Birgit M. Kaiser 
Figures of Simplicity [EPUB ebook] 
Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature—Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten—in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. This is done primarily by tracing a variety of ’simpletons’ that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. These figures are not entirely ignorant, or stupid, but simple. Their simplicity is a way of thinking; one that author Birgit Mara Kaiser here suggests is affective thinking. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting in their texts with an affective mode of thinking, and thereby continue, she argues, a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. Through her analyses, she offers an outline of what thinking can look like if we take affectivity into account.

Innehållsförteckning

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations



Introduction: On Subterranean Connections



1. Aesthetics: Sensation and Thinking Reconsidered



The Copernican Turn

The Folds of Small Perceptions

Sensate Thinking

Figures of Simplicity



2. Sentimentalities



Befuddling the Senses
(
The Betrothal in St. Domingo
)

Spectacularly Simple: Well-Willingly Seeing Nothing
(
Benito Cereno)

Sentimentalizing Resentment



3. Affectivity



Resolute Simplicity
(
Billy Budd, Sailor. An inside narrative)

Calculating Mindlessness
(
Michael Kohlhaas)

Baroque Heroes



4. Insistence



On Passive Resistance
(
Bartleby, the Scrivener. A story of Wall-Street)

Figures of Simplicity

Lingering before Consciousness
(
Das Käthchen von Heilbronn oder Die Feuerprobe)

Supersensible Figures of the Fold



5. Conclusion



Notes

Bibliography

Index

Om författaren

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.