Reading Terrorism in Kleist: The Violence and Mandates of Michael Kohlhaas

Abstract

Kohlhaas recounts scenes of murder and arson. These scenes, vivid yet complex in their unfolding, both urgently demand to be read and at the same time continually resist the framework necessary for reading. Kleist tells a story of a raid on material constructs as well as on political semiology, but the qualities of the objects or emblems under assault cannot be quantified in fixed terms: it is neither simply a tale of revenge that would restore a pre-given economy, nor merely one of a failed call for revolution. In this article I argue that Kleist's novella exposes an intrinsic dislocation between violence and discursive attempts to frame violence, and stages the consequences of this dislocation in terms of a displacement of political, historical, and narrative schemas of representation. My reading follows the stages of destruction, tracing violence as it metonymically cuts through the narrative boundaries that have traditionally been understood to rein it in. A subterranean logic that has escaped critical notice links Kohlhaas's original acceptance of a call to action with his manifestos and the concluding fortune-teller episode. Toward its conclusion, the work begins to track the makings of a counter-history, one that reviews the narrative strategies on which Kohlhaas the character as well as historians have hitherto relied. Somewhat surprisingly, the possibility of rewriting his own history erupts under the sign of the feminine-a woman changes the possibilities of historical and narrative recounting.In examining Kleist's novella in terms of terrorism I focus on a subset of critics who move beyond the debate over how to categorize Kohlhaas's violence in terms of its means or ends and instead point to moments of his attacks that exceed even the explanation he offers. Carefully following this excessive violence through the framing devices of Kohlhaas's manifestos allows me to describe the way in which it changes our understanding of terrorism: it is an attack not only on specific people and things but on political representation itself. Kleist's novella takes a specific narrative stand on this representational attack by describing the historical shift that opens when the people question their identification with the sovereign without replacing him with either the rebel challenger or a legitimate successor.