Abstract
This book seizes on Kleist's literary antithetics as a starting point for clarifying the question of what dialectics is, as well as Kleist's own diagnosis of it, which sees the contradictions that afflict our thinking in their sociality. Kleist represents then a twofold stimulus.
First, as a renowned playwright with a soft spot for science, he inspires us to take our examples from a wide field of experience, from mathematics and music to literature and the visual arts. Second, as a Prussian patriot and officer, he allows us to draw a division between dialectics of a Prussian and a Russian strain.
On the Prussian side of the fence, apart from Kleist and Kant, we have Hegel together with the social upheavals of the post-Enlightenment period, from the French Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars to the new ordering of Europe after the Congress of Vienna. On the Russian side, there is Marx and his left-wing successors, with a similarly strong social charge, from the First International through the Bolshevik Revolution to the Stalinist terror.