In the eyes of the law, literature becomes a touchstone when legal arguments are taken to their aporetic limits. This is the case in Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810), which juxtaposes aristocratic nepotism and the rebellion of an individual subject in the tradition of early Enlightenment criticism of the nobility. The ironic conclusion—execution, but also restitution—raises the question of how high the price for acts that threaten the state can or must be. Kohlhaas regards his campaign of revenge as legitimate, because he sees it as the only way to ensure that injustice is recognised as such. In his exaggerated “sense of justice,” he does not seek to restore the law as it stands, but to establish a completely new law as justice. The purpose of the novella is not reparation or restitution, but the demonstration of what cannot be repaired. The project aims to work out the universality, topicality, and radicality of the Kohlhaas material in world literary adaptations. If we understand a poetics of the irreparable with and after Kleist as part of a productive objection to the “theatre of reconciliation,” then the critical comparison of multilingual literatures raises many questions: What is the relationship between reparation and sense of justice? What aporias of the rule of law does the Kohlhaas material bring with it and raise in Kleist’s work? How are law and righteousness articulated in a poetics of irreparability? What is the relevance of Kleist’s novella for contemporary reparation processes, with its “descendants” in world literature?
PROF. DR. ANDREA ALLERKAMP
CURRICULUM VITAE
Andrea Allerkamp is a professor of western European literatures at the Europa-Universität Viadrina, where she was spokesperson for the DFG Research Training Group Lebensformen + Lebenswissen and directs the Franco-German master’s programme in philosophy and cultural studies. She is a member of the advisory board of the Kleist Museum in Frankfurt an der Oder. Before 2011, she taught at French universities: as a professor in Aix-Marseille and Poitiers, and as a maître de conférences in Toulouse. She has received several academic invitations, most recently as a visiting professor at the Université Paris I-Sorbonne and as a fellow at the International Centre Morphomata at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on the history and criticism of aesthetics, the interactions between philosophy and literature, the relationship between law and literature, and dream criticism. She is coeditor of Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch and was also on the editorial board of the Kleist-Jahrbuch until 2022.
