Vertragsformen des modernen Subjekts. Masochistische Konfigurationen bei Heinrich von Kleist, Gottfried Keller und Robert Walser

Abstract

Around 1800, the contract becomes an important – if not the most important – category in historical anthropology and epistemology. This dissertation begins to examine contracts around that time as a semiotic-ethical configuration that has authority to manage the relationship between subjects. Yet, influenced by representatives of the natural law (Hobbes, Spencer, Herder), the contract also exerts influence on creating the modern subject itself, thereby making the contract a matter of psychology and psychoanalysis. There, these contracts take on a psychodynamic shape, that the late 19th century labels as ‘masochism’ and banishes into the realm of perversion. This dissertation untangles this grave misunderstanding and shows that masochism is, instead, an aesthetic-formal configuration that has shaped literature, culture, and the modern subject alike. In detailed and intensive close readings of three different authors and various genres over the course of the long 19th century, the dissertation reconstructs the vast extent to which the images, scenes, and narratives of masochistic contracts influence our understanding of the modern subject. Heinrich von Kleist’s dramas stage masochistic contracts as motivating configurations for the dramatis personae. Gottfried Keller’s novellas contextualize masochistic contracts as instances of (unreliable) narration. In Robert Walser’s fictional and auto-fictional texts, the poetic aspects of masochism are put at the center of the readings.