The Title of This Essay refers in part to Dorrit Cohn’s influential 1975 article “Kleist’s ‘Marquise von O…’: The Problem of Knowledge.” In that work Cohn applied a Freudian methodology to the eponymous heroine’s crisis, arguing that the Marquise had indeed retained a memory trace of what Cohn termed that “erotic happening” veiled behind the famous grapheme of the “dash” — that “most pregnant graphic sign in German literature.” The Marquise’s subsequent struggles in the face of her irrefutable pregnancy became for Cohn an index of the efforts required to isolate this engram in the unconscious in order to preserve a functioning ego. Cohn’s privileging of the role of the unconscious is indispensable to any psychoanalytical consideration of the story but needs perhaps to be reclaimed from the discourse of ego psychology to give it its full ideological and linguistic dimension.

To achieve this, a shift of perspective from interior to exterior is required, a shift that moves away from the conventional idea of the unconscious as part of a discrete and irreducibly internal psychic economy, as a quarantine for those mental representations (the morally “reprehensible” sexual encounter of the Marquise, for example) that threaten the wellbeing of a given subject. Might it not be, rather, that the structures preserved by a disavowal of a presumed “unconscious truth” are not interior but part of the external symbolic fabric guaranteeing the social ground of a subject’s existence? This shift in perspective from the unconscious as touchstone of interiority to unconscious as radically externalized entity in the case of the Marquise implies that the interpretive focus of the “problem of knowledge” is not so much on unmasking hidden knowledge in the service of a humanist psychology as a description of those structural mechanisms that rely on the repressed knowledge or “un-knowledge” of the unconscious. Not so much, then, “what” or “whether” she knew but rather: “For whose benefit did she not know?”

Chief among these “external structural mechanisms” is, of course, language itself, as the medium that discloses the unconscious. This is a point illustrated by the importance of the famous “dash” to the story. It is clear that the dash as grapheme, as pure signifier, is a case of the symbol itself acting in the service of the unconscious.