Enter the Hybrid (Kleist)
This chapter examines the radicalization of this violent dimension in Kleist. While Kant and Goethe model life as a self-organizing form, Heinrich von Kleist highlights its divided and conflictual nature, depicting it as driving beyond form into the territory of deformation and disarticulation. In Kleist, this anti-organicism manifests in a poetic practice that emphasizes both the self-interrupting power of language and the prosthetic character of human life. Whereas Kant's and Goethe's autopoetic models seek to reconcile art and life, Kleist's heteropoietics frames art as an artificially intensified mode of life: art exceeds ordinary life, not by providing it with a beautiful form, but by extracting and magnifying its capacity to exceed itself, to break its own form, to become hybrid.