Written at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics,Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes of the Body Politic undertakes readings of literary and philosophical texts, ranging from Immanuel Kant, Mary Shelley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Heinrich von Kleist, to explore the dilemma of reproduction as a privileged figure for marking gender, culture and class distinctions against the formality of the emergent democratic subject around 1800. In particular, this study mines Shelley and Kleist for signs of social being lost to enlightenment modes of representation.