E Pluribus Unum. In God we trust. --US Treasury Es ist nicht Fluchtigkeit noch unbeholfene Charakterzeichnung der Autoren, wenn in den kritischen Augenblicken die Schranzen, kaum da[beta] sie Zeit zur Besinnung sich gonnen, den Herrscher verlassen, zur Gegenpartei ubertreten. [It is not a sign of superficiality (fleetingness) or clumsy characterization on the part of the authors that, at critical moments, the sycophants (courtiers) abandon the rulers and switch to the other side as soon as they grant themselves a moment of reflection (or: without any pause for reflection).] --Walter Benjamin KLEIST'S NARRATIVE DIE VERLOBUNG IN ST. DOMINGO, WRITTEN AND PUBISHED three times in the year of his suicide and its bizarre circumstances at the Wannsee near Potsdam in 1811, should perhaps first and foremost be read as an exploration and exposition of the conditions of the impossibility of reading and interpretation. These conditions of this possible impossibility are no longer transcendental but historical and textual. The site at which the narrative takes place, the holy island of St. Domingo (Haiti), is thoroughly shaken by a revolutionary insurrection of the black slave-population against the tyranny of its white colonial masters from France. This revolutionary setting, ignited--as it were inadvertently by inconsiderate steps [unbesonnene Schritte] of the French National-Convention itself, (1) provides the fragile force and extremely volatile background in and against which the narration occurs. Or, to be a little bit more accurate, the narrative demonstrates from its very inception that the revolutionary conditions under which narration explores the possibility of its own possibility or continuity are nothing but the unintended effect of its own occurrences, of its own taking place in a way that eludes narration's thematizing and theorizing grasp. (2) What takes place in the revolutionary uprising of displaced black slaves against their equally displaced colonial, white masters is not simply the inversion of power-relations which would leave the possibility of narration and reading unaltered. Rather, what takes place in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo upsets the revolutionary setup and its consolidating rhetoric of dialectical inversions and of binary oppositions by employing the insignia of a revolutionary rhetoric--most of all the guillotine--in order to undercut the rhetoric of revolution which characterizes the beginning of the story. To that effect, Kleist shifts our attention to two parties, who are both implicated on either side of the revolutionary conflict, yet are somehow distinguished from the openly clashing, fighting factions of the black immigrants and their French oppressors. Two members of these opposing parties are the protagonists of the story: a Swiss officer, named Gustav von der Ried, who tries to lead his family of 12 members across revolutionary territory toward the safe haven of Port au Prince, from where they wish to depart the island in order to return to Europe, and Toni, the 15-year-old European born daughter of Babekan and step-daughter of Congo Hoango, a ferocious negro, as the story characterizes him. He killed his master, M. Guillaume de Villeneuve, and took possession of his plantation after he had presumably destroyed it in its entirety. Gustav, having left his family behind in a safe place, arrives at this plantation in the shelter of the night in order to ask its new inhabitants of color for food in the shape of bread and wine, which are, of course, also the privileged signs and media of the Christian onto-semiology. (3) On a purely thematic level, the story continues to narrate a sequence of events, including two inserted stories, which are designated to articulate and prepare for the strange encounter between Toni and Gustav. It is an encounter that takes place across and beyond racial, sexual and class boundaries. At the same time, the story narrates its own relation to the engagement of its protagonists, which is never really consummated. …