«Mein einziges, mein höchstes Ziel ist gesunken, und ich habe nun keines mehr – ». Kleist auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Wahrheit

In the so-called «Kant-Krise» Kleist seems to have abandoned both, every hope in objective truth and his previous proposal concerning «the sure way to happiness». It is thus not at all surprising that critics often treat him as one of the foremost pioneers prior to modernism, as his literary work and his more indirect allusions, with reference to his poetical method, are seen to radically depart from previous aesthetics and philosophical models and to move towards their transposition «in an extra-moral sense» as presented later by Nietzsche. This article, in contrast, attempts to demonstrate that Kleist underwent a complex process of intellectual struggle which allowed him to rediscover a «strong» concept of truth by redirecting the problem towards the extreme subjective difficulties in discovering an access to it. All his texts trace with great investigative intensity the encoding and decoding of semiotic lines of a truth in the sphere of concrete reality and action. Following these clues, a closer reading of Kleist’s last story «The Duel» then tries to highlight what is perhaps a key to understanding the intention of his entire poetry, as something far from being relativist. Indeed Kleist appears to suggest, even through his most exaggerated textual fiction, that although randomness is all around, there is a chance of achieving a quite different dynamic of justice and truthfulness through inter-subjective confidence and commitment, endangered as they may ever be.