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The appeal of things is that they insinuate a degree of stability, durability, firmness, and a degree of certainty in times of uncertainty. Unlike objects ( Gegenstände ), things are there even if we—humans who perceive, surround, use them—are not. The article draws on Heidegger’s 1950 essay “The Thing,” which uses the example of a jug, to reflect on Kleist’s things. Kleist’s things are not stable, not durable, and not a ground of certainty for the fickle mind. Nor are they merely fragile and transient. Rather, Kleist’s things are simultaneously both stable and fragile, durable and transient, certain and uncertain. Kleist’s writings show how the liminality of things extends into the social realm where things are recognized as a potential resource: as the singular, different, and surprising element that resists, that can change, but that also makes possible the general, the rule, the law. Focusing in particular on the broken jug in Kleist’s famous comedy by the same name, the article argues that Kleist finds in things an alternative to Kant’s “thing in itself” and to the Romantic absolute (as something  Unbedingtes ). Counter to the search for certainty and stable grounds advocated by some of the new materialists, Kleist’s episteme works toward a thinking that responds and recalls the uncertainty of things and with it their singularity and generative force.

Kleist and the Uncertainty of Things