Dichter und Richter

Abstract

At the centre of Kleist’s comedy The Broken Jug procedural questions are found, which are as pivotal for evidence and procedural law (both of which were undergoing crucial transformations at the end of the 18th century) as they are decisive for the genre-poetical definition of comedy. The legal comedy is, unlike tragedy, less weighted down by material questions and is therefore more attentive to procedural aspects. Along with legal norms, and above all actual legal procedures, it presents a stage for morality and politics – a stage for dealing with damaged symbolic authority as well as for the attempt to re-establish it. The following analyses will investigate the role played by the performative practice of judgement within the framework of the representation of law, as staged by Kleist in correspondence with contemporary discussions of legal reform. The Kantian judgement of taste (Geschmacksurteil) thereby proves to be fundamental for the ›aesthetic turn‹ in the ongoing reconfiguration of the penal process according to the principle of immediacy. Kant is also central for the crisis of rule-based decision-making in literary theory, which anticipates this reconfiguration.