<au>Adrian Switzer</>
<at>To Risk Immanence/To Read Schizo-Analytically </>
<ast>Deleuze, Guattari, and the Kleistian War-Machine</>
<@@@>
What a wide array of narrative arcs are inscribed in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas: the
story is a Baroque, textual architecture overlaid with the tight coils of a horse’s braided mane;
the cuneiform lettering of illuminated scripture; the swath of destruction Kohlhaas cuts across
the German countryside; finally, the last arc inscribed in the story is the broad parabolic sweep of
the executioner’s axe: “Kohlhaas aber [...] wandte sich zu dem Schafott, wo sein Haupt unter
dem Beil des Scharfrichters fiel. Hier endigt die Geschichte vom Kohlhaas” (Kleist, Michael
Kohlhaas 103) [Kohlhaas, however ... turned to the scaffold where his head fell under the axe of
the executioner. Here ends the story of Kohlhaas]. Yet, as attested in the language with which
Kleist reports Kohlhaas’s execution, each narrative arc is figured in distinctly textual terms;
again, the swing of the executioner’s axe “endigt die Geschichte vom Kohlhaas” [ends the story
of Kohlhaas].
As Clayton Koelb points out the story is overall coherent despite its turn from an initial
realism, centering on the provincial horse-dealer who suffers injustice at the hands of the
Prussian government, to the fantastic character of its conclusion where an old gypsy woman’s
prophecy is deciphered to reveal the end of a royal line. The horses whose abuse seems to trigger
Kohlhaas’s vengeful wrath, “come into play mainly as stand-ins (that is, as collateral) for a
missing document.” It is not the horses per se that are at issue; rather, Koelb rightly argues, it is
“Kohlhaas’s lack of a ‘permit [Paßschein]’ that starts all the trouble” (Koelb 1099).
Consider in this regard the following exchange between Kohlhaas and an officer at the
border between Brandenburg and Saxony:
<ext>Der Burgvogt, indem er sich noch eine Weste über seinen weitläufigen Leib
zuknüpfte, kam, und fragte, schief gegen die Witterung gestellt, nach dem Paßschein. Kohlhaas fragte: der Paßschein? Er sagte, ein wenig betreten, daß er, soviel er wisse,
keinen habe; daß man ihm aber nur beschreiben möchte, was dies für ein Ding des Herrn
sei: so werde er vielleicht zufälligerweise damit versehen sein. (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
10)</ext>
<ext>(The warden, still fastening a waistcoat across his capacious body, came up and,
bracing himself against the wind and rain, demanded the horse-dealer’s permit. “My
permit?” asked Kohlhaas and added, a little disconcerted, that so far as he knew he did
not possess one, but that if the warden would kindly explain what on earth such a thing
was he just might possibly have one with him.) </ext>
To Kohlhaas’s dismissive comments concerning his documentation—if only he knew what it
was, perhaps he would have it after all—the Junker Wenzel von Tronka replies that without a
state permit a dealer bringing horses could not be allowed across the border.
All of Kohlhaas’s subsequent travels—across the border into the Electorate of Saxony, and
his return to the Brandenburg Mark—are figured in this missing permit: “In Dresden [...] begab
er sich, gleich nach seiner Ankunft, auf die Geheimschreiberei, wo er von den Räten, deren er
einige kannte, erfuhr, was ihm allerdings sein erster Glaube schon gesagt hatte, daß die
Geschichte von dem Paßschein ein Märchen sei” [In Dresden ... [Kohlhaas] went immediately
upon arrival to the Chancellery, where from the officials—some of whom he knew—he learned
what he all along had been inclined to believe, that the story about the pass was a fiction].
Despite the misgivings of the officials, Kohlhaas acquires from them a written certificate
attesting to the lie of the Junker’s story. No pass is, indeed, required to cross the border to traffic
in horse-trade (13).
Kohlhaas later files official papers against the Junker in the court at Dresden (21). The
court of Saxony, however, returns no official decision on Kohlhaas’s “statement.” Then, in reply
to “a private letter” written to his advocate, Kohlhaas learns that the case has been dismissed: the
Junker von Tronka has high-placed relatives in the Elector’s officiate who will read nothing
more of Kohlhaas’s case (21). The letter arrives by messenger, intercepting Kohlhaas in his
travels through Brandenburg; he in turn drafts another document, a petition, with a brief
presentation of the occurrence, which is then sent on to the Elector of Brandenburg enclosed with
the advocate’s letter (23).
After this second flurry of written exchanges, correspondence again ceases. Finally, and
only by chance, Kohlhaas hears from a passing magistrate that the Brandenburg Elector passed
all the documents off to a certain Chancellor Count Kallheim who returns to the countryside “for
further preliminary information” from the Junker von Tronka rather than going straight to
Dresden with the petition (23). Kleist here articulates a feature of the whole documentary history
of the Kohlhaas case: narrative trajectories run along textual lines that are “nicht unmittelbar”
[not straight (or) immediate] but circuitous (in this case, from outlying areas of Prussia inward to
the center of State power in Berlin and then back out again into the provinces).
In light of the “textual” character of each successive narrative arc in Michael Kohlhaas, we
might reformulate our initial description of the work as follows: The wide array of narrative arcs
inscribed in the story are also inscriptions of the story as an array of circulating texts. Kleist’s
work, then, is a proliferation of textual trajectories along narrative lines and the unfolding of the
narrative through this proliferation of textual trajectories. Each successive narrative arc—each
excursion into a further, foreign province, or scorched-earth campaign against first Dresden then
Lützen then Leipzig—figures along a curvilinear path that flattens as it extends out. Though it is
possible to read this opening of the textual space and widening of the sweep of Kohlhaas’s reign
of terror in direct proportion to the intensity of his moral indignation—and thus to read the story
in its entirety as a moral tale—the proliferation of permits, court documents, letters, and official
decrees that Kleist enumerates suggests a rather more “textual” reading of the narrative.
Furthermore, the horses whose abuse prompts Kohlhaas’s s legal proceedings, and in so doing,
roots the story in the juridico-moral categories of right and wrong or justice and injustice,
eventually disappear from the story. By contrast, texts, documents, letters, etc. pervade the
narrative and circulate through it from beginning to end. A “textual” reading of Michael
Kohlhaas—a reading of the story as a text composed of and about texts—is recommended if we
wish to address the work as a whole.i In the present discussion we will thus set aside a reading of
Michael Kohlhaas as a moral tale in which the injustices of secular law confront the absoluteness
of divine law in the person of its eponymous protagonist, in favor of a more text-based reading.
The present article adopts this approach in an effort, instead, to attend to all the different texts
that circulate throughout it.
In so, our analysis shares its point of departure with Anthony Stephens for whom moral
readings in the secondary literature are, “too common on Kohlhaas to retain any interest.” There
are, Stephens continues, “simply too many variables to be balanced against one another, in too
many combinations, to yield a consistent set of answers” (Stephens 258). To the extent that a
moral reading of Michael Kohlhaas depends upon narrative or stylistic consistency or coherence,
such a reading inevitably faces difficulties when confronted with the strangeness, incoherence,
and undecidability of the text. What remains to the reader and critic of Kleist, Stephens
concludes, is simply a description of “a literary form that tests the coherence of its own
discourse” (256).
Again, to the extent that a moral reading depends upon a minimum of decidability, such a
reading is imposed on Michael Kohlhaas—and on Kleist’s writing in general—to the detriment
of the source material. As Seán Allan writes, there is a “complexity of Kleist’s narrative,” that
reflects the “labyrinthine system of justice” that Kohlhaas attempts to navigate (Allan 55). Allan
cites the following character description of Kohlhaas to exemplify his point: Kohlhaas, Kleist
writes, has “ein richtiges, mit der gebrechlichen Einrichtung der Welt schon bekanntes Gefühl”
(Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 15–16) [a true (or) appropriate feeling, [with which he was] already
familiar, for the fragile order of the world]. This sentence poses a number of interpretive
problems; stylistically, it is unusual in separating the adjective richtig from the noun it modifies,
namely, Gefühl. Formally, the reader wonders how “real” [richtig] Kohlhaas’s “feeling” is, given
that the words are separated by a long parenthetical remark on the state of the world that
occasions the feeling and Kohlhaas’s familiarity with the feeling. Further, how “true” [richtig],
in the sense of genuine or authentic, can a feeling be that is described in terms of its being,
“already known?ii
Attempts to understand Kleist’s sense of richtig are equally problematic: Is Kohlhaas’s
feeling “right” or “real” as he really experiences it? If so, then the sentence reads as if taken from
his vantage point. But then we return to the question of how “genuine” a feeling can be that is
already known or familiar? Alternately, we might take richtig to mean “appropriate” or “proper”
in the sense that Kohlhaas’s feeling matches the circumstances occasioning it. With this reading,
the voice in this passage must then be that of the narrator: an estimate is taken of Kohlhaas’s
feeling and it is found to match the situation; the feeling is thus richtig from the vantage point of
an observer. If we decide on a third-person voice for the sentence, such a decision gives rise to a
further question: In what sense can one be said to have an “appropriate” sense of a gebrechlichen
Einrichtung [fragile order]? The adjective gebrechlich means “frail” or “fragile” and is formed
from the verb, brechen [to break]. Kohlhaas thus thinks of the world as both eingerichten
[ordered] and gebreblich [decrepit]. The world, in short, is ordered according to its disrepair or
disorder and Kohlhaas “rightly” senses this state of affairs. Does this mean that Kohlhaas’s
richtiges Gefühl is “right” with or aligned to the brokenness of the world?
Given the stylistic and interpretive peculiarity of the sentence Allan highlights (and there
are any number of other phrases that pose similar challenges), Stephens’s description seems apt
enough: Kleist writes in a literary form that, “tests the coherence of its own discourse.” Yet,
Stephens’s conclusion that all that remains for the reader and critic of such writing is a
description of its discourse is not sufficient. To read and theorize Kleist’s works might not be of
moral consequence given the incoherence of the text, but such textual incomprehensibility does
nothing to diminish the political significance of reading Kleist: quite the contrary. In fact, it is
my claim that the (proto-) modernism of Kleist’s language and narrative structure is what lends
political force to the texts, to the act of reading them, and to the work of theorizing itself. Kleist
presses narrative form to the point where text, its theorization, and the politics of reading and
interpretation converge. Using the language of narrative arcs or trajectories, we can formulate
this process in the following terms: at the outer limit of a text composed of widening intra-textual
arcs we find a zero-grade curve inhabited by narrative content, stylistic form, and textual
interpretation. Such flattened curvature can also be designated in language borrowed from
Deleuze and Guattari as a plan d’immanence or, more simply, a plateau (Deleuze and Guattari,
Mille Plateaux 325ff.).
In Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the smooth, planar space of the modern
text: “L’idéal d’un livre serait d’étaler toute chose sur un tel plan d’extériorité, sur une seule
page, sur une même plage.”iii A single-page plan d’extériorité of this kind produces an immanent
plane on which multiplicities and various lignes de fuite or lines of flight are not over-codable.
The modern text is thus an immanent plane that allows no “supplementary dimension” from
which difference and variation can be coordinated or organized (nor does such a text allow for a
single point of reference from which a determinate moral lesson can be decided).
Deleuze and Guattari continue their formal description of the modern text by portraying
this single-page plane of exteriority as populated by, “lived events, historical determinations,
concepts, individuals, groups, social formations” (15).iv Finally, in conclusion, Deleuze and
Guattari identify this textual form with Kleist: “Kleist inventa une écriture de ce type, un
enchaînement brisé d’affects, avec des vitesses variables, des précipitations et transformations,
toujours en relation avec le dehors. Anneaux ouverts [...] Le livre-machine de guerre, contre le
livre-appareil d’Etat” (16).v
At the close of the passage, Deleuze and Guattari then move without pause from discussing
Kleist’s writing style to consider, instead, the distinctly political matters of war and the State.
Thus, it is with Deleuze and Guattari that we here insist on the political significance of Kleistian
modernism; to rephrase my thesis in their language: it is in texts composed and read as plans
d’extériorité that the political potential of literary modernism is manifest. Further, it is in just this
same textual form that threats to such an immanent, modernist politics are discernable. In the
above quote Deleuze and Guattari announce their decidedly political reading of Kleist as “le
livre-machine de guerre.” it is with the same designation that Deleuze and Guattari title chapter
12 of Mille Plateaux: “1227—Traité de nomadologie: la machine de guerre.”vi In order to
delineate more precisely the politics of the Kleistian text as well as schizoanalyse imposed upon
it by Deleuze and Guattari, let us briefly examine the pertinent chapter of Mille Plateaux where
Kleist is discussed.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of a “war-machine” names the history of
revolutionary insurgency against the State form of government.vii More generally, their idea of
the “war machine” enables them to resolve the history of state politics into a dynamic of
interiority and exteriority. Where the monolithic concept of the state no longer guides the
theorization of political history or different forms of government.viii In its place, Deleuze and
Guattari offer relations of interiority and exteriority as more pliable and incisively heuristic
(Surin 110). Furthermore, the concepts of exteriority and interiority are structures or forms of
desiring, which is basic to the socio-political project of Deleuze and Guattari’s early, two volume
Capitalisme et schizophrénie.ix Desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is fundamental in the sense that
it is constitutive of various concepts and conceptual relations—the State or the war-machine—
and, in turn, is made up of those same concepts and relations. Within this general framework,
“interiority” and “exteriority” name the principles according to which desire works to construct
concepts; these two terms, together, also names the principles that structure and govern the
constitution of desire as the State or as the war-machine.
Desiring, in machine-like fashion—that is, non-psychologically and non-intentionally—
expresses itself under given socio-political and conceptual conditions. Interiority and exteriority
name such conditions as governing or structuring principles of desiring. As conditioned by the
circumstances of its expression, all desiring coalesces into forms to which subsequent
expressions of desire conform. Indeed, there is no expression of desire that is not in conformity,
to a greater or lesser extent, with the existing socio-political and conceptual-ideological order; it
is the rare instance of desire-expression that contributes to the formation of a new order.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s technical language, interiority characterizes a régime of desiring
that is conservative: desire thus expressed tends to preserve the conditions of its expression. In
less formal or less abstract terms, an interiorized regime like a State selects social and political
forces that preserve state-order or contribute to its entrenchment and continuity. Exteriority, by
comparison, does not name the principle of desire in the general absence of all structure;
Deleuze and Guattari reserve the language of le corps sans organes [the body without organs],
which they borrow from Artaud, to designate such a condition of desire. Rather, if interiority
characterizes desire that is structured into the familiar Statist forms of national identity,
consumer trends, or economic class, exteriority characterizes desire as its expression exceeds
those same familiar forms. In short, it is along the aberrant or divergent tendencies within any
particular form of interiorized desire that exteriorized desire is expressed.
The expression of desire is always and everywhere double: on the one hand it is
interiorized and conservative, or what Deleuze and Guattari term segmenté [segmented] or
territorialisé [territorialized] desire (Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux 258ff.), while on the
other hand, it is exteriorized and indeterminate (or un-determining) what Deleuze and Guattari
term déterritorialisé [de-territorialized] desire. In chapter 12 of Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and
Guattari present this double expression of desire in terms of the coexistence and concurrence of
interiority and exteriority (or the interrelatedness of the State and the war machine).
<ext>Ce n’est pas en termes d’indépendance, mais de coexistence et de concurrence,
dans un champ perpétuel d’interaction, qu’il faut penser l’extériorité et l’intériorité, les
machines de guerre à métamorphoses et les appareils identitaires d’État, les bandes et les
royaumes, les mégamachines et les empires. Un même champ circonscrit son intériorité
dans des États, mais décrit son extériorité dans ce qui échappe aux États ou se dresse
contre les États. (446)</ext>
<ext>(It is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence and concurrence in a
perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war
machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses or identity, bands and kingdoms,
megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in States, but
describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against States.) </ext>
To rephrase the point in terms of desiring: there is no desire that is either or just exterior or
interior; further, there is no interiorized desire without desire in a condition of exteriority nor can
there be an exteriorized desire that is not also under the condition of interiority. The only and
specific difference between desire in interiority and exteriority is that the latter is constituted by
what is specifically divergent from or aberrant in the former. In this way, the “lack” structure of
desire that Deleuze and Guattari inherit from Lacan, and the negativity they find in Hegelian
dialectic are both transformed (à la Nietzsche) into a double, positive expression of desire.
The divergent expressions of desire under conditions of exteriority implicate the
convergent tendencies of desiring within (Statist) interiority; this is one-half of the doubleexpressiveness in which exteriority and interiority are “perpetually” linked. When desire under
conditions of exteriority coalesces to form what Deleuze and Guattari term agencements
[assemblages] as, for example, when the anti-Statism of an insurgency triggers the formation of
terrorist cells, the condensation of desire under the conditions of exteriority is matched by a
comparable reification of interiorized desire. In short, the insurgency is paired with the intraStatist formation of the military.
Since the same desire operates under different conditions of expression, and since such a
dynamic of desire-expression is pervasive in determining all phenomena, whether empirical or
ideological, the challenge is to write about this “micropolitics” of desiring without appealing to
traditional or causal language. One instance or expression of desiring does not “cause” another,
since it is the same desire that is being described. The specifics of the different contexts within
which Deleuze and Guattari analyze desire provide different ways of articulating desiring in nontraditional language and in non-causal terms. Given the specifics of the State and war-machine,
Deleuze and Guattari use the non-causal language of appropriation to describe the dynamics of
and within desiring. Throughout chapter 12 of Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari describe
military appropriation of the war-machine as the (single) occurrence of desire structured under
the conditions of both interiority and exteriority.
The idea of state appropriation of an exterior war-machinery enables Deleuze and
Guattari to explore certain outlying regions of a nationalized market economy. The long middle
section of the “1227—Traité de nomadologie” chapter deals with metallurgy as the point of
contact between military training in weaponry and the use of machinery in factories (502ff.). The
chapter includes an excursion into mining practices, and the extraction of iron ore for the
common forging of tools of industry and war (512ff.). Mines are of particular interest to Deleuze
and Guattari in recalling le rhizome, a technical term they use to name a lateral chain of
association that undercuts the vertical, hierarchical “arboreal” structures of such things as state
institutions and government bureaucracies.x Mines also run as “lines of flight” between states
and beneath borders and thus complicate ideas of national identity and ownership rights of
natural resources.
Implications of exteriorized desire in the practices of mining and metallurgy aside, it is
the (military) appropriation of the war-machine that is of immediate relevance to our present
study of the politics of Kleistian modernism and its schizo-analytic theorization. The effort to
associate these various, disparate matters is informed by a reading of Mille Plateaux. Near the
beginning of chapter 12, and after having just claimed that, “the State has no war machine of its
own,” but rather must “appropriate one in the form of a military institution,” Deleuze and
Guattari turn to Kleist (439).
<ext>C’est dans tout son œuvre que Kleist chante une machine de guerre, et l’oppose à
l’appareil d’État dans un combat d’avance perdu […] Quant à Kohlhaas, sa machine de
guerre ne peut plus être que le brigandage. (440)</ext>
<ext>(Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, and opposes it to the
State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start ... As for Kohlhaas, his war
machine can no longer be anything more than banditry.) </ext>
Deleuze and Guattari then consider Kleist’s modernism: “[L]a plus étrange modernité est-elle de
son cotê.... Cet element de l’extériorite […] domine tout, que Kleist invente en literature, qu’il
est le premier à inventer” (440) [The most uncanny modernity lies with him.... This element of
exteriority ... dominates everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to
invent].
Later in the same chapter, Deleuze and Guattari return again to Kleist. As in with the
earlier discussion of his works, so again they orient their analysis to the same conceptual scheme
of exteriority and interiority, war-machine and State, and Kleist’s modernist writing style. From
the essay “Über die allmächliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” [On the Gradual
Formation of Ideas in Speech], Deleuze and Guattari extract the following reflections by Kleist
on his own writing: “Je mélange des sons inarticulés, rallonge les termes de transition, utilize
également les appositions là où elles ne seraient pas nécessaires” [I mix inarticulate sounds,
lengthen transitional terms, as well as use appositions when they are unnecessary]. It is by
employing such grammatical and phonetic techniques in his writing that Kleist claims, according
to Deleuze and Guattari, to,“bring something incomprehensible into the world.” Deleuze and
Guattari add the following gloss to Kleist’s self-reflections: such modern literary style is “the
form of exteriority,” and is the, “Gemüt (feeling) that refuses to be controlled and thus forms a
war machine” (469).
For a style of writing to form a war machine is a stronger—and stranger—claim about the
political import of Kleistian writing than we might otherwise expect. More familiarly, we might
read Kleist’s writing as representing the political circumstances of the early modern Prussian
state. In his own time, Kleist was active on the political scene: he served in the Prussian army
during both coalition wars against the French revolutionary forces (1792–1797; 1798–1801). He
spent time as a prisoner of war and wrote a number of political essays advocating the use of
guerrilla tactics against the French. Finally, he may ultimately have committed suicide in despair
over a resurgent Napoleon. Accordingly, a “political” reading of Kleist’s stories as fictionalized
accounts of the Napoleonic war years and as re-imaginings of Prussia’s place in postrevolutionary/post-Napoleonic Europe is quite reasonable. Certainly, works such as The
Hermannsschlacht and The Marquise von O..., written in the wake of Prussia’s military defeat at
Jena and Auerstädt respectively, lend themselves to such readings (Cf. Kittler 505ff.).
Beyond the involvement of Kleist and his family in nineteenth century Prussian politics,xi
Michael Kohlhaas has its own specific historico-political character. Kleist’s protagonist shares
his name and part of his biography with a political dissident from Reformation-era Prussia: Hans
Kohlhase. As if to announce the connection between the historical figure of Kohlhase and his
own, fictional character, Kleist subtitles this story: “[A]us einer alten Chronik” [From an old
Chronicle] (Cf. Dießelhorst & Duncker). Furthermore, the prominence in Michael Kohlhaas of
the Junker, which was an archaic government office dating back to the end of the Thirty Years’
War when mercenaries were hired from amongst the aristocracy to protect the far-reaches of the
burgeoning Prussian state (Carsten 175–76), might be read as a reflection of Kleist’s own distrust
of a military bureaucracy staffed by the landed gentry.xii The ineffectiveness of the Junker von
Tronka against the marauding forces of Kohlhaas parallels the military ineptitude of Prussia’s
traditional tactics against the more modern, mobile approach of Napoleon’s men. By analogy,
then, the Junker stands in for the inept bureaucracy of early nineteenth century Prussian politics
and war-craft.xiii
Historically and biographically warranted as such a reading of Kleist’s work may be, it is
not the interpretive course charted by Deleuze and Guattari. Again, for the Kleistian text to form
the war machine is for it to have a political significance quite beyond a literary retelling of
Kleist’s historical moment (regardless of how important for world history the politics of that
moment were). Furthermore, if the political import of Kleistian, literature were to consist in its
simulation of real political and military events, the political significance of theories of modern
literature would be twice removed in its derivativeness. Theory would entail no more than a
secondhand reconsideration of political matters set in the artificial space of the text. Deleuze and
Guattari are unequivocal on this matter, and thus politically insistent upon the importance of
their own work. Kleist’s modernist texts do not represent political exteriority in conflict with
state interiority; they instead form such exteriority.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, to read and theorize certain texts in a particular,
“schizo-analytic” manner assumes definite political responsibility and engages in real political
action. “Theorization,” or, more generally, “philosophy,” provides a mode of political activity. In
fact, for Deleuze and Guattari, “philosophy” names the primary mode of political activity. In an
early chapter of Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari make this point plain: “Indeed, before
being, there is politics” (249). Metaphysics, which throughout the history of the discipline has
been central to the practice of philosophy, is in one sentence displaced by political theory. In
L’Anti-Œdipe, Deleuze and Guattari reiterate this point with regard to the politics of texts and
their theorization:
<ext>Car lire un texte n’est jamais un exercise érudite à la recherché des signifiés, encore
moins un exercise hautement textuel en quête d’un signifiant, mais un usage productif de
la machine littéraire, un montage de machines désirantes, exercise schizoïde qui dégage du
texte sa puissance révolutionnaire. (Deleuze and Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe 125–26)</ext>
<ext>(Indeed, reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of the signified; still
less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the
literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from
the text its revolutionary force.)</ext>
For Deleuze and Guattari, the acts of reading and theorizing are politically “productive” in the
sense of unleashing the “revolutionary force” of a text. Both theorists identify an integral part of
such action in the productive use of literary machines in “montage.”
From claims such as these—and comparable politico-textual assertions can be found
throughout Mille Plateaux and Anti-Oedipe—together with the kinds of literature and the choice
of authors privileged by Deleuze and Guattari, Paul Patton, for one, conceives of the politics of
“schizo-analytic” theory as a privileging of marginal groups and non-normalized behaviors
(whether discursive or extra-discursive). Certainly, Nietzsche, Artaud, Judge Schreber, all who
figure prominently in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, exemplify marginality or minority status in
their persons and as well as in their authorship. In turn, a revolutionary politics of the marginal
and/or marginalized reminds us of the political and historical circumstances in which Deleuze
and Guattari were writing. Patton draws out this comparison as follows:
<ext>At the level of political theory, [Deleuze and Guattari’s] work, like that of Foucault
and others in post-1968 France, needs to be read in the context of an attempt to redefine
what constitutes ‘revolutionary’ politics and to rethink the terms in which we evaluate
social movements. (Patton 63)</ext>
Patton concludes that it is “apparent” from the details of their work that Deleuze and Guattari’s
“political sympathies lie with those ‘marginal’ movements which have been the principal force
of European leftism since the early 1970s”; Patton mentions in this regard, “the movements of
women, prisoners, migrant workers,” as well as the “struggles around ecology, autonomy, and
the networks of alternate institutions” (63–64).
One of the “details” of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on which Patton bases his conclusion
concerning their politics is the attention they paid to the literary and philosophical works of
authors such as Kleist, Kafka, Artaud, and Nietzsche (62). Yet, in characterizing such authors,
Patton treats them as “figures” within a “diagram of … assemblage[s].” Schizo-analysis as a
theoretical approach to the politics of texts, reading, and interpretation is thus made
diagrammatic: existent agencements [assemblages] of desire, whether government bureaucracies,
family (and/or gender) hierarchies, or academic institutions, are analyzed through representative
texts. What such analysis produces is a diagram of the assemblage and the identification of its
points of divergence or disruption.xiv Kleistian texts are thus presented by Patton’s
implementation of schizo-analytic theory as “positive figures for that which is opposed to
power” (66).
The phrasing of this formulation is telling: texts are not themselves politically opposed to
power. Rather, texts are “figures for that which is opposed to power.” Modernist literature
projects or figures whatever opposes power. In its figurative role, such literature does not itself
oppose power (the further implication is that literature does not actively exercise any
revolutionary force of its own). The theorization of modern texts, in turn, is diminished in its
political significance. In reading modernist literature “schizo-analytically,” what Deleuze and
Guattari are then doing, according to Patton, is championing authors and works that figuratively
counter the repressive practices of institutions, governments, academies, etc. Admittedly,
literature and its theorization seem a far cry from protesting on the barricades against police
brutality or organizing labor strikes in the name of pay equity and normalized promotion
procedures. As Patton would have it, in order to count Deleuze and Guattari—with Foucault—
amongst the revolutionaries of May 68, either revolutionary political action must be reconceived
in terms of texts and interpretation or, what is perhaps the same, the politics of texts and their
theorization must be reconsidered.
In an effort to discern the “real” or “non-figurative” political significance of modernism,
and the full political significance of Kleistian modernism in particular, and thus restore
revolutionary power to texts and their theorization, we might want to return to the letter of
Kleist’s writing and reconsider the opening lines of Michael Kohlhaas.
<ext>An den Ufern der Havel lebte, um die Mitte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, ein
Roßhändler, namens Michael Kohlhaas, Sohn eines Schulmeisters, einer der
rechtschaffensten zugleich und entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit. (Kleist, Michael
Kohlhaas 9)</ext>
<ext>(On the banks of the Havel, around the middle of the sixteenth century, lived a
horsedealer named Michael Kohlhaas, the son of a schoolmaster, and one of the most
righteous and most terrible men of his time.) </ext>
As if to explain the questions raised by a character described as “one of the most righteous and
most terrible men of his time,” Kleist instead compounds our confusion by bringing the first
paragraph of the story to a close as follows: “Das Rechtgefühl aber machte ihn zum Räuber und
Mörder” (9) [The sense of justice [in Kohlhaas] yet made him into a robber and murderer]. Kleist
will subsequently show Kohlhaas to be a kind of human atrocity; the viciousness of his
subsequent campaign is wildly out of proportion to the crimes committed against him. And yet,
as we are told from the outset, the theft and mass murder Kohlhaas perpetrates against the
villagers of the Prussian countryside all stem from his sense of justice.
It is at this juncture that the above reconstruction of the narrative as a general economy of
circulating texts becomes pertinent. Rather than read Kohlhaas’s actions as bearing on or
reflecting the moral psychology of a character, they become instead expressions of the intratextual network that comprises the text as a whole. By taking this approach, the incompatible
character descriptions of Kohlhaas—who is at once both righteous and terrible—are translated
into simultaneous expressions of different coordinates within the intra-textual economy.
Kohlhaas, as the central point around which the plot develops, is traversed by every narrative arc
and is the point at which all these (different) trajectories converge, diverge, shift, etc.: “Michael
Kohlhaas” is the name, in short, of the aggregate or precipitate that forms at the interstices of
each and every narrative development in the story that bears his name (even those that from a
“psychological” or “characterological” perspective are inconsistent or contradictory).
To describe the same interpretation in Deleuze and Guattari’s language of interiority and
exteriority: a hermeneutics of interiority is one that reads the narrative in terms of the
psychological depth and development of the protagonist. “Exteriorized,” schizo-analytic theory,
by contrast, treats a text as a plane of immanence in which narrative arcs are inscribed and
through whose inscription the text is constituted. With reference to the focal point around which
an exteriorized circuitry of intra-textual arcs is organized, Deleuze and Guattari write, “[L]e Moi
n’étant plus qu’un personnage dont les gestes et les émotions sont désubjectivés, quitte à en
mourir. Telle est la formule personnelle de Kleist: une succession de courses folles et de
catatonies figées, où ne subsiste plus aucune intériorité subjective” (Deleuze and Guattari, Mille
Plateaux 440–41) [[L]e Moi is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions
are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of death. Such is Kleist’s personal formula: a
succession of flights of madness and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority
remains].xv
The “Moi” left untranslated in this last passage is ambivalent. In fact, it is just this
ambivalence that is key to understanding the politics of Kleist’s text. If we read “Moi” as “self,”
then the translation is in tension with what Deleuze and Guattari offer in the rest of sentence:
there is no “self” of the protagonist if all that remains is “de-subjectified” actions and emotions.
Le Moi désubjectivé instead describes the personnnage of a story as the movement, by fits and
starts, along the narrative circuitry of a text: Michael Kohlhaas, for Deleuze and Guattari, is just
such a persona. The technical term Deleuze and Guattari employ to theorize (or schizo-analyze)
the movement of a modern protagonist in an immanent textual space is affect. Thus, it is in the
language of affects at rest, which then suddenly quicken to critical velocity before falling into
catatonic stupor that Deleuze and Guattari describe Kohlhaas’s traversal of the Kleistian text.
Le Moi operates in the above passage beyond simply introducing the notion of a story’s
protagonist as a de-subjectified subject (or self). The French “Moi” can be translated into English
as “I” or as “me.” On this second reading of “Moi,” the theorist is implicated in the claim that all
that remains are de-subjectified actions and emotions. In short, we can read the passage as
follows: I am now nothing more than a persona of de-subjectified actions and emotions; the
normal ambivalence of “I,” which is semantically open to all language-users, is in the present
case further complicated by the dual authorship of Mille Plateaux. Thus, in reading and
theorizing a work of modern literature like Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the reader and theorist are
de-subjectified; their subjectivity is dispersed into the narrative circuitry of the text and their
desire becomes dynamic and affective. To put this same point in specifically Kleistian terms:
desire is converted into discursive affect in Kleist’s writing. One after another, long, multi-clause
sentences mount against the possibility of narrative development; then, suddenly, there is a short,
grammatically peculiar sentence in which the whole narrative advances at breakneck speed.xvi
Just as the affective states of rapidity and slowness, which are articulated in the various
grammatical forms employed by Kleist, displace traditional narrative development, so then
reading and theorizing Kleist necessitates differing affective intensities. In this way, traditional
hermeneutical principles of authorial intent, biography, or historicization no longer guide theory.
Reading and theorizing become instead modes of desiring; or, what is the same since desire and
its expression are coextensive for Deleuze and Guattari, theorizing the modern affective text
becomes a political activation of desire in its exteriorized form.
In the language of intersecting narrative arcs, political desiring and acting stem from the
juncture of two narrative trajectories. “Affect,” in turn, expresses the intensity of the differential
gradients that form within the narrative at such a juncture (as well as the force of a textual
interpretation and the puissance révolutionnaire that it extracts from the text). In occupying the
plane of the text, such affective junctures refer back into the intra-textual field from which they
emerge while at the same time gesture beyond that field and across the immediate planar order of
the text as a whole. Deleuze and Guattari make this last point, obliquely, in chapter 12 of Mille
Plateaux. In an effort to distinguish between mouvement [movement] and vitesse [speed] they
describe the affective character of Kleist’s writing as follows: “[L]a vitesse [...] constitue le
caractère absolu d’un corps [...] occup[é] ou rempl[i] un espace lisse à la façon d’un tourbillon
avec possibilité de surgir en un point quelconque” (473) [[S]peed ... constitutes the absolute
character of a body ... [that] occup[ies] or fill[s] a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with
the possibility of its springing up at any point].
For an affect to spring up at a point along the smooth space of a text—and notice how both
the inward spiral of the affect backing into the plane of the text as well as emerging from it are
captured by the same term—necessitates the formation of an intra-textual and narrative gradient.
At just such junctures, at those points in the narrative where two separate plot lines intersect,
there is a spiraling of the affect back into the narrative to form a kind of recess as well as an
affective rupture out toward another textual plane (Cf. Carrière 19). In the language of textual
affects and texts as planes of immanence this formulation is a restatement of the point made
above: the emergence of the war-machine in circumstances of exteriority involves the
appropriation of the military within the State form of interiority; or, in still simpler terms: statesponsored military violence is not a response to insurgent terrorism, it is terrorism expressed
differently.
By reading Michael Kohlhaas in the distinctly “textual” terms here proposed, we find that
Kleist is himself centrally concerned with just this same action of interiorizing and exteriorizing
textual affect. Given the abstractness of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of textual affects that
“surge” up from and out of their narrative confines, it will help to consider several instances in
Kleist’s story where narrative arcs intersect and in which, and from which, State violence and the
war-machine arise. Narratively, the first textual juncture coincides with the scene of Kohlhaas’s
death. Lisbeth, Kohlhaas’s wife, has before this point volunteered to carry one of the written
petitions to the Elector of Brandenburg. Since her family joins her in court, she is certain that she
will be able to gain access to his Excellency. Instead, she is run through with sword by an official
guard and barely survives the return trip home to Kohlhaasenbrück. On her deathbed, Lisbeth is
read over by a Lutheran priest; it is the textual movement—the interiorization and exteriorization
of texts—that is of note in the passage.
<ext>[E]in Geistlicher lutherischer Religion [...] neben ihrem Bette stand, und ihr mit
lauter und empfindlich-feierlicher Stimme, ein Kapitel aus der Bibel vorlas: so sah sie ihn
plötzlich, mit einem finstern Ausdruck, an, nahm ihm, als ob ihr daraus nichts vorzulesen
wäre, die Bibel aus der Hand. (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 30)</ext>
<ext>([A] priest of the Lutheran religion ... was standing by her bed and in a loud and
feelingly ceremonious voice reading out to her a chapter of the Bible, suddenly she
frowned at him and, as though there was nothing in it to read out to her, [and] took the
Bible from his hands.)</ext>
Lisbeth’s final act is to read aus [out] a passage “in” the Bible imploring her husband to forgive
the Junker in the name of God. Subsequently, Kohlhaas retrieves the official letter from out of
the clutches of his dead wife’s hand. Once more he is ordered by official decree to drop his case.
In a single chillingly economical sentence, Kleist then has Kohlhaas “einsteckte den Brief” (31)
[pocket the letter] and bury his wife. Immediately thereafter, Kohlhaas emerges in full warmachine intensity. With a band of men, he attacks the Junker’s estate, murders the company of
knights he finds on the premises, and burns the castle to the ground. In familiar Kleistian fashion,
the moment is marked in the text with an incomprehensible description of Kohlhaas: a provincial
horse dealer has now suddenly become “der Engel des Gerichts” (32) [the avenging angel]
whose first “angelic” act is to burst open the skull of the Junker.xvii
The same interplay between texts that move inward and outward—Lisbeth’s reading
“out” a passage from the Bible; Kohlhaas’s placing a letter “in” his pocket and his dead wife “in”
the ground;xviii Kohlhaas’s rising “up” from this act as an avenging angel—is discernable at two
other key narrative junctures in Michael Kohlhaas. The first coincides with Kohlhaas’s meeting
with Martin Luther at roughly the midpoint of the tale; the second occurs at the end of the story.
The figure of Luther, cloistered away from the world and insulated against any open or public
circulation of texts in his private apartment above a Wittenberg inn, also expresses the themes of
interiorized and exteriorized texts. The scene is thus integral to Michael Kohlhaas as a whole and
Koelb is right to have singled out the scene as central to his reading of the text. However,
Luther’s prominence does not stem, as Koelb maintains, from his role in condensing the themes
of mundane and transcendent law and language that run through the narrative. Rather, Luther’s
appearance in the text is significant as a point of affective intensity around which various
narrative arcs coalesce. Here too, the moral (or religious) possibilities of the story are set aside in
the name of the political. With Deleuze and Guattari, we here read this scene as occurring on the
immanent plane of the modern text where narrative, grammatical form or style, and theory
converge in full political efficacy.
After waging a long, bloody campaign against the German peasantry in pursuit of the
Junker von Tronka, Kohlhaas is finally granted an audience with Luther in exchange for signing
a peace accord. Kohlhaas accepts the conditions of the agreement, lays down his arms, and rides
defenseless into Wittenberg. The Luther that Kohlhaas meets stands in stark contrast to the figure
of Luther earlier invoked in the story. The Kohlhaas Mandat, in which Kohlhaas proclaims
himself above all law, whether worldly or divine, is tacked onto the doorpost of a church in
Wittenberg; Kohlhaas’s act reproduces Luther’s nailing of the 95 Thesen to the doors of the
city’s Schloßkirche in 1517. In contrast to the historical image of Luther as a political
progressive challenging the authority of the State by publicly posting his reinterpretations of
Christian dogma, Kohlhaas meets a shadowy figure and agent of the crown. Holed up in his
private chambers, Luther impresses upon Kohlhaas the absolute right of a political sovereign.
Such authority, Luther continues, extends even so far as to warrant miscarriages of justice; the
concomitant obedience of the people to the crown is equally absolute (again, even when a clear
wrong has been committed) (44ff.). Upon hearing Kohlhaas’s case, Luther initiates a private
correspondence with the Brandenburg court; the outcome of this “interiorized” circulation of
texts will be Kohlhaas’s arrest, and ultimately, his execution. Thus, in contrast to the open,
public, or “exteriorized” economy of texts to which Luther earlier contributed the 95 Thesen, he
encloses Kohlhaas in a restricted economy of privately traded and official decrees: the violence
of the State-execution visited on Kohlhaas is thus already figured in the Lutheran war-machine
now fully appropriated to interiorized desire.
Finally, the theme of interiorization and exteriorization of texts reappears at the close of
Michael Kohlhaas; it is also the point from which the present study of the politics of Kleistian
modernism began. Michael Kohlhaas dies at the end of the story in committing one last passage
out of and back into texts: the secret prophecy he has kept “in” a locket around his neck is taken
out, read over, and then literally ingested.
<ext>Kohlhaas löste sich, indem er mit einem plötzlichen, die Wache, die ihn umringte,
befremdenden Schritt, dicht vor ihn trat, die Kapsel von der Brust; er nahm den Zettel
heraus, entsiegelte ihn, und überlas ihn; und das Auge unverwandet auf den Mann mit
blauen und wießen Federbüschen gerichtet, der bereits süßen Hoffnungen Raum zugeben
anfing, steckte er ihn in den Mund und verschlang ihn. (103)</ext>
<ext>(With a sudden step, surprising his guard, Kohlhaas came close to him, and
removed the capsule lying under his shirt; he took out the paper, unsealed it, read it over:
and staring fixedly at the man with the blue and white plumes, who was already
beginning to entertain sweet hopes [of hearing the prophecy], he put it into his mouth and
swallowed it.)</ext>
One last textual arc ensues: it is the stately swing of the executioner’s axe as the whole
exteriority of (desire as) the war-machine is appropriated in State violence. It is here that the
story of Michael Kohlhaas ends.
This final convergence of exteriorized and interiorized texts with war-machine
insurgency and State-sponsored terror suggests that the political potential of desire exteriorized
in the war-machine is exhausted at the very point where the story ends, at the place where the
circulation of texts ends. If we are correct in this assessment, and if the whole of Deleuze and
Guattari’s early Capitalismé et Schizophrenie project can be extracted from a focused study of
Kleist and the war-machine, then the further implication is that the revolutionary and political
work of theory consists in running texts together and thus extending the plane of textual
immanence beyond the reaches of complete State appropriation. To plug Kleist into Kafka into
Nietzsche into Beckett, etc. as Deleuze and Guattari do throughout Mille Plateaux and L’AntiŒdipe, is to form junctures at which intra- and inter-textual arcs meet, diverge, and multiply
across and off the page into the desire of readers as radical political agents. Furthermore, since it
is at such junctures that affective political action arises, as we have argued here, it is then by such
theoretical means that Deleuze and Guattari further the revolutionary, political potential of desire
dispersed into a multiplicity of narrative trajectories.xix In other words, to theorize modern
literature is to re-arrange the desire of the revolutionaries of May ’68, posited by Patton as
identical to Deleuze and Guattari’s politics, and thereby make clear that the story they tell (of)
themselves is one without end.
<aff>Western Kentucky University</>
<bmh>Works Cited</>
<bib>Allan, Seán. The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security. Rochester: Camden
House, 2001. </bib>
<bib>Birkenhauer, Klaus. Kleist. Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich, 1977. </bib>
<bib>Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. </bib>
<bib>Carrière, Mathieu. Für eine Literatur des Krieges, Kleist. Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1981.
</bib>
<bib>Carsten, F.L. “The Great Elector and the Foundation of the Hohenzollern Despotism.” The
English Historical Review 65.255 (1955): 175–202. </bib>
<bib>Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. </bib>
<bib>Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. L’Anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Tome 1.
Paris: Editions de Minuet, 1980. </bib>
———. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Tome 2. Paris: Editions de Minuet, 1980.
</bib>
<bib>Dießelhorst, Malte & Arne Duncker. Hans Kohlhase: Die Geschichte einer Fehde in
Sachsen und Brandenburg zur Zeit der Reformation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999.
</bib>
<bib>Kittler, Wolf. “Die Hermannsschlacht and the Concept of Guerrilla Warfare.” A New
History of German Literature. Eds. D. E. Wellbery and J. Ryan. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004. 505–11. </bib>
<bib>Kleist, Heinrich von. Michael Kohlhaas. Sämtliche Erzählungen und Anekdoten. München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977. </bib>
<bib>———. Die Marquise von O… Sämtliche Erzählungen und Anekdoten. München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977. </bib>
<bib>Koelb, Clayton. “Incorporating the Text: Kleist’s ‘Michael Kohlhaas.’” PMLA 105.5
(1990): 1098–107. </bib>
<bib>Lash, Scott. “Postmodernity and Desire.” Theory and Society 14.1 (1985): 1–33. </bib>
Müller-Seidel, Walter. Versehen und Erkennen: Eine Studie über Heinrich von Kleist. Köln:
Böhlau, 1961. </bib>
<bib>Patton, Paul. “Conceptual Politics and the War Machine in Mille Plateaux.” SubStance
13.3/4. 44–45 (1984): 61–80. </bib>
<bib>Phillips, James. The Equivocation of Reason: Kant Reading Kleist. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2007. </bib>
<bib>Schissler, Hanna. “Die Junker: Zur Sozialgeschichte und historischen Bedeutung der
agrarischen Elite in Preußen.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 89–122. </bib>
<bib>Stephens, Anthony. Heinrich von Kleist: The Dramas and the Stories. Oxford: Berg, 1994.
</bib>
<bib>Stivale, Charles J. “Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Schizoanalysis & Literary
Discourse.” SubStance 9.4.29 (1980): 46–57. </bib>
<bib>Surin, Kenneth. “The Undecidable and the Fugitive: ‘Mille Plateaux’ and the State-Form.”
SubStance 20.3.66 (1991): 102–13.</bib>
<bmh>Notes</>
<en>i A “textual” reading of the story—and of the horses as texts—seems to move the question
of permission back one step: if within the story no permit is needed to traffic in the economy of
horses, what does this mean for the permission needed (or not needed) at the level of theory or
interpretation for trading in an open economy of texts? What, in short, justifies or warrants a
“textual” reading of Michael Kohlhaas in particular and a figurative reading of texts in general?
Deleuze and Guattari would, it seems, answer this question in the negative: nothing explicitly
officiates or sanctions a figurative reading of texts. Rather, the modernism of the texts opens up
the possibility of such a reading (and theory occupies the space of such possibility). Accordingly,
we might read the idea of the “virtual” in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as descriptive of the
theoretical space of modernist literature and its theorization.
ii
Thanks are due to Naomi Beeman in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory
University for her thoughts on this passage.
iii
The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind on a
single page, the same sheet.
iv
By associating Kleist with an immanent form of textuality, Deleuze and Guattari implicitly
convert his favored construction—als ob [as if]—into a device of analogical comparison and
connection: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, etc. are all interchangeable through
the phrase. In other words, rather than trace the Kleistian als ob back through its Kantian heritage
to the idea of a connected immanence and transcendence, Deleuze and Guattari (implicitly)
detach the als ob from all transcendent significance so that it instead motivates a wholly
immanent economy of discursive and non- (or extra-) discursive units. On the Kleistian als ob
see Müller-Seidel. James Phillips argues for the modern, theoretical significance of Kleist’s socalled Kant-Krise (Phillips thus moves Kleist’s reading of Kant out of the domain of biography
where it has traditionally lived in the secondary literature).
v
[Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects with variable speeds, with
accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings ... The warmachine-book against the State-apparatus-book.]
vi
[1227—Treatise on nomadology: The machine of war].
vii
On the erratic, historical timeline of Deleuze and Guattari’s work—the year 1933 precedes
1730 and 7000 BCE—1227 marks the date of Genghis Khan’s successful campaign against the
Jin dynasty of Imperial China.
viii
“[I]l faut arriver à penser la machine de guerre comme étant elle-même une pure forme
d’extériorité, tandis que l’appareil d’Etat constitue la forme d’intériorité” (438) [It is necessary to
arrive at the thought of the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority; the State apparatus
constitutes the form of interiority].
ix
In dialogue with Claire Parnet, Deleuze has characterized the project as a “micropolitics of
desire” (Cf. Deleuze & Parnet, Dialogues; Lash 9ff.)
x
“[À] la difference des arbres ou de leurs racines, le rhizome connecte un point quelconque avec
un autre pointe quelconque, et chacun de ses traits ne revoie pas nécessairement à des traits de
même nature, il met en jeu des régimes de signes très différents et même des états de non-signes
(Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux 31) [[U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any
point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it
brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non-sign states].
xi
Klaus Birkenhauer, Kleist (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich, 1977). 73ff.
xii
Cf. Hanna Schissler, “Die Junker: Zur Sozialgeschichte und historischen Bedeutung der
agrarischen Elite in Preußen.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol. 6 (1980). 94ff.
xiii
Mathieu Carrière, whose Für eine Literatur des Krieges, Kleist was, as an unpublished
manuscript, influential on Deleuze and Guattari in their discussion of Kleist in chapter 12 of
Mille Plateaux, picks up a further politico-historical resonance in Michael Kohlhaas: “Kohlhaas
zum Beispiel verpasst vollkommen die Bauernrevolution um Thomas Münzer, 1524. Seine
Horde von Aufständischen hat kein Programm; und der einzige Augenblick, an dem sich
Elemente beider Revolten begegnen, verursacht die Vernichtung Kohlhaas’” (Carrière 43) [For
example, Kohlhaas completely misses the 1524 peasant revolution of Thomas Münzer. His gang
of insurgents had no program; and the only moment at which elements of both revolutions meet
occasions Kohlhaas’s annihilation].
xiv
Deleuze and Guattari use the language of “lines of flight” to characterize the points of
revolutionary potential within inter-institutional orders.
xv
The rise of the Bildungsroman as a literary form in Kleist’s time suggests another way to make
the same point concerning a hermeneutics of interiority: such a mode of interpretation treats the
general, narrative trajectory of a story as one of development, advancement, and the “deepening”
of the protagonist’s Bildung. To this, Deleuze and Guattari—following Carrière (Cf. 26ff.)—
contrast Kleist’s “anti-Bildung” approach:
<ext>C’est curieux comme Goethe, et Hegel, ont la haine de cette nouvelle écriture.
C’est que, pour eux, le plan doit être indissolublement de développement harmonieux de
la Forme et la formation réglée du Sujet, personnage ou caractère (l’éducation
sentimentale, la solidité substantielle et intérieure du caractère, l’harmonie ou l’analogie
des formes et la continuité du développement, le culte de l’État, etc.). C’est qu’ils se font
du plan une conception tout à fait opposée à celle de Kleist. (Deleuze & Guattari, Mille
Plateaux 328–29) </ext>
<ext>(It is curious how Goethe and Hegel hated this new kind of writing. Because for
them the plan(e) must indissolubly be a harmonious development of form and a regulated
formation of the subject, personage, or character (the sentimental education, the interior
and substantial solidity of the character, the harmony or analogy of the forms and
continuity of development, the cult of the State, etc.). Their conception of the plane is
totally opposed to that of Kleist.) </ext>
The specific charge Goethe brings against Kleist, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is counteror anti-developmental composition of a narrative: Kleist is thus charged with [introducing voids
and jumps that prevent any development of a central character, and [even of] a central character
(329)]. The development, or lack of development, of a narrative is thus linked with the
formation, or de-formation, of the protagonist; the same point can be made in terms of the form
of a textual interpretation or of a theory and the de/formation of the subjectivity of the theorist.
xvi
Here we are reminded of the infamous rape scene in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O…, which is
signified by nothing more than a hyphen:
<ext>[B]ot dann der Dame, unter einer verbindlichen, französischen Anrede den Arm,
und führte sie, die von allen solchen Auftritten sprachlos war, in der anderen, von der
Flamme noch nicht ergriffenen, Flügel des Palastes, wo sie auch völlig bewußtsein
niedersank. Hier—traf er, da bald darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen,
Anstalten, einen Arzt zu rufen; versicherte, indem er sich den Hut aufsetzte, daß sie sich
bald erholen würde; und kehrte in den Kampf zurück. (Kleist, Die Marquise von O…
105–06)</ext>
<ext>([H]e addressed the lady courteously in French, offered her his arm and led her,
stricken dumb by all the scenes, into the wing of the house not yet caught aflame, and,
losing consciousness entirely, she fell to the floor. Thereupon—when, soon after, her
terrified women appeared, he arranged for a doctor to be called; assured them, putting on
his hat, that she would soon recover, and returned to the battle.)</ext>
xvii
Deleuze and Guattari mark this same passage as follows: “Même la mort ne peut être pensée
que comme le croisement de réactions élémentaires à vitesses trop différentes. Un crâne explose,
obsession de Kleist” (Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux 328) [Even death can only be thought
as the intersection of elementary reactions of different speeds. A skull exploding: an obsession of
Kleist’s].
xviii
Carrière makes a similar point toward the end of his study of Kleist:
<ext>Körper und Organe sind Werden der Worte. Aber es geht auch umgekehrt. “Wenn
ich Tränen schreiben könnte!” Wenn die Dinge Worte werden! Die Mathematik operiert
das Differential zwischen Leben und Tod und funktioniert als abstrakte Linie für die
Poesie, die ihrerseits das Differential zwischen Worten und Dingen operiert, als sinnliche
Kurve. Das Resultat ist ein maschinistisches Agencement, das in Affektaussößen agiert,
die eine gewalttätige kleistische Geschichte erzählen. (Carrière 109)</ext>
<ext>(Bodies and organs are the becoming of words. But it also works in reverse. “If
only I could write tears!” If only things would become words! Mathematics operates the
differential between life and death and provides abstract lines for poetry, which for its
part operates the differential between words and things as a sensible curve. The result is a
mathematical agencement that acts through the expression of affects and [it is this] that
narrates a violent, Kleistian story.) </ext>
What Carrière describes as “mathematics” in its relationship with “poetry” is comparable to what
the present article has termed the “schizo-analysis” of texts. What this passage adds to the
present study is a new description of the movement that occurs within texts, namely, between life
and death and words and things. Given the immanence that Deleuze and Guattari insist upon for
the modern Kleistian text, Carrière’s reference “beyond” the page to life and things and the
“becoming-word of things” and the reverse is potentially misleading; such a description might, in
short, imply that there remains a space of “life” and “things” beyond the immanent plane of the
modern text.
xix
“In re-reading the works of various authors in light of the machinic syntheses, Deleuze and
Guattari reveal the molecular and fragmented discourse of schizophrenic deterritorialization.
Such a re-reading is itself an overt political act inherent to the schizoanalytic project, meant to
subvert the grip of power exerted by capitalist and oedipal reterritorialization” (Stivale 50).</en>