Kleists Teichoskopie auf die Moderne. Über Kollektive, Meuten, Subjekte und das Tier-Werden im Trauerspiel Penthesilea

In Kleist’s so called »Trauerspiel« , published in 1808, the ontological status of the eponymous famous Amazonian Queen is for a brief moment undecided between animal and human. Assuming this perspective on the text it is now possible to negotiate subjectivity and individuality as ideological constructions. This allows for approaching its deconstruction as well as other modes of being such as group-formation, hybrid and the pack. By associating Penthesilea to her dogs Kleist’s text aims at the fragile status of human beings in the Modernity. Penthesilea is thus turned into an animal. As a murderous pack the female protagonist stands amongst being a , and hybrid To understand Kleist’s »ethnological view« on the constitutive self-descriptions of Modernity, it is expedient to read Penthesilea as an ontological experiment. With the help of the concept of the , coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in , it becomes possible to understand this ontological experiment on the basis of the means of eighteenth century drama. Thereby it appears that the of Penthesila and her dogs undermines her status as a subject and human. Understanding the pack in this way the association with animals is a challenge for the force of law of the Amazons and Greeks as they are representing the female and male modes of power. To meet the significance of Penthesilea’s tragedy it is indeed necessary not to stop at the point of understanding the Becoming-Animal as a subversive and critical act. With Bruno Latour’s ethnological view on Modernity it is possible to re-construct Kleist’s strategy of talking about Becoming-Animal as shift to reconsider the way of assembling human and non-human actors. The pack will be understood as a specific group-formation and the Becoming-Animal as a mode of existence. In his latest work as well as in Latour claims a perspective on the Modernists as living in a plurality of modes of existence by denying it at the same time. This tension, which Becoming-Animal sets off, leads to understanding Kleist’s play as a revelation of what Latour calls practices of separation and purification of the Modernists on those group-formations and hybrids. Modernity, Latour argues, has always constituted Nature as an objective external place, whereas Society has always been constituted as the place of subjects. Around 1800 the practices of separation and purification of hybrids and group-formations are expressed through a dispositive of humanism that emerges amidst the t