Breaking the Laws of Language: Freedom and History in Kleist's "Prinz Friedrich von Homburg"

Abstract

THE POLEMICS BETWEEN NEW HISTORICIST AND POST-STRUCTURALIST camps having run their course, romantic studies has entered an accommodating phase. While we are aware that different approaches to the study of texts may rely on mutually exclusive assumptions and produce markedly divergent results, it has proven convenient to sacrifice ideological conviction and embrace the urge to have as many perspectives at our disposal as possible. The question is whether this inclusionary spirit deviates so far from romanticism's own conception of language and history as to amount to an outright abrogation of scholarship. We hope, for instance, that a formal analysis of linguistic structures can proceed hand in hand with an interpretation focusing on the cultural and sociological information literary works offer about their own production and reception. Yet one of romanticism's defining legacies is its challenge to the genetic understanding of origins and ends on the basis of which a text is treated as the product of its context, a challenge which suggests, among other things, that historicist notions of change and development rely on the very polarizations of form and content or synchrony and diachrony they reject as formalism. These issues are all the more pressing given the extent to which the reception of romanticism is haunted by a sense that it is too romantic, indeed, that it is often little more than an extension of a discourse it repeats rather than critiques. In this regard, it is instructive to look at a problem where contemporary views appear decidedly un-romantic. There is an overwhelming consensus today that literature participates actively in social and political reality. Poetic language is celebrated for its creativity and denigrated for its violence, lauded for its systematicity and deplored for its whimsical, at times arbitrary behavior, yet in all cases, it is treated as anything but a dormant mode of idealization or harmless fancy. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought made even stronger claims for poetry's participation in the world, but it did not share our confidence in a smooth modulation from literary to socio-political praxis. In texts as diverse as Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Hegel's Asthetik, or Holderlin's Uber die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes, literary language is accorded enormous power and championed as the pinnacle of thought, the founding of civil society, or the possibility of humanity's future. At the same time, these analyses invariably include a moment at which the poetic spirit confronts its own dormancy, idleness, or irrelevance, its constitutive failure to establish itself as a wholly reliable medium or means to an external end. The point at which language is generalized as the model for praxis proves to be the point at which it most directly challenges its own capacity to produce, act, or perform. Heinrich von Kleist's oeuvre is a sustained exploration of the limits of literature's transformative powers. Taking off from the familiar Enlightenment problem of whether a political order can be grounded in an ethical system which is independent of empirical superstructures, Kleist's works confront a number of quandaries concerning the relations between representation, expression and self-determination. One crucial intervention is his reflection on what it means to break a universal law: what it means about a subjective agent that it confirms its status as rational only by violating a basic principle of reason, and what it means about the historical existence of a universal law that it becomes lawful only insofar as its sovereignty is transgressed. The play we will examine here in detail, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, presents this as the question of whether any law can be recognized as a universal law of language, and if so, whether that law is a law of freedom or tyranny. Literature, it will be argued, is a historical phenomenon to be reckoned with not simply because of its capacity to present or represent, to posit or reproduce reality, but because it is the site where systems of ethics and politics fail to reconcile themselves to a common aesthetic paradigm in which a representational model of language would also serve as a model of human praxis. …