an account of the situation facing typical German cities and states in the period because of mediatization, see Facius; Rowe; and Schmid and Unger. See also the essays in Muller,¨ Flachenecker, and Kammerl, and Gollwitzer, for a general overview of the topic. 176 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010

The story of Michael Kohlhaas unfolds against the backdrop of the heavily mediated political landscape that characterized Germany in both its author’s lifetime and the sixteenth century, when the events take place. His movements are tracked in terms of intricate political coordinates that involve not just a number of cities and states but also the complex set of relationships that subsume smaller political units under larger ones. As an owner of properties in both Saxony and Brandenburg, Kohlhaas finds himself at a high-stakes nexus of such relationships, particularly when his status as a subject to the emperor in Vienna enters the picture. These difficulties would hardly be insurmountable if the mechanisms meant to guarantee the transitive distribution of political power functioned properly; instead, they turn out to be vulnerable to interference and contamination by personal and familial interests. To be in a politically mediate position within a system awash with corruption is, the story suggests, not just to be removed from authority but also to be absolutely dependent on the problematic mechanisms by which power is mediated. Any attempt to traverse the lines of distribution towards a highest source or instance of authority therefore entails an exposure to the possibility of disastrous errancy. As Luther informs Kohlhaas, he cannot complain that his cry for justice from the sovereign has fallen on deaf ears, for this call never reached its intended addressee in the first place (45–46). The possibility of justice in “Michael Kohlhaas” is thus derailed along two separate axes: one is political and has to do with the structure of authority and sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire, while the other is linguistic and has to do with the unreliability of communication. This double breakdown of mediatization constitutes the text’s most pene- trating critique of the logic of totalizing and lossless transport that mediatization, in all its aspects, relies on. Subject to indefinite deferral are therefore not only Kohlhaas’s written appeals for justice but also the idea of “Germany” and, along with it, the general idea of an identifiable and coherent body politic. In both cases, a middle or medium is supposed to hold a place open and therefore make available the possibility of future arrival. Instead, what ends up happening is more like a permanent deferral and foreclosure of arrival, whether this destination is imagined as the generic locus or place (Statt) of the signified that is required for the generation of meaning or the virtuality of an all-encompassing and coherent state (Staat).

THE PRAGMATIC ASPIRATIONS OF MICHAEL KOHLHAAS Immediacy is the promise that is held out by the notion of a mediating middle, the assurance that the medium will efface itself as it faithfully discharges its assigned task of transport.7 The troublesome forms of the middle that are at work in “Michael Kohlhaas” point, however, to a different kind of im-mediacy: not the simple overcoming of mediacy, but rather the inex- haustible possibility of mediacy’s failure. This failure is, as I have argued, distributed along

7Niklas Luhmann, one of the most prominent modern thinkers of the medium, has pointed out that media are characterized by “their high degree of dissolubility together with the receptive capacity for fixations of shape” (216). This emphasis on dissolution and receptivity make up the demand that has been historically posed to the form of the mediating middle that Kleist’s text so effectively renders inoperative. SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 177 two axes simultaneously in Kleist’s text, corresponding to the double task that the medium is called on to perform: the conveyance of content along purely lateral lines, but also upward through channels on which the coherence and integrity of the social and political structure depend. The mediatized world is, in short, one that relies on intermediaries, instruments, and go-betweens not just for the relationships among individuals, but also for the relationship that subsumes individual to collective. The life of Kohlhaas would scarcely have taken on such a disastrous course if he had stood, as individual, in an immediate relationship to the general (that is to say, to the political collective of which he was a part). Instead, the text reveals this relationship to be eminently mediated, for it depends on a process of subsumption that in turn relies on a line of lossless transitivity from smaller to larger unit. Standing between Michael Kohlhaas and the legal decision that he seeks is not just the lability of the written word, but also the compromised political hierarchy that he must navigate. The almost fantastic insuperability that these obstacles take on signal a thorough breakdown of mediation in Kleist’s text, a usurpation of the mediating middle by something that carries serious implications for the idea of the text’s performativity. Gailus’s model of energetic speech depends on the transformation of Kohlhaas from an individual speaking subject to a “conduit for an extrasubjective energetic force” (122). Once this transformation has been effected, energetic speech can function as “a medium through which what lies beyond language, and drives it, is drawn into its midst” (138), and the success of a “fluid movement from energetic utterance to an energetic body politic” (10) can be guaranteed. Even though literature might, strictly speaking, be ultimately unable to intervene in a realm outside of itself, it is able to establish a continuity between inside and outside, between literature and history, and therefore act on history by reducing it to text. Miller’s reading makes a related claim. For him, Kleist’s story is “inaugural” (91) because it is able to lay down a law that determines its own reading, and it can thus be described as “a work that works” (102). The ability of the text to determine its own conditions of interpretation is a function of its ability to “cross a frontier” (80), to step beyond the bounds of a particular set of laws and to open up “another realm under the jurisdiction of a law the story itself establishes” (86). It accomplishes this by means of a performative force, a law-positing power that draws on the potential created by the “conflict of jurisdiction brought about by border crossings” (80). Miller ultimately reads Kleist’s story as positing a law “of the absence, unavailability, or failure of the law” (103); what he leaves essentially intact, however, is its power to posit a law to and for itself—its heautonomy, as Kant would put it.8 The law laid down by a text thus cannot be read except in terms of its effect on reading. One could say that the text inaugurates a space that it brings under the jurisdiction of its own law, but this universal law has no content save for the compulsion to reread. The force that posits such a law is a force of pure positing, for it lays down nothing but the bare power of positing itself, which is also

8In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant points out that the seeming autonomy of aesthetic judgment should more accurately be called a “heautonomy,” because in it, “judgment legislates neither to nature nor to freedom, but solely to itself” (414). 178 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010 the power of self-positing.9 In Gailus’s reading, “the death of the individual” who functions as the “vehicle” of energetic speech ends up erasing the contingencies and particularities of the individual speaker, leaving behind only a perfect medium that puts up no resistance to absolutely fluid movement (148). Both Miller and Gailus thus emphasize the relationship between efficacious performative force and a certain freedom of movement or circulation, both within the text and between the text and its outside. This allows literature to cross the boundaries of its own domain and reach into another (such as history or politics) in order to establish a continuity of legislation. It also enables a passage from the individual to the general, whether this latter is conceived of as the political collective or as a universal law that compels only repetition without content. These two effects of force recall the twin axes along which the effects of mediatization in Kleist’s texts manifest themselves and suggest the possibility of a pure force that would eliminate all material obstacles to perfect conductivity and transitivity, evincing complete amenability to the task of conveyance and mediation. What does Kleist’s text have to say about such a force and its relationship to pure mediality? A return to Kleist’s story is necessary to reexamine its critique of force and to consider the implications of this critique for the lossless conductivity, law-positing efficacy, and uninterruptible momentum that has been claimed in its name. “Michael Kohlhaas” does, indeed, register a dynamic and intense play of forces, but these forces cannot be resolved to yield any coherent vector, such as one that would begin in either literature or history and end in the other.

PERFORMATIVITY AND FORCE One of the earliest and most significant manifestations of force in the text is the barrier that interrupts Kohlhaas’s journey across the border to sell his horses. The barrier takes the form of an unexpected tollgate that the new Junker has arbitrarily erected across this thoroughfare. In contrast to the old Junker, who delighted in and encouraged “Handel,” “Wandel,” and all forms of “Verkehr der Menschen” (10), the Junker von Tronka disrupts trade and commerce for his own advantage. Among Kleist’s readers, this tollgate has come to symbolize not just the arbitrariness and injustice of the Junker von Tronka, but the profound malaise that afflicts the general political structure of Kohlhaas’s world. Helga Gallas, for example, has commented that the disaster of the tollgate marks the beginning of a precipitous downfall:

9Miller’s insistence on the ultimate success of this self-legislative positing is perhaps the most significant difference between his account of performativity and the one given by Derrida in “Force of Law.” Derrida’s critique is aimed at exposing the positing claims of performative language as untenable in general. This point is made more explicit in his later essay, “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come,” in which he states that the perfomative “cannot avoid neutralizing, indeed annulling, the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce” (43). The primary gestures that come to dominate Derrida’s later work, such as the gift, forgiveness, hospitality, or what he refers to in this essay as “the awaiting without horizon of a messianicity without messianism” (44), are all indications of mediate relationships that remain persistently open. This postponement of an arrival or resolution that would be underwritten by instrumentality or teleology is consistent with the perpetual deferral of the middle (in both senses of the genitive) that I am highlighting here. SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 179

“Mit einem Schlag wird aus dem angesehenen Kaufmann ein Objekt der Demutigung¨ und des Gespottes”¨ (62). Gallas’s phrase “mit einem Schlag” indicates the general critical interest in investing this stroke of ill fortune, dealt by the unjust hands of a tyannical Junker, with the clear-cut character of an event. It is indeed tempting to read the border incident as a clean break that separates nature from culture, one side of Kohlhaas’s character from another, but Kleist’s text itself suggests that such a distinction is problematic:

Er ritt einst, mit einer Koppel junger Pferde, wohlgenahrt¨ alle und glanzend,¨ ins Ausland, und uberschlug¨ eben, wie er den Gewinst, den er auf den Markten¨ damit zu machen hoffte, anlegen wolle: teils, nach Art guter Wirte, auf neuen Gewinst, teils aber auch auf den Genuß der Gegenwart: als er an die Elbe kam, und bei einer stattlichen Ritterburg, auf sachsischem¨ Gebiete, einen Schlagbaum traf, den er sonst auf diesem Wege nicht gefunden hatte. Er hielt, in einem Augenblick, da eben der Regen heftig sturmte,¨ mit den Pferden still, und rief den Schlagwarter¨ , der auch bald darauf, mit einem gramlichen¨ Gesicht, aus dem Fenster sah. Der Roßhandler¨ sagte, daß er ihm offnen¨ solle. Was gibts hier Neues? fragte er, da der Zollner,¨ nach einer geraumen Zeit, aus dem Hause trat. Landesherrliches Privilegium, antwortete dieser, indem er aufschloß: dem Junker Wenzel von Tronka verliehen.—So, sagte Kohlhaas. Wenzel heißt der Junker? und sah sich das Schloß an, das mit glanzenden¨ Zinnen uber¨ das Feld blickte. Ist der alte Herr tot?—Am Schlagfluß gestorben, erwiderte der Zollner,¨ indem er den Baum in die Hohe¨ ließ. (9, my emphases)

The problem is that Kleist’s passage confronts the reader not with a single Schlag but with multiple strikes—the term Schlag appears over and over again in the passage, in the words such as uberschlagen¨ , Schlagbaum,andSchlagfluß. The arbitrary force represented by the Schlagbaum echoes the movement of mind already attributed to Kohlhaas before his arrival at the river and the tollgate. He turns over in his mind (uberschlug¨ ) two complementary possibilities: the prospect of investing part of his anticipated profits wisely to yield further profit and spending part of it on the enjoyment of the present. Both Kohlhaas and the world that he inhabits before the border incident are, in other words, already riven by oppositions within themselves. The calculating merchant, dedicated to future recuperation, already coexists alongside the man who would rather enjoy present pleasure. The hermetic economy of profit and investment is supported by the “uninhibited traffic and mobility” (116) that Gailus attributes to the world before injustice strikes as a Schlagbaum, but it is already shadowed by its double, which is the pure pleasure of presence. The appearance of the Schlagbaum brings about another face-off between circulation and its interruption by juxtaposing the kinetic fury of the rain and the stand-still to which Kohlhaas brings his horses: “Er hielt, in einem Augenblick, da eben der Regen heftig sturmte,¨ mit den Pferden still” (9). The strikes that so insistently perforate this passage are not the manifestation of a force that can be reliably identified with either the end of movement (in the sense of a simple blockage or halting) or with the initiation of a new one. There is, in other words, no single strike that would either bring things (such as circulation) to a complete halt or would set 180 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010 things (such as a coherent narrative economy of injustice and vengeance) into motion. In Kleist’s story, force produces tension and contradiction rather than simple beginnings or endings, resulting in a series of conflicted face-offs where the difference between movement and its interruption is honed to a razor-thin but irreducible border. The difficult distinction between the two is nowhere more evident than in the announcement of the old Junker’s tragic death by Schlagfluß or apoplexy. The word play seems typically Kleistian: Kohlhaas stands, literally, before a Fluß and a Schlagbaum. The river is an interruption of his journey, for it marks the border that will become passable only at a high cost. At the same time, however, it could be read as a symbol for the flow of commerce that is brought to a halt by the illegal barrier. Movement and its interruption are, in other words, represented by the one same river. Similarly, the apoplectic stroke (Schlagfluß) that fells the former Junker could refer to either the flux (of his vital forces and of commerce itself) that is stricken to a halt or the fatal outpour that is precipitated by a strike. The entry for Schlagfluß in the 1811 edition of Johann Christoph Adelung’s dictionary contains a speculative musing on just this ambivalence: “Fluß heißt diese Krankheit,” it states, “entweder wegen ihres plotzlichen¨ Anfalles, oder auch, weil sie eigentlich aus einer Ergießung der flussigen¨ Theile des Korpers¨ herruhret”¨ (1500).10 Another significant manifestation of this connection between force and indecision comes slightly later in the text. Kohlhaas has embarked on a course of violence following the death of his wife. He fails to find the Junker at his residence and pursues him to a nearby convent. Arriving just after the Junker has fled, the enraged Kohlhaas is about to order his men to burn down the convent but is stopped short by a thunderbolt (Wetterschlag):

... so wandte Kohlhaas, in die Holle¨ unbefriedigter Rache zuruckgeschleudert,¨ das Pferd, und war im Begriff: steckt an! zu rufen, als ein ungeheurer Wetter- schlag, dicht neben ihm, zur Erde niederfiel. Kohlhaas, indem er sein Pferd zu ihr zuruckwandte¨ , fragte sie: ob sie sein Mandat erhalten? und da die Dame mit schwacher, kaum horbarer¨ Stimme, antwortete: eben jetzt!—“Wann?”—Zwei Stunden, so wahr mir Gott helfe, nach des Junkers, meines Vetters, bereits vol- lzogener Abreise!– – – und Waldmann, der Knecht, zu dem Kohlhaas sich, unter finsteren Blicken, umkehrte, stotternd diesen Umstand bestatigte,¨ indem er sagte, daß die Gewasser¨ der Mulde, vom Regen geschwellt, ihn verhin- dert hatten,¨ fruher,¨ als eben jetzt, einzutreffen: so sammelte sich Kohlhaas; ein plotzlich¨ furchtbarer Regenguß, der die Fackeln verloschend,¨ auf das Pflaster des Platzes niederrauschte, loste¨ den Schmerz in seiner unglucklichen¨ Brust; er wandte, indem er kurz den Hut vor der Dame ruckte,¨ sein Pferd, druckte¨ ihm, mit den Worten: folgt mir meine Bruder;¨ der Junker ist in ! die Sporen ein, und verließ das Stift. (35–36)

10The medical consensus at the time was that apoplexy was caused by excessive bleeding in the brain due to a number of causes, but it is unclear whether Fluß refers to the normal vital flows that are stopped by the stroke, resulting in rigor or immobility, or to the excessive flow of blood that is released in the brain and that blocks normal vital functions. For more on the history of medical knowledge about apoplexy, see Storey. SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 181

The Wetterschlag stops Kohlhaas in his terrible course of action, but what it brings about is not a simple decision. Instead, the plot is stalled by a series of stoppages, reversals, and a seemingly interminable repetition of turning-in-place, recalling the earlier movement of oscillation or uberschlagen¨ .TheWendungen, Umkehrungen, and dashes that liberally punctuate the passage signal the consternation and indecision that result from this loss of momentum. Natural force exhibits a multivalency that confirms this difficulty—torrential rainfall is responsible for an overflowing of the river, but it also obstructs the messenger on his journey and unknots the pent-up anguish in Kohlhaas’s breast. The ability of natural signs to produce divergent and contradictory effects makes it difficult to read the thunderbolt as a manifestation of divine intervention, and Miller thus cautiously calls it an “ironic hint of signs indicating God’s inscrutable judgment” (99). The force behind these multiple strikes is certainly not a simple one, for its vector is compound and its target uncertain. It could, however, be called pure, for it refuses to be instrumentalized to support the imperatives of inauguration, closure, or any such ends. The Kleistian strike is, in other words, not an agent of beginnings or endings, but a purveyor of endless mediation—which is to say, of im-mediation. “Er traf einen Schlagbaum”: the event- character of this seemingly singular encounter between horse-trader and tree-turned-tollgate is dispersed by the rigorous logic of “Michael Kohlhaas” into the scatter-shot of self-reflexive strikes named by that most famous of all Kleistian formulations, es traf sich (“it so happened that”).11 The impersonal, self-directed force of es traf sich could be read as a sign of the text’s refusal to allow the conduct of energy toward any goal whatsoever besides itself—that is to say, its repudiation of any mediation at all. Similar reservations would apply to the putatively law-positing power of Kleist’s text. Kohlhaas’s campaign for justice is destined to be a failed strike, for its force is an apo-plectic one, much like the stroke that befalls the old Junker. Where this force manages to strike (in Greek, plessein) at all, it is only as a missing of the mark, as a deflection away from (apo-). It cannot securely posit a law, even if it is a law of failure or a law without content, for in the very act of positing (setzen), it also invariably deposes (ent-setzen). As Kleist points out, Kohlhaas’s desire to lay down a law by means of apoplectic force makes him a bundle of contradictions: he is “einer der rechtschaffensten zugleich und entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit” (9). As readings such as those of Gailus and Miller suggest, he is not just righteous in constitution—recht(ge)schaffen—but also wont to lay down a new law: recht-schaffend. At the same time, however, his attempts to make law seem to perpetually miss the mark, and he is far less effective as an agent of positing (Setzung) than he is as an agent of its opposite: a terrible Ent-setzung. This misfire points not to a flaw or deficiency in person but instead reveals the duplicity of a force that poses as positing force while secretly working as deposing one.

11As is well known, this phrase is employed with astounding frequency in “Michael Kohlhaas” and in Kleist’s works in general. For a good summary of some of the key usages in the story, see Gailus 136. Gailus rightly acknowledges that this phrase invokes a “rhetoric of the impersonal,” but his insistence that this impersonality can be recuperated as a conduit of energy under the rubric of “impersonal energetic speech” is less persuasive (137). 182 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010

ACRITIQUE OF FORCE The kind of apoplectic force that is inimical to all forms of medial transport, subsumption, and instrumentalization has an interesting counterpart in the well-known discussion of force in Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt.”12 To exercise force is always to participate in the logic of means and ends, as Benjamin points out in his discussion of the legal system, the military, and the police. Even something like a workers’ strike, which claims to sever relations to a system of production and therefore disrupt end-oriented action, can end up re-introducing force as extortion in the form of a promise to resume work under the right circumstances. Such a strike would end up being a means toward the end of grounding or modifying legal conditions, rather than an example of pure means (184). A similar corruption can be seen in the case of mythic force, which appears to merely manifest force rather than direct it toward any end. We might think that such a force is not a means (nicht Mittel), or even that it is completely unsuited for mediation (nicht mittelbar), but Benjamin’s analysis reveals it to be closely related or perhaps identical to law-positing force (197). Because it lays claim to legal force, mythic force proves to be susceptible to the same irrefutable law of oscillation (Schwankungsgesetz) that causes law-positing and law-preserving force to contaminate and interrupt each other (202). In unmasking the pernicious character of mythic force, Benjamin also uncovers its suppressed relationship to mediation: mythic force is, in reality, not im-mediate at all but mittelartig (197). Is there any possibility of action, then, that operates outside of the realm of means-to-ends relations and radically resists or even severs any relation to law-positing and law-preserving force? Benjamin discusses a pair of such cases: the proleterian general strike and divine force. The first is not force at all, since it suspends work indefinitely and not merely for the purpose of extortion and its sole aim is the annihilation (Vernichtung)of force (194). Its annihilating character cannot, in other words, be converted into or channeled toward law-positing or law-preserving aims. Divine force is striking (schlagend) in a similar way, on account of its abstention from all ends, such as those of retribution, punishment, or judgment.13 We find in it no trace at all of law-positing force (Rechtsetzung), and Benjamin thus characterizes it as annihilating (vernichtend) (200). Only this purely annihilating force can bring about an interruption of the perpetual cycle that mythic force maintains; its effect is, in other words, an “Entsetzung des Rechts samt den Gewalten” (202). Werner Hamacher has explored the implications of such a deposing (ent-setzende) force, which he refers to as an “amorphization” of law-positing force (112), for the idea of

12The German Gewalt is rendered by Benjamin’s translators as both “violence” and “force,” depending on the context. I will be referring to Gewalt as “force” throughout. 13As Hamacher has pointed out (119), Benjamin uses the term schlagend a number of times in con- nection with divine force. He describes it as schlagend rather than drohend (the latter being associ- ated with mythic violence) and illustrates this with the case of the Levites: divine force strikes them “unangekundigt,¨ ohne Drohung, schlagend und macht nicht Halt vor der Vernichtung” (199). He also states that divine force manifests itself not in miracles but rather “jene Momente des unblutigen, schlagenden, entsuhnenden¨ Vollzuges” (200). SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 183 performative language.14 The claim that language has the power to institute something or lay down a law depends on the efficacy of linguistic positing; by calling this efficacy into question, deposing force uncovers a dimension of language that could thus be called afformative rather than performative (113). Just as performativity has been shown to be not merely a class of linguistic acts but a latent potential within all utterances, so, too, can this afformative tendency be read as a universal disruption of that same potential. The relationship between this afformative force and mediation is a slippery one. Hamacher observes the inaccuracy of referring to it as an “annihilation of mediacy”; it would be more accurate to call it “the annihilation of the sphere of positing and its institutions by means of its reduction to mediacy” (119). This apparent paradox indicates precisely the internal fissure that runs through the middle and the concept of the medium in “Michael Kohlhaas.” The radical interruption of narrative and legal resolution in the text could, indeed, be called the “annihilation of mediacy” only if we take this to mean the annihilating tendency of pure mediacy. The form of the obstructing middle that I identified earlier is therefore to be found not in moments of clearly demarcated arrest or stasis; its mode of operation is always a diversion into potentially perpetual movement. This movement is perpetual not because it can reliably be shown to be infinite, but because its cessation can never be shown to coincide with a predetermined endpoint or aim. Benjamin’s characterization of language as a sphere of pure means should be read, according to Hamacher, as a suggestion that language is fundamentally unreliable as a support for positional acts:

Language in its mediality is pre-positional, pre-performative—and, in this sense, afformative. Even before and even during its performative effects, language does not lay the foundation for anything outside itself, but rather offers itself as the form of mediacy between speakers, as their mediacy in a third entity, in a talk, an Unterredung,aninter of their languages, without which they would not be language. (117–18)

What afformative force and its form of pure mediality disrupt is not just the ability of language to intervene outside of itself by positing new law; they affect the ability of language to posit anything at all, even itself. More precisely, language can posit itself only by deposing and interposing itself, offering itself as pure mediality. The intrenchant middleness of language is why Benjamin refers to it as the proper sphere of Verstandigung¨ (192). It is not a means of transport that could be judged in terms of its efficacy or Verstandlichkeit¨ or an instrument for the production of understanding or Verstandnis¨ . Instead, it is an empty space of potential encounter, a pure inter-. “Michael Kohlhaas” is less a demonstration of language’s jurisdiction (that is to say, of its ability to speak a law), than an exploration of its interdiction—the positing of a pure in-between that constantly intercedes between it and its own instrumentalization,

14Benjamin himself suggests such a connection in his remark that the “reine Mittel der Politik” (as instantiated by the proletarian general strike) is an analog to “den friedlichen Umgang zwischen Privatpersonen,” of which the proper sphere is language (192–93). 184 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010 not as a mediating middle but as an absolute im-mediating one that is both pure middle as well as radical interruption of middleness (the latter being understood as the principle of end-driven mediation and instrumentalization). The Schlagbaum that forbids passage in “Michael Kohlhaas” is therefore a crucial figure, marking at once the closing off of goal- directed movement and the opening up of a space of inexhaustible middleness. That such a form of the middle is a radical departure from its traditional narratological role as that which takes us from beginning to end is corroborated by the story’s interruption of its own narrative momentum—the political tale is famously put into suspension at a key moment by a fantastic plot involving the gypsy woman and her prophecy.

CONCLUSION The deployment of a gesture of self-interruption that precipitates a narrative retracing and requires a hermeneutic doubling-back can be found in a number of Kleist’s texts, such as “The Marquise of O—” and “The Duel.” The case of “The Duel” is particularly significant for a discussion of mediality and performativity in Kleist. The central duel that takes place between Friedrich and Count Jakob is meant to serve as an absolutely reliable medium for the manifestation of God’s will, a pure means for his judgment to be spoken. Unsurprisingly, numerous complications arise, and the divine utterance turns out to require an unending series of interpretations. The closing sentence of the text describes the Emperor’s desperate attempt to rewrite the medieval laws of trial by combat in order to take into account this unreliability:

... sobald er, nach Vollendung seiner Geschafte¨ mit der Schweiz, wieder in Worms angekommen war, ließ er in die Statuten des geheiligten gottlichen¨ Zweikampfs, uberall¨ wo vorausgesetzt wird, daß die Schuld dadurch unmittelbar ans Tageslicht komme, die Worte einrucken:¨ »wenn es Gottes Wille ist«. (“Der Zweikampf” 261).

Since the entire point of by combat is to make manifest and legible God’s will, the rewritten law is tantamount to a request that God repeat himself. A decision that should come to light without mediation (unmittelbar) thus turns out to be one that is sub- ject to infinite deferral because it is, after all, mediated. The phrase “wenn es Gottes Wille ist,” located at the very conclusion of the text and burdened with the task of establish- ing a certain legal conclusiveness, turns out to be yet another duplicitous purveyor of the middle. If the duel were indeed a pure medium in which God’s will could manifest itself, it would present to the spectator a complete coincidence of medium and content. The failed conclusion that turns out to be a middle of the most disruptive kind therefore illustrates again language’s interposition, and it comes at the end of a long series of trenchant thirds: threefold fanfares (243) and wounds (247), time periods of three days (257) or three weeks (261), the reference to the holy feast of Trinitatis (234), and so on. All the more striking in a text entitled “Der Zweikampf,” these references hint at an interposed thirdness that undermines SNG  POETICS OF THE MIDDLE IN “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” 185 the entire structure of decision, conflict, and resolution.15 One might even see a prefiguration of this interpositional force in the very first sentence of the story:

Herzog Wilhelm von Breysach, der, seit seiner heimlichen Verbindung mit einer Grafin,¨ namens Katharina von Heersbruck, aus dem Hause Alt-Huningen,¨ die unter seinem Range zu sein schien, mit seinem Halbbruder, dem Grafen Jakob dem Rotbart, in Feindschaft lebte, kam gegen Ende des vierzehnten Jahrhun- derts, da die Nacht des heiligen Remigius zu dammern¨ begann, von einer in Worms mit dem deutschen Kaiser abgehaltenen Zusammenkunft zuruck,¨ worin er sich von diesem Herrn, in Ermangelung ehelicher Kinder, die ihm gestor- ben waren, die Legitimation eines, mit seiner Gemahlin vor der Ehe erzeugten, naturlichen¨ Sohnes, des Grafen Philipp von Huningen,¨ ausgewirkt hatte. (229)

The passage speaks of multiple examples of relationships: marriage, feud, paternity, and political fealty. At the same time, however, Kleist uses an amazing array of interpositional syntactic elements (such as commas, relative clauses, and appositional phrases) to construct a veritable maze of references that must be navigated before we arrive at the successful completion of the legal act of legitimation that is described in the sentence. The powerful tension that is set up is well captured by the phrase “abgehaltene Zusammenkunft”—it can refer to a coming-together that has either taken place or not, since “abgehalten” can mean either having taken place or having been delayed.16 Kleist seems to be even less optimistic than Benjamin regarding the ability of the middle to transport reader from beginning to end or meaning from speaker to addressee. The opening and closing sentences of “The Duel” dramatize the effects of a pure middleness that disrupts both narratological and hermeneutic structures. If even beginning and ending turn out to be already shot through by middleness, then what opens up is less a sphere for possible Verstandigung¨ , as Benjamin would have it, than a yawning abyss of sheer mediality. The Schlagbaum that confronts both Kohlhaas and the reader thus opens a space that is not one of positive potentiality at all; more precisely, any potentiality that it opens up is one that cannot be converted into actuality or completion, since the medium itself will always interpose to forbid such an act.17 The closest relative to this tree strike might therefore be the lightning strike (Blitzschlag) that smites the grave of the Polish countess in Kleist’s “Griffel Gottes”:

In Polen war eine Grafin¨ von P ..., eine bejahrte Dame, die ein sehr bosartiges¨ Leben fuhrte,¨ und besonders ihre Untergebenen, durch ihren Geiz und ihre

15I have elsewhere explored the trope of thirdness in another text by Kleist, the tragedy ;see Sng. 16This has been pointed out by Reuß’s discussion of the opening sentence (29–32). 17Hamacher connects this negative potentiality of language to its Mitteilbarkeit or “impartability”—not its ability to communicate content, but its tendency to impart nothing but itself. “Means,” as he puts it, “are pure as long as nothing imparts itself in them but themselves, their own mediacy” (114). This figure of Mitteilbarkeit has recently been explored at length by Weber in Benjamin’s -Abilities (see esp. 40–47 and 197–98). 186 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 85, NUMBER 3 / 2010

Grausamkeit, bis auf das Blut qualte.¨ Diese Dame, als sie starb, vermachte einem Kloster, das ihr die Absolution erteilt hatte, ihr Vermogen;¨ wofur¨ ihr das Kloster, auf dem Gottesacker, einen kostbaren, aus Erz gegossenen, Leichenstein setzen ließ, auf welchem dieses Umstandes, mit vielem Geprange,¨ Erwahnung¨ geschehen war. Tags darauf schlug der Blitz, das Erz schmelzend, uber¨ den Leichenstein ein, und ließ nichts, als eine Anzahl von Buchstaben stehen, die, zusammen gelesen, also lauteten: sie ist gerichtet! (263)

God’s judgment on the Grafin¨ is communicated here with what Carol Jacobs has aptly called a “striking immediacy” (48). Divine retribution lashes out against deceitful language, but what it produces is simply a rearrangement of language—which is to say, more language. This anagrammatic act is therefore a “logogriph” (literally, a word-riddle or word-crib), but one in which, as Jacobs puts it, “nothing is caught, for the logogriph breaks the integrity of the word, passing it on as mere letters that ultimately elude the grasp” (51). The im-mediacy of such a strike of language therefore lies in its refusal to allow language to simply give way to anything but more language. It would have been better for everyone, Kohlhaas muses, if the tree had remained a tree, if it had remained in the forest instead of being turned into a Schlagbaum (10). One could read this as a comment about how nature becomes transformed into a cultural object with legal force, and how this exercise of arbitrary power is a prefiguration of the multiple injustices to come.18 Such a reading would already hold open the possibility of a reversal of this conversion and the hope for recompense, but there are other ways in which “tree/arbre” can be turned into “barrier/barre,” as Jacques Lacan has famously pointed out.19 If the power that felled the tree and made of it a barrier were indeed a logogriphic one, then the space that it opens up is one of incessant sliding and perennial wandering. Kleist suggests that no act of positing can be said to properly begin on one side and end up on the other side of the bar, crossing from old jurisdiction to new and allowing us to pose one as the solution to the other’s riddle. Instead, an understanding of their relationship would have to involve an eye for the middle, an attention to the interdiction that is internal to the very concept of the medium. Brown University

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