Gailus's book is aptly published as part of the “Parallax” series of the Johns Hopkins University Press, which addresses re-visions of culture and society. Subjects of re-vision, in the double sense of a second look and a transformation of the topics under investigation, for Gailus are the French Revolution and its impact upon the German cultural elite, here represented by the philosopher Kant and the producers of novellas, Goethe and Kleist. Under re-vision is not only the established, traditional view “at work in classicist aesthetics (Schiller), idealist philosophy (Hegel), and the modern novel (Goethe), which all relied on teleologically structured, and thus progressivist, models” (23) of history for the absorption of a radical rupture, a historical caesura, and an absolutely new event whose appearance requires a complete transformation of cultural life and its symbolic order, but also the need for a reassessment of the relationship between revolutionary event and language, between politics and poetics around 1800.

Tracing the re-visions of this relationship in impressive close readings of Kant's Conflict of the Faculties, Goethe's Conversations of German Refugees, and Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas (From an Old Chronicle), Gailus stresses the insertion and conversion of the revolutionary, historical event into the language of these texts, which defy the discursive phantasms of the idealist, organicist strategies of an integration and diffusion of the caesura into the textual and cultural fabric by precisely exposing them to the disruptive and traumatic blow of the revolutionary event. This event, here manifested in and by the French Revolution, is not an object of historiography, but rather a non-structural occurrence, i.e. the emergence of the absolutely new, inherently meaningless, contingent, violent, and groundless foundation on which cultural, political, psychic, and symbolic life restlessly rest. As such a groundless ground it is not only the source of vitality and the dynamic origin of these orders, but—at least as far as language is concerned—it imparts itself to the latter once it is liberated from its semantic function and its performative dimension is stressed as a positing force, as an articulation and utterance capable of producing and positing new discursive formations, political orders, communicative and social structures.

Now Gailus argues—hence the title Passions of the Sign—that language can assume this per- and transformative, revolutionary power “only to the extent that it opens itself up to its internal outside, the extraverbal force of passion” (11).