Passions of the Sign traces the impact of the French Revolution on
Enlightenment thought in Germany as evidenced in the work of three
major figures around the turn of the nineteenth century: Immanuel
Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist. Andreas
Gailus examines a largely overlooked strand in the philosophical
and literary reception of the French Revolution, one which finds in
the historical occurrence of revolution the expression of a
fundamental mechanism of political, conceptual, and aesthetic
practice.
With a close reading of a critical essay by Kleist, an in-depth
discussion of Kant's philosophical writing, and new readings of the
novella form as employed by both Goethe and Kleist, Gailus
demonstrates how these writers set forth an energetic model of
language and subjectivity whose unstable nature reverberates within
the very foundations of society. Unfolding in the medium of
energetic signs, human activity is shown to be subject to the
counter-symbolic force that lies within and beyond it. History is
subject to contingency and is understood not as a progressive
narrative but as an expanse of revolutionary possibilities;
language is subject to the extra-linguistic context of utterance
and is conceived primarily not in semantic but in pragmatic terms;
and theindividual is subject to impersonal affect and is figured
not as the locus of self-determination but as the site of passions
that exceed the self and its pleasure principle.
At once a historical and a conceptual study, this volume moves
between literature and philosophy, and between textual analysis and
theoretical speculation, engaging with recent discussions on the
status of sovereignty, thesignificance of performative language in
politics and art, and the presence of the impersonal, even inhuman,
within the economy of the self.
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