Infectious Hospitality and Communicative Disease in Kleist’s “Der Findling”: The Disease Inside and Out

Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003) 7. Kant’s text is not, in fact, as sanguinely utopian as all that. He recognizes that “the state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis); the natural state is one of war.” However, he argues, this natural state of hostility between men can be overcome by the establishment of a state of peace and harmony.

Ibid., 41.

In Francis Clifton, 4.

See Critique of Political Economy, 1859, esp. “The Circulation of Money.” Also “Die Zikulation des Kapitals […] ist ein perpetuum mobile.” This idea he derives from Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, Commerce and Government Considered in their Mutual Relationship [1776], where in Chapter 16, “Of the Circulation of Money,” Condillac points out that “Money is […] constantly moving around, to be collected later as into reservoirs, from which it spreads through a mass of small channels which bring it back into the first reservoirs; whence it spreads out again, and to which it returns again, This continual movement, which collects it to distribute it, and distributes it to gather it up again, is what we call circulation. Do I need to point out that this circulation assumes that, at each movement the money makes, there is an exchange; and that when it moves without causing an exchange, there is no circulation?”

Bryon Grigsby, Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (London: Blackwell, 2004) 169. On the idea of usury as a transmissible disease in Shakespeare, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “Usurers of Colour: The Taint of Jewish Transnationality in Mercantilist Literature and The Merchant of Venice,” in Helen Ostovich and Mary Silcox (eds.), The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern Europe (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2008): 158–81.

Ibid. 183.

Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Lauchlan Heath (London: Routledge, 1979) 17. In Edith Stein’s 1916 dissertation On the Problems of Empathy, written under the supervision of Edmund Husserl, Stein notes that in an act of empathy, the empathiser undergoes “the experience of the foreign consciousness” that utterly blurs the subject position. Quoted in Ann W. Astel, “Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy in the Thought of René Girard, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.2 (2004): 116–131; here 120.

Albertini, Bill. “Contagion and the Necessary Accident.” Discourse, vol. 30 no. 3, 2008, p. 443–467. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/364474.