Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T15:07:01.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Kleist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Fabrizio Mondadori*
Affiliation:

Extract

“Chaque homme est divisé entre les hommes qu'il peut être”, P. Nizan (for Sylvie)

As if we had in mind something like a scale of might-have-beens, erratically decreasing in specificity, in which each point provides some or all of the grounds for a transition to the next one, but not conversely, we could claim that Kleist might not have met Henriette Vogel; that he might not have committed suicide at all; that he might have had different properties than the properties he in fact had; even, in a somewhat figurative vein, that he might have been a different person than the person he was; and so on; and so forth, either adding new marks to the scale, or with a different scale in mind, along similar lines. Scales of this sort not only qualify as a kind of string of causally and temporally related might-have-beens; they also qualify, at the same time, as partial lists of true de re modal predications about Kleist.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)