<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 double-

expressiveness 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 intra-

Statist 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 non-

traditional 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 post-

revolutionary/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 intra-

textual 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: state-

sponsored 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 war-

machine 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’Anti-

Œdipe, 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</>

i<en> 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 so-called 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 war-

machine-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 counter- or

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>