Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist's Penthesilea

Author(s): Michel Chaouli

Source: The German Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 125-143
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German
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MICHEL CHAOULI
Harvard University
Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste
in Kleist's Penthesilea
There is something in bad taste about
Penthesilea. Certainly, the "feverish twitch-
ings, ... rawness and wildness," which
evoked "terror, loathing, and disgust" in one
of the play's earliest critics and which have
continued to repel readers and viewers, are
not easy to swallow.1 And it has not helped
the play's popularity that its heroine makes
mincemeat out of its hero, nor that the
drama-filled as it is with one-breasted,
battle-scarred women-quickly gets itself
into gender trouble.2 But my sense is that
something more than excess in plot and lan-
guage is at stake, for otherwise the depth
and breadth of antipathy that Kleist's play
provokes is hard to understand. Such ex-
cess may plausibly account for why the text
meets with stern disapproval from those
judging it with the yardstick of Weimar
classicism;3 it may even, less plausibly, ac-
count for the seventy-year hiatus between
the publication of the play in 1808 and its
first full-scale production, yet it hardly ex-
plains why theaters and audiences have
continued to shy away from Penthesilea,4
given that its scenes of mayhem are tame
compared to what any multiplex will have
to offer.
If the play is in bad taste, if it is judged
to be disgusting, it is so, I would suggest,
because it calls into question the very cate-
gories of taste-good or bad-and of what
is disgusting; this is another way of saying
that it launches an attack on one of the
seminal works of aesthetics, Kant's Kritik
der Urteilskraft, for nowhere is the opposi-
tion of good taste and disgust enshrined as
firmly and systematically. Moreover, the
The German Quarterly 69.2 (Spring 1996) 125
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play does not content itself with question-
ing the categories of the beautiful and the
disgusting, but goes on to offer a realign-
ment of the two that turns out to be as am-
bitious as it is alarming to an orderly notion
of aesthetics. In what follows I argue that
what deeply unsettled Kleist's contempo-
raries, what unsettles us today, is this dou-
ble movement in Penthesilea. On one tra-
jectory, the play stages a profound critique
of the philosophical terms that sustain the
third Critique, not so much by engaging in
an argument as by attacking it on the level
of the signifier. Penthesilea borrows phi-
losophemes-most crucially taste-and
subjects them to a punishing literary exer-
cise at the end of which these metaphors
have been so disfigured that they can
hardly be expected to sustain an edifice as
imposing as Kantian aesthetics. If, as I ar-
gue, the play is obsessed with reducing to
zero the distance to aesthetic objects, if it is
intent on reminding us of the gustatory
sense of taste, then it does so by implicitly
questioning the status of a prohibition cen-
tral to the third Critique, namely, the pro-
hibition against representing what is dis-
gusting. In a sense, the play is a sustained
attempt at trespassing as far as possible on
the disgusting, literalizing and embodying
the very terms that aesthetics has been
busy metaphorizing. At stake is not merely
an expansion of the boundaries of the aes-
thetic by shocking audiences with the "fe-
verish twitchings" and "wildness" to which
our reviewer objects, but rather the very
existence of the boundary separating the
beautiful from the disgusting, thus threat-
 126 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
ening the collapse of Kantian aesthetics.
Yet this is not all, for if it were we would
end up with not very much. Ifthe first move-
ment implies the destruction of a philo-
sophical edifice by means of a performative
literalization ofmetaphors (something that
recent Kleist criticism has frequently ar-
gued5), there is a second movement coun-
teracting it. While Penthesilea, the heroine,
may follow a path leading to a shapeless,
chaotic rubble of representation, Penthe-
silea, the play, pursues a far more compli-
cated road. I will argue that the process by
which a metaphorical discourse is literal-
ized, embodied, made flesh in the play, goes
hand in hand with, indeed depends upon,
the very metaphorical discourse it is sup-
posed to supplant; far from displacing
figurative language in favor of a radical lit-
eralism, Penthesilea makes visible the figu-
rative in the literal. I will attempt to dem-
onstrate how the very cannibalism that, on
one level, tries to bring to a halt the process
of metaphorical substitution by abandon-
ing the word and going for the flesh, on a
second level inaugurates a practice of rep-
resentation in the inscriptions that teeth
make on the body. The play, I suggest, offers
us the outlines of another theory of art, one
in which the beautiful and the disgusting,
the figurative and the literal, sustain each
other precisely because they are constantly
undermining each other; it is hardly an aes-
thetics with foundations and pillars, but a
precarious construct whose stability para-
doxically lies in its simultaneous collapse.
I dinal rules of Kantian aesthetics: what
Whatever their specific gripes, most of
Kleist's contemporary critics kept return-
ing to the scene toward the end of the play
in which Penthesilea, aided by a pack of
hounds, cannibalistically dismembers Achil-
les, her rival and lover. Though many critics
buttress their rejection by pointing out how
far Kleist has deviated from the path ofclas-
sical poetics, it quickly becomes clear that
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the real-and usually unnamed -referent
is not the classical standard but contempo-
rary aesthetics. Since Kleist uses the same
source as many of his contemporaries-
Benjamin Hederich's Griindliches mytholo-
gisches Lexikon (1770)-it is quite apparent
to everyone that Kleist has inverted the
central element of the plot: while in all of
Hederich's accounts Penthesilea is de-
feated by Achilles (even in the one account
in which she wins, he is revived by his
mother and kills Penthesilea6), Kleist casts
the queen of the Amazons as the victor, al-
beit one whose victory-in a reversal that
typifies the play's movement-prompts her
self-destruction. That the insult of a rever-
sal of the "normal" course of events is com-
pounded by the injury of cannibalism, that,
in other words, Kleist not only inverts the
classical but perverts it, makes this mo-
ment into the point of condensation for
much of the criticism heaped on the work.
Take, for example, a passage from a review
of Penthesilea that appears in late 1808 in
the journal Miszellen fiir die Neuste Welt-
kunde:
Penthesilea ist im Wahnsinn eine Furie,
die Abscheu erweckt, statt Grausen. Sie
lIiBt den Achill von ihren Hunden zerreil-
en, und der Dichter zerriB mutwillig die
Teilnahme, welche er zuvor in uns ffir die
wunderbare Amazone entspann ... Das
Ekelhafte ist niemals Objekt der schonen
Kunst.7
The reviewer crowns his judgment not with
a reference to the text but simply by stating,
as apodictically as possible, one of the car-
disgusts can never be the object of the fine
arts. He declares Kleist aesthetically out of
bounds by citing, wittingly or not, a key pas-
sage from the third Critique: "Nur eine Ha3B-
lichkeit kann nicht der Natur gemaiB vor-
gestellt werden, ohne alles asthetische
Wohlgefallen, mithin die Kunstschonheit,
zu Grunde zu richten: nimlich diejenige,
welche Ekel erweckt."8 Kant's argument fol-
lows the "except-one" logic: it is permissible
 CHAOULI: Kleist 127
to represent ugliness in art-Kant lists the
Furies, sicknesses, and ravages of war--ex-
cept in one instance, namely, when it causes
disgust. For in disgust, says Kant, the object
is represented "as if it forced itself, as it were,
upon our enjoyment" ("gleichsam, als ob er
sich zum Genusse aufdrainge" [KdU A 187,
B 189]), thus collapsing the distinction be-
tween the artificial representation ("kiin-
stliche Vorstellung") of the object and its
nature in our perception. Such forcible
imposition-albeit doubly mediated and
hedged ("gleichsam, als ob")-leads to the
quandary that artifice and nature cannot be
distinguished anymore, and since the
agency of aesthetic judgment in the third
Critique-taste-relies on such distinctions,
a disgusting object "cannot possibly be re-
garded as beautiful" ("kann allsdann un-
m6glich ffir sch6n gehalten werden" [KdUA
187, B 190]).
While the prohibition against what
evokes disgust merits its own detailed ex-
amination, both in regard to its role within
the third Critique and in the larger context
of aesthetics,9 I would like to focus on what
it implies for the Kantian concept of taste.
The severe manner in which Kant dis-
patches the disgusting from the field of the
aesthetic is yet another instance, I would
argue, of his persistent worry that there
might be a slippage between taste, the
agency ofaestheticjudgment, and taste, the
organic sense. For the agency of aesthetic
judgment-i.e., metaphorical taste-which
relies on the very distinctions that the dis-
gusting threatens to blur, only becomes
taste by requiring the very distance to its
object that its literal, gustatory precursor
lacks. It is worth attending to the notion of
distance, precisely because the third Cri-
tique never explicitly does so. This may well
be because the desirability of maintaining
a distance to the object, particularly to the
object that triggers the judgment of beauty,
is of such obvious importance to Kant's
thinking that he does not bother to dwell
on it in the third Critique. The discussion
and, more important, ranking of the senses
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in his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hin-
sicht, however, spells out some of what is
implied in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Three
of the senses-touch, sight, and hearing-
are more objective than subjective, Kant
says, that is, they contribute more to the
knowledge of the object than they excite the
affected organ. Conversely, taste and smell,
being far more characterized by an affection
ofthe body, produce more pleasure (Genuss)
than knowledge.10 It follows, according to
Kant, that we can easily agree with others
on perceptions derived from the first group
of senses, something however that is not
true of taste and smell sensations, because
subjects are affected by them in very differ-
ent ways. As we may expect, the degree of
organic affection as well as a sense's rela-
tive objectivity (and thus rank) is propor-
tional to the distance it maintains to its
object. Hence, sight is the "noblest" ofsenses
"because it is at the greatest distance from
touching, as the most limited condition of
perception" ("weil er sich unter allen [Sin-
nen] am meisten von dem der Betastung,
als der eingeschranktesten Bedingung der
Wahrnehmung, entfernt" [Anthropologie
BA 50]). In sight, Kant argues, the body is
less affected than with any other sense and
thus comes closest to pure intuition ("reine
Anschauung") in which the object is given
without an admixture of feeling. By con-
trast, taste and smell work by putting the
body in close proximity to the object of sen-
sation; indeed, the proximity is so close that
with taste and smell the limit between body
and object is violated, since the body is af-
fected by foreign objects "that must pene-
trate the organ" ("welche in das Organ ein-
dringen mUissen" [Anthropologie BA 52]).
Such penetration of the body by the out-
side world leads Kant, quite predictably, to
bring up the notion of disgust:
Daher kommt es, da3 der Ekel, ein Anreiz,
sich des Genossenen durch den kiirzesten
Weg des Speisekanals zu entledigen (sich
zu erbrechen), als eine so starke Vitalemp-
findung den Menschen beigegeben wor-
 128 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
den, weil jene innigliche Einnehmung
dem Tier gefaihrlich werden kann. (An-
thropologie BA 52)
We can now see why Kant has been keeping
the senses of taste and smell, as it were, at
arm's length, why he defines taste-with un-
mistakable distaste-as "Berihrung des Or-
gans der Zunge, des Schlundes und der
Gaumen durch den aiuBeren Gegenstand"
(Anthropologie BA 51) and smell-with
gathering disgust-as "Einziehung der mit
der Luft vermischten fremden Ausdtinstun-
gen" (Anthropologie BA51), for they are both
subject to what Kant, in a tellingly pleonastic
phrase, calls "inner ingestion" ("innigliche
Einnehmung"). It seems as though the sen-
sation of disgust does not merely occur as a
special case of taste and smell-namely
when the animal has ingested something
dangerous-but that there is something fun-
damentally disgusting about taste and smell
as such. The very structure of the lower
senses relies on the sort of invasion of the
subject from which the other senses, indeed
the other mental faculties, would turn away
in disgust; it is entirely appropriate that in
Kant's characterization of disgust (quoted
above) the human being who is equipped
with that vitally important sensation be-
comes, in the following clause, an animal
threatened by its "inner ingestion," for the
disgusting violates the very autonomy and
in-dividuality of the subject-its human-
ity-that Kant has been busy establishing
throughout his project. The suspicion that
taste and smell are inherently disgusting to
Kant is strengthened by the fact that he
metaphorically extends the notion of disgust
to include any case in which the world is, as
we would say, "in our face." Thus, when a
thought "is forced upon us but is not benefi-
cial as nourishment for the mind"("wenn [der
Gedanke] uns aufgedrungen wird, und doch
als Geistes-Nahrung fir uns nicht gedeih-
lich ist" [Anthropologie BA 52]), we will per-
ceive it as disgusting ("widerlich"). Similarly,
the higher senses lose their objective edge
when they are assaulted by the world; thus
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too much sunlight will blind us for a while
and too loud a noise renders us temporarily
deaf.
It should come as no surprise, then, that
for the purposes of the third Critique the
first group of senses will be heavily privi-
leged, for not only are sight, hearing, and
(to a lesser extent) touch-by keeping a
proper distance--equipped with a greater
immunity against the disgusting, they also
for that reason provide a more reliable per-
ception of the world, which has the advan-
tage of being communicable to others, a key
feature of aesthetic judgment. To keep aes-
thetic judgment free and disinterested,
Kant must shield it from the intrusion of
the object and thus relies on a metaphori-
zation of gustatory taste. Aesthetic taste,
the third Critique reminds us, is "barbaric"
where it requires sensory excitation-
"Reize und Rtihrung" (KdU BA 38)-in or-
der to achieve pleasure; hence Kant at-
tempts to emancipate taste from the sort of
Riihrung and Beriihrung that the tongue
requires in order to do its work of tasting.
While the latter can only register the agree-
able ("das Angenehme"), it is metaphoric
taste, divorced from any immediate contact
with its object, that can pass judgments on
the beautiful.
Penthesilea will threaten, as I hope to
show, just this separation between meta-
phoric and literal senses of taste, but before
proceeding to the play it is worth noting
that this separation is hardly stable in the
Critique itself. It is the frequency with
which Kant draws the distinction between
aesthetic judgment and organic sense, the
vehemence with which he dismisses every-
thing having to do with eating as being
merely agreeable, that draws attention to
itself. At first, Kant's repeated assurances
that aesthetic and sensory taste are indeed
different might be read as a compensatory
rhetoric meant to counteract the actual or
perceived closeness of the two phenomena.
Such insistence is curious because by 1790,
the publication year of the third Critique,
the metaphorical usage of taste had long
 CHAOULI: Kleist 129
since established itself, even in Germany.
Already in 1727 the theoretician of taste
Johann Ulrich Konig noted in his Unter-
suchung von dem gutem Geschmack that
there were still some people who resisted
the figurative sense of Geschmack, thereby
implying that this usage was already well
entrenched.11 Why would Kant repeatedly
maintain that good taste has little to do
with things that taste good, when the philo-
sophical and even belletristic discourse of
his time had long since adopted this propo-
sition? Why, if not to insist precisely on the
connection between the two, to remind the
reader who may have forgotten (or may
never have known) of the gustatory under-
pinnings of metaphorical good taste? Al-
ready the Anthropologie provides us with a
first hint in this direction: in the manu-
script, Kant had entitled Section 18 "Von
den Sinnen des Schmeckens und Riechens,"
but changed this for the first edition to "Von
den Sinnen des Geschmacks und des
Riechens." It seems odd that Kant would
substitute Geschmack for Schmecken,
would erase an available semantic distinc-
tion between two words when he wants to
insist on their conceptual difference, unless
the real force of Geschmack lies in its very
ambiguity, in the way it simultaneously
keeps the literal and figurative senses of
taste in play. The third Critique continues
this game, insisting on the refinement of
one Geschmack while continually sticking
the reader's nose into the other, securing
the province of beauty while keeping alive
the demon of disgust. Penthesilea merely
mobilizes these counteracting forces.
II
Given these parameters, Penthesilea
can indeed be read as a text that journeys
from one aesthetic pole to the other, or more
precisely, from an aesthetic pole to a non-
aesthetic one, for the shrinkage of distance
is ofgreat and terrifying concern in the text.
The diminishing distance between Achilles
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and Penthesilea, which is teichoscopically
related to us in the chase scene at the be-
ginning (387-432), is already figured as
food for Penthesilea's voracity:
Wie sie, bis auf die Mihn' herabgebeugt,
Hinweg die Luft trinkt lechzend, die sie
hemmt!
Mit jedem Hufschlag,
Schlingt sie, wie hungerheiB, ein Stuck
des Weges,
Der sie von dem Peliden trennt, hinunter!
(405-407)
And if here she only metaphorically con-
sumes the distance that separates her from
his heart, we soon find that the play literal-
izes this motif, inexorably leading to the final
scene of ingestion in which the distance be-
tween the two is reduced to zero (indeed, to
be precise, to less than zero). What makes
Penthesilea's act truly disgusting-and thus
crucial to a consideration of aesthetics-is
that, besides swallowing Achilles, she con-
sumes the very concept of distance, that she
undoes the differentiation of eating and taste
on which aesthetic judgment has depended.
This act of consumption is charged with even
greater philosophical force when we consider
that the distance that becomes fodder for
Penthesilea's voracity separates her not
from just any object of desire, but from one
that is specifically figured as an aesthetic ob-
ject; take Achilles's glorious appearance, his
slow rise over the horizon as he approaches
on his horse:
Seht! Steigt dort uiber jenes Berges
Riicken,
Ein Haupt nicht, ein bewaffnetes, empor?
Ein Helm, von Federbiischen iiberschat-
tet?
Der Nacken schon, der macht'ge, der es
tragt?
Die Schultern auch, die Arme, stahl-
umglanzt?
Das ganze Brustgebild, o seht doch,
Freunde,
Bis wo der Leib der gold'ne Gurt
umschlieBt?
 130 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
Die Haiupter sieht man schon, geschmuiickt
mit Blessen,
Des RoBgespanns! Nur noch die Schenkel
sind,
Die Hufen, von der H6he Rand bedeckt!
Jetzt, auf dem Horizonte, steht das ganze
Kriegsfahrzeug da! So geht die Sonne
prachtvoll
An einem heitren Friihlingstage aufi
(356-369)12
As if to emphasize the aesthetic quality of
Achilles's appearance, the text presents him
at a double remove, distancing us from the
distance at which he stands; like the sun,
Achilles is figured both as a luminous object
located in the distance and as one whom we
can see not directly, but through a reflection,
in this case through teichoscopy, which di-
rects the sight of him through a linguistic
representation to our ears. This resplendent
aesthetic object is in short order robbed of its
distance and transformed into a piece of
tasty meat, thus reversing the metaphoriza-
tion of taste, accrued over several centuries,
in a matter of a few hours. The trajectory of
the play can be seen, at least at this point in
my argument, as moving from the possibility
of beauty to the reality of disgust.
The repercussions of the collapse of
taste-as-aesthetic-judgment into taste-as-
cannibalistic-desire become more evident if
we consider that Achilles is not just any
warrior, nor is his appearance announced
by means of just any image; his ascent is
that of the sun, with which he continues to
be closely identified throughout the drama.
During the chaotic confusion of battle, the
sun breaks through the clouds ("durch der
Wetterwolken RiBl" [1033]) and, of all
things, illuminates, laser-like, his head; in-
deed, in a remarkable metaphoric series,
the sun is first prosopopeically figured as
kissing Achilles (1062), only to become Pen-
thesilea's rival in love ("Nebenbuhl'rin"
[1064]), whom she jealously tries to over-
take, for through Artemis Penthesileais as-
sociated with the moon, the mere reflection
of the sun. But the sun occupies a special
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position among metaphors, for metaphors
are employed in language to clarify by
means of the sensible an abstraction, which
is something from which the sensible has
been drawn away. And every process that
involves such illumination (enlightenment,
illustration, clarification) depends in the fi-
nal analysis, as Derrida has pointed out, on
the presence of the sun.13 Metaphor-and
thus the sun-is indispensable to any liter-
ary (more generally: aesthetic) discourse,
not merely for the empirical reason that
literary texts use metaphors, but because
metaphor replicates, in its structure of sub-
stitution, the very notions of distance and
distinction that are at the foundation ofaes-
thetics. Metaphor maintains the sharp
separation between "natural" and "artifi-
cial" representation that Kant sees threat-
ened by the disgusting.
We do not have to look far in Penthesilea
to find the sun, nor its peculiar property of
being simultaneously figure and meta-fig-
ure, for when Achilles and the sun rise,
early in the play, their referential relation-
ship is left altogether open: "So geht die
Sonne... auf" leaves it undecidable in which
direction the arrow of figurative compari-
son points; both are possible: Achilles is
compared to the sun ("Look, Achilles rises
over the hill just like the sun does") and the
sun is compared to Achilles ("When the sun
rises, it is just like Achilles's glorious as-
cent"). Thus, if the positions of the two are
interchangeable and reversible, if they can
stand in for one another, if, that is, Achilles
is a metaphor for the metaphor of all meta-
phors, then the trajectory we have been
tracing-how figurative distance collapses
in the materiality of cannibalism, evoking
disgust-is much more serious than it at
first seemed, for it would also imply the
destruction-the collapse--of the master
metaphor of Western discourse. It is bad
enough that Penthesilea, accompanied by
her hounds, chews up the greatest hero of
Greek mythology; but what is worse, she
dismembers the very possibility of repre-
sentational-and thus aesthetic-discourse;
 CHAOULI: Kleist 131
what she violently annuls is not merely dis-
tance and taste, but the conditio sine qua
non for distance and taste.
III
Yet Penthesilea is not as monodirec-
tional as that, nor is its brutal treatment of
aesthetic metaphors as unequivocal. As
violent as the path that I havejust sketched
from aesthetic beauty to disgust might be,
it still relies on a stable relationship be-
tween the two terms; indeed, such a trans-
formation would cement, rather than un-
dermine, the Kantian distinction between
disgust and all other representations, for if
forcing Achilles down our throats marks the
collapse of distance and its attendant con-
cepts, it conversely assumes an intact aes-
thetic beginning, an Achilles who is all sun
and no meat. This is obviously not the case:
the first time we see the body of Achilles on
stage (rather than just hearing his linguis-
tic representation), far from embodying the
glory of the ascending sun, he is nothing
more than a wounded warrior, sweating
and bleeding (after 492, 503). Kleist does
not want us to miss this wound: for seventy-
five lines of text, while Greek generals hold
forth on strategy, two medics busy them-
selves with bandaging Achilles. The stand-
in for the sun, the figure of figure, is not
only flesh, but flesh that has been marked
by an incision, flesh that bears the traces
of, that has been inscribed with, Penthe-
silea's desire. But ifhere the aesthetic object
par excellence bears the marks of meaty
materiality from the very beginning (albeit
through a cut that, as war wound, is imme-
diately divorced from the body and in-
scribed into a discourse of heroics), then by
the end of the play, when Penthesilea
makes her marks not long-distance, by
means of bow and arrow, but at the shortest
distance, with her teeth, we must realize
that the piece of meat has also already been
an aesthetic object. For while Penthesilea,
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in a bout of madness, attempts to shrink
the distance between natural and artificial
representations of Achilles, while she at-
tempts to get beyond the name and at the
meat of Achilles, while she attempts to
sever his relationship with her love rival,
the sun, halting metaphoric movement-
attempts that are not a result of, but the
same thing as her madness-we, readers
and viewers, are permitted to maintain a
generically and linguistically secure dis-
tance from these events. The play, in other
words, does not move merely in one direc-
tion-Penthesilea gobbling down the dis-
tance between herself and Achilles with
such ferocity that she forgets to stop when
she reaches him-but also in the other, for
neither the consumption nor the consumed
is ever available to us at no distance, is
never simply disgusting, but always in-
scribed in a distancing, aesthetic register
(which, indeed, performs such inscription
on the body). Just as the rising sun is at
once literalized in flesh, the piece of flesh at
the end is, as we shall see in detail, more
than literal but always also figurative; it is,
for example, more than literal in that it al-
ludes back notjust to Achilles's wound, but
to the history of ecstatic devourings start-
ing with Euripides. Thus, what is at stake
in the play is not so much a movement from
the beautiful to the disgusting as an ap-
pearance of the disgusting in the beautiful,
and vice versa.
We finally never see how she devours
him. Like all of the play's other crucial
events--except for Penthesilea's suicide-
this, too, takes place offstage;14 indeed, it
is removed by one more degree in that it is
(aside from four lines, 2594-2597) not re-
lated through teichoscopy (which would
make it contemporaneous with the action
on stage and the audience's perception of
it), but reported after the fact by an Amazon
leader. Though such formal framing devices
are important to mark the event as aes-
thetic, we need look no further than the
language in this scene to recognize that,
were the Kantian divide between the beau-
 132 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
tiful and the disgusting stable, the text
could have been said to attempt to straddle
it. The poetic power that sustains the lines
that describe Achilles's dismemberment
derives from the cohabitation of metaphori-
cal language with its imminent annulment,
of flowers with wounds. Let us look at the
scene (as related by the Amazon Meroe) in
which he, hunted "like a young stag" ("gleich
einem jungen Reh" [2631]), is hiding in a
spruce from her, who pursues him "like a
huntress" ("gleich einem Jaiger" [2642]):
Und da er eben, die Gezweige offnend,
Zu ihren FiiBlen niedersinken will:
Ha! sein Geweih verrat' den Hirsch, ruft
sie,
Und spannt mit Kraft einer Rasenden, so-
gleich
Den Bogen an, daB sich die Enden kiissen,
Und hebt den Bogen auf und zielt und
schie3t,
Und jagt den Pfeil durch den Hals; er
sturzt. (2643-2649)
At the moment in which the play is poised
to plunge into the mayhem that will, accord-
ing to the trajectory we sketched above, cata-
pult it beyond the pale of the aesthetic, it
provides us with one of its most intricately
layered passages. We should not be fooled by
the sudden change from a hypotactic sen-
tence structure to the parataxis here, which
would at first glance suggest a breathless
recounting of events. Far from replacing the
beautiful with the disgusting, marking the
end of aesthetics, the cited passage and the
account ofAchilles's destruction that follows
depend on the functioning of the very signi-
fying structures that in our first reading we
had declared dead (killed, indeed, by this
scene): allusion, metaphor, an intricate play
of literal and figurative senses.
The passage-perhaps the play, which
Alfred Doblin has called "ein Leckerbissen
von Literaten"15-is ultimately about the
question of how Achilles will fall, how the
plunge into mayhem will take place, for
both main characters are intent on making
it happen: he would like to go down gently
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to her feet-"da er ... / Zu ihren FuiBen nie-
dersinken will"-yet she foils him and
causes him to fall violently, to collapse: "er
stiirzt." The difference is crucial, since nie-
dersinken always carries a guarantee of a
soft landing, for Achilles's futile gesture of
submission, as much as it is driven by panic
at this point, contains the seeds of his
earlier plan-to feign defeat in order to
possess Penthesilea-which would have
turned the nominal vanquished into the ac-
tual victor. Niedersinken is part of a ritual
of submission and mercy, that is, part of a
signifying game, and Achilles, as we know,
is a master at playing such games of signi-
fication, a master at turning meaning in-
side out: when, in scene 14, Penthesilea-
whom he has defeated but who, having
been unconscious, does not know (or does
not want to know)16 this turn of events-
asks him whether indeed he is her prisoner
(which he merely pretends to be), he replies,
"In jedem schon'ren Sinne, erhabne
Konigin! / Gewillt mein ganzes Leben
ftirderhin, / In deiner Blicke Fesseln zu
verflattern" (1611-1613).17 Indeed, Achil-
les has already once performed for us the
manner by which he means to use nied-
ersinken: while he still maintains the fiction
of a defeat at the hands of Penthesilea, she
queries him skeptically:
PENTHESILEA: Fiurchtest du, die dich in
Staub gelegt?
ACHILLES (zu ihren Fi/3en): Wie Blumen
Sonnenschein.
PENTHESILEA: Gut, gut gesagt.
So sieh mich auch wie deine Sonne an.
(1753-1755)
The gesture ofniedersinken here is a complex
one, for it echoes a fall to her feet that never
took place and foreshadows, indeed pro-
vokes, one that will; it is Achilles's pretense
here that makes Penthesilea into a Fury at
the end. The gesture of willed submission
parallels Achilles's clever simile, for he is at
her feet as much as he-the sun-is in need
ofsunshine, namely, not at all. Just how "well
said"this is becomes clearto Penthesilea only
 CHAOULI:
later, for what allows Achilles, by way of a
simile, to slip out of the position of the sun
and into its orbit is precisely the intactness
of the metaphorical system guaranteed by
the sun, i.e., precisely the fact that he still is
the sun, rather than a flower in need of it.
Thus, niedersinken can be read not so much
as a gesture ofsubmission, but as one ofmas-
tery, indeed, ofmastery through submission.
Stiirzen, by contrast, offers no hope of a
safe landing; in the course of the play, Sturz
is the mark of a terrifying loss of control, a
fall whose endpoint can be not only death
but, worse, confusion, obscurity, chaos, that
is, the end of a system of representation in
which the illuminating metaphor reigns.
The first fall of the play occurs when Achil-
les's horses recoil from an abyss ("Abgrund"
[262]), sending rider and horses into a cha-
otic entanglement: "Und im verworrenen
Geschirre fallend, / Zum Chaos, Pferd' und
Wagen, eingesttirzt, / Liegt unser Gotter-
sohn" (269-271). We find another pairing of
stiirzen and Chaos in scene 3, where, for the
first of many times, Achilles plays a trick
on Penthesilea; she falls for it and, as a
result, falls, stiirzt. As she closes in on him,
he changes course and pretends to take a
detour-a Bogen (416)-to his goal (the
safety of the Greek camp), luring her into
taking the straight route--Sehne (417) (lit-
eralizing the abstract are into a weapon)-
which leads to her fall when she overshoots
her goal:
DOLOPER: Wie sie, die Unaufhaltsame,
vorbei
SchieBt an dem Fuhrwerk -
MYRMIDONIER: Prellt, im Sattel fliegt,
Und stolpert -
DOLOPER: Sttirzt!
HAUPTMANN: Was?
MYRMIDONIER: Stiirzt, die K6nigin!
(425-427)
The fall of the queen (which Kleist displays,
as it were, in the cascading of verse 427 on
the printed page) is traumatic enough to re-
quire a double mention; and though Penthe-
silea does not die, she and the Amazons that
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Kleist 133
pile up on her offer a sight of utter loss of
order: "das Chaos war, / Das erst', aus dem
die Welt sprang, deutlicher" (437-438). All
of this might be viewed as preparation for
the final scene, which is appropriately an-
other-indeed a double-fall; for Achilles's
last fall, rendered with a lapidary "er sttirzt"
(2649), is followed quickly by Penthesilea's,
which itself is doubled: "Und stfirzt-sttirzt
mit der ganzen Meut', o Diana! / Sich uiber
ihn, und reiBt-reiBt ihn beim Helmbusch,
/ Gleich einer Hiindin, Hunden beigesellt"
(2657-2659).
But at the moment when everything
seems to be falling, when the text points to
its own collapse into chaos, to the end of the
signifying sun, it also manages to suspend
such movement, for the very process of
pointing, of reference, assumes a linguisti-
cally functioning sun. Almost every phrase
in the account of Penthesilea's savage de-
vouring ofAchilles resonates with allusions
to rich networks of imagery either inside
the play or out (or, indeed, both). I have
suggested some of the images associated
withstitrzen and niedersinken. I should also
note that the moment in which Penthesilea
discovers Achilles, the moment that sets
the stage for the fall into what, according
to a linear reading, would be chaos, is itself
a richly resonant one. The stag that Pen-
thesilea spots between the branches of the
spruce ("Ha! sein Geweih verrait' den
Hirsch" [2645]) cites the story of Artemis
(to whose temple, under "normal" circum-
stances, Achilles would have been taken)
in which the goddess turns Actaion into a
stag, who is then torn to bits by a pack of
dogs. Not only does this line provide us with
a multilayered allusion (to Artemis, to the
temple, to the moon with whom Penthesilea
is thus associated), it also does something
more crucial: precisely when Achilles is to
die, when, according to the logic we have
delineated, the process of metaphorization
is to come to an end, the presumed agent of
his destruction does not use Achilles's name
(i.e., the only signifier with only one signi-
fied), but uses instead a metaphor (stag)
 134 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
that in turn encapsulates an allegory. And
the metaphor does even more than that: it
also points us to a simile in the play's first
scene in which the roles of hunting hound
and hunted stag are reversed. Odysseus
complains here about how Achilles has
been distracted by Penthesilea from the
real task at hand, namely, the Trojan war:
Schafft den Peliden weg von diesem
Platze!
Denn wie die Dogg' entkoppelt, mit
Geheul
In das Geweih des Hirsches fallt: der
Jager,
ErfUillt von Sorge, lockt und ruft sie ab;
Jedoch verbissen in des Prachttiers
Nacken,
Tanzt sie durch Berge neben ihm, und
Strome,
Fern in des Walds Nacht hinein: so er,
Der Rasende, seit in der Forst des Krieges
Dies Wild sich von so seltner Art, ihm
zeigte.
Durchbohrt mit einem PfeilschuB, ihn zu
fesseln,
Die Schenkel ihm: er weicht, so schwort er,
eher
Von dieser Amazone Ferse nicht,
Bis er bei ihren seidnen Haaren sie
Von dem gefleckten Tigerpferd gerissen.
(212-225)
The allusive power ofPenthesilea's reference
to the stag becomes clear only once we look
at this passage, for here all the elements that
constitute the end-hound, stag, throat,
dance,18 arrow, and death-are present but
in inverted form: here Achilles is the hound,
Penthesilea the deer, and Odysseus guides
the arrow; even the famous heel has been
passed from Achilles to Penthesilea. It would
be reductive, though, to argue that the play
stages such an inversion, exchanging in es-
sence Achilles's and Penthesilea's posi-
tions;19 such a claim would indeed merely
radicalize (and simplify) the claim that the
play stages an inversion of beauty and dis-
gust by identifying those terms with the two
characters. But, as I have suggested, some-
thing more complicated is at stake here,
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something that is announced by the very first
figure of the work:
Du siehst auf diesen Feldern,
Der Griechen und der Amazonen Heer,
Wie zwei erboste Wolfe sich umkaimpfen:
Tot sinken die VerbiBnen heut noch
nieder,
Des einen Zahn im Schlund des anderen.
(3-5, 10-11)
Rather than map the hunt between Penthe-
silea and Achilles onto this stag or that
hound, it may be more accurate to refer to
the two wolves that have their teeth, Escher-
like, buried in one another's throat. (Is it
clear, after all, who is hunting whom in this
play?) Indeed, the two tendencies that have
their teeth perhaps most deeply buried in
one another are beauty and disgust, the aes-
thetic and its other, the possibility of meta-
phor and its limits (to suggest three distinct
ways of framing the issue).
Nowhere is metaphor-and the very
concept of metaphor-played out more
resonantly than in the image of the Bogen,
which covers a semantic field well beyond
bow and arc. It is again a motif that calls
attention to itself by its double appearance
in this most economical of texts:
Und spannt mit Kraft der Rasenden,
sogleich
Den Bogen an, daB sich die Enden kiissen,
Und hebt den Bogen auf und schieBt,
Und jagt den Pfeil ihm durch den Hals; er
stuirzt. (2646-2649)
Bogen, in the sense of archer's bow, does nu-
merous duties at once in the text: it is not
just a weapon of war but, of course, as the
kiss in the above passage suggests, Cupid's
tool; in Penthesilea we are never allowed to
think of one without the other. (Indeed, the
kiss of the bow's two ends has been read as
the forcible unification of desire and vio-
lence.20) The bow is also doubly crucial to the
"Frauenstaat" (1958), for it both founds the
women's state and dissolves it; it is at the
moment in which Tanais reaches for the cere-
 CHAOULI:
monial bow that is to make her the first
queen of the Amazons that a doubting voice
interrupts the ritual, questioning whether
full-bosomed women will be able to pull a
bow tautly enough to defend themselves
against hostile, and male, neighbors. The
queen's response is swift and radical:
Doch als die feige Regung um sich griff,
RiB sie die rechte Brust sich ab, und
taufte:
Die Fraun, die den Bogen spannen
wiirden,
Und fiel zusammen, eh' sie noch vollendet:
Die Amazonen oder Busenlosen!
Hierauf ward ihr die Krone aufgesetzt.
(1985-1990)21
The fact that it is an act of self-castration
that founds the new state should surprise us
only if we expected the "Frauenstaat" to op-
erate according to an entirely different logic
of self-legitimation than men's states. If
there is a difference, it is to be found not in
the self-mutilation that allAmazons perform
on themselves, but in the movement of the
bow. For after the crowning, when the crucial
moment of the constitution-the naming-
of the state has passed, when the fluidity of
confusion yields to the fixity of baptism,
something more is added: the fall--Sturz--
of the bow which the high priestess had held
out for Tanais to mark her ascent to the
throne but which now, with the queen's col-
lapse, has nowhere to go but down:
Nichts als der Bogen lieI3 sich schwirrend
horen,
Der aus den Hiinden, leichenblal3 und
starr,
Der Oberpriesterin darniederfiel.
Er sttirzt', der groBe, goldene, des Reichs,
Und klirrte vor der Marmorstufe dreimal,
Mit dem Gedr6hn der Glocken, auf, und
legte,
Stumm wie der Tod, zu ihren FiBen sich.
(1995-2001)
The figure that both of these passages pre-
sent is the paradox of a foundation in the
midst of a fall; if Tanais names the new state
(which will distinguish itself through a lack:
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Kleist 135
those without a breast) in the moment of her
collapse-thus also establishing herself as
founder in the very motion of her fall-the
bow which is the sign of the founding in the
first place also marks the new beginning by
its fall. We have witnessed here the precise
symbolic structure of the birth of a new in-
stitution, for what at first seems like an ab-
erration from the usual ritual oflegitimizing
power (rather than clutching the bow, Tanais
drops it) becomes fixed as the sign of the new
order, or rather: it fixes what was a state of
fluid signification ("feige Regung") into a par-
ticular meaning. We can see the new master
signifier at work towards the end of the play
when Penthesilea has returned from her out-
burst of cannibalism, and when the moment
of her abdication, of the dissolution of her
bond with the state, consists of the dropping
of the bow (after 2768), vividly echoing the
language ofthe above passage; but according
to the paradoxical logic of the fall, it is im-
mediately interpreted by the Amazons not
as an abdication, but rather, as a reaffirma-
tion of her queenship:
ERSTE AMAZONE: Der Bogen stiirzt' ihr aus
der Hand darnieder!
ZWEITE: Seht, wie er taumelt -
VIERTE: Klirrt, und wankt, und fillt - !
ZWEITE: Und noch einmal am Boden zuckt -
DRITTE: Und stirbt,
Wie er der Tanais geboren ward. (Pause)
OBERPRIESTERIN: ...
Die groBe Stifterin des Frauenreiches,
Die Tanais, das gesteh' ich jetzt, sie hat
Den Bogen wtird'ger nicht gefiihrt als du.
(2769-2778)
Thus the arc-Bogen-that spans the time
from one fall ofthe Bogen to the other defines
precisely the lifespan of the Amazon state (a
life that falls, strictly speaking, between two
deaths [2001, 2771]), in which, according to
the highest ritual authority among the Ama-
zons, wielding the bow with dignity means
letting it fall. The logic ofa bow that sustains
an edifice while falling finds its architectural
expression in the arch-Bogengewolbe-that
is held up by the keystone-Schluf3stein, or
 136 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
Bogenschluf3. While visiting the town of
Wiirzburg, Kleist found himself fascinated
by this phenomenon. In a letter to his fianc6e,
Wilhelmine von Zenge, he articulates his
reading of a gate structure that may help us
with our reading of the passage: "Warum,
dachte ich, sinkt wohl das Gewolbe nicht ein,
da es doch keine Stiitze hat? Es steht,
antwortete ich, weil alle Steine auf einmal
einstisrzen wollen."22 That collapsing and
supporting, stisrzen and stiutzen, should be
so close, indeed, that the stability of the arch
should depend on the simultaneous fall of its
elements, is a motif that is employed notjust
in the passages dealing with the founding of
the state, but all over Penthesilea.
Most explicitly, the image of the arch is
evoked by Prothoe as a simile for the con-
stitution of the subject. Admonishing Pen-
thesilea, who is dejected because of her de-
feat at the hands of Achilles, Prothoe offers
this advice:
Steh, steh fest, wie das Gew6lbe steht,
Weil seiner Bl6cke jeder stuirzen will!
Beut deine Scheitel, einem SchlulJstein
gleich,
Der G6tter Blitzen dar, und rufe, trefft!
Und laB dich bis zum FuB herab zerspal-
ten. (1349-1353)23
Again, the notions of disintegration and fall
are not in contradiction with a stable struc-
ture but are, rather, its condition; even if the
subject is split from head to toe, it will hold
together as long as all its parts are in a state
of simultaneous stiurzen. The image of the
self-supporting arch renders perhaps most
accurately the conflicting tendencies we
have been sketching in the play, for if there
is a movement of disintegration, loss of dis-
tance, death of metaphor, disgust, it is met
by a counterforce that makes the first trajec-
tory available as an aesthetic object, resplen-
dent with beautiful figurative language.
Thus, if this play stages a collapse of meta-
phor, it does not collapse into simple disgust,
but is suspended in its fall.24 This is also how
we must read the peculiar language of the
play: it does not, as some have suggested,
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mirror a state of disintegration, ofZerrissen-
heit, but it follows rather the logic of the col-
lapsing arch: only when the splintered, de-
contextualized language blocks lean on each
other in precisely the right way can the sen-
tence precariously hold together.
But the text does not stop here, for the
metaphor of the arc is at once literalized
and metaphorized, both in close conjunc-
tion with one another. When there is a
metaphoric arc, we know the sun cannot be
far off. And indeed, both the passage taken
from Kleist's letter and Prothoe's speech are
surrounded by references to the sun. "Als
die Sonne herabsank," Kleist writes to Wil-
hemine with the pathos that fills so many
of his letters, "war es mir, als ob mein Gluick
unterginge" (SW 2:606). But then he walks
under the arched gate, and the fear that his
happiness may be sinking like (or with) the
sun is quickly dispelled by the comfort
("Trost") that the sight of the suspended
arch offers him. He then recalls that he had
had a similar moment of comfort earlier:
Ich stand naimlich mit dem Riicken gegen
die Sonne und blickte lang in einen lebhaf-
ten Regenbogen. So fillt doch, dachte ich,
immer ein Strahl von Glick auf unser Le-
ben, und wer der Sonne selbst den Riicken
kehrt und in die triibe Wetterwolke
schaut, dem wirft ihr sch6nres Bild der
Regenbogen zu (606).
The comfort that this sight affords Kleist, we
may surmise, does not merely lie in the
rather tired moral ofthe silver lining in times
of darkness, but is to be found above all in
the fact that the aesthetic system of the sun
functions no matter what; the sign ofits func-
tioning is the aesthetic surplus that it pro-
duces in the rainbow (itself a sign par excel-
lence) which is no mere zero-sum reflection
ofthe sun, but rather one that reflects a more
beautiful image ("ihr sch6nres Bild") even
than the sun itself can project.
The pairing of the arch and the move-
ment of the sun in the letter is not acciden-
tal, for the sight of the arch lifts his spirits
precisely at the moment when the sun is
 CHAOULI:
about to set. But what could be more uplift-
ing than discovering in the arched gate a
substitute, a metaphor, for the sun itself,
both in the geometrical form the two de-
scribe (the sun doubly so, in its apparent
turning motion and its reflection in the
rainbow) and, more important, in the fact
that arch and sun function according to the
same principle, namely without a support-
ing beam-a Stiutze-but rather through a
mysterious process of suspension which im-
mediately gives rise to metaphors. We must
keep this rich background in play when
Prothoe suggests the image of the arch, for
it is accompanied in the same scene by both
the metaphorical primal arc (we could say,
the arch-arc), the sun, and a literalized
arch, a bridge. Shortly before Prothoe's
speech, Penthesilea asks: "Wo steht die
Sonne?" (1320). Though this is no doubt on
one level a simple query about the time of
day, it is of course also an inquiry into Achil-
les's position, where he stands vis-a-vis
Penthesilea. But her mistake is to believe
that he stands still, as she herself, having
stared unflinchingly-"unverwandt" (after
1337)-into the sun, woefully concedes a
few lines later: "Zu hoch, ich weif3, zu hoch
- / Er spielt in ewig fernen Flammen-
kreisen / Mir um den sehnsuchtsvollen
Busen hin" (1342-1344). If "unverwandt"
suggests a fascinated desire for Achilles, a
desire so powerful that it risks a direct and
sustained gaze into the sun, it also implies
an essential division between Penthesilea
and the heavenly object, it implies that they
are not related, not verwandt. For while she
recognizes that he moves like Helios in dis-
tant and unattainable spheres, her phan-
tasm lies in believing that she, who through
Artemis is identified with the moon, re-
mains at rest while the sun revolves around
her ("Er spielt ... / Mir um den ... Busen
hin"). We can locate Penthesilea's insanity
in this cosmic constellation: it was hubris
spurred by jealousy when she wanted to
overtake the sun in its turns earlier in the
play (1061), but at least there she bowed to
the sun's movement; what we witness here
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Kleist 137
is the opposite tendency, namely the at-
tempt to halt the sun, to make it do what
Penthesilea believes she does, namely rest.
Thus the hopeful "Wo steht die Sonne?" and
thus the scene of utter madness when,
standing on the literalized arch-that is,
the bridge-she schemes to heap the moun-
tains Ida and Ossa onto one another to pull
down the sun, to pull down Achilles, to be
precise, the "goldne Flammenhaare" (1384)
that meld Achilles and the sun into a single
image. The megalomania turns abruptly
into an insane narcissistic fantasy when,
gazing down from the bridge into the water
where she sees the sun reflected, she imag-
ines that he is already at her feet, and
moves to join the sun's, and presumably her
own, reflection in the water (1388). The
tragi-comedy of the scene is inescapable:
mistaking the sun's reflection for the thing
itself is already an act of stupidity (for the
sun is always only available to our percep-
tion in reflections), but then attempting to
embrace the reflection to be closer to the
original is worthy of a Kaspar Hauser. Yet
the scene is also deeply moving because it
presents us with desires in Penthesilea that
militate against one another. It foreshad-
ows the moment when Achilles is indeed
thrown to her feet, when all the metaphori-
cal turnings have been embodied in the
tooth that pierces his chest and he is, finally,
laid to rest (or so it seems).
Yet (and there is always a yet in Kleist)
this foreshadowing of the horror that is to
befall metaphorical discourse is rendered
in language that attempts to play the
games of metaphoric substitution that the
sun enables. More important, Penthesilea's
desire for the Greek warrior is fueled not
by love at first sight-by immediacy of ex-
perience-but by the division of signifier
and signified that makes figurative lan-
guage possible; for Penthesilea does not de-
sire Achilles but "Achilles," a name passed
on to her by her dying mother in clear con-
travention of Amazon law, as the high
priestess observes: "Ziemt's einer Tochter
Ares, Konigin, / Im Kampfe einem Namen
 138 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
sich zu stellen?"(1045-1046). Thus the very
driving force of the play-Penthesilea's
nymphomaniacal desire-is a desire not for
the immediacy of the body (assuming such
a thing to be possible) but precisely for a
word.25 Penthesilea's tragedy lies not so
much in the fact that in order to possess
Achilles she must kill him as in the fact that
in order to kill him she must submit to him;
every time she attempts to break out of the
system of metaphors for which Achilles
stands, she is only thrown back into its orbit
with greater force. And her madness lies in
the fact that she attempts to invert the
movement of metaphor: not content with
being a heliotrope, following Helios's move-
ment above her head, she attempts to apply
the principle of substitution to the sun itself,
offering to become Achilles's sun.26
Even though she chews him up, she
fails, as she must. Penthesilea can never
strike Achilles where she intends to, for to
do so would pull the rug out from under her
own feet. She learns early in the play that
there is no shortcut to the arc of the sun's
movement, that any such attempt must fall
short: during the chase scene we have al-
ready considered, when Achilles moves
playfully along the arc of a bow-"Er lenkt
im Bogen spielend noch" (416)-she, at-
tempting a shortcut, takes the string, only
to plunge-stiirzen-into a disorder more
obscure than chaos. Or else she overshoots
her goal, voraciously consuming the dis-
tance between herself and Achilles, finally
consuming the target as well as the path.
Even when she fells him with an arrow, she
still suspects-correctly-that she may
have missed the mark:
Doch ein Verraiter ist die Kunst des
Schiitzen;
Und gilt's den MeisterschuB ins Herz des
Gliickes,
So ffihren tick'sche Gotter uns die Hand.
- Traf ich zu nah' ihn, wo es gilt? (2888-
2891)
Her master shot has, of course, missed
the mark, the heart of happiness, for she
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hits him where she may think it counts, in
the throat. But if that shot was supposed
to cut off his voice, halt the production of
playfully turning (i.e., deceptive) meta-
phoric language, it fails; not only does it not
manage to mute Achilles, who there utters
perhaps his most beautifully moving
lines,27 but it fails even to bring about the
collapse of figurative language, for Penthe-
silea relies both here and in her suicide on
the presence of that which she vainly at-
tempts to dismember. When in the final
scene, strongly reminiscent of Oedipus Rex,
the queen, relentlessly questioning her
subordinates about the murderer of Achil-
les, finally discovers that she herself is the
person she seeks, we find her trying halt-
ingly to put into words what has happened.
She corrects the high priestess's euphemis-
tic "Du trafst ihn" (2975) with the brutal
"Ich zerriB ihn" (2975), and though we may
be led to believe that this marks the advent
of a simple, direct, non-metaphorical, non-
deceptive language, that is not the case. For
in what follows the entire movement of em-
bodiment that the cannibalism was sup-
posed to accomplish is reversed in a series
of puns, rhymes, and metaphors. "KuiBt ich
ihn nicht? Zerrissen wirklich? sprecht?"
(2978); there is no answer to the question,
except the one that Penthesilea herself pro-
vides, namely, that yet again she missed
the mark: "So war es ein Versehen. Kiisse,
Bisse, / Das reimt sich, und wer recht von
Herzen liebt, / Kann schon das eine fiir das
andere greifen" (2981-2983). If it was a
Versehen, rather than the Versprechen that
she uses a few lines later (2986), we can
identify her misdirected gaze as nothing
other than her unflinching look into the
sun; that does not yield blindness but
rather the continued ability to operate un-
der the aegis of the sun, for Versehen is, of
course, a metaphor for Versprechen. But the
triumph of metaphoric discourse, of aes-
thetic distance, comes precisely where we
thought it had been demolished, for Pen-
thesilea's terrifying deed is due to a linguis-
tic slip that causes her to use her teeth
 CHAOULI:
rather than her lips when she meets Achil-
les. She is both literally and figuratively
"der raschen Lippe Herr nicht" (2987), and
she merely makes the sort ofmistake-sub-
stituting one word for a similar one-that
is normal in treacherous linguistic systems
governed by the sun. Thus Prothoe is quite
correct in suggesting that Penthesilea does
not move about "In des Verstandes Sonnen-
finsternis" (2902); the high priestess agrees
when she formulates her wish that Penthe-
silea may be covered in "ew'ge Mitternacht"
(2980), thereby indicating that, at the mo-
ment, she stands in bright sunlight.28
We can conclude with another rhyme
that has received far less attention than
Kiisse and Bisse; if Kiisse and Bisse main-
tain the sort of perilous closeness that the
bow's two kissing ends suggest (and if the
very imperfection of the rhyme implies the
complications such a kiss calls forth), then
the relationship between Bif3 and Rif3 (be-
fore Penthesilea speaks of kissing or biting
Achilles, she mentions tearing him up ["Ich
zerriB3 ihn"]) points to a process in which
disgusting acts and literary production are
fused. There have been many attempts at
reading the entire drama in terms of a the-
matics ofZerrissenheit, that is, an emphasis
on the sort of alienation and disintegration
that separates the modern mode of cultural
production from a classical one.29 The
trouble with such a point of departure is not
that it is incorrect, but that it is always
correct; there is hardly a point in the history
of Western writing before which one cannot
suppose an era of wholeness.30 It might be
more productive to read Rif3 and reif3en
more strictly in terms ofthe logic ofthe play;
and while a full-fledged investigation of the
topos would exceed the limits of this study,
we can sketch the lines along which such a
reading might take place. The earliest
meaning ofRif, Grimms Deutsches Worter-
buch reminds us, much like scriptura and
writ, is the drawing of furrows in a field,
and quickly thereafter, of letters and signs;
it is related to ritzen, to cut, to etch; the word
also denotes not just the process of such
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Kleist 139
marking, but also the product itself, i.e.,
writing and drawing. But Ri/3 is also, still
according to Grimm, the name for the prey
that a predator has caught. We can already
see how these meanings begin to converge
on the most common sense of the word-
cut, tear, incision-in the final hunt scene
of the play. For Penthesilea, who has been
compared to a wild cat countless times, does
not merely corner her prey here, nor does
she merely cut him up, but she inscribes
him, as she has done earlier, with the marks
of her desire. Though the play places itself
into the mythological time before writing,
we can read it as a long and increasingly
violent writing exercise in which Achilles is
writ, is written upon, at steadily decreasing
range and with steadily increasing harm.
When we first see him, as we have already
noted, he has been cut by one of her-and
Cupid's-arrows (and already here we can
see that this cut inscribes Achilles into the
discourse of desire and violence); later we
find him injured ("Geritzt am Arm," as she
says [1757]) after his direct confrontation
with Penthesilea during which she gets
knocked off her horse (and again the con-
nection between such a cut in the body and
a discourse of desire is made explicit for
us31). And finally, her "rasche Lippe," her
instrument of speech, bares the last writing
tool, her teeth, with which she scribbles
madly-what? Kiisse/Bisse?-all over his
body. If Penthesilea's attack is indeed, as so
many have maintained, an embodiment of
themes generally treated in an abstract
register,32 then it is also an embodiment of
the Versprechen that caused it in the first
place, i.e., it is the process of linguistic pro-
duction-cutting, writing-on the body.33
We are left with the most condensed,
and thus the most gruesome image encap-
sulating our reading of the drama. Penthe-
silea, towering over Achilles and tearing
him to bits, certainly seems to tear to
shreds, as I have attempted to show, all of
the careful distinctions and distances on
which an aesthetic discourse depends. Yet
the very gesture of tearing, of writing, of
 140 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
substituting Bisse for Kiisse, requires at the
same time that the edifice under attack re-
main intact, for it is necessary for a repre-
sentation of the attack. Put in its briefest
form, this play attempts a representation
of disgust, an impossible task since, as we
know from Kant, disgust cannot be repre-
sented. Penthesilea does it by depicting dis-
gust always also as a process ofwriting, and
writing always perilously close to the dis-
gusting. The way in which this paradox is
kept in play is that in which the arch re-
mains standing.
Notes
1Review in the Nordische Miszellen, Dec.
1808, reprinted in Heinrich von Kleists Lebens-
spuren: Dokumente und Berichte der Zeitgenos-
sen, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 2nd ed. (Bremen:
Carl Schiinemann, 1964) No. 282.
2For gender we might read the richer term
Geschlecht, for it subsumes race, family, and
gender in one, and all three are indeed deeply
intertwined with the sense of strangeness that
the play has provoked. I know of no study that
has rigorously connected the precarious posi-
tions of nation and gender in Penthesilea. Many
of the feminist readings I have consulted make
strong arguments about the asymmetry in this
war of the sexes; see for example Inge Stephan,
"'Da werden Weiber zu Hyinen ...'--Amazo-
nen und Amazonenmythen bei Schiller und
Kleist," Feministische Literaturwissenschaft,
ed. Inge Stephan and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin: Ar-
gument, 1984) 23-42. Carol Jacobs provides a
brilliant reading of the play in a chapter of her
book Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley,
Bronte, Kleist (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP,
1989) entitled "The Rhetorics of Feminism"
(85-114), though the chapter says not a word
about feminism, leaving it to the reader to
make the connections. I agree with Chris Cul-
lens and Dorothea von Mitcke, who maintain in
their well-argued Lacanian reading of the play:
"In its very insistence on the tension between
the constructed artificiality of any cultural or-
der and the intervention of accident and
chance, the play defies any feminist essentiali-
zation." Chris Cullens and Dorothea von Mucke,
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"Love in Kleist's Penthesilea and Kdthchen von
Heilbronn," Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift fur
Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte
63.3 (Sept. 1989): 461-93, here 478.
3For Goethe's censure, see his letter to
Kleist (1 Feb. 1808) in Lebensspuren No. 224.
4Cf. William C. Reeve: "Goethe's repudia-
tion became widely known and has been held
largely responsible for the fact that the tragedy
had to wait seventy years for its first perfor-
mance." William C. Reeve, Kleist on Stage:
1804-1987 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-
Queen's, 1993) 79. For an excellent overview of
the history of Penthesilea productions, see the
section "Auffuhrungen" in the appendix of
Heinrich von Kleist, Dramen 1808-1811, ed.
Ilse Marie Barth (with the collaboration of
Hans Rudolf Barth) and Hinrich C. Seeba
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987)
733-49, vol. 2 of Sdmtliche Werke und Briefe
(referred to hereafter as the Klassiker edition;
all references to the play are to this edition and
will be given parenthetically); see also Reeve
78-111. While Kleist's plays, especially Der zer-
brochene Krug and Das Kdthchen von Heil-
bronn, have been quite popular on German-
speaking stages, there have been very few
productions of Penthesilea in the past decade,
and only one, Hans Jiirgen Syberberg's produc-
tion in which Edith Clever played all the parts,
provoked a lively reception in the press. The
play's halting reception is not confined to its
stage version alone; when in 1885, more than
three quarters of a century after Penthesilea's
first publication, Theophil Zolling prepared an
edition of Kleist's collected works, the play's ori-
ginal print run of 750 copies was still not sold
out. See the Klassiker edition 685.
5For example, "In both cases the metaphor
ceases to be figurative or Symbolic and becomes
one with the act it has formerly described. The
conflation of word and deed or malfunctioning
of the Symbolic constitutes madness." Ingrid
Stipa, "Kleist's Penthesilea: From Misappre-
hension to Madness," Seminar 27.1 (Feb. 1991):
27-38, here 36.
6Benjamin Hederich, "Penthesilea," Griind-
liches mythologisches Lexikon (Reprint, Darm-
stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1967), column 1940. Cf. also the entry on Achil-
les, especially column 37.
7Lebensspuren No. 283. Even when mar-
shaling condemnatory evidence the reviewer is
 CHAOULI:
loath to mention that Penthesilea participates
in, indeed leads, her dogs' attack on Achilles.
8Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft,
ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1979) A 187, B 189 (A refers to the first
edition of 1790, B to the second edition of 1793).
Hereafter cited as KdU).
9Jacques Derrida has articulated some of
the consequences of this exclusion: "The abso-
lute excluded [l'exclu absolu] does not allow it-
self even to be granted the status of an object of
negative pleasure or of ugliness redeemed by
representation. It is unrepresentable. At the
same time it is unnameable in its singularity.
If one could name it or represent it, it would
begin to enter into the auto-affective circle of
mastery or reappropriation. An economy would
be possible. The disgusting X cannot even an-
nounce itself as a sensible object without im-
mediately being caught up in a teleological
hierarchy. It is therefore in-sensible and un-in-
telligible, irrepresentable and unnameable, the
absolute other of the system." Jacques Derrida,
"Economimesis," Diacritics 11.2 (Summer
1981): 3-25, here 22. It would be fascinating to
explore to what extent this excluded other su-
stains the argument of the third Critique, to
what extent the exclusion of disgust is necessa-
ry to maintain the coherence of what remains.
The question here, however, is whether Penthe-
silea merely presents a disgusting scene or
whether Penthesilea herself becomes the dis-
gusting object, since she seems to match Derri-
da's last description perfectly. Through the
course of the play she has been declared insen-
sible ("sinnberaubt" [342]), unintelligible ("Un-
begreifliche" [18111), unnameable ("sie, die for-
tan kein Name nennt" [2607]), and not so much
irrepresentable as incapable of representing
anything (the state, herself).
10Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in prag-
matischer Hinsicht, in Schriften zur Anthropo-
logie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Paid-
agogik, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 2 vols. [vol. 11
and 12 of Werkausgabe] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1977) 2: BA 47 (A refers to the first edition of
1798, B to the second edition of 1800). Hereafter
cited as Anthropologie.
11Konig is cited in Ute Frackowiak, Der gute
Geschmack: Studien zur Entwicklung des Ge-
schmacksbegriffs (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
1994) 211.
12As the commentary of the Klassiker edi-
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Kleist 141
tion points out (797, 847), Achilles appears here
as a collection of limbs, foreshadowing no doubt
the carving into limbs which is to be his fate. It
is as though we were observing a staging of
Lacan's mirror stage, for only after all the body
parts have been assembled does one of the
Greeks subsume them under one signifier-
"Achilleus ist's!" (370)-making out of the dis-
connected body parts a subject.
13Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Me-
taphor in the Text of Philosophy," Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1982) 207-71, here 251.
14Stipa has remarked: "In keeping with the
conception of madness as exclusion, most of the
so-called 'verriickte' events of the drama take
place at some distance from center-stage" (29).
15Helmut Sembdner, ed., Heinrich von
Kleists Nachruhm: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte in
Dokumenten (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1984) No.
623a.
16Losing consciousness is yet another motif
that is played on both a figurative and a literal
register. Having recovered consciousness after
the fall, she professes her desire for Achilles
("An diese Brust will ich ihn niederziehn"
[1192]) which prompts Prothoe, her confidante,
to say: "Der Sturz / Hat villig ums BewuBtsein
sie gebracht" (1194-1195).
17We should not moralize and accuse Achil-
les of manipulation when he merely employs
the full range of possibilities that language of-
fers. He is certainly aware of the tendency in
language to produce lies; when threatened by
an Amazon princess, he comments, "Ich kann's
nicht glauben: sfiB, wie Silberklang, / Straft
eure Stimme eure Reden luigen" (1428-1429).
The argument is clear: voice and speech mili-
tate against one another, the former belonging
to truth, the latter to lies. It does not take long
(exactly fourteen lines) to discover on which
side Achilles finds himself, for it turns out that
the sentence about the distinction between
voice and speech is already on the side of
speech, i.e., on the side of lies and deception
("Schmeichelworte" as one Amazon correctly
recognizes [1439]). Penthesilea articulates the
opposite position; when she thinks that her ad-
missions of love have fallen on deaf ears, she
laments: "Was ich ihm zugeflistert, hat sein
Ohr / Mit der Musik der Rede bloB getroffen?"
(2388-2389). Here, the sound of words is pre-
cisely what makes them into lies, or at least,
 142 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 1996
sources of misunderstanding. Her suspicion of
words goes so far that she even mistrusts
names, preferring to give a description of her
features instead of a name (1814-1815, 1819-
1821).
18For example: "Seht, wie sie ... / Voll
Kampflust ihm entgegentanzt!" (1058-1059).
19This inversion caused immense irritation
among the early readers of the play. For while
Achilles's exploits (both in the play and in
myth) do not exactly conform to the standards
of an eighteenth-century gentleman, they are
nevertheless a proper object of aesthetic repre-
sentation; Penthesilea's deeds are merely loath-
some and disgusting. It is clear that the gender
difference plays a role in this schema; what pre-
cisely such a role might be, however, is far less
clear, and deserving of a full-fledged investi-
gation.
20For example in the commentary of the
Klassiker edition 848.
21The naming proceeds according to the du-
bious etymology of Amazone current at Kleist's
time.
22Heinrich von Kleist, Sdmtliche Werke und
Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 2nd ed. (Munich:
Carl Hanser, 1961) 2: 606. Hereafter cited as
SW.
23My reading of this passage is indebted to
Cullens and von Miicke, "Love in Kleist's Pen-
thesilea" 472.
24The notion of a collapse that, in the mo-
ment of falling, does not merely destroy but also
creates structures is literalized most famously
in Kleist's story "Das Erdbeben in Chili," in
which falling walls, before collapsing into a
heap of debris, hold each other up, creating a
momentary triangular tunnel through which
one of the protagonists escapes to safety.
25For a somewhat different reading, see
Cullens and von Muicke: "Achill, excluded from
the laws of exchange and substitution the Ama-
zons apply to the male foes they consider the
representatives of Mars, thus becomes through
his immunity the exclusive representative, who
thereby stands in direct relation to the god of
war, if he cannot be equated with him" (467).
Though this is the case, my claim would be that,
far from being excluded from the laws of ex-
change and substitution, Achilles is their rep-
resentative; the commerce between Achilles
and "Achilles" effectively moves those laws in-
side the sign of Achilles.
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26Again Cullens and von Mucke: "This iden-
tification ofAchill with Apollo originates chiefly
in Penthesilea's attempts to arrest undifferen-
tiation and arbitrariness through singling out
an Other who coincides with the perfect gaze"
(467). But what we, and Penthesilea, discover
here is that the Other is already marked by a
cut, that he already lacks wholeness. And in-
deed, Penthesilea is, as we have seen, not con-
tent in being the object of a gaze but wants to
return Achilles's gaze.
27Er, in dem Purpur seines Bluts sich
walzend,
Ruihrt ihre sanfte Wange an, und ruft:
Penthesilea! meine Braut! was tust du?
Ist dies das Rosenfest, das du ver-
sprachst? (2662-2665)
28Cullens and von Mficke maintain the
opposite: "Penthesilea's love has persistently
resisted the laws of language, the fact that
meaning can only be constructed through the
differentiation of the signifiers and not through
a sheer act of identification and naming" (476).
This is only one side of the coin, for what kills
Penthesilea is that she tries, and fails, to have
her "Achilles" and eat him too.
29Thus for example Walter Miller-Seidel,
who locates Zerrissenheit in both Penthesilea
and Achilles: "Zugleich sind die Bilder der Spie-
gel eben jener Welt, die man sich im dichteri-
schen Weltbild Kleists als eine gespaltene und
gebrechliche zu denken hat." Walter Muiller-
Seidel, "Penthesilea im Kontext der deutschen
Klassik," Kleists Dramen: Neue Interpretatio-
nen, ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1981) 144-71, 158. Or Benno von Wiese: "In
dieser tragischen Selbst-ZerreiBung gerat der
Mensch in jenen Zustand des Wahnsinns ...
Solcher Wahnsinn ist wie Zerbrechen der bis-
her gelebten Einheit." Benno von Wiese, Die
deutsche Tragidie von Lessing bis Hebbel
(Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1955) 324f Or,
with more nuance, Gerhard Kaiser: "Hier fin-
det sich nicht mehr die Kunstwelt der Hoch-
klassik, die tendenziell noch im 'Zerbrochenen
Krug' und im 'Amphitryon' ... vorhanden ist;
hier st6ljt Kleist am weitesten in seinen Wer-
ken zu einer Kunstform vor, welche die Zerris-
senheit der Welt auch in ihrem eigenen Zerrei-
Ben darstellt." Gerhard Kaiser, Wandrer und
Idylle (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1977) 213. The notion ofa "zerreil3enden Wahn-
sinn" is already used in 1809 by Franz Horn in
 CHAOULI: Kleist 143

his Umrisse zur Geschichte und Kritik der sch6-
nen Literatur Deutschlands, cited in Heinrich
von Kleist, Penthesilea: Dokumente und Zeug-
nisse, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Frankfurt: Insel,
1967) 41.
30In this supposition, both conservative cri-
tics, who condemn representations of fragmen-
tation and mutilation, and progressive critics,
who tend to celebrate it, strangely agree.
31Penthesilea: "Zwar gern mit diesem Arm
hier traf ich dich; / Doch als du niedersankst,
beneidete, / Hier diese Brust den Staub, der
dich empfing" (1760-1772).
32For example, Carol Jacobs: "[Achilles]
calls Penthesilea forth to a renewed struggle of
pure theatricality, for the text is moving
through metaphorical speech to total perfor-
mance" (100). Jacobs nuances this assertion by
adding that Penthesilea is "the unnameable
embodiment ... of metaphor and literality"
(101).
33We could push the connection between the
hunt and writing into Kleist's own practice, for
his process of Rei/3en-writing-takes place on
a Bogen, as sheets of paper were commonly
called then.

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