Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation by Steven Howe (review)

Abstract

Steven Howe, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.237 pp.Steven Howe's intricately argued and meticulously documented study is an important contribution to reading Kleist in his historical and intellectual element. Howe situates Kleist's writing in a historical time and place, which he defines not by language controversies or poststructuralist lines of flight of much Kleist scholarship of 1990s and 2000s but as context and heritage of He warns his reader, citing Peter Gay, not to strip Enlightenment of its wealth and then complain of its poverty (6). This wealth is legacy of French philosophes and their relation to classical tradition of rhetoric, especially figure of paradox as a mode of rhetorical performance. For Howe, Kleist straddles fault line separating confidence of Enlightenment from anxiety of revolutionary age. It is certainly difficult, then, to choose a better interlocutor for Kleist than Rousseau, who anticipates and embodies declivity from reflection to revolution and strife between ideals and reality. Howe's procedure throughout this study is to take a tricky question in Rousseau scholarship, offer an answer, and refract this answer through a Kleistian prism. Using Rousseau as a foil, an at times ironic and generally more pragmatic Kleist continues Rousseau's reflection on violence, revolution, reform, and government.Chapter 1 functions as a second introduction, announcing major themes and signposts and setting up an image of Rousseau and the paradoxes of Enlightenment. Taking up classic studies of Rousseau (such as Starob inski's) and more recent work comparing him with Kleist (such as Christian Moser's), Howe brings Rousseau into focus as a critic of modernity who combines ethical imperatives with political thinking and a consideration of nature and presocial being with knowledge that human history only moves forward and that presocial life is a fiction, not a reality to be recovered. The figure of Rousseau as a champion of conceptual tension and paradox provides a nuanced perspective on topic announced in Howe's subtitle, Violence and Identity. Rousseau's evocations of justice and violence are modulated through conceptions of popular power and general will that emerge on arc Kleist draws between French Revolution and Napoleon. Even without longish consideration of definitions of intertextuality with which Howe sets up his demonstration that the connections between two are more complex and manifold than have previously been thought (40), he makes clear that one can read Kleist as testing Rousseau's ideas on self, society, and political power in terms of world he experienced and described in postrevolutionary Paris and in Napoleonic invasion and reordering of German lands. The evolving differences of this period have been an important object of reflection among German playwrights since Kleist, and it is good to see discussion framed here in terms of history and contingency rather than ideological belonging or attribution.Chapter 2, on novella Das Erdbeben in Chili, posits that Kleist's story speaks to caesura of revolution and violence of revolutionary mob as well as aesthetics of revolutionary popular festival. Howe compares horizontal spatiality of such festivals to spontaneity of utopian space outside city in Kleist's tale, pairing contrast of valley and city or cathedral in Kleist with Rousseau's opposition of popular festival, part of quest for forms of republican sociability (75), to theatrical forms of spectatorship and representation that Rousseau condemned. In Kleist, this process ends in theocratic setting of cathedral of Santiago de Chile, an echo of period of Thermidor, Directory, and Napoleon as First Consul, during which Revolution was re-hierarchized and brought under control. …