The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist Zachary Sng

s ta n f o r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s s ta n f o r d , c a l i f o r n i a

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of Brown University. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sng, Zachary, 1971The rhetoric of error from Locke to Kleist / Zachary Sng. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-7017-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Error. 2. Rhetoric--Europe--History--18th century. 3. Knowledge, Theory of--Europe-History--18th century. 4. Philosophy, Modern. I. Title. BD171.S59 2010 121'.6--dc22 2010004871 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5 /14 Adobe Garamond

For my mother

Contents



Acknowledgments

ix



Introduction



1.

Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge

14



2.

Linguistic Turns: Leibniz, Tooke, and Coleridge

45



3.

Kant and the Error of Subreption

76



4.

The Madness of the Middle

106



5.

“Inaccurate, as lady linguists often are”: Herodotus and Kleist on the Language of the Amazons

136

Conclusion: A Dirty Word

161



1



Notes

173



Bibliography

189



Index

199

Acknowledgments The years I spent working on this book were itinerant (though thankfully not errant) ones, and I made many connections that continue to inspire and sustain me. The teachers and colleagues to whom I am especially grateful are Rüdiger Campe, Neil Hertz, Albrecht Koschorke, Kay Goodman, Bill Keach, Tim Bewes, Karen Newman, Ken Haynes, Paul Fleming, and Carol Jacobs. I owe a special debt to my dissertation advisor, Bianca Theisen, whose selfless mentoring saw me through the most difficult years of graduate school. Many dear friends have stood by me with advice, support, and encouragement: Sascha Schmitz, Gabi Schaub, Patrick Eiden, Elke Dubbels, Malte Kleinwort, Katharina Baier, Sam Fenno, and Daniel Eschkötter. I am thankful to the German Department at the Johns Hopkins University, the research groups at the University of Konstanz (especially Die Figur des Dritten), and the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Department of German Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University for their support of my work. My students have been a source of infinite delight and wisdom, and special thanks go to Michael Powers, David Hock, Sonya Mladenova, and Will Garrity. Susan Bernstein and Kevin McLaughlin have always been there with thoughtful suggestions, careful critique, and unflagging confidence in me. I cannot thank them enough for their generosity. I am grateful to Emily-Jane Cohen, Sarah Crane Newman, and the readers commissioned by Stanford University Press for their feedback, assistance, and support. I also thank Princeton University Press for their

x

acknowledgments

kind permission to quote from the critical edition of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some material from the Introduction and Conclusion appeared in “Figure3: The Metaphor Between Virtue and Vice,” in Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of the Modern Imagination, ed. Ian Cooper et al. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); it is published here with permission of the publisher. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in German in Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz, ed. Rüdiger Campe (Freiburg: Rombach, 2008). My thanks also to the Offices of the Vice President for Research and the Dean of Faculty at Brown University for their financial assistance with manuscript preparation and printing costs.

The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist

Introduction

The entry on error in the Encyclopédie, Diderot and D’Alembert’s great compendium of Enlightenment knowledge, presents the reader with a stern warning: it is futile to try to defeat error by taking on its numerous and diverse forms. Even if such a Herculean feat could be accomplished, new Â�errors would never cease to emerge, for the mind (l’esprit) is wont to exchange one error for another, just as a sick man who recovers from one illness is often prone to contract a new one. The only way to eradicate error once and for all is to “retrace it to its source and to stem it at its point of origination [remonter à leur source même et la tarir].” What the entry claims to find as the first cause at this site of origination is the following: In tracing our errors to the origin that I have just indicated, we enclose them within a single cause. If our passions give us cause to err [occasionnent des erreurs], it is because they misuse a vague principle, a metaphorical expression, or an equivocal term, applying them to allow ourselves to deduce an opinion that is flattering to ourselves. Therefore, if we fool ourselves, then these vague principles, metaphors, and equivocations are causes that are anterior to our passions. Consequently, renouncing this empty language [ce vain Â�langage] would suffice to dissipate all the artifice of error.1



introduction

The forms into which error can evolve might be legion, but its elimination must begin with dispelling the confusion caused by vague understanding, ambiguous signs, and metaphor. This work can, however, only be initiated by an act of willing sacrifice: one must be ready to renounce the “empty language” of error. The Encyclopédie directs the reader who wishes to know more about error to Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, from which the entire entry is, in fact, taken almost verbatim. Condillac’s work is an extended exploration of the entangled relationship between language and thought that supposedly lies at the origin of error itself. The idea that language, with its unreliability and potential for ambiguity, is responsible for the errors of thought had already been prominently formulated in Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Due largely to energetic interlocutors such as Condillac, it became a recurrent theme in eighteenth-century philosophy. Like error itself, these discussions about the interpenetration of words and ideas took on many forms, but one important claim resonated throughout these debates: equivocation and metaphorical language, both stemming from the intrinsic possibility of one word meaning more than a single idea or thing, could only have deleterious effects on the clear and distinct thought that philosophy aims to establish. The call for the enclosure of error’s multiple forms “within a single cause” in order to eradicate it indicates another important co-implication in the eighteenth century, which was fascinated with the project of telling reliable histories about origins, trajectories, and destinations. To trace error back to a single origin is already to begin the work of clarification, because it allows us to perceive a unified starting point for the history of error, and to thereby reduce the multiplicity of error’s forms to a coherent narrative about divergence, mutation, and escalation. To be able to narrate a genealogy (however convoluted and diverging) of a concept and to master it are, in other words, one and the same thing. Once sites of origin are located, development or historical movement can be described and narrated, whether it be about the genesis of ideas in the mind, the origin of language, the formation of subjectivity, or the establishment of proper criteria for moral and aesthetic judgment. Much is at stake, therefore, in the attempt to retrace our steps to where we first began to err. Knowledge in the Enlightenment was often imagined as a journey, as David W. Bates notes in Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France, and Condillac’s discussion of error could

introduction



certainly be read as an exemplary attempt to secure a starting point for the itinerary of thought itself, a place from which to begin a reliable narrative about knowledge and error. The problem, however, is that the site to which the word error returns us contains just the sort of linguistic equivocation that frustrates clarification: the Latin errare means both “to wander freely” and “to wander from the right path.” The former meaning is neutral, and could be used to describe, for example, the movement of a person or animal. The second meaning is the pejorative one that became prevalent in English usage after the seventeenth century.2 In the Romance languages and in German, the neutral meaning of error as mere “moving about” survived much longer, even though the connection to some sort of intellectual or moral aberration also prevails in current usage. An instructive example of the coexistence of error’s two meanings is the ambiguity of the French errant that persisted into the eighteenth century: the chevalier errant (the knight-errant) was imagined in the medieval period as one who sets out courageously looking for adventure, and was therefore a positive figure, while the juif errant (the Wandering Jew) was seen as a perpetual exile straying from redemption and truth.3 How can we enclose error’s diversity “within a single cause” when what lies at the root of error is a nonunity, an equivocation between what Bates calls “the merely accidental deviation” and “the more productive aberration that held out the promise of some future discovery” (xi)? This undecidability strikes at the hope for a productive itinerary of thought that would begin once the source is clarified. The difficulties introduced by error’s originary ambiguity are perhaps even more radical than Bates’s examples of the chevalier errant and the juif errant suggest: error might name two kinds of movement (aimless wandering and deviation from a given path), but it is not clear that the former is the less threatening and more productive of the two. For a model that relies on the clear distinction between truth and error, pure wandering without logic or purpose could represent a more serious challenge precisely on account of its nonsystematic and nonsystematizable character. A movement that can be clearly identified as deviation from a norm would, in fact, reinforce the stability of the norm through the implicit suggestion that deviation could be excluded or even rehabilitated. The difference that divides error at its origin does not, in other words, allow for a simple distinction between the productive and the nonproductive. The tracing of error therefore cannot begin with a single stroke of disambiguation, from which would issue the possibility of describing clear lines of



introduction

development from a clarified origin.4 To read error’s movement in the eighteenth century as I propose to do would be to undertake a different kind of tracing, one that resembles neither genealogical explanation nor systematic definition, but rather the kind of infinitely laborious task that dismayed the encyclopédistes: an examination of multiple and repeated attempts at distinction that fail to foreclose entirely the possibility of new uncertainties and errors. The result will be neither an encyclopedic knowledge of error nor a conventional history of error. The figuration of knowledge as an itinerary assumes the coherence, systematicity, and productivity of movement, making it amenable to historical description, but this is precisely what error does not allow. Error shadows the history and the itinerary of thought at all times, establishing not a diametrically opposed but an alternative movement, constituted by the constant possibility that movement itself will be interrupted or undone through arrest, reversal, return, overflow, and other forms of nonsystematic wandering. To write a history of error would be to traverse the path of knowledge in order to arrive at the truth or meaning of error, but to do so one would have to first drastically reduce the full complexity and danger that error represents. Although error names a fundamental uncertainty between random and directed movement (even in the form of clear deviation) that is subject to constant chiastic reversal, its tracing also cannot take the form of a dialectical description. An insistence on a strictly binary opposition between error and truth, coupled with an acknowledgment of error’s boundless power to invert such oppositions, would only produce a story much like the one told by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Such a narrative is indeed remarkably effective as a critique of progressive knowledge, but it institutes a logic of inversion that is curiously static and totalizing in its iterability. A binary understanding of the difference between rationality and irrationality, knowledge and superstition, Enlightenment and myth, can only generate constant reversal around a single turning point. This again produces a narrative that ignores error’s ability to unsettle even the very logic on which such dialectical reversals depend. While some of error’s more obvious manifestations put it in direct opposition to truth, its most radical manifestations confound exactly the logic of such oppositions; among the many things that error names, in other words, is the unreliability of the very distinction between truth and error. The texts discussed here will be drawn primarily from the literary, philosophical, and aesthetic writings of Britain and Germany in the eighteenth

introduction



century, a period during which the relationship between knowledge and various forms of error was interrogated with particular fervor. The writers that take on this problem seek to clarify and delineate the proper contours and itinerary of knowledge, and in order to do so, they suggest how to identify errant deviation and digression. They also, however, reveal error at work in some of the less systematic ways suggested above: as uncontrollable and uncontainable movement, as unpredictable convulsions in the machinery of knowledge production, as a troubling thirdness that undoes dialectical opposition and resolution, and as an originary and recidivist contamination. The aim of this study will be to trace the irresolvable tensions that constitute these texts: on the one hand, they make claims about a reliable production and distribution of knowledge about language, cognition, subjectivity, and value; and on the other, they reveal an alternative movement that does not merely oppose or reverse the first but generates the insuperable possibility of incoherence, corruption, contingency, and randomness. Condillac’s suggestion that language’s danger is related to its metaphoricity indicates an important anxiety for the eighteenth century that will be explored in the chapters that follow. The frequency with which eloquence and figural speech were attacked in the period attests to the increased stakes in regulating language once its co-implication with thought had been established. If words are more than mere means for conveying ideas, if they interpose themselves already in the process by which ideas are formed, then the question of how to limit improper speech can no longer be confined to handbooks of oratorical practice; rather, it becomes the business of philosophy itself. Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Kant are often read as having excluded rhetoric from the field of philosophy, but their texts patently rely on the very same rhetorical practices that they denounce. Such an observation is facile, though, and leaves the complexities of the relationship between rhetoric, error, and philosophy unexamined. It would be more fruitful to consider exactly how rhetoric functions in these texts as a generator of both knowledge and risk, and how these authors attempt to regulate the risk of error through various representative and persuasive strategies. The classical system of rhetoric claims, in fact, to be just such a system of error management. The Greek schēma and tropos and the Latin figura all designate some sort of deviation from a norm, conceived either as a movement of turning or a gesture of deliberate shaping. In this respect, they resemble error: as Quintilian points out in Institutio oratoria, the figure of speech “originates from the same sources as errors of language,” because it begins



introduction

with a violation of the norms of language.5 The figure thus functions like a body that has little grace when held upright but which “gives an impression of action and animation” when artfully posed through deliberate curvature or deviation (2.13.9). There is more at stake, however, than mere aesthetics, for this violation or departure from the norm also gives figure its power to “lend credibility to our arguments” and allows them to “steal their way secretly into the minds of the judges” (9.1.19), just as an expert swordsman need only incline his body slightly in order to “lure his opponent’s weapons from their guard” and slip in for the kill (9.1.20). Although figure’s power stems from its errorlike curvature, there is a limit to the amount of deviation that a figure can sustain before it fails. Here, Quintilian lays down a general rule of thumb rather than specific prescriptions: a figure succeeds as long as it can be recuperated back into virtuous speech, but if it deviates too much, it will no longer simply resemble but actually become error. Each instance of virtuous speech that is cataloged in classical rhetoric is therefore usually accompanied by its alter-ego—a corresponding fault or vice.6 In the words of Horace, virtus est vitium fugere (virtue is to escape vice). Virtue is not the mere absence of vice (or “error,” which vitium also translates) but the active movement of recovery following an exposure to vice. Virtue is constituted, in other words, only in the approach toward and subsequent recovery from error. The economy that produces virtue begins as an approach toward vice, or one could say, the suggestion of a resemblance to error. At the last minute, though, once as much energy or profit as possible has been extracted from this resemblance, there is a subsequent recovery or withdrawal from danger. By exposing itself to the possibility of error but emerging unscathed, figural language is able to tap into a source of energy or power. From vice, we get virtue, and from error, profit. This is the central paradox at the heart of classical rhetoric: a system seemingly devoted to the regulation of proper and excellent speech turns out to be dependent on the improper or erroneous. Quintilian gives this discussion of figure a final charming twist by noting that the statement virtus est vitium fugere is itself an example of an effective flirting with error. According to the guidelines of good Latin style, Horace has overburdened the copula by forcing it to serve as a link between a nominal construction (“virtue”) and a verbal one (“to flee vice”). This is, strictly speaking, an infraction of the rules of classical Latin. Quintilian provides two alternative formulations that would be perfectly grammatical, but points out that Horace’s figure, which itself approaches but finally withdraws from

introduction



linguistic error, is far more “vigorous” than either (9.3.10). A figure thus gains something important when it returns after being exposed to error: it is now able to refer to the very processes by which it is itself constituted as linguistic excellence. Because Horace’s figure is like error but also somehow distinguishable from it, it can function as a sign that points to the passage from dangerous resemblance to safe difference. In this sense, every figure, regardless of its domain of semantic reference (that is, the actual semantic fields from which both the “literal” meaning as well as the “figurative” one are drawn), contains the potential to account for and reflect on its own genealogy, which is the passage from norm to deviation and back again. In other words, every figure points, to a certain extent, to its own figurality. The kinds of error that will be discussed in this book, however, precipitate an uncertainty between the two things that error names: either a movement that can be directed and regulated by the difference between norm and deviation, origin and goal, or a movement that is aimless, wandering, and indeterminate. The classical account of figure and its relationship to error is ultimately a complex extension of the former sort of movement. Rather than simply showing that error is a departure from the norm of virtue, it demonstrates that deviation and the process by which it is resolved are precisely what constitute virtue. This still, however, assumes the predictability and manageability of error’s movement from safety to risk and back again, which is exactly what the ambiguity that adheres to the word error puts into question. The possibility of error as a nonsystematic wandering instead of a clearly recognizable deviation creates, in other words, a radical suspension of any simple opposition between literal and figural, proper and improper—an opposition from which one can reap rhetorical profit. Its uncertainty contaminates even the economy by which vitium is converted into virtue, error into power, offering only the possibility of risk without a corresponding guarantee of recompense. The rhetoric of error to which my title refers must therefore have to do with more than the persuasiveness of such regulatory models of conversion. My focus will instead be on the nonsystematic movement of error that I call errance, which includes contaminating reflux, treasonous desertion, unpredictable circulation, violent irruption, and other movements which place simple oppositions and coherent itineraries under erasure or suspension. The model of rhetorical analysis adopted here cannot simply assume systematicity or attenuate error in order to produce a cogent narrative; reading rhetorically will have to mean, simply put, more than indulging only in



introduction

risk that is destined to yield profit. Instead, it must entail the tracing of a movement that could, in the end, turn out to be utterly incommensurate to any model of conversion and empowerment. Such a mode of reading seems to be suggested in Paul de Man’s essay “Semiology and Rhetoric,” which calls for moving beyond dialectical oppositions similar to the ones discussed above, such as inside and outside, domestic and foreign, literal and figural. In their place, de Man proposes the intriguing new coupling of grammar and rhetoric. The former provides rules for combination and transformations of syntactical units, and thus appears to be compatible with logic and understanding, while the latter “radically suspends logic and opens vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.”7 This critical intervention is itself, however, a risky one: it can only succeed if grammar and rhetoric do not end up constituting yet another coherent and symmetrical opposition, for that would merely reiterate the problems of the binary logic that they supposedly undo. De Man’s task is therefore to unsettle the simple difference between the two without resolving them into an equally fallacious compatibility or harmony. This is exactly what is attempted in the famous aporetic face-off that he stages, with Archie Bunker and Yeats in one corner and Marcel Proust in the other. De Man first shows, using the example of the rhetorical question, that rhetorical reading disrupts the “authority of the meaning engendered by the grammatical structure” (12) and makes it impossible to decide if literal or figurative meaning prevails. Then, he demonstrates how Proust’s assertion of metaphor’s mastery over metonymy ends up revealing the power of “the mechanical, repetitive aspect of grammatical forms” to bring about the “destruction of metaphor and of all rhetorical patterns such as mimesis, paronomasia, or personification” (15–16). These readings, both of which de Man calls “rhetorical,” thus illustrate, respectively, the rhetorization of grammar and the grammatization of rhetoric; de Man seems to suggest a clear difference that could be described in terms of their relationship to error: The former ended in indetermination, in a suspended uncertainty that was unable to choose between two modes of reading, whereas the latter seems to reach a truth, albeit by the negative road of exposing an error, a false pretense. After the rhetorical reading of the Proust passage, we can no longer believe the assertion made in this passage about the intrinsic metaphysical superiority of metaphor over metonymy. We seem to end up in a mood of negative assurance that is highly productive of critical discourse. (16)

introduction



If the point of rhetorical reading is to produce “negative assurance,” then criticism would be tantamount to exposing rhetoric as error. De Man shows, however, that this second alternative, in which rhetoric is reduced to the rigors of grammar and to knowledge about error produced, could be further extended: the syntactical structure within which Proustian metaphor is given and which seems to show the superiority of grammar has, as its subject, “a voice whose relationship to this clause is again metaphorical” (18). The negative assurance of a grammatization of rhetoric is, in other words, itself rhetoricized to yield suspended ignorance. What de Man describes is, one could say, knowledge about error turning out to be itself in error, but only if one remembers that error never names just one thing in such a description. In the first occurrence (“knowledge about error”), it indicates the kind of deviation that opposes itself to truth. In the second occurrence (the realization that this knowledge about error is itself “in error”), it indicates two possibilities: that this supposed knowledge stands in relation to “real” knowledge as error stands in relation to knowledge (once again, a deviation from the right path), but also, that this knowledge is set into perpetual errance, consigned to a ceaseless and aimless wandering that takes the form of suspension and infinite repetition or recursion. In the former case, the exposure of error in knowledge about error would resolve into negative assurance, while the latter would mean being able to hold on to suspended ignorance, at least until the next iteration of error’s inevitable irruption. For de Man, this difficult choice corresponds to the doubleness of rhetoric: on one hand, it names a vertiginous opening up of meaning that is opposed to the univocity and rule-based structure of grammar, but on the other, it names the suspension of this very opposition itself. To read the rhetoric of error in a set of texts therefore means two kinds of reading at once. The first is a reconstruction of the rhetorical strategies that such texts employ to produce the category of “error” and to allow for its containment or conversion into gain. The second is an examination of how error itself produces a vertigo-inducing suspension of the strategies revealed by the first reading. To conduct both of these readings simultaneously involves a close consideration of the thematics of these texts as well as their rhetorical registers, but the goal is not thereby to arrive at the knowledge of one’s superiority over the other, or even to maintain a consistent opposition between the two. Each could function as a site of reliable knowledge from which the other is exposed as “error” in the sense of nontruth, but the



introduction

crossings and interruptions that take place continuously between them also generate a restless and nondirected potentiality that always carries this first possibility away toward the prospect of further errance.8 The names that appear in the title of the book—John Locke and Heinrich von Kleist—do not therefore designate an unambiguous starting point or a definitive ending. In fact, the chapter that opens this book with a reading of Locke’s Essay will be about the impossibility of telling reliable beginnings apart from false starts, and the final chapter will explore a set of radical challenges to closure and conclusion. The chapters in between discuss some of the most significant twists and turns of error in such eighteenth-century authors as Leibniz, Horne Tooke, Coleridge, Adam Smith, Goethe, and Kant, but the aim of my readings is to show error’s disruption of models of influence, borrowings, or continuity without reinvoking these as heuristic or critical tropes. While the selection of texts is taken mainly from the extraordinary volume of eighteenth-century literary and philosophical writings about error, the earliest and the latest publication dates of its primary sources (1690 and 1808) do not designate strict boundaries. Instead, these accounts of error are explored in relation to older texts such as the Histories of Herodotus and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and also in relation to more recent ones drawn from cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary postcolonial studies. “From Locke to Kleist” names, in other words, a course of reading that is itself open to the risk of a certain wandering or straying that mimics rather than explicates the movement of error. I begin with a reading of Locke’s Essay and its controversial claims about the relationship between language and thought. Although Locke recognizes the impossibility of extricating language and its inherent unreliability from the origination of ideas in the mind, he insists that the epistemological consequences of language’s potential for error are minor. The Â�Essay attempts to sustain this difficult claim through a complex network of figures, centered on the distinction between origins and mere mechanisms of distribution, or as Locke vividly puts it, between fountains and pipes. A reading of his remarks on language, gold, and exchange in the Essay and in some of his pamphlets on money reveals, however, that this figural logic is constantly confronted with the threat of loss and contamination, causing both a destabilizing regression or corruption of origins and an exposure to hazardous distribution that cannot be regulated. The necessary dependence of this model on exchange and circulation mirrors a similar reliance in language and money: Locke recognizes that value or meaning is constituted

introduction



only in such unsafe activities, and that the same mechanisms that make linguistic and monetary value possible also open them up to error, corruption, and devaluation. Chapter Two turns to the continuation of Locke’s work on language and thought by G. W. Leibniz and John Horne Tooke, who attempt to come up with principles for a rigorous and scientific study of etymology. They assert that it is not philosophy that must clarify language, but rather it is a rigorous study of language that must correct philosophy’s errors and guide it to truth. Once freed from its slavish subservience to the aim of communicating thought as clearly as possible, language can finally reveal its own structure and systematicity. The success of this new etymological system is therefore predicated upon its ability to formulate reliable principles that can describe the diachronic movement of language as a series of predictable transformations and turns. The very principles that Leibniz and Tooke identify turn out, however, to be designators for the irresolvable ambivalence of error, revealing both the possibility of systematization and the constant undercutting of this possibility through unpredictable errance. The chapter concludes with a reading of “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was fascinated with the promise of eighteenth-century etymology. Rather than celebrating the union between mind and language, the poem dramatizes the unbridgeable gap between movements of thought and movements of word, and shows how errant movement undoes the work of animation, making vitalism indistinguishable from death. The poem’s impasse will be read alongside an entry from Coleridge’s notebook, in which he reflects on one of Tooke’s more disturbing etymologies. Chapter Three examines the “as if ” prescription contained in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and its relation to what he calls the “error of subreption.” Although resemblance is recognized by Kant as a dangerous source of confusion for reason, it is nonetheless a necessary precondition of thought, and the limits of its effects must be regulated with care. This makes judgment, which necessarily involves more than one faculty, a particularly precarious exercise: transcendental ideas such as freedom, for example, have no analogues in nature, but in judgment, we are compelled to use an “as if ” that has, strictly speaking, no ground. The impossible analogy that underpins the so-called regulative use of transcendental ideas is, however, constantly threatening to make it slip into error. I examine the unstable distinction between analogy and error in Kant’s philosophy through a discussion of Pheng Cheah’s reading in Spectral Nationality of the organismic



introduction

metaphor for the political body. Cheah’s analysis relies on the reversibility of the gift-economy that obtains between reason and nature in Kant, but he does not take into account the fact that what become transferred in the putative acts of giving are analogy and its double, error. The gift-economy itself is thus opened up not just to reversal but also to sheer impossibility, as indicated in Kant’s comments about heautonomy. To ignore this impossibility is to generate a series of lurid specters of alterity, when what Kant’s text is haunted by is itself—that is to say, error as reason’s ghostly double. I end the discussion with a parallel reading of Jacques Derrida’s remarks on the exemplarity of literature and Kant’s use of literary examples in the Critique of Judgment. The question of how literature intervenes in the debates about language and thought is explored further in the final two chapters. Chapter Four considers the significance of error in Goethe’s paradigmatic novel of subjectformation, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister. One of the novel’s claims about Bildung is that knowledge is arrived at when error cancels itself out through further error. The job of both teacher and pupil would then be to let error run its course and complete its work of self-correction. I connect this understanding of error with Aristotle’s concept of the virtuous middle and its influence on Adam Smith’s remarks on sympathy. The theatricality of Smith’s moral sentiments points to two forms of the middle—moderation and mediality—that work in harmony to produce the possibility of sympathy. His remarks on fashion and utility as deleterious influences on judgment reveal, however, that the middle is also associated with a certain mechanistic efficacy and momentum that disrupts the relationship between means and ends, particular and general. This fundamental unreliability of the middle is also at work in Goethe’s novel, where it challenges the selfcorrecting logic of error and produces a chain of alternative movements in the text. I explore this problem by describing two forms of the middle in the novel, one represented by the figure of the physician and the other by the circulation of ribbons throughout the story. The failure of Wilhelm’s Bildung is not, I argue, the result of his failure to fulfill the demands of a pedagogical program, but rather the product of an internal contradiction in the model that guarantees the canceling out of error through further errance. Chapter Five deals with an unlikely pairing of texts—the Histories of Herodotus and the tragedy Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist—in order to examine how their representation of the misspeaking Amazon reveals error’s ability to render all pairings unlikely. The failed figure called “so-

introduction



lecism” that Herodotus and Kleist attribute to the Amazon disrupts various forms of coming-together that produce union, meaning, and closure. It also names the possibility of an insistent return of originary violence and thus undermines the coherence of hermeneutic and political models that depend on the unilateral movement from origin to destination. Solecism thus stages the catastrophic failure of the rhetorical resolution of tension claimed by writers such as Quintilian, and generates the possibility of uncontainable and unpredictable errance. This reading concludes with a return to something that Leibniz claimed as a reliable marker in the reconstruction of language’s history: the names of rivers. The origin narratives offered by Herodotus and Kleist share the name Tanaïs, which simultaneously names and fails to name a river, and this unreliability indicates the impossibility of reducing errance to a coherent fluvial course. In the Conclusion, the book turns to some remarks about Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, where we find a system for dirt’s neutralization and its conversion into symbolic power. The workings of this system parallel those of a recuperative rhetoric of error, but the examination of error undertaken in the chapters described above makes it unclear that such a mechanism can ever prevent the repeated irruption of that which is to be neutralized. The book closes with a discussion of how an indelible dirtiness persists in the texts of Herodotus and Kleist, and suggests a similar anxiety about hygiene and waste disposal in the text discussed in the opening chapter, Locke’s Essay.

one

Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge

Narratives about founding texts, epochal breaks, and clear-cut beginnings tend to be taken with a grain of salt these days, but from time to time, one comes across a statement of such compelling lucidity that it seems to warrant a suspension of readerly skepticism. Hans Aarsleff’s characterization of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Leibniz’s response to it seems to be one such case: “The Essay was literally epochmaking, and such works never fail to efface their own past; in fact, one can almost say that the Essay has no other history than that which was its own future, as if Locke merely wrote to give Berkeley and Hume something to write about. Unlike Locke, Leibniz named his sources and gave citations, which may help to identify the Essay’s elusive background, and Leibniz’s vast correspondence offers a further wealth of information.”1 Aarsleff sees the “epoch-making” character of the Essay as something written into the work itself: by effacing its own historicity and remaining silent about its sources and influences, the Essay essentially produces the effect of being the first of its kind. The only history in which the Essay is embedded, in other words, is the one that it inaugurates and inscribes, and according to which it is a site of origination. Aarsleff’s statement was made in 1964, and it has since

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



been challenged by suggestions from numerous intellectual historians about Locke’s sources and influences, and by readings that show how the Essay acknowledges these debts.2 The more important provocation of Aarsleff’s claim, however, has remained largely unaddressed: how does the Essay efface its own historicity, and how does one read or interpret such an attempted erasure? These questions guide the reading proposed here, which examines the Essay’s complex reworking of historicity and origination and considers its relationship to the potential for corruption that is inextricably linked to unreliable words. In order to secure the coherent production and distribution of knowledge, and to limit the damaging effects of error-prone language, Locke has to provide a persuasive account not only of the origins of ideas and words but also of the mechanisms by which they should be allowed to enter into circulation and exchange. The Essay fails, however, to completely secure this model of origination and distribution against the threat of corruption, because something repeatedly obtrudes to undo the distinctions on which it depends. Uncovering the greatest challenges to the integrity of Locke’s epistemological claims will necessitate a closer examination of language, not just as it is explicitly discussed in book 3 of the Essay, but in relation to Locke’s own rhetoric. The Essay’s own linguistic performance has only lately begun to receive scholarly attention, and one could argue, in tandem with Aarsleff, that the text itself is responsible for this long neglect. After all, Locke argues forcefully that the best thing language can do is to submit to regulation and clarification so as not to obscure the understanding. Words, he writes, interpose themselves so much between our Understandings, and the Truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend, that like the Medium through which visible Objects pass, their Obscurity and Disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our Eyes, and impose upon our Understandings. If we consider, in the Fallacies, Men put upon themselves, as well as others, and the Mistakes in Men’s Disputes and Notions, how great a part is owing to Words, and their uncertain or mistaken Significations, we shall have reason to think this no small obstacle in the way to Knowledge.3

The business of the Essay, the Essay itself seems to tell us, is with things far more important than style and composition, and its investigation of language is aimed at rendering it nothing more or less than a medium of impeccable clarity for the conveyance of ideas. Reinforcing this compelling effect of transparency is the disarming candor with which Locke constantly



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

interrupts his own text to reflect upon its composition and structure, thus seeming to lay bare its origin and logic. Locke’s eagerness to stage the process of the Essay’s composition before the reader’s eyes is often seen as a commitment to transparency, but such gestures are also part of a coherent textual strategy that has not been adequately examined. What is the relationship, then, between Locke’s emphasis on narratives of origination (with respect both to ideas in the mind and to the text of the Essay itself ) and the call for a clarified medium with which to convey ideas? p l e a s u re , s e e i n g , a n d t he u n d e r s ta n d i n g The importance of clearing away all impediments to vision and of letting light into hitherto obscured sites of origin is repeatedly stated in the Essay. Take, for example, the opening premise of Locke’s argument: The Understanding, like the Eye, whilst it makes us see, and perceive all other Things, takes no notice of itself: And it requires Art and Pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own Object. But whatever be the Difficulties, that lie in the way of this Enquiry; whatever it be, that keeps us so much in the Dark to our selves; sure I am, that all the Light we can let in upon our own Minds; all the Acquaintance we can make with our own Understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great Advantage, in directing our Thoughts in the search of other Things. (43; 1.1.1)

Behind this pragmatic appeal to the reader lies a daring claim: before we can begin to understand anything at all, we have to first understand the faculty of understanding itself. This is achieved by retraining the mind’s eye onto itself, first setting it “at a distance” to itself and then allowing it to make it “its own object.” The understanding is therefore always two things simultaneously in the Essay: the object of investigation as well as the condition of possibility of that same investigation. The understanding, like an eye, is a sealed chamber that enables seeing, but until it is itself penetrated by sight, it cannot observe, describe, and account for itself. Before the understanding can act as a ground for a rigorous system of knowledge, light must be cast into this dark space of the eye so that it is longer its own blind spot. The point from which seeing and understanding originate must also become the destination of the gaze, a secret chamber into which light is shed so that understanding can begin. The darkroom of the mind is thus something like a “clean room” in which the assembly of the Essay can begin, undisturbed

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



by the possibility of contamination and illuminated by the pure unflickering light of understanding. One element in the scene, however, seems incongruous: the necessity of turning understanding inward upon itself has such obvious practical benefits for Locke’s professed aim (in his words, it will “bring us great Advantage”) that it seems odd to assert that it will, in addition, “be very pleasant.” Does pleasure’s presence here, in the careful space of origination that Locke has constructed for the project of understanding, signal a breach in the integrity of this primal scene? To assume that pleasure has the status of a supplement—that it arrives later and as an interloper in a scene scripted for the solipsistic self-embrace of the understanding understanding itself—would, however, be a mistake. In the “Epistle to the Reader” that precedes the Essay itself, Locke already argues for an intrinsic connection between pleasure and the understanding: He that hawks at Larks and Sparrows has no less Sport, though a much less considerable Quarry, than he that flies at nobler Game: and he is little acquainted with the Subject of this Treatise—the understanding—who does not know that, as it is the most elevated Faculty of the Soul, so it is employed with a greater and more constant Delight than any of the other. Its searches after Truth are a sort of Hawking and Hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the Pleasure. (6)4

Pleasure, found in the pursuit rather than in the attainment of truth, is a vital component of the way the understanding operates. On this basis, Locke constructs a crucial analogy: the process of writing the Essay is like the process by which understanding takes place, in that both are concerned first and foremost with the pleasure of the hunt. The epistle culminates in a famous vignette that reveals the voyeuristic pleasure of understanding to be part of an elaborate narrative strategy to give the reader a fleeting and unexpected glimpse into a scene of textual conception. The Essay, in other words, turns upon itself exactly in the way that the understanding is later called upon to do: Were it fit to trouble thee with the History of this Essay, I should tell thee that five or six Friends meeting at my Chamber, and discoursing on a Subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled our selves, without coming any nearer a Resolution of those Doubts which perplexed us, it came into my Thoughts, that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set our



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

selves upon Enquiries of that Nature, it was necessary to examine our own Abilities, and see what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the Company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed, that this should be our first Enquiry. (7)

Book 1’s description of the understanding turning inward to cast light into its own dark recesses and grasp itself as object was therefore not a primal scene at all but rather the repetition of an earlier scene, a duplicate camera obscura that repeats the interplay of pleasure and understanding set up in the first. Locke’s epistemology is thus grounded in twin acts of self-Â�reflection: the understanding’s ability to shed light on the conditions of its own possibility and the Essay’s capacity for telling its own history. Locke’s claims about his text and about the understanding establish a relationship of complete correspondence, setting the Essay up as an instance of language that reproduces with precision the operations of its subject. The principles of clarity, transparency, and unimpeded sight bind form to content, language to thought, in the mode of a perfect mirroring. This doubling, in fact, goes even further: For the Understanding, like the Eye, judging of Objects only by its own Sight, cannot but be pleased with what it discovers, having less regret for what has escaped it, because it is unknown. Thus he who . . . sets his own Thoughts on work, to find and follow Truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the Hunter’s Satisfaction; every moment of his Pursuit will reward his Pains with some Delight; and he will have Reason to think his time not ill spent, even when he cannot much boast of any great Acquisition. This, Reader, is the Entertainment of those who let loose their own Thoughts, and follow them in writing; which thou oughtest not to envy them, since they afford thee an Opportunity of the like Diversion, if thou wilt make use of thy own Thoughts in reading. (6–7)

If Locke’s text can make itself perfectly transparent, it can yield to its reader with absolute clarity and immediacy the processes by which it has come to be (that is to say, the record of its pursuit of truth), and the reader will be able to reproduce this set of processes and experience the same pleasure that its writer did. Clarity and pleasure are therefore not at all opposed for Locke, as is commonly presumed; in fact, the former guarantees the maximization of the latter. Conversely, his objection to obscurity and ambiguity in language does not stem from some deep-seated prejudice against affective categories such as delight, playfulness, and pleasure. Aarsleff’s observation that the Â�Essay

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



“has no other history than that which was its own future” (43) could be seen, in fact, as confirming the success of this almost coercive combination of pleasure, candor, and transparency, which allows the text to stage not only its composition but also its own reception with remarkable efficacy. l a n g uag e , t h e g re at c o n d u i t Indeed, one could say that the complex admixture of delight, instruction, and persuasion that Locke claims for his text is absolutely consistent with the three tasks of the orator commonly outlined by classical rhetoricians— movere, delectare, docere (to move, to delight, to instruct).5 Rather than excluding rhetoric at the opening of his Essay, Locke seems instead to give the art of persuasion a privileged position vis-à-vis the understanding. This would be consistent with the way the medial is privileged in his observation that “pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure” when it comes to the understanding. Such passages from the epistle could also, however, be read as the first signs of a deep-set ambivalence or suspicion about the means and the media through which understanding is conveyed. By positing an immediate response of pleasure in the reader, reciprocal to the writer’s own pleasure, and emphasizing pleasure as the seamless correspondence of form and content, the epistle expresses a preference for a medium that is not one at all, a mediating instance of such complete clarity and transparency that it effectively effaces itself. Pleasure is, in short, the medium through which Locke installs the precise opposite of mediation. A similar approach is also deployed in the Essay with respect to language, the most compulsively thematized instance of mediation in the text. There, however, we find a troubling aspect of language that resists the work of clarification. Language is a medium in that it interposes itself between two things, thus enabling a certain passage or exchange. At the same time, however, it puts this intercourse in peril. This can be seen in Locke’s compressed account of the origin of language, that “great Instrument, and common Tye of society” (402; 3.1.1): The Comfort, and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Communication of Thoughts, it was necessary, that Man should find out some external sensible Signs, whereby those invisible Ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. For this purpose, nothing was so fit, either for Plenty or Quickness, as those articulate Sounds, which with so much Ease and Variety, he found himself able to make. Thus we may



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

conceive how Words, which were by Nature so well adapted to that purpose, come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas; not by any natural connection that there is between particular articulate Sounds and certain Ideas, for then there would be but one Language amongst all Men; but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea. The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate signification. (405; 3.2.1)

Words are “external sensible signs” that make an internal, invisible idea (accessible at first only to the thinking subject) available to other people with whom one converses. To fulfill this function, they have to operate much like pleasure does: there has to be a mirroring principle which guarantees that the word excites within the listener the same idea that was originally within the speaker. This would not be a problem if Locke admitted a motivated relationship between ideas and words, but the situation is delicate because of his assertion that the original connection between an idea and the word that acts as its sign is arbitrary. The “perfectly arbitrary Imposition” (408; 3.2.8) that creates for each individual a connection between a word and an idea therefore has to enter into negotiation with the connections made by other individual speakers of his language, and ideally, a “common use, by a tacit Consent” (408; 3.2.8) will come to prevail for a given word. The gradual solidification of this connection as a “conventional” one does not, however, change the arbitrariness of its origin, or fully regulate its use and contain the damage that this arbitrariness could cause: T’is true, common Use, that is the Rule of Propriety, may be supposed here to afford some aid, to settle the signification of Language; and it cannot be denied, but that in some measure it does. Common use regulates the meaning of Words pretty well for common Conversation; but no body having an Authority to establish the precise signification of Words, nor determine to what Ideas anyone shall annex them, common Use is not sufficient to adjust them to philosophical Discourses; there being scarce any Name, of any very complex Idea, (to say nothing of others,) which, in common Use, has not a great latitude, and which keeping within the bounds of Propriety, may not be made the sign of far different Ideas. (479; 3.9.8)

The danger is that any word can be made the sign of any idea, and that “common use” can only limit the range of this potential deviation without eliminating its possibility entirely. In “common Conversation,” this “Imperfection of Words,” to which Locke devotes all of chapter 9 of book 3, could perhaps be tolerated, but in philosophical discourse, its effects can

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



be quite devastating. In fact, Locke sees many of the most trenchant disagreements in the history of philosophy as quarrels about the signification of words rather than as real disagreements about ideas. If the imperfections of language were recognized by philosophers, “a great many of the Controversies that make such a noise in the World, would of themselves cease” (489; 3.9.21). This is the point taken up by the Encyclopédie article mentioned in my introduction: if the ambiguity of language could be clarified at the origin, before it proliferates to corrupt all branches of philosophical inquiry, the investigation of thought could, as it were, start again with a clean slate and therefore proceed toward rigor. Even more pernicious than this natural inclination to ambiguity and variance in the use of words is the closely related category, “The Abuse of Words” (as Locke entitles chapter 10 of book 3): some speakers exploit the inherent imperfection of language to create a variance where none previously existed, thus rendering words “less clear and distinct in their signification, than they naturally need to be” (490; 3.10.1). The story of how language comes to enter the world is, however, only one side of the coin. We have two narratives to consider, as in the case of the understanding, where we were given one account of its origin in the mind and another about how this account (the Essay itself ) came to be written. The first story about language tells how it enters the world through the arbitrary imposition of signs for ideas, and the second how it enters the Â�Essay—that is, how the discussion of language came to take this form and this position within what is ultimately a system of ideas and knowledge. The key passage in this second narrative is found at the end of book 2, where Locke interrupts himself just as he is about to make an important transition: Having thus given an account of the original, sorts, and extent of our Ideas, with several other Considerations, about these . . . Instruments, or Materials, of our Knowledge; the method I at first proposed to myself, would now require, that I should immediately proceed to show, what use the Understanding makes of them, and what Knowledge we may have by them. This was that, which, in the first general view I had of this Subject, was all that I thought I should have to do: but upon a nearer approach, I find, that there is so close a connexion between Ideas and Words; and that our abstract Ideas, and general Words have so constant a relation one to another, that it is impossible to speak clearly and distinctly of our Knowledge, which all consists in Propositions, without considering, first, the Nature, Use, and



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

Signification of language; which therefore must be the business of the next Book. (401; 2.33.19)

This is just the kind of candid admission that gives the Essay its apparently transparent character. Locke tells us that he gave up a “first general view,” which assumed a seamless transition from understanding to knowledge, in favor of a new perspective, which necessitates a whole book devoted to language. This would give language the odd status of an afterthought in the Essay, not because it is unimportant or a “mere” addendum, but because of the clearly stated posteriority of the issue of language to the project of the understanding. Nine chapters into book 3, Locke again draws attention to his reasons for addressing language: I must confess, then, that when I first began this Discourse of the Understanding, and a good while after, I had not the least Thought, that any Consideration of Words was at all necessary to it. But when having passed over the Original and Composition of our Ideas, I began to examine the Extent and Certainty of our Knowledge, I found it had so near a connexion with Words, that unless their force and manner of Signification were first well observed, there could be very little said clearly and pertinently concerning Knowledge. (488; 3.9.21)

Once again, language enters the picture as the correction of a course that has already begun but must now be restarted. This is necessary because language is an obstacle that must be cleared, a dirty medium that must be clarified: And though [knowledge] terminated in Things, yet it was for the most part so much by the intervention of Words, that they seem’d scarce separable from our general Knowledge. At least they interpose themselves so much between our Understandings, and the Truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend, that like the Medium through which visible Objects pass, their Obscurity and Disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our Eyes, and impose upon our Understandings. If we consider, in the Fallacies, Men put upon themselves, as well as others, and the Mistakes in Men’s Disputes and Notions, how great a part is owing to Words, and their uncertain or mistaken Significations, we shall have reason to think this no small obstacle in the way to Knowledge. (488–89; 3.9.21)

This is the crux of Locke’s paradoxical stand on the question of how and why language enters the Essay: it intervenes and interposes itself as an in-between, as an unclear medium that is both the “great conduit” and an obfuscating

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



“mist before our Eyes.” Both narratives about language—the one about its role in the world and the one about its role in the Essay—are therefore characterized by a profound ambivalence. In society, language facilitates the communication of ideas otherwise interior to a speaker, but it also tends to sabotage this interaction by causing confusion and obscurity. In the Essay, language functions as a blockage but also as a filter that can enable a crucial passage if it is first rendered clear and transparent. Locke’s position on language is thus a deeply conflicted one. The mind is, as he argues, furnished solely from experience, which is in turn made up only of our observations about “external, sensible Objects” and about “the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves.” These, and nothing else, are “the Fountains of Knowledge” from which all our ideas spring (104; 2.1.2). Where, then, does language fit in? More importantly, what effects could its unreliability have on the formation of ideas? Locke’s answer to this is surprisingly unambiguous: “For Language being the great Conduit, whereby Men convey their Discoveries, Reasonings, and Knowledge, from one to another, he that makes ill use of it, though he does not corrupt the Fountains of Knowledge, which are in Things themselves; yet he does, as much as in him lies, break or stop the Pipes, whereby it is distributed to the publick use and advantage of Mankind” (510; 3.11.5). Despite his willingness to recognize the importance of language in the communication of ideas and in the composition of the Essay, Locke unequivocally denies language any actual epistemological potential, whether positive or negative, and relegates language’s abuse to the status of a mere kink in a secondary system of circulation. He claims that the elaborate network of distribution by which knowledge is delivered and constituted is underpinned by a strict distinction between the conduits that supply the individual nodes and the fountains from which this supply originates. The movement is emphatically unidirectional: no error or failure that takes place anywhere downstream can be allowed to contaminate the fountains by reflux. The notion of language as medium is therefore an integral part of a larger system of damage control ensuring that language and the risks it represents are never at the site of origin but rather are always removed from it. The Â�Essay’s multiple narratives of origin and its repeated emphasis on the need to clarify the medium turn out to constitute a coherent strategy to shield the integrity of its epistemology against the potential errors of language. The impressive list of guidelines for avoiding and correcting abuses of language given in book 3 is, by comparison, only a secondary set of safeguards; the real work is performed by the



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

extraordinarily coherent model of origination and circulation, and by the distinction it establishes between fountains and pipes, source and conduit.6 the origin revisited An enormous burden is therefore placed, not only on the various articulations of this model, but also on the topic of beginnings as theme and as narrative strategy in the Essay. Both Locke’s account of that first meeting in his chambers which gave rise to the Essay and his description of its compositional process, however, involved false starts that necessitated starting over. In this spirit, the opening of the Essay is worth another consideration, this time with respect to a very specific question: could language, contrary to Locke’s assertions, have already exerted its corrupting influence at the site of origin? A good place to start would be the title page to the Essay, which contains not just one epigrammatic quotation but two:7 As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the Womb of her that is with Child: even so thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all things. (Eccles. 11:5) Quam bellum est velle confiteri potius nescire quod nescias, quam ista effutientem nauseare, atque ipsum sibi displicere! How delightful it would be, Velleius, if when you did not know a thing you would admit your ignorance, instead of uttering this drivel, which must make even your own gorge rise with disgust! (Cicero, De natura deorum 1.84)

These two quotations make a surprising opening to a treatise about the understanding, for they seem to depict an impenetrable site of origin as a limit to knowing, contrary to the Essay’s claims about the all-illuminating gaze of the understanding. The Old Testament quotation compares the limited nature of human knowledge with the unknowable transcendence of the divine, the will of “God, who maketh all things.” Here, it is the secret site of origination—the mother’s womb, the intention of a god who “maketh all things”—that marks the line beyond which human knowledge fails. Â�Qoholeth thus underscores the humility that one should properly feel in the face of the one true creator and source of everything. The quotation from Cicero appears to reinforce this call for humility: confronted with the impossibility of penetrating this originary space by means of the understanding, it is better to admit that one does not know

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



(ne-scire) than to nauseate oneself (nauseare), so to speak, through an effusive outpouring of the false conviction of knowledge. A closer examination, however, reveals a complication. The words are spoken by the character Cotta in reply to a long speech by Velleius in praise of Epicureanism. Here is a longer extract from which the quote is taken: But in the first place the gods have as many names as mankind has languages. You are Velleius wherever you travel, but Vulcan has a different name in Italy, in Africa, and in Spain. Again, the total number of names even in our pontifical books is not great, but there are gods innumerable. Are they without names? You Epicureans at all events are forced to say so, since what is the point of more names when they are all exactly alike? How delightful it would be, Velleius, if when you did not know a thing you would admit your ignorance, instead of uttering this drivel, which must make even your own gorge rise with disgust! (1.84)8

Cotta is talking about a very specific kind of unknowability of the divine here (as part of his laundry list of the kinds of absurd conclusions that the Epicurean position on gods leads to), one that has to do with the multiple names that different peoples have for the same god. Epicureans claim that knowledge of the divine is guaranteed by a continuous stream of impressions (imagines) issuing forth from and determining all representations of the divine. Cotta argues, on the contrary, that the connection between the real nature of gods and our representations (specifically, our names) for them is merely conventional. The different names that gods have in different cultures indicate that such representations are merely arbitrary, not guaranteed by divine emanation. Because there is no relationship of transmission from origin to name, there is no way to get from our representations and names for gods to any real knowledge of them, despite what the Epicureans claim. The proof that we have no reliable knowledge of the gods, the reason that we cannot attain this knowledge, simply put, is that each god has many names. Attempts to know the divine thus founder, not on the absolutely original and unified position that it occupies as first cause, but on the same plurality and unreliability of names that Locke later identifies as beleaguering all attempts at understanding. The problem is, in other words, already one that has to do with language. How, then, should this quote be read together with the biblical passage, which does seem to be about a very different sort of limitation to human knowledge, one that is predicated upon the unknowability of the absolutely prior and original nature of divine will? Ecclesiastes is, in



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

fact, an Â�interesting choice of biblical books from which to quote. It is most well known for the melancholy tone of its meditations on vanity and the transience of all things, embodied in the figure of the wind that carries everything away toward death and reveals all to be passing. Take, for example, its opening passage, according to the King James version, which Locke cites: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. (Eccles. 1:2–6)

This wind that “whirleth about continually” makes it impossible to cling to anything solid in this world, and the book exposes all that men hold dear to be nothing but “wind.” It has, therefore, often been noted that this book takes up certain Epicurean notions about transience and links them with a sense of hopelessness and futility. If this pessimism were unmitigated, however, Ecclesiastes would hardly have come to be included in the biblical canon. Indeed, Qoholeth gives us a small comfort to cling to: all things might pass, but their passage is determined by the “spirit” (or according to some translations, “breath”) of God which gave us life and to which we return upon death. The “wind” that blows unto death is thus contrasted with the “spirit” which emanates from the divine source of God’s will. This anchor in God’s will is alluded to in Locke’s epigram, which speaks of “the way of the Spirit.” As the chapter immediately following says, “then shall the dust return to earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Eccles. 12:7). Unlike the “wind,” which blows in an eternal circuit and grinds all things down to nothing, the “spirit” is the divine breath of God that originates and also guarantees return. There is, however, a problem here. It becomes evident when we compare Luther’s translation of the same passage quoted by Locke with the version he cites: Gleich wie du nicht weisst den weg des winds und wie die gebeine in Mutterleibe bereit werden / Also kannst du auch Gottes werck nicht wissen, das er thut überall (Eccles. 11.5; my emphasis).

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the Womb of her that is with Child: even so thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all things. (Eccles. 11. 5; KJV, my emphasis)

Where the King James says “Spirit”—marking this clearly as the breath that originates with God and embodies his unity and priority of intention— Luther has “wind.” The simple explanation is that both the spirit of God and the everyday wind that blows things around have the same name in Hebrew: ru’ach. This is, indeed, the trickiness about the message of Ecclesiastes: we are supposed to be comforted by the thought that God’s breath mitigates the dry, dusty wind of death, but we can never be sure when the text is referring to one or the other, because “spirit” and “wind” are designated by the same word. The King James translators try to alleviate the problem by sometimes using spirit and sometimes wind, but this is tantamount to placing a helpful thumb on the scales so precariously balanced here between hope and despair. Locke’s title page offers, in other words, two different aspects of the same problem, but this problem has little to do with a god whose primal, creative will cannot be known. Instead, what we have here is essentially the problem of naming: with the Ecclesiastes quote, a case of one word for many things, and with the Cicero quote, a case of many words for one thing. These twin fountains of knowledge’s failure make up the problem that book 3 calls the unreliability of language. Putative models of origination in God (for Â�Qoholeth, his breath, and for the Epicureans, the imagines that flow from him) have, in fact, turned out to be models of circulation and contingency. Locke’s title page thus posits the unreliability of language, from the beginning, as the beginning that replaces divine will as the first point of inquiry. Language and its imperfections have, in other words, already smuggled themselves into the picture at the very beginning—in the sheep’s clothing of the name of God— in a way that not only precedes Locke’s explicit account of its origin at the end of book 2, but that also runs contrary to its assertions. truth, like gold If the imperfection of language affects the most original of all origins, then language might not be simply a smudge on the surface of the mediating filter through which sight and knowledge travel from their origin (in things) to their destination (in our minds), but rather an unclarity that is there from



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

the beginning. What does this, in turn, imply for Locke’s model of the origination and circulation of ideas through the great conduit of language, and for his claim that errors and abuses of language manage only to “break or stop the Pipes” that distribute knowledge “to the publick use and advantage of Mankind” without corrupting the fountains themselves (510; 3.11.5)? If it is difficult to tell the difference between an originary emanation (the spirit or breath of God) and what is merely circulation (the wind) because they sometimes turn out to have the same name; if the distinction between “fountains” (that is, the site from which things issue forth) and “pipes” (mere conduits for conveyance) is no longer clear; then the errors of language could indeed introduce a corruptive effect at the very origin of knowledge. Another interesting twist to this question of language’s arrival is provided by a genetic reading of the Essay. A commonplace-book dating from 1671 (usually referred to as Draft A) contains Locke’s handwritten documentation of that first meeting in which the Essay was allegedly conceived. On the very first page, we find the following paragraph: Thus the Idea of the sun is nothing but the collection of these several simple Ideas: round, bright, hot, having a constant set motion a good way from us, etc. Now because our senses do not quickly discover to us how many of these simple Ideas or qualities are constantly united in one subject, therefore our Ideas of substantial or material objects coming under determinate names and consequently our definitions of such words are often very imperfect, and therefore are best made by those who, having oftenest and with greatest care examined all the simply sensible qualities of any subject, finds such a number of them certainly and constantly united together. Hence a child, having been often shewd a thing with a bright shining yellowness and taught to call it gold, is apt to imagine that wherever he meets with that kind of idea or quality, it is sufficient to make that thing which he calls gold, and therefore is ready to call brass by the name of gold or a gilded piece of cork gold.9

Even in this earliest draft of the Essay, Locke already recognizes that “words are often very imperfect” and cause confusion when we try to investigate ideas. This serves as yet another indication that the recognition of language’s imperfection and its disruptive effects on epistemology is not a latecomer at all, but something present from early on in the composition of the Essay. Even more suggestive is Locke’s choice of examples. A child is shown a piece of gold and learns its name, but not knowing which specific qualities of this object suffice to qualify it as “gold,” he makes the mistake of calling brass or a piece of gilded cork “gold.” The word is misapplied because it

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



was learned incorrectly, or more specifically, because in learning it the child connects it with something (“a bright shining yellowness”) that is just one of the many ideas making up the complex idea of “gold” and that is not sufficient to distinguish gold from something that merely resembles gold. Alongside the imperfection of words, another thought is already present at this early stage of Locke’s project, one that is later worked upon and spun out into a luminous thread running through his investigation of language and the understanding: over and over again in the Essay, when speaking of the dangers that the imperfections of language pose for the understanding, Locke returns to the example of gold and its ever-present twin, that which is mistaken for gold. Gold already assumes its place as a key player in the Essay in Locke’s dedication to the earl of Pembroke, which establishes an analogy between the truth that the Essay conveys and gold that has been freshly mined: Truth scarce ever yet carried with it by Vote any where at its first appearance: New Opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other Reason, but because they are not already common. But Truth, like Gold, is not the less so, for being newly brought out of the Mine. ’Tis Trial and Examination must give it price, and not any antick Fashion: and though it be not yet current by the publick stamp; yet it may, for all that, be as old as Nature, and is certainly not the less genuine. (4, “The Epistle Dedicatory”)

Not yet stamped by authority or denominated by convention, gold is nonetheless genuine and its authenticity is guaranteed by none other than nature itself. The absolute character of its value is used (in the simile that begins “Truth, like Gold”) to assert a claim about the genuineness of truth; from the outset, therefore, gold seems to act as a ground in the Essay, an anchor in value that will enable truth to withstand “Trial and Examination.” When we encounter gold again in the Essay, however, its shine has faded dramatically: “In the Sciences, every one has so much, as he really knows and comprehends: What he believes only, and takes upon trust, are but shreds: which however well in the whole piece, make no considerable addition to his stock, who gathers them. Such borrowed Wealth, like Fairymoney, though it were Gold in the hand from which he received it, will be but Leaves and Dust when it comes to use” (101; 1.4.23). Knowledge—like gold, seemingly resplendent with authenticity and value—threatens to become only so much fairy-money once it “comes to use,” passed from hand to hand. Like language, gold circulates and becomes subject to the fickle



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

processes of valuation, turning into a potential source of confusion. Knowledge depends on communication and exchange, just as the nation’s wealth depends on money circulating freely and quickly, but in both cases, the unreliable character of the medium of exchange is a potential problem. With this comparison, Locke suggests a rigorous separation of two things: the genuineness of gold and its price or value as money. There is that kind of gold that one brings out fresh from the mine; its price might be undetermined but its authenticity is guaranteed by its relationship to its source, by the fact that one somehow perceives in it a proximity to its origin in nature. Then there is that other kind of gold that cannot be demonstrably traced back to any natural origin but which is always already circulating in a system of “borrowed Wealth.” Its price might be well known and its value widely accepted, but because it does not have the same guaranteed relationship to a source, it can at any time turn out to be absolutely worthless. This distinction thus parallels the lines of division in Locke’s model of fountains and pipes for language: the imperfections that render the unit of exchange unreliable within its circulatory system (the pipes) are to be taken seriously, but they do not affect the authenticity and value of that which is guaranteed by the source (the fountains). Not unexpectedly, this model exhibits the same instability with respect to gold as it does with respect to language. In book 3 of the Essay, Locke takes up the image of Draft A’s errant child, transforming his dilemma into a universal one: A Child having taken notice of nothing in the Metal he hears called Gold, but the bright shining yellow colour, he applies the Word Gold only to his own Idea of that Colour, and nothing else; and therefore calls the same Colour in a Peacocks Tail Gold. Another that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow, great Weight: and then the Sound Gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex Idea of a shining Yellow and a very weighty Substance. Another adds to those Qualities, Fusibility: and then the Word Gold signifies to him a Body, bright, yellow, fusible, and very heavy. Another adds Malleability. Each of these uses equally the Word Gold, when they have Occasion to express the Idea which they have apply’d it to: But it is evident that each can apply it only to his own Idea; nor can he make it stand as a Sign of such a complex Idea as he has not. (406; 3.2.3)10

An element of unreliability remains even when the contingencies and uncertainties introduced by economic logic and the exchange value of gold are removed, even when we bracket out the notion of monetary exchange and

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



focus on the metal “gold.” We are hard pressed to agree about what this genuine thing actually is and how we can speak of it without generating even more confusion. This account is then developed into a narrative about Adam’s naming of gold. This story turns out to be the lengthiest treatment of word origin in the Essay, and it reveals the mutual and inevitable implication of gold and language in models of unreliable circulation. The most curious thing about it, however, is that it dramatizes the problem of naming by using the case of the one name giver whose infallibility ought to be beyond question.11 The general question discussed is this: what happens when a group of speakers comes together to talk about a common thing, about which each speaker has his own particular idea? It is difficult but absolutely crucial in this situation for each speaker to “lead another by Words into the Thoughts of Things, stripp’d of those specifical differences we give them” (465; 3.6.43). To illustrate this, Locke recounts how Adam invented names; the first two examples are Kinneah and Niouph, jealousy and adultery.12 This shows how we come up with names for “mixed modes”—complex ideas that are created purely by the understanding through the free combination of simple ideas, without the need for the experience of a prior model or archetype in nature. He then moves on to a story about gold, which begins with one of Adam’s children finding a piece of glittering substance and bringing it home. Adam notices the qualities of brightness, yellowness, hardness, and weight in the substance, and gives it the name Zahab, “to denominate and mark all Substances, that have these sensible Qualities in them” (468; 3.6.46). This makes the naming of gold different from that of jealousy and adultery, where the speaker combined ideas in a manner not dependent on “the Existence of any thing” but governed only by his own imagination and using a “standard” that is “of his own making” (468; 3.6.46). In naming “gold,” however, he denominates something of which he has had experience or sensations, and not something freely composed by the mind. Gold is, in other words, a substance and not a mixed mode, because it is determined by “a Standard made by nature” and by perceptions that come “from the thing it self ” (468; 3.6.46). An inquisitive man other than Adam could, however, pick up the same object at a later point and discover other properties, such as ductility, fusibility, or fixedness. There is, in fact, a practically endless list of properties that one could discover about gold, and there are as many lists in existence as there are people who have stumbled upon this object for the first time and tried to form an idea of it. This would have grave consequences for any



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

attempts by a group of speakers to discourse about gold. The solution is, according to Locke, the invention of a real essence: To avoid this therefore, they have supposed a real Essence belonging to every Species, from which these Properties flow, and would have their name of the Species stand for that. But they not having any Idea of that real Essence in Substances, and their Words signifying nothing but the Ideas they have, that which is done by this Attempt, is only to put the name or sound, in the place and stead of the thing having that real Essence, without knowing what the real Essence is; and this is that which Men do, when they speak of Species of Things, as supposing them made by Nature, and distinguished by real Essences. (470; 3.6.49)

This reference to a fictitious “real essence,” meant to solidify the distinction between that which depends on a real standard in nature and that which is freely formed by the mind, points to a crucial anti-essentialism at the heart of Locke’s philosophy. The entire discussion of how difficult it is for many speakers to discourse about one thing when each has different ideas of it would be moot if essence were real, in that it could be linked to a “real, internal . . . Constitution of Things, whereon their discoverable Qualities depend” (417; 3.3.15), or “a certain number of Forms or Molds, wherein all natural Things, that exists, are cast, and do equally partake” (418; 3.3.17). If such a “real essence” existed, then any failure on the part of the various speakers to agree on the thing about which they speak would simply be attributable to imperfect knowledge. Locke dismisses real essence as something that can never be known; in its place, he suggests the concept of “nominal essence,” which is defined as “nothing but that abstract Idea to which the Name is annexed” (439; 3.6.2).13 The example of gold and its name thus demonstrates that something which seems indubitably real (the very notion of a “real essence”), with its standard in nature, is actually absolutely fictitious. More accurately, the word (“the name or sound”) comes to take the place of this real thing; it no longer draws from the real object but stands in its “place and stead.” Locke illustrates this difference by discussing one property of this fictitious gold in particular, its supposed “fixedness” (in the vocabulary of modern science, its “nonvolatility”). Basically, this is the chance of gold being there where we expect to find it and not turning into vapor (or dust) before our eyes: For let us consider, when we affirm, that all Gold is fixed, either it means that Fixedness is part of the Definition, part of the nominal Essence the

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



word Gold stands for; and so this Affirmation, “all Gold is fixed”, contains nothing but the signification of the Term Gold. Or else it means, that Fixedness not being a part of the definition of the word Gold, is a Property of that Substance it self: in which case, it is plain, that the word Gold stands in place of a Substance, having the real Essence of a Species of Things, made by Nature. In which way of Substitution, it has so confused and uncertain a signification, that though this Proposition, “Gold is fixed”, be in that sense an Affirmation of something real; yet ‘tis a Truth that will always fail us in its particular Application, and so is of no real Use nor Certainty. For let it be never so true, that all Gold, i.e. all that has the real Essence of Gold, is fixed, what serves this for, whilst we know not in this sense, what is or is not Gold? For if we know not the real Essence, of Gold, ‘tis impossible we should know what parcel of Matter has that Essence, and so whether it be true Gold or no. (470; 3.6.50)

The confusion between real essence and nominal essence, between actual gold and the word gold, has taken on alarming proportions, leaving us unable to ascertain the truth of a proposition such as “gold is fixed,” and to tell “true gold” from its imposters. This undermines any model based on a rigorous distinction between a “standard in nature” (something like the fountains from which knowledge proceeds) and a standard that is negotiated within the system of circulation; and most important, it calls into question the possibility of a seamless but unidirectional relationship of transmission from the former to the latter. To cast one’s epistemological lot with the likes of a precious metal whose authenticity is impossible to ascertain, with a gleaming trickster who readily and without warning transforms itself into fairy dust, is to invite trouble. If the problem identified in the previous quotation is a “Substitution” by which “the word Gold stands in place of a Substance, having the real Essence of a Species of Things, made by Nature,” then one could say that this confusion and uncertainty began much earlier, in a passage that we have already discussed: “But Truth, like Gold, is not the less so, for being newly brought out of the Mine. ‘Tis Trial and Examination must give it price, and not any antick Fashion: and though it be not yet current by the publick stamp; yet it may, for all that, be as old as Nature, and is certainly not the less genuine” (4, “The Epistle Dedicatory”). What the simile sets into motion could be described in terms of propriety and transference: one or more attributes, originally proper to gold, will be transferred onto truth. In this case, the sentence “truth like gold, is not the less so, for being newly brought out of the mine” initiates the transference, but we still have to figure out



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

exactly which property or properties of gold are brought into focus by the figure. The elaboration of the simile in the sentences that follow provides the specifications necessary to narrow down the selection: truth, like gold, is evaluated (given a price) by “trial and examination” and not by “antique fashion”—that is, by a process that must be conducted afresh and not by a simplistic appeal to historical precedents; and truth, like gold, might be genuine even though it does not bear the proper stamp that would qualify it publicly as “current.” The main property of gold that is transferred onto truth could, in short, be described as the sort of genuineness of value that is recognizable by examination, and that has nothing to do with tradition or with a fixed denomination that cannot always be negotiated anew. Alternatively, we could describe the movement of figural exchange not in terms of properties but in terms of the circulation of a substituted term. The opening simile allows us to read the subsequent phrases “trial and examination must give it price,” “though it be not yet current by the public stamp,” and so on, such that it refers to truth as well as gold. The extraction from the mine, the submission to examination in the hands of men, and the final negotiation of a price: this is a trajectory that “properly” belongs to gold, but because the simile has tied the two together, truth circulates together with gold along this course, grammatically as well as semantically. One could even make the case that truth stands in the stead of gold here, for the point of the whole simile is not to describe the process of gold’s appraisal but rather to assert that truth undergoes a similar process. In this case, one could say that truth comes to circulate in the place of gold. Regardless of which aspect one chooses to emphasize in the logic of the simile, one undeniable fact emerges: the simile “truth, like gold” opens up both truth and gold to figural exchange and circulation, the very same processes that Locke has associated with devaluation and loss. Both truth and gold are mined from the same source, namely the figural power of language, and in the place of a common origin in nature or in some “standard of nature,” we find a common reliance on the logic of exchange, which undermines the claim for reliable identification and unquestionable value made in the rest of the statement. Locke’s deployment of gold and his analysis of words in the Essay uncover an aspect of figural transfer that is characterized by unstable substitution, uncontrollable exchange, and the ultimate destruction of value. If language and money stand in any identifiable relationship to each other, that relationship is one that produces, not epistemological profit (such as homology

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



or correspondence), but rather the possibility of destabilization and devaluation of the terms which it connects. This perspective might shed some light on the question of how Locke’s economic thought can be read alongside his theories of language and the understanding. The period over which the Essay was composed and revised for publication—roughly speaking, 1671 to 1689—was also one in which Locke was occupied with economic policy and monetary theory, where very similar anxieties about exchange, error, and devaluation are thematized. money and l anguage in the pamphlets Locke’s pamphlet Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest was published only in 1691, but he had already begun formulating some of its main ideas in 1668, shortly after joining the Shaftesbury household. His other major pamphlets on economic issues were published in the later half of the 1690s: Short Observations on a Printed Paper in 1694, and Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money in 1695. The immediate occasion for these publications was the increasing pressure on the British government to respond to some major financial difficulties by lowering the interest rate, in order to increase the amount of lending in Britain, make British goods more competitive in Europe, and stimulate trade.14 Locke challenged this proposal, which he was convinced would have disastrous consequences. A lower interest rate might seem to be beneficial for everyone, but there was a “Natural Interest of Money” (SC, 217) that is determined by the supply and demand for loans, and any state intervention to lower the interest rate artificially would result in negative effects. For example, it could lead to lenders hoarding their money, allowing it to “lye dead” rather than lend it out at such poor rates and thereby causing there to be “less Money stirring in Trade, and a greater Scarcity” (SC, 215). An artificially lowered interest rate would therefore actually discourage lending, even though it makes borrowing more attractive, and there would be little overall gain in trading activity within the country. The bulk of Some Considerations is, however, devoted to a theory of money—more specifically, of coinage. Locke claims that the advocates of a lowered interest rate fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between money and trade in the economy, and sets out to clarify this relationship with a theory of money.15 British coinage had been losing its value for many years, as merchants had taken to clipping coins—that is, using a knife to



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

remove minute amounts of precious metals from the edges, passing the coins along, and accumulating the metal dust thus produced. In 1663, a technical innovation called milling appeared to present a solution to this problem: machines were introduced to mint coins with a regular edge, as opposed to hand-struck coins that had irregular edges. Clipped coins were henceforth easily recognizable, but the problem was merely exacerbated, for foreign merchants began to accept only unclipped coins (“heavy money”); within Britain, merchants always chose to keep heavy money and get rid of clipped coins (“light money”). Soon, almost the entire stock of circulating coins in Britain was made up only of light money, with newly minted milled coins disappearing immediately because they were hoarded within Britain or traded out of the country.16 The current coin was circulating at a level above its intrinsic value, and the difference between the amount of silver contained in a circulating clipped coin and the value at which the coin was fixed was growing, threatening to precipitate a crisis in public faith and hence the entire currency system. Proposed remedies included the idea of minting smaller new coins that would contain an amount of silver equivalent to that of the clipped coins already in circulation, and fixing the value of newly minted milled coins at a value above the clipped coins, allowing the two kinds of coins (“light” and “heavy”) to circulate at two different values. Locke strongly opposed such proposals to devalue the circulating coins, denouncing them as a breach of contract on the part of the government that would merely lead to a rise in prices. Pointing to the complex relationship between the amount of circulating coinage, the prevailing “natural” interest rate, and the total volume of trade, he argued that the only legitimate area for state intervention was the first, which could be done by stopping the leakage of circulating coinage from the system and replenishing its stock. Locke’s arguments were presented to Parliament, along with the other proposals for solving the crisis, but failed to gain significant support. In 1692, Parliament indeed passed a bill to cut the maximum interest rate from 6 to 5 percent. As Locke had predicted, this did not substantially improve the economic situation, which, within the next three years, actually got worse.17 In response, the secretary to the Treasury, William Lowndes, put forward a radical proposal: newly minted full-weight coins should be raised in value and all clipped coins collected and reminted. This proposal was accompanied by an elaborate set of new names for the coins, including previously unknown denominations such as testoons and sceptres. Locke’s other major pamphlet from the period,

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



the Further Considerations, was basically a (yet again largely unsuccessful) refutation of these proposals, reiterating the key tenets of his theory of money as outlined in Some Considerations. Locke’s general strategy for discrediting the prevailing proposals for currency reform and for putting forward his own counterproposals could be described as, once again, one of clarification, in that he attempted to strip the argument of misleading and obscure terms before tackling his opponents: “I hear a Talk up and down of raising our Money, as a means to retain our Wealth, and keep our Money from being carried away. I wish those that use the Phrase of raising our Money, had some clear Notion annexed to it; and that then they would examine, Whether, that being true, it would at all serve to those Ends, for which is propos’d” (SC, 304). The call for a “clear Notion” that is “annexed” to the phrase that one employs mirrors Locke’s calls for clarity in language in the Essay, in which he proposes that men should “use no word without a signification,” and that, even when they do have a signification, the “ideas [a man] annexes them to” should be simple, clear and distinct (512; 3.11.8–12). The debates about coinage seem, in fact, to be an example of the sort of confusion that Locke thinks would go away if only those arguing about it used clear and unambiguous terms. Dismissing the opinion that the popular view of the coinage debate was a “great Mystery, and very hard to be understood,” he instead blames the obscurity of the matter on the “interessed People that treat of it,” who “wrap up the Secret they make advantage of in mystical, obscure, and unintelligible ways of Talking; Which Men . . . let pass for Current without Examination” (SC, 330). According to him, the words and phrases employed in the debate are the real sources of confusion; if they were rendered clear, the debate would be easily resolved: “Whereas, would they look into those Discourses, enquire what meaning their Words have, they would find, for the most part, either their Positions to be false; their Deductions to be wrong; or (which often happens) their words to have no distinct meaning at all. Where none of these be, there their plain, true, honest Sense, would prove very easie and intelligible, if express’d in ordinary and direct Language” (SC, 330). The sense of these arguments is only difficult and complicated where it is misguided, if their positions are “false,” their deductions “wrong,” or worst of all, their words completely bereft of meaning; the truth, in other words, would necessarily produce its own clarity. As long as we do not recognize this, we remain entrenched in what Locke called in the Essay “nothing but noise and wrangling about Sounds” (510; 3.11.5).



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

When discoursing about coinage, however, we run into a complication: the matter to be discussed is one that brings together a number of ideas, one of which is designation itself. For Locke, the value of coinage is guaranteed by a common pledge between its holders, sealed by the stamp on the coin: “For Mankind, having consented to put an imaginary Value upon Gold and Silver . . . have made them by general consent the common Pledges, whereby Men are assured, in Exchange for them to receive equally valuable things to those they parted with for any quantity of these Metals” (SC, 233). This is what he means by the commonly quoted phrase “intrinsick value” of money: it is the value that men have agreed to attribute to a certain quantity of the metal. This is reiterated at the beginning of Further Considerations, where he refers to the “intrinsick value of Silver consider’d as Money” as “that estimate which common consent has placed on it, whereby it is made Equivalent to all other things, and consequently is the universal Barter or Exchange which Men give and receive for other things they would purchase or part with for a valuable consideration” (FC, 410). Even after the terms of the debate are clarified, therefore, we are left with the following question: is it legitimate for the state to modify the terms of the “common consent” between men by which the denomination of money is fixed? For Locke, the answer is clear: raising the denomination of money through such an intervention is tantamount to large-scale fraud, and the term raising of money is “but a specious word to deceive the unwary” (FC, 416).18 Locke’s call for a clarification of language and his call for a reform of coinage are therefore not simply analogous or parallel; rather, they are mutually implicated. In the Essay, Locke points out that it is illegitimate for the state or any other political authority to intervene to alter the relationship between a word and an idea: even the great Augustus “could not arbitrarily appoint, what Idea any Sound should be a Sign of, in the Mouths and common Language of his Subjects” (408; 3.2.8). In the sphere of money, however, the possibility of such an intervention is quite real.19 Locke’s condemnation of this threat is accordingly swift and uncompromising: the raising of money (that is, “altering the standard”) by an arbitrary intervention of the government is tantamount to state-sponsored clipping, in that they both result in a discrepancy between the face value of a coin and the amount of silver contained in it, with “the same denomination remaining to the piece, that hath now less Silver in it, than it had before” (FC, 417). The gravity of this comparison becomes apparent when one considers Locke’s condemnation of the crime of clipping: he calls it “a Robbery committed on the

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



Publick” (SC, 322), an “Evil which every moment it continues works powerfully towards a general ruin” (FC, 477), and likens it, in fact, to “Treason” (FC, 415). The stamp of the monarch is meant to guarantee the value that common consent has placed on a quantity of metal, and it thus appeals to and draws its effectiveness from the public faith in the Crown. Where the stamp assigns a value that diverges from what is agreed upon by common consent, it can only have detrimental effects on this public faith. If raising the money amounts to state-sponsored clipping, then it is also a treasonous act by which the state undermines its own authority. epistemological decorum A colleague of Locke in the Royal Society, John Evelyn, describes the crisis of faith that the clipper of coin causes: For (as a Learned Person shews) Money being the common Pledge and Pawn between Man and Man, becomes the Standard and Measure of the Worth and Value of every thing besides; as often, and as long as they stand in mutual need of any thing another doth possess; . . . so as he that either diminishes or sophisticates it, does as much as in him lies, make the King as great a Cheat and Imposter as himself, by (as we said) a most ignoble, wicked and devilish Fraud, for which no Punishment seems too great to be inflicted.20

Evelyn’s formulation is an unmistakable echo of Locke’s statement from the Essay about the great conduit of language and the fountains of knowledge: For Language being the great Conduit, whereby Men convey their Discoveries, Reasonings, and Knowledge, from one to another, he that makes an ill use of it, though he does not corrupt the Fountains of Knowledge, which are in Things themselves; yet he does, as much as in him lies, break or stop the Pipes whereby it is distributed to the publick use and advantage of Mankind. (510; 3.11.5)

Money and words are therefore bound in an inextricable relationship: a reform of the former cannot take place without first clarifying the latter, for they are both ultimately grounded in the same principle of common consent. It is vital that language is clarified, for only then would we have the grounds for clear denomination in coinage, in the form of a working model of the regulation of names through common consent. Conversely, intervention in the denomination of coinage would be a simultaneous



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

reaffirmation of the imperfections of the word-sign as well as the moneysign, and an admission of the failure of the conventions that should act to clarify and disambiguate them. Language and money are bound by their common reliance on the absolutely arbitrary assignation of value through nothing more than common consent. With no ground to appeal to apart from the one negotiated through social and political processes, the massive systems that are underpinned by each of them therefore depend on a rigorous policing of circulation and exchange. In the realm of coinage, this is what milling aimed at: the machine-struck coins with their regular, circular rims were supposed to make it easy to detect any clipping by making visible even small deviations from the standard machine-produced form. As an added safeguard, it was decided that an inscription would be engraved along the rim itself. In an unverified anecdote from the Numismata, Evelyn claims credit for the choice of inscriptions: “That now our current Mill’d Money have all this while been less obnoxious to this injurious Practice of Clippers, is certainly due to either a less degenerate Age, or the Contrivance of the Circumscription about the Tranche or Edge of the thicker Pieces. . . . I suggested the Decus & Tutamen out of a Viniet in Cardinal de Richlieu’s Greek testament, printed at the Louvre” (225). Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid (5.262), the inscription Decus et Tutamen, “an ornament and a protection,” is deployed here to produce a sign that decorates at the same time as it protects. 21 The way it does so is extraordinarily efficacious. The inscription describes itself as a decus—an ornament that marks the contours of that which it frames, thus making manifest its form. This safeguard of form, in turn, becomes a safeguard of value, for the way in which clipping diminishes the value of a coin is precisely by cutting away at the integrity of its form. It protects, in a way, because it says that it protects. It is thus akin to a performative, but one whose felicity is dependent on sheer materiality and not recourse to conversational or social rules. One could see this as an example of the most unfigural use of language possible, and therefore the one least prone to the possibilities of error and corruption that have proven so exasperating for Locke. If a word’s effectiveness lies in its reference to itself, or even better, to the materiality of its own inscription, then hardly anything can go wrong in the process of its deciphering. This inscription protects the value of the coin bearing it materially, but also symbolically: it provides a model for self-identity, for representation without possibility of residue or incongruity. If one wants to ensure that the (exter-

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



nal) system within which the coin circulates remain closed, in other words, a good place to start is by ensuring that the (internal) system of exchange between stamp and value is also completely congruent. This is accomplished by inscribing on the coin a model for representation without the possibility of loss, one that would, at the same time, guarantee the perfectly circular form of the material. The inscription is therefore decorative but also decorous, for it keeps what is proper to the coin intact and maintains its integrity. There is no possible confusion here between thing and name, between idea and word; self-identity obtains throughout and value is thus preserved. Milling was, however, ultimately futile: the perfectly circular coins with their absolutely truthful inscription were simply hoarded and kept out of circulation. In the final analysis, perfect exchangeability is not, in itself, an incentive for exchange, as Locke already predicted, and the prospect of complete identity and congruence might be as inimical to the principle of exchange in the realm of monetary dealings as it is in the realm of linguistic exchange. If hoarding is the result of a radical unwillingness to participate in an unreliable system of economic exchange, then its equivalent in the sphere of language and the understanding would be a sort of hermetic solipsism. Book 3 of Locke’s Essay, in which language is discussed, is designed to offer a solution to this problem. Book 2 is concerned with the formation of ideas through individual experience; book 4 is, in turn, mostly devoted to the evaluation of propositions made by others, and to the production of scientifically sound, communal assent. The transition between books 2 and 4 would therefore be the transition between individual truth and social truth, the bridge for which is provided by the clarification of language’s mediating capabilities. As Steven Shapin reminds us, this transition is crucial for the empiricist projects of thinkers such as Locke, Boyle, and Hobbes: It was widely acknowledged that the category of “experience” customarily and justifiably encompassed not just what individuals had by way of their own senses, but also the reliable testimony they had of others’ sensory engagements with the world. In the case of phenomena removed from one in space and time, it was freely conceded that one’s knowledge had to be indirectly secured. There was nothing necessarily faulty about knowledge which came to one through these routes, and to say that such knowledge was not part of an individual’s “experience” was either pedantic or solipsistic.22

The admission of knowledge by testimony is strongly determined, in the circle of scientists that Locke belonged to, by the seventeenth-century



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

practices of experimentation in the natural sciences and the conversational meetings of “gentlemen” that Shapin identifies as a key social institution of the judging of truth. Knowledge through testimony necessarily has a different character, however, from knowledge through experience, and is therefore governed by different criteria. Shapin describes these criteria in terms of the rules of gentlemanly conversation and conduct: Knowledge we had by way of testimony might be only probable, but there were degrees of probability which effectively mimicked the certainty of demonstration and eyewitness and which were wholly adequate as bases for conducting the affairs of everyday life. To expect more of knowledge which was not capable of more was to sever oneself from the common grounds of common action. Assent to legitimate testimony was grounded in the “common principles of reason.” To recognize the legitimate boundaries of demonstration and eyewitness as well as the legitimate calls of testimony was to behave with decorum: ways of behaving and judging were adapted to circumstances. The fine judgments of epistemological decorum were anchored in, and justified by, the value placed on the civil conversations of everyday life. (209)

This description underscores the ways in which truth-production and truthjudgment take place in the context of a community—the “common grounds of common action” would be no longer thinkable if knowledge were only available through individual experience that could not be communicated, or if the communication of experience did not play an important role in adding to the common store of knowledge available to everyone. At the same time, however, Shapin also captures the caution with which the question of testimony was approached. Rather than relying on the authority of antique sources, the members of the Royal Society took pains to formulate principles of informed and disinterested truth-judgment that would enable them to evaluate the increasingly voluminous results of new experimental and descriptive methods. This set of rules governing the judgment of knowledge through testimony is what Shapin refers to as “epistemological decorum,”23 and book 3 of Locke’s Essay could be seen as an attempt to safeguard this principle. As the narrative of the Essay’s origin in a friendly discussion among five or six friends in Locke’s chamber suggests, the principles of epistemological decorum and the production of communal truth are as far from being mere supplements to the knowledge of direct experience as language is from being a mere system of pipes. Just as the tenets of experimental sci-

co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e



ence and learned discussion played a constitutive role in truth-formation, and were not to be held strictly apart from the process through which truth was communicated, so too does the production of knowledge in the Essay always proceed along channels of exchange and flow rather than originating ex nihilo in subterranean sources. Admitting the constitutive role of these pipes and channels commits us, however, to confronting the question of what happens when this latter process breaks down: when men do not comport themselves decorously, when they lie or abuse words, when they refuse to play by the rules of gentlemanly conversation. This sense of unease is present throughout in Locke’s Essay, and book 3 is as much a call for language reform as it is a manual of decorous language use. This can, however, only keep language in check without eradicating the possibility of error. The list of possible threats to this project has been seen to include, among others, the arbitrary nature of language’s origin and the uncontrollable character of figural exchange. One more deserves to be added to this list, a very concrete and real danger mentioned in a section entitled “On Wrong Assent, or Errour”: Let never so much Probability hang on one side of a covetous Man’s Reasoning, and Money on the other; and it is easie to foresee which will out-weigh. Earthly Minds, like Mud-Walls, resist the strongest Batteries: and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear Argument may make some Impression, yet they stand firm, keep out the Enemy Truth, that would captivate or disturb them. Tell a Man, passionately in Love, that he is jilted; bring a score of Witnesses of the Falshood of his Mistress, ‘tis ten to one but three kind Words of hers, shall invalidate all their Testimonies. (715; 4.20.12)

Gold is, as we have seen, absolutely the opposite of “fixed”: it begins its life as a “thing” but turns out to be a complex idea, or even more disturbingly, nothing more than the word gold. Here, we see another pole toward which it seems to drift: pecuniary interest. Knowledge requires disinterest and is therefore always inimical to appetites, passions, and above all, greed, which produce erroneous assent. Once corrupted by such interests, the mind is barricaded behind walls and truth becomes the enemy that is to be kept out. The lines of division that Locke would have us perceive are clear: truth can ally itself with gold, if things are policed with great care, but it is always the enemy of money. The trick is, therefore, to prevent gold from slipping into money, to keep out any hints of pecuniary interest and desire. Yet this is the path that gold always tends to take in the Essay, for



co r ru p t i n g t h e f o u n ta i n s o f k n ow l e d g e

it is subject to figural exchange from the beginning, and once gold starts to take on the attribute of exchangeability, it has already begun to slide into money. This is ultimately the most profound paradox of Locke’s simile from the dedication: in the comparison “Truth, like gold, is not the less so, for Â�being newly brought out of the mine,” the phrase “not the less so” could be translated as “truth is not the less truth, and gold is not the less gold, and so on”—the point of comparison between the two is therefore the absolute self-identity of each. This only takes the difficulty up a notch, for the whole point of the simile is to assert that truth is like gold, and in order for this to work, the absolute self-identity of truth must be given up to figural comparison and exchange. Locke’s conflicted desire to present gold as valuable and genuine, but safely withdrawn from exchange and material interest (so that it does not turn into money), is thus mirrored by the paradoxical desire to have truth enter into figural exchange and at the same time retain its absolute self-identity. In the overall architectonics of the Essay, this ambivalence manifests itself as the threat of error at the origin, of corruption at the source that can never be fully excluded and that undoes the regulatory distinctions set up by the model of fountains and pipes.

t wo

Linguistic Turns: Leibniz, Tooke, and Coleridge

The realization that language must first be clarified before an investigation of the mind can be undertaken is certainly one of Locke’s most significant contributions to the development of philosophy in the eighteenth century. In a recent study, Michael Losonsky thus credits him with “the first linguistic turn not only in the modern period but in the history of philosophy.”1 Locke’s stand on the relationship between words and ideas was, however, a deeply ambivalent one, oscillating between acknowledgment and disavowal. This resulted in a timidity that drew criticism from some of the Essay’s earliest commentators, who wanted bolder and more extensive investigations of this relationship. Such a call is taken up in G. W. Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Knowledge and John Horne Tooke’s Epea Pteroenta; or, The Diversions of Purley, two eighteenth-century responses that attempted to complete the Essay’s philosophical project by turning it on its head: where Locke sought to bring the clarifying prowess of thought to bear on language in order to regulate it, they claim that language will help to guide errant philosophizing and cure it of its errors. For this to succeed, a number of crucial questions about language and thought would have to be resolved. Is there something that guarantees, for example, language’s coherence and systematicity, in the



linguistic turns

same way that the study of ideas can appeal to reason or the intellect? Unless some internal organizing structure, economy, or logic is demonstrated within language, it would remain stricken by the constant possibility of equivocation, ambiguity, and errance, and it could never function as a corrective to thought. Leibniz and Tooke suggest that a scientific and rigorous etymology would be the best way to establish language’s reliability. Unlike the old study of linguistic origins, which was supported by a set of dubious and partisan claims based on nationalistic or religious interests, this new etymology would reveal a predictable and calculable logic of transformation underÂ� lying the seemingly chaotic history of language, and thus clear the way for a rethinking of the relationship between language and thought, linguistics and philosophy. Leibniz, for example, declares that language is a faithful mirror of the human mind, and that a careful study of its changes reveals the history of thought itself. Tooke’s position is perhaps even more radical: in his opinion, every operation of the mind described by Locke is, in reality, merely an operation of language. Before a new understanding of language can be achieved, however, what is needed is a set of tools for describing and analyzing change within language itself, without assuming that it is always and everywhere subject only to the demand of communicating thought. The etymological models of Leibniz and Tooke attempt to provide just such tools: for the former, the key term in this new method is the trope, while for the latter, it is the abbreviation. With these terms, Leibniz and Tooke attempt to reveal principles internal to language itself that determine its change over time. Etymology thus becomes the study of a system of turns: transformations and combinations that are neither reducible to a discourse about origin nor submitted for verification to the study of ideas. This commitment to a truly linguistic approach to etymology is what will eventually give rise to the discipline of comparative or historical linguistics in the nineteenth century.2 This linguistic turn is, however, a difficult one, because it is by no means certain that language uncoupled from philosophy will reveal itself to possess the systematic coherence that Leibniz and Tooke hope for. The predictable movements that they attempt to demonstrate constantly turn out to be errant ones that cannot be recuperated as mere deviation or predictable change. Such aberrations end up suggesting that language’s diachronic movements are characterized by an incalculability that outpaces the ambitions of etymological study in much the same way that the insistent reflux

linguistic turns



of language’s unreliability to the fonts of knowledge disrupted the epistemological program of Locke’s Essay. n av i g at i n g t h e c a n a l s o f t ro p e s The New Essays are structured as a dialogue, with Philalethe (“the lover of truth”) acting as Locke’s mouthpiece, and Theophile (“the lover of God”) acting as Leibniz’s.3 Throughout the four books of the work, which bear titles identical to Locke’s, Philalethe repeats key statements from the Essay, and Theophile responds with Leibniz’s own views on the matter at hand.4 One of Leibniz’s main aims throughout the work is to foreground the importance of understanding the history of language itself—not simply its ability to speak about and record the history of man’s cultural and political achievements, but the series of changes and transformations that make up its historical development. The model that Leibniz proposes turns out, however, to be fundamentally problematic, because the difference between good and bad etymology, between a continuous movement of change and a violent, erratic leaping about, cannot be established. The most famous of Leibniz’s disagreements with Locke are centered on the latter’s claim that the relationship between words and ideas is not formed by “any natural connexion,” but rather, that words “arbitrarily” become the mark of particular ideas.5 Theophile challenges this position with an interesting account of the origins of language. Given the mixed and historically derivative character of all modern languages, he claims, their origins are best investigated by considering processes of derivation and transformation, and not by quarreling about possible fictitious scenes of origination for language. The example that he appeals to is quite unexpected: It is like that with the language which robbers have made up so as not to be understood except by those of their band, which the Germans call Â�Rothwelsch, the Italians lingua zerga and the French narquois; usually they develop them from the ordinary languages which are known to them, either by replacing the accepted significations of the words by metaphorical ones or by compounding or deriving new words according to their fancy.6

This curious and extreme example of the completely made-up language of robbers and brigands, invented not to facilitate communication but to confound understanding for all but its initiates, is meant to reveal something that is true of all languages, namely their hybridity and corruptedness. Languages,



linguistic turns

Theophile notes, “are also formed through intercourse [commerce] among different peoples, either by the haphazard mingling [en mêlant indifferemment] of neighbouring languages or, more often, by taking one language as a base and—through neglecting or changing its rules and even by grafting new words onto it—mangling and garbling and mixing and corrupting it [qu’on estropie, et qu’on altere, qu’on mêle et qu’on corrompt en negligeant et changeant ce qu’elle observe]” (279). The natural evolution of all languages, in other words, follows the logic displayed by the radical case of the language of criminals. The processes that produce a secret language invented in order to thwart comprehension—compounding words, deriving new words according to “fancy,” and replacing the “accepted significations” of words by “metaphorical” ones—are generalized to become descriptors of language change in general. The linguistic activity of these criminal and corrupt speakers does not have the status of an exception, but instead gives the rule, and its practitioners find themselves in the odd position of being simultaneously outside the law prescribed by society and at its very core. The task of understanding language must, according to Leibniz, begin with principles that would enable a description of its turns and transformations in time. Only then can we understand language’s history and come to see the errors that philosophy has committed through misunderstanding the meaning of words. In the “Dissertatio praeliminaris” (1670), written as a preface to the works of Marius Nizolius, Leibniz addresses this latter goal by underscoring the importance of clarity in philosophical discourse. To achieve clarity, one has to first address the task of identifying the “proper” meaning of a word, which entails a consideration of both usage and origin: If the origin disagrees with the use, we should follow the usage in speech rather than the origin; but if the usage is either doubtful or does not forbid it, we should rather cling to the origin. If the word has multiple usages, one must either be careful to abstract some so-called formal meaning, that is, the meaning that includes all uses in it . . . —or, if this cannot be done, one must at least establish some one use which may be called original, i.e., from which the others follow in the same way in which it itself flowed from the origin, namely, through a series of figures of speech [per canales Troporum].7

An illustration of what such a historical navigation of “the canal of tropes” could look like is Leibniz’s analysis of the word fate, which comes originally from “what is said,” for fatum is the past participle of the Latin verb fari, “to utter.” By the trope of antonomasia (the substitution of a preeminent example for the concept or rule that it exemplifies), it comes to mean “that

linguistic turns



which is said by God,” and then by synecdoche, what is said by God as a decree concerning the future, or finally by metonymy of cause, what will necessarily happen (122).8 The “trope” thus describes the various turns and changes that a word undergoes throughout its history, but it is also the way in which we navigate these changes in reverse. Its greatest benefit is that it enables us to derive some sort of origin from which present usage demonstrably flows, as indicated by the two last criteria listed by Leibniz for determining proper meaning. “Formal meaning” is basically abstraction, for it posits a generalized meaning to include all possible known variants. When we are unable to perform this abstraction, then a virtual origin (“original usage”) must be posited, which flows into the subsequent multiple uses in the same way as it itself flows from the origin. In other words, “original usage” is like a mediating point or tertium comparationis, in that present usage is to original usage as original usage is to origin. A trope is, as its etymology suggests, a turning, but the model in which Leibniz embeds it is hardly one that involves a single, unified origin from which deviation can be measured.9 Instead, tropes represent the multiple turning points in the trajectory of a word through history, and by extension, the concept of the “original” becomes, in this model, a moving target that names only the point from which the latest iteration of turning departs. In other words, the trope indicates not simply a measurement of deviation from origin, but rather the process by which a virtual origin is constructed. The work of tropes as described in the Dissertatio allows us to make sense of what the New Essays calls the “mangling and garbling and mixing and corrupting” (279) that make up language’s history. If etymology is the project of unraveling the tangled paths by which words come to us through history, then the conduct of this science is tied to the very same processes that produced the need for scientific explanation, namely the corrupting and mixing processes that produced tropes in the first place. Leibniz thus connects etymology with both obfuscation and clarity, errancy and navigation. The attempt to trace language backward via a reconstruction of its turns recalls the Encyclopédie’s approach to error discussed in my introduction, which involves enclosing it in a single cause in order to simultaneously clarify it and narrate its history. In both cases, the aim is to arrive at the possibility of accounting for deviations, bifurcations, and transformations. Where Condillac emphasized the need to arrive at a single cause from which all subsequent derivatives of error issue, Leibniz is far more concerned with the



linguistic turns

methodologies that allow us to construct such origins in retrospect, regardless of whether they turn out to be actual or virtual, historical or hypothetical ones. Both the idea of abstraction named by Leibniz’s “formal meaning” and his “virtual origin” (which also has a parallel in Locke’s “nominal essence”) are therefore part of the general strategy of disambiguation and clarification that the New Essays attempts to describe. It is therefore crucial that this method be guided by sound principles and that its integrity consists of more than claims about the plausibility of its results: I remark in passing that since the names of rivers ordinarily come from the earliest known times, they best indicate the old form of language and the ancient inhabitants; this is why they would be worth a special inquiry. Languages in general, being the oldest monuments of peoples, earlier than writing and the practical arts, best indicate their origins, kinships and migrations. This is why etymologies rightly understood would be interesting and important; but one must interrelate [joindre] the languages of various peoples, and one should not make too many leaps from one nation to another unless there is sound confirming evidence—especially evidence provided by intervening peoples [d’avoir les peuples entre deux pour garans]. In general, one should put no trust in etymologies unless there is a great deal of concurrent evidence; to do otherwise would be to goropize. (285)

Just like “original usage,” which is posited in order to guarantee a smooth flow from origin to present usage where none can actually be found, this tertium of “intervening peoples” serves as a guarantee of mediation. Two languages that would otherwise be too far apart are thus joined, and a potentially abrupt or violent movement is converted into a continuous one that is like the flow of a river. The relationship between languages and rivers is therefore also a tropological one: since names of rivers have been well preserved in the history of words, they serve as a particularly effective example of how an origin can be arrived at through careful navigation of the flowing trajectory of turns and changes throughout the development of languages. Theophile thus illustrates the trope highlighted in the fatum example from the Dissertatio: in passing from the names of rivers to the flow of “languages in general,” Leibniz moves from preeminent example to the exemplified, from species to genus, via the trope of antonomasia, which is a variety of the part-for-whole substitutions referred to generally as synecdoche.10 The passage also concludes with antonomasia, but one of a strikingly different pedigree: if we fail to follow the rules prescribed for rigorous etymol-

linguistic turns



ogy and instead make leaps based on no sound evidence, we can be said to have goropized. Leibniz allows himself a little joke here at the expense of the Flemish author Jan van Gorp (Johannes Goropius), whose Â�Origines antwerpÂ� ianae was published in 1569. Like Leibniz, Goropius believed that all human languages had a common origin. What contributed to his reputation as a bad philologist was his firm conviction that the Antwerpian dialect was the human language that most closely approached this lost common language, because it was directly descended from the language spoken by the Cimbri, sons of Japheth who were not present at the building of the Tower of Babel and therefore not subjected to the linguistic confusion resulting from it. To prove this hypothesis, Goropius proposed some fantastically elaborate and implausible etymologies, and became the target of ridicule by other scholars well into the nineteenth century.11 The trope of antonomasia thus generates both the model for reliable etymology (the names of rivers) as well as the model for its opposite—the act of “goropizing,” which exemplifies everything that is problematic about premodern etymology and thus everything that Leibniz’s own method aims to supersede. The difference between good and speculative or errant etymology is that the former proceeds by gathering gentle modulations into a whole, while the latter leaps violently from one language to another, but they are both shown to be produced in this passage by the same trope of antonomasia. Like the relationship uncovered between the made-up, corrupt language of robbers and historical languages in general, the relationship between good and bad etymology is therefore not one of simple opposition. Instead, one could say that bad etymology, as represented by Goropius, exposes the unreliability of the tropological method that is the very basis of good etymology. The navigation of the canals of tropes thus becomes one that is attended constantly by the possibility of an overflowing movement that would burst the levees of Leibniz’s freshly constructed science. weeds in the garden of eloquence In order to rescue language and therefore philosophy from error, Leibniz shifts the burden of guarantee away from a stable, unified origin, and toward the intermediate and intermediating instance of the trope. In doing so, he introduces a new element of unreliability that is as error prone as the discourse of origins. In reaching for a trope, in other words, one can never be sure whether one finds its positive or its negative aspect, and whether one



linguistic turns

is indulging in good or bad etymology. Two further examples from the New Essays illustrate this threat, both having to do with an uncontrollable and unpredictable movement that synecdoche introduces to undercut the calculable transformations on which the model of fluvial navigation depends. The first is a cluster of German words that can be traced back to the verb quaken. Theophile begins his analysis by pointing out its onomatoÂ�poetic origin; like the Latin equivalent coaxare, the verb imitates the croaking of frogs. From this starting point, however, the tropological history of the word undergoes a bifurcation: “Since these animals make a great deal of noise, we connect it with chatterers and babblers [diseurs de rien et babillards ], whom we call by the diminutive quakeler; though it seems that this same word quaken used to be taken in a favourable sense [pris en bonne part ] to signify all kinds of sounds made with the mouth, even including speech” (282). According to one of the histories, quaken becomes extended by synecdoche to become a designation for all sounds made by the mouth, including human ones, which makes it equivalent to speech in general. According to the other narrative, however, the croaking of frogs comes to stand for the idea of noncommunicative, nonmeaningful language par excellence (that is to say, by antonomasia or synecdoche). The croaking of frogs is thus an interesting counterpoint to the example of fatum from the Dissertatio, in which speaking in general becomes the speech of God. Here, two distinctly contrasting possibilities emerge from the one trope of synecdoche, all depending on whether something is grasped en bonne part or en mauvaise part. The first leads to speech in general and the second to meaningless chatter. Although one could scarcely think of any contrast more clear-cut and irresolvable than this, Theophile manages to find a way to make the two merge in the next stage of the word’s development: “Since those sounds or noises of animals testify to the presence of life, and tell us that something living is there before we can see it, in old German quek signified life or living; we can find this word in the oldest books, and vestiges of it still remain in the modern language, for quek-silber is quicksilver (vif argent ), and erquicken is to succour—i.e. to revive or enliven after some weakening or great exertion” (282). Croaking gets rehabilitated—or revived (erquickt ), one could say— from being useless chatter to signifying life itself, for even the most meaningless sounds indicate, at the very least, the presence of life. The split that synecdoche caused between meaningless and meaningful speech is thus also healed by synecdoche, which recuperates both as effects of a common cause (life). But this tropological movement does not end there, and in being car-

linguistic turns



ried on by its own momentum, it undoes its own work: “In Low German certain weeds [mauvaises herbes] are called Quäken, that is alive and running [courantes ], as they say in German, spreading and seeding themselves easily [s’étendent et propagent aisement] in the fields to the detriment of the grain” (282). The quickening movement associated with quaken can also turn into a proliferating explosion of growth—a running-amok of the useless, whose fecundity ends up choking and driving out the useful. Life can sometimes, in other words, mean the opposite of life: left to grow unchecked, weeds choke out grain like chatter drowns out speech. Medieval rhetoricians commonly called tropes and figures flores rhetorici, and the imagery of flowers can often be found in discussions of rhetoric as ornamentation. While tropes are sometimes capable of dressing up language to make it more attractive (the so-called blumige Rede), their unruly growth also threatens to turn them into “weeds in the garden of eloquence,” which is what seems to happen here.12 Theophile’s discussion of quaken is a narrative marked by movements of bifurcation, resolution, and inversion that alternate and interrupt each other. Like weeds that are “alive and running,” the tropes that underpin Leibniz’s model of language impart an almost frantic drive to his analysis that could be seen as either a sign of vitality or an indication of an uncontrollable proliferation. From the particular case of the croaking of frogs, we generalize by synecdoche to get to the production of all sounds, but the logic of this trope does not allow us to halt there: once put into play, generalization via synecdoche inevitably leads to language being emptied of all its meaning. Speech becomes chatter and babble, and we end up becoming diseurs de rien. Synecdoche allows this to be recuperated under the abstracting third term of “life,” via a substitution of effect for cause, but the trope once more outpaces itself and arrives at Quäken, pernicious weeds whose extravagant and excessive growth chokes out life itself. Any example is, of course, governed by the logic of synecdoche, and Theophile’s is no exception: quaken is offered to illustrate a point about words in general, but what it demonstrates turns out to be quite out of control. In the second example, Theophile argues that the sound-opposition between the letters r and l has caused them to be used “by a natural instinct” (282) to represent violent and nonviolent movement respectively. Some examples he gives of violent movement represented by r include, in the following order, rheō (“to flow” in Greek), rinnen, rüren, ruhr, the Rhein, rauben (from the Latin rapere, to seize), and rauschen (to rustle). For gentle movement represented by the letter l, Theophile provides a list that includes Â�leben,



linguistic turns

laben (to comfort or give life to), lindâ•›/â•›lenisâ•›/â•›lentus (slow), lieben, lauffen (to glide swiftly, like water flowing), labi (to glide), legenâ•›/â•›liegen (to layâ•›/â•›lie), lego (to read or speak), laub (leaf ), luō (to solve), and leien (to melt), from which the river Leine gets its name, for it “rises in a mountainous region and is greatly swollen by melted snow” (283). A cursory glance at the two lists shows that rivers and their movements appear on both sides, and that they seem to serve as examples of both violent and nonviolent movement. This is, in fact, only the first of many instances of ambiguity and arbitrariness in the list, as Theophile himself points out: I cannot claim that this principle applies universally, since the lion, the lynx and the wolf [le loup] are anything but gentle. But perhaps people seized upon another of their characteristics [un autre accident ], namely their speed [lauf ], which makes them feared or which compels flight, as if anyone who saw such an animal coming would shout to the others Lauf !; besides which, various accidents and transformations [plusiers accidens et changemens] have left most words greatly changed and far removed from their original pronunciation and signification. (283)

The opposition between r and l in terms of violence and nonviolence is, in other words, hardly a strict one. Theophile admits this, but attempts to rescue this analysis by diverting our attention away from the violent nature of the animals with l in their names and toward one of their other properties (un autre accident). This explanation is hardly plausible: who would call either the quick movements of a predator in pursuit or the frantic flight of its intended victim “gentle”? His appeal to “accidents” (in the sense of properties) points again to the problem of synecdoche: the substitution of part for whole allows for one property to be isolated and made to stand in as essence, but it also allows one to grab, at one’s discretion, a different property, since all properties are ultimately accidental. The distinction between grasping the positive part (taking something en bonne part) and grasping the negative part (taking something en mauvaise part) is itself beyond governance and regulation, and here too, we see that the distinction between violence and nonviolence ultimately finds its blind spot in the randomness of synecdoche. The gentle movement that has lulled the reader along from leben to Â�lentus to the river Leine thus ends up leading to the den of lions, wolves, and lynxes. Theophile’s list illustrates, one could say, a process that had been fleetingly named earlier: rapere, or rauben. Wolves, lions, and lynxes are all predatory animals, or Raubtiere. At the end of the list of words supposedly illustrating “gentle” movement, therefore, we are brought back to that lair

linguistic turns



of thieves—Räuber, another group of predators who owe their names to the same Latin root—whose language was Theophile’s starting point. Etymology itself is, in other words, constantly imperiled by the threat of violent movements, leaps, accidents, and unforeseen returns. This happens not despite but precisely because of the efficacy of tropes: they have the potential to construct an itinerary of continuous, gentle turns, but the possibility of their running wild and causing a proliferation of unintended and desultory transformations is ever present. As Theophile himself confesses, “words have passed by means of metaphors, synecdoches and metonymies from one signification to another, without our always being able to follow the trail [suivre la piste]” (283). If this is the case, then how can we distinguish between etymology, which supposedly proceeds by continuous gentle movement, and its bad Goropian twin? Leibniz extends the trope beyond a restricted field of operation within rhetoric to a more general domain where it stands for operations of transformation in history and in thought.13 A tropological analysis of language does not rely on a direct relationship of referentiality between language and the world: the way in which language in its transformations marks or indicates the history of thought is through doubling rather than through representation. Theophile thus calls language “the best mirror of the human mind” and claims that it will “tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding” (333). This is Leibniz’s counterproposal to Locke’s model, in which language is called upon to be the transparent expression or mere conveyance of thought. By decoupling the study of language from this point of origin in the mind, however, and casting its lot with the project of navigating the meandering course of tropological transformation, Leibniz excludes one source of error only to replace it with another. Even though language is no longer held in thrall to the communication and representation of content extrinsic to it, its new role as a reflection of the human mind still requires the regulation of its twists and turns, which is what the logic of tropes simultaneously promises and denies. Leibniz holds up the mirror of language to reveal to us an original that we can otherwise not see: thought itself. As was the case with Locke’s epistemological program in the Essay, however, the relocation of an anxiety about error from origin to sites of distribution and mediation produces escalation rather than containment. Do the unsettling and deviant movements that show up in the mirror-image therefore suggest that thought itself is twisted? Another etymologist writing later in the same century, John Horne Tooke, seems to corroborate this



linguistic turns

Â� suspicion: he charges language with the important task of leading philosophy out of error, but ends up revealing that the movements of language itself are always unpredictable and uncontrollably errant. the artificial wings of hermes and the argus eyes of philosophy It is hard to say whether Tooke’s Epea pteroenta, written nearly a century after the New Essays, shows more affinity with the spirit of Goropius or with that of Leibniz. Some of Tooke’s more fanciful individual etymologies became the topic of vigorous controversy among his peers, but the overall approach that he adopted toward etymology had a long-lasting and profound impact on the understanding of language and philosophy in the period.14 The notion that etymology is not just the positing of an original form for words but the actual tracing of its changes and transformations through history was, as we have seen, already proposed by Leibniz; in England, however, its main spokesperson was Tooke, who himself appears as one of the multiple participants in the text’s changing cast of characters. He concurred with Locke that many debates and controversies among philosophers stemmed from an improper understanding of language, but his emphasis on the fact that the errors of philosophy have to do with a poor understanding of language is, in some ways, even more pronounced than Locke’s: “H: Hermes, you know, put out the eyes of Argus: and I suspect that he has likewise blinded philosophy: and if I had not imagined it so, I should never have cast away a thought on this subject. If therefore Philosophy herself has been misled by Language, how shall she teach us to detect his tricks?”15 The Greek god Hermes, whose image Tooke adopted as the frontispiece for the work, is often represented as an agent of deception and a cunning trickster. One of the stories commonly told about him is that he was sent by Zeus to slay Argus the hundred-eyed giant, whom Hera had appointed to watch over the nymph Io (transformed by Hera into a cow). In Ovid’s version of the myth, Hermes lulled the giant to sleep by sealing his eyes with magic, then decapitated him and stole the cow. Hermes thus acquired the epithet Argeiphontes, or the slayer of Argus. Tooke is also alluding, however, to the immensely popular 1751 work by James Harris, entitled Hermes: A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar, which he vigorously criticizes throughout the Diversions. In Tooke’s opinion, Harris’s Hermes led to a slew of metaphysical speculation that could only be cor-

linguistic turns



rected by reÂ�examining and clarifying our understanding of language, and then proceeding to correct philosophy. One example of where philosophy has been misled by language, according to Tooke, is the question of how many parts of speech there are. Many accounts of language assume that words refer to things and that the number of “sorts” of words in existence was directly related to the number of “sorts of the things signified” (1.21). In the beginning, philosophical grammarians had two such classes: the noun (signifying “permanent” things) and the verb (signifying “fluent” things [res quae fluunt]). Since many words did not fit either of these categories, a third class, the conjunction or connective to hold things together, was invented, and soon after, a fourth one, the article. This inflationary growth did not stop there. More instances of words that fit into no existing category were found, and the classificatory system had to be further differentiated and expanded. This gave rise to a grievous misunderstanding: for every new class of words that was devised, it was assumed that there was also a hitherto undiscovered class of things to which it corresponded. The conviction that “there must be as many differences of things as of signs” caused these thinkers to become misled “by the useful contrivances of language” and to produce “errors of philosophy” (1.22). Tooke claims to have found “a kind of system” by which he holds at bay the “confusion and the imposition of words” (1.12). When pressed to say what kind of system this is, and whether it begins with “things or ideas,” he seems to reject entirely the notion that a theory of language has to start with either. Deciding for things or for ideas would be akin to starting with philosophy in order to clarify language, and he intends to do just the opposite: to provide an account of how language itself is to be subdivided and analyzed on its own terms, given its supposedly coherent and systematic nature. In recognizing only one aim of language—to communicate thought—we have neglected a second, equally important aim, which is “to do it with dispatch” (1.27). The term epea pteroenta (“winged words”) contained in the title of Tooke’s work indicates the importance that he accords this principle. Once we acknowledge that the speedy conveyance of thought is a primary aim of language, we see that entire classes of words serve its demands. These words are formed by the process of abbreviation, and they refer neither to ideas nor to things, but to other words. Words thus fall into two broad groups: those that are immediate signs of either things or ideas (comprising both nouns and verbs) and those that are signs of other words (a much larger



linguistic turns

class than one might think). One of the main tasks of etymology is therefore to trace the process of abbreviation by which we get from the second group to the first, which is Tooke’s parallel to the process of reverse transformation that Leibniz called “navigating the canal of tropes.” a b b r ev i at i o n a n d c o r r u p t i o n The individual etymologies given in the Diversions (numbering more than two thousand total) are devoted to reconstructing how words have changed over time in order to fulfill the aim of “dispatch” in communication. Tooke thus refers to abbreviation as “the wheels of language, the wings of Mercury”: they make language function more effectively as a vehicle for thought; without them language would only proceed “with much difficulty, very heavily and tediously” (1.25). He contends that Locke has fundamentally misunderstood his own philosophy, and that the entirety of the Essay (and not just its discussion of language) is an account of abbreviation.16 For Tooke, the mind has only one function, which is to receive impressions, and everything else described by Locke, such as the formation of complex ideas through the combination of simple ones, is actually an operation of language (1.51). Ideas are, in other words, always and only simple ideas, and the descriptors employed by Locke, such as complex, general, or abstract, apply only to words. With a parsimony worthy of Ockham, Tooke excises much of what his contemporaries had depended upon as guiding premises in the study of language. As his interlocutor B notes, he discards “the differences of Things, and the differences of Ideas, and the different operations of the Mind, as guides to a division of Language” (1.44). All he is left with is the difference between “necessary words” (nouns and verbs) and words that are abbreviations. This reduction lends his etymologies a startling simplicity that accounts for their persuasiveness as well as their idiosyncrasy. He claims, for example, that the preposition from does not have multiple meanings, as many have argued, but instead only one: beginning.17 It is therefore an abbreviation for a verb, as is the case for many conjunctions, such as unless, which Tooke thinks is an abbreviation for the Anglo-Saxon onles the, meaning “dismiss that” (1.171). Other examples include the preposition through, which is traced back to the Gothic noun meaning “door” or “gate,” and the conjunction still, which he derives from the Anglo-Saxon verb stellan, “to put.” With such examples, he argues against Locke’s suggestion that words such as conjunctions stand

linguistic turns



for some “Stands, Turns, Limitations, and Exceptions of the mind” (1.190), an explanation that Tooke claims evinces a fundamental confusion between language and the mind. There is “nothing more admirable nor more useful,” Tooke remarks, than the human capacity to invent signs, but there is also “nothing more productive of error,” for signs have to be properly read and interpreted. To illustrate this, he draws an analogy between abbreviation and shorthand writing: trying to interpret shorthand with the assumption that each mark is the sign of a single sound would only lead to hopeless “disputes and difficulties” (1.25). It is only when one realizes that “there may be not only signs of sounds; but again, for the sake of abbreviation, signs of those signs” (1.26) that a proper understanding can commence. Tooke’s interlocutor summarizes this point as follows: “B: I think I begin to comprehend you. You mean to say that the Â�errors of Grammarians have arisen from supposing all words to be immediately either the signs of things or the signs of ideas; whereas in fact many words are merely abbreviations employed for dispatch, and are the signs of other words. And that these are the artificial wings of Mercury, by means of which the Argus eyes of philosophy have been cheated” (1.25–27). The way of error was thus shown by the god Hermes, but the way out of it is revealed by the same deity, this time in his aspect as a guide for interpretation. Tooke’s goal is, in other words, to transform Hermes the slayer of giants and the god of trickery, into Hermes the guide, he who will lead the way out of interpretive confusion. Etymology would then be able to “give us in all languages, what Philosophy has attempted in vain” (1.318). This is a startling and bold claim indeed, and it is made no less admirable by the fact that the vast majority of Tooke’s etymologies (including the ones cited above) have since been disproven. In a long digression in the second volume, Tooke declares that the desire to communicate our thoughts and the desire to do so with clarity “are not two desires, but one desire: for as far as our meaning is not conveyed clearly and precisely, it is not conveyed at all” (1.231). The principle of dispatch and its faithful servant, abbreviation, turn out to be curiously opposed, however, to this aim of communication. Tooke illustrates this by extending his discussion of shorthand writing. It exemplifies a form of language in which abbreviation reigns supreme, and its opposite would be legal writing, in which “perspicuity or clearness is the only object” and which is therefore always “remarkably more tedious and prolix” than it needs to be. Legal writing



linguistic turns

must do without abbreviation because of the latter’s tendency to “open a door for doubt” (1.232): In common discourse we save time by using the short substitutes he and she and they and it; and (with a little care on one side and attention on the other) they answer our purpose very well; or if a mistake happens, it is easily set right. But this substitution will not be risqued in a legal instrument; and the drawer thinks himself compelled, for the sake of certainty, to say—he (the said John A.) to him (the said Thomas B.) for them (the said William C. and Anne D.) as often as those persons are mentioned. (1.232)

Abbreviation, which serves dispatch, causes a potential loss of clarity, and the desire for clarity is synonymous for the desire for communication. Tooke’s two guiding principles of language (communication and dispatch) thus turn out to be at odds with one another. Proper understanding of language does not, in other words, merely mean being attentive to two principles that work in harmony, but rather, being able to understand the ways in which the two interfere with one another, and how the history of a particular word negotiates the difficult course between the two. The most telling sign of this tension in the Diversions is the term corruption, which is introduced in a somewhat confusing manner into one of the word analyses meant to illustrate how abbreviation works. The word in question is that, which has the odd distinction of being variously classified as a pronoun, an article, and a conjunction. Tooke argues, with characteristic audacity, that it always has the same signification: I do not allow that Any words change their nature in this manner, so as to belong sometimes to one Part of Speech, and sometimes to another, from the different ways of using them. I never could perceive any such fluctuation in any word whatever: though I know it is a general charge brought erroneously against words of almost every denomination. But it appears to me to be all, Error: arising from the false measure which has been taken of almost every sort of words. Whilst the words themselves appear to me to continue faithfully and steadily attached, each to the standard under which it was originally inlisted. (1.82–83)

The sentence “I wish you to believe that I would not wilfully hurt a fly” is, for example, parsed by Tooke as follows: “I would not wilfullly hurt a fly; I wish you to believe that” (1.86). The use of that as a conjunction is therefore ultimately based on the same meaning of the word as the one that underpins its demonstrative use. To show that this analysis is not limited

linguistic turns



to the case of the English language, Tooke points to the Latin pair ut and quod, both of which he claims stem from the same Greek word, hoti (ut was originally uti and quod is a contraction for kai hoti ), and thus share the same signification. At this point, in commenting on his own analysis, he introduces a new term alongside that of abbreviation: “H: . . . Abbreviation and Corruption are always busiest with the words which are most frequently in use. Letters, like soldiers, being very apt to desert and drop off in a long march, and especially if their passage happens to lie near the confines of an enemy’s country” (1.94). This introduction of the term corruption is not preceded by any explicit definition or explanation, and it remains unclear throughout the Diversions what exactly Tooke means by it. In the case of ut and quod, for example, he remarks in a footnote that the two share a single origin, although they are “differently corrupted” (1.92n). What this remark does establish, though, is that abbreviation and corruption are both directly linked to the circulation and exchange of words. Such processes produced in Locke’s writing both the prospect of value and the threat of devaluation, and they are similarly evoked in Diversions to name the unavoidable possibility of loss. A second example of corruption arises in Tooke’s commentary on the conjunction but. Tooke tells the reader that the confusing proliferation of different supposed meanings of but can be attributed to a misunderstanding on the part of scholars such as Locke or Johnson, who suggest no less than five and eighteen different meanings, respectively. They have failed to notice what Tooke calls a corruption in the history of the word, which sometimes means “but” and sometimes “bot,” two distinct words. The first is an abbreviation for be-out, which stems from the Anglo-Saxon be-utan, thus making but a synonym for “without” (1.202) in the sense of some sort of exclusion or exception. The second meaning, “bot,” is traced back to the imperative for the Anglo-Saxon botan, meaning “to superadd, to supply, to substitute, to atone for, . . . to add something more in order to make up a deficiency in something else” (1.209); in this sense, but (strictly speaking, bot) indicates a continuation or addition. This accounts for the two seemingly contradictory senses of the word, which sometimes is used to indicate what Locke calls a “stop” and at other times a “continuation” in the operations of the mind. What misled Locke was, Tooke claims, “the corrupt use of this one word (but) in modern English, for Two words (bot and but) originally (in the Anglo-Saxon)” (1.190). Corruption denotes, therefore, an operation of conflation or condensation: it would have been possible to retain two separate words (but and bot)



linguistic turns

for these two distinct significations within the English language, but for the sake of dispatch, we have chosen one word to signify both.18 The reason for contracting be-utan to but is, however, the same one that motivates the use of one word (but) to stand for two different words. Corruption thus occurs as an extension of the logic of economy in language that Tooke has established as “abbreviation,” and it therefore belongs properly to the consideration of the systematic functioning of language, not to a set of accidental or random occurrences: “Words do not gain, but lose letters in their progress: nor has unaccountable accident any share in their corruption; there is always a good reason to be given for every change they receive: and, by a good reason, I do not mean those cabalistical words, Metathesis, Epenthesis, &c., by which etymologists work such miracles; but at least a probable or anatomical reason for those not arbitrary operations” (1.212n). Less developed languages are less corrupted than refined ones, according to Tooke, for they are not as far advanced in the process of abbreviation. They therefore have, in comparison with more developed languages, “an advantage in point of intelligibility, though it is a disadvantage in point of brevity” (1.400). Such reflections indicate that Tooke did not simply tolerate instances of corruption in language, but that he held corruption to be part and parcel of language’s history.19 While the origins of language might be in “arbitrary operations,” the rules that govern its change appear to be eminently predictable, even when we are speaking of corruption. One detects, however, a certain ambivalence in Tooke’s work, having to do with the viability of abbreviation when carried to its extreme. In his discussion of the suffix -ble in English (derived from the Latin -bilis), for example, he notes how this can cause the formation of a word to “signify indifferently two almost opposite ideas” (2.485), as was the case with but. Sensible can mean, for instance, both “capable of perceiving” and “capable of being perceived” (2.486). This potentially confusing ambiguity prompts Tooke to formulate the following admonition: “A few of these corruptions may be borne in a language, and the context of the sentence may assist the hearer to comprehend the speaker’s meaning; but when the bulk of these terminations in a language becomes generally so corrupted, that language is soon broken up and lost: and, to supply the place of these corrupted words or terminations, men are forced to have recourse again to other words or terminations which may convey distinct meanings to the hearer” (2.485). The opposition between many words with individual distinct meanings and fewer words formed by corruption or combination

linguistic turns



of significations, is thus not simply historically linear in either direction. Contrary to Tooke’s earlier assertion, language proceeds neither economically toward increasing corruption in the course of its history nor progressively toward increasing distinction. Instead, its course is a pendular one between the equally intolerable extremes of corruption and distinction. One final example adumbrates what is at stake for Tooke in the concept of corruption. In a long attack on Harris’s Hermes, Tooke ridicules its attempted definition of the preposition: it is, according to Harris, “a part of speech, devoid itself of signification; but so formed as to unite two words that are significant” (cited by Tooke, 1.290). Such a definition tells us what a preposition is not rather than what it is, and Tooke says that it could therefore “serve as well for a definition of the East India Company as of a Preposition” (1.291–92). In a footnote to this reference, Tooke elaborates as to why such an empty definition is not only useless but absolutely vicious: Let the reader who has any sense of justice, or who feels any anxiety for the welfare of his country, look back and re-consider the corrupt use which one Coalition would have made of this company in the year 1783, and the corrupt use which another Coalition has made of it since. Let him then recall to his mind the parallel history of the Company of St. George, at the close of the flourishing days of the republic of Genoa; and, in spite of all outward appearances, he will easily be able to foretell the speedy fate of this pilfered and annihilated body. Without any external shock, the sure cause of its rapid destruction is in its present despotic and corrupt constitution: to the formation of which (and to no supposed delinquency nor personal enmity) that much injured man, Mr. Hastings, was made the victim by all the corrupt parties in the kingdom. (1.292n; my emphases)

Nowhere else in the Diversions does the word corruption appear with such force, frequency, and insistency. This use of the word corrupt corresponds, obviously, to none of the linguistic significations introduced earlier by Tooke, but instead refers primarily to the dangerous admixture of commercial and political power represented by the East India Company at the end of the nineteenth century and its role in the political machinations of men such as Charles James North and Lord Fox.20 If corruption indicates the process by which a word acquires multiple, possibly incompatible meanings, then the word itself is subject to a certain corruption in the Diversions. As a linguistic descriptor, it indicates a nonarbitrary, economic process within language that proceeds along systematic lines and is therefore susceptible to scientific inquiry. The footnote demonstrates, however, that corruption



linguistic turns

also names the possibility that a certain interest might enter the picture, one whose exposure has to be accomplished using different means, namely the rhetoric of political attack. Linguistically, corruption encompasses a number of different significations: it refers to a loss or compression that occurs in the move between source and target language (as in the case of Greek hoti changing to Latin ut ), to a combination within a single language (as in the case of the English but for both “bot” and “but”), or to a combination of two opposing ideas into a single word (as in the suffix -ble to denote both a passive and an active sense of a verb). These functions appear to be extensions of what Tooke calls “abbreviation,” which is a perfectly legitimate process of language-change that facilitates the efficient transport of thought in words. What corruption seems to designate, however, is that such a principle of efficiency carries with it the danger of generating unpredictable movement, much as Leibniz’s tropes do. Another reason to be wary of the errant movement associated with corruption is given by Tooke when he says that it is caused by “letters, like soldiers, being very apt to desert and drop off in a long march, and especially if their passage happens to lie near the confines of an enemy’s country” (1.94). The clear-cut distinction between national self and foreign enemy implied in this description is belied, however, by the analysis of words such as but, which showed corruption can take place entirely within one language (English), without foreignness entering the picture at all. Tooke’s condemnation of corruption within the British parliament corroborates, instead, what he suggests with the distinction between turncoat letters and steadfast words, which “continue faithfully and steadily attached, each to the standard under which it was originally inlisted” (1.82–83)—corruption names the danger of the potential enemy within rather than the threat of barbarians at the gates.21 This casts a dubious light on the project of his entire etymology, which is an attempt to show an internal coherence within language’s history of change. on philosophizing etymology The Diversions ends up proving a certain clarity and constancy of words, but reveal that individual letters (and presumably other units smaller than the word) march to the beat of a more erratic and possibly even seditious drummer. Words are therefore destabilized by that same disjunction between part and whole, that same unreliability of synecdochic selection that was at work

linguistic turns



in Leibniz’s writings. These and other similar problems with the Diversions might help to account for the turnaround in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opinions on Tooke’s project. In a 1796 poem, Coleridge celebrated him as a “Patriot and Sage” whose “breeze-like Spirit” has dispelled the “last mists of Pedantry.” A little more than a decade later, however, he seems to see the demystifying efficacy of Tooke’s “winged words” as having taken on a dangerous momentum—he dismissively translates epea pteroenta as “Hasty Words” in an 1812 entry in the Omniana, and reportedly tells Henry Crabb Robinson in 1810 that Tooke’s is an “accidental history of words” which is sometimes right but also “often mistaken.”22 These comments suggest that Coleridge recognized the fundamental incalculability and randomness that Tooke had unwittingly uncovered in language’s movements. Stephen Prickett has described the odd relationship between Coleridge and Tooke in terms of a clear-cut opposition: “Tooke believed that he had shown the stable and unchangeable nature of words. Coleridge fell with delight upon his proof and rapidly deduced the opposite: the flux and constant change of language.”23 Such a description ignores, however, the fact that the problems introduced by “flux and constant change” were already very much part of Tooke’s insight into language, which can hardly be reduced to a belief in the “stable and unchangeable nature of words.” In fact, the erratic movement of Tooke’s letters reveals a more serious problem that escapes Prickett’s binarism, one already suggested by Leibniz’s discussion of tropes: ceaseless flux is nowhere near as disruptive as an unpredictable and random motion whose flow can always reverse itself at any given point. If the history of language is marked by such errant movement, and not by a systematic or teleological process of change, then thought itself is in jeopardy. Coleridge acknowledges this in a well-known letter to Godwin in 1800, written as the bloom starts to fade from his early enthusiasm for Tooke: I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them—in short I wish you to philosophize Horn Tooke’s system, and to solve the great Questions—whether there be reason to hold, that an action bearing all the semblance of predesigning Consciousness may yet be simply organic, & whether a series of such actions are possible—and close on the heels of this question would follow the old “Is Logic the Essence of Thinking?” in other words—Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs &—how far is the word “arbitrary” a misnomer? Are not words &c parts & germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavour



linguistic turns

to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too.24

To “philosophize” etymology means to recuperate its unpredictability, to rescue it from its exposure to “accidents” (whose mischievous work we observed in both Leibniz’s and Tooke’s accounts of language), and to restore the Â�harmonious organicism between thought, thing, and language. If etymology as practiced by Leibniz and Tooke has become overrun by such difficulties as the proliferating fecundity of weeds, the audacity of criminal speakers, and the treason of letters, then perhaps the law of natural growth that Coleridge calls for, underwritten by “human feelings” that animate words, could eliminate such tendencies and permit philosophy to put language back to work. Andrew R. Cooper has pointed out an interesting detail about Coleridge’s relationship to the Diversions: in September 1798, Coleridge wrote to his wife that he had secured Tooke’s work (whose first volume had just been reprinted), along with two other books, for a very reasonable price from a bookseller, Joseph Johnson. In return, Johnson agreed to let him publish three poems: “Fears in Solitude,” “France: An Ode,” and “Frost at Midnight.”25 Taking this as an occasion to redress an odd lacuna in the scholarship about Coleridge’s relationship to Tooke, namely its almost total lack of consideration of the former’s poetry, Cooper attempts to demonstrate that the Diversions depend on “radical and conservative cultural and political discourses that are the key to understanding its continued popularity in England until the late 1830s” (90). His reading only considers “Fears in Solitude” and “France: An Ode,” but this omission is quite justifiable: the relationship between “Frost at Midnight” and the pair of more overtly political poems listed by Coleridge has been a controversial point not just in the secondary criticism but for their author himself. My interest here is not in rehashing the question of whether or not “Frost at Midnight” could be read as political, but rather whether this poem—one of three offered in exchange, so to speak, for Tooke’s Diversions—attests to an affinity between Tooke’s ideas on language and Coleridge’s.26 In particular, I would like to explore its stand on the question of whether language can be recuperated under the law of organic growth and therefore under Coleridge’s brand of vitalism, or whether there is a more dangerous kinetic potential within language that, as Leibniz and Tooke suggest, might exceed the regulating force of life and thought. In exchanging this poem for Tooke’s Diversions, in other words, does Coleridge end up receiving but what he gives?

linguistic turns



the secret ministry of words One of the greatest poetic achievements of “Frost at Midnight” is its demonstration of the mind’s animating and transporting power. Its impressive opening seems to depict the power of thought taking the lyric speaker from solitude and stasis to an affectively charged scene of remembered childhood, then even deeper to a more powerful and earlier memory, and finally back to the presence of the child asleep beside him. Once this circular itinerary has been established, the poem is able to cite and rehearse it in the form of a grander circuit connecting past, present, and future, all culminating in a triumphant homecoming in the final lines, which returns the poem to its opening image. Read in this way, the poem celebrates the ability of memory to quicken thought but also to bring it back to its starting point, thereby gathering a chain of associations and movements into a subjective unity. As Harold Bloom has eloquently noted, Coleridge shows that the secret ministry of frost is “analogous to the secret ministry of memory, for both bind together apparently disparate phenomena in an imaginative unity,” and that the “overtly arbitrary” movement of memory is actually one based on “deeply designed associations” and an identity between poet and child.27 The poem’s claims about the unity and identity of subjectivity thus rest on its ability to reveal a more profound design to what seems like random movement, and one could say that it is the movement of thought’s departure from and return to home that generates the very idea of subjectivity and self. If this movement turns out, however, to be less amenable to systematization and more like errance, then these claims would have to be abandoned. The delicate suspension in the world of nature with which the poem opens seems to be matched by the meditative mood of the lyric speaker, and there is a correspondence between the secrecy of winter’s work and the isolated state of the lyric speaker that suggests a correspondence between nature and man. This doubling induces a further turning inward of the mind into deeper, more secret recesses of the self: The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelp’d by any wind. The owlet’s cry Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits  Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.28

5



linguistic turns

This movement into “abstruser musings” is, however, cut short, for the poem is no paean to silent solipsism. Two things intervene to deflect movement in a different direction: the child at the speaker’s side who, though dormant, will play a pivotal role in memory’s itinerary, and the fluttering film of soot at the grate (which Coleridge calls “the stranger”) whose motion evokes “dim sympathies” within the speaker.29 The “I” will come to recognize both similarity and heterogeneity in child and stranger, who act as catalysts for the outward-bound trajectory of thought as well as guides for its navigation home. The fluttering film is, however, not an object that possesses its own power of animation; instead, it must be activated by the mind: Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live, Making it a companionable form, With which I can hold commune. Idle thought! But still the living spirit in our frame, That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses into all its own delights Its own volition, sometimes with deep faith, And sometimes with fantastic playfulness.

20

25

The gesture which allows the movement and the life of the mind to commence is cast as a breathing of spirit into a “lifeless thing,” which can then become a “companionable form” with whom the subject can commune. Beneath this narrative about life, however, a different and more clandestine labor is carried out. Even as the mind gathers itself for its circuitous journey, a parallel accumulation is initiated by the mechanism of repetition, announced in the owlet’s cry that comes not once but twice, increasing in intensity over the lines that follow: The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. ‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings on of life, Inaudible as dreams!

5

10

linguistic turns



The insistent sibilance of lines 5–7 culminates in the impenetrable density of lines 8–10, in a stillness so bereft of movement that it “vexes meditation” and defeats thought itself. The escalation of this logic of repetition manifests itself as a literal expansion: it begins as the reiteration of an individual letter s, then becomes the repetition of an entire word (“calm,” in line 8), and finally produces the duplication of an entire phrase (“Sea, hill, and wood”). This phrase occurs in exactly the same position in two consecutive lines, with the only variation being an extra “and” in line 11. The minimal difference of the “and” hints that accretion through repetition is an endlessly extensible process, since all it gains from one iteration to another is an asemantic link, an “and” that signals nothing but the linguistic operation of adding. A counterpart thus emerges to the suggested doubling of mind and nature through the sharing of life-giving breath which establishes the continuity of subject and object. This alternative is a logic of purely linguistic duplication and accumulation, one that remains profoundly indifferent to possible subjective stakes such as unity and identity of consciousness. This secret ministry of letters has its own law of growth, and it proceeds, like the work of frost, unhelped by any wind or breath. Being unmoved by anima, however, it is also unable to animate: what takes us from dead letter to becalmed word to endlessly extensible phrase, is not life but inorganic growth. If repetition does gather momentum, it does so only to go nowhere, to dwell in the endless reproduction of the same, like a fractal accumulation of always identical ice crystals.30 This does not mean that language and mind travel opposite trajectories, or that the two are pitted against each other in a straightforward duel. What we have instead is a movement caused by the mind, another movement caused by linguistic repetition, and the utter inability to show that the latter is caused by the former. Thought fails to animate letter, and the twin trajectories of mind and language can only ceaselessly mimic each other without either coming to a union or being brought into a relationship of causation. This difficulty permeates the poem in the form of recurrent figures of mirroring that match the possibility of life-giving union with that of deathly stasis. Take, for example, the intricately chiastic structure of lines 39–40, which occurs in the middle of what Bloom calls “the memory within a memory” (203): “So gaz’d I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,â•›/â•›Lull’d me to sleep, and sleep prolong’d my dreams!” The sequence “dreamt-lull’d-sleep” is mirrored in “sleep-prolong’d-dreams” (d-l-s and s-l-d ) just as the sequence



linguistic turns

of phonemes s-th gets flipped around to become th-s in the phrase “soothing things.” At the heart of this demonstration of memory’s awesome power, we get an empty duration of sleeping and dreaming that is created entirely by language’s ability to mirror and invert itself. The movement of the mind thus becomes stalled at this crossroad, whose patron deity is as much Morpheus as it is devious Hermes. To call “Frost at Midnight” a “conversation poem” is therefore apt indeed: the Latin conversare can mean “to live” or “to have dealings with,” but it can also simply mean “to turn around.” The poem speaks about the possibility of conversation as a guarantee of shared life, but also about the possibility of the converse of conversation: a reversal of this doubling into its own lifeless double, a ceaseless turning and returning that produces only repetition. If dreams prolong sleep and sleep prolongs dreams, then we risk never waking, and sleeping would become scarcely distinguishable from its everpresent twin, death. That is, in fact, exactly the problem that comes up as the poem attempts to turn from its deep embedding in memory to the child sleeping beside the lyric “I”: Dear babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this dead calm, Fill up the interspersed vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought!

50

Despite the peaceful situation that lines 49–50 describe, a high-stake struggle is being staged: can the figural meaning of “dead” triumph over the horror of its literal one? The outcome depends on the resolution of two forces between which the word “dead” is suspended: on one hand, the visual homology suggested by the pair “dear-dead,” and on the other, its coupling with the revenant “calm” (“‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation” from the poem’s opening). An inclination toward the former would signal that affective investment overcomes the lifeless materiality of the literal, while a slide toward the latter would indicate a persistent and inert linguistic repetition that resists even the powerful seduction of figural animation. It is uncertain which would have prevailed, for Coleridge preempted the question by revising “dead” to “deep” in a 1817 errata to the Sibylline Leaves. Once the secret work of repetition has begun, it is difficult to clarify the distinction between life and death, movement and stasis, because any further attempt at reinstalling the distinction threatens to turn into yet another

linguistic turns



iteration of undecidability. This problem is illustrated by the last six lines (79–85) of the 1798 version of “Frost at Midnight”: â•…â•… whether the eave-drops fall  Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or whether the secret ministery of cold Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon, Like those, my babe! which, ere to-morrow’s warmth Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops, Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout, And stretch and flutter from thy mother’s arms As thou would’st fly for very eagerness.

75

80

85

The “like those” of line 80 attempts to resolve the problem of repetition’s association with death by pointing it toward the future, by holding out the promise that stasis (represented by the frozen icicles) will be ended by tomorrow’s warmth. The lyric speaker allows himself to imagine that fleeting moment of transition (albeit in the cautious mode of futurity) from solid to fluid, from suspended soul to loud expression and boisterous movement. The problem is, however, the ambiguity that nonetheless adheres to the word “flutter” in line 84, which recalls the movement of the film that enabled the mind’s journey and thus links child to “stranger”—but to what end? Perhaps the more pertinent question is: to what beginning? â•…â•…â•…â•… The thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not: Only that film, which flutter’d on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing, Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live, . . .

15

The word “flutter” at the end of the poem returns the mind to an odd moment—the word “flutter” occurs twice (in lines 15 and 16) before the word “methinks” in line 17, which begins the animating work of the mind. The return caused by the repetition of the word thus conveys us not to the point of life’s origin, but to a moment prior to life, when mechanical movement had not yet been shown to be anything other than a ghostly quiver. In its 1798 form, the poem does in fact enact a return, but it is quite possibly not life that is knocking at the g(r)ate. It is not surprising that these lines



linguistic turns

were unceremoniously deleted by Coleridge in 1817 before the publication of Â�Sibylline Leaves in order to render the poem’s return to its beginning formally more emphatic and therefore semantically less suspect.31 To read Coleridge’s multiple revisions as signs of an anxiety about the success of his own poetic creation is certainly not far-fetched, since the most obsessively reworked lines of the poem are the ones pertaining to the mind’s operations on the fluttering film and its animation of this movement into a “companionable form.” Here, the final 1829 revisions—which one critic has called “simultaneously industrious and desperate” and another “a complete reversal”32—are most telling. In the 1798 version, the description of the stranger with whom the lyric “I” hopes to “hold commune” reads thus: â•…â•…â•…â•… a companionable form, With which I can hold commune. Idle thought! But still the living spirit in our frame, That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses into all its own delights Its own volition, sometimes with deep faith, And sometimes with fantastic playfulness.

20

The corresponding lines in the 1829 version reflect a shaken confidence in the transfusion of life between mind and object that the earlier version announced: â•…â•…â•…â•… a companionable form Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought.

20

Animation, which breathed life into things, has given way to interpretation, which at most can work on “puny flaps and freaks” to produce echoes and mirrors of thought. This last pair evokes Ovid’s myth about Echo and thus points to that place to which the poem, despite its author’s anxious rewritings, cannot help but return: the death that comes to self-absorbed youths and lovesick nymphs alike. Unlike “mirror,” which takes up the visual doubling already explored in the 1798 version, the explicit reference to acoustic repetition in the form of the “echo” is new in the 1829 version. It is a fitting tribute, however, to the difficulty that has haunted the poem from the outset: that once the machinery of linguistic duplication has been set into motion, life will inevitably waste away, and nothing will remain of it but voice.

linguistic turns



“in the first i am thinged, i n t h e l at t e r i t h i n g” The new etymology of the eighteenth century was meant to demonstrate the union of thought and language that Locke had announced but seemed to shy away from. What Leibniz and Tooke uncovered instead was an uncontrollable errancy within language, as opposed to the coherence and economy of movement that they had predicted. Even worse, the primacy that they accorded to language meant that thought was itself infected by the flaps and freaks (the latter meaning, in the eighteenth century, capricious turns) of language.33 Coleridge seems to have come to much the same conclusion in “Frost at Midnight,” which at first glance appeared to be a poetic equivalent of the book that he enjoined Godwin to write, one that would demonstrate the life of words by describing “the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them.”34 If the aim is to destroy the antithesis of word and thing, to elevate words to an equal status not only with things but with living things, then a Pyrrhic victory could perhaps be claimed: Coleridge’s poem shows that life itself is subject to the mechanical power of words, to the duplicity of the stranger within that is language. “Frost at Midnight” might not seem to have anything to do with etymology, but the difficulties with which it struggles parallel the ones recorded in the book for which the poet trades it in, Tooke’s Diversions. This somewhat tenuous connection gains in plausibility if we look again at the one word in the poem upon which the heaviest burden is placed, the one that most boldly attempts to convince us of the mind’s animating power: Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live, Making it a companionable form,

17

“Methinks” is a word that Tooke would say contains a corruption: the verb think that appears in it was up till the fifteenth century two different verbs in English. One was derived from the Old English thencan, and meant “to cause to appear to oneself,” while the other came from the Old English thyncan, and meant “to seem” or “to appear.”35 The two verbs were conflated in Middle English, but in a language like modern German, for example, they remain distinct—ich denke would translate as “I think” and mirâ•›/â•›mich dünkt as “it seems to me.” The crucial question is whether the word “methinks” in line 17 signals an agency of the mind that animates



linguistic turns

the lifeless film or whether the semblance of life originates elsewhere. If “methinks” is read as “it seems to me,” and therefore as recording an act of impression upon the mind, then the tables are turned: it is the motion of the film that gives it “dim sympathies” with the lyric subject “who live[s].” In the chain of positions along which the energy of life is transferred, the living subject stands at the very end and the fluttering motion of the film at the beginning. It is, in other words, not the mind that animates matter with life, but matter that imbues mind with motion. Coleridge probably did not know this particular etymological account of the corruption of think, but he certainly did read the following entry in Tooke’s Diversions: “Res a thing, gives us Reor, i.e., I am Thing-ed. . . . Â�Remember, where we now say, I think, the antient expression was—Me thinketh, i.e., Me Thingeth, It Thingeth Me.”36 It is impossible to say what was more frightening to Coleridge: the suggestion that thoughts and things are equivalent, or the prospect of being thought (and possibly even thing-ed) by a thing. In a long and enigmatic notebook entry from 1809, he reflects on the implications of Tooke’s etymology: Words as distinguished from mere pulses of Air in the auditory nerve must correspond to Thoughts, and Thoughts is but the verb-substantive Participle Preterite of Thing. . . . Res = thing: res in praesenti = thinking, i.e. thinging or thing out of me = a thing in me—it is a thing-thing—reata, res preterita, a thought. . . . Thought is the past participle of Thing—a thing acts on me but not on me as purely passive, which is the case in all affection, affectus, but res agit in co-agentem—in the first I am thinged, in the latter I thing or think— Rem reor—reatam rursus reor. If therefore we have no will, what is the meaning of the word? It is a word without a Thought—or else a Thought without a Thing, which is a blank contradiction.37

This meticulous attempt to follow the movement of Tooke’s thought is almost matched by the significant critical labor that has been expended on integrating this entry into Coleridge’s philosophy of language.38 Prickett’s judgment of this passage is particularly striking: he calls it an ironic “parade of Tookian pseudo-erudition.”39 Irony is an apt description, for it is indeed impossible to tell the difference here between a sincere attempt to extend Tooke’s line of thinking by taking it further along the same path, and a parodic inversion of this trajectory via the mechanism of repetition to produce a near-nonsensical tangle of words. This is the very problem named by the ambiguity of methinks in “Frost in Midnight,” which raises the possibility that the seemingly vitalistic move-

linguistic turns



ment of the poem is, after all, driven by “mere pulses of Air,” by capricious movements such as those that the 1829 version calls “puny flaps and freaks.” This unshakeable uncertainty is summarized quite nicely in Coleridge’s notebook entry through the linguistic aporia of Rem reor—reatam rursus reor, which one could translate as “I thinkâ•›/thing (reor) a thing (rem)—I thinkâ•›/thing (reor) the thoughtâ•›/thinged (reatam) again (rursus).” Repetitive thought is certainly a vain exercise, but is it in fact a repetition of thinking? Could it not just as well be a repetition of thing-ing, since the common origin of think-ing and thing-ing in reor makes it impossible to establish the difference between them? Each iteration of the attempt to think could end up thing-ing the thought, and this is exactly what is announced in the word rursus—“again,” but also “conversely” or “in the other direction.” The repetition of thought could, in other words, end up being a constant turning in place, just as the conversations of the New Essays and the Diversions enact the inversion of reliable etymology into an errant one. Once again, this possibility of fruitless movement is signaled by the extravagant proliferation of that Leibnizian cipher for unreliable linguistic turns, the letter r. The etymological project of eighteenth-century writers such as Leibniz and Tooke is, one could say, derailed by its own ambitions. If language were, as Locke tried to establish, merely a medium for the transport of thought, then the study of language would never be anything more than an appendix to the study of ideas. The alternatives offered by Leibniz and Tooke turn out, however, to be even less satisfactory, because the possibility of errance within the movement of language cannot be excluded. For the former, this takes the form of an overreaching, excessive proliferation, while for the latter, it is a principle of economy that cannot be reliably distinguished from loss. The failure to exclude such errors undermines any attempt to set up the movement of language as a model or a mirror for the movement of thought without plunging thought itself into utter confusion. The linguistic turn in eighteenth-century philosophy therefore remains incomplete and ambivalent, pointing to an unbridgeable gap rather than healing the breach between language and thought. Rather than providing a means for mapping the two onto each other, the movement of language reveals, as we saw in Coleridge’s poem, a constant potential for reversibility and divergence, an infinite possibility of the turning of language within and against itself.

three

Kant and the Error of Subreption

In a memorable episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, our eponymous everyman delivers a cryptic yet eloquent lament about the absurdity of modern life: “I don’t trust this guy,” Jerry Seinfeld declares about the dentist Whatley, “I think he regifted, he degifted, and now he’s using an upstairs invite as a springboard to a Super Bowl sex romp.”1 Whatley has incurred the ire of Jerry and friends through his violation of the rules of gift exchange, but the full extent of his antisocial tendencies has just become apparent: he transforms a suggestion to go upstairs together into an invitation to go “downtown,” as Elaine euphemistically quips, and thus attempts to extract a sexual favor in exchange for football tickets. Seinfeld’s exclamation, a colorful hodgepodge of unlikely word combinations and sudden leaps, captures perfectly just what is so dangerous about such a figure. Once the economy of giving—the most basic yet impossibly complex of all social rituals—has been disrupted, the door is left tantalizingly open for illegitimate couplings, arbitrary inversions, and salacious exchanges. The desultory havoc that can ensue, exemplified by the unimaginable act of using an upstairs invite to spring upward to a downtown romp, can be captured only by language that is similarly deranged. The entwined destinies shared by gift-economy and language, and their

kant and the error of subreption



common susceptibility to interruption and errancy, lie at the crux of Pheng Cheah’s impressive study Spectral Nationality, which begins with a reexamination of eighteenth-century German philosophy’s discussion of nature, culture, and freedom. The most striking of the book’s many ambitions is its attempt to reread Kant in order to rescue the organismic metaphor for the political body from the charge of irrationalism and ideological mystification. If it can be shown that the metaphor of the political body as organic entity does not originate in the suspect interests of conservative Romanticism, but instead in the rational philosophy of the German Enlightenment, then its “inherent rationality” could serve as a starting point to construct “a more progressive genealogy for it and the nation-form from which it is dissociable.”2 The complication is that reason itself turns out to be—even for its appointed champion, Kant—somewhat less than rational. Cheah diagnoses the problem as an originary contamination of reason by its radical other in the form of nonrational and heteronomous Nature, and attempts to describe the significance of this figure in Kant’s thought through a reconstruction of the gift-economy that obtains between reason and nature in the critique of teleological judgment. This economy comprises a series of denials and erasures of giving which makes it impossible to ever identify an original giver and generates instead what Cheah calls “sheer exposure”: a haunting of Kantian reason by its radical and inhuman other in the form of nature’s technē (111–13). The organic metaphor is offered to guarantee a bridge between reason and nature, but it turns out to be a poisoned gift, and the history of the nation-form that is predicated upon it is thus destined to be perpetually haunted by radical otherness. Cheah calls the organismic metaphor, which establishes the analogy between organisms and political bodies, “Kant’s greatest bequest to moral and political thought” (99). This is certainly one of the boldest claims in Spectral Nationality’s reading of Kant, since the only passage in the three Critiques where such a metaphor is explicitly formulated is a cautious footnote in section 65 of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” In the main text, Kant points out that the organization of nature has, strictly speaking, “nothing analogous to any causality known to us,” but then appends a footnote that seems to assert that an analogy in the opposite direction is possible: while nature’s causality has nothing analogous to any causality we know, it can “on the other hand [umgekehrt ] . . . serve to elucidate a certain kind of association among people,” and we see just such an elucidation in the apt use of the word organization to name certain forms of authority, such as “the



kant and the error of subreption

entire body politic.”3 The choice of something as peripheral as a footnote as a basis for an intervention certainly does not discredit Cheah’s argument; after all, one of the most famous questions that Kant himself grappled with—“What is Enlightenment?”—was also first posed as such an aside.4 More puzzling and potentially troubling for Cheah’s reading is the odd ambivalence that Kant displays in offering this great bequest, the last-minute reversal that permits this gift of the organismic metaphor. Something must first be “turned around” (umgekehrt ) in order to make possible this giving of a strictly speaking impossible analogy. In fact, the gift of analogy is not only given but also inverted and given back (as a “regift”) in order to produce knowledge: there is no analogy that can take us from something known to us to nature’s causality, but nature’s causality can be used as an analogy to reveal something about our own reason and organization. What does this gesture of oblique and inverted offering mean for the intellectual program of recent rereadings of Kant which ask what Kantian philosophy has to offer contemporary political studies?5 If Kant’s greatest bequest is indeed this impossible analogy, then understanding its significance must entail an examination of the role that analogy plays in establishing but also destabilizing the relationship between philosophy, politics, and literature. The goal of this chapter is to delineate this role, beginning with the problem of the error of subreption (the Fehler der Erschleichung or the vitium Â�subreptionis) that occupied Kant already before the writing of the First Critique, and thereby to suggest how a better understanding of this error could serve contemporary engagements with Kant’s critical philosophy.6 Cheah’s reading is useful in that it points, like many other such engagements with Kant, to the complications that attend the relationship between reason and its other, but it ultimately leaves intact the opposition between rationality and irrationality. Such an approach tends to generate a series of ghost-figures that are invested with a certain ontological import, and in doing so, repeats precisely the error of subreption against which Kant continually warns. This is, however, an irresistible temptation: as we shall see, the distinction between subreption and its positive counterpart, analogy, is an impossible one even for Kant. resemblance and the error of subreption Subreption began its life as a late Roman juridical term describing the introduction of false evidence into a legal proceeding. The term underwent a semantic expansion as it entered the modern European languages in the

kant and the error of subreption



early modern period; writers began to speak of the error of subreption in a more general sense, as opposed to the legal concept of a crime of subreption. Among the German rationalist philosophers who continued to circulate, refine, and redefine the term in the eighteenth century, Christian Wolff stands out as particularly significant for Kant’s interest in subreption. Wolff defines the vitium subreptionis as a confusion of “knowing” (erkennen) with “experiencing” (erfahren), which we commit whenever we think ourselves to be experiencing something that is merely a product of the intellect. This was the main meaning attached to the term as it was adopted into general scholarly usage in Germany by the middle of the eighteenth century.7 Kant’s adoption of the term in his early work is not surprising, since the distinction between experience and the intellect as starting points for cognition is the main topic of his “Inaugural Dissertation,” published in 1770. Along with the division between phenomena (objects of experience or sensibility) and noumena (“pure ideas” that have their origin only in the intellect), Kant establishes a corresponding split in the faculties of cognition between sensibility (sensualitas) and intelligence (intelligentia). In his discussion of the proper use of these two faculties, Kant warns against the “infection [contagium] of cognition deriving from the understanding by sensitive cognition,”8 which most commonly takes the form of subreptic axioms that “pass off what is sensitive as if it necessarily belonged to a concept of the understanding” (2:412). When we attach a predicate involving sensible conditions to a concept of the understanding, we must bear in mind that it merely denotes conditions “in the absence of which a given concept would not be sensitively cognizable” (2:413). If we deceive ourselves into thinking that the predication has some objective force (that is, that it has anything to say about the conditions of possibility of the object itself ), we cross over into subreption.9 For Kant, the error of subreption is thus the conflation of a “sensitive condition, under which alone the intuition of an object is possible” and “a condition of the possibility itself of the object” (2:413). One could also say that it confuses epistemic conditions (subjective conditions of knowledge) with ontological ones (the conditions of possibility of the thing itself ). The real perniciousness of subreption’s threat only emerges, however, at the very conclusion of the “Dissertation”: In addition to the subreptic principles, there are also certain other principles, which are closely related to them. They do not, it is true, communicate to a given concept of the understanding any taint of sensible cognition. But the



kant and the error of subreption

understanding, however, is nonetheless so deluded [luditur] by them that it takes them for arguments which derive from the object, although they only commend themselves to us in virtue of their harmonising with the free and extensive use of the understanding [per convenientiam cum libero et amplo intellectus usu], as is appropriate to its particular nature. And thus, like the principles which have been enumerated by us above, they rest on subjective grounds, not, it is true, on the laws of sensitive cognition, but on the laws of the cognition which belongs to the understanding itself. In other words, they rest on the conditions under which it seems to the understanding itself easy and practical to deploy its own perspicacity. (2:417–18)

Subreption started out as a fairly specific error confined to the confusion between the phenomenal and the nonphenomenal, but we see that it also takes in a more general set of possible confusions concerning the distinction between subjective and objective conditions of knowledge.10 The understanding is all too quick, namely, to take its own laws (which pertain to cognition itself ) for laws which “derive from the object.” Kant refers to these close relatives of subreptive principles as principiae convenientiae: “those rules of judging to which we gladly submit ourselves and to which we cling as to axioms, doing so for the simple reason that if we abandoned them, our understanding would scarcely be able to make any judgements about a given object at all” (2:418). They are convenient principles for two reasons: they are based on the presumption of the harmony or amenability of nature’s structure with the needs of the understanding, and they make life much easier for the understanding by providing a way for it to profit from, enjoy, and confirm its own efficacy. Although these laws do not actually rest on any cognition of objects and are therefore purely subjective, the understanding is happy to pretend that they are objective, in order to produce the illusion of objective grounds and arguments where none in fact exist. If there is, in other words, some sort of analogy between the phenomenal and the nonphenomenal worlds, such as the one putatively established by the organismic metaphor, such a link can only exist in the shadow of these grave reservations about resemblance and its proximity to error. The organismic metaphor works by linking the autonomy of reason with a special causality within nature that is not determined with respect to an end outside of itself and that therefore presents nature as similarly autonomous. It would be disastrous if the idea of an autocausality or autonomy in nature turned out to be the product of the understanding having deluded itself into projecting its interests onto the phenomenal world. We would then be finding in nature the exact opposite of freedom: a state of affairs in which it

kant and the error of subreption



has indeed been shaped by an end outside of itself (namely, the interests of the understanding). The metaphor that claims to discover nature’s harmony with reason seems, in this light, a little too convenient (in both senses of the word) not to raise suspicion. How can we ensure that the seemingly felicitous discovery of a special causality in nature, exactly corresponding to what is demanded of the transcendental idea of freedom (namely the possibility of its actualization in nature without being contaminated by heteronomy), is not a case of subreption? The answer to this must be sought in the last section of the Third Critique, where Kant explicitly addresses judgment’s use of the principle of nature’s purposiveness; but first, one should consider the important elaboration of these reservations about analogy, resemblance, and error in the Critique of Pure Reason. the error of reason The Critique of Pure Reason echoes, in many ways, the closing reservations of the “Dissertation”: it is “enticing and seductive [verleitend],” Kant writes, for the understanding to make use of pure cognitions “even beyond all bounds of experience,” although it is experience alone which should provide the matter to which pure concepts of the understanding can be applied. To indulge in such “material use of the merely formal principles of pure understanding” is to engage in “sophistries [Vernünfteleien],” which is something that the understanding is wont to do.11 The exposition of the understanding therefore has to include a section devoted to the “logic of illusion [Schein]” (A131/B170), entitled the “Transcendental Dialectic.” Despite its relatively infrequent use of the technical term subreption, the Dialectic’s discussion of error expands upon the same problems thematized at the end of the “Dissertation,” and ends up being the longest, most important, and most controversial section of the entire First Critique.12 All cognition, Kant states, starts from the senses, goes from there to the understanding, and ends with reason, the “supreme [oberste] faculty,” which is responsible for “the highest unity of thinking.” While the understanding acts upon experience and intuitions to produce “unity of appearances [Erscheinungen] by means of rules,” reason produces “unity of the rules of understanding under principles” (A298/B355).13 In the appendix to the Dialectic, Kant restates this hierarchy as follows: “Reason never relates directly to an object, but solely to the understanding. . . . Thus reason really has as its object only the understanding and its purposive application, and just



kant and the error of subreption

as the understanding unites the manifold into an object through concepts, so reason on its side unites the manifold of concepts through ideas by positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the understanding’s actions, which are otherwise concerned only with distributive unity” (A643/B671).14 Kant calls this gathering of the pure concepts of the understanding under the unity of principles a “demand [Forderung ]” of reason, or even more emphatically, “a subjective law of economy [Gesetz der Haushaltung] for the provision [Vorrate] of our understanding” (A305/B362). The problem is that reason, despite being the highest faculty of all and charged with directing the understanding, is itself a fallible lawgiver and a poor practitioner of home economics: In our reason . . . there lie fundamental rules and maxims for its use, which look entirely like objective principles [gänzlich das Ansehen objektiver Grundsätze haben], and through them it comes about that the subjective necessity of a certain connection of our concepts on behalf of the understanding is taken for an objective necessity, the determination of things in themselves. [This is] an illusion that cannot be avoided at all, just as little as we can avoid it that the sea appears higher in the middle than at the shores, since we see the former through higher rays of light than the latter, or even better, just as little as the astronomer can prevent the rising moon from appearing larger to him, even when he is not deceived by this illusion. (A297/B353–54)

What was earlier described as a tendency for the understanding to overÂ� extend itself and indulge in sophistries thus turns out, surprisingly, to be the mischievous work of reason itself, which is both the highest faculty of cognition and the one most responsible for “transcendental illusion” (A298/B355). The same specious resemblance that preyed on the understanding and led it astray in the “Dissertation” takes on an even more dangerous form here. It cannot be attributed to problems in the relationship among the three faculties or between them and the external world of nature, but instead operates within reason itself. A special connection between reason and error-prone resemblance is already suggested with the former’s first appearance in the main text of the First Critique: not as the supreme faculty of reine Vernunft (pure reason) but as a legion of Vernünfteleien (sophistries)—a host of imposters that are difficult to tell apart from the real thing. If the transcendental illusions that resemblance generates with such fecundity cannot be avoided, as Kant informs us, how would we distinguish Vernunft in its pure and reliable manifestation from Vernünftelei, the work of a purveyor of un-

kant and the error of subreption



truth? This is precisely the kind of predicament that led Kant’s contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann, to declare in his 1781 review that the Dialectic exposes an “unrecognized and incurable hereditary defect [Erbschaden]” in pure reason, amounting to nothing less than its “true pudenda.”15 Kant describes the dilemma in equally dramatic terms: confronted with its own errant character, reason can only choose between “dogmatic stubbornness” or a kind of “skeptical hopelessness” that might as well be called the “euthanasia of pure reason” (A407/B434).16 k a n t ’s “a s i f ” p h i l o s o p h y Because error can never fully be purged from reason, as Kant himself admits, the Transcendental Dialectic is bound to fall short of complete success. It can only point out illusion but will never cause it to “disappear and cease to be an illusion” (A298/B354). Error remains an always present possibility around which a Sisyphean industry is continually required: For what we have to do with here is a natural and unavoidable illusion which itself rests on subjective principles and passes them off as objective. . . . Hence there is a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason, not one in which a bungler [Stümper] might be entangled through lack of acquaintance, or one that some sophist has artfully invented in order to confuse rational people, but one that irremediably attaches to human reason, so that even after we have exposed the mirage [Blendwerk] it will still not cease to lead our reason on with a false spectacle [nicht aufhören wird, ihr vorzugaukeln], continually propelling it into momentary errances that always need to be removed [in augenblickliche Verirrungen zu stoßen, die jederzeit gehoben zu werden bedürfen]. (A298/B354–5; translation modified)

The dialectic of reason cannot claim prophylactic success when it comes to error, but is instead consigned to a labor of correction which must be perpetually started anew, because neither error’s source nor reason’s willingness to be led a merry dance can be removed. We are thus dealing not with some mere possibility of error with only minor epistemological consequences, but with a constant source of anxiety for Kant. Kant’s most concerted effort to curb reason’s “natural propensity” to overstep all the boundaries and carry us into the realm of “deceptive and groundless” inferences (A642/B670) comes in the form of a precarious distinction, introduced in the appendix to the Dialectic, between the constitutive and the regulative use of these dangerous but necessary transcendental



kant and the error of subreption

ideas. Reason, by employing transcendental ideas in a regulative manner, can posit “a certain collective unity as the goal of the understanding’s actions” (A644/B672). One must, however, constantly be aware that this unity is a projected one, to be regarded “not as given in itself, but only as a problem” (A647/B675). To make the mistake of thinking that this projected unity makes some claim about the constitution of objects is to exceed the regulative use of reason, crossing over into the territory of subreption.17 Kant attempts to clarify this difficult distinction with some examples: taking the three kinds of transcendental ideas already exposed as illusions or sophistical inferences (vernünftelnden Schlüsse) in the Dialectic, he shows how they can be gainfully employed as regulative principles, enabling a kind of cognition that, “within its proper boundaries,” reveals more than could be achieved through the understanding alone (A671/B699):18 I will make this clearer. Following the ideas named above as principles, we will first (in psychology) connect all appearances, actions, and receptivity of our mind to the guiding thread of inner experience as if the mind were a simple substance that (at least in this life) persists in existence with personal identity, while its states—to which the states of the body belong only as external conditions—are continuously changing. Then second (in cosmology) we have to pursue the conditions of the inner as well as the outer appearances of nature through an investigation that will nowhere be completed, as if nature were infinite in itself and without a first or supreme member— although, without denying, outside of all appearances, the merely intelligible primary grounds for them, we may never bring these grounds into connection with explanations of nature, because we are not acquainted with them at all. Finally and thirdly, (in regard to theology) we have to consider everything that might ever belong to the context of possible experience as if this experience constituted an absolute unity, but one dependent through and through, and always still conditioned within a world of sense, yet at the same time as if the sum total of all appearances (the world of sense itself ) had a single supreme and all-sufficient ground outside its range, namely an independent, original, and creative reason, as it were, in relation to which we direct every empirical use of our reason in its greatest extension as if the objects themselves had arisen from that original image of all reason. (A672–73/B700–701)

Just what exactly Kant is trying to make “clearer” is evident from his typographical markers: the regulative use of reason is little more than a heuristic fiction, a series of as-ifs.19 The closing sections of the appendix, which Kant calls “the completion of the critical business of pure reason” (A670/B698),

kant and the error of subreption



therefore turn out to be little more than a litany of such imperatives, with “as if ” always typographically emphasized. The ever-present possibility of error is therefore regulated only by this precarious as-if. Indulging in this fiction is necessary in order for transcendental ideas to be employed at all, but to forget their as-if character is to commit subreption. The solution to the problem of error therefore ends up repeating the very principle that caused it to arise in the first place, namely the mechanism of seeing something as something else. This is why the Transcendental Dialectic itself is so reliant on analogical thinking in the form of similes and metaphors, as well as explicitly labeled analogies. The implication of resemblance on the text’s metanarrative level complicates its examination of the distinction between cognition that is dependent on sensation or objects and cognition that is dependent purely on ideas and principles.20 The very act of seeing-as (ansehen) is what leads reason astray, in that it is seduced by the deceptively similar appearance (Ansehen) of subjective and objective principles, but seeing-as also seems to be the solution to this problem. The apparatus of the as-if is meant to allow the employment of resemblance—that incorrigible agent of error—without exposing oneself unduly to its risks, but one could argue that it is itself cast as a double of the multiple varieties of delusion that circulate in the text. Distinguishing between a purely regulative as-if, in which reason remains within its legitimate domain, and a subreptive error that involves an overreaching of reason beyond all possible experience, is therefore a highly complicated task that will continue to occupy Kant as he turns to reflective judgment in the Third Critique. More importantly, the problems that it implies for reason’s (over)extension into the phenomenal realm of objects are exactly the problems that should concern any account of the organismic metaphor. The search for a bridge between the transcendental order and the natural order so that we may secure the possibility of freedom’s actualization must be undertaken while bearing in mind (according to Kant himself ) that the construction of such a thing is bound to go in the direction of subreptive error. subreption and reflective judgment Reflective judgment, whether aesthetic or teleological, begins with particulars in nature left undetermined by the “universal transcendental laws given by the understanding” (5:179). If these particulars were fully determined by such laws, judgment would be merely determinative rather than reflective,



kant and the error of subreption

but reflective judgment does require them to be conceived of as determinable (bestimmbar), for we would otherwise be unable to reflect on them and on nature at all (5:183). This necessary determinability is what Kant calls the special a priori concept or transcendental principle of purposiveness in nature, a concept that “attributes nothing whatsoever to the object (nature),” but is merely “the one and only way in which we must proceed when reflecting on the objects of nature with the aim of having thoroughly coherent experience” (5:184). The principle of nature’s purposiveness gives a certain law, but the law pertains only to reflective judgment itself and is not prescribed to nature. The three forms of reflective judgment discussed in the Third Critique— the judgment of the beautiful, the judgment of the sublime, and teleological judgment—could be described in terms of their different relationships to this transcendental principle and its employment. In the case of the sublime, the relationship is a negative one: an object of nature occasions a failure of the power of presentation (the imagination) with respect to reason’s demands, and this failure is converted into a “negative pleasure” or a feeling of “respect [Achtung].” In this process, the presentation of the object is deemed contrapurposive (Zweckwidrig) for our power of judgment (5:245), and what is judged as sublime is the feeling within us that is furthered by this incommensurability. The sublime thus indicates “nothing purposive whatever in nature itself but only in what use we can make of our intuitions of nature so we can feel a purposiveness within ourselves entirely independent of nature” (5:246). Accordingly, we commit an obvious error when we call an object in nature “sublime”: we perform “a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted for the respect for the idea of humanity within ourselves as subjects)” (5:257). This reference to the error of subreption is well known and often cited, but the case of the sublime is singled out by Kant only because it involves the clearest and most present danger of subreption. Just as this error had both a narrow designation as well as a more expansive area of influence in the “Inaugural Dissertation,” we also find crucial moments in the discussion of reflective judgment as a whole which indicate that the possibility of error is not limited to the sublime. As Marc Redfield has pointed out, “a certain subreption infects, even enables all aesthetic judgment” in the form of a “constitutive instability” that threatens the purely subjective nature of aesthetic judgment.21 In the Analytic of the Beautiful, this threat manifests itself as the many ways in which a pure judgment of taste can be compromised,

kant and the error of subreption



such as through an interest in the existence of an object or a liking immediately linked to a concept. Some of these contaminations lead to a complete elimination of judgment, while others result in judgment being only logical because they submit presentation to the concept of an object. These threats cannot be completely eliminated because a chain of as-ifs enables but also jeopardizes the integrity required by the beautiful. The most pertinent example is the “free lawfulness [freie Gesetzmäßigkeit]” of the imagination that underpins the beautiful. When judgment proceeds by relating the form of appearance to a determinate concept, the imagination is not free but instead “compelled to proceed in accordance with a determinate law [einem bestimmten Gesetz]” (5:241) given to it by the understanding. In order for the paradoxical freedom that Kant calls “lawfulness without a law” or “purposiveness without purpose” (5:241) to be possible, a curious fiction is needed: one must consider the object’s form, to which the imagination is bound, as containing “precisely such a composition of the manifold as the imagination would design in harmony with the lawfulness of the understanding in general [in Einstimmung mit der Verstandesgesetzmäßigkeit] if it were left free by itself ” (5:240). The source of pleasure is therefore the conformity or lawfulness of the imagination with the understanding, a conformity that must have the appearance of what Kant calls a “happy accident [glücklicher Zufall ]” (5:184). It is therefore possible to refer to an object in nature as “beautiful” without committing subreption, but only under very specifically delineated conditions: “Hence he will talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment were logical (namely, a cognition of the object through concepts of it), even though in fact the judgment is only aesthetic and refers the object’s presentation merely to the subject. He will talk in this way because the judgment does resemble a logical judgment inasmuch as we may presuppose it to be valid for everyone” (5:211; emphasis added). Kant’s statement that it is incorrect to call an object “sublime” but that “we may quite correctly call a great many natural objects beautiful” (5:245) has to be understood in light of this restriction. What his statement indicates is not a difference in two kinds of objects (the beautiful and the sublime), but rather a difference between two sets of relationship pertaining to the cognitive powers. In the beautiful, these relationships are characterized by complete commensurability, which provides the basis for multiple analogies, whereas in the sublime, the relationships are marked by incommensurability, and no analogy is possible because there is no object in the natural world to which it can be attached.



kant and the error of subreption

It is primarily in connection with the third form of reflective judgment (teleological judgment) that Kant’s thoughts on organism are laid out, but the preceding consideration of aesthetic judgment is pertinent insofar as it underscores the pivotal but also potentially disruptive role of analogy and resemblance in reflective judgments in general. Like the judgment of the beautiful, teleological judgment involves presenting purposiveness in an object given in experience (5:192). The crucial difference is that the former presents the object as purposive on a subjective basis (that is, for the cognitive powers) while the latter presents it as purposive on an objective basis, which is to say, for a determinate cognition of the object under a given concept. Teleological judgment thus involves a presentation (Vorstellung) of the object alongside an “exhibition [Darstellung ]” of the concept of the object (5:193). This gives the presentation of the object a fundamentally different character from the one that it had in the case of the beautiful: the judgment of taste involves natural beauty, which is “the exhibition of the concept of formal (merely subjective) purposiveness,” while teleological judgment involves “natural purpose [Naturzweck],” which is “the exhibition of the concept of a real (objective) purposiveness” (5:193). This distinction between formal and real, subjective and objective is, again, easily misunderstood. What Kant is pointing out here is that we can specify a set of conditions under which teleological judgment, just like the judgment of taste, can have a correct relationship to the objective, or more precisely under which it can make a correct claim about the relationship between the presentation of an object and the concept of objective purposiveness. All reflective judgments, including teleological ones, rely on the purposiveness of nature as a law that judgment gives to itself, and the content of this law comprises a crucial analogy: reflective judgment must consider the particular laws of nature “in terms of such a unity as they would have if [als ob] they too had been given by an understanding (even though not ours) so as to assist our cognitive powers by making possible a system of experience in terms of particular natural laws” (5:180). This consideration should not, however, tempt us to make the following mistake: That does not mean that we must actually assume such an understanding (for it is only reflective judgment that uses this idea as a principle, for reflection rather than determination); rather, in using this principle judgment gives a law only to itself, not to nature. . . . Accordingly, judgment’s principle concerning the form that things of nature have in terms of empirical laws in general is the purposiveness of nature in its diversity. In other words,

kant and the error of subreption



through this concept we present nature as if an understanding contained the basis of the unity of what is diverse in nature’s empirical laws [als ob ein Verstand den Grund der Einheit des Mannigfaltigen ihrer empirischen Gesetze enthalte]. (5:180)

Kant makes it quite clear that this understanding that is not ours, which serves as the ground for the unity of undetermined empirical laws in nature, is merely a requirement that allows judgment to yield “thoroughly coherent experience” (5:184). The concept of the purposiveness of nature must therefore remain a “regulative principle of the cognitive power” (5:197), or what the First Critique called the problematic heuristic fiction of an “as-if.” In the concept of nature’s purposiveness, nature is presented (vorgestellt ) by means of an analogy, but to forget the analogical character of this presentation—that is, to think that this presentation says anything at all about nature itself—is to exceed the regulative use of transcendental ideas and thus to commit a serious error. Even when making a teleological judgment, then, we first “attribute to nature our concept of a purpose in order to judge its product,” as opposed to simply finding such a concept of purpose in nature or, even worse, imposing it as law upon nature. This allows judgment to give us the “rules for using the concept of purposes for the sake of reason” (5:193). Such purposiveness is “objective” in a very specific sense: as Kant puts it in the First Introduction, it serves only “for reflecting on the object, not for determining the object through the concept of a purpose” (10:236). This principle of purposiveness is required on grounds that are entirely subjective (that is, pertaining to the requirements of cognition in the subject): There is clearly a big difference between saying that certain things of nature, or even all of nature, could be produced only by a cause that follows intentions in determining itself to action, and saying that the peculiar character of my cognitive powers is such that the only way I can judge how those things are possible and produced is by conceiving, to account for this production, a cause that acts according to intentions, and hence a being that produces things in a way analogous to the causality of an understanding. If I say the first, I am trying to decide something about the object, and am obliged to establish that a concept I have assumed has objective reality. If I say the second, reason determines only how I must use my cognitive powers commensurately with their peculiarity and with the essential conditions imposed by both their range and their limits. Hence the first is an objective principle for determinative judgment, the second a subjective principle for merely reflective judgment and hence a maxim imposed on it by reason. (5:398)



kant and the error of subreption

The principle of objective purposiveness in nature, in other words, is itself a subjective principle. Even though it contains something that, inflected through the necessary mechanism of analogy, has the appearance of objectivity, it does not presume to “decide something about the object” and to thus attribute “objective reality” to the concept of the object. Instead, it only determines how the cognitive powers should be used in commensuration with the concept of the object. The same set of errors that Kant warns about in the “Dissertation” and the First Critique therefore exerts a limiting influence in teleological judgment as well. The First Introduction to the Third Critique is particularly explicit on this point. If we attribute to nature “a cause that acts in terms of the presentation of purposes,” we would be regarding things as “intentional natural purposes,” and this would produce the kind of reason that strays into the “excessive” (sich ins Überschwengliche versteigende Vernunft), or “reason in its transcendent use” (10:235). A judgment made on such a basis would be a “determinative teleological judgment and hence a transcendent judgment” (10:236). As we saw in the Critique of Pure Reason (where transcendent use of principles was closely associated with dialectical illusion and subreption), this tendency of reason to overstep its boundaries is held in check only by a delicate as-if: we have to remember that judgment requires nature to be presented “as if an understanding contained the basis of the unity of what is diverse in nature’s empirical laws” (5:180). The “objective” purposiveness at work in teleological judgment must therefore remain a subjective principle for cognition. analogues of freedom It should be clear by now that Kant presents no straightforward solution to the problem posed in Spectral Nationality, which concerns judgment’s ability to bridge the realms of the sensible (nature) and the supersensible (freedom). This bridge can only take the form of a requirement that has a subjective basis in the cognitive powers, a series of as-ifs that we must embark upon in order to further the needs of cognition. To think that the bridge can be an actual phenomenon that one could stumble upon or discover in nature is to indulge in subreption, or perhaps even worse, in Schwärmerei, which is to “dream in accordance to principles,” or to “rave with reason [mit der Vernunft rasen]” (5:275). It is in its insistence on the phenomenality of this bridge that Spectral

kant and the error of subreption



Nationality comes closest to ignoring this fine distinction. In its first chapter on the rationality of life in German idealism (which situates Kant’s thought in the context of eighteenth-century theories of organic life) and in its second chapter, which discusses Kant’s model of the organism, we find no fewer than ten instances of “analogues” of the spontaneous autocausality of freedom being discovered. Using nearly identical formulations, Cheah ascribes this attribute to culture (44), Bildung (56, 75), organism (63, 81), organismic causality (89, 91), the purposiveness of culture and/or organism (57, 111), and the state or society as organism (58). Of these, seven are further specified as “phenomenal” analogues. This repeated conjuration sets up a compelling play of resemblances that positions the organismic metaphor as an answer to the problem of freedom’s actualization, but it also multiplies the danger of subreption, as a closer examination of two of these putative analogues will confirm. Cheah argues that the concept of culture was used in German philosophy around 1800 to demonstrate the ability to “transform and improve” the human condition “through rational endeavor” (41), and thus to overcome and exert a degree of freedom from mechanical nature. Culture’s greatest achievement was to elevate human reason over mechanical nature, while maintaining a link between human action and a different nature, one more continuous with reason’s interests. It is able to do so because of its careful management of resemblance. Culture is “simultaneously like and unlike nature” (43), and this bifurcation produces a corresponding split within nature: there is one nature that is heterogeneous to human reason, but also one that is continuous with it. Being both “like nature” and “like reason,” culture has one foot in each world and its very interstitial existence establishes the possibility of the link between the two. Bildung contributes to the work of resemblance by connecting culture to the reimagination of organic life in the late eighteenth century. Rooted in the discourse of religious mysticism, the term initially referred to “the remaking or transforming of the soul into the picture or image (Bild ) of God” (40), but its scope was broadened in the Enlightenment to include both “the inner-directed formation of an individual in the image of a personality prescribed by moral norms” and “objects in the external world such that one could speak of a ‘world of Bildung’” (40). This double development positions Bildung at an important intersection, since it “takes place in the sensible world” while also being “a process of auto-causality through reason” (42). Its reference to an ideal model of formation makes Bildung extremely



kant and the error of subreption

useful for eighteenth-century theorists of natural life such as Blumenbach, who argues that the living body is itself created by a Bildungstrieb, or formative drive. Because it refers to processes of “human cultivation as well as [to] organic forms” (38), the term Bildung reveals the “striking isomorphism” (56) of culture and organism. Culture provides a link between freedom and nature because it belongs to both the sphere of human action and the sphere of nature. Bildung is also a link between the nonphenomenal and the phenomenal because it refers to both the spiritual life of a subject and the outwardly manifested signs of inner development, and because it duplicates this already-doubled signification when it becomes extended to include organic life force as well as personal or cultural development. Organism, culture, and Bildung thus serve as individual parts in an overall argumentative structure that itself evinces a strikingly organic unity: each element of this triad has the exact same characteristics as the next, and ultimately, as the entire whole. Culture, Bildung, and organism are, in other words, supposedly already instances of the very link that Cheah will argue is required by Kant. The sought-after bridge between the sensible and the supersensible in the critical philosophy is therefore pre- and overdetermined in its phenomenality by a distributed system of specular reduplication before we even get to the critique of teleological judgment. But just what is it that that makes culture and Bildung “phenomenal,” besides their astounding efficacy? Both concepts acquire their special significance for the question of freedom’s actualization (their bridging ability, so to speak) because of a specific moment in their linguistic histories that Cheah narrates but does not comment upon: the words Kultur and Bildung experienced, at some point prior to the eighteenth century, a process of semantic translation that conveyed them out of one realm and into another. For “culture,” this would be the “metaphorical extension” (already evident in classical Latin usage) from the realm of agrarian activity to “the ethical and intellectual development of the human mind or the soul” (40). Bildung is transported in the opposite direction (from the nonsensible to the sensible) when it is “secularized in the Enlightenment”—its semantic range is extended beyond remaking the soul in the image of god, and now includes a reference to “objects in the external world” (40). The bridging ability that both culture and Bildung possess is predicated, therefore, upon a moment of tropological transformation in each of their respective semantic histories, a metaphorical extension that allows each to reach over the divide

kant and the error of subreption



between sensible and nonsensible and find purchase on the other side, without losing its foothold on the bank from which it started out. This transformational moment has crucial implications for the argument that Cheah is making about phenomenal analogues: it is metaphor that lends culture and Bildung their “incarnational” power, the one ability that he emphasizes above all others. These analogues are referred to by Cheah as philosophemes, a term that invokes Jacques Derrida’s work on the relationship between metaphor and philosophy. If philosopheme names something that has been transformed into and instrumentalized as a unit of thought within philosophy, then it is impossible to overestimate the importance of metaphor to this process. It is metaphor that allows culture, Bildung, and organism to inhabit the precarious zone of the in-between and thereby to establish relationships of similarity and isomorphism across realms and among each other. By securing the conditions that allow for the entire triad to enter into philosophical discourse, metaphor emerges as the condition for what Derrida (in describing the pharmakon) refers to as the “transference of a non-philosopheme into a philosopheme” or “the very passage into philosophy.”22 Cheah seems to insist on a relationship in the opposite direction when he emphasizes the incarnational power of culture, Bildung, and organism as if this were not itself the product of metaphor’s own power. A relationship of linguistic transference thereby becomes effaced in favor of a system of ontological reduplication and reproduction. t h e o rg a n i s m i c m e ta ph o r a s g i f t Spectral Nationality’s unacknowledged reliance on metaphor is not entirely at odds with Kant’s parallel faith in analogy. Where metaphor can name both delivery and delivered product, however, analogy is somewhat less forgiving. The problem with the word analogue, which forms the cornerstone of Cheah’s argument, is that its three occurrences in the main text of the Third Critique (in German, Analogon) all designate errors having to do with misunderstanding the purposiveness of nature. The most egregious is what Kant calls a realistic, physical interpretation of the purposiveness of nature, which “regards the purposes in nature as based on the analogue of a mental power that acts according to intentions” (5:392). As Cheah acknowledges, this view is identified by Kant with “hylozoism,” and rejected because it endows matter with something impossible, which is a life force (84–85).



kant and the error of subreption

The other two occurrences are found in a passage in the Third Critique that gives a direct hint about why we always miss the mark, and end up saying either too little or too much, when we speak of analogues: In considering nature and the ability it displays in organized products, we say far too little if we call this an analogue of art, for in that case we think of an artist (a rational being) apart from nature. Rather, nature organizes itself, and it does so within each species of its organized products. . . . We might be closer if we called this inscrutable property of nature an analogue of life. But in that case we must either endow matter, as mere matter, with a kind of property (viz., the property of life, as hylozoism does) that conflicts with its nature [Wesen]. Or else we must supplement matter with an alien principle (a soul) conjoined to it. But that also will not work. . . . Strictly speaking, therefore, the organization of nature has nothing analogous [nichts Analogisches] to any causality known to us. (5:374–75)

Here, Kant appends his odd footnote regarding the analogy of the political body as organism, which I will discuss in more detail later. The main text continues by reiterating that the concept of a thing as a natural purpose is “not conceivable or explicable on any analogy [nach keiner Analogie] to any known physical ability.” All one can do is treat it as a regulative concept for reflective judgment, which enables us to “use a remote analogy [nach einer entfernten Analogie] with our own causality in terms of purposes generally” to guide our investigation of nature. Such an investigation would amount to a meditation on the “supreme basis” of organized objects, “not for the sake of gaining knowledge either of nature or of that original basis of nature, but rather for the sake of assisting that same practical power in us (viz. our reason) by analogy with which we were considering the cause of the purposiveness in organized objects” (5:375). Kant suggests that the task of finding a bridge between reason and nature is less a search for analogues than it is an attempt to formulate conditions under which an analogy can be made. To consider something under the terms given by analogy might, under certain very specific conditions, be acceptable, but to call something an “analogue” is somehow less correct. The terms analogy and analogue thus seem to be caught up in a tense face-off across the almost invisible line separating cautious knowledge from error. If this is the case, then “analogy” is not simply a relationship that is given to us once we have identified an analogue or two (or even three); rather, it is an act, constitutive of judgment itself, by which one provisionally gives oneself a law. The problem of the gift is, in fact, a central one in Spectral

kant and the error of subreption



Â� Nationality’s discussion of Kant, but its significance for the question of nature’s purposiveness is given a somewhat odd twist: First, nature seems to give itself to us via specific empirical laws. We comprehend the lawfulness of nature in its specificity by thinking of it as nature’s purposiveness for our cognitive faculties, as nature favoring us. Quite independently of what we will or need, nature gives us a gift. . . . However, Kant argues that “although such purposiveness is quite distinct from practical purposiveness (in human art or in morality),” we “think it by analogy with practical purposiveness” because nature cannot relate its products to ends. . . . Nature cannot give itself to us in any other way but mechanically. So to receive the favor of nature’s purposiveness, to accept the gift of empirical nature, we must think of it in analogy with our technical purposiveness, as the gift of another understanding that is not ours. We must practice radical ingratitude. We must efface the gift by denying nature itself, for we can only present nature’s favor to ourselves as the gift of another understanding, which nature is not. This presentation is a second gift. We gift ourselves this principle in reflective judgment that supervenes over and effaces the first gift. (101)

Cheah’s concern with the question of priority and his investment in establishing Kant as the first giver of the organismic metaphor replicate themselves within his argument as the need to identify a first giver in the interplay between reason and nature.23 The unavoidably aporetic end point of this pursuit of origination produces a problem that comes close to what Kant describes as subreption: the positing of nature as a figure of radical alterity. Once it has been decided that the real question is one of the original giver, the line of argumentation that transports us to this figure is almost irresistible. A review of its barest outlines will have to suffice here. We cannot know, Cheah points out, that “natural purposiveness is completely saturated by our judgment of it as arising from an understanding that is like ours”; nature could indeed be “speaking to us of its intentions,” even though we do not and cannot know this (109). The unknowable intention or technic of nature could thus be seen as a “secret that may not be a secret, an encryption that may not after all hide any intention to be revealed, but which nevertheless unceasingly prompts us to try to decipher it” (109). When we conceive of nature’s purposiveness via analogy to an understanding that is not ours, we therefore perform an “anthropomorphic projection” that makes nature mime human technē, and subordinate it to our purposiveness. But Kant also emphasizes that technē is characterized by heteronomy, and identifying the ground of nature’s technic as an understanding that is not



kant and the error of subreption

ours means an “opening out” of nature to “an asymmetrical, even inhuman other.” In fact, the technic of nature is nothing other than this “process of sending and giving that renders nature vulnerable to supplementation” and is thus always potentially heteronomous. At the heart of what Cheah sees as Kant’s solution to the problem of freedom’s actualization is therefore both a condition of freedom’s possibility and of its impossibility in the form of heteronomy, which Cheah calls “sheer exposure” (110). This originary contamination by exposure to the “techne of the other” (111) means that the legacy of the organismic metaphor is destined to be forever haunted by the heteronomy of an inhuman other. The insistence with which Kant specifies the limits beyond which reason can and cannot go is meant to address just the kinds of problems that arise in such a reading. What are we to do with the fact that we do not and cannot know anything about nature’s supersensible basis, its intention, and whether or not it is speaking to us? Kant’s answer is that we are left with the possibility of cautious assumptions in the form of analogies, and he insists that the tentativeness or uncertainty of any principles derived in such a way is only a function of our cognitive limitation. Nature’s purposiveness is certainly not completely saturated by judgment’s use of it as a regulative principle, but this tells us nothing about nature’s purposiveness, only about judgment’s limitations, which are in turn derived from the constitution of the understanding and of reason. To read the insubstantiality of principles of judgment, not as indications of their lack of objective and ontological reference, but as the phenomenal manifestation of haunting by radical alterity is to embark on a trajectory that will almost certainly (and mechanistically) escalate into boundless luridity, because we would be following what Kant called the “false spectacle [das Vorgaukeln]” of transcendental illusion (A298/B355). It is perhaps Cheah’s insistence on trying to resolve such questions of origination within strictly binary parameters that drives his argument to the inevitable conjuration of ghostly otherness, as his exposition of the concept of heteronomy illustrates: Heteronomy is literally a lawfulness that is given by what is other to me and outside of me. It is described through a metaphor of political ownership. A heteronomous will is subject to an alien (fremde) power. It is no longer in possession of or proper to itself because it has been possessed by a foreign other. Conversely, a free will is a will of its own, one that is proper to itself. As the author (Urheberin) of its own principles, it gives the

kant and the error of subreption



law to itself and only obeys its own governance, regulation, or direction (Lenkung). (67)

The image of being “possessed by a foreign other,” which foreshadows the eventual reification of nature in the form of a radical alterity, is generated by the dialectic tension between heteronomy and autonomy. Kant emphatically states, however, that what is at work in the principle of nature’s purposiveness is precisely not such an opposition: “Hence judgment also possesses an a priori principle for the possibility of nature, but one that holds only for the subject, a principle by which judgment prescribes, not to nature (which would be autonomy) but to itself (which is heautonomy), a law for its reflection on nature” (5:185). In the First Introduction, Kant calls “heautonomy” a kind of legislation [Gesetzgebung ] whose validity is merely subjective, for in it, judgment gives the law only to itself and not to nature or to freedom (10:225). The most important condition for the proper use of the principle of nature’s purposiveness is thus something that interrupts the dialectic between heteronomy and autonomy. It does so in the act of self-legislation, a prescribing of a law to oneself in the mode of self-giving. The content of this gift is, as we have seen, an analogy: reflective judgment must consider the particular laws of nature “in terms of such a unity as they would have if [als ob] they too had been given by an understanding (even though not ours)” (5:180). Reflective judgment is precisely this act of self-giving in which originator and receiver are one and the same, and both the understanding that is not ours and the unity in nature that indicates its purposiveness are produced as effects of this self-giving. To put it differently, heteronomy and its phenomenal shade, the radical Other, are constituted in the self-gift of analogy. Trying to answer the question of who makes the first gift as if there were already an existent other, which is what we end up doing if we posit the first giving as that of radically other nature presenting itself to us, is therefore to get caught up in an endless labyrinth of reversibility, because it fails to recognize that the very category of the other is produced by rather than anterior to the act of giving. i m p o s s i b l e g i f ts a n d u n c e rta i n d e bts If heautonomy is the principle of self-giving, however, then it is perhaps equivalent to not giving at all but merely pretending to give, or offering an impossible gift, and it is certainly no surprise that what is (not) given turns out to be analogy itself. Spectral Nationality runs the risk of subreption not



kant and the error of subreption

because it misidentifies the first giver but because it does not recognize that there is no first giving. The real troublemaker here is, in other words, the unreliable gift of analogy, which is offered by its putative “originator” (21n) with tremulous hands in the footnote of Kant mentioned earlier: On the other hand [umgekehrt ], the analogy of these direct natural purposes can serve to elucidate a certain kind of association among people, though one found more often as an idea than in actuality: in speaking of the complete transformation of a large people into a state, which took place recently, the word organization was frequently and very aptly applied to the establishment of legal authorities, etc., and even to the entire body politic. For each member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means, but also a purpose; and while each member contributes to making the whole possible, the idea of that whole should in turn determine the member’s position and function. (5:375n)

Kant has just asserted in the main text that the special causality of nature has nothing analogous in the entire realm of causalities known to us. The presentation of something as a natural purpose (the signature gesture of teleological judgment) is, in other words, the making of an analogy despite the lack of any ground for the analogy within human knowledge. The groundless analogy of natural purpose is therefore, strictly speaking, an impossible analogy that can nonetheless elucidate the social or political collective when it is returned (umgekehrt). The impossible gift of analogy thus has a curious property: having been rendered as a gift that is not a gift, an analogy that is not an analogy can be returned in the opposite direction, where it surprisingly sheds light. Knowledge emerges, in other words, from a regifted impossibility. Kant’s gift of the organismic metaphor has no other content other than analogy itself, which is the act of self-giving. It is thus a self-gift in two senses: it is a gift to oneself and it is a gift that is identical to the act of giving itself (meaning, a gift of oneself ). This impossible act creates equally inconceivable (one could say, phantom) positions of “originator” and “receiver,” but these are positions that cannot be invested with ontological attributes, however ghostly. To do so is to commit the error of subreption: it takes the subjective conditions of this self-gift (quite possibly the most emphatically subjective conditions imaginable, since the subject gives itself to itself ) and uses them to conjure objective ones. One final instance of analogical thinking from Kant’s critical philosophy demonstrates both the danger of seeing ghosts and also the inevitability of exposing oneself to this

kant and the error of subreption



danger. In the Transcendental Dialectic of the First Critique, he provides an example of transcendental illusion that underscores its implication with the problem of origination and destination: [Transcendental ideas] have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely that of directing the understanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at one point, which, although it is only an idea ( focus imaginarius)—i.e., a point from which the concepts of the understanding do not really proceed, since it lies entirely outside the bounds of possible experience—nonetheless still serves to obtain for these concepts the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension. Now of course it is from this that there arises the deception, as if these lines of direction were shot out from an object lying outside the field of possible empirical cognition [als wenn diese Richtungslinien von einem Gegenstande selbst, der außer dem Felde empirischmöglicher Erkenntnis läge, ausgeschossen wären] (just as objects are seen behind the surface of the mirror); yet this illusion (which can be prevented from deceiving) is nevertheless indispensably necessary if besides the object before our eyes we want to see those that lie far in the background, i.e., when, in our case, the understanding wants to go beyond every given experience. (A644/B672)

The illusion here involves a reversal of origin and goal that is unavoidable even though we are only using transcendental ideas in a regulative manner (that is, indulging in analogy, as Kant himself is doing here). The “certain goal [gewisses Ziel ]” toward which the regulative use of such ideas directs the understanding turns out to be not so certain at all, since we are unavoidably deceived into seeing this goal as the virtual point of origin. To refrain from looking into mirrors and being duped would also mean giving up the pleasure of seeing things that lie behind us, and we therefore choose instead to live in perpetual specular confusion. It is, in other words, not enough to think about the difficult distinction between legitimate analogy and subreptive error in terms of the two being hard to tell apart. The real problem is that even the legitimate use of an as-if is already illusion and contains difficulties internal to itself, such as its constant reversibility and self-erasure. To forget the analogical character of analogy, to mistake origin for goal, is to commit subreption, but Kant’s analogy is itself always already under erasure and reversible, meaning it never allows for a reliable distinction between origin and goal. If analogy is haunted by subreption, it is a self-haunting and not an exposure to its other. If the gift of analogy is such a false one, then perhaps one should settle for something less, such as a loan. The entire discourse of secrecy, response,



kant and the error of subreption

and radical otherness evoked in Spectral Nationality is an instance of such a borrowing, as acknowledged in a footnote: I have borrowed this formulation from Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 143. (109n)

The candor of this declaration—attached to a sentence in which nature’s favor, in light of the “radical alterity of the supersensible substrate,” is pronounced to be “a secret that may not be a secret”—is somewhat undercut by the fact that the text from which it claims to borrow quite convincingly argues that offering is never a simple thing. Such a borrowing can itself only be oblique: looking up the page reference given in this footnote leads to another footnote, a long one by Derrida about neither secrecy nor nature’s favor, but something quite entirely other, namely literature. Derrida’s footnote is appended to his observation that in literature it is paradoxically possible to say everything without giving up secrets. The opposition between the secret and speaking is therefore not an opposition at all, since the secret of literature remains intact even after one has said literally everything there is to say. On the page referred to by Cheah, Derrida explores what it is about literature that makes this possible: The same words, the same grammar, can satisfy two functions. Simultaneously or successively. No more than in irony, and other similar things, does the difference between the two functions or the two values need to be thematized (sometimes it must not—and that is the secret), neither explained earnestly, nor even marked by quotation marks, visible or invisible, or other nonverbal indices. That is because literature can all the time play economically, elliptically, ironically, with these marks and nonmarks, and thus with the exemplarity of everything that it says and does, because reading it is at the same time an endless interpretation, a pleasure [jouissance] and an immeasurable frustration: it can always mean, teach, convey, more than it does, or at any rate something else.24

The play of literature is not dependent on the markers of difference that come to circulate and proliferate in its name. It is a possibility of saying more, and also of saying less, that precedes the act of saying, that precedes the direction given by marks. This could certainly be true of all marks set up to indicate relationships such as giving and borrowing—the possibility of such acts going awry cannot be assigned to the unreliability of their material markers. Rather, it is a possibility of failure or error that is prior to and

kant and the error of subreption



that goes into the constitution of this duplicitous materiality. This would be an apt description of the mark that Kant calls the as-if of analogy, which is meant to remind us of the difference between analogy and error. The as-if is an injunction to remember this difference, but even when we remember it (when we use transcendental ideas in a regulative manner), we cannot help but submit to the illusionary play of mirrors that reverses origin and goal, thereby undoing the conditions of possibility of all giving, even the self-gift of heautonomous analogy. To remember the analogy is therefore also to initiate the mechanism of self-erasure that is ultimately the same as forgetting it. But Derrida is here speaking of literature, one might object, so what does this have to do with Kant? What could one legitimately take from this meditation on literature that could be transferred to philosophy, even provisionally? If a glimmer of knowledge can emerge in the movement of a regifted impossibility, then perhaps something similar could be hoped for with a duplicated borrowing. The significance of literature’s secret is, according to Derrida, that it is exemplary, although it begins, as he has just finished explaining, where the ability to understand what is an example and what is not an example finds itself at a limit. Literature is exemplary of what happens everywhere, every time that there is something rather than nothing, “each time that there is (es gibt) and each time that it gives without return, without reason [sans retour, sans raison]” (143). The condition of possibility for literature, the ground for its special secrecy, is indeed a kind of originary giving similar to the one that Cheah is so anxious to find in Kant. Derrida underscores, however, that this is the giving of an es gibt, in which there can be no gift, strictly speaking, because there is no subject in the position of the giver, save for the minimal agency of the es. Such an originary giver is not inhuman, but impersonal—that is, prior to and constitutive of the opposition that holds apart the human and the inhuman, life and mechanism, self and other, reason and nature. Kant’s heautonomous analogy, like Derrida’s es gibt, is literally without reason, in that it acts as an injunction against what is most natural to reason itself: the urge to overreach. Reason is excluded from the originary giving so that it can be found at its point of arrival, as a product of the movement of the gift’s return. The analogy returns to the cognizing subject in the form of a meditation, as Kant puts it, “for the sake of assisting that same practical power in us (viz. our reason) by analogy with which we were considering the cause of the purposiveness in organized objects” (5:375). To say that nature gives us reason is therefore to be just as much in error as to say that we give ourselves reason. The only



kant and the error of subreption

possibility is that there is (es gibt ) reason, that reason is a gift without originator, given without reason. The passage in the Third Critique that comes closest to acknowledging such an exemplarity of literature is to be found in section 49, in which aesthetic judgment takes on the example of literature. In order to illustrate how aesthetic ideas generate a productive excess of thought and thus expand the mind, Kant gives three examples. The first comprises Jupiter’s eagle and Hera’s peacock as what he calls “aesthetic attributes”; the second is a poem by Frederick the Great comparing old age with a sunset; and the third is a poem by the moral philosopher Philipp Lorenz Withof, dealing with the shining of the sun (5:315–16). This sequence of three examples points to an unacknowledged borrowing: three exactly parallel cases are found in the famous discussion of metaphor in Aristotle’s Poetics.25 The third example could be said to be, for the purposes of exploring the question of analogy in Kant, the most illuminating: Thus, for example, a certain poet says in the description of a beautiful morning, “The sun flowed forth, as serenity flows from virtue” [Die Sonne quoll hervor, wie Ruh aus Tugend quillt]. The consciousness of virtue, even if we only think of ourselves as in the position of a virtuous person, spreads in the mind a multitude of sublime and calming feelings and a boundless outlook toward a joyful future, such as no expression commensurate with a determinate concept completely attains. (5:316)

This example is meant to illustrate, according to Kant, an inversion of the more common flow of properties established by analogy, because it shows “an intellectual concept” (virtue) serving as “an attribute of a presentation of sense” (the sun’s shining), thereby animating that presentation with “the idea of the supersensible” (5:316). As Richard Klein has pointed out, this creates an odd situation: “the sun is like virtue, as if virtue could illuminate the sun.”26 A closer look reveals an even more complicated choreography of movement, for what the imagination provides as an animating attribute is neither the image of the sun nor virtue itself, but what Kant calls the “consciousness of virtue.” A movement of thought is initiated when one is asked to “put oneself in the place of a virtuous person,” and this movement outside the self spreads “sublime and calming feelings” in the mind, opening up a “boundless outlook toward a joyful future.” The question of what this movement is similar to, which one might expect in an analogy, has become entirely eclipsed. Indeed, the gesture of revealing similarity through

kant and the error of subreption



comparison—the conventional structure of an analogy—is precisely what has been left behind or rendered transparent to the point of invisibility. The opening up of vision that is being celebrated here is therefore more an effect of erasure than of revelation. Die Sonne quoll hervor, wie Ruh aus Tugend quillt —there are only three terms in this analogy, although its structure leads an Aristotelian to expect four, and he or she might quite legitimately ask: What is the missing fourth term? If peace streams forth from virtue, in other words, then from where does the sun stream forth? Kant’s analogy is, however, no longer an analogy, and to ask after the origin of the sun no longer makes sense if we are thinking of a place from which it flows, as tranquility flows from virtue. The question of what this movement is similar to is erased by the salubrious result of the movement itself, which creates the very effect that it is speaking of. Kant’s reading, in other words, has ended up replacing Quelle, the origin, with an astoundingly efficacious quellen, an absolute movement of origination. The movements of mind that produce these sunlike effects are initiated by the second half of the line, which sets us flowing outside of ourselves to imagine virtue. This quellen is thus not merely the act of springing from an origin, but an act of production that requires nothing but the enunciation itself. The movement of mind is both cause and effect, both origin and destination in this analogy. Analogy is, in fact, perhaps nothing more than this movement itself. Under what circumstances is it possible to have an origination so total that it produces even its own cause, its own point of origin? This can only come about if the act of quellen possesses the power to erase its own historicity, to posit itself as pure origination without an origin, pure giving without giver. In other words, a luminous source casts its light behind itself, obliterating all traces of its own origin. In the place of a fourth term of the analogy, we find instead a dark spot that is made up of an excess rather than an absence of light, a solar source gone supernova. When Kant refers to the regulative employment of nature’s purposiveness as using “a remote analogy [nach einer entfernten Analogie] with our own causality in terms of purposes generally” to guide our investigation of nature, and to the ultimate goal of this investigation as being “for the sake of assisting that same practical power in us (viz. our reason) by analogy with which we were considering the cause of the purposiveness in organized objects” (5:375), he is indicating a logic of giving that erases the gift. The remote analogy is also a “removed [entfernte]” analogy, an analogy under the sign of erasure.



kant and the error of subreption

The example of literature in Kant thus reveals an important aspect of analogical thinking, which is emphatically not a simple question of rhetoric or poetics, but of critical philosophy itself. What Derrida calls the es gibt of literature’s exemplarity is seen here to be the effect of analogy’s self-erasure, which enables it to originate without an origin, to stream forth from a site that is absent of anything but its self-origination. There are two indications that Spectral Nationality’s elusive quarry, the organismic metaphor, must be understood in relation to this moment of analogy’s self-erasure in Kant. One is yet another footnote, a famous one appended in the Third Critique to this spectacle and directing the reader to the inscription over the temple of Isis: “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil” (5:316n). The reference to a vignette from Segner’s Natural Philosophy, showing the forbidden threshold to nature’s temple, is the site of nature’s mystery that Cheah repeatedly invokes as the “secret that may not be a secret” (109, 110, 111).27 As Kant and Derrida point out, however, the unsecreting of the secret is neither a deciphering nor an unveiling, nor is it a question of an agonistic struggle between self and other. Rather, it is to be traced to nothing more or less than the heautonomous self-giving and self-erasure of analogy, a rendering translucent that is both erasure and revelation. The second way in which self-erasing analogy is important to understanding Kant’s metaphor is indicated in Derrida’s Given Time, where he associates the impossibility of the gift with the rigorous demand of an “absolute forgetting” that nonetheless leaves behind “not nothing”: “Even though it must leave nothing behind it, even though it must efface everything, including the traces of repression, this forgetting, this forgetting of the gift cannot be a simple non-experience, a simple non-appearance, a selfeffacement that is carried off with what it effaces.”28 Such an impossibility, like that of Kant’s regifted analogy, effaces itself thoroughly and yet remains able to prop up a minimal possibility. For Derrida, this crucial gap that remains open despite the gift’s effacement is time itself—not the empirical time that determines human finitude, as Spectral Nationality would have it, but the time of the gift, created in the minimal difference between the event of giving and its erasure (28–29). This gap, Derrida points out, “resembles an empty word or a transcendental illusion” (30), and he refers the reader here to the Transcendental Dialectic in the First Critique. In Kant’s case, this possibility takes the form of a remote or removed (entfernte) analogy being able, in the movement of regifting, to “elucidate a certain kind of

kant and the error of subreption



association among people” (5:375n). The organismic metaphor is, in other words, located entirely within this paradoxical movement, this spectral (im)possibility that has nothing to do with nature’s secret or favor. To receive the gift of the organismic metaphor and celebrate it as Kant’s greatest bequest is to forget the gift-character of the gift and the as-if character of analogy; above all, it produces a reified alterity that can only come about by forgetting that subjects and objects are, as Derrida puts it, “arrested effects of the gift” (24). This would be, in a nutshell, the error of subreption. The alternative, however, is not simply the opposite, but must be a “forgetting of forgetting,” a recrossing and regiving that erases all trace of the giving except the space and time that it opens up. This would be the work performed by the movement of analogy as it is demonstrated in Kant’s critique. The tentative knowledge that is promised by the organismic metaphor is therefore not one that shields itself from error by simply excluding it from reason. Instead, it rests on a distinction between analogy and subreption, knowledge and error, whose minimal possibility is held open only by the inexhaustible tendency of reason to produce and cancel out, within itself, its other in the form of error.

fou r

The Madness of the Middle

If Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit could be read, as many have suggested, as a sort of Bildungsroman, then its narrative of subject-formation begins with a surprising question: how do we deal with the anxiety about error that seems to accompany any pursuit of self-knowledge? Such anxiety is dangerous because it cannot be exhausted, and giving in to it means being drawn inevitably along an itinerary of negative escalation: Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error [die Besorgnis, in Irrtum zu geraten] sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why you should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should you not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself [daß diese Furcht zu irren schon der Irrtum selbst ist]? Indeed, this fear takes on something—a great deal in fact—for granted as truth, supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true.1

To foreclose this infinite recursion of error, Hegel continues, we must examine what it takes for granted: a set of false ideas about cognition (Erkennen) as an “instrument” or a “medium” through which we approach the Absolute

the madness of the middle



or the Truth. When we separate cognition from truth and conceive of the relationship between them as one of means to ends, we generate a medial anxiety that is as much a fear of error as it is a fear of truth. The solution is to divest ourselves of this model and to thereby eliminate the corollary fear about mediacy. The dissipation of this fear leaves behind, however, not a straight and comfortable route to the Absolute, but rather, a pathway of “doubt [Zweifel ]” or perhaps even “despair [Verzweiflung]” (49). The difficult reexamination of instrumentality and mediation that Hegel demands seems, at first glance, to merely replace one set of anxieties with another, but he is adamant about its necessity: the trials and tribulations that constitute this pathway of doubt, made available by the elimination of anxiety, will amount to nothing less than the “detailed history of the education [Bildung] of consciousness itself ” (50). For Hegel, the term error seems to designate only the first itinerary, one of perpetual errancy and infinite fear (Furcht or Besorgnis) which must be overcome. The pathway of doubt, on the other hand, might be difficult to navigate, but unlike the maze of error, it is free of false waymarkers. The missteps that one makes while traversing it, following “only one’s own conviction” (50), can still eventually lead one to truth. This association of error with perpetual and nonproductive wandering seems to put Hegel’s (hi)story of the Bildung of consciousness at variance with that other great narrative of subject-formation from around 1800: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Goethe’s novel famously offers little in the way of an authoritative and nonironic definition of Bildung, but in the mysterious initiation ceremony near the end of the novel, Wilhelm and the reader do receive an unexpectedly explicit statement by the Abbé about the pathway to knowledge: The duty of a teacher is not to preserve man from error [Irrtum], but to guide him in error, in fact to let him drink it in, in full draughts. That is the wisdom of teachers. For the man who only sips at error, can make do with it for quite a time, delighting in it as a rare pleasure. But a man who drinks it to the dregs, must recognize the error of his ways, unless he is mad.2

According to this optimistic account of error’s potential, there is no such thing as useless error, because every error can be turned into profit. As we are informed by no less than God himself in Faust, “man errs as long as he strives [es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt],” which is to say, as long as he is engaged in the pursuit of truth and self-knowledge.3 The path of Bildung would therefore require not resistance but complete submission to error,



the madness of the middle

for recognition and truth are the inevitable outcome of allowing error to run its course. In parsing the cryptic message of Bildung for the hapless Wilhelm, Jarno puts it as follows: “error can only be cured through erring” (337/550).4 In such a model of subject-formation, both teacher and student play curiously minor roles: all they have to do is stand back and not impede the process by which error cancels itself to produce something like the via media of recognition, restraint, and moderation. In his classic reading of the novel from 1966, Hans Eichner thus described its narrative trajectory as the “becoming-sober [Ernüchterung]” of a Schwärmer, in that it tells how the brash enthusiast Wilhelm comes to recognize the value of realistic aspirations and “humble moderation [bescheidenem Mittelmaß ].”5 The last two books of Goethe’s novel make it quite clear, however, that this imagined path of Bildung is somewhat out of joint. The multiple ways in which Wilhelm falls short of this goal have been well documented in the secondary criticism and hardly need to be rehashed here. More interesting for the question of error, however, is that the novel unseats the logic of self-correction and moderation almost immediately after articulating its centrality to Bildung. In fact, we are told that the entire ceremony, during which error’s significance is transmitted, cannot be taken at face value: according to Jarno, the initiation comprises “relics of a youthful enterprise that most initiates first took very seriously but which all now just smile at sometimes” (335/548; translation modified). The statement about error could, in other words, have itself been in error—a possibility that already begins the recursive cycle of anxiety about error that troubled Hegel. A second challenge is presented by the image of drinking that the novel uses to convey this self-correcting mechanism of error. The claim is that the vehicle of error’s consumption is also the vehicle of its correction; drinking a little error produces, in other words, the opposite of knowledge, but if one keeps guzzling it “in full draughts,” the recognition of error and hence knowledge—error’s antitoxin—will be produced. In its final pages, however, at the end of a seemingly endless chain of absurd coincidences, the novel reveals that drinking is itself an unreliable means of pharmaceutical delivery. Young Felix has imbibed a good dose, it seems, of the liquid opium that Augustin carries around on his person. The lethal substance functions for Augustin as the opposite of a poison: it is a “talisman” to remind him of his narrow escape from death (365/597). This inverted symbol of lifeaffirmation betrays its duplicity, however, for Felix appears to have acciden-

the madness of the middle



tally drunk a glass of almond milk into which the opium had been mixed. Fortunately for everyone concerned (but poor Augustin, who kills himself in remorse before the misunderstanding is revealed), Felix turns out to have not drunk the opium after all, since he obtained his milk directly from the carafe, which contained no poison. The reversibility of poison and cure that the opium symbolizes, and that the mechanism of error’s self-correction depends upon, is thus superseded by an even more powerful undecidability, one caused by the unreliability of its medium. Drinking turns out to be an event whose occurrence cannot even be ascertained, an eminently fickle mechanism of delivery, whether of poison or cure, of error or knowledge. To drink deeply enough of error in order to counteract its deleterious effects is already a risky business, but when the mechanism of drinking is itself constantly in question, when one can never quite say for sure whether drinking has taken place or not, then it becomes downright hazardous. The kind of moderation and knowledge that is achieved through the self-canceling and self-correcting vicissitudes of error is therefore troubled by something that could be called moderation’s twin, namely the concept of mediation. The uncertain value of the Society’s ritual and the unreliable mechanism of drinking confront the reader with the possibility that the mode in which knowledge about error is expressed or in which error is transformed into knowledge could be itself subject to error. As Hegel pointed out, our assumptions about mediation and mediality must first be rigorously examined before we can judge with any confidence about error. Wilhelm Meister’s most significant reflections on the relationship between Bildung and error are therefore presented, not as a tension between an organic, inner-driven growth and the forces of external shaping or manipulation, but rather in its claims about this supposedly self-regulating logic of the middle. virtue in the middle Eichner’s model of self-correction evokes the concept of virtue as moderation, which is often traced back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and its discussion of what makes a virtuous man. Aristotle proposes that each virtue should be thought of as a member of a triad, “a mean state between two vices, one of excess and one of defect”; courage, for example, would be the intermediate state between too much confidence (rashness) and too little confidence (cowardice).6 The Aristotelian mean exists, in other words, only as far as it can be arrived at after traversing the entirety of what is available. The virtuous



the madness of the middle

middle is therefore also a virtual middle: it is not a Platonic idea, nor does it have any value independent of its relationship to the extremities of excess and deficiency.7 Arrival at the mean or the intermediate (ton meson), and therefore at virtue, is predicated on the condition of calculability: the matter in question must be continuous and susceptible to division into equal parts, so that the point that is equidistant from the extremes can be identified. If such calculation remains confined to a consideration of the object, however, then we merely achieve an objective average or middle, divorced from all reference to the subject. This sort of mechanical reckoning produces only a mathematical middle, based on what Aristotle calls “arithmetical proportion” (2.6.6), but virtue has an additional requirement: it must lie in a mean relative to us (pros hēmas), which is the proportion that is correct or proper for that particular individual. Determining the subjectively proper mean is much trickier, because it is “not one and the same for everybody” (2.6.5). Virtue is therefore well summarized in Aristotle’s dictum that feelings are proper only when they are felt “at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose and in the right manner” (2.6.11). Because virtue is constituted by the propriety of this subjective middle, it cannot be determined according to any principle or value that is available prior to the particularities of a situation. Rather, it must be attained through the experience of deviation and error: We do not blame one who diverges a little from the right course, whether on the side of the too much or of the too little, but one who diverges more widely, for his error is noticed. Yet to what degree and how seriously a man must err to be blamed is not easy to define on principle [logōi]. For in fact no object of perception [ouden tōn aesthētōn] is easy to define; and such questions of degree depend on particular circumstances, and the decision lie with perception [en tei aesthētei he krisis]. (2.9.8)

If rightness or propriety could be given by principle (logos), without us first having to muddle through the vagaries of the particular, then it would be as far removed from virtue as the merely mathematical middle, for neither would contain any reference to the particular subject. It is therefore necessary to first embark on a course of error in order to arrive at virtue. The virtue of moderation is, in other words, already a somewhat shifty one even in its earliest formulations.8 It cannot be simply given by a process of estimation or calculation that is prior to experience, nor can it be simply derived from a kind of logos that is separate from the contingencies

the madness of the middle



of the particular. On the other hand, it must depend to a certain extent on these two things. The virtuous middle must be preceded by trial and error, meaning it must rely on some kind of calculation, and there must be some principle or guide that exists as an a priori anchor for the erring subject. These tensions do not get resolved in the Nicomachean Ethics. In fact, their intractable conflict leads Aristotle to readmit logos very cautiously into the scene of decision: virtue, he concedes, could be considered to be “determined by principle [logōi],” if we define logos as simply the way that “the prudent man [ho phronimos] would determine it” (2.6.15). This is somewhat more comforting than leaving the determination of virtue entirely in the hands of calculation, but defining logos as the judgment of the “prudent man” and displacing the determination of virtue onto this figure introduces a problematic circularity. Prudence is, in fact, one of the key virtues discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics, and to require prudence or some sense of what a prudent man would do in a given situation before one can figure out the middle point of virtue is, in effect, to require virtue in order to arrive at virtue. If one of the main concerns of Goethe’s novel is indeed to warn against the dangers of Schwärmerei or naïve enthusiasm and to hold up a process of sober subject-formation as an alternative, then it could be read as engaging in a reimagination of Aristotelian moderation. The preceding summary has, in fact, suggested several affinities between the virtuous middle and the project of Bildung. Like moderation, Bildung escapes substantive description or positive definition: it is necessarily open-ended because Bildung is different for every individual, and even within the experiential unit that is an individual life, its lessons are always specific to particular situations and constellations of actors. Bildung is arrived at only after one has navigated various paths of sentimental, aesthetic, and intellectual excess or deficiency. Of all the attributes shared by moderation and Bildung, the most interesting one takes the form of problematic circularity: just as the identification of the proper middle of virtue already requires virtue, so too does Bildung seem to require the very qualities or principles that it claims to instill. Moderation is, however, not the only form of the middle that exerts a decisive influence on the characters, the narrative, and the form of Goethe’s novel. The other, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is a certain model of mediation that acquires in the course of the eighteenth century a discursive life of its own. Its complications intersect with those of moderation in multiple ways, and some of the more interesting aspects of this



the madness of the middle

entanglement can be traced in another major text dealing with the problem of subject-formation and propriety, namely Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759). Smith’s discussion of sympathy begins with an adumbration of its mediated character: because we have “no immediate experience of what other men feel,” sympathy can only function with the aid of the imagination, which enables us to represent to ourselves sensations that would be our own, “if we were in his case.”9 Sympathetic imagination ends up being an elaborate machine, however, whose operations are constantly confounded by the very kind of mediation that enables it to work at all. m o d e r at i o n , m e d i at i o n , a n d s y m pat h y The pleasure of sympathy is, according to Smith, a mutual one based on spectacle: the individual experiencing a passion “is pleased with our sympathy, and hurt by the want of it,” but we conversely seem to be “pleased when we are able to sympathize with him, and to be hurt when we are unable to do so” (19). Both parties alternate between the roles of actor and spectator, united by the common goal of producing “concord,” and to this end, they participate in an act of cooperative mimesis: the spectators assume “the circumstances of the person principally involved” and the person involved is “led to imagine in what manner he would be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation” (27–28). In analyzing the mechanisms through which sympathetic connections are produced, Smith thus uncovers its fundamental dependence on performance and theatricality.10 In order for sympathy to be successful, the person gripped by passion must heed one rule above all: “To see the emotions of their hearts, in every respect, beat time to his own, in the violent and disagreeable passions, constitutes his sole consolation. But he can only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him” (27). Extremes of passion, when expressed in their full intensity, produce a discontinuity between the two parties and disrupt the play of sympathy. The one experiencing such passion must therefore undertake a continual process of self-modulation; he must “flatten” the passion in order to “reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him” (27). Only thus can he attain what Smith calls (in the older, nonpejorative sense of the word) that “certain mediocrity” (32), that “pitch of moderation” that would allow the impartial spectator to “entirely enter into” these emotions (31).

the madness of the middle



Smith’s theory of moral sentiments is oddly indifferent to the actual moral content of such passions. The propriety of passions is submitted entirely to the question of whether we approve of them or not, and approval is, in turn, merely a matter of the felicity of the performance by which concord or harmony is created. As in Aristotle’s account of virtue, propriety is marked by a fundamental variability, in that it is “different in different passions” (33). What is new in Smith’s theory, however, is a certain emphasis on medial differences: if a passion originates in the body, then its expression must be severely curtailed, for the opacity of the other’s body prevents the spectator from entering into the sufferer’s body, and vice versa. The imagination, on the other hand, is “more ductile,” more readily assuming “the shape and configuration” of the other’s imagination. Because our imaginations can “more readily mould themselves” (35) upon the imagination of another person than our bodies can mold themselves upon his or her body, there is considerably more expressive license when it comes to passions originating in the imagination.11 When judging sentiments and conduct, we therefore need to set into motion an imaginary oscillation that involves both judicious moderation and seemly mediation. Smith’s emphasis on the mechanism of sympathy’s production introduces, however, certain problems which he addresses in a discussion of what should be excluded in moral judgment. Two of these—utility and fashion—vividly illustrate the potential for error that afflicts the logic of the middle. Such a logic is integral to proper sympathy, and utility and fashion must therefore be carefully subtracted from the core concerns of what it means to express approbation or disapprobation, and thus from sympathy itself. Utility, which Smith defines as “the fitness of any system or machine to produce the end for which it was intended” (209), is often taken to be a positive influence on our judgment, whether aesthetic or moral. Smith sees in it, however, an often unnoticed danger: fitness tends to become more valued than “the very end for which it was intended,” and we become more concerned with the “exact adjustment of the means for attaining any conveniency or pleasure” (210) than in the convenience or pleasure itself. Utility should be a consideration of the harmony or fitness between means and ends, but means seem to unavoidably take hold of our imagination in ways that obliterate the original utilitarian interest. This is nowhere more egregious than in our attitudes toward wealth and power—the foolish man envies the rich and powerful not for being happier than he is, but for possessing “more means of happiness” (213). He thus fails to see that power and riches are



the madness of the middle

actually “enormous and operose machines” that consist of “springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor” (213). This propensity to be taken in by the mechanical, and to forget that it is merely a means toward an end, is described by Smith as a “deception” imposed upon us by nature. Paradoxically, it turns out to be one that in turn serves a useful purpose: it “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind” (214). The love of utility always produces a potential confusion between means and ends, but this confusion can itself be recuperated as purposive. Its purposiveness is, however, directed only toward constant motion and industry, which is to say that the concept of purpose becomes simply a generator of activity rather than a visible or tangible goal. A second source of negative influence on moral approbation is fashion or custom, which has produced most of the “irregular and discordant opinions which prevail in different ages and nations” (227). Its effect is deleterious because it confuses what is merely common with what is deserving of approbation. On this point, Smith paraphrases the French philosopher Claude Buffier, saying that a learned Jesuit, father Buffier, has determined that the beauty of every object consists in that form and colour, which is most usual among things of that particular sort to which it belongs. Thus, in the human form, the beauty of each feature lies in a certain middle, equally removed from a variety of other forms that are ugly. A beautiful nose, for example, is one that is neither very long, nor very short, neither very straight, nor very crooked, but a sort of middle among all these extremes, and less different from any one of them, than all of them are from one another. (232)

The “middle among all these extremes” is associated with beauty purely because of its statistical frequency: the middle nose is the most beautiful Â�because “the most customary form there is, in each species of things” (233) is taken to be the most beautiful. The beautiful middle cannot, however, be identical to “the common,” a designation whose possibly negative connotations convey the ambivalence that is exactly at issue here. As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, the presentation of an “average nose” (mittlere Nase—literally, the “middle nose”) is merely “academically correct” rather than beautiful. He distinguishes between two ways of deriving this middle nose: the one that is farther removed from the beautiful is a mechanical calculation (for example, measuring a thousand noses, then dividing the sum by

the madness of the middle



a thousand), while the one that approaches but does not arrive at the beautiful is a “dynamic effect” of the imagination, in which the mind lays one image on top of another, and “by means of the congruence of several of the same kind” arrives at a “mean [ein Mittleres] that can serve them all as common measure.”12 This latter sort of middle nose is not merely an empirically derived, specific nose, but it is not quite the same as the beautiful nose either. Rather, Kant calls it the model of a beautiful nose: “The image for the whole species, hovering among all the particular and variously diverging intuitions of the individuals, which nature used as the archetype [Urbild ] underlying her productions in the same species, but does not seem to have fully achieved in any individual” (5:234–35). Both these forms of the middle nose, whether produced empirically by measurement or dynamically by the imagination, share a common failing: completely regular [regelmäßigen] faces, Kant notes, “usually betray an inwardly only average [mittelmäßigen] human being” (5:235). Moderation that is merely calculated thus turns out to be always prone to mediocrity, regardless of whether this calculation proceeds empirically or only in the imagination. In order to turn this middle into an ideal of beauty, Kant has to supplement it with a teleological ground, borrowed from Buffier, by specifying that it is equivalent to an Urbild (an archetype or model) aimed at by Nature, even if all individual tokens deviate from it. A similar gesture is performed by Smith. The beautiful middle is the form which Nature seems to have aimed at in them all, which, however, she deviates from in a great variety of ways, and very seldom hits exactly; but to which all those deviations still bear a very strong resemblance. When a number of drawings are made after one pattern, though they may all miss it in some respects, yet they will all resemble it more than they resemble one another; the general character of the pattern will run through them all; the most singular and odd will be those which are most wide of it; and though very few will copy it exactly, yet the most accurate delineations will bear a greater resemblance to the most careless, than the careless ones will bear to one another. The most customary form there is, in each species of things, according to him, the most beautiful. (232)

Even though this “certain middle” might not be found at all in the entire set being considered, because all members are in some respects different from it, it is still considered the “middle” pattern because all actual faces resemble it more than they do each other. Such a “general character of a pattern” can therefore be found everywhere and nowhere at the same time.



the madness of the middle

The intentionality of nature that Smith drives in here to hold apart “the most customary” and the beautiful reflects a mistrust of the purely statistical middle, one that comes across quite clearly in the closing paragraph of the remarks on custom and fashion: I cannot, however, be induced to believe that our sense even of external beauty is founded altogether on custom. The utility of any form, its fitness for the useful purposes for which it was intended, evidently recommends it, and renders it agreeable to us, independent of custom. . . . But though I cannot admit that custom is the sole principle of beauty, yet I can so far allow the truth of this ingenious system as to grant, that there is scarce any one external form so beautiful as to please, if quite contrary to custom and unlike whatever we have been used to in that particular species of things: or so deformed as not to be agreeable, if custom uniformly supports it, and habituates us to see it in every single individual of the kind. (234)

Smith reintroduces, alongside the principle of nature’s aim, the ideas of propriety, fitness, and utility to temper the sway of habit and custom on the beautiful, as if the former alone were not sufficient to allay the anxieties that surround the statistical middle. The problem is that propriety, fitness, and utility all depend, as we have seen, on the same idea of middleness, and are therefore all afflicted with the same instability. Taking recourse to them at the end of his discussion is thus tantamount to acknowledging the indefatigable tendency of the mean to displace and replace purpose or content. Smith’s discussion of propriety, utility, and fashion in connection with moral approbation indicates some of the anxiety that surrounds the virtuous middle and the need to temper its reliance on calculation and statistical distribution by positing some sort of ground for it (parallel to Aristotle’s problematic appeal to logos). Without this anchor, moderation threatens to slip into the merely fashionable middle: contingent, fleeting, and potentially mediocre. In an article from the Edinburgh Magazine in 1818, William Hazlitt comments with characteristic insight and candor on this perilous middle: “To look like nobody else is a sufficiently mortifying reflection; to be in danger of being mistaken for one of the rabble is worse. It is the perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious from its being common.”13 The domain of fashion has no foundation or authority apart from this uneasy oscillation between extremes, between what Hazlitt calls “singularity and

the madness of the middle



vulgarity.” Being completely exposed to statistical determination, fashion is stuck in the middle, doomed to an unsettled existence that perpetually destroys the very standard of taste that it appeals to and establishes. Â�Hazlitt’s German contemporary Christian Garve adds another element to this critique; in his essay Über die Moden (On Fashion), he describes the “rule of fashion [Herrschaft der Mode]” as holding sway over “smaller things” that cannot be regulated by “fixed rules,” standards of taste based on “natural dispositions, education, and artistry,” or even the principles of “usefulness, practicality, and convenience.”14 Garve thus locates fashion exactly where Kant places reflective judgment: in that domain of what is left ungoverned by rules that allow simple subsumption of the particular under the general using determinate rules. Garve is, however, profoundly pessimistic about the ability to formulate even something as refined as Kant’s reflective judgment for this domain, and instead places these remnants outside the purview of judgment altogether: “Just as there are small objects that, with respect to what is good and what is a matter of duty, cannot be judged using laws given in the general, so too are there, with respect to the beautiful and the proper, things of a small, or fleeting and mutable nature, that cannot be uniformly judged by the sensibilities of even the most well organized and the most finely discriminating among men” (121). By disrupting the conditions under which it is possible to formulate a stable relationship between general and particular, fashion thus unsettles judgment itself (whether moral or aesthetic), which Kant refers to as the general faculty for “thinking of the particular as contained under the universal” (5:179). the phantom genre of the bildungsroman Utility and fashion thus undermine the conditions of any act of judgment that entails understanding the particular as contained under the general, and in doing so, indicate the unreliability of any account of moral sentiment that relies on mechanism, moderation, and mediation. If the underÂ� lying logic of Bildung parallels that of virtuous moderation, then it perhaps also shares a susceptibility to similar disturbances. In his description of the Bildungsroman as a paradigmatic genre of subject-formation, Marc Redfield seems to confirm this commonality: One would be hard-pressed to find another instance of a genre in which particularity and generality appear to mesh so thoroughly. For since the



the madness of the middle

Â�Bildungsroman narrates the acculturation of a self—the integration of a particular “I” into the general subjectivity of a community, and thus, finally into the universal subjectivity of humanity—the genre can be said to repeat, as its identity or content, its own synthesis of particular instance and general form.15

If Bildung is this movement of absorption and integration of the particular subject into the “general subjectivity of a community,” then the BildungsÂ� roman would be the literary form that embodies the general problem of aesthetic ideology and aesthetic education in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, it would itself provide the model of subsumption under which individual instantiations of such a novel form could be absorbed into a single genre. Redfield’s analysis shows, however, that the Bildungsroman has remained a “phantom genre,” suggesting that this integrating logic ultimately falls short of its task: The Bildungsroman may be said to symbolize the possibility of aesthetics itself—the only problem being that literary criticism, as we have seen, is unable to guarantee the existence of a Bildungsroman. The status of this uncertainty is itself uncertain: this genre seems on the one hand excessively available, since any narrative can be taken as some sort of Bildungsroman, yet on the other hand hyperbolically absent, since under inspection no literary text appears to meet the aesthetic expectations of the genre. (63–64)

If even Goethe’s novel is already a departure or deviation from the absolute norm of the generic convention, then where is the actual, original BildungsÂ� roman that is located precisely in the middle, prior to any inflection? Like Kant’s hovering, virtual Urbild, or the general character of Smith’s “pattern,” the exemplary Bildungsroman is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. These generic difficulties are, as many critics have noted, mirrored in the novel itself. Upon his admission into the Society of the Tower, Wilhelm is informed that his travails were not governed by chance but rather by a pedagogical program, and he receives a certificate of apprenticeship (Lehrbrief ) written out on a scroll to attest to the self-knowledge thus attained. Its message is, however, incomprehensible to the initiate: ironically, Wilhelm is unable to see how its collection of sayings about life, art, judgment, and assorted other topics applies to him, because they sound like hollow generalities. The lesson that the Lehrbrief is trying to impart is precisely a lesson about how to subsume the particular under the general, but the point is lost because it is expressed in terms that already assume the understanding

the madness of the middle



that it is supposed to inculcate. What the end of the novel depicts cannot, therefore, be a messiah-like arrival of meaning and Bildung to Wilhelm and to the reader, but rather a final interpretive challenge: how can our subject-to-be figure out the pattern that holds together the various stages of his life? To do so requires, as the Lehrbrief indicates, an art (Kunst ), one already mentioned by the first representative of the Society in the novel, the unnamed stranger who approached Wilhelm in the streets in book 1: It is not a matter of believing, or trying to make sense out of what is otherwise incomprehensible, but simply of deciding which way of looking at things [Vorstellungsart] suits us best. The texture [Gewebe] of this world is made up of necessity and chance. Human reason stands between them [stellt sich zwischen beide] and rules them both, treating necessity as the basis of existence, but manipulating and directing chance, and using it. (38/71; translation modified)

The use of this fine instrument of reason to sort out and direct the contingencies of life is an “art,” something that is not innate but must be learned (39/72). What Wilhelm must do is to give up his tendency to see life events as being governed by either necessity or chance, and to learn the art of using this thing that stands in the middle of the two and therefore masters them both—reason. The key to Bildung lies, in other words, in this artfulness of reason, in the art of the middle. Like moderation, Wilhelm’s Bildung must be achieved by a negative process through which the extremes of error are explored and then renounced, after a moment of epiphanic recognition, as deviations from a common norm. Error can thus be healed only by error because an exhaustive pursuit of multitudinous pathways of deviation is necessary in order to attain moderation. From the vantage point of this post-errant arrival at the middle, the seemingly random occurrences in Wilhelm’s life will finally emerge as instances of what Dilthey called “necessary points of transition [die notwendigen Durchgangspunkte].”16 Governed neither by chance nor by necessity, these individual stages—when finally seen through the filter of reason, the art of the middle—become recognizable as a series of successively higher platforms that enable the subject to gradually ascend to knowledge. The truth of Bildung lies therefore not in a recognition of the end but in a Â�thorough understanding of the middle. But if knowledge and recognition in the BildungsÂ� roman emanate from the middle, then who gets to speak for it? Who guides our errant Wilhelm in the name of this middle? The problem in Goethe’s novel is, paradoxically, not the lack but the surfeit of potential candidates.



the madness of the middle

w i l h e l m’s m o d e r at i o n Two such contenders are present already at the very opening of the novel, in the form of the maternal figures who attempt to check the excesses of the young lovers, Wilhelm and Mariane. In the opening scene, Barbara awaits Mariane’s arrival at home, where the custom is for the former to lay out a simple dinner (ein mäßiges Abendessen) for the two. When Mariane appears, a heated discussion ensues because of the love triangle involving her and her two suitors, Wilhelm and Norberg. Mariane’s impassioned declarations of love for Wilhelm and disregard for Norberg become increasingly wild until they are interrupted by Barbara’s exhortation to moderation: “‘Calm down [Mäßigt Euch]! Calm down,’ said the old woman quietly” (2/11). For Wilhelm, the voice of restraint is that of his mother, who complains of his “immoderate passion [unmäßige Leidenschaft ]” (2/11; translation modified) for the theater, which his father considers a waste of time. Angered by the implication that everything is useless that “doesn’t bring in money or enlarge our property,” Wilhelm embarks on a tirade against his father’s own weakness for pleasure, but is, like Mariane, stopped short by a similar admonition: “‘Don’t overdo it! [Mach es nur mäßig]’ said his mother” (3/12). The two female figures, interposed in the middle of masculine duels (between Wilhelm and Norberg in one case, and between Wilhelm and his father in the other), thus act as voices of moderation (Mäßigung), thereby prefiguring the pedagogical program of the male-dominated Society of the Tower that later dominates the novel. As any reader knows, however, the maxims of the Society that close the novel turn out to be as futile as the imperatives to moderation spoken by the female figures in its opening chapters. Neither mother figures nor father figures, in short, count for much as voices of authority, and moderation remains as out of reach for Wilhelm at the end of the story as it was in the beginning.17 The command “Moderate yourself!” (Mäßigt Euch! ) is, indeed, a tricky one to fulfill. Rather than calling upon its addressee to perform a specific, determinate set of actions, “moderate yourself ” simply tells him to occupy the complex and elusive position of the middle, without telling him quite how. The problem does not remain confined to the addressee of Bildung, however, but also extends to the voices that claim to speak in its name. Just as the true path of Wilhelm’s Bildung emerges as some sort of ghostly middle buried amid multiple dead ends and errant wanderings, so too does the authoritative voice of truth and wisdom in the novel exist only as a

the madness of the middle



virtual product of calculation. A cacophony of voices surrounds Wilhelm, offering contradicting perspectives on art, life, and ethical conduct: those of his mother, his father, Werner, Philine, the Harper, the “Beautiful Soul,” and so on. Even the Abbé’s maxims, delivered from the position most resembling one of authority, are contradicted in part by Jarno’s views; the odd revelation that the Abbé has an identical twin, making it impossible to work out whether it was he or his double that appeared in disguise to Wilhelm at various points throughout the narrative, only deepens the confusion. No single voice is left unchallenged or uncompromised by a competing one, and both the reader and Wilhelm must struggle hard indeed to construct the one virtual narrative of truth out of these conflicting enunciations. This is, perhaps, the most radical manifestation of what Friedrich Schlegel called “the irony which hovers over the entire work.”18 If none of these voices of moderation can reveal its truth to Wilhelm, then perhaps a more persuasive agent of the middle is needed. There is, in fact, such a figure in the novel, but its presence is, like that of Aristotle’s golden mean, a necessarily virtual one that is easy to overlook. Its neglect is further exacerbated by the critical fixation on the division of figures of authority into fathers and mothers, and the assignment of Bildung’s custody to one of the two. While earlier criticism on the novel tended to concentrate on the paternal, more recent studies such as Redfield’s have revisited the importance of female authority in the novel. The ubiquitous father figures in the novel all have something of the spectral about them, Redfield argues, and therefore exert only a “wraith-like grip on the world” (83). The maternal figures, on the other hand, evince a compelling presence that is at once material and uncanny. The opposition of paternal to maternal thus turns out to be a complex one that is entangled with a number of other tropes in the novel: On the one hand, the mother is paired with theatricality as the literal to the figurative; on the other hand, the difference between these two is precisely what cannot be established. This uncertainty means that the very relation between mother and theater, or literal and figurative meaning, is irreducibly theatrical or figurative, since no stabilizing ground of meaning presents itself. This drama of uncertainty confronting us here differs slightly, however, from that staged by the tropes of fatherhood or Entsagung. In keeping both with bourgeois gender roles and a metaphysical hierarchy that Wilhelm Meister at least pretends to respect, the mother represents a prelinguistic site of natural origin; and thus in her proximity the text allegorizes the impossible and contradictory referential drive of fiction as the condition of all language. (86)



the madness of the middle

Motherhood becomes the “site for referentiality itself ” in the novel, but this by no means suggests that it is a simple stand-in for the natural, the real, or the originary. Instead, it is the figure for the nonclosure of the signifying system, the “non-empirical materiality of the sign: the sign’s dependence, or ‘propping,’ upon an illegibility rather than a presence” (87). This analysis of the maternal offers many more hermeneutic possibilities than readings occupied solely with the paternal, or those that align motherhood in the novel with straightforward domesticity or nature. It remains beholden, however, to the assumption that the oedipal scenario encapsulates the sum total of positions available to Wilhelm, and that Bildung itself is governed ultimately by the familial structure.19 The very turn that takes Redfield’s reading from the paternal to the maternal illustrates this assumption. Because the position of paternity is ultimately a spectral one, and because Wilhelm’s fatherhood at the end of the novel can only be read ironically, we need therefore to look to motherhood in order to account for the novel’s recourse to “the constant vacillation of an assertion that cannot know its own impossibility” (85): “And if we ask after the text’s representation of the genesis of this problematic, we need to account for the remaining term in this oedipal scenario: the mother who gazes at the portrait, who is marginalized, half forgotten, and, in the person of Mariane, killed off, but who is never entirely expelled from the narrative of Bildung” (85). Since the positions of son and father have both been exposed as positions of unreliability and nonknowledge, “the remaining term” is, indeed, that of the mother—insofar as one considers the familial logic as the sole determining logic in the novel, the only positions available for imaginary identification seem to be father, mother, and son. The very portrait cited here as evidence, however, presents an alternative in the form of a fourth figure: the doctor who diagnoses, in one look, the prince’s illness, the mother’s desire, the father’s dilemma, and the family’s oedipal structure. the physician, the king,   his wife, and her lover The portrait of the sick prince is first introduced toward the end of book 1 in the exchange between Wilhelm and the mysterious interlocutor cited earlier. Their conversation turns to the art collection owned by Wilhelm’s grandfather and to the one piece in it that Wilhelm remembers being most attracted to as a boy, the painting of the sick prince. The painting itself is

the madness of the middle



not described in detail in the novel, but it appears to be one of the many depictions of a famous scene described by a number of authors in antiquity, such as Plutarch and Valerius Maximus. The basic story is as follows: Â�Stratonice is married off to the much older Seleceus I of Syria, whose stepson Antiochus is much closer in age to his stepmother than the king is and eventually falls in love with her. This forbidden passion causes the prince much distress, and he becomes deathly ill. Seleceus learns of the true cause of his sickness, and in order to save the life of his son, he gives up his wife, allowing Antiochus and Stratonice to wed. In the scene most commonly represented by painters, the physician Erasistratus tends to the sick prince, Antiochus, while his father Seleceus looks on in concern. Stratonice’s entrance into the room at this moment triggers a compelling tableau of tensed bodies and charged gazes. In a number of the most famous depictions in painting, an important detail common to many classical accounts is represented: the physician, with his hand on the boy’s pulse, is the only one to recognize the interplay of gazes in the room for what it is, and thus to diagnose the real cause of the prince’s illness.20 The drama might be performed by father, mother, and son, but it is only with the diagnosing gaze of the physician that it emerges as an oedipal one. In this light, Wilhelm’s initial response to the painting is significant, for it is far too entangled with his own situation (that is, his secret love affair with Mariane) to qualify as an aesthetic judgment: “How distressed I was—and still am—that a young man should have to keep bottled up in himself those sweet feelings, the best that Nature gives him, and must hide those fires which should warm him and others, so that his soul is consumed with pain and suffering! And how I pity an unhappy woman being joined to someone other than the one her heart felt worthy of her true, pure love!” (38/70). Wilhelm’s shortcoming demonstrates his inability to perform exactly the kind of diagnosis that the physician represents. As the stranger tells him in reply, this response shows no real understanding of artworks, but is instead merely an act of “putting yourself and your feelings into them” (38/70). Wilhelm’s ability to sympathize with Stratonice notwithstanding, it is clear that what prevents him from making a clear judgment of the artwork is his readiness to imagine himself in the position of the sick son. Toward the end of the book, the painting reappears, and Wilhelm returns “eagerly [mit Verlangen; literally, ‘with desire’]” to it, “still finding it as moving and affecting [reizend und rührend ] as ever” (316/516). Changed circumstances have given him an additional imaginative possibility by now, for he has carefully been



the madness of the middle

prepared to leave the role of the son behind him and to become a father to young Felix, his reputed son.21 Why, though, does he remain as implicated in affective identification and incapable of judgment as before, if the whole point of Bildung is to have him step into paternal shoes? The answer is that as a father, he is still caught up in the portrait’s oedipal passions and is consequently unable to judge it. To be able to identify with the father instead of the son gets Wilhelm nowhere; more precisely, it leaves him still within the triangulated coordinates of desire. The three positions that are provided for in the classic oedipal scenario represent three different instances of implication and entanglement, all caught up in a play of gazes which excludes seeing as knowing, recognizing, or judging, and which reduces it to specular desire. The position in the middle, from which the oedipal triangle becomes legible (and thus constituted) as such, cannot be identical to the one occupied by any of these three figures. The only one who truly sees in this scene is the physician, who, with his finger on the pulse of the sick prince, is able to measure its fluctuations while observing the scene unfold and thus bring into relation bodily symptom, directed gaze, and underlying desire. The position of measurement is the only vantage point from which reliable judgment is possible, and it is both pre- and postoedipal: it is the condition for the constitution and recognition of triangulated desire between father, mother, and son, but it also allows for the resolution of this triangle in the form of the father’s sacrifice.22 The physician, who is able to combine the measurement of an individual pulse with general knowledge of diseases and their symptoms, and who is thus able to apply abstract rules to the situation unfolding before his eyes, demonstrates uncommon skill indeed. This art of the middle, and not the painterly one, is the Kunst that is set before Wilhelm’s eyes in the painting, and it is precisely his lack of this art that is revealed in his response to it. This particular form of judgment (Urteilskraft ) is also hinted at in Wilhelm’s Lehrbrief, in the words of another physician: Art is long, life is short, judgment difficult, opportunities fleeting. Action is easy, thinking is hard: acting after thinking, uncomfortable. Every beginning is joyous, every threshold a point of experience. The boy stares in wonder, impressions condition him, he learns in playing, seriousness takes him by surprise. Imitation is natural to us all, but what to imitate is not easily ascertained. Rarely is the best discerned, still more rarely appreciated. Height attracts us, not the steps upwards; with the mountaintop in our eyes we linger lovingly on the plain. Only a part of art can be taught, an artist needs the whole. (303/496)

the madness of the middle



The source of the ars longa vita brevis motif with which the letter begins is the collection of aphorisms left to us by Hippocrates, which contains a mixture of general wisdoms for treating illnesses, but also careful warnings about where general rules cease to apply and individual case histories of patients have to be considered. Portrayed by the Middle Ages as an almost spiritual healer, Hippocrates came to be associated with a more secular wisdom in the early modern period: his writings began to be read for their astute sense of how to combine general theoretical knowledge about disease and medicine with empirical observation of symptoms and the effects of treatment.23 The task of the wise doctor such as the one depicted in the painting is thus to discern the true relationship between the general and the particular, which is the very project of Bildung itself. A passing comment in book 15 of Goethe’s autobiographical work DichtÂ�ung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) summarizes Wilhelm’s problem succinctly: “The writings which have come to us under the name of ‘Hippocrates’ provide a model for how man should see the world and its events, without mixing himself in with them [ohne sich selbst hinein zu mischen].”24 Mixing-in his self is exactly what Wilhelm cannot stop doing, and he thus forecloses the possibility of ever arriving at a position of reliable judgment because he cannot even perceive a position of moderation that would lie outside of the triangulated structure represented by the oedipal family. Wilhelm’s Bildung, one could say, does not come to completion at the end of this novel, with his assumption of fatherhood, but in the second book of Goethe’s sequel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, in which he realizes that his destiny is to practice medicine.25 His failure in the Apprenticeship cannot therefore be attributed to either impossible paternity or paradoxical maternity but rather to the failure to recognize that the true position of the middle can only be read. For what else is it that the physician performs when he takes a bodily sign (the quickening pulse), connects it to another visual sign (Stratonice’s appearance), and uses them to point to something nonphenomenal (desire as disease)? The stranger who tries to tell Wilhelm how to properly judge art is telling him that he has to stop identifying, stop “mixing-in” his self into the scene of desire. Instead, he must see how reason interposes itself as a middle between the two opposing forces of chance and necessity that seem to compose the sum of human experience. This position of moderate and moderating reason allows one to see this totality as a “texture [Gewebe]” (38/71), and thus to read it as a text, which is the precondition for judgment and for Bildung. Wilhelm’s most significant



the madness of the middle

failure is therefore his failure to read: unable to make sense of the Hippocratic Lehrbrief, he decides instead to roll it up and carry it around his neck like an amulet, thereby reducing text and knowledge to just another fashion accessory. w i l h e l m’s f a l s e e n t h u s i a s m A passing remark from Ästhetik und Bildungsroman, Albert Berger’s seminal 1977 study of the novel, reveals a significant dimension to Bildung’s failure in the novel. Bildung, Berger notes, is tied to the choice of the right medium, but it is also able to transcend this choice if it has to. The purely formal, indeterminate character of Bildung does not eliminate the need to find a suitable medium for it to unfold, but it does enable Bildung to reap profit from the error of a false choice: The material upon which the self-actualization of a person acts is not unimportant but it is “coincidental” [zufällig], as the county clergyman tells Wilhelm with reference to the puppet theater. A medium can be either conducive or adverse. But because Bildung in the “Lehrjahren” is conceived of as a formal principle, it is possible that even a falsely chosen means [auch die falsch gewählten Mittel ], as represented by Wilhelm’s theatrical ambitions, can become converted into a positive one.26

Berger takes this to be a sign of Bildung’s astounding efficacy in both recovering and profiting from error, but his description poses a more urgent question. The program of Bildung is a seemingly open-ended and formless process by which error can mechanically cancel itself out, and this should allow Wilhelm to recover from having repeatedly chosen the wrong means in which to develop his (presumed) talents: the theater, commerce, poetry, and so on. But what if Wilhelm’s choice of the false medium is not only a choice of the false means (die falschen Mittel) but also of the false middle (die falsche Mitte)? This question returns us to Hegel’s remark that there is a sort of error from which one cannot recover because its misunderstanding of mediation dooms it to perpetual escalation. Could the Abbé, along with Berger and scores of other Goethe critics with similarly optimistic prognoses about the self-correcting potential of error, be in error about error? Can a middle or medium be so false that it throws into complete derangement the automatistic mechanism of error’s self-cancellation? The German words for the acts of moderation (mässigen) and measurement (messen) are both etymologically derived from the word Maß, which

the madness of the middle



translates the Latin modus, with its wide range of semantic possibilities. Wilhelm picks a third choice, however: instead of learning to moderate himself and to judge by measurement, he casts his lot with the pure mediality of fashion (Mode).27 This middle is treacherous and false, as we already know from writers such as Smith, Hazlitt, and Garve, and its hold on Wilhelm throws the error-correcting mechanism of Bildung decisively off course. The problematic character of this middle is announced already in the very first scene of the novel. The exuberant Mariane refuses to be sobered by Barbara’s stern warnings to calm down and instead jumps on her advisor in indignation. Laughing off the attempted assault, Barbara says: “If I am to be sure of my life, I have to see to it that you are soon in a long dress again. Go and change! I hope that you will apologize, as a girl, for the harm you did me as a flighty officer: off with that coat and with everything underneath it. It’s an uncomfortable costume, and dangerous for you, I see. The epaulettes have gone to your head [Die Achselbänder begeistern Euch]” (2/10). The word Â�Achselbänder refers to some sort of ornamental ribbon or cord worn around the shoulder as part of Mariane’s officer costume (Bänder, the plural of Band, can refer to any ribbon or strip of cloth). The scene is, in fact, absolutely saturated with references to little strips of fabric or ribbons; the package that has just arrived from Norberg, for example, is filled with almost nothing but such scraps—little unruly remainders that, as Garve pointed out, subvert judgment itself. The oft-cited description of the first encounter between the two lovers at the end of the chapter brings this fixation on fabric and clothing to a comical climax: “Wilhelm entered the room. How eagerly [lebhaft] she rushed towards him! And how passionately he embraced that red uniform and the white satin vest. Who would dare to describe, who has the right to describe, the bliss of two lovers. The old womanservant went off muttering, and we too, leave the happy couple to themselves” (2/11). For Mariane, strips of cloth are not simply to be attached to bodies, marking the medial zone between inside and outside; rather, they literally go to her head, as Barbara says. They are a source of inspiration (Begeisterung) in that they are capable of actually inhabiting the inside and providing a source of animation. Begeisterung, like Schwärmerei, was a much debated term in the eighteenth century, where it was invoked as the translation and semantic equivalent of the Greek enthousiasmos: the two were the most notorious enemies of moderation. Begeisterung evokes the model of divine inspiration via the entry of the god into a human vessel, but here, it is the vessel itself (an article of clothing) that, paradoxically and heretically, enters Mariane’s soul.



the madness of the middle

She is animated, rendered lifelike (lebhaft) by ribbons, and it is thus fitting that the scene closes with Wilhelm embracing uniform and vest rather than an actual body. Wilhelm’s situation is, not surprisingly, a parallel one. In describing to Mariane and Barbara his childhood fascination with the puppet theater, he recalls displaying a similar affinity for the ribbons, costumes, and other such accoutrements with which he attired his marionettes: When I saw my sisters dressing and undressing their dolls, I had the idea of getting exchangeable clothes for my heroes. The costumes were taken off in small sections, and I recombined them as well as I could. I saved some money, bought ribbons and finery [neues Band und Flittern], begged bits of taffeta, and little by little assembled a whole collection of stage costumes, not forgetting hooped skirts for the ladies. (10/24)

As the young Wilhelm begins to stage actual theatrical pieces with his friends, this obsession with clothing and other external trappings intensifies, leading to one of his earliest artistic mishaps. Intending to re-create on stage the final battle between Tancred and Clorinda from Tasso’s Jerusalem Â�Delivered, he plans everything down to the last detail, save for one crucial detail that only occurs to him as the scene is being performed: Suddenly it dawned on us for the first time that we didn’t know what we were going to say. My imagination was so excited by the whole enterprise that I had completely forgotten that everyone should know what and when he had to speak. The others, so thrilled to be performing, hadn’t thought of it either. They imagined that all they had to do was present themselves as heroes and that it would be easy to act and speak like the characters in the world I had told them about. (13/28)

What the scene stages is the unreliability of the kind of Begeisterung that had earlier gripped Mariane. Clothes might be able to penetrate, possess, and inspire, but only sporadically so, and their animating ability alone cannot reliably generate theater. Wilhelm’s rueful words to himself following this incident seem to reflect that he has learned a genuine lesson: “I swore that once I was out of this fix, I would never again put on a play without a great deal more thought” (13/29). As is to be expected, however, he repeats the mistake with almost comical frequency. In fact, the very narrative situation in which this childhood mishap is related already demonstrates Wilhelm’s failure to learn his lesson: he is completely oblivious to the signs that Barbara and Mariane

the madness of the middle



produce to indicate their lack of interest in what he is saying and he ends up effectively playing to an empty room—Barbara finishes off the wine while Mariane falls asleep. In telling about his failure to share his passion for the theater with his audience, in other words, Wilhelm repeats the very same mistake by failing to engage the audience of his narrative. This example of what Smith would characterize as a complete breakdown of sympathy could be attributed to Wilhelm’s inability to moderate his excitement and to flatten it into that pitch of mediocrity that would allow his listeners to enter into his situation. As we have seen, however, it is also related to the problem which comes up in the story that he is telling—the confusion between the proper medium of expression and a false medium of unreliable inspiration in the form of clothing. Wilhelm’s false enthusiasm thus functions as a constant impediment to his Bildung. Its most disruptive effect is the frenzied circulation of items of clothing throughout the novel, both as physical items (sometimes retained and passed along by Wilhelm himself ) and as imaginary points of reference for our protagonist. The case of the ribbon (das Band ) is particularly significant because of its connection to the verb binden (“to bind”) and because of its implication in Wilhelm’s construction of an imaginative narrative that chains together scenes and objects of desire. Instead of striving to perceive the general pattern that emerges from the sum total of incidents in his life, thereby recognizing the true character of each incident, Wilhelm’s imagination is captivated by a chain of ribbons and other strips of cloth. In an early scene, for example, immediately after parting from the stranger and presumably with the latter’s words about moderation and restraint still echoing in his ear, Wilhelm is suddenly nearly overcome by emotion when he thinks of Mariane: “How often has it happened that, being away from her, or lost in thoughts of her, I touched a book or some garment, and thought it was her hand I felt, so clothed was I in her presence [so ganz war ich mit ihrer Gegenwart umkleidet], and remembered those precious moments which shunned the light of day as if it were some icy interloper, those moments to enjoy which gods would gladly abandon their state of bliss. But how can one talk of remembering—as if one could ever relive that frenzied intoxication which enslaves with heavenly bonds all our senses [unsere Sinne, von himmlischen Banden umstrickt, aus aller ihrer Fassung reißt]—and her figure . . .” He lost himself in thoughts of her, thoughts that soon changed to desire, embraced a tree, cooled his cheek on the bark, and breathed out his excitement into the night air that was all too ready to receive it. He tried to find the scarf that he



the madness of the middle

had taken from her room, but he had left it in his other suit. His lips were burning and his limbs quivered with desire. (39/73; translation modified)

Like Mariane, Wilhelm is intoxicated and inspired by ribbons or bonds [Bänder or Bande] but his connections are even more ungrounded and imaginary: just the mere touch of any book or garment, not necessarily one that has been touched or owned by Mariane, sets off a chain of association in him. Aesthetic sensibility has been entirely replaced by a pathological hypersensitivity, featuring a body that is nothing more than a delicate sounding board of desire, sent into paroxysms of quivering ecstasy by the slightest touch of anything. Wilhelm seems to attribute his haptic lability to a propensity for literally transvestite exchange: because he is so “clothed [umkleidet]” in Mariane’s presence even when apart from her, the slightest brush with any object such as a garment or book feels like the touch of her hand. The logic of tropological substitution here is difficult to work out (like Wilhelm’s mind at this point, it seems quite deranged), but it certainly establishes a link to two other scenes of transvestimentary desire where Wilhelm imagines himself in garments borrowed from a woman. The first comes from his first attempt at poetic composition—an extremely overwrought allegory in which Commerce and the Muse of Tragedy are represented as two female figures fighting over the poet, Wilhelm himself. He eventually turns his back on Commerce and gives himself, “naked and disinherited,” to Tragedy, who lends him her golden veil to cover himself (15/33). The second scene occurs in book 4, where Wilhelm meets the beautiful Amazon who rescues him after he and his troupe are set upon by robbers. At first, all he sees of her is the man’s overcoat that drapes her figure, but just before he loses consciousness from pain, she removes the overcoat to cover him. When he wakes up, wrapped in her coat, he recalls that last image with startling clarity: “Electric warmth seemed to be penetrating his body from the fine wool, and he felt transported into a state of extreme comfort. The beautiful owner of that garment had made a strong impression on him. He could still see the coat slipping from her shoulders, her noble form surrounded by shafts of light; and his spirit rushed through forests and crags in pursuit” (135/229). The fact that this is a man’s coat that she has borrowed does not mitigate the radically destabilizing effect that the Amazon has on the gender distinctions in the novel. Indeed, the coat’s uncertain provenance and its transferability are perhaps reminders that the mobility of attributes defies simple binarisms

the madness of the middle



such as male versus female. More significant, the garment’s ability to act as an affective as well as an electrical conductor, establishing a link between two bodies separated by time and space, reveals an important inversion. Although Wilhelm thinks that he is being inspired by the coat, in that something from it is “penetrating his body,” what it actually ends up producing is an emptying of his interiority, an expense of spirit in pursuit of game. madness and the middle Wilhelm’s fixation on these scraps and garments renders the position of subject a highly unstable one, prone to sudden inversion and unpredictable evacuation. It also leads to an entirely different conception of unity from the one represented by the physician’s measured moderation, which can subsume particular to general and thus generate a larger picture. In a conversation with his mercantile friend Werner, Wilhelm reveals his understanding of wholeness, which turns out to be one literally inflamed by desire: Only some inner drive—pleasure—love—can help us overcome obstacles, prepare a path, and lift us out of the narrow circle in which others tread out their anguished, miserable existences! . . . You never feel that sense of an ignited, conglomerate whole [das zusammenbrennende, zusammentreffende Ganze] that can only be created, comprehended and executed by the mind. . . . If the examples of active men were always present in your soul, if your bosom were warmed by the fire of participation [ein teilnehmendes Feuer ], if your whole being were enveloped in some feeling that came from your inmost self [verbreitete sich über deine ganze Gestalt die Stimmung, die aus dem Innersten kommt], if the sounds of your voice, the words of your mouth were pleasing to listen to, if you had a sufficient sense of self [ fühltest du dich genug in dir selbst], you would surely look for places and opportunities where you might feel yourself in others [dich in andern fühlen zu können]. (28–29/55; translation modified)

For Wilhelm, wholeness is a product of a burning-together [zusammenÂ� brennen] or a collision [zusammentreffen], rather than an act of understanding (or as I have argued, an act of reading) like the physician’s, which involves gathering together heterogeneous phenomenal elements to reveal something that is not available to the senses. Wilhelm’s kind of wholeness again involves a complete inversion of inside and outside: the warmth of desire’s fire within the breast spreads out to envelop the entire body, turning the subject inside out and causing it to feel most at home when it departs from itself.



the madness of the middle

The series formed by a concatenation of ribbons (and the images and bodies that they evoke) cannot lead to a wholeness that is anything but a hot mess, testifying only to the sheer mediality of unchecked desire. Irresistibly drawn to the seduction of purely metonymic combinations and associations that bind things together rather than allowing some pattern to emerge from their midst, Wilhelm is swept along by a false middle that corresponds to only one side of the concept of moderation—its contingent, always shifting, calculated side. Among the ribbons, scarves, veils, and necklaces that the novel sets into imaginary circulation, one is particularly significant, for it brings out with dramatic clarity the consequences of Wilhelm’s choice between two middles. In book 7, a doctor arrives at Lothario’s castle, where Wilhelm is staying, to treat the grievous wounds suffered by the former in a duel. Wilhelm notices a ribbon on the doctor’s instrument case and is instantly transported to the thought of his beloved Amazon: “Bright contrasting colors, a strange pattern of gold and silver in curious shapes, this distinguished the ribbon from all others he had ever seen. Wilhelm was convinced that these instruments were those of the old surgeon who had tended his wounds in the forest, and the hope of finally discovering some trace of the Amazon brought new life to his whole being” (262/428). Once again animated by a ribbon, the agitated Wilhelm attempts to question the doctor, but circumstances cut the interrogation short, leaving him without clear answers. In book 8, the doctor appears again, this time to embalm the deceased Mignon. In the midst of the grief that grips the entire household, Wilhelm creates a terrible scene when he again sees the same ribbon, this time ascertaining that the doctor got it from his father, the old surgeon who had earlier tended to Wilhelm’s wounds in the forest: So I was not mistaken [so habe ich mich nicht geirrt]. . . . I recognized the ribbon immediately. Give it to me! That ribbon first put me on the track of my benefactress. Inanimate objects like this outlast so much joy and sorrow! It was present at so much suffering, and yet its threads still hold. It was there at the last hours of many persons, but its colors have never faded. It was there at one of the most precious moments of my life, when I lay wounded on the ground and you came to my aid, while that poor child with blood on her hair was tenderly caring for my life, that girl whose own untimely death we now are mourning. (334/546)

By now, Wilhelm has found his lovely Amazon (she is, in fact, standing right next to him as he delivers this speech), but he still yearns to possess the ribbon. Wilhelm’s fetishistic drive has reached its peak: he no longer

the madness of the middle



pretends that the ribbon is a means to an end, but has given in to his desire for it as a material thing. In Smith’s terms, the utility of this ribbon, whose purpose was to help Wilhelm track down the object of his desire, has become entirely replaced by a love for the ribbon itself and the delusion that its materiality stands for a permanence that is of a higher value than transient human life. Its animating and inspiring potential has turned on itself to endow not the possessor but the material with vitality, a life that exceeds the merely human. This instance of Wilhelm’s obsession is particularly ironic because it entails his overlooking the physical presence of the doctor, who embodies the ideal that his Bildung is meant to achieve. The model of the physician is explicitly set before Wilhelm’s eyes, but the young apprentice is drawn instead to the phantasmagoric trail of ribbons that his imagination has constructed. Wilhelm’s ribbon ironically fails to live up to its promise of mediality: it gives way to nothing but further ribbons and sets him on a path of errancy with no return, no promise of recuperation, restitution, or moderation. This failure is far more than a subjective one, for it is the concept of Bildung itself that requires the subject-to-be to dwell perpetually in the middle, without the aid of concrete principles to apply or examples to emulate. Bildung’s strict aniconicism forbids the concrete actualization of this figure in the form of an example (Vorbild), and the actual physicians that appear in the novel thus turn out to be no more authoritative than the countless other would-be savants who populate the novel. The injunction against representation and actualization applies no less stringently to the painting that first made legible the position of the judging physician. There is no mention in the novel of the actual physician in the painting, except in the last chapter, where an inebriated Friedrich tears aside the curtain, so to speak, to point out the explicit analogy between Wilhelm’s lovesickness and the situation of the sick prince: He opened the doors and pointed to the large painting in the anteroom, “What’s the name of that old goatee with the crown, pining away at the foot of the bed of his sick son? What’s the name of the beauty who enters with poison and antidote simultaneously [Gift und Gegengift zugleich ] in her demure, roguish eyes [sittsamen Schelmenaugen]! Who is that botcher of a doctor [der Pfuscher von Arzt] who suddenly sees the light and for the first time in his life can prescribe a sensible remedy, give medication which is a complete cure and is as tasty as it is effective?” (370–71/606)

This moment of confrontation between literal and figural produces general embarassment (Verlegenheit), and its tendency to turn everything into a



the madness of the middle

farce culminates in a comic scene in which Friedrich drags the doctor to the painting, shows him his counterpart, and delivers “a ridiculous encomium on medicine” (371/606). To ignore the limits set by Bildung and to cross over from virtuality into actuality is therefore to enter the realm of parody. The coincidence of poison and cure [Gift und Gegengift] would no longer be the guarantor of error’s ability to heal itself, but rather a harbinger of reckless inversions, such as the one that turns a monarch into an “old goatee with the crown” and unites virtue and roguery in a single pair of eyes, judge and “botcher” in a single figure. This is error seen through the looking glass of irony—no longer the kind of error that is possessed of a self-correcting and self-moderating logic but one that escalates into a proliferation of doubles. Just as Smith’s demand that sympathy be construed as pure mechanism produces spectral and uncanny forms of the middle, so too do the conditions of Goethe’s Bildung end up producing the very threats that disrupt it. The figure of the physician as reliable judge must therefore remain a virtual one in the novel, for its mere entry into actuality would already set it into certain errancy. This means that it must also remain extratextual, for becoming-text is no less risky an enterprise, as the fate of the Hippocratic Lehrbrief in Wilhelm’s hands demonstrates. If Goethe’s novel leaves us with one assurance, however, it is that irony is not easily held at bay and that the pure virtuality of the middle which would shield Bildung from error cannot be guaranteed. In choosing an entirely different sort of Mittel from the one that is represented by the art of the physician, Wilhelm gives in to the contingent and metonymically determined materiality that is represented by ribbons. He is thereby perhaps also succumbing to the drive of textuality itself, since the German words for tome or volume [der Band] and for ribbon [das Band] are identical except for gender, and both items exhibit a common fecundity and prodigiousness of circulation in the novel. The errant art of tying together parts with material connectors such as ribbons is practiced by one other besides Wilhelm: Mignon’s insane mother, Sperata, whose tragic tale is related in the closing pages of the novel. Thinking that her daughter has drowned, she comes to believe the wild tales that circulate about a drowned child who was restored to her mother after her bones (thrown up one by one by the malevolent lake, who demands the sacrifice of innocent children) were gathered to form a whole body. Sperata spends her time gathering bones from the lakeshore, unaware that they belong to dead animals, in the hopes of forming a whole skeleton and thus regaining her daughter.

the madness of the middle



Taking pity on her, her doctor proposes gradually mixing the bones of a real child’s skeleton with these animal bones, to “increase her hopes” so that once the whole is restored she might “at least be persuaded to cease her endless searching” (361/591). The plan is put into action, and poor Sperata falls for it: And so it was: her companion secretly exchanged what she had acquired with what Sperata herself had gathered, and a great joy spread over the poor woman’s face when the parts gradually fitted together and she was told which were still lacking. She had fastened every part where it belonged with a ribbon and thread [mit Fäden und Bändern], and had filled in the gaps with silk and embroidery [mit Seide und Stickerei] as is done to honor the remains of saints. (361/591)

Unbeknownst to her, the task that she has embarked on is fruitless and the whole which she is gradually piecing together is nothing more than a monstrous substitute, a mere ruse that will never restore what she has lost. The ribbons will never animate the skeletal remains that they hold together, but are instead only markers of her insanity. Redfield refers to Sperata’s quest for wholeness through the connecting power of ribbons as “deluded labor,” and reads Sperata as “the mark of a linguistic predicament, the trace of a randomness within language that can neither be comprehended nor entirely effaced” (93). She is, however, merely a parodic version of Wilhelm, and her tragedy underscores the loophole in the Lehrbrief’s account of error. The claim is that the mechanism of selfÂ�correction can cancel out even the most egregious deviations and aberrations of the foolhardiest ephebe, and that a man who drinks error “to the dregs” will come to recognize and recover from error, “unless he is mad” (302/496). We have to take this to mean: unless the principle of the moderate middle (which makes up the minimal condition for error’s self-correction) is no longer distinguishable from the power of sheer mediality, in which case reason gives way to a filamentary frenzy, a madness of the middle that baffles judgment, virtue, and cognition alike.

five

“Inaccurate, as lady linguists often are”: Herodotus and Kleist on the Language of the Amazons

Among the literary writers of the eighteenth century, there is perhaps none that has explored the systemic importance of error more extensively than the German romantic author Heinrich von Kleist. Replete with instances of misspeaking, misunderstanding, mistaken identities, and other such confusions, his texts also reflect, in often ironic and ambivalent ways, on just what to make of these errors and failures. One work stands out among his writings for its unflinchingly brutal exploration of error: the tragedy Â�Penthesilea, which retells the story of the encounter between the Greeks and the Amazons before the walls of Troy, and the ill-fated love affair between Achilles and the Amazon Queen, Penthesilea. Although poorly received in his lifetime, the play has received much commentary from modern critics, for whom its intriguing concatenation of violence, seduction, and war, all centered around moments of disastrous linguistic failure, has proven irresistible. In this closing chapter, I consider the connection between Penthesilea’s misuse of language and the two main problems that haunt the text so spectacularly: the instability of origination and the deferral of closure.1 Kleist’s texts contain notoriously unexpected and enigmatic scenes of opening and closing, and this formal playfulness is often coupled with nar-

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



ratives that thematically call into question notions of origination and of closure. Penthesilea gives a particularly powerful twist to these hermeneutic complications by pairing them with the threat of madness and violence. The mysterious origin of the Amazon nation, for example, is given considerable attention, and its founding myth narrated in lurid detail (including a famous account of how Tanaïs, their first queen, ripped off her own breast). The end of the play is just as shocking, with its scene of savage dismemberment conflated with passionate love. The history of the play’s interpretation shows a similar fascination: critics have debated long and hard about the possible sources of Kleist’s version of the Penthesilea story, and about the implications that this question would have on larger topics such as his use of classical myth. In considering the problem of origination and closure in Herodotus and Kleist, this chapter returns to a number of issues explored in the earlier chapters, such as failed mediation, uncontrollable movement, and their implications for the relationship between language and thought. Beginnings and endings participate in a triadic structure centered on the problem of the middle, but in the case of Kleist’s Penthesilea, it is precisely the stability of such a triadic constellation that is called into question. Two statements by Kleist himself about the play illustrate some of the complications that attend any triadic structure. In a note written in 1808, he refers to his play as a “canine comedy [Hundekomödie],” and laconically lists its actors as “heroes and dogs and women [Helden und Köter und Fraun].”2 This deliberate naming of three central actors already suggests that the temptation to read Penthesilea as a straightforward story of male-female conflict should perhaps be resisted. The conventionally gendered binarism of “heroes” and “women” (whose conventionality is underscored precisely by its asymmetry) is interrupted by the word Köter, which interposes itself as a stubborn third term that must first be accounted for. Köter (usually translated as “dogs,” but much stronger in its negative connotations and perhaps better rendered as “curs”) seems to challenge the reader to bridge, through an act of hermeneutic effort, the gap that it creates: how indeed, the reader might ask, could dogs function as an intermediate term between heroes and women? In Goethe as Woman, Benjamin Bennett takes on just such a hermeneutic task: the terms heroes and women suggest to him a “categorical differentiation” between the two, with the triadic formulation indicating that “the mode of their differentiation has to do with the animals . . . named between them.”3 The abjection, uselessness, and disobedience associated with Köter



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

hint, however, at an alternative reading. Not all dogs serve their masters well, and perhaps some words or things might turn out to be just as resistant or indifferent to the goal of profitable use, even when we are speaking of something as seemingly self-evident as an intermediary. The word Köter resonates with the very similar word Kot(h)—“filth,” “excrement,” or any dirty leftover that will not be cleaned up, and the play is, in fact, absolutely saturated with references to dirt, dust, and other kinds of refuse. The most famous invocation of this motif is the following one, in which the Amazon queen expresses a wish to be washed clean of both the dust of battle and the taint of her forbidden passion for Achilles:4 O laß mich, Prothoe! O laß dies Herz Zwei Augenblick’ in diesem Strom der Lust, Wie ein besudelt Kind, sich untertauchen; Mit jedem Schlag in seine üpp’gen Wellen Wäscht sich ein Mackel mir vom Busen weg. (1674–78) O leave me, Prothoe! O let my heart for two moments plunge into this stream of pleasure like a soiled child; with each splash in its luscious waves, a stain is washed from my breast.

Penthesilea’s imagery could be read alongside similar passages from a number of Kleist’s other texts in which the loss of feminine virtue or honor is represented as an act of soiling that can be reversed by a subsequent cleansing or purification with water.5 This is the very question upon which a reading of the phrase Helden und Köter und Fraun (and with it, a reading of Penthesilea itself ) hinges: can the term Köter be successfully resolved to yield a coherent triad, or will it remain a stain of failure, a stumbling block that prevents us from understanding the play’s central dramatic structure as a binary one? In the former case, the path would be paved for staging a clearcut opposition and therefore a duel between heroes and women, while in the latter case, the term Köter would itself be something like a dirty remainder (Kot ), one which contaminates and disrupts any possibility of the two terms coming together, whether in harmony or in conflict. The question of whether the third can be resolved in Penthesilea is posed again in the most famous debate about Kleist in the twentieth century. In a letter to his cousin Marie, Kleist wrote the following of his play: “My innermost being lies in it . . . the whole pain and resplendence of my soul

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



[der ganze Schmerz zugleich und Glanz meiner Seele].” That is, at least, how the phrase appeared in the letter’s first publication by Ludwig Tieck in 1821. In 1923, the discovery of a manuscript by the German poet Wilhelm von Schütz raised some interesting questions about the letter. Schütz had interviewed Marie upon Tieck’s commission, and he produced a nineteenpage manuscript containing biographical notes and extracts from the letters between Marie and her cousin. The letters were later burned and Schütz’s manuscript lost after being delivered to Tieck. Examining the newly rediscovered document in 1923, critics were in for a shock: according to Schütz’s transcription, Kleist wrote that the play contained not “the whole pain [Schmerz] and resplendence” but rather, “the whole filth [Schmutz] and resplendence” of his soul. Tieck was apparently unhappy with the constellation Schmutz-Glanz-Seele (dirt-resplendence-soul) and decided to replace it with Schmerz-Glanz-Seele (pain-resplendence-soul). With no original to consult, the question of how to read this line has become an interpretive one. As the critic Beda Allemann notes, Tieck was an aggressive editor who often made emendations for the purpose of “the elimination of the incongruous/offensive [die Beseitigung des Anstößigen]” in the text.6 The suggestion therefore is that Tieck saw something incongruous about Schmutz-Glanz-Seele, and thus changed it to read Schmerz-Glanz-Seele. Another critic, Fritz Schlawe, expresses a similar opinion in the same article as Allemann, concluding that Schmerz was, indeed, a better choice. He gives a series of examples from other letters, for example, where Kleist used the word dirty (schmutzig) and concluded with the following objection to reading Schmutz: “The adjective ‘dirty’ is employed only in the most concrete sense, and relating it to the soul would therefore be unthinkable” (388). To ask the question as to which is preferable is, of course, to return to the intricacies of triangulation. The formulation “dirt and resplendence of my soul” presents not simply the pair of dirt-resplendence, but rather, the pair “dirt of my soul” and “resplendence of my soul.” Although the words of my soul occur only once, they are semantically implied a second time. They thus function as an overarching element that governs both dirt and resplendence, yielding the figure of speech known as the zeugma (from the Greek epezeugmenon, referring literally to a yoke used to bind two animals together to pull a plow). The success of a zeugma is dependent upon how successfully it brings together two signs under a third sign; it is therefore a figure that is fundamentally triadic. In his systematic study of classical rhetoric, Lausberg describes the zeugma in algebraic terms: when an a-x/b-y construction (with



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

four elements) gets replaced by an a(x/y) construction (with only three elements), the b element gets left out and a takes on an overarching, yoking function.7 In some cases, a and b are absolutely identical, and we have what Lausberg calls “an uncomplicated zeugma,” which is found very often in normal sentences. For example, the sentence “This is bland and uninteresting” is already a zeugma, because it is a contraction for “This is bland and this is uninteresting,” but the zeugma is so uncomplicated that it hardly deserves the name of figure. The bulk of Lausberg’s discussion is consequently devoted to the “zeugma with complication,” which contains a certain tension between the yoking element and at least one of the terms that it coordinates. The yoking is therefore what Lausberg calls a “forced parenthesizing” (311). If a zeugma with no complication runs the risk of being no longer recognizable as a figure at all, the zeugma with complication is susceptible to the opposite danger: when the tension is too great, the yoke holding the two coordinated terms together could break apart under the strain of the figure. It would then cease to be a figure, becoming what the Greek rhetoricians called a solecism, a term to which I will return. Allemann’s appeal to the “elimination of the incongruous” and Schlawe’s objection about the concreteness of dirt are both calculated to reduce tension in the figure contained in Kleist’s letter. What they do not consider is the possibility that Kleist’s style might exhibit an affinity for just such figural tension. In fact, the relationship between tension, violence, and triadic constellations is one of the key themes of Penthesilea. From its outset, the tragedy takes on the question of how a third party, the Amazon nation, interposes itself into an arena of supposedly dualistic conflict: the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Penthesilea arrives on the scene, in other words, as a figure of the third whose role is always something of an enigma. Even Odysseus, who speaks as the Greek voice of wisdom in the text, is unable to fathom her place in the conflict, and is left wondering aloud about this “third [Drittes]” that disrupts even the strict opposition between natural enemies such as water and fire. In referring to the three actors in his play as “heroes, dogs (or dirt), and women,” and in claiming that it contains the whole dirt (or pain) and resplendence of his soul, Kleist adumbrates two things: that the fundamental logic of this text is not dyadic but triadic, and that the crux of this triangulation is characterized by impurity, corruption, and uncleanliness. These elements come together in the most dramatic moment of failure and violence in the text. Pressed to explain the maenadic rage that led her to dismember Achilles with her teeth and bare

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



hands, Â�Penthesilea has nothing to offer but what would be called in German a “dirty” or “impure” (unreiner) rhyme: she was unable to tell the difference between kisses (Küsse) and bites (Bisse), and therefore devoured her lover in a fit of erotic passion.8 Both these discussions of thirdness point to its significance for the question of error and its role in the production of meaning and value. What has emerged again here is a bifurcation in the concept of error. On one hand, there is a class of interposed thirds that could be resolved in order to convert tension into figure, resistance into meaning. These present no lasting problems for the understanding, and could in fact generate a certain profit through their recuperation. On the other, there is a class of more stubborn elements that undo the very logic that would allow for resolution. These obstinate errors that cannot be systematically recuperated or converted persist in challenging the structural integrity of the textual movements that depend on their resolution. It is this second kind of error that will be investigated in the rest of this chapter, and its most eloquent representative will, ironically, turn out to be the figure of the misspeaking Amazon, who interposes herself as an irresolvable linguistic third but also disrupts the possibility of resolution on multiple thematic levels. herodotus on the solecizing amazon It is difficult to identify the exact classical sources that Kleist drew on for his version of the ill-fated duel between Penthesilea and Achilles. Key details do not quite match with these sources, suggesting that he pieced together motifs taken from a wide range of accounts, some of them having nothing to do with the Amazon myth.9 Given the documented writing and reading habits of Kleist, the most plausible place to look for his source is the entry on Amazons in Benjamin Hederich’s 1771 lexicon, which is in itself an excellent summary of the myth in its various classical versions. Hederich highlights in particular one passage from book 4 of the Histories of Herodotus, which deals with a geographical area on the periphery, rather than at the center of the main stages of conflict that he is most famous for describing. The book is mostly devoted to the Scythian society (already distant from the center of Greek civilization), but the people described in this particular section are neighbors of the Scythians, even further removed from the Greeks. The passage describes an event, in other words, at the periphery of the periphery, at the very outer edges of the



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

known world: the formation of the nation of the Sauromatae, a hybrid people formed by a union between the Scythian men and the Amazons.10 According to this account, a group of Amazons were taken captive by the Greek victors after a battle at the Thermodon, but on the way back to Greece aboard three ships they manage to kill their captors and take control of the vessels. Knowing nothing about navigation, the Amazons end up shipwrecked upon Scythian shores. They make their way inland and attack the Scythians, and the latter attempt to fight off the mysterious invaders, whose language and dress are unfamiliar to them. After the fight, the Amazons set up camp, and the Scythians send a group of their own young male warriors to camp near them and observe them, with the ulterior motive of fathering children with these fantastic women warriors. The two camps live in uneasy truce, but move closer to each other every day. One day, some distance apart from the two camps, a lone Scythian warrior happens upon a single Amazon maiden, and the two end up having sexual relations. The next day, they meet at the same place and each brings along a friend, and this happy rapprochement escalates into a full-scale union of the two groups. The men attempt to persuade the Amazons to return to the Scythian community and live with them as their concubines, but the Amazons refuse. Instead, they convince the men to leave their Scythian wives and homeland, to cross the River Tanaïs with them and establish a new home and the nation of the Sauromatae. Herodotus reports that the language spoken in this hybrid nation was not a simple mixture of the languages spoken by the Scythian men and the Amazon women, but an entirely new one. The reason was an odd linguistic asymmetry: the men were unable to learn the language of the women, but the women were able to learn the men’s. After an initial phase of gestural language, therefore, the two groups had to communicate in Scythian, which the Amazons managed to pick up. This new language of the Sauromatae was, however, not entirely the same as Scythian, for it was “not spoken in its ancient purity [soloikizontes autē apo tou archaiou] since the Amazons never learned it correctly” (4.117). The Greek verb soloikizō is the word from which our modern term solecism is derived. The word solecism itself has a double history—or more precisely, it is a term whose import can be described either formally or genealogically. The formal definition of solecism has already been mentioned: it is a linguistic error that has to do with the failed comingtogether of two or more words.11 This aspect is particularly important here because Herodotus’s myth is also about the coming-together of two groups

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



of people and the possibility of converting war into love, peace, and nationhood. The historical significance of the error of solecism is, however, equally pertinent: the word also names the renewed irruption of a sedimented history in language. Soloi was a city in the Greek colony of Cilicia in Asia Â�Minor, and the form of Greek that was spoken there was so corrupted by the existing native language that the people of Soloi became known in the rest of the Hellenic world for being poor speakers of Greek.12 The word solecism thus refers, by an antonomasia, to poorly spoken or corrupted Greek. This becomes extended, as Herodotus’s example shows, to speaking any language badly, but it retains an important emphasis on a particular kind of mistake: the corruption of a newly acquired (and incompletely learned) language by the traces of a previous (and incompletely unlearned) language. This second aspect of solecism lends a compelling twist to the phrase apo tou archaiou, whose obscurity has divided translators. The noun archē designates a beginning or an origin, and the phrase could be understood to mean “solecizing it from the beginning.”13 Other translators have decided to understand the phrase as “solecizing so as to cause a departure from (apo) the way it was in the beginning.” If the phrase describes a language that, by being misspoken, has been spoken away from its origin, then the story becomes one of multiple abductions: the Scythian language, just like the men who speak it, ends up being transported away or abducted from its origin or place of home by the Amazons. The oddness of this phrase has resulted in somewhat awkward commentary from classicists on this passage: Herodotus’s French translator, Legrand, calls it “out of place [hors de sa place],” while the otherwise fairly restrained English commentators How and Wells feel compelled to supply the following editorial, referring to the Amazon’s ability to learn the men’s language: “The greater aptness of the Amazons is a delightful touch of nature; but they were inaccurate, as lady linguists often are.”14 u n d e r s ta n d i n g a n d v io l e n c e The complications of the phrase soloikizontes autē apo tou archaiou introduce an element of doubt into this seemingly happy story of union: if solecism names an error in the coming-together of two things, then the solecizing Amazons represent the possibility that the harmonious union of two words and two peoples might turn out to be a violent and infelicitous coupling. Retracing the movements staged in this passage reveals further hints about this possibility of failure. When the Amazons first appear, the Scythian



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

men are confronted by a lack of comprehension; they are unable to grasp (Â�sumbalesthai ) the situation and to comprehend the language and the origin of these women (4.111). From this point, the situation slowly improves: the two groups begin to understand each other and come to some sort of union. The narrative reaches a crucial turning point when the two parties decide to join their camps, after sexual relations have occurred: Presently they joined [summixantes—from the verb summignumi] their camps and lived as one, each man having for his wife the woman with whom he had had intercourse [sunemichthē—also from the verb summignumi ] at first. Now the men could not learn the women’s language, but the women could comprehend [sunelabon—from the verb sullambanō] the speech of the men; and when they understood [sunēkan—from the verb sunhiēmi] each other, the men said to the Amazons, “We have parents and possessions; therefore, let us no longer live as we do, but return to our people and be with them; and we will still have you, and no others, for our wives.” (4.114; my emphasis)

The compound verbs formed with the prefix su- and describing some sort of coming-together or understanding signal the turning of the tide from hostility to union, from incomprehension to understanding. Interestingly, all these verbs can be characterized in the following manner: each has a concrete as well as an abstract meaning, and in order to arrive at the meaning that would make the passage tell the story of successful union, the tension between concrete and abstract, literal and figural meanings in these verbs has to resolve into understanding. In other words, in order for these verbs to mean “union” or “understanding,” they also have to successfully perform this union. The negotiation toward peace that is related thematically by the text is thus mirrored in its rhetorical performance, and the density with which these verbs are employed could therefore be read as an elegant stylistic gesture on the part of Herodotus. The verb summignumi, for example, literally means “to mix together.” Of the fifty-two occurrences of the verb in the Histories, twenty-one describe hostile encounters (e.g., joining a battle, engaging the enemy), only about five describe instances of understanding or peaceful union, and the other instances describe mixing in a more or less neutral sense (the mixing of liquids, the intersection of rivers, and so on).15 Here, the verb is used first to indicate a neutral movement (although taking place within the context of peace making) as “joining the camps” but then a second time to mean “having sexual intercourse”—the only occurrence of this particular usage in Herodotus. Understanding this verb is therefore an exercise in understand-

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



ing the difference between “hostile” mixing and “peaceful” (and ultimately sexual) mixing. The same analysis could be made of the verb sullambanō— literally, “to take up together.” This verb occurs a total of twenty-nine times in the Histories : fourteen describe seizing, abducting, or arresting a person and eight describe the act of comprehension. Again, what is crucial is knowing the difference between “taking together” in a literal sense—implicated with force, violence, and hostile intent—and “taking together” in the figural sense of being able to put together and make sense of something. The other verb that Herodotus uses for “to understand” (when he speaks of the men not being able to understand the women just before this passage Â�begins) is sumballō, which can also mean to violently throw together or engage in battle. Fifty of its ninety-two occurrences in Herodotus mean just that; only twice is it ever used to designate “understanding.” Sumballō is also the source of our modern word symbol, implying that reading a symbol, and by extension all figures, always involves some sort of negotiation between tension and resolution, conflict and union. To understand these verbs is to be able to divert them from their literal, concrete meanings toward their figural ones—from “mixing” to “sexual intercourse” and from “seizing together” to “understanding.” While it is the Scythian men in Herodotus (and the Greek men in Penthesilea) who are charged with the difficult task of understanding, it is the women who are the key figures in this drama. Since the women are the only ones who can leave behind the confines of their own language and learn the language of the other, it is through them that this new nation is conceived (or rather, in them, since sullambanō [“to understand”] can also mean “to become pregnant” in Greek, just as the English verb to conceive can also mean both). The revelation that the Amazons, despite all the happy prospects of understanding, union and nation building, could not learn the language of the Scythians properly, thus calls into question the success of the whole narration. The ability to understand language precisely, to tell the difference between the literal and the figural, is the basic prerequisite for this passage to even function. It is, in fact, the archaios itself, the condition of possibility that has to be posited at the very beginning before understanding can begin. The inability of the Amazons to learn the language correctly thus strikes a fatal blow to the communication between the two parties, at its very origin, and undoes the conditions of possibility of understanding itself. Once the self-evident success of union and understanding has been put into question, a multiplicity of simultaneous and divergent narratives is



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

opened up. Do the Amazons really enable a peaceful union with the Scythians because they “understand [sullabein]” the language of the men? Or are they simply violent captors who literally just “carry things away with themselves [sullabein],” in that they kidnap the men from their homeland across the river Tanaïs, and abduct their language by contaminating it with their own and establishing a new one? Or perhaps most provocatively, does Herodotus not tell us that the power of the women to wrench these men away from their homeland and found a new state is predicated precisely upon their ability to bear children, to conceive (again, sullabein)? One could go on, but perhaps it would suffice to note the difficulty of saying what it means that at the end of the passage the two groups “understand” [sunhiēmi—literally, to be “set alongside”] each other. Perhaps the things that are “set alongside” one another, in a less than comforting way, are the multiple possible meanings of each verb that designates understanding— peace and conflict, war and love no longer resolve into one, but stand alongside each other in constant tension and oscillation. Only a hermeneutic movement that begins in violence and ends in harmony can yield an understanding of this sort of language. The origin of such understanding is therefore in violence, in the state of conflict in which two meanings first find themselves (the archaios, so to speak), but this possibility of violence has to be sacrificed to yield the final result of peaceful resolution. Conflict has to efface itself, without making too much of a fuss, in the face of union, although it is, in the first place, only the interplay between similarity and tension that enables this whole process to start. It is necessary, for example, to begin with “taking together” in its concrete sense before the hermeneutic process that leads to “understanding” can occur. The “literal” sense therefore has to put up a certain amount of resistance by making its presence felt, but it must give way at the crucial point. Its contribution to the tension or conflict that produces understanding cannot, in other words, be a real resistance. One could say (at the risk of getting ahead of oneself ) that it comes to the dueling grounds already prepared to surrender, that it only pretends to want to fight. In the case of a verb like summignumi, what has to efface itself is the possible (and in the Histories more commonly found) meaning of “engaging” in a hostile sense, and what it must yield to is “sexual intercourse.” The discourse of hostile encounter must, in other words, be sacrificed for the discourse of desire, or one could say (again, in anticipation of the reading that is to come): the discourse of war is sacrificed for the discourse of love.

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



The ultimate subterfuge of this textual logic is, therefore, as follows: what appears as union between two parties turns out to be, when one looks more closely, the sacrifice of one in order that the other might take its proper place. It is precisely this sacrificial logic that becomes disrupted when the possibility of misspeaking and corrupting language enters the text in the figure of the solecizing Amazon. If a language has been diverted from its original course, if it has become spoken away from and disconnected from its origin, then conflict no longer naturally resolves into peace, war into love. Violence is not completely dispelled and it threatens to erupt anew, much like an incompletely unlearned language that reveals itself in careless slips of the tongue. Just as the people of Soloi proved unable to forget their native language and learn Greek properly, so too does the Amazonian language— as a corrupt speaking—interrupt the logic of union through sacrifice. The Amazons, indeed, seem to have little regard for origins or careful navigation: they first appear in Herodotus’s narrative as an interruption to the Greek nostos—the return to the place of origin. Even after gaining control of the ships, they show no skill in navigation and no interest in returning to their homeland. Small wonder that they end up (mis)speaking a language apo tou archaiou—theirs is not the logic of homecoming but of abductions and tropological diversions, turns upon turns that make the return to origin impossible. Herodotus does not deign to speculate on the possible consequences of this complication for the Sauromatae, for the fate of this nation forged in the fires of misunderstanding and solecism. It is instead Kleist who takes this story of error to its terrible but logical conclusion. penthesilea, the figure of the third “By Diana, I have misspoken [Ich habe mich, bei Diana, bloß versprochen]” (2986)—like her counterpart in Herodotus, Kleist’s Amazon is a gifted but inaccurate linguist, and the escalating madness of Penthesilea could be read as the inevitable consequence of a language improperly mastered and therefore corrupted. The ability to attend to fine differences is far from Penthesilea’s forte: she cannot distinguish kisses from bites (Küsse from Bisse), cannot tell an Achilles who really wants to fight from an Achilles who is only pretending to, cannot hold apart the discourse of war from that of love. In the final scene, she wields a dagger of words as if it were a real dagger, and strikes herself a fatal blow with this indifference. Holding things apart in a binary matrix of opposition and difference is the prerequisite for the



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

crucial movement that begins in antagonism and ends in peaceful union, but Penthesilea makes it radically impossible to stage these conflicts and to ever arrive at a resolution. From the very beginning, she thus appears as a figure who, in disrupting the coming-together of two things, makes not just peace but even war impossible. The Greeks first assume that Penthesilea and the Amazons have come to unite against them with Deiphobus, son of Priam. They hasten to the scene to prevent what Odysseus calls the “dreaded alliance” (28) of two enemies, but are amazed to discover the Amazons fighting the Trojans. They conclude that the newcomers must be allies, for they fight a common enemy, but Penthesilea and her army end up attacking, in complete disregard for the rules of warfare and to Odysseus’s great consternation, Greeks and Trojans alike. Odysseus says: So viel ich weiß, gibt es in der Natur Kraft bloß und ihren Widerstand, nichts Drittes. Was Glut des Feuers löscht, löst Wasser siedend Zu Dampf nicht auf und umgekehrt. Doch hier Zeigt ein ergrimmter Feind von beiden sich, Bei dessen Eintritt nicht das Feuer weiß, Obs mit dem Wasser rieseln soll, das Wasser, Obs mit dem Feuer himmelan soll lecken. (125–32) As far as I know, there is in nature only force and that which resists it, and no “third.” That which quenches the glow of fire, does not boil water to steam, and vice versa. But here a grim foe of both appears, upon whose entrance fire no longer knows if it should flow alongside water and water if it should lick toward the sky alongside fire.

Penthesilea is, in other words, the quintessential figure of the third—an element that not only fails to combine with another harmoniously but that radically suspends through its mere presence the logic of binary opposition and resolution, throwing into confusion even natural foes such as water and fire. She solecizes not only in the way she misspeaks; if solecism is the problematization of the principle of connection and the persistent threat of corruption, she is quite possibly solecism incarnate. As is the case in Herodotus, the disruptive effect of the Amazon is related to her problematic relationship to origins. The Greeks desire from the outset to know Penthesilea’s provenance so they can come to some sort

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



of conclusion about her and figure out what she wants, but like the Scythian men in Herodotus’s text, comprehension eludes them, and Penthesilea’s intentions remain as unreadable to Odysseus in the following lines as her origin is mysterious: â•…â•…â•…â•… . . . diese Jungfrau, doch Die wie vom Himmel plötzlich, kampfgerüstet, In unsern Streit fällt, sich darin zu mischen, Sie muß zu einer der Partein sich schlagen. (50–53) â•…â•…â•…â•… But this maiden, who suddenly falls as if from the heavens, fully armed, in the middle of our struggle, in order to mix herself in it, she must declare herself for one party or the other.

The comparison to Athena (which recurs explicitly in later speeches) is telling: the warrior goddess, springing forth from the head of Zeus, was born fully equipped in many ways but with one striking lack—she had no mother. This originary lack generates the unreadability that characterizes the expressionless (von Ausdruck leere) Penthesilea (65), whose absolute inscrutability seems to remove the ground for understanding itself. In reply to a question about whether anyone can figure out what she wants from them, the Greek Diomedes replies: “That’s just it: no one, no matter where we drop the prying plumb line of thought [wohin wir spähendâ•›/â•›Auch des Gedankens Senkblei fallen lassen]” (157–58). In one of their many battles, for example, she had shown a singular rage that the Greeks interpreted as personal hatred for Achilles, but in a recent struggle, she had his life in her hands and decided inexplicably to spare him (158–69). The Greeks want to fathom (ergründen—literally, “find the ground for”) her intentions and draw conclusions (schließen) from her behavior, but Penthesilea is precisely a figure of boundless resistance against grounding and closure. Neither the Greek quest for knowledge nor Kleist’s play itself ever arrives at the production of understanding through such means. A number of challenges are thus posed to the understanding in these opening scenes, all embodied in Penthesilea: a lack of origin, an ungrounded and ungrounding obscurity, an impenetrability of intention. These, in turn, find resonance in the recurrent references to Grund (the basis of understanding and rationality), and to Brust (the seat of authentic sentiment and intention) throughout the play. The corruption of language produces a nondifference between word and deed, between language and that to which



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

it refers, and intention, born in the human breast, can no longer be conceived of as the ground for guaranteeing the production of meaning in language. Set loose from and abandoned by its origin in this way, language turns against its begetter, striking as a dagger at the supposed point of its origination. The fifteenth scene, in which Penthesilea and Achilles speak to each other intimately and at length for the first and last time in the play, is pivotal to this escalation. This is a scene that is explicitly about knowledge and origins: Achilles gets to pose his many questions to Penthesilea about how things begin and how they end. He repeatedly asks about her origins and those of the Amazon nation, and is also insistent on her bringing the narrative to a close—“Go on . . . / You owe me an ending [Du bist den Schluß noch schuldig]” (2019–20), he complains. Knowing about the origin and knowing about where things are headed and where they end are intimately connected for Achilles, but disastrously for him, Penthesilea has set her sights on a different course. n a r r at i v e s o f o r i g i n It is here that the reader is provided with the origin of the name Amazon: it literally means “breastless,” being composed of a- as privative prefix and mazos for breast.16 Just how to read this story is, however, a difficult question, because the scene constantly complicates the very idea of origin, as the opening exchange between Achilles and Penthesilea already indicates: Penthesilea: . . . —Du fürchtest mich doch nicht? —Verhaßt nicht, weil ich siegte, bin ich dir? Sprich! Fürchtest du, die dich in Staub gelegt? Achilles: Wie Blumen Sonnenschein. Penthesilea: Gut, gut gesagt! So sieh mich auch wie deine Sonne an. (1751–54) Penthesilea: You do not fear me, do you? Am I hateful to you because I was victorious? Speak! Do you not fear the one who threw you down into the dust? Achilles: As flowers do sunshine. Penthesilea: Good. Well said. So you see me as your sun.

Achilles attempts to convey, prompted by Penthesilea’s questions, an emotion by means of a simile: Achilles is to Penthesilea as flowers are to sunshine. The simile has four terms, but the real crux of the comparison is

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



between only two: the way Achilles relates to Penthesilea, and the way flowers relate to sunshine (a is to b as c is to d, so to speak). But the question that he is replying to, the one to which this simile is offered as an answer, is, “(How much) do you fear me?” What the simile attempts to convey or illuminate is, in the terms of our model, the relationship between fear and the a-to-b relationship. Achilles’ answer could therefore be translated as follows: the relationship between fear and the way he feels about her (a-b ) is similar to the relationship between fear and the way flowers feel about sunshine (câ•‚d ). This comparison is odd indeed: it conveys, strictly speaking, not a determinate thought or relation, but rather the relation of nonÂ�relation. Flowers do not fear sunshine at all, and Achilles feels a similar absence of fear about Penthesilea as flowers do about the sun. The original thought behind this simile is an absolute lack, an absence of relation, and if figures of speech originate in an emotion or thought to be communicated, then what lies at the origin of this figure is absolutely nothing. In line with this presentation of absence at the origin, the human breast as seat of feeling becomes systematically displaced in this scene from its position as the origin of authenticity and meaning. Penthesilea tells Achilles that her hostile behavior toward him on the battlefield does not reflect her true feelings: even as he fell, “this heart envied the dust which received you [beneideteâ•›/â•›Hier diese Brust den Staub, der dich empfing]” (1762), she cries. The human breast is offered, via metonymy, as a sign of her true intentions, as opposed to her outward behavior, but what the breast feels is envy—it desires precisely to be something other than what it actually is, to be on the other side, to switch places with dead matter itself. Penthesilea wishes to exchange, in other words, this symbol of vital animation from within for dust, which gets to receive Achilles’ body in its material embrace. The metonymy of breast for life is thus extended into an irrational and inhuman desire for sheer contiguity, one so strong that it overpowers life itself. As if to defuse her frenzy and undo the damage she has wrought, Achilles makes a generous counteroffer: he will forgive her “with all his heart [Von ganzem Herzen]” (1765). Penthesilea turns down this gift of wholeness, however, and again insists on a different figure: “For the feelings of this breast, O youngling, they are like hands, and they caress you [wie Hände sind sie, und sie streicheln dich ]” (1774). Love is tantamount, for Penthesilea, to her heart always being or wanting to be something else than what it actually is, somewhere else than where it actually is. This overdetermined symbol for the wellspring or origin of life itself is therefore always threatening to be



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

somewhere else. Entering into the economy of rhetorical substitution, the heart as origin becomes abducted by the ceaselessly sliding movement of language. This culminates in the moment where Achilles, who thinks of the breast as “the seat of tender, loving feelings” (2013), realizes that the Amazons have, at the origin of all feelings, a lack—they follow their founder Tanaïs in the tradition of ripping out their right breast. The name of the Amazons thus has its origin in a place which was associated with intentionality and authentic feeling, but which now contains a scar marking only the lack that is left in the wake of abduction. It is in this context that the play’s multiple narratives about mothers have to be read. The originary lack installed by the Greek comparison of Penthesilea with Athena—repeated here by Achilles’ description of her as “like Athena” (1878)—is hardly made up for by what Penthesilea relates, for her story gives the opposite of a comforting picture of motherhood. Just like Athena, the Amazon nation is born of violence and adorned, from the moment of its origin, with the trappings of martial strife. This originary instability ripples outward to undercut the superficial structure of dialectic engagement that is imposed onto it, and manifests itself as an errant speaking from the beginning that disrupts an entire economy charged with the conversion and resolution of violence into peace, war into love. The most compelling presentation of this originary disturbance in Kleist can be found, as in the Histories, at the heart of the founding myth of the Amazon nation, where the name Tanaïs is offered. In Herodotus, this was the name of the river that the Amazons and the Scythian men crossed to found the new nation of misspeakers. In Kleist’s play, it names the first queen of the Amazon nation. The critic Wolf Kittler takes on the mystery of the name Tanaïs, but ends up in much the same quandary as the Greeks who inquire after the origins of Penthesilea.17 He posits the origin of the name in an act of misnaming, in that Kleist has supposedly taken the name which properly belongs to the son and given it to the mother. “It is, however, not the name of a woman, but rather the name of a man. His story is the following: ‘Tanaïs, . . . a well-known river. Hygin. Prf. p. 6. Others claim him to be the son of Berossus and Lysippe, an Amazon. He was an enemy of the female race and scorned marriage. Venus, however, punished him by making him fall in love with his own mother. He resisted this passion for a long time, and as he reached the point where he could no longer overcome it, he leapt into the river that has since then borne his name. Plutarch. de fluv. p. 1156. Tom. II. Opp’” (187).18 The Ur-Sprung of this name is thus a literal pri-

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



mal leap of the son Tanaïs into the river. Noting two similar stories in Kleist of unfortunate men either nearly falling or wishing to fall into water—Juan in Familie Ghonorez and the Graf Wetter von Strahl in Käthchen von Heilbronn—Kittler postulates an equivalence between Tanaïs (the son), Achilles, and other members of this male series. All experience a dangerous desire for women that threatens to culminate in absorption and loss of bodily integrity, and this fate is suitably allegorized in Kleist’s catachresis: he has performed the absorption of Tanaïs the son by Tanaïs the mother, in that “the name is transferred from the youth onto the founder of the Amazon nation” (189). There is an elegant economy of argumentation to Kittler’s reading, but also a suspiciously autonomous momentum to its series of equivalences and substitutions. He gives one possible explanation for this himself: This transference [Übertragung] was made more convenient in that it, after all, stands for the total fusion [restlose Verschmelzung] of man with woman, or better, of son with mother. For these are the forces conjured by the name “Tanaïs.” Penthesilea, a worthy successor of the founder of the Amazon nation, appears in her frenzy as the swallowing [verschlingende] mother, and Achilles as the son who stands defenseless before her and unites with her completely [ganz mit ihr verschmilzt]. The displacement of the name Tanaïs from a man onto a woman only describes the movement that is completed [vollzieht] in the act of cannibalistic love: namely, the total incorporation [restlose Einverleibung] of the man by the woman. (189–90)

Once the question of where the name properly and originally belonged has been settled, and it has been established that the originary substitution is without remainder (restlos), the pump is primed and the logic of transference or translation (Übertragung) takes over with its own momentum. Its efficacy can be observed in Kittler’s own text, which transports the reader within the space of two pages (188–89) from similarity to union to incorporation— from the observation that two things are similar (ähnlich) and that one thing reminds us (erinnert an) of something else, to the claim, “no longer to be doubted after all this,” that Achilles is the “reincarnation of Tanaïs.” Even within the brief passage given above, this inexorable impetus is evident: what starts out as totalizing fusion (Verschmelzung) ends up becoming the even more theologically and metaphysically charged notion of incorporation (Einverleibung)—complete (ganz) and without remainder (restlos). The name Tanaïs is charged with summoning seamlessly and immediately the force of a unifying logic that leaves no remainder behind, that itself operates without mediation or residue. Penthesilea/Penthesilea is, Â�however,



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

less than compliant when it comes to such matters. This is evident in Kleist’s own remarks about the play, in the rhetorical difficulties of the text discussed thus far, and finally, in the very dramaturgy of its closing scene. There, an egregiously offensive residue is left behind after the act of putative “total incorporation,” one that no one, including the critic, wants to see: Die Oberpriesterin: Was soll mir das? Was soll die Leiche hier vor mir? Laß sie Gebirge decken, unzugängliche, Und den Gedanken deiner Tat dazu. (2727–30; emphases in original) High Priestess: What is this? What is this corpse here in front of me? Let it be buried under mountains, beyond reach, and with it, the thought of your deed.

And later, again: Protoe (verstohlen zur Oberpriesterin): Rasch jetzt die Leiche hinweg! . . . (Sie winkt den Priesterinnen, die Leiche, die aufgehoben wird, mit ihren Leibern zu verbergen.) (2868–72) Protoe (secretly to the High Priestess): Quickly, away with the corpse! . . . (She motions to the priestesses to hide the corpse with their bodies as it is lifted.)

Achilles’ fusion with Penthesilea is, like his pitiable corpse, anything but complete. She does not consume his body completely, despite all the priestesses and not a few readers of Kleist wanting it to be so, but only dismembers it, and the corpse is emphatically and horribly present throughout the final scene. The mutilated remnants refuse to quit the stage, much to everybody’s embarrassment and despite various attempts to hide or dispose of it. For Penthesilea herself, in her usual postbattle trance and unable, as always, to tell the difference between language and its other, the gruesome remainderreminder is not the physical mutilated body, which she is happy to ignore, but the word itself. As the Amazons helpfully rush to fetch water, hoping to bring Â�Penthesilea to herself, and it begins to look as if she is heading toward recovery, the Oberpriesterin carelessly mentions the word corpse (Leiche). Â�Penthesilea is struck by this and “shoots the high priestess a glaring look,” as the stage directions put it (2811–15). In her frantic attempt to clear the stage not just of the corpse but of the word corpse (which appears no fewer than

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



eleven times in this scene, including stage directions), the high priestess is reduced to an anxious stutter that only worsens the matter: “Nothing, my queen, nothing, nothing!” (2816). As much as we, too, would like for the corpse to not be there, to be nothing—for acts of union to leave behind nothing as leftover trace—we and the Amazons would have to will ourselves to collective amnesia to overlook the fact that things are otherwise.19 Kleist’s text does not, in other words, move in a coherent and unidirectional manner toward resolution in the form of fusion, whether this is imagined positively (as in the Histories) or as negatively (as in Kittler’s reading). In an earlier scene, an Amazon warrior describes a tangle of horses and weapons as pure disorder, in comparison with which “the chaos—the origin, from which the world sprang—was clearer” (437–38). That is, in fact, a more accurate description of the play’s trajectory: one of increasing disorder and an accumulation of remainders and remnants. What is emphatically absent in Kleist’s play is a functional economy of metaphor (oikonomia; proper housekeeping on metaphor’s part, so to speak, which would certainly include the disposal of corpses), and this means, in turn, that the conservation of meaning in substitution, a complete transfer of name between two terms that produces neither excess nor lack, can no longer be assumed. In the closing scene, indeed, we encounter the exact opposite: excess represented by the corpse of Achilles, and lack by a nameless Penthesilea. But what madness leads the text to this point? If the problems having to do with nonclosure and nonresolution in Kleist’s play are connected to an originary disturbance, then perhaps the origin of the problem here is the problem of origin: in order for the logic of metaphor to function in the fully predictable way that Kittler would have it function, we have to be quite sure where and to whom names properly belong in the first place. But are we? ursprung and river names Hederich’s Lexicon contains two entries that could be the possible source of the name that Kleist uses for the founder of the Amazon nation: one for “Tanais” and one for “Tanāis” (with a long a). The story of the drowned son and the stolen name is found in the second, but the first, which Kittler makes no mention of, runs as follows: Tanais, or Tanaitis, dis, a Goddess of the Armenians, which should probably be read Anaetis, or Anaitis. Strabo l. XI. p. 532. See Anaetis.20



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

The goddess that Hederich refers to has a long tradition in Eastern religions. In the Zend-Avesta—the sacred book of the Zoroastrians to which Kleist alludes in a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge and in his short text “Gebet des Zoroaster”—she bears the name Anahita and is invoked as the goddess of rivers and source of the celestial river that delivers water as a mystic cleansing force.21 Anahita in the Zend-Avesta also appears sometimes as a virginal war goddess leading a huge army and riding fearsome warhorses, and she has therefore been linked to the Roman goddess Diana (explicitly identified in Penthesilea as the patron goddess of the Amazons), as Hederich’s crossreference to the entry for Anaetis indicates: Anaeitis, Anaitis, Gr. Anaitis, one of the natural goddesses of protection for the Persians . . . who represents the moon. She was therefore conflated by the Greeks with the goddess Diana, to whom they dedicated a temple under this name.22

The iconography surrounding this goddess is consistent, in other words, with the imagery of Kleist’s Amazonian mythology, with respect to the association both with cleansing and with Diana. Can one be quite sure that the name Tanaïs for the founder of the Amazon nation in Kleist’s play really belonged properly to the son before being transferred to the mother by way of the river, as Kittler would have it? Or was the name already in the possession of the mother in the first place? Actually, the picture is even more complicated, as the entry for Anaitis in Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft suggests: Anaitis, (Anaitis). Originally perhaps a Babylonian goddess, which was taken on early by the Persians and mentioned already in the cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis under the name Anahīta . . . sometimes identified with Aphrodite . . . usually, however, seen as Artemis. Her name was even modified to Tanaïs . . . , in order to bring her in connection with the river bearing that name. (Iamblich. a. a. O.; . . . ) 23

The quest for the origin of the name Tanaïs leads to two choices in Hederich: the name is originally that of a river or that of a goddess. Each of these choices in turn bifurcates: if the name is that of a river, does it come from Tanaïs the drowned son, or from Tanaïs (Anahita) the mother goddess? If the name is that of the goddess, did it come from the river or vice versa? No decision can be made, for as has already been shown in the discussion of etymology and linguistic turns in Chapter 2, names (whether of rivers or

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



of goddesses) are eminently unreliable. Instead, they are subject to unpredictable diversions and abductions that wreak havoc in the texts of Locke, Leibniz, and Tooke, and to the kind of illegitimate combinations that the latter called “corruption.”24 The quest for a reliable origin of the name leads, in other words, to quite a tangle indeed. Did the mother really take it from the son, or did she have it in the first place? The case of the purloined name could certainly be investigated at more length, but the ancients themselves provide an important piece of information about the river Tanaïs. The origins of the Tanaïs were a constant mystery to them, as the second-century geographer Strabo points out: Now the Tanaïs flows from the northerly region—not, however, as most people think, in a course diametrically opposite to that of the Nile, but more to the east than the Nile—and like the Nile its sources are unknown. Yet a considerable part of the Nile is well known, since it traverses a country which is everywhere easily accessible and since it is navigable for a great distance inland. But as for the Tanaïs, although we know its outlets . . . , yet but little of the part that is beyond its outlets is known to us.25

Its source is unlocatable, and its course mysterious. Given the speculative nature of ancient geography, this might not be surprising, but there is something that makes the case of this particular river especially interesting: Strabo tells us also that it was “agreed by all that the Tanaïs separated Asia from Europe” (11.7.4).26 Much more than geography is at stake, of course, for this line is also where the Other begins for ancient Greece. It is indeed telling that the ancients chose for a border between Europe and Persia, self and other, a river whose contours they themselves were not quite sure about. This sometimes worked out nicely—two great figures from the fourth century b.c.e. used it to their advantage. One was Pytheas of Massalia, the great navigator whose work “On the Ocean” is today considered to be full of exaggerations and inaccuracies. Strabo calls him an outright liar, for Pytheas apparently used the phrase “as far as the Tanaïs” quite loosely, meaning simply that he had gone as far east as possible before leaving the known world (2.4.1–5). The other case is Alexander the Great, whose territorial coverage had an entirely different purpose. Strabo writes that “many false notions” surrounded the origin and the course of this river because of “Alexander’s love of glory”: Since it was agreed by all that the Tanaïs separated Asia from Europe, and that the region between the sea and the Tanaïs, being a considerable part of Asia, had not fallen under the power of the Macedonians, it was resolved



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

to manipulate the account of Alexander’s expedition so that in fame at least he might be credited with having conquered those parts of Asia too. They therefore united lake Maeotis, which receives the Tanaïs, with the Caspian Sea, calling this too a lake . . . Polycleitus goes on to adduce proofs in connection with his belief that the sea is a lake . . . and that it is no other than Maeotis he judges from the fact that the Tanaïs empties into it. From the same Indian mountains, where the Ochus and the Oxus and several other rivers rise, flows also the Iaxartes, which, like those rivers, empties into the Caspian Sea and is the most northerly of them all. This river, accordingly, they named Tanaïs. (11.7.4; my emphases)

By conflating names of various lakes and rivers so as to redefine the course of the Tanaïs, these accounts play with the imaginary boundaries between Asia and Europe. The fluidity of the name’s reference thus becomes exploited in order to support a narrative glorifying expansionist ambition. If the name Tanaïs is peculiarly elusive and difficult to pin down, it is because it appears to have become severed from its reference to any empirical river and no longer refers to anything that exists independently of itself in an uncomplicated way. One last quotation from Strabo, taken from his discussion of why Homer fails to mention certain geographical features of the Greek world, makes it clear why this is so: But in the case of things not so significant, either not at that time or for the purposes of his work, how could anyone find fault with Homer for omitting them? For example, for omitting the Tanaïs River, which is well known for no other reason than that it is the boundary between Asia and Europe. But the people of that time were not yet using either the name “Asia” or “Â�Europe,” . . . since the continents had not yet been distinguished, there was no need of mentioning the Tanaïs either. (12.3.26; my emphases)

There is no need for Homer to mention Tanaïs because the geographical entities named Europe and Asia had not yet been imagined as opposing units. In other words, Tanaïs is a name that is only important once the division between Europe and Asia (which is to say, self and other) has been made, and what it could possibly refer to (this or that actual river) prior to that distinction is simply unimportant. Tanaïs is, one could say, less the name of a river than the name of a difference. It therefore has no simple origin, for there is no preexisting referent to which the name refers and in which it is anchored. It constructs the thing named in the very moment that it names, which makes it useful for Pytheas and Alexander but troubling for the reader of Penthesilea on a quest for origins. Even if one takes the ori-

“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a r e”



gin of a name to be not its referent but some act of original naming, one would be no better off, for this river has a history of multiple “baptisms,” all with suspicious motivations. Neither its source (in either a possible referent, some place where one could definitely say the name properly and originally belonged, or a singular act of naming) nor its course (how it has come to mean something particular, how it has descended or been derived from some origin) is available. All that we have is its “outlet”—the moment when it opens itself out to meaning, when it issues into something other than itself, when it leaves the order of language to construct what it names. At the heart of the story of origin told by Penthesilea stands, therefore, a name that defeats cartographers and literary critics alike, that tells a curious story of the origin that retreats constantly before its pursuer. As Carol Jacobs has pointed out, Penthesilea is as loaded with the imagery of the hunt as it is with the imagery of falling while in pursuit. It is odd that the imposing warrior-queen, stridently leading her army with such confidence and ferocity across the battlefield, should be so often in danger of losing her footing. The precariousness is not, however, confined to Penthesilea’s actions—the whole project of understanding her, and thereby Kleist’s tragedy as a text, founders on this same slippery groundlessness. As was the case with the multiple verbs for to understand that Herodotus gave his reader, “understanding” seems to always be on the verge of slipping into something else, into the idea of violence. What this slip precipitates is not a conflict of the kind that can be settled by armed struggle or amorous union, but rather one that resists containment within a binary matrix and absorption into a dialectic of meaning production. The figure of the misspeaking Amazon, abducting language and men away from their origins, ensures that there is no point of return once such an errant slipping of the signifier has begun.27 A movement that can be reliably traced from origin to outlet—from a place that can be called “proper” (eigentlich ) to the name to a place where the name appears as borrowed, as clearly transported (übertragen ) from its original place—would be predictable and nameable. Its name would, of course, simply be metaphor. Above all, it would be reversible: one would be able to track the course of the word back to its source, navigating in reverse the canals of its tropic transformations. This is precisely what something like an investigation of the origins of Tanaïs undertakes. As was the case with Leibniz’s canals of tropes, however, the tricky and errant pathways of language’s history do not allow for a reverse navigation that returns us safely to the source. Instead, they precipitate an infinite regress of divergences and



“ i n ac c u r at e , a s l a d y l i n g u i s ts o f t e n a re”

bifurcations—small wonder, for Tanaïs is the name for bifurcation itself, for the unstable and unfathomable difference between self and other. The erratic movements of this river and its name are mirrored in the running amok of Kleist’s text itself. Just like the clandestine and subversive movements that have been uncovered in the key literary and philosophical texts of the eighteenth century, these errant tendencies undercut the vectors established on the argumentative level of the text and call into question the stories told about coherence, union, and life itself. Such instances of error cannot simply be described as deviation, difference, or divergence, for these terms reinstall precisely the logic of recuperation and synthesis that has been rendered dysfunctional. Instead, error points to something that stands outside of dialectical and binary opposition, an insistent and transgressive crossing, recrossing, and crossing-out at the rhetorical register that produces an explosion of nervous movements within the texts that attempt to contain and master them.

Conclusion: A Dirty Word

Error is a restless border dweller, and its haunting ground is the shifting boundary between irrecuperable breakdown and potentially productive deviation. As we have seen, this double valency of error exerted its most powerful and disruptive influence at the same sites where the boldest claims about knowledge, value, and meaning were advanced in the eighteenth century. A reliable history of language and thought, a rigorous critical philosophy, a coherent model of subject-formation—these are some of the narratives of risk and promise that depend upon a regulation of error’s ambiguity. A study of error must therefore take it to be more than just one part of a binary pair, locked in stable and identifiable opposition to truth, knowledge, or value. Instead, it should also attend to the crucial difference (itself constantly jeopardized by error) between error as a predictable and recuperable movement, amenable to reabsorption within the itinerary and circulation of knowledge, and error as an indefatigable threat of overflow, contamination, desertion, and abduction. The preceding chapter, with its attention to failed figures and acts of misspeaking, returns to a suggestion made in the Introduction: that rhetoric gives us a model for the reliable conversion of error into profit but also



conclusion

a model for the undoing of this very logic. The impure rhyme that seals the fate of both Penthesilea and Achilles, read alongside Kleist’s remarks about dirt and Köter, points to the importance of this rhetorical complication, but it also suggests a complex interaction between dirt, error, and the production of meaning that requires further elaboration. On this topic, there is perhaps no more authoritative source than Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, whose analysis of pollution and taboo provides (among other things) a structuralist answer to a puzzling question about uncleanliness: why do objects that have been clearly and painstakingly defined as “dirty” or “unclean” by a culture sometimes appear again paradoxically as objects to be revered in the holiest of rituals? Studies of rituals of purification and cleanliness have historically suggested that it would be possible to classify cultural systems as either “dirt-rejecting” or “dirt-affirming,” but Douglas points out unmistakable instances of “dirt-affirmation” even in the most apparently “dirt-rejecting” cultures.1 What needs to be put under microscopic scrutiny, therefore, is the very concept of “dirt” itself: If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity. (44)

The presence of dirt signals, in other words, not the absence or the failure of a system, but rather its meticulous functioning. Dirt is created in a complex process of systemic self-maintenance; it is not the simple result of a moment of contravention but rather the “by-product” of an intricate interaction between order and disorder. To understand dirt is to grasp the larger system of relationships between meaning and signs which makes up the totality of a culture and which determines the meaning of an object as it is used in ritual practice. A study of dirt would, like a study of error, be an effective way of examining the mechanisms of regulation and value-production that otherwise tend to escape notice. The most significant insight that Douglas offers into the process of dirt’s formation lies, however, not simply in this synchronic observation, but in her description of the processes that account for dirt’s special significance

conclusion



to the system that produces it. After a series of careful case studies, Douglas returns in her conclusion (entitled “The System Shattered and Renewed”) to dirt’s symbolic importance, and breaks down its story into a number of stages. At first, dirty objects are marked as out of place and “a threat to good order.” At this point, they can still be seen as “unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings.” Their danger lies in the “half-identity” that still clings to them and impairs “the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude” (197). A dirty object that is still recognizable as what it actually is, in other words, remains dangerous. In the final phase, arrived at after “a long process of pulverizing, dissolving and rotting,” the dirty object becomes fully absorbed under the abstract category of dirt. Having lost all traces of its concrete specificity and its origin, the object is no longer threatening. It does not even create any ambiguity, because its place is clear: “a rubbish heap of one kind or another” (198). It passes at long last into the pure, undifferentiated, and harmless realm of dirt. The role of dirt within a system of cultural meaning is, Douglas suggests, precisely to make this passage from the concrete to the abstract: it begins as a specific object that transgresses and therefore threatens, and ends up being the most nonspecific thing of all—pure dirt, as it were. At the very end of its life cycle, therefore, dirt is emphatically more than simply nothing: it has the potential to be used as a “symbol of beginning and of growth” (198). The implicit suggestion is that there is a third stage to the story of dirt, one that comes after a contravention of order has become neutralized and reabsorbed. In this third stage, dirt comes to stand for the process which took it from the first to the second stage. Aided by what Douglas calls the “ritual frame” (203), dirt thus takes on the status of a symbol, and its power is tapped to invoke the entire process by which all threatening things lose their contours and become recuperated into nondifferentiation. This symbolic potential is only available once dirt has reached the final phase, but the conditions for its possibility are given by dirt’s contravening, transgressive character in the first stage: “In its last phase then, dirt shows itself as an apt symbol of creative formlessness. But it is from its first phase that it derives its force. The danger which is risked by boundary transgression is power. Those vulnerable margins and those attacking forces which threaten to destroy good order represent the powers inhering in the cosmos. Ritual which can harness these for good is harnessing power indeed” (161). Dirt’s power lies, therefore, in its ability to act as a sign of the passage from concrete to abstract and from differentiation to nondifferentiation by which dirt is itself



conclusion

both made and unmade. Something that violates or contravenes a system produces a tension, and if this tension can be resolved, the neutralized object can come to stand for the very process that it underwent on its way from danger to harmlessness. Because all systems depend upon such processes of neutralization and containment for their integrity, these signs play a vital role in generating and directing a certain energy within them and on their behalf. This is, ultimately, the explanation for dirt’s privileged and paradoxical role in rituals of purity. The movement of dirt in Douglas’s study parallels the movement of Â�vitium or error in classical rhetoric discussed in the Introduction and taken up again in my reading of Penthesilea: something that represents violation can, after it is reabsorbed into order, function as a symbol for the restoration of order in the face of disorder. Douglas’s story about dirt’s conversion into symbolic power might therefore be taken as a suggestion that the rhetorical production of meaning could be generalized into an analysis of cultural meaning per se.2 The success of the narrative of conversion in Herodotus’s Histories does, indeed, involve something like a ritual repetition of linguistic performance, with each verb reenacting symbolically the passage from nonunderstanding and tension to understanding and peace. The story has two sides, however, and what Penthesilea indicates, with its inversion of ceremonial sacrifice into bloody madness, would be the unforeseen but always possible converse to this. It shows that the ritual economy is a precarious one subject to parody and excess, and that its logic of conversion is always at risk. The misspeaking Amazon could therefore be taken as a figure for a general problem having to do with ritual and repetition, one whose locus cannot be limited to a single period in literary or philosophical history, or even to a specific problem like the co-implication of language and thought in any epoch. Instead, the ambivalent insight that it affords would pertain to a cultural or anthropological phenomenon. It could, in this sense, be read alongside Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of sacrifice in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which reveals that “the history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice,” because the “transformation of sacrifice into subjectivity occurs under the sign of the artifice that was already a feature of sacrifice.”3 The amenability of rhetoric to such a homologous union with cultural anthropology is, however, only one side of the riven logic named by the word error, as we have seen. Dirt’s conversion into symbol and vitium’s rehabilitation into virtue depend on the same set of systematic, dialectic

conclusion



movements—approach and withdrawal, deviation and reabsorption. Error does contain such movements as one of its possibilities, but the analogy between anthropology and rhetoric founders on the other possibility named by error: that of a radical suspension of the economy of regulated movement. This is, indeed, the more serious challenge posed by Herodotus and Kleist. Their texts reconfigure classic binarisms such as love and war, peace and violence, around figures of thirdness that reenact and reinscribe an originary disturbance or a primal lack in a way that refuses closure and understanding. The solecizing Amazon interposes herself not as a third term in a dialectic, but as a force that interrupts the movements underpinning the narrative of profitable conversion in both cultural anthropology and classical rhetoric. This suggests that the two are analogical only in their common susceptibility to error. In the main chapters of this study, I have discussed examples of other related hopes surrounding error’s potential recuperation: Locke’s system of regulated circulation, the etymological projects of Leibniz and Tooke, Goethe’s model of self-correcting error, the as-if philosophy of Kant, and Kleist’s parable of meaning- and nation-formation. In each case, we find a narrative of knowledge or value that is precariously suspended and constantly in danger of being undermined by unpredictable and desultory movement, the movement of error itself. An interesting commonality has emerged in these readings: the possibility of errancy often turns out to be the product of a troubling excess. If dirt refuses to submit to the process of pulverizing and undifferentiating described by Douglas, a different story could emerge, one in which obdurate remnants stop up the tracts of directed circulation that textual economies depend upon, establishing the possibility of less pleasant movements. The word Kot that is associated with the homogenizing category of dust and nonspecific contamination in Kleist’s play is, in fact, also a euphemism for human excrement, and the multilayered allusion to dirt, dust, and Kot in the play could be read as a sign of what one could call abjection.4 The story of the Amazons narrated by Herodotus contains a fleeting but intriguing reference to this. One of the prerequisites for the successful union of the two camps is a chance meeting between single Amazon warriors and Scythian scouts, and this occurs only because the women would go out of their camp at midday to attend to a personal need. The Loeb edition discreetly renders it as “roaming apart for greater comfort” but newer translations dispense with the euphemism: the touching tale of amorous



conclusion

encounter takes place at the makeshift latrines of the Amazon camp.5 There are therefore two different narratives that could be told about the poetics of the origin story of the Sauromatae nation: one is about the rhetorical resolution of conflict into meaning, while the other is about the conversion of feces into desire. The transformation of war into peace and incomprehension into understanding depends perhaps as much on one as on the other. Might the multiple instances of error’s resistance to conversion that arise in the texts of the eighteenth century also then be read as the obtrusion of waste matter that refuses to be rendered profitable? Error would thus refer us to the difficult distinction between the harmless nondifferentiation of dirt and the offensiveness of excrement: the former allows itself to be harnessed for power, while the latter remains a noxious disturbance that must be disposed of. I proposed in the Introduction that one way to retain the complexity of error’s polysemy was the delicate kind of “suspended uncertainty” that de Man associates with rhetorical reading. The comparison between error’s ambiguity and the difference between dirt and excrement suggests why it is so seductive to resolve suspended uncertainty into negative assurance, and why maintaining the former is such an impossible task. There is, namely, something deeply offensive and dirty about certain kinds of errors, and to preserve them in the mode of suspension seems counterintuitive and possibly perverse. In the essay entitled “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” de Man explores an interesting aspect of such offensive impropriety in Locke’s supposed condemnation of rhetoric. Noting that the Essay’s eloquent invective against eloquence should perhaps be read ironically, de Man singles out the distinction between fountains and pipes already discussed in Chapter 1: “But when, on the next page, Locke speaks of language as a ‘conduit’ that may ‘corrupt the fountains of knowledge which are in things themselves’ and, even worse, ‘break or stop the pipes whereby it is distributed to public use,’ then this language, not of poetic ‘pipes and timbrels’ but of a plumber’s handyman, raises, by its all too graphic concreteness, questions of propriety.”6 The question of how much power to assign to pipes and their potential malfunction might indeed raise the question of propriety, but it is not just the “plumber’s handyman” who is throwing spanners into the works of philosophical sanitation. Locke’s argument is, as we have seen, that breakdowns and stoppages in the pipes of language do not corrupt the fountains of knowledge. The omission of this crucial “not” from de Man’s quotation from Locke thus turns a thought on its head through an act of critical error.

conclusion



Ironically, this enacts the very movement that de Man’s version of Locke speaks about: the critic’s text, whose parasitic relationship to the original should locate it firmly downstream from the source, ends up causing a backwash that reaches all the way back to the font and corrupts it, so to speak. Did de Man know about this error? Did he mean to commit it? These are questions that are futile to pursue, for the only possible (albeit highly unlikely) outcome would be a form of negative assurance, a piece of knowledge about error. Instead, the more interesting question is what it means to say that Locke’s text asserts the opposite of what it patently asserts. The distinction between incorruptible fountains and pipes that can fail without consequence is the key trope with which Locke intends to contain the effects of error, but as I have argued, the Essay itself shows that it cannot be maintained, because it is impossible to exclude these supposedly secondary mechanisms of transport from the site of thought’s origination and generation. To claim that language can indeed corrupt the fountains of knowledge is effectively to point to one of Locke’s pipes and say that it is not one. De Man is not pointing to plumbing but to writing; still, the gesture is similar: indicating a text, he asserts that it says the opposite of what it seems to say, that it is something other than what it purports to be. “The Epistemology of Metaphor” is an essay that is easily (mis)read as producing knowledge out of error: taking on Locke, Condillac, and Kant, de Man shows how the uncontrollable and unpoliceable movement of tropes in their texts reveal “the proliferating and disruptive power of figural language” (50). If the goal is simply to catch philosophers red-handed, indulging in the guilty pleasures of figural language that they claim to denounce, then the reading would produce the most banal form of negative assurance or knowledge about error conceivable. To ask after the epistemological consequences of de Man’s own error is, however, to ask what it means when knowledge about error is itself in error, to raise the multiple and devastatingly disruptive possibilities that always accompany the rhetoric of error. To embark on an answer is to open oneself to the danger of being swept up in error’s momentum, but this is precisely the risk of reading error, one for which there is no guarantee of profit. The breaking down of pipes and the reversion of gold into worthless lead (the metal whose name de Man’s hapless plumber bears), all triggered here by the refluent backlash of improper textual citation, could be an affront to more than delicate academic sensibilities. As many scholars have shown, the discourse of fountains, pipes, and conduits in Locke’s London evoked



conclusion

not just the business of water supply but also that of waste disposal. Julian Yates notes in his study of errant objects in the Renaissance that “when autonomous systems fail, when pipes leak, waste returns and the accumulated debris of the city reappears.”7 Locke’s assertion that a breakdown or failure of pipes cannot corrupt the fountains that supply them could certainly be read alongside the numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts attesting to the dream of what Yates (alluding to the work of Bruno Latour) calls a sanitation system “so perfect . . . that it allows for no unexpected or unwanted return” (84). For dirt and error to refuse the logic of abstraction and conversion by which they can be converted into value is, in effect, for a system of waste delivery to break down and cause execrable and excremental return. Instead of fulfilling the hope of the system’s return to nondifferentiation and abstract order, error causes unpredictable evacuation and uncontrolled movement, and these kinds of return threaten widespread contamination. In a short text entitled “Character and Anal Eroticism,” Sigmund Freud points out another aspect of the relationship between figural language and such unexpected return. Freud claims that our tendency to identify excrement and gold cannot simply be explained by saying that neurosis follows everyÂ�day language use in calling a person who is stingy with money “dirty” or “filthy.” Instead, what happens is that neurosis, in mimicking common language, causes an unexpected return: “Thus in following the usage of language, neurosis, here as elsewhere, is taking words in their original, significant sense, and where it appears to be using a word figuratively it is usually simply restoring its old meaning.”8 What exactly is this “old meaning” that reemerges in the guise of the figurative and therefore derived, but which actually effects the restoration of the original? Freud suggests two things in connection with this comment. The first is that the opposition between the most valuable (Wertvollsten) and the most valueless (Wertlosesten) has somehow led to the two being identified. To this, he adds a second suggestion: that the original that returns is the anal eroticism of childhood, “destined to be extinguished in later years” when the child is introduced to the love of money. This new interest is supposed to allow the earlier impulse, “which is in the process of losing its aim, to be carried over [übergeleitet] to the newly emerging aim” (175). When Freud implies that these two hypotheses work together, he can only mean this: anal eroticism is “worthless,” not because its object has any inherently negative relationship to value, but because it must be given up and con-

conclusion



verted or carried over into something else. The very injunction that destines it for disposal in a system of conversion thus also generates the logic that leads to its return—by becoming worthless for the subject, it enters into a relationship with the absolutely valuable that allows for the two to become identical. Just as in his reading of Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Freud demonstrates that the mechanism of repression produces the inevitability of return and therefore an uncanny doubling of original and copy, literal and figural.9 If the two aspects of error that have been discussed in this book evince a similar relationship to each other as gold does to excrement, then it is perhaps because they are bound in a comparable way. The notion that Â�error is an identifiable deviation, that it can be recuperated through calculable mechanisms and along a predetermined trajectory, seems to produce via repression a spectral counterpart in the form of nonsystematizable, immeasurable, and absolutely abject errancy. The mechanism that excludes this double is the same as the one that causes its return, and the result is a constant suspension of difference. This suspension is one that itself resists conversion through dialectical resolution into something like valuable knowledge, and instead presents the inexhaustible possibility that even the most precious thing could turn out to be utterly worthless, and that what is left in one’s hands is, as Freud warns, not gold but excrement.

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction 1.╇ Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5:910. Translations are mine, based on the English translation of the identical passages appearing in Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 196–99. All translations in this book are mine unless indicated otherwise. 2.╇ See, for example, Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, s.v. “errō,” and Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “err.” 3.╇ This example is discussed in Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations, 21. For information about the history of the French erreur, Bates cites the Grand Larousse de la langue française and the Trésor de la langue française. The German word history can be found in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bates’s examples of the knight-errant and the Wandering Jew serve as useful reminders of the rich material on error offered by medieval and Renaissance writers. The wealth of scholarship available on such earlier explorations of error underscores the difficulty of extracting them from Christian narratives about sin and expiation, and I therefore bracket them out in order to focus my attention on the epistemological stakes of error in the eighteenth century. For some examples of how earlier treatments of error could be integrated into a more general discussion, see Brown, “‘Errours Endlesse Traine,” in Turning Points, 3–30; and Teskey, “From Allegory to Dialectic.” 4.╇ This would be, one could say, the approach of an intellectual historian like Bates: after a survey of the different metaphorical models that make up the Enlightenment’s “topography of knowledge” in his second chapter, he is able to then declare his intention to “leave the metaphorical depiction of this epistemological problem” (40) in order to study error more closely. 5.╇ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.3.3. Quintilian does not provide a name for this common genus to which both tropes and figures belong. Since the discussion about figure cited here deals with the general issue of “departure from the simple and straightforward” (9.1.3), I employ the term figure for expediency when discussing Quintilian. 6.╇ A parallel case could be made for Greek rhetoric (which Quintilian occasionally cites using the Greek terms). There, the operative terms would be schēma instead of figura, and either soloikismos or barbarismos in the place of Quintilian’s “vices.” For an excellent overview of the various classical systems of rhetoric, see



notes to introcuction and chapter one

Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. Solecism will be taken up in more detail in Chapter 5. 7.╇ De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 7. This essay opens the volume entitled Allegories of Reading, and it could be argued that in the course of his chapters, the suspending potential of what he calls “rhetoric” is eventually assumed by the metatrope of “allegory.” De Man’s concept of allegory is based on “narratives to the second (or the third) degree” (205) that are engendered by an undecidability between truth and error in a primary narrative, and it could certainly also have been adopted here as a key critical term. My only reason for preferring rhetoric over allegory is historical: while both terms are used by de Man to indicate roughly the same vertiginous undecidability between truth and error, the former experienced a general circulation and co-implication with the discourse of knowledge in the eighteenth century that the latter did not. For more on the relationship between de Man’s treatment of allegory and error, see J. Hillis Miller, “‘Reading’ Part of a Paragraph.” See also Corngold, “Error in Paul de Man,” for a general discussion of error’s importance in the writings of de Man. 8.╇ Another suspension that is entailed by this approach to error is the one between reader and writer. The undecidabilities surrounding error apply, in other words, also to reading, criticism, and interpretation as acts of mastery through interpretation, but so too does the possibility of being in error about error. This will be an important consideration here, especially in my discussions of modern critics who read eighteenth-century texts, as well as Enlightenment authors reading classical texts. For a more explicit discussion of error and practices of reading or commentary, see Lerer, Error and the Academic Self.

Chapter One: Corrupting the Fountains of Knowledge 1.╇ Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 43. 2.╇ There has, for example, been a series of discussions about Locke’s indebtedness to Pierre Gassendi and Nicolas Malebranche, whose ideas circulated under the banner of a revived Epicureanism in seventeenth-century England. See Norton, “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism’”; Kroll, “The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi”; and Michael and Michael, “The Theory of Ideas in Gassendi and Locke.” 3.╇ Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 488–89; 3.9.21. All quotations are based on the text of the fifth edition, published posthumously in 1706. References are to page, followed by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers. Emphases are from original unless otherwise noted. 4.╇ The “Epistle to the Reader” can be found in all four editions of the Essay printed during Locke’s lifetime. I cite from the version found in Nidditch’s edition, which is taken from the fourth edition. 5.╇ The two most famous classical descriptions of these officia oratoris from antiquity are to be found in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, 4.482, and Cicero’s De oratore, 69. 6.╇ Jonathan Gil Harris has pointed out that the word conduit seemed to oscillate

notes to chapter one



between meaning both source and distribution in early modern England. See J. G. Harris, “This Is Not a Pipe.” 7.╇ This pair of quotations (with the Cicero quote in Latin) appears on the title page of the third edition in 1695. In the first two editions, the title pages only contain the first quote. 8.╇ Locke was almost certainly familiar with Cicero’s text, for he quotes another passage from its first book as the motto for the unfinished “Of the Conduct of the Understanding.” The listing of books in Harrison and Laslett, eds., Library of John Locke, shows that Locke owned two seventeenth-century editions of the complete works of Cicero that contained De natura deorum (entries 711 and 721). 9.╇ Nidditch and Rogers, eds., Drafts for the “Essay,” 1.2. I have modified Locke’s irregular orthography and punctuation in the passages cited from Draft A in order to facilitate reading. 10.╇ For a discussion of the use of the child as example in early modern philosophy, see Krupp, Reason’s Children. 11.╇ The concept of Adamic naming was a crucial one for seventeenth-century theories of language. For a general discussion, see Coudert, Language of Adam. A discussion of Locke’s use of Adam in the Essay can be found in Paxman, “‘Adam in a Strange Country.’” 12.╇ The story is of Locke’s own invention, but based on the descendents of Adam named in book 4 of Genesis. A fuller consideration of this parable would, of course, have to also take into account Locke’s depiction of Adam in book 1 of his Two Treatises of Government, published in the same year as the Essay (1689) and containing a lengthy refutation of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. 13.╇ Locke’s exact position on essentialism is a controversial topic that remains unsettled. Indeed, in 3.3.17, he seems to suggest that real essences of things, in the sense of an “unknown Constitution of their insensible Parts, from which flow those sensible Qualities, which serve us to distinguish them one from another,” do exist, even if they always remain unknowable. This would imply that his doubts regarding essences are merely epistemological ones. For an overview of the debates, see Hacking, “Locke, Leibniz, Language, and Hans Aarsleff”; and Uzgalis, “The AntiEssential Locke.” 14.╇ These difficulties have been attributed to a number of factors, including the cost of the wars with France and Holland, the great Fire of London in 1666, and the rise of rival cloth industries in Europe. The most vocal proponent of reduced interest rates was Sir Josiah Child, who called in his Brief Observations Concerning Trade, and Interest of Money (1668) for a reduction of the maximum legally allowed interest rate from 6 to 4 percent. This proposal had found substantial support, and as the economic situation in Britain continued to deteriorate in the following two decades, the idea that the interest rate needed to be lowered by state intervention continued to gain in popularity, resulting in a reprint of Child’s book in 1690. Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest will be cited henceforth as SC, and Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money will be cited as FC.



notes to chapters one and two

15.╇ Economic historians sometimes point to Locke’s various remarks on the topic as one of the first formulations of the quantity theory of money. See, for example, Eltis, “John Locke, the Quantity Theory of Money and the Establishment of a Sound Currency.” 16.╇ This is, of course, today a well-known phenomenon known as Gresham’s law: bad money always drives out good money. There had, in fact, already been a gradual decline in the amount of circulating coinage in Britain from the middle of the seventeenth century onward that was reaching crisis proportions—the then Master of the Mint, Isaac Newton, estimated in 1700 that the net stock of silver in Britain declined by about 5.75 million pounds sterling between 1689 and 1699 (see Kelly’s introduction, 110–15). For a discussion of clipping in relation to Locke’s views on language and politics, see Caffentzis, Clipped Coins. 17.╇ For a more complete discussion on the complicated question of why this crisis occurred, see D. W. Jones, “London Merchants and the Crisis of the 1690s.” 18.╇ He gives the example of someone who has lent one hundred British pounds sterling of silver to another man, containing four hundred ounces of silver. If he is repaid after the denomination of money is raised, the one hundred pounds that he gets back will contain a smaller amount of silver than the four hundred ounces he lent out, and this presents an untenable situation (FC, 417). 19.╇ Ironically, the very figure of linguistic impotence chosen by Locke, the Emperor Augustus, was also the most important reformer of coinage in ancient Rome. Among the innovations attributed to him is the reproduction of the emperor’s profile on every coin as a guarantor of its assigned value. See A. H. M. Jones, Roman Economy. 20.╇ Evelyn, Numismata: A Discourse of Medals Ancient and Modern, 224. 21.╇ As mentioned previously, milling ultimately failed to address the complex bundle of monetary problems that Britain was facing during the period. The practice itself, however, and the edge inscription perhaps attributable to Evelyn, remain in place till today, with some interruptions along the way: the same classical motto can still be found on one-pound coins minted in England. 22.╇ Shapin, Social History, 203. 23.╇ See the discussion of epistemological decorum and the truth-judgment of testimony in Shapin, Social History, 193–42.

Chapter Two: Linguistic Turns 1.╇ Losonsky, Linguistic Turns, 2. 2.╇ For an overview of the development of language study in Germany during the period, see Willer, Poetik der Etymologie. For discussions of the British developments, see Aarsleff, Study of Language in England; Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English; and Smith, Politics of Language. 3.╇ Leibniz’s engagement with Locke’s Essay only began in earnest with the publication of Pierre Coste’s French translation in 1700. In 1703, Leibniz began working on The New Essays, a reply to Locke, and a draft was finished by 1704. Locke’s death in November of that year seemed to have caused Leibniz to reconsider its publica-

notes to chapter two



tion, and it was not until 1765, a considerable time after Leibniz’s own death in 1716, that the work was published. Leibniz’s response thus remained unknown to the French philosophes (such as Condillac and Turgot) who had enthusiastically engaged Locke’s Essay in the early eighteenth century. In Germany, Leibniz’s work was translated quickly after its French publication and became a major success. Among those who studied the work carefully were Herder and Kant. 4.╇ The theatrical character of this setup is emphasized by the two characters speaking explicitly about taking on these names, and what they signify (73). See Fenves, Arresting Language, 13–79. 5.╇ Locke, Essay, 405; 3.2.1. It should be noted that the question of what it means to posit “arbitrariness” in the origin of language is not a self-evident one, as the first chapter has suggested. See also Gensini, “De Linguis in Universum,” especially 15–23. 6.╇ Leibniz, New Essays, 278–79. For a general overview of Leibniz’s place in the history of language study, see Schulenburg, Leibniz als Sprachforscher; and Dutz, “‘Lingua Adamica nobis certe ignota est.’” 7.╇ Leibniz, “Preface to an Edition of Nizolius,” 121. The Latin original consulted is Leibniz, “Dissertatio praeliminaris,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, 6.2. 8.╇ Pointing out that “canals of tropes” are themselves a trope that stands in for the lack of a fully articulated analysis of the modes through which words depart from their origin” (25), Fenves reads these figural “canals of tropes” as indicating the failure of language to describe its own historical character using a nontechnical, nonfigural language, just as canalization supplements the natural flow of rivers by providing channels that would otherwise be unavailable. See also Feldman, “Per Canales Troporum.” 9.╇ The Greek verb trepō means “to turn,” and the word Greek tropos thus means “a turn.” This is familiar to us from its use in rhetoric, where it designates a deviation from normal usage. The word was, however, used much more generally in Greek: it signifies a “mode” or a “manner” in general (of speaking, acting, dressing, and so on). More significantly, it can also simply designate a course (possibly, but not necessarily characterized by changes in direction). 10.╇ For a discussion of antonomosia, and how the substitution of species for individual raises pressing complications for Leibniz, see Fenves, Arresting Language, 32–50. 11.╇ A summary of two of Goropius’s most famous etymologies can be found in Metcalf, “The Indo-European Hypothesis.” For a very readable overview of various monogenetic theories of language in the early modern period, see Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, especially 73–116. A more detailed survey of the debates on the origins of language, covering a vast historical and geographical expanse, can be found in Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel. 12.╇ See Lanham, “Weeds in the Garden of Eloquence” for an overview of the problem of proliferating tropes in classical and medieval rhetoric. Examples that she points out of the metaphor of flowers for rhetoric include Alberic of Monte Cassino’s Flores rhetorici from the eleventh century (134–35) and the Tudor handbook



notes to chapter two

The Garden of Eloquence (135). See also de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Aesthetic Ideology, 34–50; 43–45. 13.╇ The focus in this chapter has been mainly on the New Essays, but this movement can also be traced in other works by Leibniz. For a more general discussion of the importance of tropes for Leibniz, see Piro, “Are the ‘Canals of Tropes’ Navigable?”; and Campe, “Rhetorische Perspektive.” 14.╇ Unlike Leibniz’s New Essays, the writings of Tooke were widely circulated and read during his lifetime. On Tooke’s influence in England, see Aarsleff, Study of Language in England, 73–114; and Tomalin, “‘The New-Invented Patent-Lamp of Etymology.’” 15.╇ Tooke, Epea pteroenta, 1.15. In the first volume, the participants are the author himself (H), William Tooke (T), and Richard Beadon (B); in the second volume, the two interlocutors are the author and Francis Burdett (F). 16.╇ In reality, he claims, the Essay on Human Understanding should have been entitled “A Grammatical Essay, or a Treatise on Words, or On Language” (1.31n). 17.╇ Here, Tooke derisively cites Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, as he often does in the Diversions, which lists more than twenty different meanings for the word (1.345). 18.╇ Tooke’s use of the word corruption does not make him a linguistic purist. As he later points out, his aim is not to argue against corruption in the history of language change, but to uncover it and make it available for description. The unwillingness to recognize corruption as a principle is precisely what has led the study of language and philosophy astray: “To the pedagogue, indeed, who must not trouble children about the corruption of words, the distinction of prepositions and conjunctions may be useful enough . . . ; and for some such reason, perhaps, both this and many other distinctions were at first introduced. Nor would they have caused any mischief or confusion, if the philosopher had not adopted these distinctions; taken them for real differences in nature, or in the operations of the human mind; and then attempted to account for what he did not understand. And thus the Grammatist has misled the Grammarian, and both of them the Philosopher” (1.327–28). 19.╇ Tooke’s insistence that the study of language not be instrumentalized to measure the difference between cultures in terms such as primitive and civilized, or even within a linguistic community in terms such as high and low, could be read alongside his political radicalism. Tooke was not only a philologer, but also an active political journalist and pamphleteer. Large portions of the Diversions were, in fact, written during his incarceration for seditious activities against the British government. For a detailed discussion of Tooke’s politics, see Smith, Politics of Language, 110–53; and Lamarre, “John Horne Tooke and the Grammar of Political Experience.” 20.╇ In another politically charged aside, Tooke uses the word corruption to denounce his political persecutors: “The enemies of the established civil liberties of my country have hunted me through life, without a single personal charge against me through the whole course of my life; but barely because I early descried their conspiracy, and foresaw and foretold the coming storm, and have to the utmost

notes to chapter two



of my power legally resisted their corrupt, tyrannical and fatal innovations and usurpations: They have destroyed my fortunes: They have illegally barred and interdicted my usefulness to myself, my family, my friends, and my country: They have tortured my body: They have aimed at my life and honour: . . .” (1.246). 21.╇ As is well known, the first draft of the Diversions was written during Tooke’s imprisonment in 1777. The charge was libel against the Crown, for he was linked with an advertisement to raise money for the widows and orphans of soldiers killed in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which contained a statement accusing the king’s troops of having committed murder. During his one-year incarceration in the King’s Bench prison, he composed a text entitled “A Letter to J. Dunning,” first published in 1778 and later expanded into volume 1 of the Diversions. The passage on words remaining true to their standard can be found in this first version (686); the remark about the desertion of letters appears to have been a later addition. 22.╇ Coleridge, Poetical Works, 365–67; Coleridge and Southey, Omniana, 228; and Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, 390. A summary of Coleridge’s relationship to Tooke can be found in Jackson, “Coleridge, Etymology, and Etymologic.” 23.╇ Prickett, Words and the Word, 136. 24.╇ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1:625–26. 25.╇ Cooper, “‘Monumental Inscriptions,’” 87. The copy was procured for Thomas Poole; Coleridge himself had already read Diversions by 1796. 26.╇ Although all three were written in early 1798 and published together by Johnson in that same year, Coleridge seems to have thought of “Frost at Midnight” as distinct from the other two, as his note on the 1817 proofs of the Sibylline Leaves indicates: “How comes this Poem here? What has it to do with Poems connected with Political Events?—I seem quite confident, that it will not be found in my arranged Catalogue of those sent to you—It must, however, be deferred till it[s] proper place among my domestic & meditative Poems—& go on with the Mad ox [i.e., Recantation, the next poem in 1817]—S.T.C.—“ (cited in Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, 55). The printer had included “Frost at Midnight” together with the other two poems under the section entitled “Poems Occasioned by Political Events or Feelings Connected with Them,” but this was apparently a mistake. For a reading that takes on the political import of “Frost at Midnight,” see Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism, 67–94. 27.╇ Bloom, Visionary Company, 204–5. 28.╇ Coleridge, Poetical Works II. The poem, notes, and all variants can be found on 569–73. 29.╇ The reference is to the film of soot that hovers around a fireplace. See Coleridge’s 1798 note to this line: “In all parts of the kingdom these films are called strangers, and supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend” (Poetical Works II, 570). 30.╇ A similar reading is proposed in A. Williams, Art of Darkness, 200–207, but by way of a refraction through Irigaray’s mère de glace. 31.╇ In a handwritten note in the margins of his copy of the 1798 poem, Coleridge explains as follows: “The six last lines I omit because they destroy the rondo, and



notes to chapters two and three

return upon itself of the Poem. Poems of this kind & length ought to be coiled with its tails round its head.” See Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, 54. 32.╇ Vanwinkle, “Fluttering on the Grate,” 594; and Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, 59. 33.╇ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “freak.” 34.╇ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1:625. 35.╇ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “think.” 36.╇ Epea pteroenta, 2.405–6. 37.╇ Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 3, no. 3587. 38.╇ See, for example, McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, 33–52; and Lockridge, Ethics of Romanticism, 66–68. For a broader discussion of the wordthing relationship in the eighteenth century, see Keach, Arbitrary Power, 23–45. This notebook entry and “Frost at Midnight” are discussed in the context of Coleridge’s interest in the spectral in Terada, “Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction.” 39.╇ Prickett, Words and the Word, 136.

Chapter Three: Kant and the Error of Subreption 1.╇ Seinfeld, episode no. 98, first broadcast 19 January 1995 by NBC, directed by Andy Ackerman, written by Alec Berg and Jeff Schaffer. 2.╇ Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 19. 3.╇ Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5.375n. All further references from this work are to the Akademie volume and pages numbers given in the margins of Pluhar’s edition. 4.╇ As is well known, Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” along with others by contemporaries such as Moses Mendelssohn, was written as a response to a footnote in an article by Johann Friedrich Zöllner on marriage. See Zöllner, “Ist es rathsam?” 5.╇ See, for example, the essays in Beiner and Booth, Kant and Political Philosophy; and H. Williams, Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy. 6.╇ Kant himself uses the Latin vitium subreptionis, the German Fehler der Â�Erschleichung, and the hybrid Fehler der Subreption interchangeably. The word subreption stems from the prefix sub- and either repo (“to creep”) or rapio (“to snatch”). I am indebted to two recent studies of subreption and dialectical illusion in Kant, and draw on them extensively in the following discussion. The first is Grier’s Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, a detailed examination of subreption, illusion, and error in the First Critique and the “Inaugural Dissertation.” The second is Birken-Bertsch’s Subreption und Dialektik bei Kant, which contains an exhaustive compilation of the ways in which subreption has been used not just by Kant but also by the later Latin authors and Kant’s German predecessors (such as Joachim Jungius, Leibniz, and Christian Wolff). 7.╇ For a summary of Wolff’s usage of the term, see Birken-Bertsch, Subreption und Dialektik bei Kant, 41–49. Birken-Bertsch gives two good examples of the term’s typical usage in the mid-eighteenth century. The Zedler lexicon (1742) says that the error of subreption occurs “when we mix in our imaginary notions [Einbildungen] and preconceived opinions [Meinungen] with experience [Erfahrung], and

notes to chapter three



thus falsely give certain a foundation to knowledge that does not exist in things” (34.272). The Deutsche Encyclopädie of 1783 (edited by Andreas Böhm) warns in its entry on “experience” [Erfahrung] that “nothing can be given the title ‘experience’ except something that we have, with certainty, perceived with our senses,” and that violating this precept would result in committing the error of subreption [Fehler der Erschleichung] (8.802). Both are cited in Birken-Bertsch, Subreption und Dialektik bei Kant, 50. 8.╇ Kant, “Inaugural Dissertation,” 2:411 (references are to the volume and page number in the Akademie edition of Kants Gesammelte Werke, which are given in the margins of the English translation). The English translator uses “sensitive” instead of the more conventional “sensible,” but no important semantic distinction seems to be thereby intended. One should also bear in mind that Kant makes no distinction in the “Dissertation” between the intellect (or intelligence), the understanding, and reason. 9.╇ One example Kant gives is the axiom “every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and thus every magnitude is finite,” which he holds to be subreptive because the concept of time is introduced surreptitiously as the “means for giving form to the concept of the predicate” (2:415). Every magnitude can only be cognized as a product of successive coordination, and therefore the concept of a magnitude can only come about through temporal means, and conversely, the impossibility of comprehending an infinite magnitude or series is an impossibility determined by sensitive conditions. To call such a series or magnitude “impossible,” however, and to thereby mean not that it is impossible to conceive of infinity because of sensitive conditions, but that infinity is itself impossible, is to commit subreption. 10.╇ In the “Inaugural Dissertation,” Kant seems unwilling to broaden his definition of the technical term subreption to includes these so-called “closely related” errors, but he goes on to do just that in the First and Third Critiques. 11.╇ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A63/B88. All subsequent references to this work will use the standard A/B notation. 12.╇ The Dialectic takes up more than a third of the entire work, and scholars are still divided about its persuasiveness and coherence. Strawson, for example, refers to it in The Bounds of Sense as being largely made up of “unplausible claim and fallacious argument” (156). One sign of Kant’s growing interest in subreption is the fact that he makes the transition from speaking of the “metaphysical error of subreption [vitium subreptionis metaphysicum]” in the “Dissertation” to speaking of the “transcendental error of subreption [vitium subreptionis transcendentale]” in a fragment from 1771 (Gesammelte Werke 15:94), and of “transcendental subreption” in the Critique of Pure Reason. 13.╇ By principle here, Kant means the formation of “synthetic cognitions [Â�Erkenntnisse] from concepts,” something which the understanding is incapable of, since intuitions (Anschauung) (albeit pure ones) or “the conditions of a possible experience in general” (A301/B358) are the necessary ground for its synthesis. 14.╇ The Dialectic gives yet another version of this ranking in the well-known progression of different types of presentation (Vorstellungen): if perception refers



notes to chapter three

to a modification of state in the subject, it is sensation, whereas if it refers to the object, it can either do so in a manner that is “immediate [unmittelbar],” in which case it is an intuition, or in a manner that is “mediated [mittelbar],” in which case it is a concept. Synthesizing pure concepts (also called “notions”) given by the understanding, reason produces ideas (also called “concepts of reason”), which sit at the very top of the pecking order (A320/B376). Properly speaking, therefore, the understanding can have either an immediate relationship to sensation (in the case of intuition) or a mediated one (in the case of concepts of the understanding), but reason should have no such relationship at all. 15.╇ Hamann, Sämtliche Schriften, 3:278–79. 16.╇ One way to rescue reason from the alarming possibility of a mercy killing is to read Kant as distinguishing between illusion (Schein) and actual error (Irrtum): while the tendency to confuse things might be unavoidable, actual confusion occurs only when that tendency is not successfully resisted. The tendency itself might be what Kant means by “illusion,” but only the actual failure to see the illusion as an illusion would lead to confusion and therefore constitute “error” and “subreption.” Grier takes up this line of argument, and proposes that reason is thereby rescued from what she calls the “inevitability thesis” (that is, the thesis that transcendental illusion is inevitable because of the way reason works), and Birken-Bertsch implicitly consents to this view when he points out that all uses of the word subreption in Transcendental Dialectic occur in connection with misapplication of a concept or judgment (Subreption und Dialektik, 115). We should, however, bear in mind Kant’s reference to transcendental illusion in the appendix as not only unavoidable but “irresistible [unwiderstehlich]” (A643/B671). 17.╇ For a good summary of the disagreement among philosophers regarding the hypothetical but apparently imperative unity of reason that, according to Kant, governs its regulative use, see the opening section of Grier, Kant’s Doctrine, 263–88. Alternative accounts can also be found in Neiman, The Unity of Reason; and Nuzzo, Kant and the Unity of Reason. 18.╇ Grier quite rightly calls Kant’s revival of these discredited ideas (rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology) an “attempt to resurrect the very same ideas whose use had been so successfully undermined during the course of the Dialectic”; and, despite her staunch defense of reason in general, she therefore describes this section as “less believable” (Kant’s Doctrine, 264). 19.╇ In the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Kant reiterates that the transcendental ideas of reason are “merely thought problematically, in order to ground regulative principles of the systematic use of the understanding in the field of experience in relation to them (as heuristic fictions)” (A771/B799). See Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob; and Adickes, Kant und die Als-ob-Philosophie. 20.╇ As Grier acknowledges, many of the problems that confront the reader here stem “from Kant’s use of analogy, i.e. his tendency to characterize judgmental error in what we may refer to as ‘Newtonian terms’” (Kant’s Doctrine, 105n). 21.╇ Redfield, Phantom Formations, 15. 22.╇ Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 72.

notes to chapters three and four



23.╇ The strenuous demands of this task produce some odd claims in Spectral Nationality about the mechanism of giving. Cheah states, for example, that “political organization is adduced as the only example of human creation available to us that is like the organization of nature” (Spectral Nationality, 107). This is quite unsupportable by the passage from Kant cited above, which only points out that the analogy of natural purposes can be used to elucidate political organization. He also reads Kant as claiming that “it is through an at best ‘remote’ analogy with political craft that we can better understand organismic causality” (107), whereas Kant points out that reflective judgment involves a use of a remote analogy only “with our own causality in terms of purposes generally,” and that the objective of this use is “not for the sake of gaining knowledge either of nature or of that original basis of nature, but rather for the sake of assisting that same practical power in us (viz. our reason) by analogy with which we were considering the cause of the purposiveness in organized objects” (5:375). The remote analogy has nothing to do with political craft, and its objective has nothing to do with understanding organismic causality. It is an analogy with our own causality in the sense that we assume it to be given by an understanding not our own but like our understanding, and the goal is to further the needs of reason. 24.╇ Derrida, “Passions,” 143. 25.╇ “I mean, e.g., the wine bowl is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares: so one will call the bow ‘Dionysus’ shield,’ and the shield ‘Ares’ wine bowl.’ Or old age is to life as evening to day: so one will call evening ‘the day’s old age,’ or like Empedocles, call old age ‘the evening of life’ or ‘life’s sunset.’ In some cases of analogy no current term exists, but the same form of the expression will still be used. For instance, to release seed is to ‘sow,’ while the sun’s release of fire lacks a name; but the latter stands to the sun as does sowing to the seed, hence the phrase ‘sowing his divine fire’” (Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b). 26.╇ Klein, “Kant’s Sunshine,” 30. Klein’s essay takes up and extends Derrida’s reading of Kant in “Economimesis,” which appeared in the same volume. For other discussions of this section, see, for example, Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 61–67; and Wang, “Kant’s Strange Light.” 27.╇ For a reproduction of this frontispiece and a discussion of the veiled figure of Isis, see Hadot, Veil of Isis, especially 247–83. 28.╇ Derrida, Given Time, 16–17.

Chapter Four: The Madness of the Middle 1.╇ Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 47. 2.╇ Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 302/495–96. German original taken from Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in Werke, vol. 7. Page numbers in parentheses hereafter refer to the English and the German texts. 3.╇ Goethe, Faust I, in Werke, vol. 3, line 317 (my translation). 4.╇ For a discussion of these and other positions on error in the period with respect to Gnosticism and skepticism, see Pfau, “The Philosophy of Shipwreck.” 5.╇ Eichner, “Zur Deutung von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,” 21.



notes to chapter four

6.╇ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.6.15. 7.╇ For more on the virtuality of the medium, see Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, especially 34–38. 8.╇ In Excess and the Mean, a recent study of the mean in the early modern period, Joshua Scodel echoes a commonly held sentiment in suggesting that the via media experiences a decisive decline in the eighteenth century, and that this turn could be attributed to the emergence of a “growing cult of the sublime” (285) and other forms of excess in Europe. If the idea of moderation as virtue indeed undergoes a crisis in the period, however, it is far from clear that this crisis is the result of the emergence of superior adversaries (such as the sublime or the discourse of the genius), rather than being a function of internal difficulties that have marked the concept from the outset. 9.╇ Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment, 11. 10.╇ There are certain kinds of passion in others, Smith grants, whose mere sight seems to affect us directly, but such spontaneous and unmediated moments of sympathy are rare and “always extremely imperfect” (ibid., 14). For a discussion of theatricality in Smith’s work, see Marshall, Figure of Theater, 167–240. 11.╇ One could draw a parallel between Smith’s account and the one found in Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) between the materiality of the visual sign and the transparency of the verbal sign. Smith’s work is, in fact, referred to (albeit dismissively) in section 4 of Lessing’s Laocoon. 12.╇ Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5.234. For a discussion of mediocrity in Kant, see Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, especially 15–40. 13.╇ Hazlitt, “On Fashion,” 51–52. 14.╇ Garve, Über die Moden, 122. 15.╇ Redfield, Phantom Formations, 38. 16.╇ Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 253. 17.╇ As if to underscore the futility of moderation’s imperative, the novel has Barbara return towards the end, to discover that Wilhelm has not learned to control his passions. In reply to his enraged outbursts, which interrupt the story of Mariane’s life that she is trying to tell, she can only repeat in vain what she already told him at the outset: “You would do better to control yourself [Ihr tätet besser, Euch zu mäßigen]” (292). 18.╇ Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 279. 19.╇ This assumption has had a powerful hold over the secondary literature on the novel. A paradigmatic example of this focus on familial structure as the framework of Bildung is Kittler, “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters.” 20.╇ The version by Antonio Bellucci from 1700 (formerly attributed to Andrea Celesti) has often been taken as the source of Goethe’s description, because he visited the art museum at Kassel several times during his lifetime, where the painting was located. Another popular candidate is the version by Januarius Zick. For an overview of the discussion, see Stechow, “The Love of Antiochus with Faire Stratonice”; and Nolan, “Wilhelm Meisters Lieblingsbild.” 21.╇ Later in the same book, Felix will also be sick and presumed dying, but Wil-

notes to chapters four and five



helm will find out that it is all a misunderstanding (as described at the beginning of this chapter). According to Redfield’s reading, “Wilhelm, thus invited, moves from the position of the child to that of the father” (Phantom Formations, 78). 22.╇ For examples of more conventionally oedipal readings of the painting, see Roberts, Indirections of Desire, 43–52 and 187–190; or Schweitzer, “Wilhelm Meister und das Bild.” 23.╇ For a discussion of the connection between Goethe and Hippocrates, see Deichgrüber, “Goethe und Hippokrates.” As Deichgrüber points out, Goethe was intimately acquainted with the writings of Hippocrates: during the winter of 1795, as Goethe was making his final revisions on the novel, he was also occupied with the ambitious (and never completed) project of translating Hippocrates’ aphorisms into German. A preliminary version of Wilhelm’s Lehrbrief can be found in Goethe’s handwriting scribbled on the back of one of his pages of translations and later imported almost unchanged into the novel. Goethe himself was strongly influenced by Hippocrates as well as other classical scientific thinkers such as Aristotle, in developing his own approach to scientific inquiry, which strongly emphasized experience and observation. See ibid., 27–28. For a more general discussion of Goethe and medicine, see Flaherty, “Stage-Struck Wilhelm Meister”; and Tobin, Doctor’s Orders. 24.╇ Goethe, “Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit,” Werke, 10:66. 25.╇ Even this moment of decision in the Wanderjahren is, however, subject to a certain irony: it is entirely unclear that Wilhelm picks the profession for the “right” reasons. One could, indeed, argue that even there, his reasons remain entirely bound up in desire and personal inclination, and to that extent, merely repeat the errors of the Lehrjahre. 26.╇ Berger, Ästhetik und Bildung, 104. 27.╇ In English, mode used as a synonym for fashion would strike the modern native speaker as antiquated, but its connection to the idea of the common has survived as a technical term in statistics: in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, the mode is “the value or range of values of a variable which occurs most frequently in a set of data” (s.v. “mode”).

Chapter Five: “Inaccurate, as lady linguists often are” 1.╇ For an overview of some recent scholarship on Kleist’s play, see Hansen, “Â�Poetik der Irritation”; and Herman, “Kleist’s ‘Penthesilea.’” 2.╇ Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 1:20. 3.╇ Bennett, “Heroes and Fleabags and Women,” 138. Reading Köter as a synecdoche for animality in general, and therefore for the materiality of bodies that are alive but without consciousness, Bennett takes this principle of the material body to form the axis that separates the male and female characters in the play, thereby constituting the site of their conflict. See Bennett, ibid., 125–48. 4.╇ Quotations from the play are taken from Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1:856–85; line numbers given in parentheses. 5.╇ The most immediate intertextual candidate is Kleist’s story “Marquise of O.,” in which the male protagonist dreams of a swan splattered with dirt (Kot), which



notes to chapter five

dives under the water and emerges restored to purity. For a general discussion of the importance of the swan motif and the logic of purification for Kleist, see Bentzel, “Knowledge in Narrative.” For an analysis of further references to dirt and dust in Penthesilea, see Theisen, “‘Helden und Köter und Fraun.’” 6.╇ Allemann et al., “‘Schmerz’ oder ‘Schmutz,’” 399. The debate about this letter, which continues today, was originally published as an exchange between three critics (Fritz Schlawe, Helmut Sembdner, and Beda Allemann) in the journal Euphorion in 1966. Sembdner and Allemann end up arguing for Schmutz, while Schlawe sticks with Schmerz. 7.╇ Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, 309–13. 8.╇ For an exemplary reading of how thirdness functions in the play, see Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism, especially ix–xiv and 85–114. See also Reuß, “‘Im Geklüfft.’” Allemann’s use of the term Anstößige is also suggestive, because it conveys an affective dimension and could perhaps be translated as “offensive” rather than merely “incongruous.” For a fuller discussion of Kleist and Kant in terms of judgment, taste, and the affective as well as aesthetic problems raised in the play, see Chaouli, “Devouring Metaphor.” 9.╇ Another complication is that the classical accounts of the Amazons by authors such as Homer, Diodorus of Sicily, Hippocrates, and Strabo sometimes contradict one another in their descriptions of the Amazon’s homeland, their habits and customs, or their history. In the eighteenth century, two important works about the history of the Amazons appeared, summarizing the different versions of the story, but also adding their own twists and obscurities to the affair: Pierre Petit’s Traité historique sur les Amazones and Claude Marie Guyon’s Histoire des Amazones. Guyon’s work was translated into German by Johann Georg Krünitz as Geschichte der Amazonen (Berlin, 1763). For an overview of the use of the Amazon myth in German literature, see H. Klein, Die antiken Amazonensagen. 10.╇ Herodotus: With an English Translation, vol. 2, 4.110–17. 11.╇ See Lausberg’s discussion of solecism (232–40) for a brief overview of its treatment in the rhetorical writings of late antiquity, embedded in a more general discussion of elocutionis vitia (errors in expression). He divides the rules of elocutio into two sections: those governing single words (verba singula) and those governing combinations of words (verba plura and verba coniuncta)—an infraction of the former results in a barbarism, and one against the latter in a solecism. 12.╇ One example of such an account is given by Strabo in Geography, 14.2. There is some doubt even in Strabo, writing in the second century c.e., that this really is the origin of the word, but he appears to accept the etymology. Dionysus Laertius also mentions this etymology in his “Life of Solon.” 13.╇ Dindorf proposes, for example, in Herodoti Historiarum: Libri IX “solœce quidem illo utentes inde ab antiquis temporibus.” This is, however, problematic: the Greek phrase commonly used to express “from the beginning” is ex archēs or archēthen. 14.╇ How and Wells, Commentary on Herodotus, 341. See Herodotus, Histoires, the note to book 4, line 117, for Legrand’s comment.

notes to chapter five and conclusion



15.╇ Powell, Lexicon to Herodotus. All further references to frequency of word occurrence in Herodotus are drawn from this source. 16.╇ This etymology (just one of several contradictory accounts of the origins of the Amazons) can be found in classical authors such as Diodorus of Sicily and Hippocrates, and is mentioned in Hederich’s lexicon entry (s.v. “Amazonen”). See also the discussion in Richter, Missing the Breast, 216–47. 17.╇ W. Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen, 181–90. 18.╇ The embedded quote is taken from Hederich, Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon, s.v. “Tanaïs.” 19.╇ The material sound-object that is the word Leiche has a typographical counterpart: the word also refers, in the jargon of the printing press, to a blank inserted in place of a word. This use is still current today, but Grimm’s Wörterbuch reminds us that it was already established in the eighteenth century. The high priestess’s words are thus uncannily accurate: the Leiche is a nothing (Nichts) that nonetheless occupies space with its horrifying materiality. For a discussion of this, and of blankness in general in the works of Kleist, see Theisen, Bogenschluß, 147–51. 20.╇ Hederich, Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon, s.v. “Tanaïs.” 21.╇ For the letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge from 1801, see Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2:694. The “Gebet des Zoroasters” is in ibid., 2:325–26. Ringbom, “Zur Ikonographie der Göttin Ardvi Sura Anahita” points out the importance of the urn as dispenser of water in depictions of the goddess. We recall that when asked by Achilles from where the law of the Amazons (so “unwomanly [unweiblich]” and “unnatural”) stems, Penthesilea replies, “From far away, from the urn of all that is holy [aus der Urne alles Heiligen]” (1905–8). For a general discussion of Kleist’s depiction of Persia, see Doering, “Persien im märkischen Sand.” 22.╇ Hederich, Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon, s.v. “Anaetis.” 23.╇ Wissowa, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie, 1:2030. 24.╇ To complicate matters further, a number of the source texts involved are either corrupt (such as the pseudo-Plutarch de fluviis from which Kittler’s preferred version is taken) or no longer extant (such as Iamblich’s Dramatikon, which we know only from the reading notes of the Babylonian scholar Photius). 25.╇ Strabo, Geography, 11.2.2; my emphases throughout. 26.╇ This must be an exaggeration, for we know that Herodotus, for example, drew his boundaries somewhat differently, but it is certainly true of most classical writers attempting to describe the world cartographically. 27.╇ For a general discussion of unsure footing in Kleist’s works, see Schneider, “Standing and Falling.”

Conclusion 1.╇ Douglas, Purity and Danger, 203. Another common line of explanation that Douglas rejects immediately is that cultures evincing paradoxical behavior about dirt are primitive and therefore imprecise in their attempts at classification. This position is attributed by Douglas largely to early anthropological studies such as those of James Frazer, who pronounces in The Golden Bough that the “savage” is unable



notes to conclusion

to distinguish between holiness and pollution (2:343), and that primitive societies can be recognized precisely by the “hazy state of religious thought in which the idea of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet sharply distinguished” (2:304). See Douglas, Purity and Danger, 12–14. 2.╇ This is a growing trend in current research on rhetoric, both in the United States and in Europe. See, for example, Oesterreich, Fundamentalrhetorik; Kopperschmidt, ed., Rhetorische Anthropologie; and Sapir and Crocker, eds., Social Use of Metaphor. 3.╇ Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 55–56. 4.╇ See, for example, Kristeva, Powers of Horror. 5.╇ The Oxford World Classics, for example, translates the phrase as “go some way apart from one another in order to relieve themselves” (Herodotus, Histories, 272). Herodotus: With an English Translation, 4.113. 6.╇ De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 36; my emphasis. 7.╇ Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure, 68. For other studies of water supply and waste disposal in the period, see J. G. Harris, “This Is Not a Pipe”; and Newman, “Filth, Stench, Noise,” in Cultural Capitals, 76–91. 8.╇ Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism,” in Standard Edition, 9:174. The German original consulted is Freud, “Charakter und Analerotik,” in Studienausgabe, vol. 7. 9.╇ Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Standard Edition, 17:219–56.

Bibliography

Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ———. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. 1966. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Adickes, Erich. Kant und die Als-ob-Philosophie. Stuttgart: Frommann, 1927. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. 1971. Reprint, London: Verso, 1997. Allemann, Beda, et al. “‘Schmerz’ oder ‘Schmutz’: Diskussion einer Briefstelle Kleists.” Euphorion 60.4 (1966): 388–401. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Vol. 19 of Aristotle in 23 Volumes. London: Heinemann, 1934. ———. Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. In Vol. 23 of Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Bates, David. Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Beiner, Ronald, and William James Booth, eds. Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Bennett, Benjamin. “Heroes and Fleabags and Women: Gender and Representation in Penthesilea.” In Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature, 125–48. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Bentzel, Curtis C. “Knowledge in Narrative: The Significance of the Swan in Kleist’s ‘Die Marquise von O . . . ‘” German Quarterly 64.3 (1991): 296–303. Berger, Albert. Ästhetik und Bildungsroman: Goethes “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” Vienna: Braumüller, 1977. Birken-Bertsch, Hanno. Subreption und Dialektik bei Kant: Der Begriff des Fehlers der Erschleichung in der Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 2006. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. Böhm, Andreas, ed. Deutsche Encyclopädie oder Allgemeines Real-Wörterbuch aller Künste und Wissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main, 1783.



bibliography

Borst, Arno. Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. 6 vols. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1957–63. Brown, Marshall. Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Caffentzis, Constantine G. Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money. New York: Autonomedia, 1989. Campe, Rüdiger. “Rhetorische Perspektive: Metapher und Metonymie bei Leibniz.” In Die paradoxe Metapher, ed. Anselm Haverkamp, 332–57. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Chaouli, Michel. “Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist’s Penthesilea.” German Quarterly 69.2 (1996): 125–43. Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Child, Josiah. Brief Observations Concerning Trade, and Interest of Money. 1668. Reprinted in Sir Josiah Child: Merchant-Economist, with a Reprint of Brief Â�Observations, ed. William Letwin. Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1959. Cicero. De natura deorum; Academica. Trans. Harris Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. ———. De oratore. Trans. Edward William Sutton and Harris Rackham. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. London: Constable, 1936. ———. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. ———. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 5 vols. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. ———. Poetical Works II: Poems (Variorum Text). Ed. J. C. C. Mays. Vol. 16, book 2 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and Robert Southey. Omniana. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown , 1812. Condillac, Etienne-Bonnot de. Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. Ed. Charles Porset. Paris: Galilée, 1973. ———. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. Ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cooper, Andrew R. “‘Monumental Inscriptions’: Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke.” English Literary History 66.1 (1999): 87–110. Corngold, Stanley. “Error in Paul de Man.” Critical Inquiry. 8.3 (1982): 489–507. Coudert, Allison P., ed. The Language of Adam / Die Sprache Adams. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999. de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

bibliography



———. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Deichgräber, Karl. “Goethe und Hippokrates.” Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 29 (1936): 27–56. Derrida, Jacques. “Economimesis.” Diacritics 11.3 (1981): 3–25. ———. Given Time : 1. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering.’” Trans. David Wood. In On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, 3–31. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, 61–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Diderot, Denis, and Jean D’Alembert, eds. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société des gens de lettres. 17 vols. Paris, 1751–65. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin. Ed. Gabriele Malsch. Vol. 26 of Gesammelte Schriften. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005. Dionysus Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. C. D. Yonge. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Doering, Sabine. “Persien im märkischen Sand: Kleists Bild vom Orient.” KleistJahrbuch (1996): 171–86. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo. 1966. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2004. Dutz, Klaus. “‘Lingua Adamica nobis certe ignota est’: Die Sprachursprungsdebatte und Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.” In Theorien vom Ursprung der Sprache, vol. 1, ed. Joachim Gessinger and Wolfert von Rahden, 204–40. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989. Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Trans. James Fentress. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995. Eichner, Hans. “Zur Deutung von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren.” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1966): 165–96. Reprinted in Gegen den Strich: Â�Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Rodney Symington, 11–41. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. Elfenbein, Andrew. Romanticism and the Rise of English. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Eltis, Walter. “John Locke, the Quantity Theory of Money, and the Establishment of a Sound Currency.” In The Quantity Theory of Money: From Locke to Keynes and Friedman, ed. Mark Blaug et al., 4–26. London: Edward Elgar, 1995. Evelyn, John. Numismata: A Discourse of Medals Ancient and Modern. London, 1697. Feldman, Karen S. “Per Canales Troporum: On Tropes and Performativity in Leibniz’s Preface to Nizolius.” Journal of the History of Ideas 65.1 (2004): 39–51. Fenves, Peter. Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.



bibliography

Flaherty, Gloria. “The Stage-Struck Wilhelm Meister and 18th-Century Psychiatric Medicine.” Modern Language Notes 101.3 (1986): 493–515. Fleming, Paul. Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 2nd ed. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1900. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74. ———. Studienausgabe. 11 vols. Ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, et al. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000. Garve, Christian. Über die Moden: Versuche über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Moral, der Litteratur und dem gesellschaftlichen Leben. 1792. Reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1987. Gensini, Stephen. “De Linguis in Universum”: On Leibniz’s Ideas on Languages. Münster: Nodus, 2000. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust I and II. Ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins. PrinceÂ�ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. 14 vols. Ed. Erich Trunz. Â�Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982. ———. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall. PrinceÂ� ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Gorp, Jan van [Goropius Becanus, pseud.]. Origines Antwerpianae. Antwerp, 1569. Grier, Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1960. Guyon, Claude Marie. Histoire des Amazones. Paris, 1740. Hacking, Ian. “Locke, Leibniz, Language, and Hans Aarsleff.” Synthese 75.2 (1988): 135–53. Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hamann, Johann Georg. Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. Josef Nadler. 6 vols. Vienna: Verlag Herder, 1949–57. Hansen, Birgit. “Poetik der Irritation: ‘Penthesilea’-Forschung 1977–2002.” In Â�Heinrich von Kleist: Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Inka Kording and Anton Philipp Knittel, 225–53. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003. Harris, James. Hermes: A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar. 1751. Reprint, Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “This Is Not a Pipe: Water Supply, Incontinent Sources, and the Leaky Body Politic.” In Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, 203–28. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

bibliography



Harrison, John, and Peter Laslett, eds. The Library of John Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Hazlitt, William. “On Fashion.” In The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe, 17:51–56. London: Dent, 1930–34. Hederich, Benjamin. Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon. 1770. Reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Vol. 3 of Werke, ed. Eva MoldenÂ�hauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. ———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Herman, Jost. “Kleist’s ‘Penthesilea’: Battleground of Gendered Discourses.” In A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Bernd Fischer, 43–60. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003. Herodotus. Herodoti Historiarum: Libri IX. Ed. Karl Wilhelm Dindorf. Paris: A. Firmin-Didot, 1855. ———. Herodotus: With an English Translation. Trans. A. D. Godley. Loeb Classical Library, 1921. Reprint, London: Heinemann, 1963. ———. Histoires. Trans. P. E. Legrand. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948. ———. The Histories. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hook, Larue van. The Metaphorical Terminology of Greek Rhetoric and Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905. Horne Tooke, John. Epea pteroenta; or, The Diversions of Purley. 2 vols. 1798–1805. Reprint, Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968. ———. “A Letter to John Dunning, Esq.” In Epea pteroenta; or, The Diversions of Purley, to Which Is Annexed His Letter to John Dunning, ed. Richard Taylor, 685–724. London, 1840. How, Walter Wybergh, and Joseph Wells. A Commentary on Herodotus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. Jackson, H. J. “Coleridge, Etymology, and Etymologic.” Journal of the History of Ideas 44.1 (1983): 75–88. Jacobs, Carol. Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jones, A. H. M. The Roman Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Administrative History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Jones, D. W. “London Merchants and the Crisis of the 1690s.” In Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack, 311–56. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Kants Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaft. 23 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902-.



bibliography

———. “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World [Â�Inaugural Dissertation].” In Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. and trans. David Walford, 393–416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Keach, William. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Kelly, Patrick Hyde, ed. Locke on Money. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Kittler, Friedrich. “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters.” In Dichtung als Â�Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller, ed. Friedrich Kittler and Gerhard Kaiser, 13–124. Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1979. Kittler, Wolf. Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1987. Klein, Hans. Die antiken Amazonensagen in der deutschen Literatur. Leipzig: Radelli and Hille, 1919. Klein, Richard. “Kant’s Sunshine.” Diacritics 11.2 (1981): 26–41. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ed. Helmut Sembdner. 2 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1993. Kopperschmidt, Josef, ed. Rhetorische Anthropologie: Studien zum Homo rhetoricus. Munich: Fink, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kroll, Richard W. F. “The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi.” Journal of the History of Ideas 45.3 (1984): 339–59. Krupp, Anthony. Reason’s Children: Childhood in Early Modern Philosophy. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Lamarre, Paul. “John Horne Tooke and the Grammar of Political Experience.” Philological Quarterly 77.2 (1998): 187–207. Lanham, Carol Dana. “Weeds in the Garden of Eloquence: The Proliferation of Rhetorical Figures.” In Design and Production in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Nancy Van Deusen, 133–48. Ottawa, Ontario: Institute of Medieval Music, 1998. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Dissertatio praeliminaris: De alienorum operum editione, de Scopo operis, de Philosophica dictione, de lapsibus Nizolio.” In Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 6, book 2, 398–476. Leipzig: Akademie, 1966. ———. New Essays on Human Understanding. Ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain. Vol. 6, book 6 of Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Leipzig: Akademie, 1962.

bibliography



———. “Preface to an Edition of Nizolius” (1670). In Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy Loemker, 121–30. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969. Lerer, Seth. Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Lewis, Charlton, and Charles Short, eds. A Latin Dictionary, Founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary. 1879. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ———. “Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money.” In Locke on Money, 2 vols., ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly, 2:399–481. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. ———. “Short Observations on a Printed Paper.” In Locke on Money, 2 vols., ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly, 2:343–59. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. ———. “Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money.” In Locke on Money, 2 vols., ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly, 1:203–342. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Lockridge, Laurence S. The Ethics of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Losonsky, Michael. Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Magnuson, Paul. Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Marshall, David. The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. McKusick, James C. Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Metcalf, George. “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the 16th and 17th centuries.” In Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, ed. Dell Hymes, 233–57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. Michael, Fred S., and Emily Michael. “The Theory of Ideas in Gassendi and Locke.” Journal of the History of Ideas 51.3 (1990): 379–99. Miller, J. Hillis. “‘Reading’ Part of a Paragraph in Allegories of Reading.” In Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, 155–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Neiman, Susan. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Newman, Karen. Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.



bibliography

Nidditch, Peter, and G. A. J. Rogers, eds. Drafts for the “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” and Other Philosophical Writings. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Nolan, Erika. “Wilhelm Meisters Lieblingsbild.” Jahrbuch des Fr. dt. Hochstifts (1979): 132–52. Norton, David Fate. “The Myth of ‘British Empiricism.’” History of European Ideas 1.4 (1981): 331–44. Nuzzo, Angelica. Kant and the Unity of Reason. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005. Oesterreich, Peter L. Fundamentalrhetorik: Untersuchungen zu Person und Rede in der Öffentlichkeit. Hamburg: Meiner, 1990. Paxman, David. “‘Adam in a Strange Country’: Locke’s Language Theory and Travel Literature.” Modern Philology 92.4 (1995): 460–81. Petit, Pierre. Traité historique sur les Amazones. Paris, 1718. Pfau, Thomas. “The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge’s Catastrophic Modernity.” Modern Language Notes 107.4 (2007): 949–1004. Piro, Francesco. “Are the ‘Canals of Tropes’ Navigable? Rhetoric Concepts in Leibniz’s Philosophy of Language.” In Im Spiegel des Verstandes: Studien zu Leibniz, ed. Klaus Dutz and Stefano Gensini, 137–60. Münster: Nodus, 1996. Powell, J. Enoch. A Lexicon to Herodotus. 2nd ed. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1960. Prickett, Stephen. Words and the Word: Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22. Redfield, Marc. Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Reuß, Roland. “‘Im Geklüfft’: Zur Sprache von Kleists Penthesilea.” Brandenburger Kleist-Blätter 5 (1992): 3–27. Richter, Simon. Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Ringbom, Lars-Ivar. “Zur Ikonographie der Göttin Ardvi Sura Anahita.” Acta Academieae Aboensis 23 (1957). Roberts, David. The Indirections of Desire: Hamlet in Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister.” Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1980. Sapir, J. David, and Jon Christopher Crocker, eds. The Social Use of Metaphor: Â�Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977. Schlegel, Friedrich. “On Goethe’s Meister.” In Classical and Romantic German AÂ�esthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein, 269–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schneider, Helmut J. “Standing and Falling in Heinrich von Kleist.” Modern Â�Language Notes 115.3 (2000): 502–18.

bibliography



Schulenburg, Sigrid von der. Leibniz als Sprachforscher. Ed. Kurt Müller. 1937. Â�Reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973. Schweitzer, Christophe. “Wilhelm Meister und das Bild vom kranken Königssohn.” PMLA 72.3 (1957): 419–32. Scodel, Joshua. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Â� Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Stechow, Wolfgang. “The Love of Antiochus with Faire Stratonice in Art.” Art Bulletin 27.4 (1945): 221–37. Stillinger, Jack. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Strabo. Geography. Trans. Horace Leonard Jones. London: Heinemann, 1924. Strawson, Peter F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” London: Methuen, 1966. Terada, Rei. “Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction in Coleridge’s Notebooks.” Studies in Romanticism 43.2 (2004): 257–81. Teskey, Gordon. “From Allegory to Dialectic: Imagining Error in Spenser and Milton.” PMLA 101.1 (1986): 9–23. Theisen, Bianca. Bogenschluß: Kleists Formalisierung des Lesens. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1996. ———. “‘Helden und Köter und Fraun’: Kleists Hundekomödie.” Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung 17 (2004): 129–42. Tobin, Robert D. Doctor’s Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Tomalin, Marcus. “‘The New-Invented Patent-Lamp of Etymology’: Hazlitt, Horne Tooke, and the Philosophy of Language.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.1 (2008): 61–90. Uzgalis, W. L. “The Anti-Essential Locke and Natural Kinds.” Philosophical Quarterly 38.152 (1988): 330–39. Vaihinger, Hans. Die Philosophie des Als Ob. Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1911. Vanwinkle, Matthew. “Fluttering on the Grate: Revision in ‘Frost at Midnight.’” Studies in Romanticism 43.4 (2004): 583–98. Wang, Orrin N. C. “Kant’s Strange Light: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Â�Catechresis of Genius.” Diacritics 30.4 (2000): 15–37. Weber, Samuel. Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Willer, Stefan. Poetik der Etymologie: Texturen sprachlichen Wissens in der Romantik. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003.



bibliography

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Williams, Howard, ed. Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Wissowa, Georg, ed. Paulys Real-Encylopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1894–1980. Yates, Julian. Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Zedler, Johannes Heinrich. Grosses vollständiges Universallexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste. Leipzig, 1742. Zöllner, Johann Friedrich. “Ist es rathsam, das Ehebündnis nicht ferner durch die Religion zu sanciren?” 1783. Reprinted in Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der berlinischen Monatsschrift, ed. Norbert Hinske, 107–16. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973.

Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 14–15, 18–19 abbreviation, 46, 57–64 aesthetics, 85–87, 102, 118, 123 alterity, 12, 77–78, 91, 95–100, 104–5, 142, 157–60 Amazons: in Herodotus, 12–13, 141–49, 152, 164–66, 186n9; in Penthesilea, 12–13, 136–38, 140–41, 147–56, 159, 164–66, 187nn16, 21; in Wilhelm Meister, 130–32 analogy, 11–12, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 87– 90, 182n20; analogue versus, 90–94; self-gift of, 97–99, 101, 103–5 animation, 68–74, 93–94, 102, 127–31, 135 antonomasia, 48–52, 143. See also synecdoche arbitrariness: in language, 20–32, 43, 47, 54, 65; value of coinage, 36–40 Aristotle, 10, 12, 185n23; Nicomachean Ethics, 10, 12, 109–11, 116, 121; Poetics, 102–3, 183n25 autonomy, 12, 80, 91, 97 autocausality, 12, 80, 91, 97

Bildungsroman, 106, 117–19, 126 Bloom, Harold, 67, 69

Bates, David W., 2–4, 173n3 Bennett, Benjamin, 137–38, 185n3 Berger, Albert, 126 Bildung, 12, 91–93, 117–18; in Hegel, 106–9; in Wilhelm Meister, 107–9, 111, 117–22, 124–29, 133–34

danger/risk, 4–8, 10–12, 161–67 De Man, Paul, 8–9, 166–67, 174n7 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 93, 100–102, 104–5 desire: in Penthesilea, 136–38, 140–47, 151–54, 165–66; in Wilhelm Meister, 120, 122–24, 127, 129–35

Cheah, Pheng, 11–12, 77–78, 90–101, 104, 183n23 chiasmus (inversion), 51–55, 69–75, 76–78, 99, 108–9 Cicero, 24–25, 27 circulation, 7, 10–12, 161; in Locke, 15, 23–24, 27–31, 33–36, 38–44, 165–66, 174–75n6; in Wilhelm Meister, 129–34 clothing, 12, 126–35. See also fashion Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10–11, 65–75, 179n26 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 1–3, 5, 21, 49, 167, 176–77n3 Cooper, Andrew R., 66 corruption, 5, 7, 10–11, 161; in Horne Tooke, 60–64, 73–74, 178–79nn18, 20; in Leibniz, 47–49; in Locke, 15, 17, 21–24, 27–28, 30, 35–44, 166–68; in Penthesilea, 138, 140, 142–43, 146–49, 157, 165, 187n24 culture, 77, 91–93, 162–64, 187–88n1



index

deviation, 3–9, 49–50, 110–11, 115, 118–19 dirt: in Douglas, 13, 162–69, 187–88n1; in Penthesilea, 137–41, 151, 154–55, 185–86n5 Douglas, Mary, 13, 162–65, 187–88n1 Ecclesiastes, 24–28 Enlightenment, 1–5, 77–78, 91–92, 164, 174n8 enthusiasm: Begeisterung, 127–33; Schwärmerei, 90, 108, 111, 125, 127, 129 Epicureanism, 25–27, 174n2 error: Bildung and, 106–9, 111, 117–20, 125–29, 133–35; dirt, excrement, and, 162–69; errance and, 3–13, 165–69, 174n8; unreliability of language, 1–12, 165–69;—in Horne Tooke, 59– 67, 73–75;—in Leibniz, 51–56, 73, 75;—in Locke, 19–33, 37–41, 43–44, 46–47. See also solecism; subreption; thirdness essence, 32–33, 50, 175n13 etymology, 11, 46–47, 77, 165; in Coleridge, 65–66, 73–74; in Horne Tooke, 55–66, 73; in Kant, 78–79, 91–93; in Leibniz, 47–55, 65–66, 73; in Penthesilea, 142–43, 150, 152, 155–60, 187n16 exemplarity, 12, 50–51, 100–105, 117–18 experience, 23, 31, 41–42, 79, 81, 84– 89, 180–81n7 Evelyn, John, 39–40, 176n21 fashion, 12, 113–17, 127, 185n27 Fenves, Peter, 177nn4, 8, 10 fountains and pipes, 23–24, 27–28, 30, 39, 42–44, 166–68, 174–75n6 Freud, Sigmund, 168–69 Garve, Christian, 117, 127

gift, 12; analogy and, 77–78, 88, 94–95, 97–99, 101–5; heautonomy as self-giving, 88, 94, 97–98, 101, 104; impossibility of, 78, 97–99, 101, 103–4; question of original giver, 77, 95, 97–98, 101–2; re-gifting, 76, 78, 98, 101, 104 Godwin, William, 65–66, 73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 185n23; Faust I, 107; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 107–9, 111, 118–35, 165, 184n17, 185n25 gold, 28–34; excrement and, 167–69; false gold versus, 10, 29–30, 32–33, 43–44. See also money Goropius, Johannes, 50–51, 55–56, 177n11 Grier, Michelle, 180n6, 182nn16, 17, 20 Hazlitt, William, 116–17, 127 Hederich, Benjamin, 141–42, 155–56 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 106–9, 126 Herodotus, 10, 12–13, 137, 141–48, 152, 159, 164–66, 186n9, 187n26 Hermes, 56–57, 59, 63 Hippocrates, 124–26, 185n23 Horne Tooke, John, 10–11, 157, 165; Epea pteroenta, 45–46, 55–66, 73–75, 178–79nn18, 19, 20, 21 imagination, 86–87, 102, 112–13, 115 interest, 43–44, 63–64, 86–87; interest rate, 35–38 irony, 74, 100, 118, 121–22, 133–36, 166–67 Jacobs, Carol, 159, 186n8 judgment, 2, 11, 12; in Wilhelm Meister, 118–19, 123–25, 127, 133–35; in Kant, 77, 80, 85–90, 92, 94–97, 102, 117; in Smith, 113–14

index Kant, Immanuel, 10–12, 77–79, 165, 167, 180nn4, 6; analogy in, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 87–90, 95–105, 182n20; Critique of Judgment, 77–78, 85–90, 93–94, 114–18, 182–83nn17, 18, 19, 20, 23; Critique of Pure Reason, 81–85, 89–90, 99, 181–82nn12, 13, 14, 16; Inaugural Dissertation, 79–81, 86, 90, 181nn8, 9, 10 Kittler, Wolf, 152–53, 155, 187n24 Kleist, Heinrich von, 10, 12–13, 139– 40, 185–86n5, 187n19; Penthesilea, 136–41, 147–56, 159–60, 162, 164–65, 187n21 language: corruption and, 47–49, 60– 64, 73–74; money and, 29–35, 37–41, 43–44; origin of, 19–21, 31, 47–49, 51; thought and, 15–29, 31–39, 41–43, 45–47, 55–61, 65–75, 137, 141, 161, 164; violence and, 50–55, 135, 140, 143, 145–48, 151–55, 159, 164–66. See also corruption; etymology; money Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 10–11, 13– 14, 58, 64–66, 73, 75, 157, 159, 165, 176–77n3; New Essays on Human Understanding, 45–56; “Dissertatio praeliminaris,” 48–50 Locke, John, 10–11, 45, 55–56, 58, 61, 73, 75, 157, 165–68, 174n2, 175nn8, 12, 13; economic writings, 35–41, 175n14, 176n18; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 13–35, 41–44 madness, 134–35, 137, 147, 164 maternity, 120–22, 149, 152–53, 156–57 mediation: in Hegel, 106–9, 126–27; language as medium, 15–16, 19–34, 39–44, 166–67; language change and, 49–51, 55, 59–60, 74; moderation and, 108–9, 111–13, 116–17, 119–21, 123–27, 129–35, 184n10; sympathy and, 12, 112–13, 123, 129, 134, 184n10;



in Wilhelm Meister, 107–9, 117, 119– 21, 123–35. See also middle, the memory/forgetting, 67–70, 101, 104–5, 128 metaphor, 1–2, 5–10, 12, 163–64, 168– 69; in Kant, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 88, 91–98, 104–5, 183n23; understanding and, 141–48, 152, 159, 164–66; violence and, 145–48, 152–53, 155, 159, 164–66 metonymy, 8, 67, 69–70, 73–74, 129–35, 151 middle, the, 12; Bildung and, 108–11, 117–20, 124–29, 132–35; fashion, utility, and, 113–17, 127–35; mediocrity and, 115–17, 129; reason as art of, 119, 124–25, 131, 135; physician as figure of, in Wilhelm Meister, 123–25, 131, 133–34; thirdness and, in Kleist, 137–41, 148–52, 157–60, 165; virtue and, 109–11, 116, 135, 184n8. See also mediation; moderation mirroring, 18, 20, 46, 55, 69–70, 72, 99–101 moderation, 12; in Wilhelm Meister, 108–9, 111, 117, 119–21, 123–27, 129, 131–35, 184n17; sympathy and, 112–13, 123, 129, 184n10; virtue and, 109–13, 116–17, 135, 184n8. See also mediation; middle, the money: coinage, 35–41, 176nn16, 19, 21; gold vs., 10–11, 29–30, 43–44. See also gold naming: Adam and, 31, 175nn11, 12; names of gods, 25–27; names of rivers, 50–51, 54, 152–53, 155–60 origin: of language, 19–21, 31, 47–49, 51; narrative of origination in Locke, 14–19, 21–24; in Penthesilea, 13, 136–37, 140–52, 155–59, 165



index

paternity, 120–22, 124 performativity, 40, 112–13, 144 pipes. See fountains and pipes pleasure, 16–20, 86–87, 112 Prickett, Stephen, 65, 74 propriety, 5–7; in Aristotle, 110–11; in Horne Tooke, 56, 59–60, 62; in Kant, 79–80, 84, 96–97; in Leibniz, 48–49; in Locke, 20, 33–34, 40–43, 166–67; in Penthesilea, 145, 147, 152– 56, 159; in Smith, 112–13, 116–17 purposiveness, 81, 86–91, 93, 95–97, 103 Quintilian, 5–7, 13, 173n5 reading, 125–26, 131, 174n8; rhetorical, 3–13, 166–67 reason (Vernunft), 11–12, as-if character of, 84–85, 87, 89–90, 97, 99, 101, 105, 165, 182nn17, 19; fallibility of, 79–86, 90, 99, 105; transcendental ideas of, 11, 81–90, 99, 101, 182n19 Redfield, Marc, 86, 117–18, 121–22, 135 repetition, 9, 18, 68–75, 164, 169 resemblance: gold vs. false gold, in Locke, 29–30, 32–33, 43–44; in Kant, 11, 79–85, 91–92, 104 rhetoric, 5–9, 13, 19, 53, 139–40, 161– 69, 173–74n6, 177–78n12, 186n11, 188n2; rhetorical performance in Herodotus, 144–47, 164–66;—in Locke, 14–19, 21–24 risk. See danger/risk sacrifice, 123–24, 146–47, 164 secrecy, 67–69, 95, 99–101, 104–5 Shapin, Steven, 41–42

simile, 29–30, 33–34, 44, 102–3, 138, 147–52 Smith, Adam, 10, 12, 127, 129, 133–34; Theory of Moral Sentiment, 112–16, 118, 184nn10, 11 solecism, 12–13, 136, 140–52, 159, 161, 164–65, 186n11 spectrality, 12, 169; in Cheah, 77–78, 92, 95–100, 105; in Coleridge, 71–72, 180n38; in Wilhelm Meister, 120–22, 134 Strabo, 157–58, 186nn9, 12 sublime, 86–87, 102, 184n8 subreption, 11, 78–91, 93–101, 104–5, 180–81nn6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 182n16 sympathy, 12, 112–13, 123, 129, 134, 184n10 synecdoche, 52–54, 64 Tanaïs, 13, 137, 142, 146, 152–53, 155–60 teleology, 77–81, 85–98, 104, 115–16 theatricality, 112–13, 121, 128, 184n10 thirdness, 5, 49–51, 137–41, 148–52, 157–60, 165 trope, 46–54, 65, 177nn8, 9 truth, 27–30, 33–35, 41–43 Urbild, 115, 118 utility, 12, 113–14, 116, 133 violence, 47, 50–55, 136–37, 140–54, 159, 165 virtuality, 49–50, 99, 101, 110–11, 120–22, 133–34 virtue, 6–7, 12, 102–3, 109–13, 116–17, 135, 164, 184n8 zeugma, 139–40