Unclaimed Experience by Cathy Caruth

Author:Cathy Caruth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1996-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

A SHADOWY REALITY

De Man himself offers an alternative autobiographical reading in his essay, one that is, in contrast to the traditional spiritual biographies, somewhat more difficult to integrate:

The only explicit referential mark in the text is the date of the action, given as the winter of 1801. Now 1801 is certainly an ominous moment in a brief life rich in ominous episodes. (AFK, 283)

In de Man’s reading, the referential potential of the story thus seems to derive, not from the figure of the dance, but from what he will later call an “innocuous-looking notation,” the innocuous number marking a date. If this date is to refer us to the referential Kleist, however, what we find most immediately is a series of crisis-ridden relations between Kleist and others with whose names he had come to be associated:

1801... is the year when Kleist’s self-doubts and hesitations about his vocation culminate in what biographers call his “Kant crisis.” It is also the year during which Kleist’s engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge begins to falter and during which he is plagued by doubts similar to those which plagued Kierkegaard in his relationship to Regina and Kafka in his relationship to Felice. Between the two events, the Kant crisis and the forthcoming breach of promise with Wilhelmine (the final break occurred in the spring of 1802), there seems to be a connection which, if only he could understand it, would have relieved Kleist from his never resolved self-desperation. To uncover this link would be the ground of any autobiographical project. (AFK, 283–84)

As de Man reads Kleist’s “life” from the notation “1801”, he produces a series, not of movements, but of breaks, or rather of proper names that name particular discontinuities in the life: the crisis of reading Kant, the breach of promise with Wilhelmine, not to mention the introduction of several new proper names in the status of biographical analogues. The possibility of referential self-recognition becomes in de Man’s story the possibility of providing a meaningful continuity between these breaks, a continuity presumably provided by the spiritual biographers when they speak of “death experiences” that will ultimately be redeemed through writing. The stakes of such autobiographical self-recognition are clear in de Man’s reference to Kleist’s self-desperation, which would eventually lead to a horrible suicide. But as de Man’s story continues, Kleist’s own attempts within his life to make meaningful links between events appear to be thwarted, precisely, in the bewildering displacements and substitutions that occur among the proper names attached to them, names that at times appear to take over the very reality of the unfortunate Kleist’s life:

The link [between the Kant crisis and the break with Wilhelmine] actually and concretely existed in the reality of Kleist’s history, but it took a somewhat circuitous route. For when Kleist next met his bride-to-be, in 1805 in Königsberg, she was no longer Fräulein Wilhelmine von Zenge but Frau Professor Wilhelmine von Krug. Dr. Wilhelm Traugott Krug was Kant’s successor in the latter’s chair in philosophy at the University of Königsberg.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.