Vom Zweikampf zur Hetzjagd. Die politische Bedeutung der Tiere in Heinrich von Kleists Penthesilea

In Kleist’s drama Penthesilea animals are not only presented in order to carry meaning through their use as rhetoric figure to enucleate and underline human qualities or vices, but also agents themselves (McHugh 2009) in scenes of hunting. With Rolands Borgards we can refer to the dogs of Penthesilea’s chases as “diegetic animals” (Borgards, 2012). Taking over Bruno Latour’s “Actor-Network Theory” (Latour 2004) we point out that dogs are actors of the play living with the Amazons in a cross-species community (Haraway 2008) rooted in the common organic natural bios that they share and co-shape by their participation in hunting. On the contrary, the Greek community is a stereotyped one, crystallised in empty formulas and in predictable behaviours. The hunting scenes in Penthesilea had a specific meaning in Kleit’s epoch when the famous par force hunting practice was ment to represent the political egemony and the court.