Critical Storytelling and Diabolical Dialectics - AK and The Devils Blind Spots

The Germanic Review, 85: 318–339, 2010
Copyright
c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0016-8890
DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2010.513661
Critical Storytelling and Diabolical

Dialectics: Alexander Kluge and the Devil’s
Blind Spots
Matthew Miller
Downloaded by [165.215.94.10] at 12:13 28 June 2011
Does dialectical method induce clairvoyance or blindness? Alexander Kluge’s Die Lücke,
die der Teufel läßt probes this question by exploring the theoretical interests of the
Frankfurt School on literary terrain. In his experimental storytelling, Kluge suggestively
and playfully deploys the devil as an unlikely ally of enlightenment. This enables him
to redress the relationship of enlightenment to contingency and its blind spots as well
as investigate the spaces of human action at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
A diabolical dialectics of the kind found in Kluge’s short prose texts proves adequate
to the spatiotemporal complexities of the new century’s power constellations. In his
transformation and expansion of the lessons of his Frankfurt teachers, Kluge reorganizes
the architecture of Frankfurt School dialectics along spatial coordinates. This article
demonstrates Kluge’s narrative spatialization of dialectics by addressing Die Lücke, die
der Teufel läßt’s strategic constellations of devil tales, analyzing selected stories in detail
and providing an account of Kluge’s use of the chiasmus.
Keywords: Adorno, critical theory, dialectic, enlightenment, Kluge, prose
“Der Teufel ist nicht so schwarz, wie er gemalt wird.” (Stechlin in Fontane’s
Der Stechlin 26)
n one of several reflections on dialectical method in Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem
I beschädigten Leben, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno confronts the method’s tendency
to succumb to the same compulsive character of logic that it seeks to break through. The
difficulty of steering dialectical thought between the Scylla and Charybdis of a dominating
enlightenment and a regressive barbarism leads Adorno, in a commentary on the legacy
of Walter Benjamin’s thought, to underscore the need for knowledge not only to attend
to the “unselige Geradlinigkeit der Folge von Sieg und Niederlage” in world history. It
must also “dem sich zuwenden, was in solche Dynamik nicht einging, am Wege liegen
318
MILLER DIABOLICAL DIALECTICS 319
blieb—gewissermassen den Abfallstoffen und blinden Stellen, die der Dialektik entronnen
sind” (172). Adorno’s acknowledgment of dialectics’ blind spots in such a passage is closely
related to the two-pronged approach of the work that he was writing with Max Horkheimer
at the same time Minima Moralia was composed. Dialektik der Aufklärung notably pursues
a critique of the Enlightenment’s dominating tendencies to come to terms with the events of
a world history turned blatantly catastrophic in the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, the authors
simultaneously seek to locate and restore anchors of a nondominating enlightenment after
catastrophe.
The contemporary German writer Alexander Kluge has committed himself to a multi-
faceted demonstration of enlightenment’s possible continuation throughout his voluminous
and multimedia cultural production. Of the many passages one might cite from the writings
of the Frankfurt School of critical theory to characterize Kluge’s work,1 the one above is
most pertinent to his largest single volume of short prose texts, Die Lücke, die der Teufel
läßt, published in 2003. This collection of short prose pieces numbering well into the hun-
dreds, published in a shortened English edition titled The Devil’s Blind Spot the following
year, makes manifest the author’s concern with the Enlightenment’s uncharted, excluded, or
impenetrable spaces, which, on Adorno’s own claim, necessitate an interplay of dialectical
and undialectical treatment (Minima Moralia 173). Kluge’s Lücke delivers this interplay to
explore enlightenment’s renewal from the perspective of its blind spots.
Kluge establishes the dialectical dimension of the book by pitting the power of the
devil against human power in the foreword to the volume.2 The opposition suggests a di-
alectical approach insofar as it calls to mind the secularizing tendencies of the German
philosophical tradition of ideology-critique, which would demystify devil power to reformu-
late it as the concealed agency of human beings. The devil is no straightforward adversary
to human beings, however. Throughout Lücke, Kluge draws on the long tradition of devil
tales in the German context in which demons of all kinds served human beings as familiar
if dubious companions, enabling them to explain and sometimes helping them to master
their environs. Moreover, the introduction of the third term into this equation—the blind
spot—complicates rather than clarifies the relationship between humans and devils. This
space is the target of Kluge’s stories. “We humans inhabit it,” the author emphasizes in the
English foreword (DBS vii). The blind spot or Lücke serves Kluge as an important placeholder
to denote the contingent aspects of human endeavors that previous enlightened approaches
have either insufficiently explored or mistreated. The power of the blind spot, that is, of
contingency—which afflicts human and devil power alike—renders the otherwise elegant
opposition between the power of the devil and human power unstable. This instability derails
the prospects of a premature enlightened exorcism. Precisely how to draw the line between
1
Scholarship has addressed Kluge’s relationship to critical theory, especially in accounts of Kluge’s
programmatic interests. The main contribution of the present article is to locate Kluge’s transformation
of Frankfurt School dialectics in the literary execution of this program through close analyses of selected
stories from Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt.
2
See both Kluge, Lücke 7 and Devil’s vii. Subsequent references to these volumes will be cited in
parentheses in the text with the abbreviations L and DBS, respectively, followed by the page number.
320 THE GERMANIC REVIEW VOLUME 85, NUMBER 4 / 2010
devils, humans, and contingency is the question Kluge pursues in the various fictionalized
contexts of Lücke’s stories. Of course, Kluge is “not really interested in devils and demons,”
as he once admitted, suppressing a faint smile.3 But at the outset of the twenty-first century,
in an age of religion’s resurgence and enlightenment’s uncertainty, devils and demons serve
him as comical and illuminating means to ascertain enlightenment’s renewal from out of its
blind spots.
Kluge’s active deployment of the devil as a foil by which to illuminate the contours
of human agency constitutes the book’s playful experimentation with the uncontrolled, di-
abolical dimension of dialectics, which serves to challenge demystificatory enlightenment
strategies, including those of the Frankfurt School. Kluge’s reliance on diabolical means is
motivated by his interest in continuing, in the aesthetic medium of literature, the project
that Adorno and Horkheimer initiated but that, for Kluge, constitutes an unfulfilled demand.
Kluge regards critical theory as presenting an unfulfilled demand because, while he iden-
tifies footholds of the enlightenment’s restitution in the writings of his “teachers” Adorno,
Benjamin, and Horkheimer (DBS viii), he tends to regret the extent to which those remain
undeveloped amidst the primacy in Adorno, for example, of epistemological issues over
the practical concerns of emancipation. This is reflected in the abundance of metaphors of
blindness in Adorno’s writings. From “Schuld ist ein gesellschaftlicher Verblendungszusam-
menhang” (Adorno and Horkheimer 48) to the rampant use of blindness to designate (asym-
metrically) the unmarked sides of Adorno’s own critical observations—as in “blind nature,”
“blind fate,” “blind domination,” and so forth—such rhetoric points to the desideratum of
clairvoyance.4 “Was Natur vergebens vermöchte,” writes Adorno in an opposition character-
istic of his thought, “vollbringen die Kunstwerke: sie schlagen die Augen auf” (Ästhetische
Theorie 104), and thereby combat Verblendung in principle. Kluge’s critical storytelling
does not eschew cognitive functions of illumination through demystificatory strategies, but
his use of devils for the purposes of enlightenment moves his stories beyond the contem-
plative interest of such strategies by foregrounding the unexplored relation of blind spots
to practical emancipation. Hence, where “blind spot” in the English translation, as in the
Adorno passage above, reinforces the demand for vision, the “Lücke” of the German original
points to Kluge’s focus on the spaces of human action.
Kluge’s express interest in orientation, navigation, and the practical concerns of eman-
cipation more broadly develops concerns with which Adorno, in his labor as a philosopher,
grappled in primarily conceptual ways. Minima Moralia—that book of Adorno’s that comes
closest to a literary exposition of everyday living—still proceeds either by conceptualizing
blind spots in terms of a larger sociophilosophical theory of society that emphasizes entrap-
ment or by circumscribing their recalcitrance to conceptual distillation in lieu of exploring
their emancipatory potential. Following Kant’s classical definition of enlightenment as the
3
Kluge made this remark at a discussion following a reading from his book at New School University’s
Theresa Lang Center, New York City, in December 2004.
4
This applies especially to Dialektik der Aufklärung, from which these examples are drawn, but the
metaphors point to the primacy of cognition rather than one sense over another. Aesthetically, Adorno
was, of course, predisposed to the nonvisual media of literature and music.
exit (Ausgang) from self-imposed immaturity, Kluge likes to call this potential Auswege.5
In his search for these exits, Kluge’s redress of the relationship between enlightenment
(including Frankfurt’s second enlightenment) and blind spots (that is, contingency) in the
narrated actions and discussions of the literary story leads to a reorganization of Frankfurt
School dialectics along spatial coordinates.6 To demonstrate this thesis, I turn to the narrative
strategies of enlightenment that Kluge pursues in his devil tales. I begin with a brief account
of the overwhelming topography of Die Lücke itself and discuss the strategic constellations
of its devil tales, then turn to analyses of two selected stories and offer an account of the
chiasmus as a key component of Kluge’s spatialization of dialectics.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF DIE LÜCKE, DIE DER TEUFEL LÄßT

The volumes in which Kluge assembles his short prose pieces are epic in scope. This holds
for the 905-page Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt no less than for his two-volume Chronik
der Gefühle of 2000, in which Kluge juxtaposed new stories to republications of older tales
from the 1960s and 1970s. His Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben of 2006 assembles over
six hundred pages of new stories. Because the stories themselves are short, ranging from a
couple of sentences to a few pages in length,7 and because they are not organized according
to any overarching temporally integrated narrative, readers may find the sheer appearance
of the volumes overwhelming. Combating such impressions, Kluge’s forewords underscore
the programmatic highlights of his storytelling to help navigating such volumes, just as
Kluge believes the general contribution of his writing to consist in facilitating sociocritical
orientation in the lives of his readers.8
The foreword to the German edition of Die Lücke, der Teufel läßt relates the new
book to Chronik der Gefühle. Here, Kluge maintains a shift in the narrative interest from the
subjective dimension of the earlier collection, the title of which imputed a temporal structure
to the author’s treatment of feelings, to the “‘Geisterwelt’ der ‘objektiven Tatsachen”’ in
Lücke, which foregrounds the spatial dimensions of orientation (L 7). That such orientation
proves precarious is further emphasized in the foreword’s reference to the picture of mules
stranded on an island amidst floodwaters on the adjacent page of the book. Kluge claims
their position to be symptomatic of people’s experience at the beginning of the twenty-
first century. The attested contraction of living spaces—of which we fail to understand the
mechanisms—is a finding that runs contrary to Kluge’s initial anticipation that after 1989
the bitter experiences of the twentieth century could lead to something more hopeful. The
5
Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 1 in Ausgewählte kleine Schriften. On Kluge’s
Auswege and their relation to his reception of Adorno, see Reichmann 41–42. See also Stefanie Harris’s
contribution in this issue of The Germanic Review.
6
Although Adorno’s later Negative Dialektik undertakes a spatialization of dialectics, in the Minima
Moralia passage, Adorno’s use of the terms dialectical and undialectical appear to be aligned to history
and space, respectively. Kluge’s diabolical dialectics crosses these distinctions with one another.
7
Reichmann explores the literary heritage of Kluge’s short prose forms in ch. 3 of his book.
8
For an account of Kluge’s “Vorwortpolitik,” see Müller.
temporal markers of history lose their anchoring potential here amidst Kluge’s worry that
the Thirty Years War is still current. In light of these admissions, Kluge’s narrative interest
turns spatial at a time when the future trajectory of the historical dialectic is uncertain. The
preponderance of space over time that I am attributing to the foreword requires us to account
for the ground the volume surveys.9
The epic topography of Lücke extends across pages divided into eight more or less
topically organized chapters ranging from fifty to over one hundred pages, plus the seven-
part chapter 9 of over 230 pages. Each chapter, including the final chapter’s subdivisions,
contains additional forewords. The thematic foci of several of the first eight chapters are
determined according to either a specific spatial location (ch. 2 on Chernobyl, ch. 3 on
Paris of 1940) or a spatial metaphor (ch. 1 inquires into the “border traffic” between the
dead and the living, ch. 4 recycles the volume’s title as a co-title) or a more general spatial
location as in “Geschichten vom Weltall” (ch. 5), “U-Boot Geschichten” (ch. 6), or in
the tales from centers of political power in chapter 8, “Was heißt Macht?” The final two
subdivisions of the recapitulative chapter 9 further reflect the spatial imagination operative
here with “Land der Verheißung/Festung Europa” and then “Die blaue Gefahr” with which
Kluge intends planet Earth’s perils as a whole. More generally speaking, Lücke appears to
be positioned midway between the largely European focus of Chronik der Gefühle and the
globally expansive framework of Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben, insofar as Lücke
evinces both a preoccupation with the European past—for example, devil tales from the
Middle Ages, references to the Thirty Years War, and Inquisition tales—and a turn toward
a nonwestern framework in recasting blind spots of the United States’s “war on terror” and
off-beat tales from Baghdad’s past, in addition to the geoscope and outerspace scopes of the
“Die blaue Gefahr” and “Weltall” stories, respectively.
A survey of such frames helps to ascertain Kluge’s topical interests here in a preliminary
way, but a closer look reveals an additional challenge. Stories exceed their chapter frames.
There is often no readily apparent connection between individual stories and the chapter
in which they are situated. Often another chapter seems a far better fit. This is because of
the relative arbitrariness of Kluge’s arrangement. Lücke’s topography proves malleable in
what constitutes a radicalization of one component of epic form—the independence of its
parts.10 The book’s constitutive malleability implicates the author himself in the hermeneutic
procedure that usually falls to readers: the relation of part to whole. Vis-à-vis an unwieldy and
open text that refuses any account of its totality, my selections of stories remain exploratory
constructs. The devil’s multifarious work in Kluge’s book can nonetheless be canvassed as
symptomatic of his narrative strategies of enlightenment and his diabolical spatialization of
critical theory’s dialectics.
9
In his account of Kluge’s media practices, Langston operates with the distinction between irreversible
time (chronos) and the time of agency (kairos) to grasp Kluge’s temporal practices. The use of spatial-
ization in this article aims to draw attention to the necessity of locating spaces for the time of agency.
See Langston, esp., 196–97.
10
As established in Schiller’s exchanges with Goethe. See the entry “Lyrisch—episch—dramatisch” in
Ästhetische Grundbegriffe.
ENLIGHTENMENT, DEVILS, AND BLIND SPOTS
Wahr wäre der Gedanke, der Richtiges wünscht. (Adorno, Negative Dialektik
100)11
Kluge’s narrative strategies of enlightenment redress the enlightenment’s relationship

to contingencies it has tended to dominate, unsuccessfully penetrate, or ignore. The very first
story of the German edition, “Das Gesetz der Liebe,” stages the tension between enlighten-
ment and contingency to point to Kluge’s playful reworking of the latter category in his book.
In this two-page enlightenment tale, a radically condensed variation of Christian Fürchtegott
Gellert’s eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Das Leben der Schwedischen Gräfin von G∗∗∗ ,
the Countess Sidonie Oltrup, born in 1735, mourns from her grave over the fates of her many
descendents, whose intimate relations have been miserably compromised by everything from
the poor choice of a sexual partner to the Nürnberg laws of 1935 (L 16). Oltrup, for her part,
while still alive, had worked hard to establish a universal legislation of love that would serve
as a steady and implementable principle guiding her descendants and their partners toward
a tenable happiness. To this project of the main character, Kluge comically lends the tones
of a Kantian enlightenment. Not only is the story introduced with an emblematic citation
from Kant on the opposition of law to chance, which forces us to question Oltrup’s attempted
harmonization of love with law; but Oltrup’s own formulations, too, such as the demand
that “ein Mensch seine Liebesfähigkeit so einrichtet, dass sein Verhalten Gegenstand einer
öffentlichen Gesetzgebung sein könnte” (L 15–16), retain a Kantian syntax. Oltrup, thus,
transfers the scope of private happiness to the public sphere, which in this story is depicted as
a domain where customs and law stand opposed. Each couple’s love shatters on the rocks of
customs, including those customs manipulated into racist laws during the National Socialist
period. Hence, in “Das Gesetz der Liebe,” at least, reference to the contingency of customs
suggests the ways in which contingency (understood here in the sense of dependency, as in
the English expression contingent upon) can elude a legislative enlightenment. Such enlight-
enment proves incapable of penetrating the thick layers of historically accumulated prejudice
on which particular(ist) customs depend. The divide between the universality of the former
and the particularity of the latter is depicted as a gap, a Lücke, a blind spot—perhaps that of
legislative enlightenment itself.
“Gesetz der Liebe” identifies such a gap to raise a question about enlightened ap-
proaches to contingency. In characteristically Klugean fashion, the text treats its main charac-
ter endearingly while at the same time marking her naı̈veté and misguidedness. The blind spots
of the enlightenment she wishes to advance confine love to the “Zufallsgründe” she laments.
Her own story—a dubious mastery of chance in the form of bringing her emotions in line
with the lawful claims of two husbands to her—stands out as an exception that cannot be leg-
islated. Despite documenting these difficulties, the text does not thereby relinquish Sidonie’s
hope to facilitate enlightened exits from unhappiness for the living. By acknowledging
11
Subsequent references to Negative Dialektik will be cited in parentheses in the text with the abbrevi-
ation ND followed by the page number.
any “energischer Zuruf” to her descendents as “lehrhaft” (L 17), she revokes the dominating
relation to her descendents that she practiced on her own emotions. In a story opening a
chapter that inquires into the traffic between the living and the dead, enlightenment’s bearer,
though buried, remains capable of learning. The story suggests that a different approach to
chance than legislation is in order. In channeling hope, the gap of “Gesetz” signals Kluge’s
modification of the category of contingency. No longer is contingency to be grasped as a
form of dependence that calls for enlightened elimination, but rather as chance, that is, as a
possible foothold of enlightened emancipation.
The shift in the semantics of contingency from dependency to possibility energizes
many of Lücke’s tales. A story about Adolf Hitler’s motorcade, for example, poignantly
demonstrates the devil’s role in delineating chance in human affairs. “Eine Geschichte aus den
Anfängen des Automobilismus” is located in the middle of chapter 7’s “Basisgeschichten,”
whereas the English edition places it in the first chapter on the devil’s good deeds, the fore-
word of which alone points to the devil’s agency in the story. The story narrates a narrowly
avoided fatal accident between two drunk drivers under icy conditions in the winter of 1931.
The devil’s mistakes—one of which is leaving twenty-five inches of room between Hitler’s
and the other car—“occasionally work to our advantage, sometimes to our disadvantage”
(DBS 1). Although a speaker in the story attributes the avoidance of the fatal accident to
providence (L 470), it is clear that the devil’s success in this instance would have signifi-
cantly altered world history. Kluge toys with the positive effects of the devil’s machinations
throughout Lücke. In a world in which providence is interpreted as saving Hitler’s life, it
becomes clear that the devil could produce quite positive results! But so closely is the devil
aligned to contingency and so committed is Kluge to enlightened demystification that we
can by no means rely on the devil’s allegedly good deeds. The advantage or disadvantage of
contingency must be determined interpretatively. Devils have a role to play in this determina-
tion, for which reason there is no need to shun the ways in which people seek to understand
their experiences of the same supernaturally. Problems ensue when supernatural explana-
tions persist in veiling a contingency that admits of practical responses rather then passive
contemplation. Furthermore, that any value judgment on contingency is itself processual and
contingent, as in this story, suggests the limits of normatively determining responses to it
from the outset. This lends further credence to Kluge’s insistence that literary exploration,
in addition to theoretical conceptualization, can contribute to enlightenment about the ad-
vantageous human use of contingency. By narratively contextualizing human responses to
seemingly chance events in their own lives, Kluge’s devil tales serve to reconfigure blind
spots as exits through which enlightened emancipation may take shape.
The devil is a fickle creature, as numerous stories demonstrate: “[e]in Teufel stirbt nicht.
Er wandelt die Gestalt” (L 901). For this reason, there is hardly a better figure through which
to bring contingency into play. But the demystification of the devil into contingency does not
by itself lead very far because “contingency” is a broad category that has elicited so many
responses in the philosophical tradition in which Kluge writes.12 Of these, Adorno’s lead is the
12
From Hegel through Lukács’s Marxist dialectics, contingency was conceptualized as an irritating or
disturbing factor in the process of human emancipative human social development. It was linked to
most important to Kluge. In Negative Dialektik, Adorno aspires to practice a nondominating

conception of rationality and productively ground negative-dialectical models of immanent
transcendence by accepting contingency as a condition of all thought and experience. With
his devil tales, Kluge likewise pays heed to contingency as an ineliminable feature of human
life. If chance occurrences are treated gently enough, they may take on beneficial features
overlooked by an enlightened reason’s aspirations to demystify or dominate. Demystification
does not proceed without its own blind spots. That the devil does not die, but rather changes,
enables Kluge to destabilize demystificatory responses and expose their own blind spots.
A cursory glance at other stories that explicitly raise questions about the devil nonethe-
less reveals his fading grip on human beings. Are his gaps and blind spots also deceitful?
Stories such as “Die mißglückte Scheidung,” “Der Teufel und die Macht,” “Der Teufel als
Unterhaltungskünstler,” and “Der Teufel verliert das Interesse an seinem Objekt” document
the diminishment of the devil’s power. “Die mißglückte Scheidung” attributes the rescue of
a marriage to a chance firestorm (in which the devil may or may not have had a hand) that
blocks a couple’s trip to the county court to file for divorce (L 503–04). Napoleon, his “Gier
nach Weltherrschaft” dwindling, dismisses the devil’s offer in “Der Teufel und die Macht”
(L 882), and there is an increasing perplexity, in “Der Teufel als Unterhaltungskünstler,” on
the part of the tempter as to how to really ensnare Faust and hold his attention (L 688–89);
in “Der Teufel verliert das Interesse an seinem Objekt,” Mephistopheles basically gives up
on Faust as the latter proves to be the most uninteresting of subjects (L 898–99).
What other work can the devil perform? His changing role in the book raises the stakes
of our interest in chance openings, yet the devil’s partial power by no means indicates the
omnipotence of humans, who are called on to respond to contingency in nondominating
ways. This demand also commits Kluge to demonstrating features of exemplary responses
to devils and their blind spots. This is the task of the title story, which is worth considering
in detail.
THE CHANCE PRODUCTION OF A NORM

The title story, “Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt,” like other devil tales in the volume, directly
thematizes the inconclusive signs in the tests that human society presents itself. Set in
the closing years of the European Middle Ages, shortly before the Reformation, the story
examines a witch trial of the Inquisition. While the text documents the ways in which the
trial puts into play impossible and damning procedural criteria, it also stages the emergence
of the juridical principle “innocent until proven guilty” from the tiny gap that opens in
the procedure. And yet, the narration includes twists that prohibit us from gaining much
consolation from this emergence of a desirable norm.
“chance” or “accidental” occurrences in the capitalist economy necessitated by the conditions of capital-
ist production themselves. For Lukács, this simultaneously indicated the irrationality of this system, and
he takes pains, in the History and Class Consciousness, to illustrate how contingency can, in principle,
be eliminated altogether on the basis of society’s conscious production and rational organization. It
would be left to Adorno (and Horkheimer) to suggest how these past dialectical methods—witness the
fury of negation from Hegel through Lenin—participate in the perpetuation of domination.
The prospects of an accused half-witch surviving her trial are compromised from the
outset. Under torture, Annie Kerklaus is subjected to a situation in which a coerced confession
frees her from torture only to condemn her to the appropriate sentencing. Conversely, suffering
the torture may likewise incriminate her, because the devil, to whom she has been accused
of being loyal, may decide to test her loyalty by leaving her at the partial mercy of the
ordeal (L 259), only to ultimately demonstrate his power in protecting the half-witch: “Es
entsteht zwischen dem Versuch des Teufels, die Zuwendung der Hexe oder Halbhexe zum
Bösen zu testen, und dessen Versuchung, seine Allmacht zu zeigen, eine winzige Lücke.
In die muß das Gericht, wenn es kein Geständnis erhält, eindringen” (L 260). Given this
framework, the present-day reader struggles to imagine what would have to be the case for
her to be acquitted, since withstanding the torture and not withstanding the torture (which
presumably is terminated by forced confession or, worse, death from the procedure itself)
can both be interpreted as proving her guilty.13 In the face of these options, withstanding the
ordeal without confession is the hardest and unlikeliest path. It is the path that Kluge seeks
to have Annie Kerklaus tread, and he accesses it by staging a debate about its attainability.
To do so, Kluge exposes the suspect’s delayed reaction to the ordeal to the interpretative
debate of two “experts”: Wittenberg physician and theologist Dr. Gustav Ebner defends the
victim against the ambitious efforts of his Ingolstadt colleague Dr. Eckholt, who seeks
to have her condemned. When Annie breaks into tears three hours after the ordeal, the
prosecutor Eckholt insists that Annie’s reaction is linked to the ordeal and indicates that
she has not withstood it. When Ebner challenges him on this, Eckholt responds that her
delayed reaction must be construed as either a confession or a denial: “Im letzteren Fall
müsse die Folter fortgesetzt werden.” From Eckholt’s statement, it is clear that for him there
can be no end (Ausgang) to the ordeal. Rather, it must either culminate in confession or
the court must pursue the torture until the results correspond to Eckholt’s own suspicions.
But the interpretative debate surrounding her outbreak continues. Advancing a quasimodern
psychological approach, Ebner rebuts that the outbreak has no expressive quality apart from
being a reaction to wounds suffered during the torture; in other words, it does not indicate
conscious and complicit agency on Annie’s part in terms of any pact with the devil. To
Eckholt, this seems an inappropriate way to refute the prosecution’s claim, which does not
distinguish between conscious and unconscious: “Wieso der Teufel nur das Bewußtsein
regiere, fragte Dr. Eckholt zurück.” Further on in the text, Ebner similarly associates Annie’s
breakdown as a simple assertion of nature: “die setzt sich durch nach der Quälerei. Was heißt
hier Natur? fragte Dr. Eckholt. Sie gerade ist ja die Domäne des Teufels” (L 260). In the
end, the debate between experts undecided, the chief judge declares an impasse by ruling
that Annie’s delayed reaction was an “‘untentscheidbares Zeichen.”’ The lack of sufficient
evidence results in the chance production of what was to become a juridical norm: the
13
Here, Annie’s guilt seems preestablished, as her surname already suggests: Kerklaus recalls Kerker,
prison cage. A Laus is a louse. Thus, Annie might be considered a Laus in the Kerker, a parasite of
overriding structures that are determining her fate. It is the structures themselves that constitute the
Kerker, not the punishment arising from a guilty verdict, which, for all we know, may culminate in a
death sentence.
first application of the principle in dubio pro res, or innocent until proven guilty (see DBS
13). Like the Latin, the German idiom “im Zweifel für den Angeklagten” (or the related
English demand for “proof beyond reasonable doubt”) highlights the role of doubt, which
accompanies this story on more than one level.
For one, Eckholt’s view of the ordeal of torture along with his firm belief in the devil
provide no exit for Annie whatsoever: her breakdown either indicates confession or denial,
the latter of which incurs the resumption of the torture. Curiously, Ebner’s attempt to divide
the human agent with the help of the categories “conscious and unconscious” seeks a way
out, but his approach, bracketing the question of nature, fails to secure an exit for Annie.
Instead, the impasse in the interpretation between Eckholt and Ebner itself constitutes a way
out. Although it is true that Ebner’s argument is crucial to triggering the judge’s decision on
the inconclusiveness of Annie’s breakdown, it is only by preserving the sign of the same in
its undecidability vis-à-vis the question of interpretation that we are able to cull a seemingly
redeemable principle out of this case.
Like “Das Gesetz der Liebe,” the title story hovers around the gap to thematize possible
responses to it. Whereas Eckholt wants to seal the trial, Ebner seeks to block its proceedings
by excluding nature from any juridical accountability. But there is no emphatic truth on
the side opposite to Eckholt’s fundamentalist belief in the devil. Ebner states that nature’s
revulsion does not provide for any “verbalen, schiftlich bezeichenbaren Inhalt” and proceeds
to properly note the breakdown’s externality to reason. (He opposes its shock-character and
spontaneity to the conscious mind.) But in doing so, he also sets it outside the realm that
can be addressed in the proceedings, declaring it, as it were, juristically irrelevant. This
does not mean that Ebner’s position does not represent a progressive step forward vis-à-vis
Eckholt’s fundamentalism. Yet, the mere nominal expulsion of the devil from the conscious
mind does not free Annie. By declaring her outburst an inconclusive sign, Kluge’s judge, into
whose character—“privat ein Liebhaber der Metamorphosen des Ovid”—he projects himself,
refrains from taking sides. He thereby allows for the redeemable principle to emerge, thus
saving Annie.
The lingering uncertainty of nature’s role—negligible for Ebner but crucial for
Eckholt—creates additional doubt in a text that cannot establish the spatial locus of the
devil’s role. The above-mentioned paragraph that elucidates the nearly impossible way in
which Annie could be acquitted, introduces a commentary on power relations through the
following line, written in capital letters in the text and ascribed to the perspective of the
court: “WER SEINE UNTERTANEN ÜBERHAUPT NICHT ZU SCHÜTZEN VERMAG,
KANN NICHT HERRSCHER SEIN” (L 259). In context, this is offered to explain the
possible innocence of the accused. But the line reads like a passage from Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan, which was conceived in direct response to problems of religious animosity af-
flicting the civil society of his time. Hobbes identifies the sovereign’s failure to protect his
subjects as the only condition that effectively dissolves the obligation of subjects to their
ruler (147). Although Hobbes otherwise criminalizes human power’s aspirations to popu-
lar sovereignty—his Leviathan is notably another form of the devil14—Kluge’s citation of
14
Although a mortal and conventional, i.e., human and transient, form thereof (cf. Hobbes 114).
the exception to obligation underscores the emancipation of (human) nature, with which
humanity’s aspirations to power over the gods are now confronted.
The text further underscores its political dimension by attending, like the trial it nar-
rates, to a transitional historical moment on the eve of the German Reformation, in which
old powers are ebbing, striving to reassert themselves, or giving way to new powers. The
gap to which the judge refers—and the gap through which Annie escapes conviction—thus
enjoys additional resonance in symbolizing the transition of powers taking place on the
politico-historical horizon of the text. In the final paragraph, the text documents the trial’s
aftermath—most unfortunately for Ebner. Ebner’s indirectly successful attempt to establish
an acquittal for Annie Kerklaus leads to his own arrest, indictment, and fifteen-year incar-
ceration without conviction. Here, although Eckholt attempted to preestablish Annie’s guilt
(already suggested by her surname), the Wittenbergian Ebner becomes the Kerklaus of a
preemptive counterreformation. The argument he made that led to such an advance in the
juridical system by giving rise to the principle “innocent until proven guilty” is counterpro-
ductive as far as his own fate is concerned. The protest movement of north German princes
began shortly after this trial, but the ensuing Reformation “hatte keinen Einfluß auf das
süddeutsche Ingolstadt.” The theologist from Wittenberg remains imprisoned there, serving
as the prison doctor in the end, and thus marking a shift from theology to medicine (and from
the corporeal punishment of the inquisition to the disciplinarian system’s control of an inner
nature15) that his argument before the court already anticipated. Being “enlightened” ahead
of one’s time incurs punishments. Ebner will practice his modern medical occupation in a
cage.
The text triggers associations. Kluge is again developing a carefully compressed drama
of enlightenment. Yet, by no means does it culminate in exorcising the deceiver. That is not
its aim. For one thing, the direct attack on such a deceiver is not identical to the move
that displaces the devil’s power. Kluge opposes Eckholt and Ebner’s positions, the one
fundamentalist and “medieval,” the other scientifistic and quasi-enlightening, to effect the
chance production of a provisional exit for Annie. But she remains somewhat marginal to
the text. However inconclusively, it is the gentle judge who effects a human imposition
on the devil’s erstwhile domain, for he suspends judgment about the devil’s role in Annie’s
“nature” that Eckholt’s manipulation of the trial would have predetermined. The judge thereby
demonstrates the instructive relationship to contingency, allowing it to work for human
advantage. The embrace of inconclusiveness represents an advance over and against Ebner’s
blind spot, incurred in his line of attack that skirts the question of (a still diabolical?) nature,
which he posits to exclude it from human jurisdiction. His blind spot underscores the merely
abstract aspect of the law’s displacement of the devil. Legislation proves incompletable with
regard to the vastness of the object produced in this story, human nature. It remains very
much in question whether the devil, chance, or human beings themselves could yet govern
this domain.
15
As discussed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish.
THE DIABOLICAL DIALECTIC
Alles gesellschaftliche Leben ist wesentlich praktisch. Alle Mysterien, welche

die Theorie zum Mystizism[us] veranlassen, finden ihre rationelle Lösung in der
menschlichen Praxis und in dem Begreifen dieser Praxis. (Marx 7)
The story “Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt” upholds an example of juridical history-
making as a response to indeterminacy, to the failure of human knowledge. History was
not made here on the basis of an intention fulfilled—no one sat down to implement the
concept of “Im Zweifel für den Angeklagten”—but via a chance opening. In the exploration
of such chance openings, Lücke not only spans the past; its forays into the present speak
to Kluge’s insistence on the importance of anchoring critically conceived exits in realis-
tically fictionalized contexts. The Lücke story “Der Teufel im Weißen Haus,” featured in
both volumes,16 is a key text in the author’s literary approach to the Bush administration’s
“war on terror.” In a characteristic fusion of highly theoretical issues with the popular genre
of anecdotal storytelling, Kluge’s piece confronts the problems of indeterminacy afflicting

human power by exploring the role of the devil in world politics. The importance of the his-
torical context—contemporaneous at the time of Lücke’s publication—indicates that Kluge’s
reframing of Frankfurt School dialectics along spatial coordinates is no abstract procedure,
but rather responds to the demands of an ever-changing reality.17 In the face of that challenge,
Kluge’s narrative dialectics necessarily turns diabolical.
“Der Teufel im Weißen Haus” stages a dialogue between one Nigel MacPherson, head
of security at the U.S. White House, and an unnamed journalist, who observe a photograph
on which the former believes to have captured the devil’s appearance at a high-level White
House staff meeting. A comical discussion ensues in which the two interlocutors probe
the significance of human and diabolical motives, the desirability of the devil’s presence
in the White House, and the extent of the devil’s critical nature. The story is ensconced in
diabolical indeterminacy. Neither the demarcations between the figures represented on the
absent picture and the devil himself, nor those between the devil and MacPherson, nor even
those between the two interlocutors, are clearly established. On the contrary, Kluge toys with
the dissolution of such boundaries in a juggling act that pits a demystifying critique of devils
against a remystifying faith in diabolical spirits. In negatively contrasting these approaches,
Kluge intimates a model of human agency that would establish a nuanced response to
contingency between the desire to command and a passive faith. It is precisely because the
devil’s own powers are dwindling that he remains an instructive figure to humans in their only
partial potency. By critically attending to the devil’s experiences of power failures, Kluge is
able to lay out the parameters of a difficult positive pedagogy.
16
In the German edition, the story constitutes a kind of closer, followed only by the epilogic “Büßer-
schnee,” in which nature assumes penitence on behalf of humans’ omission of the same; whereas in the
English edition it serves as the title and opening story of the final chapter.
17
This takes place in continued conformity with Kluge’s conception of realism following Bertolt Brecht,
first laid out in Kluge, Gelegenheitsarbeit. For an account thereof, see Müller, “Die authentische
Methode.”
In pondering the devil’s machinations at the center of power, the interlocutors first
consider motives underlying the Bush administration’s possible responses to the infiltration.
They establish that the human power in question seeks to instrumentalize the devil in one of
two ways. The journalist first presupposes the desirability of the devil’s immediate expulsion.
Although this is not further explored in the dialogue, the outright expulsion of the devil is
clearly related to the administration’s desire to uphold the distinction between good and evil
that it wields to justify its wars and torture schemes. The journalist’s initial deference to the
“frommen Präsidenten” and the “schärfsten Verfolger des Bösen” reflects his own investment
in this distinction (L 903). Alternatively, MacPherson claims, the administration may wish
to capture the devil in order to “pump him for information” about the shifting frontlines of
the war it is trying to conduct and win (DBS 282). This ambiguity of the administration’s
intentions marks the diabolical instability of its own distinctions, which MacPherson exposes
by underscoring the limits of Bush’s “sixth sense for evil” (DBS 281) and the administration’s
concomitant inability to instrumentalize evil in any but a performative fashion.
The devil’s resistance to being easily tapped draws greater attention to the scope of
his activities. In the wake of the devil’s quick departure from the center of power, MacPher-
son expresses a continued interest in his whereabouts. The simple question—“Wo ist er
jetzt?”—is pivotal. The interlocutors’ ensuing reflections about the devil’s role are impor-
tant because they double as a probe into the contours of contemporary power relations.
MacPherson’s attentiveness to the devil’s changing character-forms highlights the diabolical
tool’s epistemological suitability to the task of ascertaining power amidst the uncertainty
of its temporal and spatial coordinates during the administration’s terror wars: the attested
acceleration of the devil’s metamorphoses indicates the temporally dynamic conception of
reality operative here just as the emphasis on the spatial procedure of locating him speaks to
changes in power’s spatial configurations.
These issues become the focal points of the conversation. Whereas MacPherson wagers
that the devil was meddling in the White House “die Fäden der Weltpolitik durcheinander
[zu] bringen,” the journalist acknowledges human power’s lack of omnipotence by observing
that the “Geschehen in der Welt ist durch Beschlüsse in einer solchen Machtzentrale aber
doch nur auf eine sehr indirekte Weise beeinflußbar.” The center of power is thereby demoted.
Executive and military power’s effectiveness is plausibly subjected to a categorical limit that
MacPherson underscores by adding that “die wirklichen Verhältnisse zu zahlreich sind, um
sich anleiten zu lassen” (L 903). The dialogue thereby problematizes any straightforward
political remedy to the difficulties endemic to executive and military action. At most, a
critical Enlightenment’s political proposal to replace one set of human power interests with
another is only the beginning of a solution.
If the White House no longer figures as a center of power, what attracts the devil to it?
The interlocutors establish the possibility of a temporal lag afflicting the devil’s endeavors
that compromises his spatial practices: “Es kann sein, daß der Teufel noch einer älteren
Vorstellung von Macht folgt. Es ist schwer, so rasch zu lernen, wie sich die Weltverhältnisse
ändern” (L 904), thereby, as in other stories, suggesting a lack of omniscience on the devil’s
part. Reality’s temporal dynamic outpaces that of gods once believed to be all-knowing.
That the devil himself is challenged by the limits of power over contingency introduces
a clear distinction between the two. He no longer serves to signify diabolical intricacies:
the temporal lag afflicting the devil himself, that is, the slippage between the devil and the
advanced complexity of conditions, implies a spatial gap, which calls for a human response.
MacPherson’s remystificatory gestures prohibit him from delivering this response.
He expresses a questionable reassurance that “ein so alter Fahrensmann der Welt” as the
devil is present at the center of power to interfere with the White House’s intensions.
True, he thereby reverses the good versus evil distinction, which the administration used
to justify its actions, to attribute goodness to the devil’s interruption of a naı̈ve human
power’s attempt to instrumentalize evil. But MacPherson’s professed reassurance of the
devil’s opposition to human power presupposes a centralized model of power that the text
had just identified as anachronistic and spatially off the mark. His comments fail to uphold
the possible gaps between the devil’s status as an “ancient steersman of the world” and
the hypermodern changeability of power’s frontlines. Finally, by describing the opposition
in terms of a metaphysical force pitted against human endeavors—the description recalls
Hegel’s account of the cunning of reason, which blocks human intentions from reaching
their outcomes—MacPherson removes the topics under discussion from their political arena
altogether. Because the plethora of real conditions resists being directed according to a model
of intentional agency, because the real conditions are both too many (the spatial overview
of problems in the present is inhibited) and change too quickly (the ability to predict is
undermined) to be overseen and submitted to human control, MacPherson, gleefully deferring
to the devil, relinquishes any concern with the sorry plight of human intentions.
For these reasons, the critical force of the dialogue shifts back to the journalist, who
articulates reservations about specific policy issues, namely, the administration’s hoarding
of good will and its concomitant instrumentalization of evil. The journalist’s focus on the
monopolization of good will reopens a gap erased in MacPherson’s displacement of the
opposition between the devil’s and human power to a metaphysical plane of an obscure
world-spirit. The subjective side of human possibility, toward which the journalist redirects
attention, necessarily complements the objective openings stemming from the devil’s critical
opposition to the Bush administration and the slippage between the devil and the complexity
of real situations. Such gaps are of great interest to those refusing to take solace in reason’s
obscurantist cunning. The journalist’s comments point to the establishment of a different
model of human agency, the intentions of which are based on lessons in the force of unfore-
seeable outcomes, the shifting character of fronts in space, the hardly controllable nature
reality’s temporal acceleration, and the dangerous belatedness of learning. In seeking to
implement action informed by such lessons, this model would continue to draw critically on
the questionable knowledge deriving from the devil’s own projects, especially in his battle
with contingency, to which a new relationship is sought.
This textual constellation renders the dialogue’s probes fruitful for the reader. Extend-
ing its framework via gaps, the text suspends the reader amidst demystification, remystifica-
tion, and another yet-to-be unfolded kind of human intentionality and collective self-interest
that the text has put forth in the form of the journalist’s reservations about hoarding. In
closing, the text points to further resources of specific criticism:
—Do you consider the Devil to be a critical spirit? [The journalist asks.]
—We know too little about him. Our files are incomplete.
—How on earth did you find out that the assistant in your group photo was the
Tempter in another form?
—A tip from the German Intelligence Service.
—From Germany?
—Yes, information from the “old Europe.” (DBS 283–84)
The amusing addendum with which the dialogue concludes suggests the continued salience
of the devil’s critical nature not by confirming his function according to the logic of reason’s
cunning, but as a contrastive heuristic used to identify the dynamic character of power’s
temporal and spatial coordinates. The devil’s extensive experience with the machinations
of world and personal power points to his qualifications to speak to the frailties of power,
including his own. The defeated yet immortal devil is a long survivor. His critical nature
consists in confronting the present with submerged lessons of the past. Ever concerned with
facilitating the Enlightenment’s learning from the catastrophic failures of its very own history,
Kluge banks on the assumption that negative confrontations of human power, of which the
procedures of de- and remystification are a part, can elicit gaps in the interstices of which a
positive project can take shape.
The devil remains a potential ally because his experience is humanity’s own, although
not yet appropriated as such. Difficulties in this appropriation persist because there is no
normative architecture, no legislative principle available for the translation work that must be
performed for humans to reformulate the devil’s experience as their own. That much is clear
from the kinds of dilemmas Kluge’s short prose texts belabor. Although his forewords and
theoretical writings programmatically demand such an appropriation of experience, detailed
consideration of Kluge’s stories reveal the labor of relating negated approaches to a positive
project as a diabolically intricate affair.18
If we nonetheless take stock of the context-based lessons that have emerged from
these readings in Lücke thus far, we wind up with a little litany of guidelines: no domination
of chance through legislation (Countess Oltrup), necessity of a context-based interpretative
evaluation of contingency (“Automobilismus”), suspension of judgment in the face of un-
decidability (“Lücke”), relaxation of hoarding, awareness of how analytical and evaluative
distinctions are being drawn (“Teufel im Weißen Haus”), and so forth. Notably, the force of
the negative still preponderates in such indexes. Incomplete pedagogy, unforeseeable trans-
ferability of its lessons—these features constitute the real Lücken, the necessary blind spots
of a procedure whereby Kluge can intimate and orient readers toward alternatives and exits
but not stake them out. Context has primacy. Each is different. Pedagogic guidelines derived
from one context may prove blind with regard to others. The injunction prohibiting legisla-
tion across contingencies is less an abstract command than grounded in Kluge’s conception
of reality, in which the thicket of spatiotemporal complexity demands particularist and play-
ful, dialectical and diabolical treatment. This is also why Kluge’s prose-writing proceeds
additively. But these findings do not condemn his own account of the “devil’s poisons” to
negativity (DBS viii). On the contrary, as the foregoing analyses have sought to demonstrate,
18
The relationship between program and text may even include the latter’s refusal of the former, as Carp
notes in her account of Kluge’s earlier writings (11).
Kluge vigilantly persists in directing his exploratory interest in enlightenment’s continuation

toward the search for exits to combat perceived contractions of the spaces of human agency.
His forays into fictionalized accounts of the history of the early twenty-first century further
reveal the power of context to influence the interplay of the dialectical and undialectical
treatments of enlightenment’s blind spots. In my concluding section, I consider Kluge’s use
of the chiasmus as a key component of this interplay to outline his spatial reorganization of
dialectics.
TOWARD A SPATIAL DIALECTICS: NOTES ON THE CHIASMUS

Kluge’s critical strategy crosses seemingly opposed positions with one another to point to
alternatives. A main tool of Kluge’s navigation through false oppositions is the chiasmus.
From the early Marx writings on, the chiasmus was deployed as a literary device to compress
and convey rhetorically insights via which the gesture of demystifying critique gained force.
Marx wielded the chiasmus primarily in a temporalizing way: no longer, he had announced
in his early writings, would history make human beings (which is, in any case, only the
way in which history appears). Rather, human beings would make history once they placed
themselves in control of society’s forces and relations of production. The syntactic inversion
of the chiasmus served this critical strategy as shorthand for its demystification of capitalism’s
contingencies—from its economic infrastructure to its ideology—which were to be subjected
to human mastery in its regulation of society. In Marxian usage, not least in the writings
of Adorno,19 the rhetorical structure of the chiasmus could further unveil social verities
enshrouded by the abstraction of a capitalist system that is upheld and reproduced in the
context of commodity fetishism and reification. Although Marx’s chiastic announcement of
humanity’s own homecoming was, at the very least, premature, and although Adorno wielded
the chiasmus to circle critically around mostly debilitating entwinements of rationality and
social reality,20 the entrance of this literary form of dialectics into Kluge’s writing by way of
devil tales points to both its critical and demystifying function as well as its deceptive and
remystifying tendencies.
The chiasmus is a literary structure both “old European” and diabolical. One telling
chiasmus with which Kluge’s work confronts us is not even his own nor Marx’s nor Adorno’s,
but, rather, belongs to Donald Rumsfeld, a citation from whom is featured in The Devil’s
Blind Spot. But this character first needs proper introduction. Since the exchange in “Der
Teufel im Weißen Haus” inconclusively thematized exactly which form the devil assumed
during the high-level cabinet meeting, I would like, in some jest, to humbly suggest this
19
Jameson has called the chiasmus “the fundamental deep figure of the Marxian or materialistic dialectic”
(256). Marx wielded the chiasmus as a mimetic-constructivist tool of demystifying critique both to
characterize society’s prevailing tensions (diagnosis) as well as to anticipate the outcomes of history’s
tumultuous dialectical processes (prognosis).
20
In an overview of Adorno’s use of the chiasmus, Rose writes that his “arguments which expose
the illegitimate abstraction in philosophy reveal principles of abstraction in society; arguments which
expose the illegitimate dominance of the subject in philosophy reveal modes of social domination” (66).
character as a candidate for two reasons.21 One is the interesting fact that the story refers
to a photograph, yet, unlike many of Kluge’s stories, does not include such a picture in its
pages. But we find a nice image elsewhere in Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt: although not at
a high-level staff meeting, a beaming Donald Rumsfeld appears at a security conference in
Munich in 2003 with the caption “Ein Glückspilz” (L 615). The term Glückspilz (literally,
“lucky mushroom”) can be advantageously translated into the English expression “lucky
devil.” Rumsfeld’s diabolical nature is further underscored by his use of chiasmus.
Rumsfeld’s most famous chiasmus, amidst all his other word-play, is reprinted in this
context at the beginning of Kluge’s last chapter to The Devil’s Blind Spot: “The absence of
evidence is not the evidence of absence” (DBS 279). The displacement of the quote puts it to
good use. Although the falsity of the statement’s reference to weapons of mass destruction
has been long documented, in the context of Kluge’s chapter, it refers on the first level most
obviously to the devil’s possible machinations behind the scenes. To represent the devil via
the chiasmus is spot on: the chiasmus itself is a deceptive and deceiving tool, which is why
Rumsfeld, a true champion of deceit in political life, and thus really a prime suspect for the
form the devil assumes in the White House, relied on it and other rhetorical play to twist
reality into its opposite. The devil is leaving a trail in rhetorical forms, ambiguously outing
himself.
Kluge’s citation of Rumsfeld at the beginning of his chapter indeed shows how easily
the structure of chiastic inversion can be abused. The former secretary of defense deceives
himself into sticking with a course of action that would eradicate something that was not
there. He nonetheless serves Kluge well in two crucial ways. First, he provides the famous
line about the geopolitical irrelevance of “old Europe,” which Kluge cites at the end of
“Der Teufel im Weißen Haus” and transformatively co-opts in activating the resources of the
condemned past, not least its long tradition of devil storytelling. Second, by citing Rumsfeld’s
chiasmus, Kluge is able to both call Rumsfeld on his deceit and activate the deceit for other
purposes.
It is not simply because of Rumsfeld’s abuse that I hesitate to ascribe to Kluge the
demystifying gesture of a one-sidedly critical inversion of the social order. Rather, the
double nature of the chiasmus, its oscillation between demystification and deceit, restrains
the sociocritical dialectician’s desire to wield it for the sake of objective social analysis
and prediction. This destabilizes Marx’s own control of the prognostic dimension of the
chiasmus to advance claims about the historical process. Marx can be a devil, too.22 That
is the real difficulty for Kluge. The possible deceptions in the trails left by such devils call
for the responsive work of interpretation to ascertain their continued instructiveness. Such
instructions can be captured by attending to Kluge’s use of his own chiasmi, in which the
interplay of dialectical and diabolical tendencies in his prose is brought to a head.
21
In deferring to the reader’s activity, Kluge’s texts invite such playful schemes of identification. This
fanciful interpretative gesture is just meant to serve as an example of such play.
22
“Prof. Dr. Miriam Hansen . . . hat eine Fundstelle bei Marx entdeckt, in der dieser darauf hinweist,
daß Mephistopheles zur Gattung der Wahrsager, der Zukunftsdeuter gehöre,” writes Kluge in “Der
Teufel als Unterhaltungskünstler” (L 689).
Across the diverse terrain of his Lücke stories, Kluge deploys the chiasmus to ef-
fect spatial as well as temporal orientation. His usage highlights the labor of wielding
distinctions—the Unterscheidungsvermögen that Kluge believes his texts can train—as well
as invites the inversion of distinctions; recall the reversibility of the distinction between
good and evil observed in “Der Teufel im Weißen Haus.” Chiastic play becomes especially
interesting as soon as differences are incorporated into the syntactic structure in such a way
as to allow for asymmetrical inversions, as in Marx’s symptomatic use: “Nicht die Religion
macht den Menschen, sondern der Mensch macht die Religion” (“Zur Kritik” 378), where the
insertion of the negation provides for the inversion’s transformative force. Kluge follows the
dialectician’s lead in this by crossing negated positions, as discussed above, to map out unseen
alternatives to positions assumed or insinuated in the texts themselves. This is wonderfully
borne out in another compact tale from Lücke, which retells the homecoming of Odysseus
from a modern perspective. In “Das unverrückbare Bett des Odysseus,” a young American
student of international relations at Stanford University attempts to appropriate Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment by searching for counterimages for each of its
images (L 100). The mirroring function at work in the student’s approach—which points
to the rudiments of a dialectical procedure—bears promise if it allows for a transformative
multiplication of distinctions suitable to the spatiotemporal complexity of reality.
The navigational work to which chiastic inversions are put in this text, which abounds
in cartographic marks, guides its traverse of temporal and spatial distances. In the end, the
student’s efforts lead him to identify moments of consolation in the Greek epic that Adorno
and Horkheimer neglect in their enlightenment-dialectical reading. Yet, the extent to which
Kluge’s readers can derive solace from the student’s findings—he emphasizes Odysseus’s
bed as a bastion of recognition between man and wife, and a footnote associates the bed with
“STORYTELLING” itself—depends on how much they choose to scrutinize the student’s
procedure. Another footnote (omitted from the English translation) mobilizes a chiasmus to
draw attention to the deception and, hence, possible fallibility in the mirror-play the student
relies on: “Blickt einer auf eine Kugel, so erscheint es ihm, daß er sich in ihrer Mitte befinde;
liest einer die Zahl 265, so muß er ‘verstehen’ 562” (L 101). Mirror reflections may invert
images, but where is the real? There is nothing to guarantee the tenability of the student’s
simple inversions. Hence, in similarity to the narrative structures analyzed above, Kluge
again introduces an opposition in approaches—that of his teachers with the hopeful young
student’s—to effect an opening between image and counterimage. Further indication of this
exit stems not so much from the realpolitische examiner at Stanford University, who presses
the student on his reading, but rather from the diplomat-to-be’s fellow student, who is willing
to remain patient and make further efforts with her friend. She indicates a potential source
for the transformative multiplication of the male student’s mirror-play.
The student’s juxtapositions, his reference points of hope versus doom, in addition
to other distinctions operative in the “Odysseus” story such as image and counterimage,
the familiar and the foreign,23 and so forth, must be crossed with one another to guard
23
In the compact constellation that Kluge assembles here between Homer, Lewis Carroll, the Frankfurt
School in California, and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the student is called on to negotiate
against their one-sidedness. The simultaneous use of distinctions allows for their reinscrip-
tion into one another. This is key to rendering the student’s analytical arsenal sufficiently
complex to provide a cartography appropriate to the future, in which “man solche Praktiker
brauchen [werde]” (L 102). The complex structure emerging from such an arrangement of
distinctions—which can be dialectical, without having to conform to the tripartite scenarios
analyzed in the other stories above24—speaks as much to spatial as to temporal procedures of
orientation. In fact, the navigational emphasis of so many of Kluge’s Lücke tales underscores
the primacy of space over time. The chiastic crossings that Kluge delivers further recall
the originally spatial technique indicated by the structure’s name: the drawing of the “X,”
which precedes dialectics’ harnessing of the structure to a future-oriented conception of a
progressive history. Although Kluge maps time no less than space, the emphasis on the spatial
coordinates of human orientation may be construed as compensating for a perceived bias
toward temporality in the architecture of German dialectics through the Frankfurt School.
Each of Kluge’s contributions to the continuation of enlightenment in the vein of his teachers’
writings—the expansive scope of his investigations, the diabolical flexibilization of philo-
sophical dialectics, and the persistent concern with examining the footholds of praxis—is
indicative of the spatial imagination at work in Lücke.
As noted in my introductory remarks, Kluge commits himself to a continuation of the
Frankfurt School’s attempt to rehabilitate enlightenment from out of its blind spots with an
emphasis on the relation of those to practical emancipation. Further analysis shows that Kluge
cannot deliver practical emancipation; he can only foster it through the preliminary labor of
orientation across a plethora of contexts to survey wherein the anchors of a renewed process of
enlightenment might inhere. In so doing, he believes himself to be bolstering exits too feebly
conceived in critical theory. His concern with identifying spaces where enlightened forms of
praxis might unfold comes at a time when the temporal architecture of a historical dialectic has
been rendered uncertain. In the German edition Kluge cites 1989, and in the English edition,
more globally, 1991—the “disintegration of the Russian imperium”—as watershed events in
this regard, but not as indications of any eclipse of progress. To the contrary, actually existing
socialism long having forfeited any plenipotentiary status of utopian hope, Kluge attests to the
hopefulness such geopolitical changes suggested to him. But the grounds for such hope are
not readily ascertainable. Foregoing investigations—in space—of the ambiguous situation
of the new geopolitical order take precedence for Kluge over any possible predictions of new
historical departures.
What could a dialectics of space look like? With respect to the transformative spa-
tialization of Frankfurt School dialectics that I ascribe to Kluge, here, an account could
certainly be mustered of Adorno’s own spatialization of dialectics in Negative Dialektik.
no fewer “international” relations than between Gleichnis and Gegengleichnis, the familiar and the
foreign, self and other, living and dead, past and future, nature and culture, and beginning and end, all
in a two-page story.
24
Kluge can again be understood to follow Adorno, whose Negative Dialektik trains differentiation
per se without jettisoning the attempt to imagine the relations between differentiates dialectically:
“Dialektisch ist Erkenntnis des Nichtidentischen auch darin, daß gerade sie, mehr und anders als das
Identitätsdenken, identifiziert” (ND 152).
To be sure, Adorno’s refusal to allow dialectical method positive predications or predictions

retards historical time, which the philosopher does not in any case perceive to be advancing.25
Still more, the spatial arrangements of conceptual force-fields, or “ensembles” (ND 39), that
Adorno mounts in his “Modellanalysen” point to his wresting of dialectics away from its
temporal-historical trajectory in the interest of locating a tenable life in the here and now.
Moreover, Adorno positively deploys concepts such as Ensemble, Konstellation, Modell,
Konfiguration, and Zusammenhang26 that are crucial to Kluge’s own theoretical imagina-
tion and literary techniques. Yet, for many readers, including I suspect for Kluge himself,
Adorno’s enormously suggestive conceptual labor nonetheless demands concretization be-
yond the scope of the philosopher’s limited deliverance thereof in the “Meditationen zur
Metaphysik” which conclude Negative Dialektik. Kluge’s short prose pieces undertake the
experimental concretization necessary to fill this gap. The scope of his epic volumes and their
redress of enlightenment amidst the saturation of its principles in social complexity serve
Frankfurt as its travel agency. Furthermore, their directedness toward practical questions take
critical theory into a direction for which the ice in Adorno is too thin to serve as a ground
and for which no rational theory of communicative action is tenable.27 “Das Bedürfnis nach
Orientierung ist praktischer gerichtet als bloße Erkenntnis,” write Negt and Kluge (GE 1002).
It is not yet political praxis, but is situated right between knowledge and praxis to serve as a
link between the two.
The theoretical companion to Kluge’s literary expansion of Frankfurt School dialectics
is, of course, the seminal Geschichte und Eigensinn, which Kluge composed in collaboration
with the sociologist Oskar Negt. In closing, I wish only to underscore the connection between
the tendency of Kluge’s narrative prose to move increasingly more toward spatial concerns
and Geschichte und Eigensinn’s own imaginative reorganization of dialectics.28 The kind of
multiplication strategy discussed above is found in each and is connected to the conception of
realism developed in Geschichte und Eigensinn, which adds the categories of the irrational,
the imaginary, and the revolutionary to Bertolt Brecht’s account of the horizontal, vertical,
and functional dimensions of the real.29 The multiplication is characteristic. Negt and Kluge
proceed similarly in their direct confrontations with dialectics, which is conceptualized in
25
Dialectical method is arguably less in lock-step with a dialectic of history in Adorno’s book (cf., e.g.,
ND 160) than in the more adamantly mimetic Geschichte und Eigensinn, in which Negt and Kluge follow
“dunkle Stellen bei Hegel” to maintain the traditional connection: “Dialektik ist nicht nur eine Methode,
um geschichtliche Verhältnisse zu untersuchen. Sie ist auch das konkrete Bewegungsverhältnis in der
Geschichte; die Methode liest gleichsam durch Nachahmung aus der Wirklichkeit” (Geschichte und
Eigensinn 711). Subsequent references to this volume will be cited in parentheses in the text with the
abbreviation GE followed by the page number.
26
For more on the status of these terms in Adorno, see Jameson, Late Marxism, esp. ch. 6.
27
Stollmann accurately paraphrases Kluge’s approach to Habermas in his article “Vernunft ist ein Gefühl
für Zusammenhang” (243).
28
Langston’s account of Geschichte und Eigensinn’s Benjaminian heritage in fact emphasizes spatial
techniques of relocation and reframing endemic to its handling of temporality. See his Visions of
Violence, esp. 46.
29
See GE 511. For discussion of this extension of Brecht’s conception of realism, see Jameson, “On
Negt and Kluge”; and Müller, “Die authentische Methode.”
terms of diabolically multipolar relationships: “Alle dialektischen Verhältnisse sind äußerst

vielpolig, unterliegen Verzerrungen und dialektischen Beugungen, aber zeigen wenig Ten-
denz, auf ihren Begriff zu kommen oder gar in den diametralen Pol umzuschlagen” (GE 710).
The resistance of dialectical relations themselves to conceptual clarification indicates a limit
to the theoretical investigation of the same. In another passage that points to the precedence
of spatial analysis over possibilities of temporal predications, Negt and Kluge write, “Über
progressiv und regressiv kann [die Dialektik] aus sich heraus nicht entscheiden, sondern nur
über zusammenhängend und nicht-zusammenhängend” (GE 241). Indeed, Geschichte und
Eigensinn exerts tremendous effort to demonstrate the power of human labor’s resilience as
well as the reach of the book’s own theoretical postulates. Yet, its search for concretization,
its need for contextual anchoring, must ultimately give way to another medium altogether.30
In providing such contexts through experimental literary production, Kluge’s stories are less
the illustration of his theoretical work with Negt than a testing ground for the reality of his
theories.31 Interpretation reveals the verdict of those clashes. Further Kluge scholarship, in
my view, would do well to develop a fuller analysis of Kluge’s spatial imagination in terms
of, first, the global expansion of his storytelling represented by recent prose publications such
as Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (“Mimesis in the Global Age”); second, the spatial
architecture implied by the epic arrangement of short, independent tales in large volumes
(literary networking of stories); and third, the spatializing techniques of the stories in relation
to the same tendencies in Negt and Kluge’s own contributions to critical theory.
Colgate University
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor. Ästhetische Theorie. Vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden. Ed. Rolf Tiede-
mann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. Print.
———. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem Beschädigten Leben. Gesammelte Schriftenin zwanzig Bänden.
Vol. 4. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. Print.
———. Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden. Vol. 6. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. Print.
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer Verlag, 1988. Print.
Carp, Stefanie. Kriegsgeschichten: Zum Werk Alexander Kluges. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987. Print.
Fontane, Theodor. Der Stechlin. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1978. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.
30
On Geschichte und Eigensinn’s relation to other discourses, see both Jameson, “On Negt and Kluge”;
and Stollmann, “Vernunft.”
31
The unacknowledged implication of this architecture is that the stories are closer to “reality” than
theory itself.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. J. P. A. Gaskin. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 1996. Print.
———. “On Negt and Kluge.” October 46 (1988): 151–77. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. Ausgewählte kleine Schriften. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1965. Print.
Kluge, Alexander. The Devil’s Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century. Trans. Martin Chalmers and Michael
Hulse. New York: New Directions, 2004. Print.
———. Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt: Im Umfeld des neuen Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 2003. Print.
Langston, Richard. Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes after Fascism. Evanston: Northwestern UP,
2008. Print.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Print.
“Lyrisch—episch—dramatisch.” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: ein historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden.
Ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. 7 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004. 3: 717. Print.
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———. “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung.” Werke. Vol. 1. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956.
378–79. Print.
Müller, Harro. “Die authentische Methode: Alexander Kluges antirealistisches Realismusprojekt.” Re-
alitätskonzeptionen in der zeitgenössischen Kultur: Beiträge zu Literature, Kunst, Fotographie, Film und
zum Alltagesleben. Ed. Susanne Knaller. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2008. 117–38. Print.
Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Geschichte und Eigensinn. Der unterschätzte Mensch: gemeinsame
Philosophie in zwei Bänden. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2001. Print.
Reichmann, Wolfgang. Der Chronist Alexander Kluge: Poetik und Erzählstrategien. Bielefeld: Aisthesis,
2009. Print.
Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London:
Macmillan, 1978. Print.
Stollmann, Rainer. “Vernunft ist ein Gefühl für Zusammenhang.” Der Maulwurf kennt kein System: Beiträge
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mann. Bielefeld: Verlag, 2005. 233–67. Print. Transcript.
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Critical Storytelling and Diabolical Dialectics - AK and The Devils Blind Spots

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The Germanic Review, 85: 318–339, 2010

Critical Storytelling and Diabolical

Keywords: Adorno, critical theory, dialectic, enlightenment, Kluge, prose

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF DIE LÜCKE, DIE DER TEUFEL LÄßT

ENLIGHTENMENT, DEVILS, AND BLIND SPOTS

Kluge’s narrative strategies of enlightenment redress the enlightenment’s relationship

most important to Kluge. In Negative Dialektik, Adorno aspires to practice a nondominating

THE CHANCE PRODUCTION OF A NORM

THE DIABOLICAL DIALECTIC

Alles gesellschaftliche Leben ist wesentlich praktisch. Alle Mysterien, welche

of anecdotal storytelling, Kluge’s piece confronts the problems of indeterminacy afflicting

Kluge vigilantly persists in directing his exploratory interest in enlightenment’s continuation

TOWARD A SPATIAL DIALECTICS: NOTES ON THE CHIASMUS

To be sure, Adorno’s refusal to allow dialectical method positive predications or predictions

terms of diabolically multipolar relationships: “Alle dialektischen Verhältnisse sind äußerst

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