Autós: Individuation in the European Text 9781786606754, 9781786606761

Table of contents :
Autós
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Reader’s (Short) Gide to Autós
1 Of Wounds and Woundings: Damages to the Relational Body
2 The Invention of the Modern Self between Ḥayy and Robinson
3 The Fundamentalist Reinvention of the Individual in the Age of Reformation and Its Discontents
4 Painted, Mirrored, and Mystical Bodies: A Medieval Proliferation
5 A New Interiority in Christian Romania
6 Roman Legal Actors: The Ordered Permutation of Personae
7 Keys to Greek Individuation: Oikeiōsis, Ousia, Autos
8 Greek Early Theoretical Bottlenecks and Their Homeric Horizon
9 Not Just Autos: The Reinvention of Abundance
Epilogue: Provincializing the Individual: The Perdividuation of Relational Bodies
As a Conclusion
Appendix: A Note on Paradigms (and Relational Bodies)
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Autós

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Experiments/On the Political Series Editors: Iain Mackenzie, University of Kent Amanda Giorgio, UMass Amherst This series reflects on how interdisciplinary and/or practice-led thought can create the conditions for experimental thinking about politics and the political. What if the domain of the political is not what we usually think it is? Are there ways of thinking about the nature of politics and the political that can take us beyond frameworks of conflict and cooperation? These questions derive from a commitment to the idea that political thought has not yet exhausted its creative potential with regard to what constitutes the political domain. It is also motivated by the desire for political theory to become a genuinely creative discipline, open to collaborative interdisciplinary efforts in innovation. Moreover, if our understanding of the political world is to keep pace with political events then it is important that political theorists do not simply presume that they express one or other of these dominant models of the political; rather they should remain open to the possibility that experiments in politics may be happening ‘on the street’ in ways that require theorists to think differently about what is meant by ‘the political’.

Titles in the Series

The Political Space of Art: The Dardenne Brothers, Ai Weiwei, Burial and Arundhati Roy Benoît Dillet and Tara Puri Comedy and Critical Thought: Laughter as Resistance Edited by Iain MacKenzie, Fred Francis and Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone The Politics of Everyday Life Robert Porter The Aesthetics of Necropolitics Edited by Natasha Lushetich A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet George Sotiropoulos Autós: Individuation in the European Text Riccardo Baldissone

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Autós Individuation in the European Text

Riccardo Baldissone

London • New York

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2020 by Riccardo Baldissone All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-675-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-675-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-676-1 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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To fortuna

I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and clichésα1 Donner de belles raisons. Il serait beaucoup mieux de n’en point donner du tout, ou d’en donner de bonnesb2 ce n’est que par des contes qu’on réussit dans le mondeg 3 Nous sommes tous de lopins, et d’une contexture si monstreuse informe & diuerse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, feit faict son ieud 4 ignotas animum dimittit in artes naturamque novate 5

α  Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 140. b  ‘Give beautiful reasons. It would be much better than not giving any at all, or giving good ones.’ Denis Diderot, Principes de Politique des Souveraines xxv, in Œuvres complètes, J. Assézat et M. Tourneux eds., vol. 2 (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 459–502, 466. When not otherwise specified, translations are mine. g  ‘It is only through stories than one succeeds in the world.’ Voltaire, Le Taureau blanc, in id., Œuvres Complètes, Louis Moland ed., vol. 21 (Paris: Garnier, 1883), 483–512, 504. d  ‘We are all made of patches, and of a texture so monstrous formless and diverse, that every piece, every moment, plays its own game.’ Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 5th ed., Bordeaux Copy with autograph corrections and additions (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1588), 140r. e  ‘He devotes himself to unknown arts and changes nature.’ Publius Ovidius Naso (hereinafter Ovid), Metamorphoses 8.188–189.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A Reader’s (Short) Gide to Autós xi 1  Of Wounds and Woundings: Damages to the Relational Body

1

2  The Invention of the Modern Self between Ḥayy and Robinson

25

3  T  he Fundamentalist Reinvention of the Individual in the Age of Reformation and Its Discontents

47

4  Painted, Mirrored, and Mystical Bodies: A Medieval Proliferation

69

5  A New Interiority in Christian Romania

97

6  Roman Legal Actors: The Ordered Permutation of Personae

113

7  Keys to Greek Individuation: Oikeiōsis, Ousia, Autos 133 8  Greek Early Theoretical Bottlenecks and Their Homeric Horizon

161

9  Not Just Autos: The Reinvention of Abundance

183

Epilogue: Provincializing the Individual: The Perdividuation of Relational Bodies

219

As a Conclusion

239

Appendix: A Note on Paradigms (and Relational Bodies)

241

Selected Bibliography

243

Index 265 vii

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Acknowledgments

I came to this book not only, as Catullus would have it, multas per gentes et multas per aequora vectus, carried through many a people and sea, but also with other people: in these brief notes I will list just some of them, as representatives of the many to whom I am obliged. In Australia, Jim Ife unconditionally backed my first wide-ranging exploration of modernities. Lubica Ucnik witnessed with benevolent surprise my public deconstruction of Platonic and Aristotelian language apparatuses; Ali Mozaffari gave me the opportunity to apply my pluralistic construction of identity to a Greekinspired funerary monument in Persian land. In London, Costas Douzinas hosted me and my Roman Law project at Birkbeck, where Peter Fitzpatrick offered me his museum-like office and his conversation; I benefited from the hospitality of Anton Schütz too. Daniela Carpi’s several invitations to Verona encouraged my ever-expanding incursions into literature; I could explore in detail the work of La Boétie, also through the eyes of his brotherly friend Montaigne, thanks to Sidia Fiorato. I owe Bernard (and Caroline) Stiegler a generous hospitality to me, my daughter, and even Evagrius at Épineuil, and intellectual stimulation aplenty; I thank Maria Drakopoulou and Nick Piška for my sojourn at the University of Kent, and the time and space to work on my reconstruction of the trajectory of juridical theology. Saul Newman, who shares my interest in Stirner, hosted me on the page and at Goldsmiths. Sara Baranzoni and Paolo Vignola kindly made room several times for my pen, my voice, and my construction of subjectivities. Andrew Lockett gave me all his support as a publisher during my systematic exploration of the constellation of freedom. I owe Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos a repeatedly renewed hospitality at the University of Westminster, and the precious encouragement to improvise. I would at least mention Fausto Buttà, Cedric Beidatsch, David Bellatalla, John Mandalios, Francesco Vitale, Jacques de Ville, ix

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Acknowledgments

Andrea Mura, Chiara Battisti, Marc de Wilde, Andrea Bardin, Ronald Bogue, Bruno Latour, Etienne Balibar, Vito De Lucia, David Chandler, Bice Benvenuto, Nathan Widder, Antonio Cerella, and last but not least, the friendly and helpful staff of the British Library, which is a place that after several years of everyday squatting, as it were, I may rightfully call home. Of course, it would be difficult to thank enough Iain MacKenzie, who made this book possible. Finally, I thank my lover also for her editing work, and Annalisa Mazzeni for her hospitality. To all these people, and to all the others I failed to mention, goes my gratitude.

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Introduction A Reader’s (Short) Guide to Autós

The text of a book may by pictured as a reading path: as we go along, a timely distribution of quotations and cross-references that work as appropriate signposts reassures even the boldest of travellers. In other words, a book is supposed to help the reader to strike a balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar, so that her advance into the (relatively) unknown could rely on the comforting support of her previous knowledge. Yet, whilst this very knowledge allows the reader to engage with the text of a book, it may diverge and even conflict with the novel and unfamiliar material that the book brings to light: this dissonance is even stronger when a reader is faced with a book’s unusual ways of presenting well-known and canonical texts. This is the case with the present book, which retraces the European construction of the identity of humans, gods, and things in general with the help of its most authoritative source, namely, written texts: the book reassesses these texts on the basis of their components, that is, written words. It is a relatively unusual focus, which produces a shift of priority, from the supposed objects of the texts to the ways in which these texts construct their objects. Such a change of perspective may be disorienting, especially because the exploration of textual strategies does not discriminate between disciplines and genres: in this book, texts are chosen according to their relevance, whether generally acknowledged or not, to the processes of construction of identities. In turn, the book detects the relevance of a text by tracing its influence on other texts: we may visualize this effect as a cascade, which descends as a xi

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variety of water flows from a common source, namely, the Homeric poems, and which is also fed from other textual traditions. We directly access this catchment area from its lowest level, that is, the current senses of words and texts. These senses construct our present world(s): yet, they bear the long-term legacy of their transformations in time. We may say that our language constantly re-enacts the past through its moulding of present humans and things. We cannot prevent this moulding effect: what we can do is to render somewhat visible the layering of deriving, deviating, and conflicting senses, in order to be able to negotiate their influence on ourselves and on our world(s). Historical reconstructions usually perform this task by narrating the course of the events in chronological order. Such a narrative device allows us to produce an image of the past as preceding its later developments, as if we could ignore that we can observe this past only through the lenses, so to speak, of these developments. On the contrary, we inevitably project onto the past our concerns: these concerns are doubly anachronistic, because they are our present concerns, and they include the various historical concretions that operate through our language. No cutting power can undo this Gordian knot that ties together an ever-growing amount of temporal sequences. Yet, we may at least acknowledge the relative priority of our position as narrators: this priority is relative, both because of the previously recalled formatting action of our past-laden language, and because of our inevitable, though often denied, reciprocal collaboration, as no narrator is an island. Moreover, it is important to caution that such authorial priority too is itself the expression of the specific tools with which we construct the past: narrations, and their spatialization of temporal transformations, especially after the spreading of alphabetical technology. Actually, also before writing, past and future are allocated a spatial position in relation to each other, with the former (the past) preceding the latter (the future). Nevertheless, whilst we use to imagine ourselves as backing the past and facing the future, these positions appear somewhat reversed in the Homeric epic: when Homer describes the wise Palamedes as being able to see forward and behind, he means Palamedes’ ability to build on his knowledge of past events an anticipation of their consequences in the future, which follow behind. However, neither Palamedes nor Homer necessarily places the future behind his shoulders, as we do with the past: our embodied orientation

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Introduction xiii

of the temporal sequence relies on a unified notion of the living body, which in Homer is missing, as it has not yet been invented. We are long used to set ourselves as the reference position for the temporal sequence of events that are either already behind us in the past or yet to happen in the future in front of us. Hence, the Homeric image of a future that lays behind produces on our embodied temporal horizon a reversal of perspective: we may describe it with the words of Valéry, who insists that we enter the future backwards, just like Benjamin’s angel of history, who is facing the storm that is coming from the past and is propelling him into the future. These surprising and slightly disturbing images of retrograde advancement share with Homeric characters the sense of the generally unfathomable novelty of the future. Moreover, their backward orientation may also help us to visualize our relationship with the past as an ongoing layering, whose results are constantly in front of us, but in the reverse chronological order: the later, the closer. Our engagement with the past is not so neat though. In the case of written texts and their senses, if we recover the previous water metaphor, the downstream chronological motion of the variety of flows and rivulets is not only altered by the rocks and pebbles of historical chance: inasmuch as we move upstream into the past to engage with texts (and words), we keep repositioning them with respect to other texts, to ourselves, and to our present. This ongoing interference seems to undermine the possibility of recovering the past: yet, as the past itself only re-emerges through our work in the present, we can but make as visible as possible our inevitable intervention. The book pursues this visualization through a double strategy: the narrative integration of textual sources, also in their original language and script, and the exposure of the historical perspective of its author (and its readers) as a narrative point of view that moves from the present towards the past. On the one hand, whilst the quotations in their original form may appear to hinder the narrative flow, their visible presence allows readers to directly follow the transformations, translations, and manipulations of words: these words are thus shown to work as catalysts of senses and actions, rather than just windowpanes onto the world. On the other hand, the reversal of the narrative convention of chronological order may be challenging, as it unsettles our writing and reading habits: yet, the choice of a narrative path that moves from our modern temporal location

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towards the past may spare us the fictive construction of past words and texts as if they were not changed by their various later uses. Of course, a retrograde narration is fictive too: nonetheless, its uncommon progressing direction makes it immediately visible as a narrative device, and it thus shows the operativity of the historical reconstruction as a narrative apparatus. This visibility is enhanced by contrast with the first and last parts of the book, which follow in chronological order the emergence of the European semantic constellation of wounds and woundings, and of the modern deviations from the discourse of identity respectively. Let’s examine this alternance of narrative orders in more detail. The exploration of the transformations of the European vocabulary of wounds and woundings starts in medias res at the beginning of the book: it is meant to let appear at once the plurality of senses that is hidden behind our conceptual apparatus, and the more general limitations cast on this very apparatus by more general categories. In particular, the first chapter shows that the European lexicon of wounds and woundings keeps reproducing the Greek dichotomy of acting and being acted upon. This dichotomy rationalizes the archaic logic of war and personal domination as the abstract priority of the unchanging over the changing: hence, the historical constellation of wounds and woundings unfolds as a relevant example of the historical trajectory of the discourse of being and identity. Nevertheless, as the historical mapping of wounds and woundings proceeds in chronological order, it may appear to be teleologically oriented towards its final outcome, namely, conceptual abstractions: such an orientation risks reiterating the discourse of being and identity as our inescapable horizon, because abstractions seem to be inextricable from this discourse. This is why the book then sets forth to explore the transformations of the language of being and identity in the reverse chronological order, so as to reach a textual stratum that precedes the early constitution of this language. The Homeric epic is shown to provide the lower chronological boundary for the discourse of being and identity: the transcriptions of Homeric poems are presented as enacting a previous discursive regime that implicitly underlines the historicity of the language of being and identity. After that, the narration can directly address the construction of a language that is not centred on being and identity: the last two chapters of the book resume the chronological order to extract from within the very modern textual tradition as many as possible theoretical tools for this task.

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Introduction xv

The recovered modern tools are also recombined with novel ones, which the book puts to work during the investigation of the past through its textual remnants. All these theoretical devices concur in sketching the sphere of practices as an addition, rather than an alternative, to the sphere of being, as construed by the language of identity. This additive nature is claimed as the distinctive character of practices, which deliver even destruction and death as novel productions. The previous schematic description may suffice as a general roadmap of the book’s narrative path: I may specify that ahead of this path (in both chronological directions) further details are frequently added to the narration, so as to enrich its linear progression with a network of references: numerous internal cross-references to the body of the text and the notes are also provided. Introductions must be kept short, as they are only needed to facilitate the reader’s approach to the text: at this point, some readers are probably ready to go and dive into the actual narration, and perhaps, they are even prepared to follow my salmon’s leaps upstream the chronological flow, as it were. But as some other readers may feel more comfortable with a further foretaste of the path to come, I will draw a brief outline of its steps. As previously recalled, the first chapter of the book charts the historical appearance of the vocabulary of wounds and woundings in major European languages. Poets such as Ovid and Iacopone help to illustrate the evolving senses of this lexicon with their powerful images: in turn, the image of their relational bodies is proposed as a key to their different sufferings and coping strategies, and as a more general way out of the dichotomic construction of vulnerability and agency. Robinson Crusoe’s relational body too is suggested as a tool for (de)constructing his isolation, which soon after the publication of his story becomes a paradigmatic representation of the modern individual condition: Defoe’s novel ends up being read as a veritable narrative demonstration of the existence of the atomized individual. On the contrary, Robinson’s relational body is shown to incorporate a heterogeneous array of things (including several decisive human products) and living beings: each of these additions acts not simply as a prosthesis but as an enthesis, that is, a grafting agent, whose felicitous composition with Robinson’s indefatigable activity renews Robinson himself. The second chapter also provides an excursus (in chronological order) on the transformations of the European vocabulary of demonstration. The chapter then recalls an intentional narrative thought experiment: the Andalusian Ibn

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Ṭufayl recounts the mostly solitary life of Ḥayy as a demonstration of the natural human potential to learn and acquire divine-inspired wisdom. The third chapter describes how Bunyan literally turns upside down Ibn Ṭufayl’s optimistic view of human nature: the main character of the possibly most read English book, namely, The Pilgrim’s Progress, keeps reaffirming the absolute wickedness of the human soul. The chapter then reconstructs Calvin’s double apparatus, which incessantly produces uncertainty about one’s salvation, and temporary reassurance through the relentless removal of the possible obstacles to one’s redemption. In turn, Calvin is shown to rely on Luther’s rejection of the Church mediation between the Christian god and the faithful, who is severed from the other humans in her double inner role of accuser and accused. Rabelais’ decidedly larger-than-life heroes are called instead to witness human inter- and intra-connections: Rabelaisian characters appear to push further their Aristotelian source, and to offer a radical alternative to the contemporary Calvinist shrinking of relational bodies. In the fourth chapter, the proliferation of Renaissance and medieval bodies is evoked especially through self-representations in images and words: an astonishing variety of relations is shown to be involved in the bodily construction of both individuals and collectives. Inner plurality is openly claimed by Montaigne, who generalizes the outcome of his self-observation as the icastic statement that we are all made of patches; Dante coins neologisms that construct compenetration as a more-than-human faculty and a human model. The notion of mystical body as more than a mere aggregate of humans transcends the boundaries of juridical theology and overspills into the lay justification of the self-government of city-states; and also the pervasive god of Anselm may be construed as a relational body that absorbs the whole of reality. Tragic circumstances push Boethius towards inner dialogue, which he dramatizes as a conversation with the female personification of philosophy. The fifth chapter evokes not only the soothing arguments of Boethius’ Consolation, but also his previous work of translation of Greek philosophical (and religious) language into Latin, and his canonical definition of person. The chapter then explores the even more influential autobiographical narration that Augustine styles as a dialogue with his ever-silent divine interlocutor. Augustine masterfully depicts a dynamic of repression, transgression, and repentance that is at work in the life of his mother, his younger self, and himself: the narration of his inward turn is to set a standard for both confessional and autobiographical texts.

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Introduction xvii

The sixth chapter surveys the Roman construction of the person by juridical means. It first underlines Ulpian’s invention of the derivation of Roman juridical practices from the abstract notion of justice. This principled approach to law, albeit now familiar, will only be claimed by medieval jurists: Byzantine legal compilations mostly rely on the earlier Gaius’ tripartition of legal matter into issues about persons, things, and (legal) actions respectively. The chapter construes Gaius’ law of persons as a cartography of lawful transformations of personal status, which does not require a general definition of the person itself. Definitions and logical structures are instead previously demanded for systematizing law by Cicero, who is influenced by Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The seventh chapter opens with another brief excursus (in chronological order) that traces the Stoic roots of the modern notion of self-preservation: the narration then resumes its retrograde motion for dealing with Aristotle’s and Plato’s construction of the philosophical lexicon. Main Aristotelian expressions, including the fundamental term ousia, are examined in detail, and novel English translations are offered: moreover, the new powerful Aristotelian notions, which include that of definition, are shown to presuppose the priority of the unchanging. The chapter then addresses Plato’s interventions on Greek language, which allows him to contrive his veritable apparatus of production of abstract notions: the nominalization of the key word autos is recalled as the possibly first written appearance of the self, as a result of a language technology. Before Plato, writers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes endow written Greek language with a vocabulary of nominalized epithets and verbs, including the neologism ‘being,’ or that-which-is, by tinkering with the Homeric oral language of actions: the eighth chapter first documents these language endeavours. It then follows Hesiod’s construction of his poetic characters, which comprise not only the Homeric gods and many novel divine personifications of notions and features, but also the author himself. In turn, the chapter’s consideration of the Homeric characters and their activities reveals the felicitous absence of both definitions of the living body and the unified psyche: Homer depicts humans as permeable and sensitive to the interventions of gods, of other humans, and of their own inner psychic agents, which are also multiplied into the outcomes of their actions. Homeric narrations show that before the Platonic reduction of the person to her tiered psyche inner dialogue does occur, and its interlocutors evaluate different options without necessarily conforming to a pre-determined hierarchy of values.

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Introduction

After having reached a textual layer that precedes the invention of body, mind, being, and self, in the ninth chapter the narration once again resumes the chronological order to integrate in an evolving path the modern displacements of the technologies of the self. The chapter recalls that Leibniz ascribes to bodies a condition of perpetual flux, which Hume then extends to souls too. For his part, Hegel displaces Platonic and Aristotelian self-reflexivity as the seat of identity by internalizing contradiction; Stirner instead claims the uncontrollability of the inner sphere by evacuating it of all definitions, concepts, and theoretical structures that could hinder its action. Dostoyevsky’s characters enact inner multiplicity as an inner splitting, which Nietzsche embraces as a pluralization of collaborating and conflicting inner subjects, and which Breuer and Freud theorize as a functional (and dysfunctional) inner articulation. Bergson stresses not only the interpenetrability of inner phenomena, but also interpersonal exosmosis, which Simondon recasts as an intrapersonal transindividual dimension, and which Deleuze and Guattari propound as a generalized spreading of multiplicities. The epilogue gathers together the various innovative tools that are at work in the book. It first remarks that the image of the relational body is intended not just as another possible notion of the body, but as a further theoretical reoccupation of a wider semantic space: the Homeric constellation of bodily parts and agents, which Plato recasts as the dichotomy of sōma and psykhē, the Christians render in Latin as corpus and anima, and the moderns understand as body and mind. Yet, unlike post-Homeric dichotomic settlements, the sphere of action of the relational body is not the being of entities, but the performing of practices. In the sphere of practices, transformation replaces being as the key language tool: more important, transformation itself is no longer the becoming of an entity (as in the sphere of being), but the movement of quitting a sharing and entering another one. The epilogue recalls that such is the ongoing movement of incorporations, because a relational body is somewhat reshaped by each enthesis that it invaginates. In turn, the epilogue underlines that the very image of invagination reverses and displaces the metaphors of cutting, which still bear (also through such words as ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’) the legacy of the Greek male vocabulary of war and its Platonic and Aristotelian rationalizations. Moreover, the incessant absorption of entheses by the relational body well exceeds the control of the individual: the epilogue suggests instead the neologism ‘perdividual,’ and the likewise new verb ‘perdividuation.’ These novel words are construed with the Latin prefix per, that is, through, in order to remind us that we can neither choose all that enters us nor all that we enter, but surely, we could better manage our constitutive participation with humans and things.

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Chapter One

Of Wounds and Woundings Damages to the Relational Body

From his painful exile on the Black Sea, Ovid writes in verse to his wife on a somewhat similar destiny: ‘paene decem totis aluit Poeantius annis / pestiferum tumido vulnus ab angue datum,’1 for nearly ten years the son of Poias kept nursing / the festering wound, inflicted by a venom-ripe snake. We owe the Iliad the first hint to the disturbing vicissitudes of Poias’ son Philoctetes, whose intolerably stinking ἕλκος2 [helkos], ulcer on the foot causes him to be abandoned on the uninhabited island of Lemnos. In the Odyssey, Nestor reassures both Telemachus and us readers that Philoctetes is safe at home3: we know through later sources4 that he is rescued and cured because his presence is needed to render successful the Greek siege of Troy. It was recently suggested that Philoctetes’ wound is the effect of a poisoned arrow5: yet, both the duration of his illness and its role in the economy of the Trojan War seem to transcend the dimension of mere physiology. However, if compared with Philoctetes’ wound, Ovid’s vulnus, or, as he repeatedly writes, vulnera,6 in the plural, are less a solution of continuity in his bodily tissues7 than in his existential path.

 Ovid, Tristia 5.2.13–14.  Homer, Iliad 2.723. In the text, ἕλκεϊ [helkei], singular neuter dative case. 3  Homer, Odyssey 3.190. 4   See the so-called Little Iliad, whose text is mostly lost, but whose plot is summarized by Proclus. 5   See Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological & Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2008). 6   See, for example, Tristia 1.1.99, 1.3.35, and 2.209. 7   This is a modern surgical definition of the term ‘wound.’ In Latin, the surgeon is aptly named ‘vulnerarius.’ 1 2

1

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2

Chapter One

We don’t know why the emperor Augustus exiles Ovid for good, and the poet himself does not give us more than a couple of clues to the motivations for his punishment: ‘carmen et error,’8 a poem and a mistake. We know instead for sure the excruciating effects9 of his deportation to the last conquered province of the empire. Ovid’s vulnera mostly affect his relational body, as it were, and even we later readers experience the effects of the cut of his Roman relations: the exile severs the poet also from the historical and literary sources of his work Fasti,10 which thus remains unfinished. As to Ovid’s contemporaries, they could have described him as vulneratus,11 wounded, which is a word that the poet himself is not keen to use. On the contrary, at the time of Ovid, the term vulnerabilis, from which the English word ‘vulnerable’ derives, is yet to appear. Among extant texts, we may first spot it a few decades later, in a letter of Seneca to his friend Lucilius12: moreover, this occurrence seems to be repeated only four centuries later, in an unimaginative commentary to Virgil’s Aeneid by the scholiast Maurus Servius Honoratus.13 It is then perhaps surprising that the term invulnerabilis, invulnerable, is instead soon to proliferate in Seneca’s tracts. The Spanish sage, who is also to incur the lethal ire of another emperor,14 is even happy to define the word by comparison: ‘invulnerabile est non quod non feritur, sed quod non laeditur,’15 invulnerable is not that which is not struck, but that which is not wounded. As to the more abstract notions of vulnerability and invulnerability, neither of them finds Latin expression in ancient times: we come across some of their instances much later, for example in seventeenth-century treatises

  8 Ovid, Tristia 2.207.   9  We are immediately alerted to these effects by the very title of Ovid’s first collection of poems from the exile, namely Tristia, that is, sad things. 10   In the book Fasti, which deals with the Roman traditional calendar, Ovid uses the old form volnus (for example, 1.666). 11   See, for example, Quintus Ennius, fragment 144, in Marcus Tullius Cicero (hereinafter Cicero), Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino 90. 12   Lucius Annaeus Seneca (hereinafter Seneca), Ad Lucilium 82.24. 13   Maurus Servius Honoratus, Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil 6.57. 14   The emperor Nero forces his former mentor and advisor Seneca to suicide in 65, less than fifty years after Ovid’s death. 15  Seneca, De Constantia Sapientis 2.3.

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(invulnerabilitas16) and nineteenth-century clinical essays (vulnerabilitas17) respectively. The late emergence of language abstractions from the depictions of actions, things, and events is neither specific to the morphological area of the word vulnus, wound, nor to the Latin language: we may trace a parallel path within the constellation of terms that are related to the Greek verb τιτρώσκω [titrōskō], which we may translate as ‘to wound.’ The verb titrōskō18 recurs five times in the Homeric text19: its derivative form τρωτός20 [trōtos], vulnerable, is instead attested only once in the Iliad; it then reappears in the fourth century BCE, and it rarely occurs after that. In the meantime, in mid-fifth century BCE, Pindar and Aeschylus deploy the term ἄτρωτος21 [atrōtos], which expresses the sense of being invulnerable by adding an alpha22 privative prefix to the word trōtos. Whilst the notion of wound is referred to in medical tracts by the more abstract derivative τρῶσις23 [trōsis], Pindar associates the Homeric term helkos, ulcer, with the word τρώμα24 [trōma], whose Attic version τραύμα25 [trauma] will experience a brilliant resurgence in modern times. Aeschylus not only, perhaps, first uses the word trauma, but he also has Aphrodite, the goddess of love, use the very verb titrōskō to portray the desire of Ouranos, the sky, for Gaia, the earth: ‘holy ouranos craves to wound [trōsai] the earth.’26 Yet, this seemingly violent expression of male sexual desire is

16  See, for example, Georg Siegfried, Philosophia quinque-partita (Wien: Susanna Rickesin, 1662), 73; Henry More, Opera Theologica (London: J. Macock, 1675), 360. 17   See, for example, Michael Neidl, De ligandi arteriis laesis et dissectis (Landshut: J. Thomann, 1816), 10. 18   The verb first appears in the future middle infinitive form τρώσεσθαι [trōsesthai] in Homer, Iliad 12.66. 19   See Homer, Homeri Opera in five volumes, David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920). However, this text does not exhaust Homeric poetry, which, from the standpoint of oral poetics, ‘is a system that generates the forms that survive in the texts that we know as the Homeric poems.’ Gregory Nagy, Homer’s Text and Language (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 59. 20   The word is attested in the phrase τρωτὸς χρὼς [trōtos khrōs], vulnerable skin, Iliad 21.568. 21   ἄτρωτοί γε μὰν παῖδες θεῶν [atrōtoi ge man paides theōn], only the children of the gods are invulnerable, in Pindar, Isthmian 3 18; see also ἄτρωτον οὖθαρ [atrōton outhar], unwounded breast, in Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 532. 22   The Greek letter α [a], alpha, may be used as a prefix (αν [an] in front of vowels) before words that designate entities and qualities in order to express their privation. 23  Hippocrates, On Injuries of the Head 14. 24  Pindar, Pythian 4 271. 25  Aeschylus uses the word in the plural genitive form τραυμάτων [traumatōn] in Agamemnon 866. 26  Aeschylus, fragment 25 Danaides, from Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.73.

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not even realized in an anthropomorphic act of penetration, because it is the rain falling from the loving sky that gently impregnates [ekyse] the earth.27 As Aeschylus well knows, it is rather Ouranos who is soon to experience a traumatic wound on his divine body: according to Hesiod, a metal28 sickle forged by Gaia and held by her son Kronos will sever the heavenly father from his genitals and his power at once.29 Despite his godly nature, Ouranos seems to lack the feature of invulnerability, which in fact has no written expression in classical Greek, apart from the isolated occurrence of the word ἀτρωσία30 [atrōsia] in an Alexandrine scholium to Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. As to the opposite notion of vulnerability, in ancient times its closest Greek expression is the Galenic utilization of the word εὐπάθεια [eupatheia]. Paradoxically, the term eupatheia takes shape, following its etymology,31 as the condition of feeling good32: only later on, in a text previously attributed to Aristotle, the superlative form of the epithet εὐπαθής 33 [eupathēs] is used as the attribution of a better sensitivity, which within Galen’s symptomatological framework becomes an increased susceptibility to pain.34 It may be not by chance that, apart perhaps from Galen’s technical use of eupatheia, only in modern times terms that express the notion of vulnerability are attested in both Latin and Greek: actually, similar terms first emerge in vernacular languages. We may map their appearance in main European 27   Here is Aphrodite’s marvellous speech: ἐρᾷ μὲν ἁγνὸς οὐρανὸς τρῶσαι χθόνα, / ἔρως δὲ γαῖαν λαμβάνει γάμου τυχεῖν, / ὄμβρος δ᾽ ἀπ᾽ εὐνάοντος οὐρανοῦ πεσὼν / ἔκυσε γαῖαν· ἡ δὲ τίκτεται βροτοῖς / μήλων τε βοσκὰς καὶ βίον Δημήτριον· / δενδρῶτις ὥρα δ᾽ ἐκ νοτίζοντος γάμου / τέλειος ἐστί. τῶν δ᾽ ἐγὼ παραίτιος. [era men hagnos ouranos trōsai khthona, / erōs de gaian lambanei gamou tykhein, / ombros d’ ap’ eunaontos ouranou pesōn / ekyse gaian: hē de tiktetai brotois / mēlōn te boskas kai bion Dēmetrion: / dendrōtis hōra d’ ek notizontos gamou / teleios esti. tōn d’ egō paraitios.] Holy ouranos craves to wound the earth, / desire possesses gaia of mating, / and the fallen rain from the loving sky / impregnates gaia: it brings to mortals / limbs’ food and Demeter’s living: / by that moist marriage the tree’s produce / is ripe: of all this I am the cause. Ibid. 28   In the Theogony, Hesiod narrates that Gaia first produces γένος πολιοῦ ἀδάμαντος [genos poliou adamantos] (161), that is, literally, the element of grey unconquerable material, which we may perhaps render with ‘steel,’ and then she makes a sickle with it. 29   Ibid., 174–182. 30   Scholia in Apollonium Rhodium vetera 1.57. 31   The term eupatheia combines the word εὖ [eu], well, with a nominalized form of the verb πάσχω [paskhō], to be affected. 32   For example, Herodotus (1.22) uses eupatheia with the sense of ‘having a good time.’ 33  Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 887b23. 34   τὴν μὲν εὐπάθειαν (. . .) τῆς κεφαλῆς [tēn men eupatheian (. . .) tēs kephalēs], the sensitivity to pain (. . .) of the head, in Galen, Περί τῶν πεπονθότων τόπων [Peri tōn peponthotōn topōn], De Locis Affectis or On the Body Parts Affected by Disease, 3.13.

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idioms, together with the emergence of a constellation of morphologically related words. The first of these words does not come out of the metaphorical obscurity of the dark ages, but of the actual darkness of a fetid35 subterranean cell, where Iacopone is held in chains.36 The eloquent37 friar does not lose his high spirits though: in his undaunted verses, he proudly fields his champion, who cannot be wounded because he is shielded by his hate, or better, contempt of himself: Lo mio campione è armato del mio hodio scudato non pò esser uulnerato mentr’a collo lo scudone;38

My champion is armed by my hate is shielded he cannot be wounded as the shield ’s up the neck;

By constructing himself as a character of his poetic text, Iacopone re-enacts a literary tradition that harks back to the Hesiodic Theogonia,39 which is the first extant written European text. However, his self-representation is not only more humorous than Hesiod’s, but it also gives shape to the Christian tension between body and soul. This tension is previously expressed by Augustine’s endorsement of odium mundi et sui,40 that is, the hatred of the world and oneself. In turn, Augustine rationalizes Paul’s factual statement of the death of his self 41: ‘I have been crucified with Christ; I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.’42 35  ‘[A]rescece una priuata, / non fa fragar de moscune.’ There [in the dungeon] opens a latrine, / it does not give off a scent of musk. Que farai fra’ Iacovone? in Iacopone, Laude, Franco Mancini ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1974), 147, lines 17–18; London manuscript (hereinafter MS), British Library add.16567, 271r. The text is as close as possible to the manuscript. 36   Pope Boniface VIII has Iacopone imprisoned in 1298, and the Franciscan friar is only released in 1303, after the death of the pope. 37  Iacopone is a successful lawyer: only after the accidental death of his wife he radically changes his life. 38  Iacopone, Que farai fra’ Iacovone?, 151, lines 111–114; MS 272v. 39  Hesiod, Theogony 22. 40  Augustine, De Spiritu et Anima, in Migne, Patrologia Latina (hereinafter PL) 40, 779–832, 782. The expression odium sui appears in Tacitus (Germania 33) with a partially reflexive sense, as it targets other components of a collective subject (the Germans). 41   Here, the term ‘self’ renders Paul’s statement in modern psychological terms, whilst he paradoxically claims his own death tout court. 42   Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι· ζῶ δὲ οὐκέτι ἐγώ, ζῇ δὲ ἐν ἐμοὶ Χριστός [Khristō synestaurōmai; zō de ouketi egō, zē de en emoi Khristos], Galatians 2.20 (Nestle-Aland). Paul is convinced that he will not much longer endure his vicarious existence, because of the impending second coming of Jesus: ἔτι γὰρ μικρὸν ὅσον ὅσον, ὁ ἐρχόμενος ἥξει καὶ οὐ χρονίσει [eti gar mikron hoson hoson, ho erkhomenos hēxei kai ou khronisei], yet indeed in just a little while, he who is coming will come and will not delay. In Paul, Hebrew 10.37 (Nestle-Aland). Augustine writes three centuries after Paul, and because Jesus does not show up again, he and his fellow Christians have to learn to exercise the art

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Following this tradition, Iacopone’s consistent embodiment of the contemptus mundi et sui, the contempt of oneself and the world, gives a Christian turn to Seneca’s definition of the word invulnerabile, invulnerable: the friar’s Christian self cannot be wounded, inasmuch as he embraces the sufferings of his bodily self. Such an embracing entails the previous severance of Iacopone’s soul and body, which enter his poetic narration as fully individuated characters. In particular, the depiction of the champion makes visible the split that allows Iacopone to relocate, as it were, his identity: the parodic description of his misfortunes is a brilliant tool in this distancing strategy, which has Iacopone watching, side by side with his readers, the tragicomic show of his duress. Iacopone’s vulgarization of the Latin verb vulnerare is followed by the French term vulnérer, which is attested around 138043: the Spanish vulnerar44 and the English ‘vulnerate’45 instead only appears at the end of the sixteenth century. Whilst the French inuulnerable,46 the Italian invulnerabile47 and the English ‘invulnerable’48 emerge in this order during the sixteenth century too, their counterparts vulnerable,49 vulnerabile50 and ‘vulnerable’51 only surface between the end of the same century and the end of the following one.

of patience: they get used to put up with their anxiety and to delay their expectations beyond the end of their ordinary life. 43   Jean d’Outremeuse, Ly Myreur des Histors [1380ca], tome 5 (Bruxelles: M. Hayez, 1867), 288. 44   The past participle vulnerado, wounded, appears as a hapax in the thirteenth poem of the second version (Canticle B) of the Cántico espiritual of Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross). The phrase cieruo vulnerado, that is, wounded stag, echoes the phrase cieruo herido in the previous version (Canticle A), but in this case the need to rhyme with the word amado, loved, probably prompts the use of the new term in this erotically charged conversation between bride and groom. 45   Oswald Gaebelkhover, The boock of physicke, A. M. trans. (Dorte: Isaack Caen, 1599), 54/1. 46   Lemaire de Belges, Jean, Les Illustrations des Gaules et Singularitez de Troye (1509), in id., Œuvres, J. Stecher ed., vol. 1 (Louvain: J. Lefever, 1882), 280. 47   The first occurrence of the word invulnerabile is in 1532, according to the Grande dizionario italiano della lingua dell’uso, 2ª ed., 8 vols. (Torino: Utet, 2007). The word ‘invulnerabile’ is attested in the 1612 first edition of the vocabulary of the Accademia della Crusca. 48   Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: Richard Field for William Ponsonbie, 1596), Second Part, 6.4, sign. Ccv. 49   François Antoine Pomey, Le Dictionnaire Royal: Augmenté (Lyon: Antoine Molin, 1671), 1004. Pomey does not list the word vulnerable as a neologism though. 50   The first occurrence of the word vulnerabile is in 1532, according to the Grande dizionario italiano della lingua dell’uso. 51   According to the OED, the first occurrence of the word ‘vulnerable’ (written as ‘Uulnerable’) in the sense of ‘having power to wound’ is in Thomas Middleton, Sir R. Sherley, sent ambassadour in the name of the King of Persia, to Sigismond the third, King of Poland and Swecia and to other princes of Europe his royall entertainement into Cracovia, the chiefe citie of Poland, with his pretended comming into England: also, the honourable praises of the same Sir Robert Sherley, giuen vnto him in that kingdome, are here likewise inserted (London: J. Windet, for J. Budge, 1609), 13; Shakespeare possibly first uses the term in our current sense in the same year in Macbeth (published 1623) 5.8.11.

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We saw that the abstract notions of vulnerability and invulnerability have no expression (apart from the Alexandrine scholium) in classical Greek and Latin: they are both first attested in English, where they are construed with an English Germanic suffixation, in 1655, as ‘invulnerablenesse,’52 and in 1727, as ‘vulnerableness’53 respectively. The French term invulnérabilité is first in print in 1732 on the Mercure de France: it is probably the model of the alternative English word ‘invulnerability,’ which is registered in Ash’s 1775 New and Complete Dictionary of English Language. The Oxford English Dictionary first detects the English alternative term ‘vulnerability’54 in the 1808 moralist tract in form of a novel Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, written by the bluestocking-turned-preacher Hannah More: another thirty-two years are to pass before Balzac coins the French neologism vulnérabilité.55 The Spanish vulnerabilidad56 and the German Vulnerabilität57 are likewise a (late) nineteenth-century legacy: but it is only in 1922 that the Italian dictionary Zingarelli records the word vulnerabilità. Nowadays, the concept of vulnerability seems not only to have gained currency, but it is also undergoing a radical re-evaluation, which is questioning its (mostly) negative modern connotation.58 We may reconsider in this light the time frame of the terminology of wounding in main European languages. The words that describe the inability59 to be wounded appear to be construed by adding a negative prefix to the words expressing the ability to be wounded. Yet, with the sole exception of the Homeric hapax, all the words that exclude 52   John Prideaux, Euchologia: or, the Doctrine of Practical Praying (London: R. Marriot, 1656), 92 (1.6). 53  Nathan Bailey, The Universal Etymological English Dictionary, vol. 1 [printed as ‘Vol. II’] (London: T. Cox, 1727). 54   Hannah More, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), vol. 1, 108. 55   Honoré de Balzac, ‘La France et l’Étranger’ (1836), in id., Œuvres complètes, vol. 23 (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1873), 379–516, 381. 56   José Tomás de Cuéllar Facundo [1871], Historia de Chucho el Ninfo (Barcelona: Hermenegildo Miralles, 1890), 184. 57   August Weismann, Das Keimplasma. Eine Theorie der Vererbung (Jena: Fischer, 1892), 176. 58  See, for example, Judith Butler, ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics,’ in id., Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (London: Verso, 2004), 19–49; id., ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,’ in Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay eds., Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 12–27. 59   Here, I deliberately turn upside down the traditional association of the words ‘inability’ and ‘ability’ with the conditions of being and not being affected respectively. I will go beyond this mere reversal later.

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the possibility to be wounded seem to occur in writing before their counterparts: even in the case of Seneca, who probably coins both Latin words vulnerabilis and invulnerabilis, the latter emerges before the former. One may be tempted to read this chronological priority as the expression of a generalized preference, and even an obvious one. No doubt, the European vocabulary of wounding owes much to the practice of war, and especially to the cutting and piercing effects of metallic objects on bodies: nonetheless, already in the Iliad, Apollo’s arrows are also spreading disease,60 which Euripides later turns into erotic insanity at the hands of another divine archer, namely, Eros.61 The figure of the wound of love becomes so widespread that it is no longer simply a metaphor: moreover, when Ovid sets one divine archer against the other, it is the very inventor of medicine who concedes defeat, and admits that ‘nullis amor est sanabilis herbis,’62 love can’t be healed by pharmaceutical herbs. Be as it may, this impossibility is not worrying Iacopone, who definitely does not want to be healed of his wound of love—and of course, he means the love of god: O ferita ioiosa ferita delettosa ferita gaudiosa ki de te è uulnerato63

O joyful wound delightful wound rejoicing wound for the one you hurt

Here, our good friar rekindles a long-standing tradition of transposing the object of love to an allegedly higher sphere than eros: this tradition harks back at least to Plato’s Symposium, and, possibly through the mediation of Philo, it motivates the inclusion of an indubitably explicit erotic poem, namely, ‫ׁירים‬ ִ ‫ש‬ ּ ִ ‫שׁיר ַה‬ ִ ‬ [Šîr HašŠîrîm] or Song of Songs, in both the Hebrew and the Christian biblical canons. Whilst the status of the wounds of love remains at least ambiguous, one might assume that, similarly to bodily injuries, a negative consideration of emotional wounds would be unanimous: for sure, Ovid’s vulnera would confirm this supposition. Yet, Iacopone’s champion appears to derive his strength from both physical and psychological abuse: in a hilarious mockery  Homer, Iliad 1.48 on.  Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 548–551. 62  Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.523. 63  Iacopone, O Amor, devino Amore, 107–108, lines 11–14; MS 248r. 60 61

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of his contemporary financial accumulation, Iacopone even describes his selfdespising attitude as a great capital (granne capetale64). We saw that Iacopone also capitalizes on a Christian tradition of contempt for the body: it would be easy also to show that such a tradition transcends the Christian utilitarian trade-off of the limited investment of a lifetime (to say it with Pascal65) for the unlimited profit of eternal life. In particular, long before Christianities, the disparaging of social conventions impoverishes at once the body politic and the personal (male) body, which Diogenes the Cynic degrades to a producer of faecal matter and sperm.66 Diogenes radicalizes Antisthenes’ approach67 and realizes a vertiginous downsizing of the philosophical focus, which is shrunk to the limits of the physical body. However, whilst the Cynics just mutilate the body by severing its relational components, the Stoics construct the body itself as an obstacle to the realization of their philosophical ideal of ἀπάθεια68 [apatheia], that is, absence of emotions. In so doing, they push Plato’s call for rationally directing emotions towards a strategy of systematic repression. Of course, as Foucault (and Deleuze, and Guattari) would remind us, repression is but another construction of that which is repressed: hence, when the Stoics pursue apatheia, Plotinus disregards his body,69 and Christian anchorites daily mortify their flesh, they do not renounce their desires in toto. On the contrary, they try to react to the widespread condition of fear and anxiety, which, after the collapse of participatory democracies in Greece and Rome, mirrors the social and political impotence of Hellenistic and Roman Imperial subjects respectively. These feelings of fear and anxiety are cunningly construed as merely inner hindrances, which are not as insurmountable as the social and political hurdles in the outer world, and which can be kept under control with an effort that appears to be within the reach of the individual.70

 Iacopone, Que farai fra’ Iacovone?, 150, line 107; MS 272v.  The celebrated Pascalian wager (Pensées, part III, §233) reduces human ethical choice to a mere computation of time. An anticipation of this quantitative evaluation is in Arnobius, Adversus Gentes 2.4. 66   See Diogenes Laërtius 6.22 and 6.46. 67   ‘Antisthenes gave the impulse to Diogenes’ apatheia,’ ibid., 6.15. 68   See, for example, ibid., 7.1.117 and 7.4; Epictetus, Discourses 1.4. 69   According to his pupil, editor, and biographer Porphyry, Plotinus ἐῴκει μὲν αἰσχυνομένῳ ὅτι ἐν σώματι εἴη [eōkei men aiskhynomenō hoti en sōmati eiē], seems ashamed to be in a body. On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books 1. 70   Christians also need the help of their god. 64 65

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In anachronistic modern terms, individualist ideologies71 such as Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Neoplatonism, and the various Christian faiths, recover the waning or lost decisional power of Greek and Roman citizens as the individual autonomy of the κοσμοπολίτης72 [cosmopolitēs], that is, citizen of the world—a word probably coined by Diogenes the Cynic. We may understand this autonomy as the idealized representation of the free male individual’s power of decision,73 which is more widely74 regained at the price of a substantial reduction of its domain of action, from the social to the merely personal sphere.75 In this way, the new narrowly contained individual can effectively exert her will (or desire) to power as the act of restraining some other desire.76 However, whilst this retreat may prove itself occasionally successful—such as, perhaps, in the case of Plotinus—it also uncovers another Pandora’s box: as witnessed in the fourth century by Evagrius,77 the mutilation of the relational dimension of the body opens the floodgates to a plethora of phantom limbs, which stage a veritable theatre of temptations. Whilst living in a semi-anchoritic community in the Egyptian desert, Evagrius strives to give order to this jumble of ghosts78 by identifying eight well-defined tempting δαίμονες79 [daimones], which is a word that we now

  I use here the word ‘ideologies’ in its etymological sense, that is, principled discourses.   Diogenes Laërtius 6.63. 73   Christians variously share this power of decision with their god. 74   The extension of this recovery varies: for example, whilst the Stoic Musonius Rufus seems to include women (Stobaeus, Anth. 2.31.126), Paul grants women and slaves a merely inner jurisdiction. 75   In the second century, Epictetus, himself a former slave, rationalizes the citizens’ loss of public power as a repartition of spheres of action: τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν. ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν μὲν ὑπόληψις, ὁρμή, ὄρεξις, ἔκκλισις καὶ ἑνὶ λόγῳ ὅσα ἡμέτερα ἔργα: οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν δὲ τὸ σῶμα, ἡ κτῆσις, δόξαι, ἀρχαὶ καὶ ἑνὶ λόγῳ ὅσα οὐχ ἡμέτερα ἔργα [tōn ontōn ta men estin eph᾽ hēmin, ta de ouk eph᾽ hēmin. eph᾽ hēmin men hypolēpsis, hormē, orexis, ekklisis kai heni logō hosa hēmetera erga: ouk eph᾽ hēmin de to sōma, hē ktēsis, doxai, arkhai kai heni logō hosa oukh hēmetera erga]. Of things, some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, attraction, desire, aversion and, in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. In Enchiridion 1. 76   As a comparison to our contemporary neoliberal ideology of absence of alternatives, see the corresponding remarkable proliferation of self-imposed alimentary constrains in the form of diets. 77  The archdeacon Evagrius gains the desert around 385 as a final escape from some successful metropolitan temptation of the flesh: he is preceded in the same area by the illiterate Antonius, whose unsuccessful diabolical temptations then become antonomastic, thanks to their narration by Athanasius. 78  ‘[O]perantem monachum dæmone uno pulsari; otiosum vero innumeris spiritibus devastari.’ A busy monk is besieged by a single devil: but an idle one destroyed by spirits innumerable.’ Johannes Cassianus, De Institutis Coenobiorum 10.23, PL 49, 394. 79   Evagrius Ponticus, Logismoi, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca (hereinafter PG) 40, 1271–1278, 1272. 71 72

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translate as ‘demons.’80 Evagrius’ demons will have to renounce their individuation as subjects, in order to start their brilliant career as the Seven81 Deadly Sins: in the meantime, the heaviest (βαρύτερος, baryteros) of them, that is, ἀκηδία [akēdia], easily preys on the lonely monk. This is because— Evagrius explains—the condition of isolation does not trigger the sympatheia, or compassion for the others, which is our natural defence against akēdia, that is, the lack of care that makes us insensitive. The noonday82 demon of akēdia occupies the whole soul of the monk,83 and no assistance can be expected from anyone else: Evagrius thus suggests to react by splitting the soul itself in two parts, with the one giving sympathetic comfort to the other.84 Though Evagrius’ final task is to help himself and his fellow monks to achieve a condition of apatheia,85 a quiet state, here he seems to acknowledge both the risk of insensitivity and the need to somewhat replace the positive function of sympatheia, compassion. In other words, we may understand Evagrius’ diagnostic and therapeutic efforts as an attempt at reconstructing a new relational body for the monk, whose retreat from the world disrupted his previous one.86 Evagrius’ unacknowledged87 reconstruction is to become, through the mediation of Cassianus, a main source for Benedict88 and his extremely successful 80   The English translation ‘demon,’ with its exclusively Christian connotation, erases the previous uses of the Greek term daimōn, which describes a variety of divine entities (including the famous Socratic one). The Christian recasting of the term is witnessed, for example, by Augustine’s attack on his fellow Berber writer Apuleius over the nature of daemones: see De Civitate Dei (The City of God) 8.14–22, PL 41, 13–804, 238–247. 81   Following Cassianus’ appropriation of Evagrius’ demons as vitia, vices, Pope Gregory the Great not only recasts them as sins, but he also reduces their number to seven. See Gregory the Great, Magna Moralia 31.45, PL 76, 9–782, 620–21. 82  When Evagrius warns that the attack of the demon of akēdia occurs in the middle of the day, he is probably reminiscent of ‫[ מקטב ישוד צהרים‬miqqeṭeḇ yāšūḏ ṣāhorāyim], the destruction that strikes at noon in Psalm 91.6, through its Greek rendering as the work of δαιμονίου μεσημβρινοῦ [daimoniou mesēmbrinou] in LXX Psalm 90.6, which Jerome renders as daemonio meridiano. 83   ‘[T]he noonday demon generally enfolds the whole soul and suffocates the mind.’ In Evagrius, Praktikos 36, PG 40, 1219–1252, 1228. 84   Ὅταν τῷ τῆς ἀκηδίας περιπέσωμεν δαίμονι, τὸ τηνικαῦτα τὴν ψυχὴν μετὰ δακρύων μερίσαντες τὴν μὲν παρακαλοῦσαν τὴν δὲ παρακαλουμένην ποιήσωμεν [Hotan tō tēs akēdias peripesōmen daimoni, to tēnikauta tēn psykhēn meta dakryōn merisantes tēn men parakalousan tēn de parakaloumenēn poiēsōmen]. When we are oppressed by the demon of akēdia, we should then divide our soul in two with tears, making one part encourage the other. Ibid., 27, PG 40, 1225. 85  Evagrius’ apatheia is not Stoic absolute imperturbability: ‘apatheia is a quiet state of the rational soul. It results from gentleness and self-control.’ In Evagrius, Skemmata 3. 86   We may compare the depressive effect of the solitary cell of the Christian hermit to that of the virtual cell of the modern individual, especially in its extreme neoliberal form. 87   Cassianus never acknowledges his debt to Evagrius, whose writings then mostly disappear or are re-attributed to other authors, because he is targeted too by the posthumous anti-Origenist persecution. 88   The Rule of Benedict explicitly prescribes the reading of Cassianus’ Collationes (43 and 73) and Basil’s Regula (73), which, together with Basil’s Ἀσκητικαί Διατάξεις [Askētikai Diataxeis], Ascetic

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mode of subjectivation, namely, that of Western European medieval monasticism. We may understand as effects (albeit diverging) of such a mode of subjectivation both the hierarchical reorganization of the medieval Church on the model of Cluniac monastic centralism, and Francis’ predication of poverty and renounce, which inspires Iacopone’s bold anti-papal stance. Despite the difference of practices between most popes89 and most pauperist preachers90 in the course of the thirteenth century, Iacopone’s daring poetic imagery ends up meeting halfway Boniface VIII’s verbal and physical violence, as it does not dismiss the language of armed confrontations. Within this language of bodily harm, Iacopone claims to be shielded from the negative effect of bodily wounds91 insofar as he welcomes them: in anachronistic modern terms, we may say that Iacopone recasts his vulnerability in the language of invulnerability, so as to turn it into a weapon—or, at least, an effective survival tool. Of course, in a condition as extreme as unlimited harsh detention, Iacopone’s coupling of paradoxical humour and pragmatic engagement is nothing short of miraculous: but miracles are perhaps not absolute exceptions,92 if they can be repeated on a wider scale. For example, we may notice Himmler’s irritated perplexity at the behaviour of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi concentration camps: ‘Every confinement in the dungeon, every pang of hunger, every period of freezing, every punishment, every blow is a merit with Jehovah.’93 If we could ignore the recent propagandistic overtone of the phrase ‘yes, we can,’ we could describe this paradoxical relation with vulnerability in the contradictory form ‘yes, we can because we can’t.’ This is more than affirming the presence of some space for action even in the most exacting condition of domination: and it is also more than claiming that some space for action can Constitutions or Constitutiones Monasticae, predates Evagrius’ works. 89   Celestine V’s unsuccessful attempt to escape the logic of raison d’etat in his role of pope ultimately leads to his reclusion for good in the castle of Fumone by order of his successor Boniface VIII. 90   Right at the time when Iacopone is imprisoned in the dungeon, Dolcino, his partner Margherita, and his followers take up arms in the name of evangelical equality, and only in 1307 they are overpowered by a coalition led by the bishop of Vercelli. 91   Since Jesus’ crucifixion, bodily wounds pervade Christian imagery, and in Iacopone’s time they are spectacularly re-enacted by Francis’ alleged exposure to the effects of nail perforation. 92   We may perhaps recover Malebranche’s definition of miracles as volontez particulieres (of god) to describe the unusual will of Iacopone. 93   Heinrich Himmler, 6 January 1943 letter to the Main Economic and Administrative Office (SSWirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt, abbreviated SS-WVHA), in Watchtower History Archives of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Selters/Taunus, Germany, Dok 06/01/43, Himmler to Pohl. Eng. trans. in Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 448.

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always be produced, as in the case of the inverted letter ‘B’ on Auschwitz concentration camp’s iron gate.94 It is a more radical inversion, that which turns the value of suffering upside down, so as to provoke Himmler’s utilitarian outburst as a paradoxical threat to the ‘good-natured lunatics’95 with the purple triangle96: ‘You are forbidden to work. You are to be better fed than the others and you do not have to do anything.’97 However, regardless of its effect, this factual reversal of the condition of vulnerability also restates the dichotomic space of the act of vulnerare, albeit upside down. The still persistent Bible Students98 may be seen as a modern authoritarian echo of those ‘lunatik lollers’99 whom Piers Plowman invites his audience to shelter, and their prophecies may well iterate the medieval promise of a topsy-turvy world, in which the wounded is at last to replace the wounder: yet, this reversal does not alter the twofold order of doing and receiving damage. From within this dichotomic distribution of roles, the (supposedly) just passive and subjected party may well be at least willing to substitute the active one. Nietzsche is probably not too wrong in underlying ressentiment,100 that is, resentment towards the powerful, as a major motivation behind the popularity among the destitute of the Christian devaluation of the saeculum, or mundane order. It is not surprising the lack of attachment of the many to the order of things, considering that such order more often than not mistreat

  94  The gate is surmounted by the sentence ‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI,’ work sets free, in wroughtiron letters. The Polish political prisoners who construct the gate reverse the letter ‘b’ in the word ‘arbeit’ as an act of defiance.   95  Himmler, 6 January 1943 letter. Eng. trans. in Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (1974), 197.   96  Jehovah’s Witnesses prisoners in Nazi concentration camps are assigned the distinctive identification mark of a purple triangle from 1937 on.   97  Himmler, 6 January 1943 letter. Eng. trans. in Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses (1974), 197. Needless to say, Himmler’s paradoxical statement is nothing more than a boutade, and apart from sporadic exceptions, the Nazis keep subjecting imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses to deadly exploitation and mistreatment.   98  ‘Bible Students’ is the common definition of the followers of Charles Taze Russell, before the imposition of the label ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’ by his successor Joseph Rutherford.   99  William Langland, The vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, Version C, 10.107. ‘Loller’ or ‘Lollard’ is a name of contempt used in the fourteenth century to define a nonconventional Christian, and in particular, a follower of John Wyclif, and a reader of his English Bible. 100  Before appearing in print in Genealogy of Morality 1.10, the French term ressentiment emerges in an 1875 note to qualify the very Rechtsgefühl, sense of justice, and then it spreads to Nietzsche’s notebooks and letters. In Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Sommer 1875 9[1], Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe (hereinafter eKGWB), http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1875,9[1]

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them: the replacement of the few and their position of privilege is thus probably the easiest image of transformation at hand. However, Nietzsche also underscores the essential role of the priest as the direction-changer (Richtungs-Veränderer101) of this ‘natural’ ressentiment, which is readdressed from the powerful back to the powerless. The priest turns the sufferer into a guilty one: ‘you yourself alone are to blame for yourself’102—a reproach not completely alien to Nietzsche, who rather blames the weak for her weakness. Actually, Nietzsche claims to unmask the Christian reversal not only of ressentiment, but also of every natural trend: ‘Assuming that such a personified will to contradiction and counternature can be made to philosophize (. . .) it will look for error precisely where the actual instinct of life most unconditionally judges there to be truth.’103 We may probably forgive Nietzsche for challenging here Christian narratives in the name of nature and truth, which he himself teaches us to understand as rhetorical constructions: for sure, we can now better articulate his astute remarks on ressentiment by following his very advice: There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity.’104

More eyes are definitively needed to observe the war of cunning (Krieg der List105) that pits Christianities against mundane powers, and against each other. Apparently, the Christian first wages this war against herself: yet, whilst until Constantine’s legalization of Christianity this inner struggle aims at the rebirth of conversion—and its repetition in case of relapse—Iacopone’s 101  Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 3.15, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GM-III-15 102  ‘[D]u selbst bist an dir allein schuld!’ Ibid. 103  ‘Gesetzt, dass ein solcher leibhafter Wille zur Contradiction und Widernatur dazu gebracht wird, zu philosophiren (...) er wird den Irrthum gerade dort suchen, wo der eigentliche Lebens-Instinkt die Wahrheit am unbedingtesten ansetzt.’ Ibid., 3.12, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GM-III-12 104  ‘Es giebt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen, nur ein perspektivisches „Erkennen“; und je mehr Affekte wir über eine Sache zu Worte kommen lassen, je mehr Augen, verschiedne Augen wir uns für dieselbe Sache einzusetzen wissen, um so vollständiger wird unser Begriff“ dieser Sache, unsre „Objektivität“ sein.’ Ibid. 105   Ibid., 3.15, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GM-III-15. Here, we may even read a mockery of the notorious List der Vernunft, the cunning of reason, which is Hegel’s recasting of Christian providence.

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champion earns his stripes in the battle with other demons, which only resemble Evagrius’ ones.106 In thirteenth-century Italy, on the horizon of a common Christendom, the Church is a major mundane power, and Iacopone battles at once with himself and with a concurrent use of contemptus mundi as a powerful juridicopolitical weapon: By the words of the gospel we are taught that the two swords, namely, the spiritual authority and the temporal, are in the power of the Church. (. . .) The former is to be used by the Church, the latter for the Church; the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and knights, but at the command and permission of the priest.107

Such imperious words are given the sanction of Canon law by Pope Boniface VIII, and they dispel any doubt about Iacopone’s need to be shielded from wounding, and not only metaphorically. However, by the irony of history, this proclamation of absolute power does not bring any luck to Boniface himself, who dies broken and defeated just one year later, in 1304: his proud bull Unam Sanctam rather stands as the swan song of the grandiose medieval project of papal universal power. In the meantime, Iacopone prudently doubles his defence: he adds to his diamond left shield, which is his contempt of himself joint with the honour of god, also a ruby right one, whose extraordinary depiction is worth quoting in full: Lo dericto scudone d’una preta en carbone ignita como foco d’un amoroso ioco; Lo proximo enn amore d’uno enfocato ardore.109

The right escutcheon108 of carbuncle stone as burning as flame of a loving game; of loving the neighbour with a flaring ardour.

106  Iacopone dramatizes a veritable genealogy of vices as female characters, which, as if reflecting his own self-analysis, are almost all the offspring of pride. However, as in Evagrius, acedia (Accidia) ‘enters to possess the heart’ (entra el core a ppussedere). Iacopone, La Superbia de altura, 80, line 40; MS 232v. 107  ‘In hac ejusque potestate duos esse gladios, spiritualem videlicet et temporalem, evangelicis dictis instruimur. (. . .) Uterque ergo in potestate ecclesiae, spiritualis scilicet gladius et materialis. Sed is quidem pro ecclesia, ille vero ab ecclesia exercendus, ille sacerdotis, is manu regum et militum, sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis.’ Boniface VIII, bull Unam Sanctam, 1302. In Reg. Vatic. L, fol. 387. 108  The scudone or big shield covers the whole person: the term ‘escutcheon’ from the early thirteenth century defines both the shield and the coat of arms that is painted on it, so as to identify the individual warrior. 109  Iacopone, O papa Bonifazio, 155, lines 37–42; MS 274r.

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Yet, even though these gemmed coverings can shield the friar from swords, they are ineffective against Boniface’s papal tongue,110 which decrees Iacopone’s excommunication. As a Christian—and a lawyer—Iacopone knows that only the pope himself can revoke this extreme measure, and he grudgingly ask forgiveness in his own way: Colla lengua forcuta m’ai facta esta feruta: ke co la lengua ligne e la piaga ne stigne.111

With the two-pointed tongue this wound open you flung: which with the tongue do lick and the sore do delete.

Considering tone and wording of Iacopone’s plea, it is not surprising that he is excluded from the general amnesty proclaimed by Boniface for the celebration of the first112 Christian Jubilee in the year 1300. However, Iacopone’s description of his excommunication as a wound inflicted by the pope’s tongue is a powerful image of the wounding power of language.113 This power bypasses both active and passive defences, insofar as it relies on the potential wounded: the mere sharing of words exposes each sharer to these words’ use, misuse, and abuse. If we are to believe Ovid, even the first Roman emperor is vulnerable to the words of a poem: though suffering from the effects of Augustus’ retaliation, Ovid can at least proudly affirm the power of his words: ‘Di quoque carminibus, si fas est dicere, fiunt,’114 even the gods, if it is licit to say it, come to being through poems. Evagrius likewise defines his eight demons as λογισμοί [logismoi], that is, arguments: and arguments too are provided by Evagrius to himself and his fellow monks as weapons to fight demons back. Also Iacopone’s poems are probably at once personal expressions and didactic examples for his Minor brothers: whilst Iacopone acknowledges the limits of language, he relentlessly strives to capture in words even the maddening side of religious devotion.

110   After the abdication of Celestine V, Iacopone first questions the legitimacy of Boniface’s election: then, he follows his fellow Franciscan Petrus Ioannis Olivi, and he accepts at least Boniface’s papal role. 111  Iacopone, O papa Bonifazio, 154, lines 5–8; MS 273v–274r. Iacopone only pleads on behalf of his soul: he does not ask for the liberation of his body. 112   Boniface’s 1300 Jubilee and Holy Year follow the example of the plenary indulgence that his predecessor Celestine V decrees shortly after his coronation in 1294. 113  Iacopone’s word for ‘tongue,’ namely, lengua also means ‘language.’ 114  Ovid, Ex Ponto, 4.8.55. And he adds (56): ‘tantaque maiestas ore canentis eget,’ and such a majesty needs the mouth of the singer, that is, the poet.

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In turn, he is exposed to that which, in anachronistic contemporary terms, we would call the performative power of the words of the pope: as a Christian sheep, Iacopone can but accept the injunction of the shepherd, who, as he literally recalls, ‘posto m’a for dell’ovile,’115 put me out of the fold. However, the friar Iacopone is not just submitting to the command of his superior. The mortal wound to his soul also immediately116 cuts his ties with the other Christians, that is, it isolates him from his human context. Whilst the imprisonment imposes on Iacopone a merely physical separation from the human flock, his excommunication completely severs him from his fellows. As compared with Ovid’s vulnera, which are the result of his mere geographical distance from Rome, Iacopone’s wound is a different mutilation on a different relational body: whilst Augustus can exert a merely external pressure upon Ovid’s relational body by physically severing it from people and places, Iacopone and his brothers bow to Boniface’s power to cut their reciprocal links by excluding them from the community of Christians. In fact, Boniface’s wounding tool, namely, excommunication, is deployed as a veritable weapon of war in the eleventh century, when its performative power is successfully put to work against the emperor Henry IV by Pope Gregory VII. This clash between papacy and empire is the most visible effect of a wider process, which Rosenstock-Huessy defines as ‘Papal Revolution.’117 Though Augustine himself uses the Latin term revolutio—which usually describes a rotation—in the more general sense of transformation,118 the association of popes and revolution may certainly appear hazardous. For all we know, only in the fourteenth century the word revoluzione119 emerges in the pages of Villani’s Florentine chronicle with our familiar sense of radical political change: and if we suppose with Condorcet that ‘the word revolutionary only applies to revolutions which have freedom as their object,’120 we would hardly  Iacopone, Lo pastor per meo peccato, 195, line 1; MS 294v.   This immediacy is itself a major feature of the performative strategy of the injunction: it is produced as a specific temporalization. 117   See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Berg, 1993). 118  Augustine, De Civitate Dei 22.12; De Trinitate 12.15. It is ironic that Cicero (De Divinatione 2.2) describes political revolutions with the word conversio, to which the Christians later give the sense of ‘conversion.’ 119   Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica 8.121; 11.55; 11.87. 120  ‘[L]e mot révolutionnaire ne s’applique qu’aux révolutions qui ont la liberté pour objet.’ Nicolas de Condorcet, Sur le sens du mot Révolutionnaire, in id., Œuvres, A. C. O’Connor et M. F. Arago eds., vol. 12 (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847), 615–624, 615. 115 116

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agree with Rosenstock-Huessy on the revolutionary character of the eleventhcentury hierarchical reorganization of both Church and Christendom. Yet, we may reconsider the fundamental modern revolutionary texts, namely, the declarations that usher in the new revolutionary American and French governments at the end of the eighteenth century: and unlike Condorcet and the many who follow him, we may focus on how these declarations operate, rather than just taking at face value what they say. In the case of the bolder French declaration, the unsympathetic Burke is quick to detect in the new ‘arch-pontiff’ principle of the rights of man the plenitude and even ‘more than the boldness of the papal deposing power in its meridian fervour of the twelfth [sic] century.’121 A more learned commentator would have also spotted a more remote legacy, namely, that of Plato’s Politeia or, in its Latinate rendering, Republic, as a seminal attempt to set the a priori principles of ‘[t]he science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it.’122 In the Republic, this science is neither simply political nor psychological. Plato not only constructs the body politic as a tripartite hierarchical structure, but he also depicts it as the mirror image of the hierarchical tripartition of the human ψυχή [psykhē], which we may render as ‘psyche’123: such isomorphism of structures couples the macropolis,124 that is, the big (and actual) city, with the micropolis, that is, the (metaphorical) small city of the individual body. In both cases, one part is to lead the other two as a result of its capacity to attain the vision of the Good, which is a principle that absolutely precedes its instantiations. Though Paul most probably ignores the Platonic text, he deploys the traditional Jewish trope of the head as leading bodily part. He builds on this image a veritable chain of command: ‘the head of all man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.’125 However, here man and   Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: James Dodsley, 1790), 17.   Ibid., 90. 123   Though the Platonic psykhē, through its Latin translation as anima, is traditionally rendered with the English word ‘soul,’ it rather hierarchizes various and differently located bodily functions: the λογιστικόν [logistikon], calculative, that is, rational psykhē in the head, which is to restrain the other two centres, the θυμοειδές [thymoeides], high-spirited psykhē in the chest (a subordinated recasting of the Homeric feeling force θύμος [thymos]), and the ἐπιθυμητικόν [epithymētikon], desiring psykhē that is set in the abdomen. In Plato, Republic 439d–441c. 124   I borrowed the images of macropolis and micropolis from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Lectures on Greek Philosophy [1956], in id., The Collected Works on DVD (Essex, VT: Argo Books, 2005). 125   παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἡ κεφαλὴ ὁ Χριστός ἐστιν, κεφαλὴ δὲ γυναικὸς ὁ ἀνήρ, κεφαλὴ δὲ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ὁ θεός [pantos andros hē kephalē ho Khristos estin, kephalē de gynaikos ho anēr, kephalē de tou 121 122

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woman are only potential representatives of the whole humanity: in reality, they just stand for its tiny Christian portion. In Paul’s time, the collective body of the πνευματικοί126 [pneumatikoi], that is, spirituals is distributed and interspersed, so to speak, within the wider social space: hence, it is more a community of faith than a community of fact. Medieval Canonists recast the Platonic structural isomorphism of individual and collective bodies by setting the pope as the head of the mystical body of the Church, which includes all Christians. At that time, the Pauline community of faith has grown so much that it may seem to nearly127 coincide with the Platonic community of fact. Though the eleventh-century claim of papal command spans over the limited universality of actual Western European Christendom, within these boundaries it repeats Plato’s claim of the entitlement of his philosopher-kings to rule the πόλις [polis], the city-state. Moreover, in the texts of both Plato and the Canonists, this entitlement relies on theoretical assumptions that absolutely precede politics. Burke detects a similar dynamic at work in revolutionary France. Of course, he writes in a country where papal claims are long neutralized by the reduction of the Church to a branch of state administration: following a tradition of anti-papist rhetoric, it is not too difficult for Burke to conflate the past threat of medieval religious universalism with the modern threat of universalist emancipation. Burke denounces all universalist attempts to delegitimize local ruling elites, which instead he is more than eager to join individually, rather than pursuing the long and fatiguing detour of a collective change of leadership. On the contrary, the American and French revolutions are precisely examples and future models of radical alternation of collective leadership,128 which rely on the performative power of a likewise alternative narrative. For sure, the narrative of natural rights is not too far from the assertions of medieval juridical theology: the very Roman vocabulary of natural law goes

Khristou ho theos], Paul, I Corinthians 11.3 (Nestle-Aland). Jerome translates as ‘omnis viri caput Christus est caput autem mulieris vir caput vero Christi Deus.’ 126  Paul ignores the term ‘Christians.’ 127   Jewish communities are the more visible exception to this expansion: more widespread traditional peasant cultures only become partially and indirectly visible in the documentation of their repression. 128   Pareto’s apparently cynical notion of substitution of elite for elite may rather be an anticipation in a sociological key of Derrida’s depiction of European thought as a chain of substitutions of centre for centre. See Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di Sociologia Generale (Firenze: Barbera, 1916); Jacques Derrida, ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ in id., L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 409–429.

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Chapter One

through Gratian’s and Aquinas’ recasting in Christian terms.129 However, eleventh-century juridico-theological declarations may be defined as revolutionary not because of the resemblance in content between the modern narrative of the rights of man and Christian jusnaturalism. It is rather the analogous strategy of (successful) political legitimation that assimilates the papal injunctions to the modern revolutionary declarations: both of them pretend to ground the political order on principles. More than that, whilst the 1789 French Declaration sanctions the new revolutionary power just post festum, the papal declarations largely anticipate the new order to come, and they may even appear to predate130 modern political manifestos and their performative effects.131 However, whilst modern manifestos recast biblical prophesizing as the revelation of historical necessity, Papal Revolutionary statements, such as the seminal eleventh-century Dictatus papae,132 speak in the a-temporal indicative present tense133 that they inherit from Byzantine legal compilations, and which informs their most important legacy to modern thought: the rhetoric of the restoration of the natural order.134 Papal revolutionaries announce their novel arrangement by flatly presenting it as the natural order of things. This rhetoric of restoration proves itself more resilient than that of divine providence, which modern thinkers also recast as the secularized notion of historical progression: even after the dismissal of the notion of progress, the quest for unveiling the natural order is still with us, not only in its previous religious attire, but also in the powerful shape of the modern rhetoric of scien129   Whilst Isidore of Seville simply salvages Roman legal definitions, Gratian and, more notably, Aquinas rearticulate these notions with an unheard-of principled approach. 130   Of course, here the word ‘predate’ is but a handy shortcut: it would be more precise to say that our experience of modern political manifestos makes us read the papal declarations as modern manifestos’ antecedents. We may surely extend beyond the sphere of literature Eliot’s consideration that one ‘will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.’ In Thomas Stearns Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ in id., The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 42–53, 45. 131   It may be objected that the performative power of papal declarations is produced as an unintended side-effect of the belief of both extenders and recipients. Yet, the very practice of papal excommunication, and its extraordinarily successful use by Gregory VII, should make us doubt of the supposed naïveté of the Canonists; in particular, we should consider that the very performativity of the ritual act of the priest is at stake in the heated debate on the validity of the sacraments administered by simoniac clerics. 132   In Gregory VII, Registrum, PL 148, 407–408. 133   Gregory of Rimini is to capture this appeal to the natural order in his definition of lex indicativa, ostensive law. See Gregory of Rimini, dist. 34, q. 1, a. 2, coroll. 2, in id., Super secundo sententiarum, Augusto Montefalco ed. (Venezia: Lucantonio Giunti, 1522), fol. 118v (O)–119r (H). 134  This restitution was also understood in political and economic terms as the attempt to recover (recuperare) the Southern Italy Church possessions confiscated by the Byzantine emperor in 733, during the iconoclastic dispute. In a more abstract key, it may be worth exploring the relation of the notion of restitution with Luria’s later Kabbalistic conception of ‫[ תיקון‬tikkun], the reparation of the divine vessels.

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Of Wounds and Woundings 21

tific discovery. Just like the position of the pope and his Church in the natural order, which has just been waiting to be revealed, each and every discovered scientific fact—Latour and Woolgar remark—‘has been there all along, just waiting to be revealed for all to see.’135 We may now be back to Iacopone: after this long detour through the transformations of European politics, we are no longer surprised that his ability to turn wounds into weapons falls short of a particular feruta,136 wound. As we saw, that special wound is inflicted by an instrument, namely, the excommunication,137 which is the fundamental tool in the juridico-theological apparatus of his contemporary hegemonic political power (albeit on the brink of disaster). Whilst Iacopone masters the traditional Christian defences from secular powers, he is impotent against the more recently developed weapon of the hegemonic Church. I previously recalled that the renewed tool of excommunication is put to work by Gregory VII against a secular foe such as the German emperor, but it is likewise successfully deployed against religious targets, from simoniacs to so-called heretics. In particular, the papal weapon hits Iacopone as a retaliation for his questioning of Boniface’s juridico-theological legitimacy to ascend to the seat of Peter.138 If we may generalize, the act of wounding is thus a contextual operation in a double sense: it deploys contextually crafted weapons upon contextually construed bodies. More than that, by inflicting a wound on a body, wounding also produces that body as a wounded body139: if, as Bergson argues, ‘the possible is the combined effect of a reality once it has appeared, and an apparatus that projects it backward,’140 the factual wounding becomes also the possibility for that body to be wounded. In this case, wounding would produce the body as a vulnerable body. 135   Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 177. More in general, Bergson ironically observes: ‘le possible aurait été là de tout temps, fantôme qui attend son heure,’ the possible would have been there all the time, as a ghost who waits for its moment.’ In Henri Bergson, ‘Le Possible et le Réel,’ in id., La Pensée et le Mouvant (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 115–134, 128. 136  Iacopone, O papa Bonifazio, 154, line 6; MS 273v. 137   Of course, excommunications and anathemas are deployed as political weapons also before the Papal Revolution: yet, they express different political contexts and interests. 138  Iacopone is one of the signatories of the 1297 Lunghezza Manifesto, which denounces Boniface VIII as illegitimate pope. 139   Whilst this passage may seem obvious, it is slowly constructed in time by the infant. See, for example, Siegried Bernfeld, The Psychology of the Infant, R. Hurwitz trans. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1929), 265–66. 140  ‘[L]e possible est l’effet combiné de la réalité une fois apparue et d’un dispositif qui la rejette en arrière.’ In Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le Mouvant, 129.

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Chapter One

But what if we turn upside down the dichotomous relation between wounder and wounded, and we say that by receiving a wound, a body produces the wounder? In this case, the being-wounded of the body would also become the possibility for that wounder to wound: the wounded body would thus produce the wounder-ability, so to speak, of the wounder. There is no need to underline the awkwardness of the previous sentences, which show the linguistic asymmetry between the practices of wounding and being wounded, and, more in general, of acting and being acted upon141: the vocabularies of these complementary practices lack corresponding functions, and the asymmetry confirms that such dichotomies not only operate a logical partition, but also establish a preferential distinction. More than that, the previously recalled double series of wounds and wounded bodies, from Ouranos to Jehovah’s Witnesses, shows us that the very term ‘wounding’ does not describe just one action, but a variety of interventions. The modern concept of vulnerability makes abstraction of this actual plurality of vulnerations,142 which it thus risks to erase. If this is the case, the recasting of vulnerability as a somewhat positive attribute may unwittingly allow such erasure: in so doing, it may end up being just the last element in the series of the brave and defiant attempts at reversing the dichotomy of wounder and wounded. In order to produce a way out of this dichotomy, we may rather deploy in a different way the very tools of grammar, which allows conceptual thought to force the plurality of vulnerations into the bottleneck of the singular noun ‘vulnerability’: in particular, we may recur to the indefinite article, so as to construct ‘a vulnerability,’143 which would appear as just one instance of a multiplicity of vulnerabilities, in the plural form. Nevertheless, though an expanding typology of vulnerabilities may better account for the contextual condition of the wounded, it would also restate on a differential horizon the dichotomous relation between wounder and wounded. In modern conceptual terms, each of these vulnerabilities would still play the role of the passive counterpart to the active agency of the wounder. 141   There is another downside of this reversal, namely, the risk to produce an insidious rationalization of the attitude to blame the victim, as if, for example, the vulnerability to rape produced the rapist. 142   The English term ‘vulneration’ appears at the end of the sixteenth century just like the verb ‘vulnerate’: nowadays, according to the OED, both forms are obsolete. Here the recovery of the word ‘vulneration’ is meant to underline also morphologically the derivation of the abstract notion of vulnerability from the concrete occurrence of wounding. 143  Butler, ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics,’ 43.

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Of Wounds and Woundings 23

If we are to overcome the dichotomy that pits vulnerability against agency,144 we may need to bypass altogether its warlike language apparatus.145 This requires a preliminary step before addressing the specific categories of vulnerability and agency: the reconsideration of the various processes of construction of the ones who are supposed to wound and be wounded, and, more in general, to act and be acted upon.

144  Butler not only rejects the construction of vulnerability as an ontological feature of specific subjectivities by stating that ‘we are invariably acted on and acting’ (‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,’ 24), but she also suggests that ‘[o]nce we understand the way vulnerability enters into agency, then our understanding of both terms can change, and the binary opposition between them can become undone’ (25). Whilst I do not at all dismiss the catachrestic strategy of queering the notion of vulnerability, I feel urged to seek for a more productive vocabulary. 145   I anticipate here that the warlike language apparatus of dichotomic oppositions is not simply a residual of war practices: for example, the apparently innocent notion of ‘zero-sum game’ pushes the partially destructive practices of war towards the abstraction of total loss, if not complete extermination. See John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), 47.

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Chapter Two

The Invention of the Modern Self between Ḥayy and Robinson

In our previous excursus on wounds and wounded bodies, we saw that a wounding may not only be the result of the presence of others, but also of their absence. In this case, I used the phrase ‘relational body,’ and I described the wounding effects of relational deprivation as mutilations, by analogy with the notion of physical bodily integrity. The image of the relational body may help us to take account also of human vulnerable areas that may be overlooked by merely physiological approaches: yet, this very image may appear to rely on the modern distinction between mind and body. I will try to dispel this suspicion by recurring to the inventor of the modern dichotomy of mind versus body, namely, Descartes: Certainly I first observe here that there is a great difference between mind and body, in that a body, by its very nature, is always divisible, whilst the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, that is, myself insofar as I am only a thinking thing [res cogitans], I cannot distinguish any parts within me, but I understand myself as one and complete [integram] thing: and though the entire mind seems to be united to the entire body, were a foot or an arm or any other bodily part to be amputated, I know that nothing has been taken away from the mind.1

1  ‘Nempe imprimis hic aduerto magnam esse differentiam inter mentem & corpus, in eo quod corpus ex natura sua sit semper diuisibile, mens autem plane indiuisibilis; nam sane cum hanc considero, sive meipsum quatenus sum tantum res cogitans, nullas in me partes possum distinguere, sed rem plane vnam & integram me esse intelligo; & quamuis toti corpori tota mens vnita esse videatur, abscisso tamen pede, vel brachio, vel quauis alia corporis parte, nihil ideo de mente subductum esse cognosco.’ René Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Paris: Soly, 1641), 109.

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There is undoubtedly a certain unwitting humour in the staging of a first René (subject) who can observe a second René (object) but is unable to detect the split that allows the ongoing operation.2 However, the allegedly indivisible Cartesian mind would never be exposed to the risk of mutilations, which instead haunt its bodily counterpart, as the military officer Descartes knows by direct experience. A relational body too is liable to damage: whilst it may even share the unlimited reach of the Cartesian mind, it is not likewise sheltered by the delirious shield of Cartesian integrity,3 so that it offers itself to potentially unlimited abuse. A relational body has thus to resort to a variety of self-defence mechanisms, such as, for example, Iacopone’s shields, and Evagrius’ inner split. As compared with Iacopone’s self-conscious protective weapons, and Evagrius’ inventive inner dialogue, Descartes’ rational integralism4 epitomizes the antalgic reaction of the siglo desanimado,5 the dejected (seventeenth) century, to the pervasive spreading of the ideological violence of religious wars. The Cartesian mind may be understood as a relational body which is so utterly terrified that it barters its own safety for a monstrous mutilation, which cuts out its bodily part.6 Descartes relies on his severed and undivided mind also to recast as a methodological issue the Platonic argument about the advantages of a unified command, which he extends to technical activities, from architecture to city 2   Of course, the problem is not new; for example, Aristotle asks: ἔτι δ’ εἰ νοητὸς καὶ αὐτός· [eti d’ ei noētos kai autos?], and besides, is falling within the province of nous also nous itself? In Aristotle, De anima 429b. 3   It is surely a long-term delirium, as there is more than a Platonic echo in Descartes’ statements. For example, in the Republic (610b) the Platonic Socrates warns: μή ποτε φῶμεν ὑπὸ πυρετοῦ μηδ᾽ αὖ ὑπ᾽ ἄλλης νόσου μηδ᾽ αὖ ὑπὸ σφαγῆς, μηδ᾽ εἴ τις ὅτι σμικρότατα ὅλον τὸ σῶμα κατατέμοι, ἕνεκα τούτων μηδὲν μᾶλλόν ποτε ψυχὴν ἀπόλλυσθαι [mē pote phōmen hypo pyretou mēd᾽ au hyp᾽ allēs nosou mēd᾽ au hypo sphagēs, mēd᾽ ei tis hoti smikrotata holon to sōma katatemoi, heneka toutōn mēden mallon pote psykhēn apollysthai], we must never say that by fever or any other disease, or yet by the knife at the throat or the chopping to bits of the entire body, there is any more likelihood of the psyche perishing because of these things. 4   ‘A name sometimes adopted for a philosophical or political, etc., doctrine or theory which involves the concept of an integral whole.’ In ‘integralism, n.,’ OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), accessed 27 March 2018 at: www.oed.com/view/Entry/97345 5   In Jorge Luis Borges, ‘La esfera de Pascal,’ in id., Obras Completas, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), vol. 1, 638. 6   The enormity of the Cartesian mutilation may be compared to that of Calvino’s cloven viscount, who is vertically cut in half by a cannonball that splits in two parts both his body and his psychological characteristics. We may say that the two cloven viscounts embody at once Stevenson’s alternative Jekyll and Hyde. See Italo Calvino, Il visconte dimezzato (Torino: Einaudi, 1952), Eng. trans. id., The non-existent knight; and, The cloven viscount, Archibald Colquhoun trans. (London: Collins, 1962); Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886).

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The Invention of the Modern Self between Ḥayy and Robinson 27

planning.7 However, Descartes’ endorsement of intellectual self-sufficiency is soon to be exceeded by the narrative extolment of human isolation and auto-didacticism. Of course, human (in most cases, male) self-sufficiency is not a modern invention. For example, we saw that Cynics and Stoics already circumscribe the individual body as an autonomous sphere and a privileged locus of intervention. Yet, during the last forty years, neoliberal hegemonic narrations appear to revive a specific early modern textual tradition, which combines individual atomization and unchecked rational claims.8 These early modern texts may be understood as a veritable literature of fear: it is the fear for personal (and public) safety9 that motivates seventeenth-century bona fide authors to take refuge into the safe haven of rationally ascertained facts, reversible scientific reactions, and likewise imaginary social contracts. On the contrary, the neoliberal mala fide10 recovery of early modern atomized rational subjects reverses the role of fear, which no longer requests theorists to prudentially advance masked,11 but which is rather the outcome of the rudimentary neoliberal individuation: neoliberal authors pride themselves with the acknowledgement that the other is essentially to be feared, as she can but limit the sphere of action of the self-sufficient individual. Nowadays, these descriptions of both the individual and her others appear more suited to comedy roles than to subjects of theoretical speculation: yet, such feuilleton characters are firmly attested in academic literature. In particular, the neoliberal atomized individual provides the anthropological sub-

  7  René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637), 13. Descartes’ Ingenieur (engineer) is the veritable ancestor of Levi-Strauss’ ingénieur, though here the bricoleur counterpart is not the exotic savage, but the builders of the organically growing medieval cities. Marx and socialist economists are then to merge Descartes’ claim of the methodological superiority of planning with the Platonic-Aristotelian legitimation of design on the basis of the anticipatory power of knowledge.   8  See, for example, the previous Cartesian statement on the indivisibility of the mind: however, at least in the case of Hayek, the source of choice is neither Descartes nor Hobbes, but Locke, who recasts their individual subject within the more palatable context of constitutional government.   9  For example, Hobbes is threatened by the civil war, Galileo and (virtually) Descartes by the attentions of the Inquisition. 10   Toulmin explains the seventeenth-century construction of the language of facts as a proactive response to the breakdown of intellectual communication produced by religious conflicts: nearly four centuries later, neoliberals recover factual objectivity as an anachronistic tool for deresponsibilizing scientific and political choices at once. See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). 11  ‘Larvatus prodeo,’ I advance masked, writes the young Descartes around 1619. In René Descartes, Cogitationes Privatæ, in id., Œuvres de Descartes, Ch. Adam and P. Tannery eds. (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1908), vol. 10, 213–248, 213.

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stratum12 for many a text by Nobel13 laureates: in the hilarious case of Lucas, this model even attains a trans-specific breadth, as it is (virtually) applied to simian behaviour too.14 However, neoliberal literature and its tragicomic characters pay homage to early modern authors: for example, Hobbes is quoted in his notorious recasting of the Plautine adagio homo homini lupus,15 man (is) a wolf to man. Moreover, the features of neoliberal subjects owe much also to less credited sources, such as those literary characters who are given the opportunity to show their fullyfledged self-sufficiency by the fictional staging of a solitary condition. The most renowned of these characters, namely, Robinson Kreutznaer or, in the cautiously Anglicized version of his family name, Crusoe, becomes soon antonomastic: in 1730, eleven years after the publication of the story of Robinson’s adventures, Johann Gottfried Schnabel coins the German term Robinsonadenspäne,16 that is, pieces of Robinson-like tales. The German term Robinsonade is then imported into English in 1837.17 Nevertheless, the fictional shipwrecked Robinson and his brilliant author Daniel Foe18 are well aware that the objects—and the living dog and seeds —salvaged from the wreckage play a major role in the survival of the cast  In this case, it is a proper Aristotelian hypokeimenon, subject.   We may question the legitimacy of the label ‘Nobel’ of the prizes that are conferred to authors of Economic literature (which was not part of Alfred Nobel’s original plan) with the ambiguous official definition of Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne, Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 14   See Robert E. Lucas, Studies in Business-Cycle Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 289–90. 15   This sentence is first attested in Plautus’ comedy Asinaria (act 2, line 495) as ‘lupus est homo homini,’ man is a wolf to man: Hobbes deploys the famous shortened version with the implied verb in the dedication of his tract Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia De Cive (Paris, 1642), sign. ãÿv. 16   Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Wunderliche Fata einiger Seefahrer, absonderlich Alberti Julii, eines geborenen Sachsens, welcher in seinem 18den Jahre zu Schiffe gegangen, durch Schiff-Bruch selb 4te an eine grausame Klipe geworffen worden, nach deren Übersteigung das schönste Land entdeckt, sich daselbst mit seiner Gefährtin verheyrathet, aus solcher Ehe eine Familie mit mehr als 300 Seelen erzeuget, das Land vortrefflich angebauet, durch besondere Zufälle erstaunens-würdige Schätze gesammlet, seine in Teutschland ausgekundschafften Freunde glücklich gemacht, am Ende des 1728sten Jahres, als in seinem Hunderten Jahre, annoch frisch und gesund gelebt, und vermuthlich noch zu dato lebt, entworffen Von dessen Bruders-Sohnes-Sohnes-Sohne, Mons. Eberhard Julio, Curieusen Lesern aber zum vermuthlichen Gemüths-Vergnügen ausgefertiget, auch par Commission dem Drucke übergeben Von Gisandern, shortened in 1828 by Ludwig Tieck as Insel Felsenburg (Nordhausen: J.H. Gross, 1731), Preface [1730]. As the title duly specifies, Schnabel’s highly popular book turns Robinson’ solitary experience into the story of the successful population of a previously desert island with the 300 descendants of a couple of castaways. 17  ‘In part 1, book 6, chapter 19, there is a Robinsonade which may pass for an Ilias ante Homerum.’ In F. A. Ebert, General Bibliographical Dictionary, A. Browne trans., 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1837), vol. 4, 1736/1. 18   It seems that the resourceful Daniel adds the prefix ‘De-’ to his unencouraging surname ‘Foe.’ 12 13

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The Invention of the Modern Self between Ḥayy and Robinson 29

away: ‘if I had got nothing out of the Ship (. . .) I should have liv’d, if I had not perish’d, like a meer Savage.’19 Though Robinson is left alone for a long time on a desert island off the South American coast, he keeps enjoying the outcome of the inhabited world, both as material goods and personal recollections: these legacies even allow the survivor-turned-craftsman20 to somewhat retrace the path of human technological history. We may well say that Robinson’s relational body is only constrained by the liquid barrier of the treacherous currents that surround the island; and that only once he mentions ‘the Lust of the Flesh,’21 but just as one of ‘the Wickedness of the World,’22 which he is apparently happy to escape. We don’t know how he would have reacted to the tactile stimulation of sex: yet, we are informed about his grateful response to the renewed acoustic experience of the sound of the human voice, when he meets his first new companion. It is just a moment of rejoicing, because Robinson himself tells us that the presence of less sociable newcomers leaves ‘no time for such Reflections’23: however, the generally unsentimental hero lets slip here a hint to his pain for the severing of his social interactions. At least, the narration of Robinson’s solitary years is replete with animal characters, which may appear to somewhat replace his human acquaintances: the already recalled long-lived dog, several generations of domesticated wild cats, a vocal and affectionate parrot, and a herd of goats. Indeed, a heterogeneous array of things, living beings, and thoughts never leaves Robinson alone. Humans too are always there through their products, which include the words of Robinson’s sober and convincing first-person narration: and also these human products may appear to act as prostheses,24 which temporarily replace their actual human producers. Nevertheless, such inner and outer valuable allies give Robinson more than supplementary assistance: their felicitous composition with Robinson’s indefatigable activity also renews, as it were, Robinson himself as a different and more satisfied human being. 19   Daniel Defoe, THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRIZING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of YORK, MARINER: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the Great River of OROONOQUE; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. WITH An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by PYRATES (London: W. Taylor, 1719), 154. 20   Robinson candidly confesses: ‘I had never handled a Tool in my Life.’ Ibid., 79. 21   Ibid., 151. 22   Ibid. 23   Ibid., 241. 24   Stiegler insists on the prosthetic role of technical tools in the process of hominization. See Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 1. La faute d’Épiméthée (Paris: Galileé, 1994).

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On the one hand, this anthropo-poietic25 effect should make us question the very distinction between inner and outer allies, or, in Cartesian terms, mental and bodily elements: Robinson’s developing skills, which include the planning of not always successful endeavours, are incorporated within his expanding relational body together with tools, objects, and living beings. On the other hand, these heterogeneous allies do not so much replace something lacking,26 but rather enhance Robinson’s powers through a synergic composition of forces27: even the oceanic tides are incorporated as the extreme limit of Robinson’s range of action. Hence, each of these allies may be better described not simply as a prosthesis, that is, a substitute, but rather as an ἔνθεσις28 [enthesis]: this Greek word describes an insertion such as, for example, the act of grafting. Among these entheses29 we may count entities as varied as the copy of the Bible and its soothing action on Robinson,30 the sun with its blistering effect on Robinson’s skin,31 and his fur umbrella,32 which is to attain an iconic status.33 We may say that also the very Robinson is an ally of himself, insofar as (similarly to Evagrius) he plays the role of his own interlocutor. Robinson’s reflections enact the Platonic Socrates’ definition of thought as a conversation of the psyche with herself,34 and they take the dramatic shape of an inner   The Greek term ποίησις [poiēsis], from the verb ποιεῖν [poiein], to make, means ‘production.’   It is the supposed substitution that produces retrospectively a virtual lack, which becomes a real lack only when the alleged substituting intervention fails to fulfil its task: the lack of manpower for moving into the water the enormous pirogue only appears when Robinson’s rightly optimistic planning meets the limits of his own knowledge of levers and pulleys (which is quite surprising, considering his sailing experiences). 27   In the language of Deleuze and Guattari, Robinson makes rhizome with his allies. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 2 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). 28   Both Greek words prosthesis and enthesis are compounded with the verb τίθημι [tithēmi], to put: the former compound word includes the preposition πρός [pros], which expresses direction, in order to describe an application (for example, of a ladder against the wall in Thucydides 4.135; of uterine irrigation in Hippocrates, Nature of Women 11); the latter deploys the preposition ἐν [en] that is, in, to describe an insertion (of a letter in a word in Plato, Cratylus 426c; of a graft, in Geoponica 10.37.1). We may say that a prosthetic intervention solves a problem in need of a solution: on the contrary, an enthesis does not solve a pre-existing problem, but it retrospectively produces the problem of which it appears as a solution. 29   Plural form of enthesis. 30   Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 133–134. 31   Ibid., 158. 32   Ibid., 159–160. The visual image of the umbrella first appears in a 1726 French edition. 33   The fame of the book earns the early eighteenth-century English umbrella the nickname ‘Robinson.’ 34   λόγον ὃν αὐτὴ πρὸς αὑτὴν ἡ ψυχὴ διεξέρχεται περὶ ὧν ἂν σκοπῇ [logon hon autē pros hautēn hē psykhē diexerkhetai peri hōn an skopē], the discourse that the very psyche recounts to herself about that which she would consider. In Plato, Theaetaetus 189e. The Greek word psykhē is feminine, and 25 26

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The Invention of the Modern Self between Ḥayy and Robinson 31

dialogue35: as Robinson reports these dialogues in his first-person narration, we readers can follow them as if attending the representation of an autobiographical theatre piece. It is probably Defoe’s choice and skilful mastery of the literary device of first-person narration that makes Robinson stand out among the series of solitary characters who precede and follow him in the history of literature. Defoe’s well-crafted literary fiction makes us read the book as an actual autobiography,36 insofar as the castaway’s own account of his deeds and thoughts37 produces Robinson himself not simply as a dramatis persona, but as a plausible person. More in general, we may observe that written first-person communications, from letters to epistolary novels, and from autobiographies to interviews, can rely on a rhetorical potential of verisimilitude and directness at once. We will later consider the machinery of autobiographical texts in both its ancient expressions and its Christian recasting, when its merging with confessional practices produces the moral undertones that seem almost inevitable in modern novels. For the moment, I would just underline the power of narrative actualization: in the case of Robinson, the narration gives actual shape to an atomized individual, who is not only able to stand an utterly alien context, but also to turn it into a source of comfort, enjoyment, and novel inner balance. Moreover, regardless of Defoe’s intentions and scruples, if we consider the expanding effects of the Robinson Crusoe as a novel-cum-readers combination, we may well acknowledge it not only as a cornerstone of the narrative of the modern individual, but also as a veritable narrative demonstration of the existence of the individual itself.38

so are the Latin and Italian anima, the Spanish and Portuguese alma, the French âme, the German Seele, and the Russian душа́ [dušá] (Bulgarian душа [duša]) among others. 35   See, for example, Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 133–134. 36   Probably, the main inspiration for Defoe was the adventure of Alexander Selkirk, who lived for four years on Mas a Tierra, an island of the Juan Fernandez archipelago, west of Chile. Selkirk’s story gained fame especially after Richard Steele made it the focus of the whole issue 26 of the Guardian (Dec. 3, 1713). Nowadays, the unflinching fascination with desert islands is witnessed by Tom Neale’s autobiographical narration An Island to Myself. 37   Though the Platonic Socrates does not set apart thinking from other deeds, Aristotle’s tripartition of θεωρία [theōria], contemplation, πρᾶξις [praxis], practice, and ποίησις [poiēsis], production opens the way for the dichotomic construction of theory and practice. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. 38   At the time of Defoe, the individual should be generally addressed in the masculine gender: since then, women had to put an enormous effort (with uneven results) to have their individual status recognized. My use of the neuter gender instead constructs the individual condition as more akin to a teratological one, as an outcome of the vicious circle of fear.

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I used the term ‘demonstration’ by analogy with the acknowledged power of the homonymous scientific procedure. However, the very modern scientific use of the word ‘demonstration’ for defining a validating procedure is a metaphorical extension of the previous ostensive sense of the Latin verb demonstrare, that is, to show. This concrete visual sense is already stretched by classical authors: for example, Caesar underlines that a topic has been previously recalled in his text with expressions such as ‘ut supra demostravimus,’39 that is, as we showed above: this phrase hints at once to the spatial order of the written lines and to the metaphorical ability of writing to make things visible. By considering the possibility to figuratively show a content by conjecture,40 Tacitus furthers this metaphorical drift. However, only in the fourteenth century41 does the technical Latin term demonstratio enter the lexicon of logicians as a translation of the Greek term ἀπόδειξις [apodeixis], which in the recently recovered Aristotelian text defines deductive reasoning. Actually, it is Aristotle’s master Plato who substantially alters the sense of the word apodeixis, which he makes shift from that of immediate visual and narrative evidence42 to that of necessary proof, as opposed to mere probability.43 Similarly to ostensive evidence, this kind of proof cannot rely on εἱκότα [eikota], that is, (just) likely objects: on the model of geometrical operations, it requires chains of incontrovertible steps. Aristotle then further specifies the nature of apodeixis by comparison with the complementary procedure of ἐπαγωγή [epagōgē]: he describes apodeixis as the reasoning that moves from the general to the particular, and epagōgē as the reverse path. In the late fourteenth century, the new notion of demonstration enters the English language through vernacular storytelling with an ironic twist; whilst

39  Caesar, De Bello Gallico 5.3; 5.19, etc. See also ‘ut ante demonstravimus,’ 2.21; ‘ut demonstravimus,’ 6.35; ‘ut antea demonstravimus,’ 7.76. 40  ‘[U]t coniectura demonstrabat,’ as [Bassus] showed by conjectural inference. In Tacitus, Annales 16.1. According to Tacitus’ senatorial perspective, Bassus is waving a tale to entice the gullible emperor Nero. 41   Boethius still uses the word ‘demonstratio’ with its ostensive sense. 42   δεῖ οὖν πρῶτον ψυχῆς φύσεως πέρι θείας τε καὶ ἀνθρωπίνης ἰδόντα πάθη τε καὶ ἔργα τἀληθὲς νοῆσαι: ἀρχὴ δὲ ἀποδείξεως ἥδε [dei oun prōton psykhēs physeōs peri theias te kai anthrōpinēs idonta pathē te kai erga talēthes noēsai: arkhē de apodeixeōs hēde]. First, then, we must learn the truth about the nature of the divine and human soul by observing actions made and suffered: this is the principle of [our] demonstration. Plato, Phaedrus 245c. 43   ἀπόδειξιν δὲ καὶ ἀνάγκην οὐδ᾽ ἡντινοῦν λέγετε ἀλλὰ τῷ εἰκότι χρῆσθε [apodeixin de kai anankēn oud᾽ hēntinoun legete alla tō eikoti khrēsthe], you do not present a demonstration and a necessity whatsoever, but you make use of the probable. In Plato, Theaetetus 162e. The Platonic turn is then projected backward by modern translators into the texts of Plato’s predecessors such as Herodotus and Thucydides.

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Gower associates ‘demonstracions’44 (demonstrations) with evil magical practices, Chaucer describes a ‘demonstracioun’45 (demonstration) of the exact subdivision in twelve parts of a single fart. The successful ‘demonstratyf’46 (demonstrative) proof is nothing less than a concrete three-dimensional parody of the Euclidean abstract definition of the circle47: the necessary equal length of the spokes of a cartwheel would grant the equal distribution of ‘soun’48 (sound), and ‘stynk’49 (stink). One century later, the tragic experience of undecidable theological disputes, with their trail of religious massacres, gives renewed currency to Plato’s understanding of the exactness of geometrical operations as the royal road to objective knowledge and civil coexistence: at the end of the seventeenth century, when Locke puts forth his new philosophical lexicon, the notion of demonstration is identified with an agreement or disagreement ‘plainly and clearly perceived.’50 Regardless of Plato’s and seventeenth-century natural philosophers’ intentions, the definitive shift of sense of both words apodeixis and ‘demonstration’ from the embodied practice of displaying to the formal operations of abstract reasoning is fraught with consequences—which, nonetheless, may have been neither completely unforeseen nor undesired. However, in both cases, the previous use of a term that describes a most common gesture, that 44   ‘He makth his calculacions, He makth his demonstracions’ (He makes his calculations, he makes his demonstrations). In John Gower, Confessio amantis 6.1345–1346. 45   In Geoffrey Chaucer, The Somnours (Summoner’s) tale in Canterbury Tales, Hengwrt manuscript, 85v (line 2224). Here are the surronding lines (85v-86r, 2222-2226): In Arsmetrik shal ther no man fynde In Arithmetic shall there no man find Bifore this day of swich a questioun Before this day of such a question Who sholde make a demonstracioun Who should make a demonstration That euery man sholde hau ylike his part That every man should have like his part As of a soun or sauour of a fart. As of a sound or savour of a fart. 46   Ibid., 86v (line 2272). 47   κύκλος ἐστὶ σχῆμα ἐπίπεδον ὑπὸ μιᾶς γραμμῆς περιεχόμενον [ἣ καλεῖται περιφέρεια], πρὸς ἣν ἀφ᾽ ἑνὸς σημείου τῶν ἐντὸς τοῦ σχήματος κειμένων πᾶσαι αἱ προσπίπτουσαι εὐθεῖαι [πρὸς τὴν τοῦ κύκλου περιφέρειαν] ἴσαι ἀλλήλαις εἰσίν [kyklos esti skhēma epipedon hypo mias grammēs periekhomenon (hē kaleitai periphereia), pros hēn aph᾽ henos sēmeiou tōn entos tou skhēmatos keimenōn pasai hai prospiptousai eutheiai (pros tēn tou kyklou periphereian) isai allēlais eisin]. A circle is a plane figure contained by one line [which is called circumference] such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying within the figure [towards the circumference of the circle] are equal to one another. In Euclid, Euclidis Elementa. J. L. Heiberg ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883), vol. 1, 4. Just to be sure, Chaucer quotes ‘Euclyde’ shortly after, ibid. (line 2289). 48   Ibid. (line 2273). 49   Ibid. (line 2274). 50   ‘Those intervening Ideas, which serve to shew the Agreement of any two others, are called Proofs; and where the Agreement or Disagreement is by this means plainly and clearly perceived, it is called Demonstration.’ In John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690), 265 (4.2).

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is, showing, is replaced by series of specialized procedures, which follow specific rules. Of course, also the gesture of showing is anything but ‘natural’: the anthropological literature provides us with a great variety of bodily ostensive movements, which may be understood as following broad behavioural rules too. Within the same cultural group these movements are either catholically shared, or they characterize specific occasions and subgroups, along the various lines of age, gender, stock, and wealth. On the horizon of this gestural variety, we may consider the two words apodeixis and demonstratio before they are detached from their original visual context. In the first case, we may locate the emergence of the Ionic form ἀπόδεξις [apodexis] in the very first line of Herodotus’ Ἱστορίη [Historiē], that is, inquiry: ‘This is the display (apodexis) of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus.’51 There can be no doubt about the ostensive sense of the new term, which is applied to the written text as the literal visualization of Herodotus’ researches. As to apodeixis’ later circulation, it became popular enough to be used by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians.52 In turn, the Latin word demonstratio, that is, a showing, is less common than the verb demonstrare, of which it describes the act. It also comes to characterize a specific kind of rhetorical argument, which depicts either the merits or the demerits of its object.53 Both terms apodeixis and demonstratio are already the result of a process of abstraction, which condenses the various showing gestures, as expressed by verbs, into the definition of the act of showing, as expressed by a noun. Yet, this nominalization does not immediately alter the visual content of the showing gesture: it is the later stress on the purpose54 of the act of showing that produces the semantic shift towards the notion of evidence as proof. 51   Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε [Hērodotou Halikarnēsseos historiēs apodexis hēde]. Herodotus then adds: ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται [hōs mēte ta genomena ex anthrōpōn tō khronō exitēla genētai], so that the action of humans may not be forgotten in time. In Herodotus 1.1. 52   ἀποδείξει [apodeixei], singular dative form, in Paul, 1 Corinthians 2.4 (Nestle-Aland). Whilst in the Pauline text the word apodeixis is often translated as ‘demonstration,’ I would prefer to render it as ‘evidence.’ 53   Latin authors follow Aristotle: ἐπιδεικτικοῦ δὲ τὸ μὲν ἔπαινος τὸ δὲ ψόγος [epideiktikou de to men epainos to de psogos] epideictic rhetoric (is) about praise or blame. In Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.3. Here Aristotle does not use the term apodeixis, which Plato has already turned into a demonstrative apparatus, and which he has further qualified as ‘deductive reasoning.’ 54   For example, Euclid closes each proof with either of the two formulas ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι [hoper edei deixai], this is what was to be showed, and ὅπερ ἔδει ποιῆσαι [hoper edei poiēsai], this is what was to be done.

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In the case of the Greek term apodeixis, this process takes place in the short span of time between the publication of Herodotus’ work, presumably around 440 BCE, and Plato’s Theaetetus, around 369 BCE. As to the Latin word demonstratio, much more than a millennium is needed instead for its semantic transformation. However, not only English, but all European languages adopt for their translations the new sense of demonstratio, which is thus definitively detached from its visual content. Moreover, the late medieval and modern reoccupation (in the sense of Blumenberg’s Umbesetzung55) of the previous semantic space of demonstratio with the latter’s new abstract sense does not just erase its concrete references to gestures and vision: the appropriation of demonstratio as the definition of new validating apparatuses also produces a new dichotomic partition, which severs demonstrative procedures from mere depictions. This partition is similar not only to that produced by Plato’s new use of apodeixis, but also to the outcome of his recasting of the term ἐπιστήμη56 [epistēmē] as proper knowledge, in order to demote δόξα57 [doxa] to unwarranted opinion. It is probably Sophocles who derives from the Homeric epithet ἐπιστήμων,58 skilled, the abstract noun epistēmē, which appears in his 481 BCE tragedy Antigone59 with a sense very close to ‘wisdom.’ A few decades later, Plato claims the essential link of epistēmē with τὸ ὄν60 [to on], namely, that-whichis, or, in more conventional terms, being, which thus cannot be the object of doxa, that is, opinion. Plato’s new epistēmē defines knowledges and knowing procedures that give access to that-which-is: as previously recalled, on the model of geometrical reasoning these procedures must work as a chain of uninterrupted and incontrovertible steps. Conversely, Plato’s delimitation of epistēmē reduces any other judgement to doxa, that is, mere opinion. 55   Blumenberg claims as the contribution of modernities the reoccupation (Umbesetzung) of the space of previous theoretical questions with novel senses. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). 56  Plato, Republic 477b. 57   The term doxa is used with the sense of ‘expectation’ in Homer, Iliad 10.324. After Homer, it acquires the sense of ‘judgement,’ whether well-grounded or not. Negative connotations only begin to appear in Herodotus (8.132) and Thucydides (1.32; 5.105). 58   αὐτὸς μὲν γὰρ ἐπιστήμων βουλῇ τε νόῳ τε [autos men gar epistēmōn boulē te noō te]. For he [Telemachus] himself is skilled in deliberation and thinking. Homer, Odyssey 16.374. 59  Sophocles, Antigone 721; see also Trachiniae 338. The term also appears in the plural: μυρίαι ἀνδρῶν ἐπιστᾶμαι πέλονται [myriai andrōn epistamai pelontai], countless human knowledges come to existence, in Bacchylides 9.38. 60  Plato, Republic 477b.

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Early modern demonstrations similarly appeal to geometrical reasoning as a model: moreover, this model is considered unsurpassable because, as Galileo explains, geometrical certainty is on par with divine certainty.61 Conversely, the delimitation of the new demonstrative reasoning demotes all the other approaches to mere illustrations. Yet, despite their apparently debased status, also in the seventeenth century narrations keep acting as veritable demonstrations of their objects: I am here considering not only the hegemonic religious narrations, whose selfjustificatory power far surpasses the reach of the new Cartesian evidence62— even without the support of the secular arm—but also other stories, which modern partitions confine within the boundaries of literature. As an extraordinary example, which is as well-documented as long forgotten, I will recall a truly dignified predecessor of Robinson Kreutznaer. We don’t know with reasonable certainty whether Defoe read63 any of the translations of the novel‎ ‫[ حي بن يقظان‬Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān], that is, Alive son of Aware, which is better known by its Latin and English titles, namely, Philosophus Autodidactus and The Self-Taught Philosopher respectively. However, in 1671, Henry Pococke publishes in London his Latin translation of the story, which is to have a deep and lasting impact on the intellectual community on both sides of the Channel.64 As the original version of the Philosophus Autodidactus first appears in twelfth-century Spain, its early modern appreciation may well be described as a demonstration of the selective recovery of historical objects and of their delayed effects. This delay does not simply concern the half a millennium gap between the original Arabic version of the book and its early modern Latin translation65: the story of Ḥayy not only narrativizes the theoretical insight of its author, the physician, polymath and vizier of Almohad Morocco ‫بن طفيل‬ [Ibn Ṭufayl]—known in medieval European Christianity as Abubacer—but it 61   See Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Firenze: Giovan Battista Landini, 1632), 96. Eng. trans. id., Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, Stillman Drake trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 103. 62   On the horizon of hegemonic conflicting religious narrations, the seventeenth-century natural philosophers’ claim of universal rationality is little more than wishful thinking. 63   Unsurprisingly, Western and Middle Eastern scholars generally hold opposite views in regard to Defoe’s debt to Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān. 64   Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society who probably pens the presentation of the Philosophus Autodidactus on the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, writes in his 27 November 1671 letter to Wallis that in Paris ‘they are so greedy’ of the copies of the book. 65   The novel is previously translated into Hebrew and Latin, and it exerts a detectable influence on the work of Pico della Mirandola and Balthasar Gracián.

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also gives modern European readers a renewed access to the Arabic66 interpretation of Platonic and Aristotelian thought. Already in medieval times, Western Christian Europe’s recovery of the texts of Plato and Aristotle from the Islamic world also conveys a certain amalgamation of Platonic and Aristotelian views, according to Plotinus and the Neoplatonic tradition: following his master Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus maintains the substantial harmony of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy. We should not find too surprising that ‫ ابن ناعمة الحمصي‬67 [Ibn Na‘ima alHimsi] entitles his Arabic paraphrase of part of the Enneads of Plotinus, along with the commentary of Porphyry, ‫[ ثيولوجيا أرسطو‬Thuyulujiya Arisṭū], The Theology of Aristotle. Similarly to the Arabic Plotinus, also a derivation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, the Book on the Pure Good, which is translated in Latin as Liber de Causis (the Book of Causes), at first is ascribed to Aristotle; though not particularly influential in its Arabic version, in the Latin West it spreads Neoplatonic ideas under Aristotelian authorship, which is eventually disproved by Aquinas. The Arabic Proclus also derives several elements from the Arabic Plotinus, such as the hierarchical structure of god, intellect, soul, and material world. This philosophical miscegenation surfaces in Ibn Ṭufayl’s narration, which draws on ‫[ ابن سینا‬Ibn Sīnā], Avicenna, for title, names, and narrative form,68 but which has a deeper affinity with the depiction of the mystic solitary by ‫ه‬‎ ‫[ ابن باج‬Ibn Bājjah], or Avempace. In his Tadbīr Al-Mutawaḥḥid, The Regime of the Solitary, Ibn Bājjah unproblematically conflates the Aristotelian horizon of matter and form with the notion of al-madīna al-kāmila, the perfect, or wholesome city, which he explicitly derives from Plato’s Republic. Ibn Bājjah maintains that, in the more likely condition of an imperfect social arrangement, the solitary state, whether of actual solitude or of estrangement from the surrounding familiar and social circumstances,69 is no longer evil but is a useful choice—indeed, the only possible one—for the wise man (sic):

66   The term ‘Arabic’ refers here to the texts in Arabic language (and, by extension, Persian) that are written in the course of what the standard European periodization defines as the Middle Ages. 67  ‫[ ابن ناعمة الحمصي‬Ibn Na‘ima al-Himsi], who is a Christian of Emessa (Homs) in the Lebanon (now Syria) and a translator of the circle of ‫[ الكندي‬Al-Kindi], writes his paraphrase at the beginning of the ninth century. 68   Ibn Sīnā writes a Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and a Recital of Salaman and Absal. 69   ‘These are the persons meant by the Sufis when they speak of “strangers” (ghurabā).’ In Ibn Bājjah, Tadbīr Al-Mutawaḥḥid, in Maʻan Ziyadah, Ibn Bājjah’s Book Tadbīr Al-Mutawaḥḥid, M.A. Dissertation, McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies, 1968, 60 (Article 1).

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unnatural isolation is the adequate response to the unnatural circumstances of imperfect cities.70 Ibn Bājjah’s eulogy of the tadbīr or regime of the solitary has to be considered on the horizon of the previous treatise ‫[ مبادئ أراء أهل المدينة الفاضلة‬Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila], Principles of the opinions of the inhabitants of the virtuous city, in which ‫[ الفارابي‬Al-Fārābī] describes the tadbīr of the perfect commonwealth, as opposed to the regimes of other four faulty social arrangements. Al-Fārābī inserts his taxonomy of cities within a universal hierarchical structure, which is construed as a chain of rulers, assistants, and ruled, according to degrees of self-sufficiency. The whole structure is the ‫ فيض‬71 [faydh], emanation or overflow of an entity that is ‫[ واحد‬wāhid], unique: in this ‫[االول‬al’awāl], First, Al-Fārābī appears to merge the Aristotelian First Cause, the Plotinic One and the Islamic god insofar as expression of ‫د‬‎ ‫ توحي‬72 [tawḥīd], oneness. The perfection of the First somewhat reverberates on the virtuous city, apart from a marginal portion of its inhabitants, which Al-Fārābī depicts as ‫ نوابت‬73 [nawābit], that is, weeds. A similarly negative judgement applies to the four cities that are opposed to the virtuous one, and to their inhabitants, except for the virtuous people74 who are forced to live there. It is tempting to read the treatise in an autobiographical key: Al-Fārābī is an extraordinary non-Arab75 outsider. He anticipates Spinoza in supporting himself on manual work to keep his intellectual independence, until he moves 70   ‘In this essay we intend to discuss the Tadbīr of this solitary man. It is clear that (by living in an imperfect city) he lives in unnatural circumstances.’ Ibid., 61 (Article 1). 71   Al-Fārābī, Al-madīna al-fāḍila 7. 72  The word tawḥīd, which is considered to express the core principle of Islam, is not attested in the Qur’an: it appears in the speeches of the fourth caliph ʿAlī as an infinitive (masdar) form of the transitive verb ‫[ و َّح َد‬waḥḥada], to unify. We may compare the construction of tawḥīd with the process of early Greek nominalization of verbs: for example, in the Theogony, Hesiod turns the noun χάος [khaos], which is derived from the act of gaping as expressed by the verb χαίνω [khainō], into the origin of any possible action (116). However, Hesiod’s Khaos is (still) a character of a story: on the contrary, we will see (infra, pag. 162–163) that the present participle ἐόν [eon], that which is, is derived by Parmenides from the verb εἰμί [eimi], to be, in order to define the notion of being. In a similar way, we will see (infra, pag. 153ff) that Plato first nominalizes epithets, and then he turns these derived forms, such as, for example, the Good, into the origin of each and every good occurrence. The notion of tawḥīd likewise reverses the historical, logical, and linguistic priority of the activity of unifying over its product, namely, a unified entity, which, in turn, is derived from the abstract notion of oneness: we may detect a kind of functional resemblance between these processes of construction of metaphysical objects. 73   Al-Fārābī, Al-madīna al-fāḍila 33. 74  Al-Fārābī defines them as ‫’[ أهل المدينة الفاضلة‬ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila] people of the virtuous city, regardless of their actual dwelling. Ibid., 32. 75   Al-Fārābī was born around 870 in Transoxiana of (probable) Turkish ancestry.

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from Baghdad to Aleppo: there he accepts a modest pension from the local rulers, whose affiliation to Shī‘ite Imāmiyya he presumably shares. Not even the Zaragozan76 polymath and physician Ibn Bājjah (who, as a young man, also serves as vizier to the Almoravid governor of his native city) excludes the felicitous opportunity of a perfect civil arrangement: however, in time he may have grown disillusioned.77 This is probably why he reconsiders the very term nawābit, which, he recalls, ‘can be applied in a general way to any man who does not share the belief of the citizens of the city, whether true or false’78: yet, in the particular case of the wise man who lives in a flawed commonwealth for need of a better alternative, his metaphorical status of spontaneous vegetation, as opposed to the cultivar condition of ordinary citizens, comes to define a truly honourable life. Moreover, the weed may also become the seed of change. However, regardless of Ibn Bājjah’s motivations, in the pages of the Regime of the Solitary his Aristotelian language of nature re-dresses the Platonic construction of the ideal dimension, which debases as unnatural its various actual counterparts. As we saw, right at the same time, and few hundred kilometres apart, the Papal Revolutionaries launch their attack on the mundane encroachments over ecclesiastical prerogatives with very similar theoretical weapons. By the irony of history, the powerful appeal to nature, as understood by Ibn Bājjah and Ibn Ṭufayl, deeply resonates with seventeenth-century European natural philosophers: but it is even more ironic that our contemporary naturalists, just like early modern ones, keep hiding nature’s metaphysical apparatus behind the finger of the appreciation of facts. At least, Ibn Ṭufayl presents these supposed facts within the charming framework of an exotic79 narration. Actually, the story soon bifurcates, as Ibn Ṭufayl gives us two alternative versions of the birth of Ḥayy: a more palatable recasting of the story of Moses, in which the child is entrusted to the waters by his desperate mother, before being rescued by a cubless gazelle; and an

  Ibn Bājjah was born in Zaragoza before 1106.   Ibn Bājjah’s disillusion is probably due to adverse circumstances, as he has to flee Zaragoza for the arrival of the new Christian rulers: he eventually dies by poisoning in exile at Fez in 1139. 78   Ibn Bājjah, Tadbīr Al-Mutawaḥḥid, 59 (Article 1). Ibn Bājjah applies Al-Fārābī’s relational notion of nawābit to single individuals. 79   This exotic aspect is partially obfuscated in the first English translations: for example, Ḥayy’s gazelle stepmother is assimilated to the European fauna as a more familiar roe, not unlike the gazelle of Song of Solomon 2.9 in the King James Bible. 76 77

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audacious account of autochthonous spontaneous generation, which the second English translator duly censors.80 However Ḥayy appears on his desert island, the description of his selfsufficient life after his weaning does not fail to capture the attention of his readers: the boy, and then the man, never stops nurturing both his body and his curiosity. It is worth sketching Ḥayy’s path of discovery and self-discovery, whose steps both repeat and anticipate several key European texts. Since his first years of life, Ḥayy constantly practices self-observation: he first finds himself disadvantaged in comparison with the other animals, insofar as he feels naked and unarmed; then, he discovers the advantage of having hands, which allow him to contrive bodily coverings and tools. With the latter he dissects the dead body of the gazelle, in the attempt to revive her: and after vivisecting another animal, he comes to the conclusion that they both died because a gaseous entity—a kind of warm vapour that lies in the heart—irreversibly left them. Ibn Ṭufayl follows Ḥayy’s ascending series of discoveries, from his practical management of fire, cooking, hunting, and fishing, to his speculative overcoming of the appearance of multiplicity: Ḥayy gradually realizes that the differences between the various elements that compose bodies, species, the animal kingdom, the realm of living creatures, and the whole world of material entities in general are merely accidental. Not only does Ḥayy becomes aware of the substantial unity of forms, celestial bodies, and the whole universe81: more important, he grasps the oneness of his non-corporeal self, and of a likewise non-corporeal universal maker.82 Ḥayy’s ultimate endeavour is the direct experience that his consciousness of this true, powerful, and glorious essence is one with the essence itself.83

80   In 1686, George Ashwell publishes his English translation from Pococke’s Latin translation as The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, an Indian Prince, or, The self-taught philosopher. 81   ‘The universe was, in reality, like one individual whose many parts formed a unity.’ In Ibn Ṭufayl, The Story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, in Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn Rushd, Two Andalusian Philosophers, Jim Colville trans. (London: Kegan Paul, 1999), 3–66, 35. 82  The description of this discovery is a veritable narrative demonstration of the fundamental Islamic tenet of ‫ة‬‎ ‫[ فطر‬fiṭrah], the natural faculty of apprehending Allāh and his oneness (tawhid). The word fiṭrah derives from the verb ‫[ فَطَ َر‬faṭara], to originate, and it appears in Qur’ān 30.30 with the possible sense of ‘nature’: only later on it is associated with the notion of tawhid. 83  This identification is close to Porphyry’s (and Plotinus’) ἕνωσις [henōsis] or unio mystica, which, according to Ibn Rushd, gets from Al-Fārābī the traditional Greek sexist dismissal of being γραῶν ὕθλος [graōn hythlos], old women’s idle talk (already quoted as a commonplace in Plato, Theaetetus 176b).

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The story then recounts Ḥayy’s encounter with Absal, which is also the name of Ibn Sīnā’s characterization of the self that has attained gnosis.84 Ibn Ṭufayl’s Absal is well read and spiritually enlightened indeed: he teaches Ḥayy to speak, but only to discover that his temporary pupil is far more advanced in knowledge and enlightenment than himself. Finally, after a joint unsuccessful attempt to bring Ḥayy’s awareness to a larger audience, they are back to Ḥayy’s island with a determination that will be later expressed by Voltaire’s Candide: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin,’85 we have to take care of our garden— and so (metaphorically) do they, ‘until life’s only certainty came to them.’86 Ibn Ṭufayl’s outstanding text recovers and expands Plato’s theoretical use of narrations: he turns the plain explanatory reasoning of Aristotle and his Arabic interpreters into a dramatic enactment of the psychological, biological, anthropological, philosophical, and cosmological tenets of Aristotelian science. Ibn Ṭufayl recasts and merges the discourses that display the outcome of these various researches into a tale of discovery, which describes the construction of knowledge as an evolutionary process: each step prompts a novel inquiry, not unlike the Hegelian progression and its pragmatist reeditings. And not unlike these modern examples of gradus ad Parnassum, also Ḥayy’s advancement is pre-determined by Ibn Ṭufayl’s allegiance to a principle, here named as ‫[ الواجب الوجود‬al-wājib al-wuyūd], The Necessary Existent, which is Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical definition of god.87 Though the narration is interspersed with Koranic quotations, Ibn Ṭufayl’s Necessary Existent blurs the supposed boundaries between the theistic and the deistic understanding of the divine: this probably grants the book its European appreciation also in the course of the eighteenth century. At that time, it is for Rousseau to popularize in his Emile two major features of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the focus on knowledge not as the effect of teaching, but as a result of a learning path; and even more important, the illustration of this learning path as a story, rather than as a sequence of learning contents.88 It is the skilful narration of Ḥayy’s practical and theoretical enquiries that makes them so fascinating, and, at least in the intention of Ibn Ṭufayl, convincing too. On this regard, Ibn Ṭufayl’s narrative enactment of Ḥayy’s   See Ibn Sīnā’s Recital of Salaman and Absal.  Voltaire, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Genève: Gabriel Cramer, 1759), 294. 86   Ibn Ṭufayl, The Story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 65. See also Qur’ān 15.99. 87  See especially Kitāb al-shifā’ (The Book of Healing) and Dānish nāma-i ‘alā’ī (The Book of Scientific Knowledge). For Ibn Sīnā, the ‫[ لفظ‬lafẓ], term wuyūd is equivocal, as it describes both essence and existence. 88   However, only part of the Emile is written as a told or dramatized story. 84 85

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research path may be compared to a scientific research tool that likewise stages hypothetical circumstances and their outcome: in other words, we may conceive of Ḥayy’s story as a sustained Gedankenexperiment,89 which is the German agglutinated term for ‘thought experiment.’ Whilst the term Gedankenexperiment is a modern coin, it may be argued that it hints to a long established research practice: following Szabó,90 Lakatos contends that the Greek verb δείκνυμι [deiknymi], to show, from which the term apodeixis is derived, is deployed by ancient Greek mathematicians with the sense of showing an imagined finding, that is, constructing a thought experiment, well before the invention of the Euclidean proof.91 In the words of Lakatos, ‘[t]hat conjectures (or theorems) precede proofs in the heuristic order was a commonplace for ancient mathematicians.’92 Moreover, he recalls that such apparent reversal never disappeared in mathematical practice: ‘The heuristic precedence of the result over the argument, of the theorem over the proof, has deep roots in mathematical folklore.’93 Lakatos does not only question the heuristic order of mathematical results and proofs, but also the linearity of their connection: ‘the problem is not to prove a proposition from lemmas or axioms but to discover a particularly severe, imaginative “test-thought experiment” which creates the tools for a “proof-thought experiment,” which, however, instead of proving the conjecture improves it. The synthesis is an “improof,” not a “proof”.’94 Lakatos thus

89   Around 1812, Hans Christian Ørsted coins the German term Gedankenexperiment on the model of the Danish word Tankeexperiment: the English phrase ‘thought experiment’ translates the German term as used by Ernst Mach to denote exclusively the imaginary conduct of a real experiment. 90   Szabó writes: ‘δείκνυμι may have become a technical term for “proof” in mathematics because “to prove” meant originally “to make the truth (or falsity) of a mathematical statement visible in some way”.’ In Árpád Szabó, The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics, A. M. Ungar trans. (Dordrecht: D. Reisel, 1978), 189. 91   ‘Thought-experiment (deiknymi) was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proofs.’ In Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 9. 92   ‘The Greeks did not think much of propositions which they happened to hit upon in the deductive direction without having previously guessed them. They called them porisms, corollaries, incidental results springing from the proof of a theorem or the solution of a problem, results not directly sought but appearing as it were, by chance, without any additional labour, and constituting, as Proclus says, a sort of windfall (ermaion) or bonus (kerdos) (Heath [1925], I, p. 278).’ Ibid. 93  ‘Chrysippus is said to have written to Cleanthes: “Just send me the theorems, then I shall find the proofs” (cf. Diogenes Laertius [c. 200], VII. 179). Gauss is said to have complained: “I have had my results for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them” (cf. Arber [1954], p. 47), and Riemann: “If only I had the theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.” (Cf. Hölder [1924], p. 487).’ Ibid. 94   Imre Lakatos, Mathematics, science and epistemology: Philosophical Papers Volume 2, John Worrall and Gregory Currie eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 96.

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maintains that the added demonstration does not simply secure its previously reached result, but it also gives it a richer sense. Though Ḥayy’s discoveries are narrated as the outcome of his enquiries, they heuristically precede his course of action too, because they express Ibn Ṭufayl’s understanding of Aristotelian doctrines with a Neoplatonist and mystical twist. However, the pre-existence of such speculative tenets does not devalue Ibn Ṭufayl’s effort to provide them with a narrative demonstration.95 Borrowing from Lakatos’ definitions, Ḥayy’s practices, which go from medical experiments to the meditative conjunction with the Necessary Existent, may well be considered as ‘improofs,’ rather than simply proofs, of his variety of syncretic Aristotelianism. If we understand Ḥayy’s story as a thought experiment, we may link it to a series of predecessors. The closest antecedent is probably the depiction of the free-floating man,96 which Ibn Sīnā devises to demonstrate that self-awareness does not depend on bodily perception. A nearer narrative path is the more remote example of the underground dwellers in Aristotle’s lost dialogue On Philosophy97: probably Cicero’s extract from the latter work in the fourth century inspires Arnobius’ apologue of the child who is raised in a subterranean abode by a silent and clotheless nurse.98 Arnobius’ anti-Platonic thought experiment may even be regarded as a sad and cruel segregationist anticipation of Ḥayy’s upbringing: however, it is unlikely that the text of this Berber Christian apologist of uncertain orthodoxy had any influence on Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. For sure, the extraordinary success of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān’s early modern translations pays homage to Ibn Ṭufayl’s relatively unusual choice of theorizing by way of narration. Moreover, it reveals the felicitous convergence of an Islamic and a Christian recasting of classical thought: the Neoplatonic-inspired Arabic appropriation of Aristotelian naturalism, and the renewed naturalism of the early modern reinvention of Platonism99 that we call modern science.   Ibn Ṭufayl is perfectly aware of his endeavour and of the risks of disclosing esoteric knowledge.  As his faithful pupil Juzjani tells us, Ibn Sīnā devises his demonstration of both the existence and one’s awareness of ‫[ ذات‬dhāt], the self, which is known as the thought experiment of the floating man, during his detention in the fortress of Fardajan. 97  Aristotle’s thought experiment, which is probably part of his lost dialogue Περί Φιλοσοφίας [Peri Philosophias], is quoted in Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.95. 98  Arnobius, Adversus Gentes 2.20-24.  99  As exemplified by Francis Bacon’s definition of Plato as theologus mente captus, mad theologian (Temporis partus masculum 2), apart from a group of Cambridge latitudinarian dons, seventeenth-century natural philosophers generally neither aim to revive Plato nor his forms (unless in the specific shape of innate ideas, as in the case of Descartes): they rather repeat Plato’s appropriation of the incontrovertibility of mathematical procedures as an instance and a model—a veritable demonstration, indeed—of the ideal dimension. Following the previous example of Oresme, natural 95 96

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Ḥayy himself may be easily interpreted as an idealized depiction of a seventeenth-century natural philosopher, whose intellectual self-sufficiency is glorified by the progressive ascension of Ḥayy’s knowledge and powers (an ascension that pleases his Quaker readers too100). The story also includes a comforting moment of classical ἀναγνώρισις [anagnōrisis], namely, the recognition of Ḥayy’s awareness on part of his fellow enlightened thinker Absal. This exemplary peer acknowledgement mirrors the practice of natural philosophers’ learned societies, and it is paradoxically confirmed by Ḥayy’s contradictory reception by far less enlightened companions. For sure, Ḥayy appears as the veritable embodiment of the natural philosopher’s ideal of observation and self-observation, inasmuch as he ‘did by his single Use of Reason and Experience (without any human converse) attain the understanding.’101 These words (probably written by Oldenburg) are published on 17 July 1761, as part of the review of Pococke’s Philosophus Autodidactus, on the sixth yearly volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Few days before, in the first line of the first draft of his Essay on Humane Understanding, Locke declares: ‘I imagin [sic] that all knowledg [sic] is founded on and ultimately derives its self from sense.’102 Locke does not need Oldenburg’s review to get acquainted with Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān’s translation by Pococke, whom he previously tutored at Oxford. Gül Russell argues at length103 that the sudden notoriety of Ḥayy’s ‘Faigned History’104 may have had an impact on Locke’s likewise sudden recognition that ‘it was necessary to examine our own Abilities, and see what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with,’105 as Locke himself recalls in his 1689 introduction to the Essay. philosophers outdo in this respect Plato, because they apply mathematical tools to the construction of impermanent objects too. 100   The Presbyterian-turned-Quaker George Keith, who probably provides in 1674 the first and anonymous English translation of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as An Account of the Oriental Philosophy, writes in the Advertisement to the Reader (sign. a2v) of ‘a degree of knowledge attainable, that is not by premisses premised, and conclusion deduced.’ The sentence is then attributed to Ḥayy by Robert Barclay in his Apology for the true Christian divinity (126), as an illustration of the Quaker notion of ‘inner light’: this passage is erased in the editions of the Apologia from the 1779 on though. 101   Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 6, 1671, 2214. 102   John Locke, An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, R. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 3. 103   See Gül A. Russell, ‘The Impact of Philosophus autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends,’ in id. ed., The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in SeventeenthCentury England (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 224–265. 104   Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 6, 1671, 2214. 105   John Locke, The Epistle to the Reader, in id., An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, sign. A4v. The book appears in 1689 with the date ‘1690.’

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Understanding as such is presented by Locke as the object of his inquiry since the 1671 second draft of the Essay, which also revives the Platonic distinction between opinion and knowledge: but only in the 1694 second edition of the Essay does he devote a chapter to the twin categories of identity and difference, which pave the way for his notion of the self. Similarly to Ḥayy and Descartes, Locke constructs his idea of the self as the identity of consciousness: as also Descartes (and Plato) argues before him, a hand,106 a finger,107 or an unspecified limb108 can be detached from the body without altering the identity of the person.109 The latter, Locke specifies, ‘is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merits.’110 In turn, the mundane accountability of the person is but an imperfect instance of the perfect disclosure of the ‘Great Day, when (. . .) the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open.’111 Consciousness, on which Locke’s notion of the self relies, is then nothing more than a criminal record, whose complete readability by the divine judge apodeictically assures its ontological stability. Nor it is surprising that in the following century Hume, who lacks this divine assurance, is to let loose the self itself: this move so terrifies Kant, that it triggers his philosophical counterrevolution, which ushers in the theoretical horizon of lower modernities.112

106   John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, 2nd ed. (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, and Samuel Manship, 1694), 182. 107   Ibid., 185. 108   Ibid., 188. 109   Yet, the various bodily parts are not equally dispensable: for example, as James I states in an unwitting anticipation of the fate of his son: ‘it may very wel fall out that the head will be forced to garre cut of some rotten member (as I haue already said) to keepe the rest of the body in integritie. But what state the body can be in, if the head, for any infirmity that can fall to it, be cut off, I leaue it to the readers judgement.’ In James I, The True Lawe of free Monarchies: or, the reciprock and mutuall dutie betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subiectes (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegraue, 1598), sign. D4v–D5r (4.2). 110  Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, 2nd ed., 189. 111   Ibid. 112  We will be back to these issues, after completing our retrograde path towards the classical sources of European individuation.

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Chapter Three

The Fundamentalist Reinvention of the Individual in the Age of Reformation and Its Discontents

Locke’s construction of personal identity on the justiciability of consciousness is not exceptional. We may compare it with the extremely popular contemporary view of John Bunyan, whose 1678 allegorical novel The Pilgrim’s Progress is to be re-edited more than 1300 times.1 The possibly most read English book is the fruit of hardship: with undeniable humour, its author lets this legacy transpire in the very first page of the story. ‘As I walk’d through the wilderness of this word,’ Bunyan starts telling with Dantean grandeur, ‘I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn.’2 In this habitation for wild beasts, Bunyan’s first-person narrator sleeps and dreams the whole content of the book, just like the author writes the whole story in the prison where he is hosted for ten years as a nonconformist preacher.3 The plot of the story, which Vladimir Propp would probably recognize as a classical folktale,4 narrates the adventures of the hero, who is endowed with the metaphorically transparent name of Christian. Deeply distressed by the perspective of the final judgement, Christian is instructed by Evangelist (who is introduced by name even before Christian, as the first in a series of char-

1   Frank Mott Harrison, ‘Editions of the Pilgrim’s Progress,’ The Library, Volume s4-XXII, Issue 1, 1 June 1941, 73-81, 73. 2   John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1678), 1. 3   Bunyan’s imprisonment is an effect of the post-revolutionary Royalist restoration. 4  Whilst the object of Vladimir Propp’s study Morphology of the Folktale is the specifically Russian волшебная сказка [volshebnaya skazka], fairy tale, he would probably detect in Bunyan’s narration close morphological analogies to his Russian material. Propp’s Морфология сказки [Morfologiya skazki] is first published in Leningrad in 1928.

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acters with self-explanatory appellations) to look for Wicket-gate,5 where he will receive instruction about his salvation. Christian’s veritable treasure hunt unwinds through the due alternation of rises and falls: Bunyan pours upon his readers a wealth of dramatic events, from the truly hilarious scene of Christian running away from his relatives with his fingers in his ears, ‘crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life,’6 to Christian’s epic battle with the dragon Apollyon. However, apart from satanic avatars, surprising as it may be, Christian does not dispute with metaphorical representatives of the Royalist establishment that keeps Bunyan shackled as a Puritan, but with a ‘very brisk Lad’7 named Ignorance. At first, Christian warns him because he did not go through Wicket gate, and thus he could not collect the Certificate8 to be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Christian then turns their second conversation into a doctrinal controversy, and he rebukes the latitudinarian young fellow for not following the ‘Word of God’9: The Word of God saith of persons in a natural condition, There is none Righteous, there is none that doth good. It saith also, That every imagination of the heart of man is only evil, and that continually. And again, the imagination of mans [sic] heart is evil from his Youth.10

The disagreement of Ignorance could not be expressed more clearly: ‘I will never believe that my heart is thus bad.’11 To which Christian replies with (probably) unwitting humour: ‘Therefore thou never hadst one good thought concerning thy self in thy life.’12 Christian is not yet satisfied though, and he keeps restating what he understands as the word of god: ‘the Word of God saith, That mans ways are crooked ways, not good, but perverse: It saith, They are naturally out of the good way, that they have not known it.’13 It would be difficult to imagine a more stark contrast between Bunyan’s and Ibn Ṭufayl’s understanding of human nature: despite they both subscribe to an omnipotent and omniscient creator, they imagine he endows his human  Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 3.   Ibid.  7  Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 162.  8   Propp would probably classify the Certificate, pace Weber, as a волшебный агент [volshebnyy agent], magical agent.  9  Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 202. 10   Ibid. 11   Ibid., 203. 12   Ibid. 13   Ibid.  5  6

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creatures with very different thinking and acting capabilities. And it is remarkable that whilst Bunyan’s mouthpiece Christian cannot tolerate alternative views, his character Ignorance is instead happy to live and let live, just like Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Absal do. Probably Ignorance’s happiness, even more than his inventiveness, owns him his terrifying destiny: two angels throw him into hell by instruction of the King of Heaven, who is upset about Ignorance’s missing Certificate.14 This last action ends the narration, no doubt, to the satisfaction of the good Christian, who works hard to get his Certificate and would not stand a queue jumper.15 The irony of history, rather than its cunning, is surely at work in this tale of compensation, which a Puritan targeted by an obtuse political repression under religious shape appears to direct against some of the gentlest Christian sectarians, namely, the Quakers. I previously recalled the Quakers’ appreciation for Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān,16 but perhaps Bunyan’s feelings towards them runs deeper than dogmatic disagreement: To him [Bunyan], life above all meant suffering—if not the externally inflicted suffering of Faithful in Vanity Fair, then the inner torment of doubt and despair. Whether Bunyan was right in associating Ignorance with Quakers it is neither possible nor proper for me to say. Yet he must have felt personally rebuked, if not threatened, by their preaching, which reduced to nothing the fear and anguish on which he had based his claim to salvation.17

Fear and anguish18 seem indeed to be essential components of Christian’s (and Bunyan’s) relational body. During the initial segment of the Pilgrim’s wanderings, the presence of this double enthesis is even visualized as a heinous burden on our hero’s back: more important, Christian is relieved of his burden well before the end of the journey. This is a demonstration of the 14   This final event may confirm a Proppian understanding of the Certificate as a magical agent: I would rather observe that it works as an enthesis that draws the boundary between Christian’s and Ignorance’s relational body. 15   When, still in 2000, an Australian senator stigmatizes asylum seekers as ‘queue jumpers,’ he possibly stirs well-entrenched Puritan feelings. 16   However, Barclay, who put into writing his admiration for Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, also ‘theologized the Quakers’ return to sin.’ In Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972), 204. Moreover, Hill observes (205): ‘Since part of the strength of the inner light, of conscience, is its ability to change with a changing intellectual climate, it is not surprising that in the England of Charles II the Quaker consensus came down on the side of discipline, organization, common sense.’ 17   Richard F. Hardin, ‘Bunyan, Mr. Ignorance, and the Quakers,’ in Studies in Philology, vol. 69, n. 4, Oct.1972, 496–508, 508, my italics. 18  Of course, Bunyan’s feelings echo Paul’s injunction for servants to obey their masters μετὰ φόβου καὶ τρόμου [meta phobou kai tromou], with fear and trembling, in Ephesians 6.5 (NestleAland).

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effectiveness, already in this life, of faith, which grants Christian a literal discharge of his anxiety through the proper way of the Cross19: we will see that such a discharge is far more than a felicitous personal trade-off. I underlined the (understandable) role of fear in seventeenth-century religious, scientific, and philosophical speculations. The Quakers, together with Leibniz20 and Spinoza, are among the rare rays of enlightening openness in this dark age. It is not surprising that in the following century, Defoe produces a very sympathetic depiction of a Quaker, William Walters, who ends up stealing the scene from the main character of The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton: Voltaire himself, who is generally hostile to organized religions, devotes the first four Lettres Philosophiques to a fair-minded and approving analysis of Quakerism. However, the Puritan Christian and the Quaker Ignorance claim their (more or less limited) sovereignty over the same territory: self, heart, innerness, whatever the name of the one-person-flock entrusted by Luther to each believer’s priesthood is. Whilst tools and reliability of individual judgement vary, its jurisdiction is pretty much the same: the inner court. Of course, this inward sphere may even become ‘[a] Paradise within thee, happier farr,’21 according to Milton’s truly alchemical transmutation of the Fall into a Fortunate Fall.22 Yet, the same is the inward precinct, which Milton boldly claims as the seat of human freedom.23 This absolute focus on the individual sphere may appear to repeat the narrowing of horizon that affects ancient Greek and Roman thought, and which 19  Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 35. Bunyan writes in his spiritual autobiography: ‘unless guilt of Conscience was taken off the right way, that is, by the Blood of Christ, a man grew rather worse for the loss of his trouble of minde, than better.’ In John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the chief of Sinners (London: George Larkin, 1666), 23. 20   Leibniz’s welcoming openness exposes him to Catholic manoeuvres during his life, and to Voltaire’s mockery in the following century. He is also eager to engage with the ‘heretic’ Spinoza, whom he meets in The Hague ‘plusieurs fois, and fort long temps,’ on several occasions and for a very long time, shortly before the latter’s death. In Leibniz, September 1677 letter to Jean Gallois, in id., Philosophischer Briefwechsel, Band 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 566–571, 568. 21   John Milton, Paradise Lost 10.1478, sign. Vv1v. 22   When the archangel Michael announces that ‘(. . .) the Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Then this of Eden, and far happier daies,’ Adam too does not know how to react: ‘(. . .) full of doubt I stand, / Whether I should repent me now of sin / By mee done and occasiond, or rejoyce / Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring.’ In Milton, Paradise Lost 10.1354–56, sign. Tt3v; 10.1364–67, sign. Tt4r. 23   Weber reports that Milton comments upon the 1647 Westminster Confession on predestination: ‘Mag ich zur Hölle fahren, aber solch ein Gott wird niemals meine Achtung erzwingen,’ may I be sent to Hell, but such a God will never command my respect.’ I was not able to locate in Milton’s works this supposedly ‘well-known opinion.’ In Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (überarbeiteten Fassung), in id., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Band 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1920), 17–206, 91.

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I recalled in the first chapter. Yet, unlike seventeenth-century eschatological obsession, ancient autochthonous individualist ideologies keep being concerned with mundane24 well-being, albeit somewhat hybridized with soteriological concerns.25 Moreover, though in 380 Christianity becomes the State religion of the Roman Empire, the peasant majority of Western Christian Europe only undergoes a systematic Christian cultural colonization in the twelfth century, when the new centralized Church imposes on its flock the reinvented sacraments.26 However, even before the sacramental indoctrination, waves of millenarian fear shake the Christian lands27: despite these waves are triggered by a conventional computation of time, they are instances of the process of collective arousal of anxiety (and possibly, hope) and the likewise collective attempt to keep this anxiety at bay. Christian’s (and Bunyan’s) deep concern with salvation is nothing short of the angst of these chiliastic hordes: yet, the word of god no longer reaches them just by word of mouth, because in the meantime the verb is made paper.28 It would be surely an exaggeration to define the Reformation as an epiphenomenon of the printing press: as a counter-example, we may consider that the auditive power of Islamic recitation is more than enough to construct the one-to-one relation of the faithful with Allāh. Nevertheless, for sure the word of god appealed to by Bunyan’s Christian is a written word: not only because sola scriptura, that is, (holy) writing alone, is the Lutheran rallying cry against the layers of Church interpretations of the Bible, but also because the spreading of books—and literacy—grants each believer direct access to the holy text. Whilst the character Christian quotes the scripture by heart, Bunyan diligently provides us with the corresponding scriptural references in the margins of the text. This paratext is no longer just an apparatus for the erudite, but it 24   As the term ‘mundane’ implies the Christian invention of the otherworldly dimension, it would be incomprehensible in the pre-Christian ancient world (which the gods share with humans), despite it morphologically derives from a Latin term, mundanus, that is, cosmopolite. 25   Even in this case, salvation is not necessarily located in the afterlife: see, for example, the last chapter of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. 26   Extreme Unction: around 1150. See Peter Lombard, Sententiarum Libri Quatuor 4.2.1, PL 192, 521–1112, 842. Marriage: 1184 Council of Verona. Penance and Communion: 1215 Fourth Lateran Council. 27  Whilst the evaluation of medieval chiliasm is controversial, its appreciation may have been hindered by approaches that ‘overvalued the written and undervalued the spoken word.’ In Richard Landes, ‘The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000, Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern,’ in Speculum, vol. 75, n. 1 (Jan. 2000), 97–145, 106 note 33. 28   Though the threatening injunction ‘Fly from the wrath to come’ (3) that Christian receives from Evangelist is written on an archaizing ‘Parchment-Roll,’ his previous fear and trembling is the effect of Gutenberg’s technology, which allows him to read a printed religious book.

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is an essential tool that allows the reader qua believer to access the scriptural source. It is not by chance that the previously exonymic29 definition of Christians as People of the Book is now embraced as an endonymic claim. Bunyan goes as far as declaring that ‘the holy scriptures, of themselves, without the addition of humane inventions, are able to make the man of God perfect in all things.’30 Many of Bunyan’s readers would not emulate his dismissal of all other books: however, they would all agree with him on their necessary association with the holy book. We may well say that such a reading device is an indispensable enthesis in each and every Reformed Christian’s relational body. In fact, Luther makes a cunning use of the newly invented31 movable type press, which he even supplies with the iconic messages of Lucas Cranach’s beautiful woodcuts: his taste for innovation would probably surprise the eponym of his monastic order, namely, Augustine, who maintains that ‘a man supported by faith, hope, and charity (. . .) does not need the Scriptures except for the instruction of others. And many live by these three things in solitude without books.’32 However, the printed paper becomes soon the terrain of theological debate: one generation after Luther, Jean Chauvin (who Latinizes his name as Calvinus, then Calvin) devotes most of his theological effort to the writing of a book, which is significantly entitled Christianae Religionis Institutio, The principles, or institutes of the Christian religion.33 Calvin publishes the first edition of his book in 1536: he then progressively expands the text, which in the course of four subsequent Latin editions34 swells from four to eighty chapters in four volumes.

29  In Qur’an 3.110 the definition of ‫ الكتاب‬‎‎‫’[ أهل‬Ahl al-Kitāb], People of the Book refers to Jews, Christians, Sabians, and possibly, Zoroastrians. On this regard, it is tempting to quote a current disenchanted Jewish view: ‘We are the people of the Book, the Rabbi said. / Not of the phone book, said I.’ In Howard Nemerov, ‘Debate with the Rabbi,’ in Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 271. 30   John Bunyan, A Confession of My Faith and a Reason of My Practice (London: Francis Smith, 1672), 43. 31   Actually, the Chinese Bi Sheng seems to predate Gutenberg of four centuries. 32  ‘Homo itaque fide, spe et charitate subnixus (. . .) non indiget Scripturis nisi ad alios instruendos. ltaque multi per haec tria etiam in solitudine sine codicibus vivunt.’ In Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 1.39, PL 34, 5–122, 36. More precisely, Augustine does not mention books but codices, which for him are a technical innovation as compared to the traditional scrolls. 33  The Institutio does not exhaust Calvin’s writing effort though: the German edition of his collected works amounts to fifty-nine volumes. 34   Calvin publishes further Latin editions in 1539, 1543, 1550, and 1559. From the second edition on, the title of the tract is Institutio Christianae Religionis.

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The original structure of the treaty is straightforward: it consists of two parts, which deal with ‘the knowledge of God, and of ourselves’35 respectively. Since the beginning, we are offered a brief and clear compendium of what Bunyan’s Christian is later to think about humans: after Adam’s fall—proclaims Calvin—‘he [and his descent] is left with nothing else than ignorance, iniquity, impotence, death, and the judgement.’36 Shortly after, the future unofficial authority of the city of Genève, and future author of fifty-nine volumes of complete papers, adds with unwitting humour: ‘however splendid (is) the façade of sanctity that man puts on, it is nothing else than hypocrisy.’37 Hindsight makes humour turn dark when Calvin explains the sixth commandment, which forbids homicide: ‘If we have some fear and love of God, let’s show benevolence towards all, friends [and] enemies.’38 Whilst Jesus’ invitation to love the enemy is undoubtedly challenging, we may wonder what may have felt the friendly (or at least, fellow reformer) Miguel Servet, who in 1553 is burnt at stake at Genève together with his work on pulmonary circulation and without Calvin’s opposition.39 At least, god’s decisions are properly incomprehensible to humans: in the first edition of the Institutio, Calvin simply states that ‘out of his [god’s] eternal judgement,’40 some are chosen, and some are rejected. Only in the third edition of the work does he devote a whole new chapter to god’s predestination and providence.41 However, from the outset of the chapter Calvin warns the one who seeks to investigate predestination that ‘he will enter a labyrinth, of which he will not find the way out.’42 Such a consideration does not prevent him to further explore the issue for other twenty-four pages though, with the ‘only light’43 of the Lord’s word, of course. Yet, it is a rather slant light that which Augustine’s anti-Pelagian

35  ‘Cognitione Dei, ac nostri.’ In Jean Calvin, Christianae Religionis Institutio (Basel: Thomas Flatter and Balthasar Lasius, 1536), 42. 36  ‘[N]ihil illi reliquum fuit, nisi ignorantia, iniquitas, impotentia, mors, & iudicium.’ Ibid., 44. 37  ‘[Q]uantumuis splendida sanctimoniae faciem ex se habeat homo, non aliud est quam hypocrisis.’ Ibid., 44–45. 38  ‘Si quis est in nobis timor atque amor Dei, omnibus, amicis, inimicis beneuolentiam exhibeamus.’ Ibid., 66. 39   Apparently, Calvin only asks that Servet be beheaded instead of burnt: it seems that also other chief Reformers, such as Bucer and Melanchton, fully approve the execution. 40  [Æ]terno eius consilio.’ In Calvin, Christianae Religionis Institutio (1536), 140. 41  See Jean Calvin, De Predestinatione et Providentia Dei. Caput XIIII (sic), in id., Institutio Christianae Religionis (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1543), 350–374. 42  ‘[L]abyrinthum ingredietur, cuius nullum reperiet exitum.’ Ibid., 350. 43  ‘[U]nicum (...) lumen.’ Ibid., 351.

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writings throw onto Calvin’s etymological44 definition of predestination: god’s eternal decree that predetermines ‘for the ones eternal life, for the others eternal damnation.’45 Hosts of theologians discuss predestination, before and after the Institutio: Calvin may at least be credited with his steady obstinacy in upholding human docta ignorantia,46 the learned ignorance of god’s inscrutable plans, which belong to a dimension that is by definition incommensurable with the human one.47 We may wonder whether Calvin can foresee the effect of his own theological speculations, which commit the ultimate aim of individual salvation to the unfathomable plans of god: because god’s gratuitous election manifest itself as the double gift of faith and assurance,48 even the occasional wavering of one’s faith and assurance becomes a dreadful hint to one’s eternal damnation. On this regard, Weber famously remarks: In its tragic inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its grandiose consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.49

According to Weber, Calvin is sure of his own salvation, insofar as ‘he feels to be [god’s] instrument’50: in Weber’s view, uncertainty heavily burdens only his followers, who endeavours to face it by acting as if they were chosen, and by intensifying their worldly activities. Yet, Calvin is well aware of the ‘futuri status anxietas,’51 the anxiety about one’s future condition, which his doctrine of predestination feed on: his thoughts and works may be understood as expressions of one and the same apparatus, which he shares with his followers. On the one side, this appara44  ‘[P]roprietatem etymologiae simpliciter sequamur,’ we simply follow the property of etymology. Ibid., 352. 45  ‘[A]liis uita aeterna, aliis damnatio aeterna.’ Ibid. 46   Ibid., 351. Here it is impossible not to reference Cusanus and his conciliarist stance, whose defeat opens the way to the mirroring fundamentalisms of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. 47   As we saw, Ḥayy would not be so categorical. 48  ‘Fidelis (inquam) non est nisi qui suae salutis securitati innixus, Diabolo & morti confidenter insultet,’ No man, I say, is a believer but he who, trusting to the security of his salvation, confidently triumphs over the devil and death. In Jean Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (Genève: Robert Estienne, 1959), 197. 49  ‘In ihrer pathetischen Unmenschlichkeit mußte diese Lehre nun für die Stimmung einer Generation, die sich ihrer grandiosen Konsequenz ergab, vor allem eine Folge haben: ein Gefühl einer unerhörten inneren Vereinsamung des einzelnen Individuums.’ In Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 93. 50  ‘Er fühlte sich als “Rüstzeug”.’ Ibid., 103. 51  Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (1543), 362.

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tus turns the slightest uncertainty into a terrifying demonstration of personal inadequacy (which witnesses the absence of grace): on the other side, it multiplies suggestions, injunctions, and prohibitions as coping strategies through personal improvement. Weber reads Calvin’s theology as the complete dismissal of the means of attaining the grace of god, and thus, as the logical conclusion of the longlasting ‘process of the disenchantment of the world’52: nevertheless, the Calvinist version of the Lutheran resignification of reality rather produces its own peculiar enchantment by minimalist spiritual abstraction, as opposed to embodied practices and their products. Stirner, who is more worried by the effectiveness of the Lutheran approach, points out: ‘[Calvinism] excludes at once a great number of things as sensual and worldly, and purifies the church; Lutheranism, on the contrary, tries to bring spirit into all things as far as possible, to recognize the holy spirit as an essence in everything, and so to hallow everything worldly.’53

A clear example of Calvin’s exclusion strategy is his attitude towards Church furnishing, decorations, and practices. He refuses any representation of god as improper54: and because he also rejects the use of musical instruments, he entrusts the bare human voice with the task of singing the word of god.55 But this is not yet enough, as Calvin does not fail to warn the faithful against the dangers of the enjoyment of singing: ‘We must, however, carefully beware, lest our ears be more intent on the music than our minds on the spiritual meaning of the words.’56

52  ‘Prozeß der Entzauberung der Welt.’ In Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 94. Pace Weber, the modern notion of rationality rather exerts in a new way the old enchanting power of objectivity. 53  ‘[Calvinismus] schließt flugs eine Menge Dinge als sinnlich und weltlich aus und purificirt die Kirche; das Lutherthum hingegen sucht wo möglich in alle Dinge Geist zu bringen, den heiligen Geist in Allem als Wesen zu erkennen, und so alles Weltliche zu heiligen.’ In Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (Leipzig: Wigand, 1845), 121–122. Eng. trans. id., The Ego and Its Own, David Leopold ed., 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84. 54  ‘Deum effingi visibili specie nefas esse putamus,’ we deem impious to represent god in visible form. In Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (1959), 28 (1.11.12). 55   In 1539, probably influenced by Lutheran choir practice, Calvin publishes in Strasbourg Aulcuns Pseaulmes et Cantiques mys en chant, Some Psalms and Hymns put into song. The volume includes twelve popular French translations of Biblical psalms by Clément Marot, to which Calvin adds some of his translations, and the musical notation of presumably popular melodies as accompaniment. In subsequent editions, Calvin’s translations are replaced by Marot’s ones. 56  ‘Cauendum tamen diligenter ne ad modulationem intentiores sint aures quam animi ad spiritualem verborum sensum.’ In Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (1559), 325 (3.20.32). Eng. trans. Beveridge, vol 2, 182.

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Calvin’s apparent push for dematerialization is just a side-effect of his theoretical apparatus: the construction of uncertainty as the lack of grace pushes the believer to seek for a counter-demonstration through the relentless removal of the obstacles on the way to salvation. These obstacles are nothing else than the (naturally) wicked subject’s very practices: and because these practices cannot be suppressed altogether, they must be incessantly curtailed, redressed, and chastised. Calvin’s main text consequently expands in time in the attempt to discipline human practices, which, as we saw with music, he submits to veritable cycles of depuration, according to a cascade structure that follows the scholastic method and anticipates the practice of chemical industrial plants.57 We may say that Calvin makes shrink his and his followers’ relational body by expelling a variety of its long-time constitutional entheses, from church paintings to sculptures, and from priestly and friendly advice to dancing. More than that, the Calvinist relational body is threatened not only by Calvin’s written eviction orders, but also by the decrees of the Calvinist selfscrutinizing conscience, which may banish any of its entheses.58 This new ostracizing power is first bestowed upon believers by Luther as a (partly unintended) double-edged sword: whilst the faithful is emancipated from the manipulative direction of the clergy, she is at the same time burdened with a self-policing duty, which is even more rigid than the previous external control, as here controller and controlled immediately coincide.59 Before addressing Luther’s fateful recasting of personal responsibility, I would anticipate that reconsidering the effects of Calvin’s speculation on himself and his followers—or, in anachronistic terms, early Calvinist subjectivation processes—may open for us surprisingly productive contemporary perspectives.

57   Chemical depuration processes cannot grant absolute purity, but they are iterated just until they reach a prescribed purification threshold. 58   It would probably be more precise to add ‘almost’: for example, whilst discussing women’s head coverings, Calvin polemically observes: ‘Quand il y aura donc permission que les femmes descouvrent leurs testes, on dira, et bien, quel mal sera-ce que l’estomach non plus?’ When it will be permissible for women to uncover their heads, one will say, well, what harm in uncovering the stomach also? In Calvin, Onzième Sermon, I Cor. 11.2–2, in id., Opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. 49 (Brunsvick: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863), 709–722, 714. 59   Stirner complains that ‘Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, “conscience,” watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a “matter of conscience,” that is, police business.’ In Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 81–82. However, even more worrying is the immediate coincidence of spy and spied, which predates the aporetic condition of the Cartesian self-scrutinizing mind.

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For example, we may imagine our current neoliberal era as a sort of Calvinist parousia, that is, a second coming of Calvin’s double apparatus, which constructs uncertainty as a haunting threat, and which incessantly pursues mundane achievement as a (temporary) relief to overpowering stress. The neoliberal transformation of success into an apparent end60 shows that the religious uncertainty about one’s salvation can be recast in merely secular terms, such as the uncertainty about one’s satisfaction, without altering the consequential obsessive pursuit of mundane tasks. Yet, with the fading of the judge (in the person of both the Christian god and his various mundane authoritarian duplications) the anxiety about the external judgement turns into a depressive drift, as a way out of the inflation of personal responsibility. A major step towards our contemporary notion of absolute personal responsibility is the rejection of the priestly mediation between the Christian believer and god, which, as previously recalled, is successfully theorized by Luther. The new Lutheran economy of salvation emerges as a critique of the Christian subordination to a more literal economy, namely, the Papal sale of Jubilee indulgences: Luther appropriates a major ideological weapon of the Papal Revolution, that is, the struggle against the commodification of the Christian faith, and he turns it against the Papacy itself. However, the Lutheran critique does not simply target Papal practices, but it also challenges theological assumptions that ground the very authority of the Church. In 1520, Luther describes these assumptions with the image of a triple wall, which protects the privileges of ‘popes and Romans.’61 The first wall severs the supposedly spiritual estate of ‘pope, bishop, priest, and monks,’62 from ‘princes, lords, artisans, and peasants,’63 which are discriminated as the temporal estate. Luther claims instead that ‘all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save

60   In the neoliberal metaphysics of immanence, the quantification of fame easily passes into the quantification of gain and vice versa, so that Debord’s image of the society of the spectacle acquires the concrete sense of an interlacing of practices. As in Milton’s prophecy, the Earth is thus Paradise, but not for all selves: this realized salvation shows the human cost of the doctrines of selection (professed by Augustine, Luther, and Calvin), as opposed to those of universal recovery (professed by Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Eriugena). 61  ‘Pepste und Romer,’ in Martin Luther, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung (Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate) [1520], in id., D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe, hereinafter WA), 120 Banden (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2009), Band 6, 404–469, 406. 62  ‘Papst, Bischoff, Priester, Kloster volk,’ ibid. 407. 63  ‘Fursten, Hern, handtwerks und ackerleut,’ ibid.

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of office alone.’64 This is because, Luther declares, ‘we are all consecrated as priests by baptism.’65 The second wall also differentiates among Christians by stating that ‘no one may interpret the Scriptures but the pope.’66 On the contrary, for Luther ‘it behoves every Christian to aid the faith by understanding and defending it and by condemning all errors.’67 The third wall too discriminates against all Christians but one, as it states that ‘no one may call a council but the pope.’68 According to Luther, ‘[t]he third wall falls of itself, as soon as the first two have fallen.’69 Moreover, as a factual disproof of this principle, Luther can easily quote the case (among others) of the possibly most important Christian council, namely, that of Nicaea, which was not called by the pope, but by the Roman emperor Constantine. Luther publishes his Address to the Christian Nobility in August: having thus cleared the Christian ground of any wall whatsoever, he can duly profit from his new level plain field for addressing the new generic Christian subject. In November, Luther issues his treatise De Libertate Christiana,70 on Christian liberty, which also appears in a shorter German version as Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, on the freedom of the Christian. Right from the beginning of his tract, Luther raises another immaterial wall, which is to prove itself far more resilient than the Papist ones.71 This new boundary encircles each and every Christian’s inner sphere, which it sets irredeemably apart from the outer sphere. Of course, Luther does not invent the dichotomy between our inner and outer part, of which he quotes his Christian source: in the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul pits ὁ ἔξω ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος72 [ho exō hēmōn anthrōpos] our outer man, against ὁ ἔσω ἡμῶν73 [ho esō hēmōn], our inner one. According to 64  ‘[A]lle Christen sein warhafftig geistlichs stands, unnd ist unter ihn kein unterscheid, denn des ampts halben allein,’ ibid. 65  ‘[S]zo werden wir allsampt durch die tauff zu priestern geweihet,’ ibid. 66  ‘[E]s gebuhr die schrifft niemant auszulegenn, den der Papst,’ ibid. 406. 67  ‘[G]eburt einem iglichen Christen, dass er sich des glaubens annehm, zuvorstehen und vorsechten, und alle irtumb zuvordammen,’ ibid., 412. 68   ‘[E]s muge niemant ein Concilium beruffen, den der Papst,’ ibid., 406. 69  ‘Die dritte maur fället von ihr selbs, wo disse erste zwo fallenn,’ ibid., 413. 70   In Luther, WA 7, 49-73. 71   A plethora of modern authors is to re-enact this building activity. 72  Paul, 2 Corinthians 4.16 (Nestle-Aland). 73   Ibid.

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Paul, the law that rules the outer part is at war (ἀντιστρατευόμενον,74 antistrateuomenon) with the law of the inner part: the desire of the flesh (σὰρξ, sarx) goes against that of the spirit (πνεῦμα, pneuma) and vice versa.75 Paul’s simplistic split between flesh and spirit is meant to provide the narration of Jesus’ ultimately unsuccessful worldly practice with an underlying logic, which mirrors the unbridgeable gap between Jesus’ supposedly divine nature and his impotence in front of death: the same spirit (pneuma) of god that allegedly raises Jesus from death is to grant the believer eternal life.76 Jesus’ worldly failure thus becomes the necessary outcome of his supposedly divine mission of spiritual salvation. Luther faithfully reports the Pauline expressions as translated into Latin by Jerome: yet, his literality erases the difference between Paul’s addressees, that is, urban minorities of newly converted faithful, and his Christian readers in long-Christianized77 Western Europe. This notable difference is even less relevant than the gap between Paul’s expectation of the imminent second coming of Jesus, and Luther’s involvement in the long-term project of establishing a new church. Considering these divergences, it is not surprising that the mere restatement of Pauline theses on part of Luther ends up opening fairly different perspectives. For example, whilst Paul’s quietist stance simply underlines the irrelevance of social change on the horizon of the impending final judgement, Luther’s allegiance to authority qua authority sets the severance of the inner from the outer sphere as an existential model for the reformed Christian.78 Paradoxically, the literality79 of Luther’s recovery of the Pauline partition be Paul, Romans 7.23 (Nestle-Aland).  Paul, Galatians 5.17 (Nestle-Aland). Paul’s partition is only echoed once in the gospels: τὸ μὲν πνεῦμα πρόθυμον ἡ δὲ σὰρξ ἀσθενής [to men pneuma prothymon hē de sarx asthenēs], the spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak, in Mark 14.38 (Nestle-Aland) and Matthew 26.41 (Nestle-Aland). In Luke 24.39 (Nestle-Aland), the resurrected Jesus even uses the word pneuma with its current meaning of ‘ghost’: πνεῦμα σάρκα καὶ ὀστέα οὐκ ἔχει [pneuma sarka kai ostea ouk ekhei], a ghost has no flesh and bones. 76   See Paul, Romans 8.11 (Nestle-Aland). 77  The expression ‘long-Christianized’ should be qualified: for the moment, we may accept as terminus post quem the twelfth-century sacramental colonization of Western European peasantry. 78   This severance is even to be invoked soon as the progressive grounding for religious toleration, because it is to be recast as the more general private versus public partition. Kant will later write in his enlightened reshaping of Luther’s split: ‘räsonnirt, so viel ihr wollt, und worüber ihr wollt; aber gehorcht!’ Reason, as much as you want, and about what you want; but obey! In Immanuel Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,’ in id., Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe, hereinafter AA), vol. 8 (Berlin: Reimer, 1923), 33–42, 37. 79   By the irony of history, Luther has instead to defend himself for not being literal enough as a translator. 74 75

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tween inner and outer man reinvents the Christian by redefining her relation with herself and the world. In the Pauline letters, this relation does not emerge as a state of fact but as a possible choice: the advent of Christ opens the possibility to choose between the diverging ways of flesh and spirit. Hence, the divide between inner and outer man is less a spatial than a temporal boundary: there is a time before Christ’s incarnation and a time after it, and the choice of spirit means accepting the responsibility of living after Christ’s first coming, and trustfully waiting for his imminent return. Hence, Paul’s hints to the inner and outer man are not expressions of a systematic anthropology, but of a new temporalization: not only time is no longer the same, but a further and radically different time is soon to come. Paul makes explicit this temporal dimension by contrasting the new with the old man80: Luther then conflates the Pauline images as the ‘spiritual, inward, new man,’81 and the ‘fleshly, outward, old man’82 respectively. Nevertheless, the Pauline renewal marks a temporal passage that is epochal and personal at once, whereas the Lutheran novelty rather operates as a spatial dislocation of spiritual authority, which is removed from the centralized Papal Church and placed in the inward seat of individual conscience. Whilst this is indeed a radical innovation, there is no comeback to primitive Christianity, as imagined by Reformation theologians: on this regard, there is no point in universalizing priesthood, as this very notion would be incomprehensible to Paul, who sees himself and his fellow preachers simply as οἰκονόμοι83 [oikonomoi], that is, household managers of god’s mysteries. On the contrary, the bestowing of priesthood onto all believers universalizes the functions of instruction, control, and reprimand of the clergy, as construed in the course of fifteen centuries of Christian history.84 The new ramparts of the Lutheran inner citadel entrap these priestly functions together with their object of concern, namely, the individual soul: the ‘inward, new man’ is thus scrutinizer and scrutinized at once. This double role is  Paul, Colossians 3.9-10 (Nestle-Aland).  ‘[S]piritualis, interior, novus homo,’ in Luther, De Libertate Christiana, WA 7, 49–73, 50. 82  ‘[C]arnalis, exterior, vetus homo,’ ibid. 83  Paul, 1 Corinthians 4.1 (Nestle-Aland). In the text, the word is declined in the accusative case as οἰκονόμους [oikonomous]. 84   However, Luther does not dismiss the specific role of the priest, but he maintains that ‘solt ein priester stand nit anders sein in der Christenheit, dan als ein amptman,’ a priestly stand should not be different in Christendom from that of a functionary. In Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility, WA 6, 404–469, 408. 80 81

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not a novelty: yet, the external intervention of the Christian community first, and then of the priest, helps the believer to produce the authoritarian inner split between accuser and accused. In other words, whilst fifteen centuries of Christian relational practices work to help each believer to accommodate an inner cop, Luther boldly puts the whole burden of this excruciating construction on the single Christian. Actually, the inner split is not problematic by itself: for example, we saw that Evagrius elaborates a schizoid self-helping technique in order to face a condition of unusual isolation. Moreover, we will see how, well before Christianities, inner multiplicity is taken for granted: following Plato,85 diverging inner inclinations are understood by classical authors as a plurality of psykhai, that is, autonomous and differently located inner functions, which recast Homeric bodily impulses. The Platonic rational psykhē is anything but the judge of its heterogeneous companions: it should lead the other two psykhai just because it pursues different and, at least according to Plato, better ends. Christian thinkers then appropriate these heterogeneous and competing psykhai within their one-dimensional moral hierarchy. The classical functions become spiritual components of the anima, the Christian soul, which is also subjected to a pastoral external guidance: in the early thirteenth century, as an effect of the Papal Revolution, this model of direction is systematized through the prescription of a regular confession. Overall, the Christian relational body is made to include a judging86 human other, who makes himself heard in a communication that is not completely determinable by one’s wits.87 On the contrary, Luther internalizes altogether this relation of authoritarian control and judgement: in the new Lutheran inward man (sic), the inner accuser and the inner accused are left alone to face each other. Apparently, the personal weight of their unsupported split does not come into sight, because the human mediation of the priest is replaced by the direct divine gaze: the sinner is not completely alone insofar as he is coram Deo,88 in the presence   See Plato, Republic.   Of course, in theological terms, the Christian clergy only exerts a vicarious judgement that is merely provisional, pending the final judgement: however, in Luther’s time this judgement extends to decisions over life and death, and his claim of universal priesthood may well be understood (as many peasants do) as a call to arms. 87   For example, in the case of Iacopone, Boniface VIII makes himself heard through the bull of excommunication. 88  See, for example, Martin Luther, Römervorlesung [1515/16] (lecture on Romans), WA 56. Luther derives from Augustine the expressions coram Deo and coram hominibus. As the term coram is construed with the word os (gen. oris), mouth, it shows the ancient Roman operative sense of presence, which implies direct oral communication. This etymological link, which most probably escapes both Augustine and Luther, perfectly fits their understanding of confession and prayer: yet, their 85 86

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of god. God can overcome the sinner’s inner boundaries, and, according to Luther, he may bring the inward man the gift of an ‘alien righteousness.’89 Nevertheless, as no other human can reach the inward man, he does stand alone, and alone he has to control himself.90 Only the outward man is coram hominibus, that is, in the presence of men: as a consequence, the new reformed congregation is a gathering of reciprocally impenetrable solitaries. Of course, however effective, the preaching of Luther and Calvin cannot immediately expel from each follower’s inner space the vast array of connections that link humans to each other. Yet, the murderous practice of the ensuing wars of religion throws a deeply disquieting light on the potentialities of the newly atomized believer, who ominously realizes Paul’s erasure of links and belongings other than faith.91 The unprecedented pervasiveness of religious massacres shows how the absolute priority of belief can turn the new individual against neighbours and even relatives, so that it effectively renders man a wolf to man: for the first time in Europe, the war of religion becomes an individual affair. During the stage of religious conflicts, the person’s adherence to a religious denomination becomes literally an issue of life or death: and the new inward man (and woman too, such as in the case of Luther’s wife and former nun Katharina) has to face this choice alone, as the wall that severs him from the outward man also precludes him from participation with others. In other (and anachronistic) words, Luther’s allocation of clear-cut spheres of jurisdiction to the inward and the outward man produces not only a juridico-theological alternative to the Papal Revolution, but also a new mode of subjectivation. Apparently, Luther just relies on the ideological cornerstone of the Papal Revolution, namely, the absolute priority of principles over practices, in order to discredit works as a ‘dead thing’92: yet, this theological devaluation of human activity generates a new anthropological horizon. Because works are useless for salvation, the Christian can rightly adopt a double standard, according to which, in the words of Calvin, ‘spiritualis libertas cum politica sense of presence shifts towards visibility when, following Paul (Rom. 2.25–29), both Augustine (PL 44, 207–208) and Luther (WA 56, 27–28) dissert on penis integrity in literal and metaphorical sense. 89  ‘[I]usticia aliena,’ in Martin Luther, Sermo de duplici iustitia [1519], WA 2, 145–152, 146. 90   The extraordinarily successful practice of Alcoholics Anonymous makes nowadays visible a crucial clandestine enthesis in the Reformed relational body: another kind of spirit, which since its manufactured production in the sixteenth century produces a relieving space of oblivion between the inner accuser and the inner accused. 91   See Paul, Galatians 3.28 (Nestle-Aland). 92  ‘[T]odte ding.’ In Martin Luther, Von der Freiheit eines Chistenmenschen, WA 7, 20–38, 26.

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seruitute optime stare potest,’93 spiritual liberty is perfectly compatible with political slavery. In classical times, the complete disjunction of inner and outer freedom is an expression of human solidarity regardless of the actual condition of slavery: even if one’s body is enslaved—Sophocles notices with relief—at least his thinking ability is unfettered.94 Reformed theologians apparently follow the Sophoclean logic by salvaging the subject within the sanctum sanctorum of his interiority: nonetheless, their renewed anthropological severance abandons the outward man, that is, the actual acting individual, in the hands of mundane authority and of the new discipline of work. The most radical contemporary alternative to this split anthropological horizon challenges spatial closures with the overflow of excess: Rabelais cheerfully trespasses not only the boundary between inward and outward man, but also that between the individual and the species. By sketching a comparison of bodily parts that recovers Aristotelian wisdom, his character Panurge undermines several previously recalled hierarchies of the body: ‘La teste perdue, ne perist que la persone: les couilles perdues, periroit toute humaine nature,’ the head being lost, that single person only dies: the ballocks being lost, the whole human nature would perish.95 Panurge depicts both the macrocosm and the microcosm as a circulation system. Blood is the messenger of the exchange of nutrients in the individual body: but—warns Panurge—‘this is not yet all. This lending, owing, and borrowing world is so good that no sooner is this alimentation finished, it has already forecast how it shall lend to those who are not as yet born, and by that loan endeavour what it may to eternize itself, and multiply in images in its likeness, that is, children.’96 The physician and classicist Rabelais follows both Aristotle and Hippocrates in reconstructing ‘the supraindividual sphere of the ancestral life of the

 Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (1559), 549 (4.20.1).   εἰ σῶμα δοῦλον, ἀλλ’ ὁ νοῦς ἐλεύθερος [ei sōma doulon, all’ ho nous eleutheros]. Sophocles, fragment 940, in Stobaeus, Anthologium 4.19.33 (Wachsmuth-Hense). 95   François Rabelais, Tiers liure des faictz et dictz Heroïques du noble Pantagruel (Paris: Chrestien Wechel, 1546), 70. Panurge does not consider a generic human body but an explicitly gendered, male one. 96  ‘Encores n’est ce tout. Ce monde prestant, doibuant, empruntant, est si bon, que ceste alimentation paracheuée, il pense desia prester a ceulx qui ne sont encores nez: et par prest se perpetuer s’il peult, & multiplier en images a soy semblables, ce sont enfans.’ Ibid., 51. 93 94

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body.’97 Death and birth articulate individual and ancestral body98: whilst the facies hippocratica, that is, the impersonal Hippocratic features of the dying, marks the continuity of the ancestral body by abandoning the specific features of the individual,99 the Rabelaisian character Gargantua reminds his son Pantagruel that human nature ‘can acquire in a mortal state a kind of immortality’100 through incessant procreation. In Gargantua’s ‘kind of immortality’ there is a clear echo of the Aristotelian living entities’ sharing ‘in the eternal and the divine insofar as they can,’101 by producing ‘another similar to oneself, the animal producing an animal, the plant a plant.’102 Insofar as he is part of this self-perpetuating ancestral body of mankind, Gargantua gladly tells his son: ‘(I can) see my hoary old age blooming again in your youth.’103 Here, the verb refleurir, blooming again, expresses with a charming botanical image the iteration of the cycle of life as renewed by animal reproduction. Yet, whilst Aristotle explicitly denies each mortal the perpetuation of its numeric individuality,104 Gargantua celebrates his own renewed flowering in his son. Bakhtin recurs to the notion of the ancestral body to describe this continuity through repetition: I would rather reconsider the position of Gargantua through his relational body. We may say that the relational body of Gargantua incorporates his son Pantagruel, not as a mere representation, but as a blossoming branch of the ancestral body of which he himself is part. In other words, Gargantua’s relational body embraces his own genus, which includes his son as this genus’ last outgrowth. Of course, the inclusion within the individual not only of another

 97   над-индивидуальной сфере родовой жизни тела [nad-individual’noy sfere rodovoy zhizni tela]. Eng. trans. in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Helene Iswolsky trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 358.  98   Bakhtin writes родовое тело [rodovoe telo], from the root род [rod], birth, which in modern Russian has the various senses of kin, generation, and species.  99   For the author of the Prognostic, the lack of resemblance of the face of the patient with her normal appearance may be a sign of death. In Hippocrates, Prognostic 2. 100  ‘[E]lle peult en estat mortel acquerir une espece de immortalite,’ in François Rabelais, Les horribles & espouventables faictz & prouesses du tres renomme Pantagruel, Roy des Dipsodes, filz du grand geant Gargantua, Composez nouvellement par maistre Alcofrybas Nasier (Lyon: C. Nourry, 1532), sign. Diir (27). 101   τοῦ ἀεὶ καὶ τοῦ θείου μετέχωσιν ᾗ δύνανται [tou aei kai tou theiou metekhōsin hēi dynantai], in Aristotle, De anima 415b. 102   ἕτερον οἷον αὐτό, ζῷον μὲν ζῷον, φυτὸν δὲ φυτόν [heteron hoion auto, zōon men zōon, phyton de phyton], ibid. 415a. 103  ‘[V]eoir mon antiquite chanue refleurir en ta jeunesse.’ In Rabelais, Pantagruel, sign. Diiv (28). 104   ἓν ἀριθμῷ [hen arithmō], in Aristotle, De anima 415b.

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individual,105 but also of the individual’s genus defies Aristotelian logic: the image of the relational body may require a different logic, which allows the operation of mise en abyme106 not only as self-inclusion,107 but also as the inclusion of a more comprehensive unit, such as that of the whole tree by one of its branches. In other words, unlike Aristotle’s arborescent logic, the logic of the relational body is neither necessarily modelled on the Greek108 geometrical construction of space nor on the hierarchical structure of inclusion of properties. We may rather borrow the Platonic term μέθεξις109 [methexis], participation, to describe the link between Pantagruel and his father. ‘[A]s in you resides the image of my body, so also shine the manners of [my] soul,’110 writes Gargantua to his son. This double participation exceeds individual identity: once he reached his mortal boundary, Gargantua explains, ‘I will not consider myself as completely dying, but rather as transmigrating from one place to another.’111 More important, until that moment, a double share fills Pantagruel’s relational body with the features of his father, and vice versa. These family resemblances are much more than merely statistical expressions of a family relation, as they are carefully cultivated in the pursuit of perfection ‘as much in virtue, honesty and gentlemanliness as in all liberal and honest knowledge.’112 Gargantua is not only a link in the family chain between his father Grantgousier113 and his son Pantagruel: Rabelais understands this specific genealogical participation

105  Aristotle has no problem in including a slave within her owner, as a part with respect to the whole. See Aristotle, Politics 1254a. 106   In 1893, André Gide borrows from heraldry the phrase mise en abyme, literally ‘placed into abyss,’ which describes the recursive inclusion of a pictorial image within itself. See, for example, the fourteenth-century Stefaneschi triptych by Giotto. 107  In set theory, self-inclusion produces undecidability, so that Bertrand Russell introduces a hierarchization of sets in order to exclude it. In more general terms, Russell’s paradox exposes the problematicalness of individuation by way of definition. 108   I am considering here geometry as construed by Euclid, or, in Aristotle’s time, by Theodorus and Theaetetus. 109  Plato appears to first nominalize the verb μετέχω [metekhō], I partake of, as methexis in Parmenides 132d. 110  ‘[A]insi comme en toy demeure l’ymage de mon corps / si pareillement ne reluysoient les meurs de l’ame.’ In Rabelais, Pantagruel, sign. Diiv (28). 111  ‘Je ne me reputeray point toutallement mourir: mais plus tost transmigrer d’ung lieu en aultre,’ ibid. Here Rabelais recovers the doctrine of transmigration of the individual soul by transmuting it into an expression of participation with another. 112  ‘[T]ant en vertuz/ honnestete/ & preudhommie/ comme en tout scavoir liberal & honneste.’ In Rabelais, Pantagruel, sign. Diiir (29). 113   Ibid. In later editions, ‘Grangousier.’

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also as an example of a wider commonality, that of ‘gens liberes/ bien nez/ & bien instruictz,’114 free, well-born, and well-educated people. This ideal community of (privileged) peers is brought to life in the depiction of the anarchic monastic order of Thélèmites, who are subject to no restraint at all. The Thélèmite relational body may even appear to emulate the Lutheran inward man, insofar it emancipates the individual conscience from all mundane rules115: yet, Luther internalizes the pessimistic anthropology of Christian monasticism, which is instead reversed altogether by the naturally good-oriented Rabelaisian gens. From our contemporary perspective, the tragic success to come of the Lutheran relational body, and even more so, of its restlesser Calvinist variety, may let appear their Thélèmite alternative as little more than a fictional expression of humanist wishful thinking. Even a well-intentioned interpreter such as Bakhtin confines the Rabelaisian world within a subaltern tradition of Carnivalesque excess, which is then successfully kept in check by the modern recasting of the classical containment of bodies and entities. However, Bakhtin does not fail to notice that the pessimist and the optimist poles of sixteenth-century humanist anthropology, namely, Calvin and Rabelais, end up sharing the role of ‘creators of French literary prose.’116 In particular, Rabelais not only substantially expands the French lexicon with borrowings from both classical and oral vernacular traditions, but he deploys part of these additions in a strikingly peculiar way: [H]is common and proper nouns are not sharply differentiated, as we are accustomed to find them in modern literary style. This softening of the dividing lines between proper and common nouns has the goal of expressing praise-abuse in a nickname. In other words, if a proper noun has a clear etymological meaning that characterizes its owner, it is no longer a name but a nickname. And a nickname can never be neutral, since its meaning always includes an element of evaluation, positive or negative.117

More than that, the blurring of the divide between proper and common nouns undermines the main marker of individuation, namely, the name, by turning 114  François Rabelais, La vie tres horrificque du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel iadis composee par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence (Lyon: François Juste, 1534), sign. Niir. 115   Rabelais expresses this emancipation in the paradoxical form of the injunction ‘Faictz ce que Vouldras,’ do what you want. Ibid. 116  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 457. 117   Ibid., 459. We may say that Rabelais uses the name as a demonstratio, that is, an epideictic statement about its bearer.

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it into an expression of either praise or abuse. This typification of characters shifts the focus of individuation from numerical identity towards features and behaviours, which can be even more widely shared than family commonalities. Of course, from the teleological perspective of our contemporary atomized individual, Rabelais’ language drift may just seem to reproduce medieval typologies, which modern authors often stigmatize as a still rudimentary stage of European individuation. Nevertheless, if we compare the popular narrations of the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Rabelaisian saga as representatives of their respective cultural and historical contexts, the supposedly evolutionary passage into modernities rather shows itself, mutatis mutandis, as an astonishing narrowing of horizon. I recalled how Bunyan thrills his plentiful readers with his storytelling ability, which allows him to turn Calvinist angst into a source of narrative excitement. Christian’s oversimplified stance towards life rightly fits a lively fairy tale: and even if the eventual reward is bestowed onto the hero by the irritable and vindictive Old Testament god, Christian’s adventures can probably be enjoyed regardless of Bunyan’s gloomy worldview. Yet, though the characters of the Rabelaisian tales are no less fantastic than Bunyan’s, they map a veritable parallel reality, which is enriched at once by the legacy of the classical world, and by the irruption of vernacular orality on the written scene. In other and contemporary words, early modern subjectivations and their sixteenth-century Reformation antecedents do not face their Rabelaisian (and Erasmian, La Boétiean, and Montaignian) alternative simply as a pessimistic versus an optimistic construction of human beings: the Lutheran retreat within the inward man also opens the way to a vertiginous reduction of human interrelations and motivations. We saw that Iacopone is no less interested in his own salvation than Bunyan, and his alternatives are no less clear-cut: nonetheless, even from his dungeon he strives to remain in touch with the world. In the next chapter, we will explore this much-despised medieval world: in particular, we will attempt to check whether its rich texture of human interconnections necessarily involves that minority condition,118 which Luther and his many wittings and unwitting epigones are then to address with their individualizing therapies.

118   In his article ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ Kant uses the term Unmündigkeit, nonage, as an epideictic description of the non-enlightened human condition. In Kant, AA 8, 35.

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Painted, Mirrored, and Mystical Bodies A Medieval Proliferation

‘Aetherna ipse suae mentis simulachra lutherus / Exprimit · at vultus cera lucae occiduos / MDXX,’ Luther himself presses the eternal images out of his mind, whilst the mould of Lucas the perishable features, 1520: this is the text of the inscription that runs beneath an insightful engraving of the young tonsured Luther by Cranach. The painter wittily evokes the Lutheran divide between inward and outward man, by comparing Luther’s depictions of his inner landscape with his drawn simulacrum, that is, the imitation of the monk’s transitory appearance. Cranach’s metaphorical cera, wax, at once replicates this very appearance and immobilizes it into a stable and reproducible image. In the sixteenth century, the work of art is yet to follow the spiritualizing path that will lead painters such as Kandinsky and Malevich to abstraction: Cranach is not even ready to embrace the first Western European iconoclasm, which since the Reformation allows northern painters to focus on the mundane features of their clients. In retrospect, if we consider extant1 Western European medieval works of art, these features begin to appear as additions to religious subjects: they mostly get centre stage by interacting with religious characters, such as Jesus crowing the Norman king Roger II in the imposing twelfth-century Palermitan mosaic.2

1   In medieval times, religious buildings and works of art may be spared destruction out of respect for their contents: artistic representations of profane subjects may not survive as easily. 2   The mosaic is in the church of the Martorana at Palermo. Whilst the work is in Byzantine style, it follows the previous example of a mosaic (now lost) in Montecassino, which is an indirect visual expression of the Papal Revolution: the abbot Desiderius, then Pope Victor III, recovers in the European West the lost technique of mosaic as a revival of Early Christian art.

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From the sixteenth century onward, in Reformed countries, the hostility to the depiction of religious subjects gives the long march of the representation of the individual in the medieval painted world a distinctively bourgeois turn: however, also before the Reformation individual portraits monumentalize the bearers of outstanding power, strength, and richness. Moreover, these works also witness the features, and possibly, the self-affirmation of the artists themselves. For example, we may follow the bodily transformation in time of Albrecht Dürer through the series of his self-portraits, with which he painstakingly documents his features also in the nude.3 Dürer’s relational body seems to expand into the many images of the painter: it also appears to include the nonfigurative self-representation of the amazing monogram, with which Dürer leaves his personal mark on his vast production. The proliferation of self-portraits may also be linked to a technology of smallscale mirror making by metalizing glass with lead or tin: this craftmanship is attested since the twelfth century in Germany and Lorraine, and it reaches Venice in the fourteenth century. Moreover, in 1540 Venetian artisans begin to use a new procedure for producing flat mirrors of unprecedented quality: the verisimilitude of this new optical duplication of bodies turns a surface into a virtual double of the reflected space.4 All these mirrors not only offer new challenges to painters qua technicians of image reproduction: painters are also given an extraordinary tool for self-observation. Since the fourteenth century, the painters’ represented bodies merge with the represented scene from the margins of frescoes and tables: their faces may turn towards the viewer, and their gaze sometimes observe the observer: even if the artist does not yet dare the Dürerian fully frontal conflation of religious icon and self-portrait,5 he (and sometimes she6) surely claims his presence both in the painting and in the world. 3   Montaigne is later to announce in the preface to his Essais: ‘Que si i’eusse esté parmy entre ces nations qu’on dict viure encore sous la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, ie t’asseure que ie m’y fusse tres volontiers peint tout entiér, & tout nud.’ Because if I had been living in those nations that are said to live under the sweet freedom of the law of nature, I assure you that I would have very willingly depicted myself whole, and completely naked. In Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 5th ed., Bordeaux Copy with autograph corrections and additions (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1588), sign. aijr; id, Essais, published after the Bordeaux Copy, Fortunat Strowsky et al eds. (hereinafter Strowsky), 5 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nouvelle F. Pech et C.ie, 1906–1933), vol. 1, 2. 4   In turn, the deformed image of reality produced by traditional curved mirrors is represented by painters to show their pictorial virtuosity, as in Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini portrait, which he paints in 1434: in 1525, according to Vasari, Parmigianino astounds Pope Clement VII with his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. 5   In 1500, Dürer paints himself in a full-frontal pose, which is generally used for religious subjects. 6   Catharina van Hemessen’s 1548 self-portrait is possibly the first one that depicts a painter at work in front of the easel, and also the first painted self-portrait of a woman, though there are previous female self-representations in miniature works.

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In the sixteenth-century retrospective account by Vasari,7 the self-affirming path of these skilful decorators is made to teleologically converge towards the towering figure of Michelangelo: Vasari is contented to sit close enough to the Master along the inevitably (after Michelangelo) descending curve of pictorial competence.8 Michelangelo himself describes in flattering terms Pope Julius II’s approval of his new plan for the Sistine Ceiling: ‘Then he [Julius II] gave me a new commission to do what I wanted.’9 These conditions may appear as a turning point in the relation of Michelangelo qua artist with his client: it is not surprising that in Vasari’s eyes the breadth of Michelangelo’s skills, work, and fame culminates a long ascent, which, as we will soon see, begins with the humble work of depicting images as minuscule as miniatured letters in illuminated manuscripts. Nevertheless, the social visibility of the artists, which is witnessed by the emergence of their self-portraits within collective subjects, seems less a cipher of individual pre-eminence than a proud claim of participation in the rich texture of public life: the painter stages his representation as an urban living being,10 even when he collectively performs on a country landscape. Of course, facial traits are undoubtedly the marker of a specific human being: yet, their detailed reproduction is meant less to let emerge the artist11 in isolation than to underline his belonging in a potential orchestra of virtuosi, as later shown by Veronese’s spectacular depiction of himself and his fellow brightest Venetian painters whilst performing together chamber music.12

 7   See Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Firenze: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550).  8   Mutatis mutandis, Michelangelo somewhat plays the role of Socrates for Vasari, who nonetheless is no pictorial Plato.  9  ‘Allora mi decte nuova chommessione che io facessi ciὸ che io volevo.’ In Michelangelo Buonarroti, December 1523 letter to Giovan Francesco Fattucci, in id., Il carteggio di Michelangelo, Paola Barocchi, Renzo Ristori, Giovanni Poggi eds., vol. 3 (Firenze: Sansoni, S.P.E.S., 1965–1983), 8. 10   This is also Aristotle’s definition of human being, πολιτικόν ζῷον [politikon zōon], which is generally (and anachronistically) translated as ‘political animal.’ In Aristotle, Politics 1.1253a. 11   We have also three-dimensional self-portraits, such as, for example, the sculpted heads of Peter Parler, Andrea Orcagna, and Lorenzo Ghiberti. 12   See Paolo Veronese, The wedding of Cana. The monumental painting gains Veronese the attention of the Inquisition for the mixture of sacred and profane subjects: he attempts to call in his defence the previous example of Michelangelo’s naked religious characters, but he is just left to claim: ‘Nui pittori [hauemo la] si pigliamo licentia, che si pigliano i poeti et i matti,’ we painters [have] take the liberty that poets and madmen take. Already in 1573, this is the residual space of action for artists in dark times of mounting religious conflicts. In 18 July 1573 verbal process, Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, quoted in André Chastel, Chronique de la peinture italienne à la Renaissance (Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1983), 282.

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It may be observed that monumental art demands a co-operative effort, which is also distributed through the expanding production of a master painter in demand. From our contemporary perspective, self-representation may thus be understood as an attempt to affirm one’s individuality on the horizon of a collective enterprise. Yet, individual style is less an issue of concern than the choice and the use of subjects, which painters negotiate with their clients: Michelangelo’s autonomy of decision stands out as an exception to a longestablished practice. One may wonder whether the celebrated Renaissance individualism rather expresses the desiderata of its later transalpine admirers, such as Stendhal, and even more, Burckhardt.13 As compared with the consonant choir that glorifies the Renaissance’s caesura as an anticipation of modernities, it may be worth recovering Burdach’s lectio difficilior, which underlines the links between the so-called dark ages and their more glamorous aftermath.14 In this case, it would not be difficult to recognize in the alleged manifesto of individual affirmation, namely, Machiavelli’s Prince, a recasting of the medieval miroir du prince, the mirror of the prince: Machiavelli turns such a traditional laudatory exhortation into a toolbox for gaining and preserving political power. Rather than celebrating political individuality, the manual expands medieval typologies by depicting a new kind of state-builder, which implicitly involves an adaptation of the Roman Republican category of homo novus,15 the new man. The task of the new ruler is to grant a new and stable 13   Burckhardt’ construction of Renaissance individualism is clearly not extraneous to his reformed theology training, as it couples ‘[d]er (. . .) Entwicklung des Individuums,’ the inward development of the individual, with ‘eine neue Art von Geltung nach außen: der moderne Ruhm,’ a new art of outward distinction: the modern glory.’ In Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860), 142 (2.3). In his analysis of Suger of Saint Denis, Panofsky imaginatively stretches this dichotomic horizon by contrasting the centripetal affirmation of Burkhardt’s Renaissance individual to the centrifugal projection of the abbot’s ‘colossal but, in a sense, humble vanity.’ In Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), 29. ‘Yet, it would be perhaps more realistic—Gurevich observes—to maintain the opposite with regard to Suger: in his hunger for self-affirmation, Suger as it were absorbed the building into himself.’ In Aaron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, Katharine Judelson trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 146–147. 14   See Konrad Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus. Zwei Abhandlungen über die Grundlage moderner Bildung und Sprachkunst (Berlin: Paetel, 1918). 15   Homo novus, new man is the Roman Republican definition of a man who is the first magistrate in his family: the exemplary case is Marius, whom Sallust makes justify his new position in Bellum Iugurthinum 85. Machiavelli unfavourably compares Republican Florence’s exclusively popular government with Republican Rome’s joint access of patrician and plebeians to positions of power: ‘perché, potendo i Popolari essere à la amministratione de’ Magistrati de li Eserciti, & de li Imperii co i Nobili preposti, di quella medesima virtù, che erano quelli, si riempievano: et quella Città, crescendoui la virtù, cresceva in potenza.’ Because, as the Populars could be assigned to the administration of the Magistratures, of the Army, and of the Empires with the Nobles, they filled themselves

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object of affection to Machiavelli, who values his political belonging even more than himself: ‘I love my homeland more than my soul.’16 Machiavelli’s public role as Secretary of the Florentine Republic allows him to demonstrate his civic devotion. The fall of the Republic then forces him to retreat to his country estate and thus inflicts on his relational body a painful mutilation: Machiavelli has his relational body severed from both his embassies abroad and his negotiations with his fellow citizens. Nevertheless, Machiavelli’s evening writing activity after a day out17 makes him somewhat regain these lost spaces of intervention18: more than that, following a tradition that harks back to Thucydides, the prosthetic evocation of the past soon turns into a new and powerful enthesis. The Athenian disgraced general carves into words the new art of commanding the past by extracting its cyclical rules19: Machiavelli does not content himself with revisiting Roman history through Livy, but he also combines his knowledge of Republican Rome and contemporary Florence into a device for immediate action, The Prince, indeed. Despite the black legend of Machiavellianism, the Florentine patriot simply entrusts the self-determination of his renewed urbs to the military and political expansion of a yet-to-be Italic state: the urgency of such a task in the face of contemporary European power struggles even pushes him to put on hold his deep Republican commitment. Probably Machiavelli feels as a painful (albeit necessary) cunning the temporary sidelining of his Republican allegiance20 because of his acceptance of tyrannical means to realize the ends of state building. On the contrary, when Hobbes re-enacts this tragic coupling of means and ends as the fiction of his social contract, not only the painful political loss is moved away to a remote (and imaginary) past, but the tyrannical means becomes a de facto end. The actual painful severance of individual subjects from each other is not so far in time though: in the new Reformed relational body there is hardly with the same virtue of the latter: and that City in which virtue was growing, was growing in power. In Niccolò Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine (Roma: Antonio Blado, 1532), 52v (3.1). 16  ‘[A]mo la patria mia più dell’anima.’ In Niccolò Machiavelli, 16 April 1527 letter to Francesco Vettori, in id., Lettere, Franco Gaeta ed. (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1961), 505 (n. 234). 17   See 10 December 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori, ibid., 423–428 (n. 224). 18  ‘[E]ntro nelle antique corti degli antiqui huomini (. . .): tutto mi trasferisco in loro.’ I enter the ancient courts of ancient men (. . .): I transfer the whole of myself in them. Ibid., 426. 19   See Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War. 20  ‘[I]o non mancai mai a quella repubblica, dove io ho possuto giovarle, che io non l’habbi fatto, se non con le opere, con le parole, se non con le parole, con i cenni,’ I never failed that republic, so that I have been of help wherever I could, if not with deeds, with words, if not with words, with gestures. In 17 May 1521 letter to Francesco Guicciardini, in Machiavelli, Lettere, 519–520 (n.270).

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space for others. It is the brutish and nasty condition of religious wars that allows the staging of the Hobbesian theatre, where individual characters are completely detached from each other, in order to be composed within a mere aggregate of reciprocally extraneous entities as the body of the Leviathan. The Lutheran expulsion of the others from the inner space and the devaluation of the outer space may be understood as the preconditions21 to the clear-cut Hobbesian political sphere, where the isolated subject faces the body politic either as a threat or as an assimilated and impotent cog. This simplistic dichotomization of the public sphere is to shape the modern political horizon, so that even our contemporary gaze is nearly blind to Machiavelli’s multiple loyalties. On the contrary, Machiavelli can compare his city-state and his soul because his relational body makes room for both. In turn, for him the city is not an abstract notion, but the living compound of its human constituents: it is then not surprising that he expresses his civic virtue in a Roman Republican language, which also allows him to escape his contemporary theological justifications of political power. However, the very vocabulary of juridical theology can also be cunningly twisted to express a similar allegiance to the city. In the late fourteenth century, the Perugian lay jurist Baldus challenges the authority of Accursius’ Glossa, and he affirms that ‘men [taken] separately do not make a people’22: properly speaking, a people is rather ‘a collection of men into a single mystical and abstractly gathered body.’23 Here Baldus appropriates the juridicotheological language of the Papal Revolution to support the juridical claim to self-determination of city-states, as asserted by his master Bartolus24: ‘the city is its own prince.’25 Baldus deploys the notion of mystical body, which is the strongest contemporary expression of political unity and collective identity: yet, by specifying that such a unity is produced by abstraction, he turns upside down the 21   I dealt with the more direct influence of Galilean physics on Hobbes in the first section of the third chapter of my Farewell to Freedom. A Western Genealogy of Liberty (London: University of Westminster Press, 2018). 22  ‘[H]omines separate non faciunt populum.’ In Baldus de Ubaldis, Lectura in VI-IX libros Codicis (Lyon: Johannes Siber, 1498), fol. 236r (7.53.5). 23  ‘[H]ominum collectio in unum corpus misticum et abstractive sumptum,’ ibid. 24   Though we haven’t a proper portrait of Bartolus, his personal contribution to medieval jurisprudence is proverbial: nemo jurista nisi Bartolista, no one is a jurist unless he is a follower of Bartolus, a widespread adagio advises. 25  ‘[C]iuitas sibi princeps est.’ In Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Commentaria ad Digestum Vetus, Tommaso Diplovatazio ed. (Venezia: Battista Torti, 1520), fol. 133r (4.4.3, n. 1).

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descending theory of power that justifies the Papal Revolution. Men (sic) are never mere members of a collective body, which is rather the outcome of their practices. Nevertheless, for the jurist Baldus, these practices include legal stipulations, such as the Roman people’s alleged transfer of its sovereign prerogatives to the emperor Vespasian26: this is why, according to Baldus, cities only ‘fill in their territory the place of the emperor.’27 Whilst Dante contrasts the paranoid hierarchy of the Papal Revolution with a bipolar overlordship of pope and emperor,28 he too fiercely defends the selfdetermination of his native Florence. It would be hard to deny a sense of self to the proud politician who makes a dead and beatified ancestor commend him for being of a party by himself,29 after the expulsion from his homeland. Yet, Dante never accepts his condition of lifelong exile, and out of his city, the bread is invariably too salty for him30: no doubt, Dante’s relational body includes Florence and its ovens. However, Dante’s actual relational body is less remarkable than his potential one: he is to obtain this new relational body in due time after his death, when, as the praises that he receives during his visit to the Afterlife make us presume, he will complete his purgatorial cleansing, and he will be admitted to paradise for good. At that stage, Dante will achieve the evidently valuable ability to compenetrate the others at ease.31 This is a skill that humans lack, as he remarks to a resident spirit during his first brief stay in paradise: Già non attendere’ io tua dimanda, s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii.32

I wouldn’t yet be waiting for your question if I’d be in you the way you’re into me.

26  The Lex de Imperio Vespasiani (law regulating Vespasian’s authority), which is officially ratified by the Roman Senate on 22 December 69, is crafted as a legal justification of the transfer of power from the Roman people to the emperor. 27  Baldus de Ubaldis, Super Decretalibus (Lyon, Pierre Fradin, 1551), fol. 28v (1.2.13, n. 3), quoted in Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116. 28   See Dante, De Monarchia. 29  ‘[S]i ch’a te fia bello / averti fatta parte per te stesso,’ so that be good for you / to have made yourself alone your very party. In Dante Alighieri, Paradiso XVII, 68–69. 30   ‘[S]ì come sa di sale / lo pane altrui,’ how much it tastes salty / another’s bread. Ibid., 58–59. 31   See Paul, 1 Corinthians 13.12 (Nestle-Aland): ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην [arti ginōskō ek merous, tote de epignōsomai kathōs kai epegnōsthēn], now I know in part, then I will know fully, just like I have been fully known too. 32   In Dante, Paradiso IX, 80–81.

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This paradisiac faculty of compenetration has no worldly definition in words. As Dante himself cautions whilst recalling his fly to heaven, ‘[m]uch is allowed there, which here do not permit / our capabilities,’33 which include his own aptitude to verbally describe his transformation: ‘to signify with words human-transcending / we may not.’34 However, Dante does what he can to set into words his heavenly experience, which includes the transhuman capacity to penetrate others: the bizarre verbs ‘in-you-ing’ and ‘in-me-ing,’35 which he conjures up to describe the active and passive facets of this compenetration, also construct such an ideal participation as an activity rather than a state. In paradise, each saved one can enter another, which is thus, as it were, coram alia or alio, that is, in the presence of another: this presence is the result of an ability of penetration that is a trait, if not of perfection, of transhuman improvement over living beings. In mundane life, as an anticipation to the beatified condition, inner readability is facilitated by a variety of self-disclosures. We previously saw self-portraits spread on walls and wooden tables since the fourteenth century as veritable self-disclosures of at least the external features of the artists: but even before that, written parchments sometimes host the portraits of the illuminators and their names. From the eleventh century on, these signed depictions of their authors appear hanging from within glorified capital letters, such as the illuminated ‘I’ where Robert Benjamin, the scribe, stands under William of St. Calais, Bishop of Durham.36 More than that, Hugo pictor, that is, painter, represents himself in the act of decorating Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah37; the tonsured monk Rufillus even multiplies the selfreferences, as he portrays himself while painting the surrounding letter ‘R’ in red, which is the colour of his hair and the probable motivation for his name.38 Moreover, personal features can be revealed in words without the limitation of visual boundaries. In particular, right before the bottleneck of modernities, self-disclosure in writing attains a possibly unsurpassed level of narrative  ‘Molto è licito là, che qui non lece / a le nostre virtù.’ In Dante, Paradiso I, 55–56.  ‘Trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria.’ Ibid., 70–71. 35   In Dante, Paradiso IX, 81: the literal translation of this line, which includes the astonishing neologisms that turn the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘me’ into verbs, would be something like ‘if I in-you-ed myself just like you in-me yourself.’ 36   In Augustine, Commentary on the Psalms, part 2, MS. B.II.13, folio 102r, Durham Cathedral Library. 37  In Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, MS. Bodleian 717, folio 287v, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 38   Rufillus is the diminutive of Rufus, that is, red in Latin. In The Lives of the Saints, codex 127, folio 244, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Geneva. 33 34

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virtuosity in the reflections by Montaigne. The Frenchman’s extraordinarily balanced considerations, which will have a stimulating and soothing effect on generations of readers to come, are anything but a self-glorifying exercise. The more Montaigne expands his public exploration of himself, the more he reaches an unexpected recognition, namely, the perception of his own composite nature: ‘we are all made of patches,’39 he dares to generalize by analogy with his consideration of himself. On the copy of the last published edition of the Essais that Montaigne keeps annotating until his premature death, the previously quoted sentence is followed by a significantly modified specification: ‘and of a texture so monstrous formless and diverse, that every piece, every moment, plays its own game.’40 The negative term ‘monstrous’ appears under erasure, and is replaced by the descriptive adjective ‘formless,’ as a clear sign of Montaigne’s acceptance of his own multiplicity, which he does not want to put in a bad light. We will need to go well through the dark parable of modernities to find again such an irenic acceptance of one’s plurality in Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ to himself and the world. Montaigne’s death, and the even more untimely passing of his brotherly friend La Boétie, interrupt a double path of reconsideration of small and big subjects, which early modern speculation will instead freeze, so to speak, into our familiar shapes of the individual and the state. Montaigne’s narrative and autobiographical approach is to leave its trace on Descartes,41 who, in turn, is to be haunted by Montaigne’s embracing of uncertainty and temporariness: La Boétie powerful political notion of voluntary servitude will be obscured even sooner by Calvin’s homonymous theological concept. For sure, a thinker like Descartes, who programmatically declares to advance masked,42 can but find unnerving Montaigne’s equally deliberate openness, as professed in the Essais: ‘I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do, and I dislike even thoughts that are unpublishable.’43 Montaigne has nothing to hide not so much because of the exemplarity of his behaviour, but rather because he polemically refuses to censor issues such as, for example, sexual activities, which are being obscured by the contemporary mounting prudishness. ‘Each one of my parts makes me myself just as much as every  ‘Nous sommes tous de lopins.’ In Montaigne, Essais, 140r Mm4 (2.1); Strowsky vol. 2, 9.  ‘[E]t d’une contexture si monstreuse informe & diuerse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, feit faict son ieu.’ Ibid; Strowsky ibid. 41   ‘As a young man, Descartes studied the Essais at La Flèche: the College library had a fine copy, with annotations some scholars think are his own first reactions.’ In Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 42. 42  See supra, chapter 2, note 11. 43  ‘[I]e me suis ordonné d’oser dire tout ce que i’ose faire: & Et me desplais des pensées mesmes impubliables.’ In Montaigne, Essais, 369r (3.5); Strowsky vol. 3, 75. 39 40

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other one,’44 he writes to accept responsibility for a failed erection: by doing so, he also rejects in advance the Cartesian severing of the body from the mind, which, as he sardonically observes, ‘if its companion has the colic, it seems to have it too.’45 Montaigne’s fully embodied identity is not far from the identity of the Rabelaisian characters. However, whilst the latter explore the register of excess well beyond the limits of linguistic and factual possibility, Montaigne’s sober and classically balanced prose appears to mirror in writing, as it were, his real, if uncommon, person. From the perspective of the modern obsessive research for truth, Montaigne’s realistic enquiries may thus be easily understood as an enlightened, albeit embarrassing, predecessor to later self-examinations. Yet, analogously to La Boétie’s happy deployment of Plutarchian categories in the political analysis of his contemporary France, Montaigne seems rather to radically transform the Christian tradition of public confession by turning the Plutarchian detached biographer’s gaze towards himself. We will see how the rhetorician Augustine puts his art in the service of both his preaching duty and his literary exhibitionism, thus setting a standard for confessional and autobiographical narrations at once. Whilst Heloise first painfully challenges both traditions in her marvellous and redolent letters to Abelard, Montaigne claims this challenge as a veritable confessional and autobiographical counter-canon. ‘I want to be seen in my simple, natural, and ordinary state,’46 Montaigne makes clear from the outset of his writing endeavour. Instead of boasting the status of Renaissance homo faber, he doubts that ‘each one is the maker [faber] of his own fortune’47: at best, one can adapt himself to the turns of fortune, which ‘is made of glass: when it shines, it breaks out.’48 It would be

44  ‘Chacune de mes pieces me faict esgalemant moi que toute autre. Et nulle autre ne me faict plus propremant home que cetecy.’ Ibid., written on the margin at 389v (3.5); Strowsky ibid., 131. 45  ‘sSi son compagnon a la cholique, il semble qu’il l’ait aussi.’ Ibid., 368v (3.5); Strowsky ibid., 73. 46  ‘Ie veus qu’on m’y voie en ma façon simple, naturelle & ordinaire.’ Ibid., sign. aij; Strowsky vol. 1, 1. 47  ‘[F]aber est suae quisque fortunae.’ Ibid., written on the margin at 21v (1.14); Strowsky vol. 1, 77. From Pseudo Sallustius, De republica 1.1.2. 48  ‘Fortuna uitrea est tunc cum splendet frangitur.’ Ibid., written on the margin; Strowsky ibid. From Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, quoted in Justus Lipsius, Politicorum 5.18.3.

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difficult to find anything more distant from Augustine’s bombastic claim: ‘me, not the destiny, not fortune, not the devil.’49 Whilst Augustine’s narration and literary character are means to his declared and undeclared ends, Montaigne’s miscellaneous discourses realize in advance Borges’ apologue of the man who ‘peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people’50: these combined shapes eventually compose the man’s portrait. The Essais give the medieval genre of speculum, that is, the mirror of the various realities that the text depicts in writing, the literal meaning of the reflected image of their author. Shortly before Montaigne, also the Milanese physician and polymath Gerolamo Cardano attempts a self-portrait in writing by assembling a series of Latin texts, which are variously related to the writer’s person and activities51: the outstanding artist Cellini recurs instead to a linear, if incomplete, chronological account of his adventurous life, which he colourfully narrates in his native Florentine vernacular. Cellini’s first manuscript is completed in 153952: a hundred years before makes its appearance a written vernacular narration, which is credited as the earliest autobiographical text in the English language. A male hand (which signs at the end of the text as ‘Salthows’) probably copies the manuscript that recounts the deeds of Margery Kempe, who is evoked in Caesar’s narrative third person as ‘thys creatur,’53 this creature. Moreover, a 1436 preface that claims to be a later addition recalls a previous version, written in a language that is ‘neithyr good englysch ne dewch,’54 neither good English nor German. Margery’s difficult dealings with sex, food, family, commerce, visions, travels, and plentiful weeping are not even ‘wretyn in ordyr,’55 written in (chronological) order: yet, the fragmented structure 49  ‘Ego, non fatum, non fortuna, non diabolus.’ In Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XXXI, PL 36, 275–300, 268. 50  ‘[P]uebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas.’ In Jorge Luis Borges, El Hacedor, Epilogo, in id., Obras Completas I, 854. 51   See Gerolamo Cardano, De propria vita [1576] (Paris: Jacques Villery, 1643). 52   See Benvenuto Cellini, 22 May 1539 letter to Benedetto Varchi. Cellini keeps adding to this first draft, as the last version narrates his life until the year 1562. See Benvenuto Cellini, La Vita di Benvenuto di Mo Giovanni Cellini, Fiorentino scritta per lui medesimo in Firenze, codice Mediceo-Palatino 234 2, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze. 53   The Book of Margery Kempe, British Library MS Additional 61823, folio 1r. 54   Ibid., folio 2v. 55   Ibid., folio 3r.

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of the text seems to fit the likewise fragmented existential vicissitudes of the amazing East Anglian woman. Margery’s character stands out as a devotional model too. In particular, the last six pages of the text are occupied with her ordinary prayer, which lists the people on which she invokes the divine mercy: in her plea to god, Margery painstakingly embraces as part of her own relational body pretty much every other human being, including ‘jewys, and sarazinys, and alle hethen pepil,’56 Jews, and Saracens, and all heathen people. The first autobiographical account in the Spanish language is dictated by a woman too: probably shortly after 1412, Leonor Lόpez de Cόrdoba summarizes the main and mostly tragic events of her life in a dry and concise memoir, which is framed as a certified declaration.57 Unfortunately, the narration does not include her momentous involvement in public life as the main adviser to Catherine of Lancaster, the widowed queen of Castile. French and Italian autobiographies merge, so to speak, in the 1405 Livre de l’advision Cristine, the book of Christine’s vision, a text composed and handwritten by the Venetian-born Bolognese Cristina of Pizzano, best known by her French name of Christine de Pizan. In this partially autobiographical work, Christine recalls the beginning of her successful career, in 1399, as the first professional writer of French literature.58 Christine is not new to autobiographical writing: her previous Livre de le la Mutacion de Fortune, Book of the Mutation of Fortune, opens with a wittily allegorical transposition of her public engagement as a daring answer to her family misfortunes. Christine describes in rhyme her own transformation into a man: Et jadis fus femme, de fait Homme suis, je ne ment pas, Assez le demonstrent mes pas59

Once a woman, but in fact I’m a man, I do not lie, My steps this well verify

  Ibid., folio 121v.   See Leonor López de Córdoba, ‘Memorias,’ in Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux ‘Las memorias de doña Leonor López de Córdoba,’ in Journal of Hispanic Philology 2 (1977), 11–33, 16–25. 58   Christine’s authorship (and publishing activity) is publicly revealed, she herself recounts, ‘quoy que celler le voulsisse,’ despite I wished to conceal it. In Christine de Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Cristine, Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac eds. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 111 (3.11.10, 63d). 59   Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, 2 vols., Suzanne Solente ed. (Paris: Picard, 1959), vol.1, 12, lines 146–148. 56 57

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Christine’s literary production follows the sequential loss of a series of male benevolent authorities, namely the French king, her father, and her husband, to which her writing efforts may seem to act as a prosthetic replacement in the public sphere. Yet, the transgendering of Christine’s literary avatar is not a devaluation of her female body, but a sarcastic depiction of this body’s limited social acknowledgement. In other words, her transformation is a visible solution to the cognitive dissonance between the actual expansion of her relational body and the supposed limits of her female body: her metamorphosis is a narrative demonstration of her capabilities through a reductio ad absurdum, as either she is a man, or no one yet knows what a female body can do. These unthought-of possibilities well exceed the sphere of intellectual activities successfully championed by Christine herself: in 1429, she also celebrates female military leadership in her Ditié a la Pucelle, that is, Said to the Maid, after Jean d’Arc leads the French troops to relieve the English siege of the city of Orléans. Gender also visually overspills on the paper of Opicinus de’ Canistris’ visionary maps through the merging of geographical and bodily shapes. In these magnificent cartographies, anthropomorphised land contours are arranged as somewhat perturbing tableaux vivants: a female Africa mischievously whispers in the ear of a male Europe,60 which alternatively appears as a female in a sexual conjunction with a red and Luciferian Mediterranean Sea.61 Since long time, stars in the night sky are grouped in the shape of constellations. We are likewise used to assimilate the silhouettes of clouds to familiar shapes: Opicinus’ gaze anthropomorphizes the silhouettes of land and sea as represented in his cartographies. His enhanced sensitivity allows him to 60  ‘Venite commiscemini nobiscum,’ come, copulate with me, says Africa. Another depiction of the map is enclosed in a medallion on the open breast of a self-portrait of Opicinus, close to which is the sentence ‘talis sum ego interius,’ this is how I am inside. In Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993, p. 39 and 42, Vatican Library, Vatican City. 61   A written antecedent to Opicinus’ drawings is an unusual geographical description in the Corpus Hippocraticum: ‘Terra autem omnis septem partes habet: caput et faciem, P(e)lopon(nes)um [Pylopon-5tium Hs.], magnarum animarum habitationem. Secundum I(sth)mus [Idymus Hs.], medulla, cervix. Tertia pars, inter viscera (media) [et] praecordia, I(o)nia[e] [Iuniae Hs.]. Quarta, crura Hell(e) spontus. Quinta, pedes, Bosporus transitus, Trachias et [Ho]c[h]imer(i)us. Sexta, venter, Aegyptus et pelagus Aegyptium. Septima, venter inferior et longa(b)o intestinum majus, (E)uxinus Pontus et Palus Meot[h]is.’ The whole earth has seven parts: the head and the face, the Peloponnese, dwelling of magnanimous people. The second one, the Isthmus, marrow of the neck; the third part, between the middle internal organs and the diaphragm, Ionia; the fourth, the legs, Hellespont; the fifth, the feet, crossed the Bosporus, Thrace and Crimea; the sixth, the belly, Egypt and the Egyptian Sea; the seventh, the lower abdomen and the straight gut, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. In pseudo-Hippocrates, Περὶ ἑβδομάδων [Peri hebdomadōn], Ambros. lat. G 108, ch. XI, in Die hippokratische Schrift von der Siebenzahl, W. H. Roscher ed. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1913), 15–16.

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re-appropriate the two-dimensional abstraction of the body of the earth by reembodying it as a plurality of human forms. We may understand Opicinus’ humanized geographical shapes as an attempt at familiarizing the cuttingedge technology of coastal charting, which in his contemporary Christian West is becoming a powerful weapon of commercial and political power. Gender features arise not only in relation to represented human bodies, but also to the supposedly perfect embodiment of human characters, namely, Jesus. Already in the twelfth century, in the attempt to allegorically dissimulate the explicitly erotic content of the Biblical Song of songs, Bernard of Clairvaux commends Jesus’ breastfeeding virtue62: in the late fourteenth century, the mystic (and later saint) Julian of Norwich is not afraid to squarely claim Jesus as mother.63 In turn, male authors stigmatize females’ narcissistic attachment to their bodies: for example, in the Canzoniere, a bitterly explicit remark links Narcissus’ fixation with his own image and the behaviour of an unnamed woman, who appears to deny Petrarch the due attention.64 For sure, the Canzoniere itself may be read at once as a poetic diary, as a literary monument, and, last but not least, as a large enough mirror for Petrarch’s vast persona. The light of faith works instead as a metaphorical mirror that shows the Sienese Catherine in god, and god in her.65 This reciprocal participation of the woman and god, whom she engulfs in her relational body, is rendered with an image that defies experience: ‘the soul then is in God, and God in the soul just like the fish that is in the sea, and the sea in the fish.’66

62   In Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 9, De uberibus sponsi, id est Christi (On the breasts of the bridegroom, that is Christ), PL 183, 815–819. 63   Julian is possibly of Jewish ancestry: she can rely on Anselm’s prayer to Paul in which, taking further Matthew 23.37 and Luke 13.34, Jesus is mother, and even more on god’s self-described maternal role in Isaiah 49.15 and 66.13. See Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love [1373], British Library Sloane 2499 manuscript. 64   See Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, 45. Petrarch also blames ‘i micidiali specchi, / che ’n vagheggiar voi stessa avete stanchi,’ the homicidal mirrors / which are worn out by your self-admiration (46, 7–8). A sad chiasm links Petrarch’s tirade with the eventually homicidal assessment by Nicolas de Lyra of a metaphorical mirror, the treatise Le Mirouer des Simples Ames, the mirror of simple souls, whose author, Marguerite dicta Porete, is then burnt at stake in Paris in 1310. 65  ‘[R]aguardando in questo specchio, tenendolo con la mano dell’amore, mi rappresenta me in te, che so’ creatura tua, e te in me,’ Watching this mirror, while I keep it with the hand of love, it represents in you me, who am your creature, and you in me.’ In Caterina da Siena, Dialogo, Conclusione 205-207. Catherine speaks in an ecstatic condition: she dictates her revelations as a discursive flow, which is not too constrained by syntactical rules. 66  ‘[L]’anima allora è in Dio e Dio è nell’anima sì come il pesce che sta nel mare, e ’l mare nel pesce.’ Ibid., Proemio 76–78.

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Though the sea cannot be in the fish in terms of volumetric measurements, it can surely be there in another modality of discourse. For example, the fish may include the sea as an alternative habitat to freshwater: in our contemporary parlance, the sea is in the fish not only in the happily evocative terms of flavour, but also in the threatening sense of radioactive and mercury levels. More in general, the very preposition ‘in’ does not always express the same link between the words it connects, as if it were a formal logic operator,67 but it produces different relations in different modalities of discourse. This topic is duly considered in Aquinas’ thirteenth-century Christian recasting of Aristotelian thought, the encyclopaedic Summa Theologiae. Aquinas firmly replies to the question whether god is in all things: ‘I answer that, God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works.’68 He also further specifies that ‘God is whole in all things and in each one.’69 Probably, Aquinas would not risk endorsing Catherine’s simile between fish and soul, as he carefully draws a distinction between corporeal and spiritual entities: Although corporeal things are said to be in another as in that which contains them, nevertheless, spiritual things contain those things in which they are; as the soul contains (continet) the body. Hence also God is in things containing them; nevertheless, by a certain similitude to corporeal things, it is said that all things are in God; inasmuch as they are contained by Him.70 67   In the preface to his book Begriffsschrift, Conceptual Notation, Frege justifies the introduction of his new logical notation with the need to prevent anything intuitive from penetrating the chain of inference in a proofing procedure. This is why his signs have either a completely determined meaning or retain a meaning throughout a given context. Yet, Frege compares the relation between his new instrument and ordinary language [Sprache des Lebens, V] to the relation between the microscope and the eye: whilst the microscope is more effective than the eye when the task is a great sharpness of resolution, it is useless for all other tasks. See Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift, Eine der Arithmetischen Nachgebildete Formelsprache des Reinen Denkens (Halle: Louis Nebert, 1879). 68  ‘Respondeo dicendum quod Deus est in omnibus rebus, non quidem sicut pars essentiae, vel sicut accidens, sed sicut agens adest ei in quod agit.’ In Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.8.a1co. 69  ‘Deus totus est in omnibus et singulis.’ Ibid., 1.8.a2ad3. The Platonic Socrates similarly claims in Parmenides 131b the whole presence of each form in each of its participants at once. 70  ‘[L]icet corporalia dicantur esse in aliquo sicut in continente, tamen spiritualia continent ea in quibus sunt, sicut anima continet corpus. Unde et Deus est in rebus sicut continens res. Tamen, per quandam similitudinem corporalium, dicuntur omnia esse in Deo, inquantum continentur ab ipso.’ In Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.8.a1ad2. Following Aristotle’s method of enquiry, Aquinas also scrupulously consider various ways in which someone or something is said to be in another (1.8.a3co.): ‘A king, for example, is said to be in the whole kingdom by his power, although he is not everywhere present. Again a thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subject to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be present to anyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in

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Of course, Aquinas does not derive this distinction from his Greek model: Aristotle knows nothing of spirit and spiritual things, whose semantic space may just partially overlap with that of Aristotelian incorporeal entities. Moreover, according to Aristotle, both incorporeal and corporeal entities follow the same logical rules, which hardly allow the conflation of contained and container: we will see how Aristotle extracts the rules of logic from Greek language, which he handles as the immediate expression of underlying logical dispositions.71 However, the Latin verb continet describes the soul’s containment of the body also in a more sinister sense, which Iacopone vividly depicts: ‘oh neighbours do succour me / because the soul has kill’d me,’72 cries the body under the disciplining blows of a knotted rope. With indubitable theatrical skill, Iacopone stages as a violent ‘ntenzone, that is, a duel, the divergence between bodily health and the health of the soul. The conflict repeats, mutatis mutandis, Plato’s description of his threefold psykhē as a charioteer and two uneven horses73: well before Iacopone’s soul, the charioteer inflicts violent and painful acts of physical restraint upon the horses. We may notice that Plato confines this disciplining practice within the boundaries of the psykhē: Christian practices of mortification of the body74 instead resort to physical violence. However, just like the Platonic charioteer, the Christian soul has a hard time in converting to her75 extended time line the body, which relies on the temporalization of its mortal path. Unsurprisingly, the ultimate request of Iacopone’s body to the soul is ‘I beg you not to kill me.’76 We may read Iacopone’s brilliant dramatization as representing the typological conflict between the two main components of the Christian relational body, namely, body and soul. Such a compound rightly speaks in the plural form: ‘delectable it will be / the saving of our life,’77 eventually acknowlevery part of the house. Lastly, a thing is said to be by way of substance or essence in that place in which its substance may be.’ 71   See Aristotle, Categories. Unlike Aristotle, Plotinus deeply distrusts language: I anticipated that his harmonization of Aristotle and Plato facilitates his Abrahamic readers in adapting Aristotelian categories to a god-governed theoretical framework. 72  ‘Soccorrite vicine / ka l’anema m’a morto,’ in Iacopone, Audite una ‘ntenzone, 30, line 15; MS 203v. 73   See Plato, Phaedrus 246a-254e. 74   Christians appear soon to read literally a rhetorical trope in Paul, Romans 8.13 (Nestle-Aland): εἰ δὲ πνεύματι τὰς πράξεις τοῦ σώματος θανατοῦτε, ζήσεσθε [ei de pneumati tas praxeis tou sōmatos thanatoute, zēsesthe], but if by the spirit you put to death the practices of the body, you will live. 75  See supra, chapter 2, note 34. 76  ‘Prego ke non m’occidi.’ In Iacopone, Audite una ‘ntenzone, 32, line 79; MS 205v. 77  ‘[S]irà delectamento / nostra uita saluare.’ Ibid., 32, line 86; MS 205v, my italics.

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edges the soul, after the body recognizes the counterproductive nature of the internecine fight.78 In the anachronistic terms of von Neumann and Morgenstern, Iacopone’s body and soul come to realize that they cannot confront each other in a zero-sum game: as they both either win or lose, they have to reach some kind of compromise. In historical terms, the Christian soul, insofar as a component of the Christian relational body, generally tends to realize the need to take care of the body in its integrity (apart from relatively isolated excesses, such as the self-castration of the Valesians,79 and maybe of Origen80). As witnessed by Evagrius’ efforts, monastic rules in the East appear to seek for a balance between the excesses of penance and bodily needs. In the West, the Benedictine daily allocation of prayer, work, and rest is a veritable repartition (albeit unequal) of the monk’s time between his soul and his body. But what about the bodies of nuns? We have to wait for the mid-twelfth century, to have the abbess Heloise put into writing her perplexities: At present, the one Rule of St Benedict is professed in the Latin Church by women equally with men, although, as it was clearly written for men alone, it can only be fully obeyed by men, whether subordinates or superiors. Leaving aside for the moment the other articles of the Rule, how can women be concerned with what is written there about cowls, drawers or scapulars?81 Or indeed, with tunics or woollen garments worn next to the skin, when the monthly purging of their superfluous humours should completely avoid such things?82

Further on in her letter to Abelard, Heloise quotes twice Macrobius, who recalls that ‘[a] woman’s body which is destined for frequent purgations is pierced with several holes, so that it opens into channels and provides outlets for the moisture draining away to be dispersed. Through these holes the fumes of wine are quickly released.’83 Heloise relies on medical science to 78  ‘Lo ‘ntenzare veio / ke retorn’a me danno,’ coming to blows I see / that brings damage to me. Ibid., 32, line 81; MS 205v. 79   See Epiphanius, Panarion 58. 80   See Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 6.8.1. 81  See Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 55. 82  ‘Vnam quippe nunc Regulam beati Benedicti apud Latinos femine profitentur eque ut uiri. Quam sicut uiri solummodo constat scriptam esse, ita et ab ipsis tantum impleri posse tam subiectis pariter tam prelatis. Vt enim cetera nunc omittam Regule capitula, quid ad feminas quod de cucullis, femoralibus et scapularibus ibi scriptum est? Quid denique ad ipsas de tunicis aut de laneis ad carnem indumentis, cum earum humoris superflui menstrue purgationes hec omnino refugiant?’ In Heloise, Sixth Letter, in Peter Abelard and Heloise, The letter collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, David Luscombe ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013), 220. 83  ‘Muliebre corpus crebris purgationibus deputatum pluribus consertum foraminibus ut pateat in meatus et uias praebeat humori in egestionis exitum confluenti. Per hec foramina uapor uini celeriter

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claim that ‘we [women] cannot easily fall victims to gluttony and drunkenness, seeing that our moderation in food protects us from the one and the nature of the female body as described from the other.’84 Heloise keeps seeking the advice of Abelard in his quality of spiritual director of hers and her nuns: yet, she can’t help recalling him as her lover.85 ‘For my mind (animus) was not with me but with you,’86 she writes to Abelard: ‘that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you.’87 This is no declaration of female submission to male authority: whilst after the castration Abelard recasts his persona of intellectual primadonna in the more defiled but also more productive role of Christian sage, Heloise sticks to the singularity of her relational body, which stubbornly includes his mentorturned-lover-turned-mentor. Heloise also makes room for god, but she does not expect any reward from him, ‘for it is clear that I have done nothing as yet for love of him,’88 as she writes to Abelard. These are truly astonishing words in the mouth of the founder of a monastic order, which at her death will include six nunneries. More than that, so unwavering is her worldly love that Abelard himself euanescit.’ Ibid., 232, from Macrobius, Saturnalia 7.6.18. 84  ‘[C]rapula uidelicet corda et hebrietate grauari facile non possunt, cum ab illa nos cibi parcitas, ab ista feminei corporis qualitas, ut dictum est, protegat.’ In Abelard and Heloise, The letter collection, 232. 85  ‘In tantum uero ille quas pariter exercuimus amantium uoluptates dulces mihi fuerunt ut nec displicere mihi nec uix a memoria labi possint. Quocumque loco me uertam, semper se oculis meis cum suis ingerunt desideriis, nec etiam dormienti suis illusionibus parcunt. Inter ipsa missarum sollempnia, ubi purior esse debet oratio, obscena earum uoluptatum phantasmata ita sibi penitus miserrimam captiuant animam ut turpitudinibus illis magis quam orationi uacem: que cum ingemiscere debeam de commissis, suspiro potius de amissis. Nec solum que egimus sed loca pariter et tempora in quibus hec egimus ita tecum nostro infixa sunt animo, ut in ipsis omnia tecum agam nec dormiens etiam ab his quiescam. Nonnumquam etiam ipso motu corporis animi mei cogitationes deprehenduntur, nec a uerbis temperant improuisis.’ The lovers’ pleasures we enjoyed together were so sweet to me that they cannot displease me and can scarcely fade from my memory. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold on my most unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness rather than on prayer: I, who should be grieving for the sins I have committed, am sighing rather for what I have lost. The things we did and also the places and times in which we did them are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through them all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word. Ibid., 170. 86  ‘Non enim mecum animus meus, sed tecum erat.’ Ibid., 138. 87  ‘[S]umma et ubique nota proditio meipsam quoque mihi tecum abstulerit.’ Ibid., 130. Heloise’s tutor Fulbert has Abelard assaulted and castrated in 1117. 88  ‘[C]uius adhuc amore nihil me constat egisse.’ Ibid., 138.

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quotes her words in a letter to their son Astralabe: ‘if I cannot be saved unless I repent of what I did in the past, there is no hope for me.’89 We may well say that Heloise, similarly to Machiavelli, cherishes her belonging more than her soul, simply because her belonging exceeds her soul, as it also includes her memories90 and the man who (somewhat reluctantly) shares these memories with her. Heloise never stops reminding Abelard of their intimacy: svo specialiter sva singulariter,’91 to him who is hers specially, she who is his singularly, she writes as the salutation of her last surviving letter to Abelard. The terms specialis and singularis are not simply epithets of their previous dialogue as lovers, but they also evoke their intellectual conversation, and the themes of Abelard’s speculation. For example, in his Logica Ingredientibus, that is, logic for beginners, probably written shortly after his mutilation, whilst commenting upon Boethius’ Latin translation of Aristotle’s Categories, Abelard evokes the Aristotelian acknowledgement of the plurality of uses of the same word: But because we say individua in many ways, either in the sense of smallness, or hardness, or in a singular (singularem) and personal sense, he [Aristotle/ Boethius] determines to accept individua in this last meaning of numerically singular entities (singularia), that is, of personal sense.92

Boethius writes ‘individua et numero singularia,’ in order to literally render the Aristotelian phrase τὰ ἄτομα καὶ ἓν ἀριθμῶ [ta atoma kai hen arithmō], which we may translate into English as ‘individual and numerically singular entities.’ Yet, I need to anticipate that the rendering of individua as ‘individual entities’ erases the previous meaning of the word, namely, ‘indivisible.’ I have also to recall in advance to our path that Cicero constructs with the negative preposition in and the epithet dividuum, that is, divisible, the new compound individuum,93 indivisible, as a Latin linguistic calque of the Demo89  ‘[S]i, nisi peniteat me comississe priora, / saluari nequeam, spes michi nulla manet.’ In Peter Abelard, Carmen ad Astralabium, José M. A. Rubingh-Bosscher ed. (Groeningen: [privately published], 1987), 127, lines 381–382. 90  ‘[D]ulcia sunt adeo comissi gaudia nostri / ut memorata iuuent, que placuere nimis.’ The joys of what we did are still so sweet / that after delight beyond measure, even remembering brings relief. Ibid., lines 383–384. 91   In Abelard and Heloise, The letter collection, 218. 92  ‘Sed quia individua pluribus modis dicimus, vel propter parvitatem scilicet vel propter duritiam vel propter singularem et personalem significationem, determinat se individua accipere in hac ultima significatione ut singularia numero, id est personalis significationis.’ In Abelard, Die Logica ‘Ingredientibus’, Bernhard Geyer ed. (Munster: Aschendorff, 1919), 128–129. 93  ‘[I]lle atomos quas appellat, id est corpora individua propter soliditatem,’ he [Democritus] defines them atoms, that is, bodies indivisible because of their solidness. In Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 1.17.

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critean Greek term ἄτομον94 [atomon], indivisible, which we now translate as ‘atom.’ Democritus uses the word atomon to define the irreducible basic components of reality: yet, in the Aristotelian text, this word comes to describe the condition common to all singular entities, as opposed to their species. We may say that the absolute indivisibility of the Democritean atoms turns into the relative indivisibility of Aristotelian individuals. In Aristotle’s Categories, the word atomon appears either in conjunction with its counterpart εἶδος95 [eidos], which Boethius translates as ‘species,’ or in the previously recalled association with the phrase hen arithmō,96 numerically one. Boethius keeps following Cicero’s translation of atomon with individuum, though Aristotle uses the word differently from Democritus. In his commentary, Abelard then adds another semantic layer to this already complicated language stratification: the adjective personalis, that is, personal. Abelard’s addition inevitably carries the semantic weight of the doctrinal controversies on the three divine persons of the Trinity. We will see how these disputes, and in particular, the Christological debate over Jesus’ incarnation, also produce as an unwitting side-effect a renewed reflection on human nature. It is precisely in a commentary on Boethius’ treatise on Trinity,97 written by Gilbert de la Porrée in the 1140s, that the bishop of Poitiers gives a new definition to the Latin word dividuum,98 that is, dividual. Gilbert endeavours to clarify the senses of the words singularis, singular, indiuiduus, individual, and persona, person. He observes that neither all individuals are persons, nor all singulars are individuals: Often, however, singular entities diverse in number are conformed with respect to some of the things by which they are. And so not only the things that are, but also the things by which they are conformed, are one dividual (dividuum).99 94   Atomon is the neuter form of the word atomos, which appears in Sophocles (Trachiniae 200) with the etymological sense of a-tomos, that is, not cut: it is reported to have assumed the sense of ‘indivisible’ in the writings of Democritus and, before him, of Leucippus. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1039a. Aristotle deploys the term atomon in the sense of ‘individual,’ whilst he rather uses the word ἀδιαίρετον [adiaireton], undivided and indivisible, also to describe the Atomists’ theoretical stance: see, for example, Aristotle, On generation and corruption 315b. 95   See, for example, Aristotle, Categories 3b (5). 96   See, for example, Aristotle, Categories 1b (2). 97   Gilbert de la Porrée, Commentarium in librum de Trinitate, PL 64, 1255-1310. 98   The Latin word dividuum is first attested in its archaic form dividuom in Plautus’ comedy Rudens (5.3.52), where a character proposes a deal for the redemption of a slave by literally making divisible a talent, that is, a valuable Roman coin. In Terence’s Adelphoe (2.2.33), a similar deal is proposed by making dividuum a lesser sum, namely, ten minae. 99  ‘Saepe autem diversa numero singularia secundum aliqua eorum quibus sunt, conformia sunt. Ideoque non modo illa quae sunt, verum etiam illa quibus conformia sunt, unum individuum sunt.’ In Gilbert de la Porrée, Commentarium in librum de Trinitate, PL 64, 1255–1310, 1294.

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Gilbert then adds: ‘for if likeness makes a dividual, unlikeness makes an individual.’100 Gilbert possibly derives his terminology, similarly to Hugh’s couple of ‘dividua et individua (. . .) substantia,’101 divided and undivided substance, from Calcidius’ rendering of Plato’s terms μεριστός [meristos] and ἀμερής [amerēs] in his partial Latin translation of Timaeus.102 However, Gilbert’s notion of dividual as a singularity that is not individual by virtue of its likeness with other dividuals is not to make its way in medieval speculation, probably also because of Bernard of Clairvaux’s attack on Gilbert’s trinitarian doctrine.103 Whilst the controversies on the interpretation of the divine persons are not new, Otloh’s written expression of his own uncertainty about ‘the being of God himself’ (ipsius Dei essentia104) makes emerge a radical dimension of speculation. The eleventh-century Benedictine monk, copyist, and scholar shares with his readers his excruciating doubts in the Liber de temptationibus suis, the book of his temptations: this text is meant to be at once evidence of his victorious inner struggle and an example for his brethren. In the first chapter of the current book, we met some of the fourth-century predecessors of Otloh as both subjects to temptations and their witness in writing: we may now describe the tempting agents and their objects of temptation as unwelcome intrusions into the relational body of the tempted. In this case, Otloh’s doubt ‘whether the omnipotent God exists’105 somewhat shifts the relation: the tempting demon does not bring an object of temptation into view, but he rather renders thinkable an unprecedented absence.106 Yet, for Otloh the absence of god is intolerable, and not only theoretically: this is shown by his reaction to the temptation erupting so violently, he recalls, ‘that not only my spiritual senses, but also my bodily ones were divested of their usual strength.’107

 ‘Si enim dividuum facit similitudo, consequens est ut individuum dissimilitudo.’ Ibid.   Here Hugh, following a traditional interpretation that harks back at least to Remigius of Auxerre (and possibly, Eriugena), shifts the Platonic considerations on Anima mundi, the world’s soul, to the human soul. Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 1.2, PL 176, 741–838, 741. 102  ‘[I]ndiuiduam et (. . .) diuiduam substantiam,’ in Calcidius’ translation of Plato, Timaeus 35a. Plato uses the words ἀμεροῦς [amerous] and μεριστοῦ [meristou] in the singular genitive case. 103   See Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 80, PL 183, 1166–1171. 104   Otloh of Saint Emmeram, Liber de tentationibus suis, PL 146, 29–58, 32. 105  ‘[S]i Deus omnipotens constet.’ Ibid. 106   Otloh recalls elsewhere a similar questioning: ‘Ubi quoque est iste Deus tuus?’ Where is also this God of yours? In Otloh, Liber visionum, PL 146, 341–390, 355. 107  ‘[U]t non solum spirituales, sed etiam corporales mei sensus vigore solito destituerentur.’ In Otloh, Liber de tentationibus suis, PL 146, 32. 100 101

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A comparison between Otloh’s and Opicinus’ extraordinary sensitivities may throw light on both authors’ enigmatic trajectories. Opicinus’ art and worldly engagements project him outward, towards the boundaries of the body of the earth,108 insofar as they are the limits of human collective action. Otloh’s writing activity in the seclusion of the scriptorium turns instead him inward, so that he can see the boundaries of his relational body as the limits of his own action: in other words, he can at once envision the possible expulsion of god from his relational body, and feel the unbearableness of such a loss. Otloh cannot clear his relational body of god without undermining the mirroring of his persona and the divine persons. This reflection is described by the author of Genesis with the synonymous expressions of likeness (‫דְ ּמּות‬, demuth) and semblance (‫ ֶ֫צלֶם‬, tselem)109: following the Nicene creed, Otloh not only repeats that the first man ‘is made in the likeness of God,’ but he also specifies: ‘that is, of the Trinity.’110 Yet, after the Fall man ‘lost his trinitarian shape (Trinitatis figuram) and remained in a duality, which is in the persons of body and soul.’111 What is lost, Otloh adds, is the third person of the human trinity, namely, unity. Otloh’s speculation somewhat shifts Augustine’s construction of the reflection of the Trinity on man as a tripartition of human faculties, which, in turn, find their perfection in the three divine persons.112 Right after Otloh’s death, this understanding of god as the veritable superlative degree113 of the human horizon is turned by Anselm into that which may appear as a timely answer to Otloh’s radical doubt.

108   This body of the earth is, in turn, included within Opicinus’ relational body: ‘It is he, Opicinus, who is standing in the middle of the world, but, at the same time, incorporating that world into himself.’ In Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, 220–221. 109  More precisely, in Genesis 1.26 ‫[ אֱֹל ִ֔הים‬Elohim] is reported to say ‫מּותנּו‬ ֑ ֵ ְ‫[ ִכּד‬kiḏmūṯênū], in our likeness, and ‫[ ְ ּב ַצל ֵ ְ֖מנּו‬bəṣalmênū], in our semblance. 110  ‘[A]d similitudinem Dei, id est ad Trinitate factus est,’ in Otloh, De Tribus Quaestionibus, PL 146, 59–136, 112. 111  ‘[P]erdidit ejusdem Trinitatis figuram et substitit in dualitate, quae est in personis animae et corporis,’ ibid. 112   See Augustine, De Trinitate. 113   Latin grammarians render with the term superlativus, superlative, the Greek word ὑπερθετικὸν [hyperthetikon], which defines the highest degree of a quality. In fact, Anselm (as he replies to his critic Gaunilo) does not directly appeal to an entity defined as ‘maius omnibus,’ greater than all, which is rather just evoked through an apophatic apparatus: ‘quo maius cogitari nequit,’ (that) than which a greater cannot be thought. In Anselm, Responsio Anselmi ad Obiecta Gaunilonis 1.

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In his Proslogion, that is, discourse, Anselm addresses himself to the fool (‫נ ָ ָ֣בל‬,114 nabal) of the Psalmist, who says in his heart that there is no god.115 Anselm does not even attempt to disprove the latter statement, but he rather recasts god under a definition that even the fool116 understands: ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought.’117 This something does necessarily exist because, Anselm argues, ‘if it were only in the understanding, it could also be thought as an existing being, which is greater.’118 Such an assumption would contradict the definition of Anselm’s god as ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought,’ which thus necessarily exists too. In this momentous step in European thought, Anselm deploys the form of argument of reductio ad absurdum119 (which we saw implied in Christine de Pizan’s ironic transgendering) to prove the existence of the Christian god. Whilst this argument is first systematized by Aristotle as the logical reduction ‘to the impossible’ (εἰς τὸ ἀδύνατον,120 eis to adunaton), it is also previously applied by Parmenides and, before him, by Xenophanes. We will see that Xenophanes validates his claim that gods and men are improperly supposed to share features (both good and bad) by showing the ultimate untenability of the opposite conclusion, namely, that humans generally make proper portrayals of the gods. In the sixth century BCE, Xenophanes rejects Homer and Hesiod’s traditional anthropomorphic rendering of the deities, which also survives at least eleven centuries of Christian era, as Abelard tells his son Astralabe: philosophers never shared the faith of the people, who think that god has a body like theirs.121 Anselm not only puts to work Xenophanes’ rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdum: he also follows Xenophanes’ path of religious abstraction. His refashioning of god leaves his mentor (and predecessor as archbishop   Psalm 14.1.  ‫ֱֹלהים‬ ֑ ִ ‫’[ ֵ ֣אין א‬en ’Elohim], no Elohim, writes the Psalmist: here the fool may be just denying the significance of Elohim, rather than his existence. In Proslogion 2, Anselm quotes the Vulgate: ‘dixit insipiens in corde suo: non est deus,’ the fool says in his heart: there is no god. 116   Here the term insipiens denotes less a weakness of mind than a moral one. 117  ‘[A]liquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest,’ In Anselm, Proslogion 2. 118  ‘Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re, quod maius est.’ Ibid. 119   This rhetorical technique operates first by accepting the point to be disproved (in Anselm’s case, that god does not also exist out of understanding), and then by showing that the consequences of the accepted point are untenable. 120  Aristotle, Prior Analytics 27a15. 121   Philosophis populloque fides numquam fuit una: Philosophers’ and people’s faith was never one: huic semper sensus pro ratione fuit; always had people sense in place of reason; nil nisi corporeum, nisi sencile mens capit eius their mind gets nothing but bodily or sensuous tale quid et summum cogitat esse deum.’ and such they think to be god the supreme. In Abelard, Carmen ad Astralabium, 141, lines 637–640. 114 115

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of Canterbury) Lanfranc deeply perplexed, as it does not essentially rely on biblical narrations. Instead of participating in the ongoing interweaving of stories about the divine person(s), Anselm builds the relational body of god as an abstract space, which, as we saw, is outlined first by an impossibility: ‘nothing greater can be thought.’122 However, Anselm does not renounce the possibility to know god, albeit within the limits of what god deems useful: ‘I believe in order to understand’123 (credo ut intelligam124), he famously declares. Moreover, even before the demonstration of the existence of god in the Proslogion, in his previous Monologion or monologue Anselm describes god as having no outside: insofar as the relational body charts the limits of one’s action, it is not surprising that the body of god not only ‘sustains and excels,’ but also ‘encompasses and pervades all other things.’125 Here, Anselm may appear to logically expand Paul’s claim that ‘from him [god] and through him and for him are all things,’126 by adding that ‘he exists in and through all things.’127 Nevertheless, Paul affirms that god will be ‘all in all’128 only at the end of times: Anselm is thus probably misled by Jerome, who in the Vulgate translates Paul’s previous sentence as ‘from him, through him and in him are all things.’129 Here Jerome renders the Greek preposition εἰς [eis], which denotes a movement and a penetration, with the preposition in, which in Latin, when followed by a word in the ablative case, has a static sense.130 Jerome’s translation shift is fraught with consequences for both creator and creatures in subsequent Christian texts. However, midway between the omnipresent body of god—as construed by Anselm—and its human reflection, a third body grows, gets fruitful, and

 ‘[M]aius cogitari non potest,’ in Anselm, Proslogion 3.   Understanding something may precede the understanding of something’s existence just like ‘a painter envisions what is about to be painted’ (‘pictor praecogitat quod facturus est,’ ibid., 2): after painting, he understands his picture to exist. We may recall the mathematician’s similar understanding of the theorem before the demonstration makes it mathematically exist. 124   Ibid., 1. 125  ‘[C]uncta alia portat et superat, claudit et penetrat.’ Anselm, Monologion 14. 126   ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα [ex autou kai di’ autou kai eis auton ta panta]. In Paul, Romans 11.36 (Nestle-Aland). 127  ‘[I]n omnibus est et per omnia,’ Anselm, Monologion 14. 128   [τὰ] πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν [ta panta en pasin], in Paul, 1 Corinthians 15.28 (Nestle-Aland). 129  ‘[E]x ipso, et per ipsum, et in ipso sunt omnia.’ In Vulgate, Paul, Romans 11.36, my italics. 130   The 1979 Catholic official Nova Vulgata, New Vulgate has ‘in ipsum,’ in the accusative case, which we may render as ‘into him.’ 122 123

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multiplies as a powerful model of collective identity: the mystical body of the Church. I previously recalled this growth’s peak, which shortly predates the sudden and ruinous fall of the hegemonic project of the Papal Revolution: the 1302 Papal bull Unam Sanctam, in which Pope Boniface VIII solemnly proclaims that the Church ‘represents one sole mystical body whose head is Christ and the head of Christ is God.’131 The definition of the Church as corpus mysticum,132 that is, mystical body rapidly spreads133 during the second half of the twelfth century, probably as a metonymic shift on Peter Lombard’s phrase caro mystica,134 mystical flesh (of the Church). The image duly fits the Papal Revolutionaries’ understanding of the Church as a metaphorical body that encompasses both clergy and laypeople, as depicted already in 1057 by the cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida: In the church, the clerical order is thus as distinguished as in the head the eyes, of which the Lord says: ‘He that toucheth you, toucheth the pupil of my eye (Zach. II, 8).’ The secular power is like the chest and arms, strong and ready to obey and defend the church. Then comes the common people like the lower members, equally subordinate and necessary to the ecclesiastical and the secular power alike.135

Humbert’s hierarchized body gives a clear political turn to ‘the scriptural tradition, which—according to Augustine—maintains that the church is the community of the whole earth.’136 This ecumenical concordance is promptly 131  ‘Quae [ecclesia] unum corpus mysticum repraesentat, cujus caput Christus, Christi vero Deus.’ In Boniface VIII, bull Unam Sanctam, 1302. In Reg. Vatic. L, fol. 387. See Paul, I Corinthians 11.3. 132   The first written formulation of the new definition may be in Master Simon’s treatise De Sacramentis, on the sacraments: ‘misticum Christi corpus, id est Ecclesia,’ the mystical body of Christ, that is, the Church. In Maitre Simon et son groupe, De Sacramentis, Henri Weisweiler ed. (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1937), 27 (Codex latinus monacensis 3220, f. 134v, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliotek). 133   The phrase ‘mystical body’ is not a twelfth-century invention: in the ninth century, Rabanus Maurus deploys it to describe the presence of the body of Christ in the host, in the course of a controversy that reignites in the eleventh century. In Rabanus Maurus, De Clericorum Institutione 1.33, PL 107, 293–420, 324a. 134   Peter Lombard, Commentaria in Epistulas d. Pauli, PL 191, 1297–1696, 1642; Sententiarum, PL 192, 521–1112, 857. 135  ‘Est enim clericalis ordo in ecclesia praecipuus tanquam in capite oculi, de quo ait Dominus: “Qui tetigerit vos, tangit pupillam oculi mei (Zach. II, 8).” Est et laicali potestas tanquam pectus et brachia ad obediendum et defendendum Ecclesiam valida et exerta. Est deinde vulgus tanquam inferiora vel extrema membra ecclesiasticis et sæcularibus potestatibus pariter subditum et pernecessarium.’ In Humbert of Silva Candida, Adversus Simoniacos Libri Tres, 3.29, PL 143, 1007–1212, 1188. 136  ‘[S]cripturarum testimonia quae commendant Ecclesiam in totius orbis communione consistere.’ In Augustine, Contra Donatistas Epistula vulgo De Unitate Ecclesiae 20.56, PL 43, 391–446, 434.

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applied by Canon and Roman Law scholars to what will be later called the corpus, that is, the body, of both Canon and Roman Law: as Berman remarks, ‘in contrast to the earlier Roman jurists and the earlier Greek philosophers, they supposed that they could prove by reason the universal truth and universal justice of authoritative legal texts.’137 Canonists and Romanists assume the fundamental consistency of authoritative legal texts because they understand these texts as elements of a body of knowledge that expresses the divinely ordained universal order138: in turn, their construction of legal texts as components of a hierarchical principled structure both mirrors and integrates the analogous construction of the Church as a hierarchized body. There is a clear affinity between this harmonizing approach to legal texts and Abelard’s treatment of religious scriptures: by systematically matching apparently contradictory quotations in his treatise Sic et Non, that is, yes and no, Abelard envisages a yet virtual body of consistent Christian doctrines, thus inventing the discipline of theology as we know it.139 For sure, the successful juridico-theological practices of the Papal Revolution catalyse the coalescing power of the metaphor of the body. However, we may trace also a previous textual body, which becomes a model of consistency and intellectual primacy at least until the twelfth century140: in his fifth-century commentary to Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, that is, the dream of Scipio—a much-praised passage from De re publica—Macrobius stages a theoretical

137   Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 140. 138   Dante (Paradiso 1.103-105) later depicts the relation between the divine and the mundane order as a resemblance: [. . .] Le cose tutte quante [. . .] All things whatever hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma between themselves have order, that’s the form che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante. which makes the universe akin to God. 139  Abelard does not even need to deal with all the seeming inconsistencies between texts, as he is contented with showing the path to their solution. In turn, Bernard of Clairvaux is so worried of the new course that he goes as far as defining Abelard’s theology as stultilogia, that is, ‘stupidology.’ In Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistula 190, PL 182, 1053–1072, 1061. 140   It may be noticed that until the Papal Revolution, the medieval Latin text is a veritable body without organs, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari derive from Artaud: namely, a non-hierarchical and uninterrupted sequence of words, which has to be crossed throughout its length in a kind of journey, to say it with Hugh of Saint Victor (PL 176, 793). During the twelfth century, organs suddenly proliferates in the body of the text: chapters, subtitles, indices, notes, ‘[u]t autem quod quæritur facilius occurrat,’ so that what is searched more easily appears (Peter Lombard, PL 192, 522). These functional advantages obscure powerful long-term countereffects, such as the production of the scarcity of time and the devaluation of the text, which is reduced to the selective mirror of the order that it reflects, as the Summae will show in the following century.

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confrontation between Aristotle and Plato on the subject of the source of κίνησις [kinēsis], that is, movement and transformation.141 The Neoplatonist Macrobius makes appeal to ‘one body of continuous defence,’142 which the many followers of Plato compose to shield their master from the Aristotelian objections to the capability of self-movement and transformation of the soul (anima). This veritable body of consistency transcends the limits of a philosophical school though, as it also includes Homer, Cicero, and Virgil. Macrobius thus presupposes a canon of wisdom and shared knowledge as antiquity’s legacy: he leaves to medieval authors to come an image of the past, which is at the same time an ideal model and a textual body of testable coherence.143 Macrobius seems not to notice that he is championing a mostly narrative body of literature: and neither do his medieval readers, at least until thirteenthcentury Scholasticism challenges the theoretical primacy of the poeticorhetorical way to knowledge. At that time, Dante’s proud assertion of both the poetical and the philosophical value of his Commedia may still be understood in the wake of Macrobius’ harmonic vision, whose Scholastic dismissal instead follows in the steps of late classical Christian writers.

141   According to Aristotle, the term kinēsis defines not only the action or power to change position in space, but any kind of transformation, apart from the changes from non-subject to subject (generation), and from subject to non-subject (death), which are instead included in the wider notion of μεταβολή [metabolē]. In Aristotle, Physics 225a–b. 142  ‘[U]num continuae defensionis corpus,’ in Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis 2.15.2. 143   For example, the characters of Macrobius’ Saturnalia deal at length with Virgil’s borrowings from Homer.

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Chapter Five

A New Interiority in Christian Romania

The word Romania appears in Latin and Greek texts in times of crisis, as a definition of the fourth-century Roman world that is surrounded by potential invaders.1 However, it survives the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and it ends up underlying the cultural continuity of the West, regardless of its political fragmentation. Boethius, qua Roman patrician and top senior official under the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, well exemplifies this continuity. Boethius is ultimately disgraced, imprisoned, and killed in his native city of Pavia, as his fellow countryman Opicinus recalls,2 in the year 524. During his captivity, he writes a text that is to enjoy uninterrupted popularity: De Consolatione Philosophiae, the Consolation of Philosophy. Nearly six centuries before, Cicero gives a reflexive turn to the literary genre of consolation, which he first addresses to himself,3 because of the loss of his beloved sister Tullia: Boethius takes the trend further, as he consoles himself for his own approaching death. Yet, unlike Cicero,4 Boethius recurs to the then current rhetorical aid of an allegorical character, the female5 personification of philosophy. His selfconsoling tract is thus narrativized as a dialogue between him and Philoso1   See Jacques Zeiller, ‘Sur l’apparition du mot Romania chez les écrivains latins,’ in Revue des Études Latines (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1929), vol 7, 194–198. 2   More precisely, Opicinus was born in Lomello, a town close to Pavia. He not only quotes Boethius, but even depicts his portrait as the landmass of Europe: see cod. Vat. lat. 6435, fol. 71v. 3  ‘Quin etiam feci quod profecto ante me nemo, ut ipse me per litteras consolarer,’ indeed, I also did what certainly no one did before, I consoled even myself in writing. In Cicero, Ad Atticum 12.14.3. 4   We have to rely on Cicero’s comments and on a few other indirect sources, as we have only few surviving fragments of his Consolatio. 5   The Latin word philosophia, philosophy, is grammatically feminine.

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phia, that is, Lady Philosophy. In fact, the poetical Muses appear to join the prisoner even before Philosophy, who nonetheless promptly addresses them as ‘stage whores’6 and chases them away. Actually, Boethius’ Platonic-leaning Lady Philosophy does not despise the poetic medium,7 as she alternatively speaks to him in prose and verse, according to a well-established prosimetric tradition.8 However, as a living enthesis within Boethius’ relational body, Lady Philosophy has not only a role of consolation, but she intends to help Boethius to practically overcome setbacks: ‘it is time, she says, for medicines, rather than complaints.’9 Whilst this therapeutic aim is in line with the tradition of rhetorical consolations, the reflexive nature of the dialogue10 draws it close to Evagrius’ suggested split of one’s soul into an encouraging and an encouraged part. Moreover, the magistrate Boethius adds to the minimalist severance of the desert-dwelling Evagrius all the theoretical resources of Greek thought11: the very Lady Philosophy reminds his protégé, who ‘has been for a little while oblivious of himself,’12 that he was ‘nourished with Eleatic and Academic studies.’13 The woman invites Boethius to disclose his condition: ‘If you expect a healing intervention, it is necessary that you expose your wound.’14 He then reveals the tragic precariousness of his position: ‘I am condemned to death and confiscation of property.’15 Impending death (and family ruin) confines Boethius to a tiny island of time, so to speak.

 6  ‘[S]cenicas meretriculas,’ in Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (hereinafter Boethius), De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, Claudio Moreschini ed. (München: K. G. Saur Verlag, 2005), 5 (1.1).  7   As Havelock convincingly argues, also Plato’s actual target is not so much poetry as a genre, but rather the traditional Greek παιδεία [paideia], that is, education, and the Homeric epic as its core. See Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).  8   This tradition includes Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (on the marriage of Philology and Mercury), Petronius’ Satyricon, and Varro’s Latin adaptations of Greek Menippean Satires.  9  ‘Sed medicinae, inquit, tempus est, quam querelae.’ In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 8 (1.2). 10   Lady Philosophy rhetorically exposes Boethius’ egotistic drive behind this dialogical reflexivity: ‘Estne aliquid tibi te ipso pretiosius?’ Is there anything more precious to you than yourself? Ibid., 39 (2.4). 11  The classical scholar Evagrius shares his semi-anchoritic condition with mostly uneducated monks, and he is careful not to exceed their understanding in his less theoretical writings. 12  ‘Sui paulisper oblitus est.’ In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 8 (1.2). 13  ‘Eleaticis atque Academicis studiis innutritum,’ ibid., 6 (1.1). 14  ‘Si operam medicantis exspectas, oportet vulnus detegas.’ Ibid., 12 (1.4). 15  ‘[M]orti proscriptionique damnamur.’ Ibid., 17 (1.4).

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The kind lady promptly comes to his rescue by reminding him of his own belief that ‘the minds of men are in no wise mortal.’16 Having released Boethius from his time constraint, Lady Philosophy then goes on disentangling him from his mundane attachments, such as riches, authority, and even posthumous fame: when the latter will inevitably fade away, Boethius will undergo a veritable ‘second death.’17 Only one thing is not wiped out by the resolute lady: she names it as beatitudo, a word that hints to the Greek notion of εὐδαιμονία18 [eudaimonia], and which spans the semantic areas of the English words blessedness, satisfaction, and happiness. Whilst beatitudo is partially and transitorily enjoyed by humans through the realization of their various and particular desires, the whole ‘body of beatitudo’19 escapes them: this is because the very substance of beatitudo is nothing else than the substance of goodness, that is, god. At this point, Lady Philosophy pushes her Platonic tirade towards a surprising outcome: she presents as a porisma, that is, a geometrical corollary of the triple equivalence between beatitudo, goodness, and god, the deduction that ‘every one that is happy is then (a) god.20 But—she adds—by nature there is only one god; yet, nothing forbids that there be many by participation.’21 This participation with god includes the latter’s judging prerogatives: If you apply your mind to the better, you need no judge to reward you, as you have joined yourself to the more excellent things. If you decline to that which is worse, never expect any other to punish you, you have put yourself in a miserable estate.22

Lady Philosophy’s substantial equation of the happy human being with the very substance of happiness, namely, god, appears to attain through a reverse path the same result achieved by Boethius in his commentary on Aristotle’s  ‘[M]entes hominum nullo modo esse mortales.’ Ibid., 40 (2.4).  ‘[S]ecunda mors.’ Ibid., 54 (2.7). 18   Whilst the term eudaimonia is generally rendered in English as ‘happiness,’ at least until classical times it defines more specifically the happy conduct of life as a whole: for example, Herodotus (1.32) recalls that Solon cautions against its use before the person’s death. 19  ‘[C]orpus beatitudinis.’ The phrase is preceded by the word veluti, that is, ‘as it were,’ which underlines its figurative sense. In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 84 (3.10). 20   Before the Christian appropriation, the Latin word deus (just like its Greek counterpart θεός, theos) does not necessarily refer to an individuated entity, but it is often used in the sense of that which in English may be rendered as ‘the divine’: Boethius’ Latin expression inevitably engages with the double register of the non-Christian and Christian use of the term. 21  ‘Omnis igitur beatus deus. Sed natura quidem unus; participatione vero nihil prohibet esse quam plurimos.’ In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 84 (3.10). 22  ‘Melioribus animum conformaveris, nihil opus est iudice praemium deferente, tu te ipse excellentioribus addidisti. Studium ad peiora deflexeris, extra ne quaesieris ultorem, tu te ipse in deteriora trusisti,’ ibid., 116 (4.4). 16 17

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Categories: ‘Every time something participates in something else, it acquires through the substantial participation also the name.’23 More in general, Boethius deploys the notion of participation also to describe the relation between individuals, species, and genera: ‘species are equally participated by individuals,’24 just like genera are participated by species. However, this participation is all but mystic, as it is the result of an operation of thought: Universals, and the species should be considered to be nothing else, are thought of as anything but thought gathered on the basis of the substantial similitude of numerically different individuals, whilst the genus as the notion gathered on the basis of the similitude of species.25

Boethius underlines the double nature of the participating subjects: ‘the subject (subiectum) is one, but it is universal when it is thought of, singular when it is perceived in those things in which it has its being.’26 Here, subiectum stands for any subject, be it a genus, a species, or an individual. However, in his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge Boethius renders as subiectum, which literally means ‘under-laid,’ the Greek term ὑποκείμενον [hypokeimenon], which literally means ‘under-lying.’ In his subsequent treatise Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, Boethius identifies the human subject as a substance in his famous definition of persona, the person: ‘an individual substance of rational nature.’27 Furthermore, on the one hand, the very word persona, which is the Latin translation of the Greek term πρόσωπον [prosōpon], countenance (but later, also theatrical mask), is derived by Boethius from the act of making resound (the mask)28; on the other hand, the word persona applies not only to human beings, but also to angels and, more important, to the three divine persons of the Trinity. In this case,

23  ‘[Q]uotiescumque aliqua res alia participat, ipsa participatione sicut rem, ita quoque nomen adipiscitur.’ In Boethius, In Categorias Aristotelis, 1, De Denominativis, PL 64, 159–294, 167–168. 24  ‘[S]pecies aequaliter indiuiduis participantur,’ In Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii Commenta, Samuel Brandt ed. (Wien: F. Tempsky, 1906), 337 (5.19). 25  ‘[C]ogitantur uero uniuersalia nihilque aliud species esse putanda est nisi cogitatio collecta ex indiuiduorum dissimilium numero substantiali similitudine, genus uero cogitatio collecta ex specierum similitudine.’ Ibid., 166 (1.11). 26  ‘[U]num quidem subiectum est, sed alio modo uniuersale est, cum cogitatur, alio singulare, cum sentitur in rebus his in quibus esse suum habet.’ Ibid., 167 (1.11). 27  ‘[N]aturae rationabilis individua substantia.’ In Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium 3, ibid., 214. 28   ‘Persona vero dicta est a personando,’ the person is actually named after that which is to make resound. Ibid., 215. Boethius probably derives this etymology from Gavius Bassus, a grammarian whose work on the origin of words is quoted by Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae 5.7).

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Boethius notices, persona renders in Latin the term ὑπόστασις [hypostasis], which in Greek defines both divine and human persons. Boethius commendably attempts to clarify the correspondence between Greek and Latin terms: in his time, this is a particularly sensitive issue, because it involves the features of the three Christian divine persons. Both the 449 Second Council of Ephesus and the 451 Council of Chalcedon focus precisely on the definition of Jesus’ φύσις [physis], a Greek word that corresponds to the Latin term natura, nature. In combating the doctrine of Nestorius, Eutyches emphasizes the fusion of the divine and human nature in the person of Jesus: the Chalcedonian creed proclaims instead against Eutyches’ merging that Jesus’ two natures—human and divine—concur ‘into one person and one hypostasis.’29 The Christological debate allows Boethius to rekindle a tradition of comparative analysis of language that harks back to Varro through Apuleius, Seneca, and Cicero: though his treatise Contra Eutychen is explicitly doctrinal in scope, it may be read as a veritable Rosetta stone between the Greek and Latin languages, along the triple axis of philosophy, religion, and culture in general. Yet, Boethius’ translations also shift the sense of his religious and philosophical sources: in particular, his rendering of the word hypostasis as substantia, substance, not only somewhat twists the dogmatic formulation of Chalcedon, but it also overlaps with his Latin rendition of the Aristotelian term οὐσία [ousia] as substantia, substance, in his previous translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge. To further complicate things, in Contra Eutychen Boethius translates instead ousia with essentia.30 Arguably, Boethius is not so much caught by the polysemy of the word hypostasis,31 but rather he follows Aristotle in conflating rule and foundation: substance might be predicated of god, Boethius explains, because ‘just as he presides (praeesset) over all things, so he is, as it were, the principle beneath all things.’32 This analogy generates the semantic enchainment33 of the terms 29   εἰς ἓν πρόσωπον καὶ μίαν ὑπὸστασιν συντρεχούσης [eis hen prosōpon kai mian hypostasin syntrekousēs]; Latin version ‘in unam personam atque subsistentiam concurrente.’ In Philip Labbé and Gabriel Cossart eds., Sacrosancta Concilia ad Regiam Editionem Exacta, tome 4 (Paris: Societatis Typographicae Librorum Ecclesiasticorum, 1671), 567; 568. 30   In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 217. 31   As suggested by Alain de Libera, in id., L’art des généralités (Paris: Aubier, 1999), 187. 32  ‘[I]dem omnibus, uti praeesset, ita etiam quasi principium subesset rebus.’ In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 218–219. 33   This enchainment overdetermines, as it were, the series of translations of essentia for ousia, subsistentia for οὐσίωσις [ousiōsis], substantia for hypostasis, and persona for prosōpon. Ibid., 218.

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essentia, essence, subsistentia, subsistence, and substantia, substance, which will long inform European thought. The semantic expansion, so to speak, of the two associated terms hypostasis and persona appears thus to rely on the traditional European solidarity between ruling principles and ontological settlements: that which presides, is also a foundation. Conversely, whilst considering the associated couple hypostasis and substantia, Boethius recalls the semantic contraction of its Greek component, which the Greeks do not apply to animals: But the reason why the Greek does not use ὑπόστασις [hypostasis] of irrational animals while we apply the term substance to them is this: this term was applied to things of higher value, in order that what is more excellent might be distinguished, if not by a definition of nature answering to the literal meaning of ὑφίστασθαι [hyphistasthai] and substare, certainly by the words ὑπόστασις [hypostasis] or substantia.34

Boethius thus explains the different semantic range of the word hypostasis and of its Latin correspondent substantia, substance, as the effect of a value judgement: the supposed superiority of humans over the other animals. This specific distinction plays an important role in Aristotelian classifications, and it possibly mirrors a distinction among humans themselves: more in general, value judgements imbue Aristotelian supposed descriptions just like they do with modern philosophical and scientific ones. The Boethian convergence of the words that express the notions of person and substance is to have a huge impact also on modern thought, as it underlies both the Cartesian conception of mind’s indivisibility and (through the influence of Leibniz on nineteenth-century German psychologists) the scientific model of the undivided self. Moreover, Boethius merges person and substance under the more general Platonic conflation of being and unity, which Lady Philosophy powerfully summarizes: not only anything that exists ‘desires to subsists and to remain,’35 but also to be one, ‘for if this [unity] be taken away, being itself 34  ‘Quare autem de inrationabilibus animalibus Graecus ὑπόστασιν non dicat, sicut nos de eisdem nomen substantiae praedicamus, haec ratio est, quoniam nomen hoc melioribus applicatum est, ut aliqua id quod est excellentius, tametsi non descriptione naturae secundum id quod ὑφίστασθαι atque substare est, at certe ὑποστάσεως vel substantiae vocabulis discerneretur.’ Ibid., 217–218. 35  ‘[S]ubsistere ac permanere petit,’ ibid., 90 (3.11). The notion of such a supposed natural drive is more Stoic than Platonic though, in the shape of the animals’ ὁρμήν (. . .) ἐπὶ τὸ τηρεῖν ἑαυτό [hormēn (. . .) epi to tērein heauto] impulse to take care of themselves. In Diogenes Laërtius 7.85. See infra, pag. 133–134.

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cannot remain.’36 This is a fundamental metaphysical principle that is to be restated in philosophical, theological, and scientific (re)formulations. However, probably the major contribution of late Roman antiquity to European individuation processes—even more than Boethius’ semantic blending—appears in the narrative shape of another dialogue: Augustine’s Confessiones,37 the Confessions. We already met the first monumental self-narration in poetry by Petrarch: on the horizon of ancient autobiographical prose, Augustine first produces a comparable self-monumentalization in words. The parallelism between Augustine and Petrarch does not escape the attention of the clergyman and poet Herder, who acknowledges their vanity, or at least admits that ‘a thin vein of it runs through their whole lives.’38 We may compare this ‘thin vein’ with the ‘humble vanity’39 of the twelfthcentury Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, as recalled by Panofsky. Gurevich rightly observes that Suger not so much (as Panofsky suggests) centrifugally projects his self onto the church complex whose realization he leads, but he rather absorbs the building into himself40: this image seems to evocate in advance the notion of relational body. Moreover, Gurevich’s observation somewhat echoes the obituary couplet written for Suger by Simon Chièvre-d’Or: Corpore, gente brevis, gemina Small of body and kin, by a twin brevitate coactus smallness forc’d In brevitate sua noluit esse brevis.41 In his smallness, a small man he refused to be.

Panofsky notices that, similarly to Suger, imposing personalities such as Napoleon, Lucas van Leyden, and Erasmus of Rotterdam with their restless activity seem to strive to overcome the limits of both their physical and social size. Their appropriation of the world, be it literal, in effigy, or through words

36  ‘[H]oc enim sublato ne esse quidem cuiquam permanebit.’ In Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, 90 (3.11). 37   See Augustine, Confessions, James J. O’Donnell ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 38  ‘[E]ine feine Ader davon [Eitelkeit] läuft durch ihr ganzes Leben.’ In Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (Letter on the advancement of humanity), in id., Ausgewählte Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1844), 1109–1244, 1152. 39  Panofsky, Abbot Suger, 29; see supra, chapter 4, note 13. 40  Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, 146–147. 41   Quoted in Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 140, modified translation.

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may well be described, if not as a compensation for their physical and social limitations, as a strongly desired expansion of their relational bodies. Augustine doesn’t need to overcome physical and social restrictions, but he repeatedly sets himself on stage through his writings.42 In his earlier dialogue Soliloquia, The Soliloquies, he even engages with another possibly inner voice, though he is not certain of its source: someone is speaking, writes Augustine, ‘I don’t know whether either myself, or another within or without me.’43 This declared uncertainty is probably more than a rhetorical artifice: we will see that the internalization of the voices of the Homeric gods marks a crucial transition in the construction of the Greek (and European) psyche. Whatever its source, the voice goes on questioning Augustine in a Socratic fashion: ‘Do you know that you are thinking?’44 it asks at the beginning of the second book of Soliloquia. ‘I know it,’45 answers Augustine, thus allowing the voice to anticipate Descartes by completing the sentence with the phrase ‘therefore it is true that you think.’46 Several variations on that which appears to us as the theme of the Cartesian cogito constellate the Augustinian corpus47: they emerge quite early, as befitting a freshman’s questioning, long before that the seventeenth-century obsession with certainty makes them de rigueur. Moreover, their final expression in the treatise De Trinitate, On Trinity, seems to anticipate not only the Cartesian formulation, but also its immediately previous path. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes stages the dismissal of all his previous knowledge: ‘I resolved to feign that all the things that ever entered my mind (esprit) were no more true than the illusions (of) my dreams.’48 We may say that in his thought experiment, the Frenchman refurbishes his relational 42   Before the Confessiones, see De beata vita 1.4; Contra Academicos 2.23-6; De utilitate credendi 1.2, 8.20; De duabus animabus 9.11; Contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti 3.3. 43  ‘[S]ive ego ipse, sive alius quis extrinsecus, sive intrinsecus, nescio.’ In Augustine, Soliloquia 1.1., PL 32, 869–904, 869. 44  ‘Cogitare te scis?’ Ibid., 2.1, 885. 45  ‘Scio.’ Ibid. 46  ‘Ergo verum est cogitare te.’ Ibid. Questioned on the similarity with his cogito by Colvius, Descartes unsurprisingly hastens to specify that his and Augustine’s tasks are ‘fort différentes,’ very different. In René Descartes, 14 November 1640 letter to Andreas Colvius, in id., Œuvres, vol. 3, 247–248, 248. See ‘Adresse et Date’ in vol. 10, 578. 47  See De Beata Vita 2; Soliloquia 2.1; De Libero Arbitrio 1.7 and 2.3–7; De Vera Religione 39; De Duabus Animabus 10; Confessiones 13.11; De Civitate Dei 11.26; De Trinitate 10.10 and 15.12. 48  ‘[I]e me resolu de feindre que toutes les choses qui m’estoient iamais entrées en l’esprit n’estoient non plus vrayes que les illusions le mes songes.’ In René Descartes, Discours de la Methode (Leyde: Jan Maire, 1637), 33.

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body49 by ascribing a delusional nature to all its content: in other words, he removes this content qua knowledge. The only knowledge left is that expressed by the notorious sentence ‘I think, therefore I am.’50 Augustine is even more blunt, as he prescribes to the mind, in order for it to think itself, the removal of all its content: ‘let [the mind] remove (detrahat) that which it added to itself.’51 Thus relieved from its cognitive and affective attachments, the mind cannot but find,52 apprehend, and love itself.53 In De Trinitate there is no trace of dialogue, and the mind’s apprehension of itself as the result of its emptying of content is the only reflexive moment: such operation is just prescribed though, rather than being enacted. However, in this treatise that follows Augustine for all his adult life (‘I began [it] as a young man and I finished [it] as an old one,’54 he recalls), he manages at last to sever the city of god from the city of man, which are otherwise always ‘entangled and reciprocally intertwined.’55 This entanglement is determined by the temporal nature of the mundane reality: and dialogue, insofar as it enacts this duration as an alternance of utterances, renews the intertwining of the exiled (peregrina56) eternal city and the temporal one. As the dialogue of the Confessions involves an ever-silent interlocutor, it stands somewhat in between the final reflection of De Trinitate and the previous inner and outer exchanges in Soliloquia, De Magistro (On the teacher), and De Ordine (On order).

49  Descartes mentions the things that entered his mind as if they could do it without a bodily intervention. 50  ‘[I]e pense, donc ie suis,’ in Descartes, Discours de la Methode, 33. The sentence first appears in its more famous Latin version ‘cogito, ergo sum’ in René Descartes, Principia Philosophiae (Amsterdam: Louis Elzevir, 1644), 2 (1.7). 51  ‘[I]d quod sibi addidit detrahat.’ In Augustine, De Trinitate 10.8, PL 42, 817–1098, 979. 52   Leibniz is to turn the reflexivity of the Augustinian mind into a principle against a long tradition that goes from Bede’s Aristotle to Aquinas and Locke: ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, excipe: nisi ipse intellectu,’ nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself. In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Nouveaux essais (1765), 2.1.6, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 1 (Berlin: Eichler, 1840), 194–418, 223. Eng. trans. in id., New Essays on Human Understanding (2009) Jonathan Bennett trans., Book 2, 36. Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of scientific psychology, recovers Leibniz’s sentence as a slightly modified epigraph to his 1862 book Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung, Contributions on the Theory of Sensory Perception. 53   This association of self-knowledge and self-love recalls Cicero’s consideration (of Stoic derivation) on children: ‘nisi sensum haberent sui eoque se diligerent,’ if they hadn’t a sense of themselves and therefore loved themselves. In Cicero, De Finibus 3.16. 54  ‘[I]uvenis inchoavi, senex edidi.’ In Augustine, De Trinitate, Prologue, PL 42, 817/818. 55  ‘[P]erplexas (...) invicemque permixtas.’ In Augustine, De Civitate Dei 11.1, PL 41, 317. 56   Ibid., 18.1, 559.

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Since the very beginning of the Confessions, Augustine addresses himself to a lord (domine), whose presence he seems not to doubt, because he is convinced that ‘those who seek [for him] indeed find him’57: following Jerome’s uncertain translation of Paul, Augustine speaks to this god ‘from whom and by whom and in whom all things [are].’58 Augustine describes the action of his god in concrete economic terms, as a gratuitous production that is similar to the overflow of Plotinus’ One59: ‘you pay debts though you owe nothing, you remit debts without losing anything.’60 And god’s action is present since the beginning in Augustine’s life, when, he tells his god, ‘neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts, but you through them nurtured my infancy.’61 Here Augustine gets close to the exemplification of the system of Spinoza by Pierre Bayle, who rephrases the factual statement of the killing of ten thousand Turks by the Germans as ‘God, modified in Germans, has killed God modified in ten thousand Turks.’62 Augustine does not go as far as describing his infant self as god’s modified substance though. After reiterating commonplaces on young children’s allegedly tyrannical behaviour, Augustine compares the years of his vanished childhood with god’s years, which are always ‘today’s day,’63 that is, the present time. Then his anguished question, ‘where or when was I innocent?’64 sets the tone for the whole narration, which, borrowing from Pessoa, we may depict as a veritable book of disquiet.65 The child Augustine invokes god’s protection from the tortures66 (tormenta) to which he is subjected at school: then, following Ambrose (and, unwit ‘[Q]uaerentes enim inveniunt eum,’ in Augustine, Confessiones 1.1.  ‘[E]x quo omnia, per quem omnia, in quo omnia.’ Ibid., 1.2. See also, for example, Sermo 277.13, PL 38, 1257–1268, 1264, ‘ubique totus Deus,’ God (is) all everywhere, which almost literally repeats Plotinus’ statement that the One is πανταχοῦ [pantakhou], everywhere, in Enneads 6.4.1. 59   The Augustinian corpus is peppered with Plotinian theories, arguments, and even images: ‘il nous arrivera assez souvent, en mettant des textes en regard, de rencontrer la même similitude jusque dans les détails.’ It will happen to us quite often, by matching [Plotinian and Augustinian] texts, to meet the same simile right down to the details. In Léon Grandgeorge, Saint Augustine et le NéoPlatonisme (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896), 69. 60  ‘[R]eddis debita nulli debens, donas debita nihil perdens.’ In Augustine, Confessiones 1.4. 61  ‘[N]ec mater mea vel nutrices meae sibi ubera implebant, sed ut mihi per eas dabes alimentum infantiae,’ ibid., 1.6. 62  ‘Dieu modifié en Allemans a tué Dieu modifié en dix mille Turcs.’ Entry ‘Spinoza,’ in Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique, vol. 2, t. 2 (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1697), 1093. 63  ‘[H]odiernus dies.’ In Augustine, Confessiones 1.6. 64  ‘[U]bi aut quando innocens fui?’ Ibid., 1.7. 65   See Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). 66   Augustine tells that as a child he prays god with a specific request: ‘ut ne schola vapularem,’ that I might not be flogged at school. He specifically mentions as similar instruments of terror ‘eculeos 57 58

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tingly, Philo67), Augustine at least admits that no one does good against one’s will.68 However, even his dismissal of rhetorical exercises gives him the opportunity to recall how much he was applauded (adclamabatur69) in performing them publicly: and the recollection of his craving to win at all costs turns into a damning view of human beings, which only changes their objects of greed with age, ‘from nuts, balls, and birds’70 to ‘gold, estates, (and) slaves.’71 This vicious circle of irrepressible desire, guilt, and punishment well fits Augustine’s embracing of his mentor Ambrose’s attitude towards ‘incontinence, the mother of all vices.’72 In fact, the sexual continence of priests and deacons is an important contemporary issue, and the main focus of the official letter that Pope Siricius writes to the Iberian bishop Himerius in 385, less than fifteen years before the writing of the Confessions. However, Siricius only prescribes that deacons marry virgins, and that those clerics who previously followed other avenues to marriage and procreation may be forgiven once, because he accepts their claim of ‘having fallen into error because of ignorance’73: he also quotes Paul, who requires the ἐπίσκοπος74[episkopos] to be ‘a man of one woman,’75 that is, the husband of only one wife. For sure, this is an injunction that Augustine declares to obey for many years in his relation with his lover and mother of his son Adeodatus: this, at least, until his mother Monica’s push for a socially acceptable matching succeeds, and Augustine abandons his loving and loved companion whilst keeping their child with him: even after his conversion to Catholicism and et ungulas,’ wooden racks in the shape of a horse, and claws, that is, tearing hooks. In Augustine, Confessiones 1.9. 67  Ambrose pillages Philo’s essay ‘Every good man is free’ in his letter 37 to Simplicianus, which is Augustine’s source here. Ibid., 1.12. 68  ‘[N]emo autem invitus bene facit,’ ibid. 69   Ibid., 1.17. 70  ‘[A] nucibus et pilulis et passeribus,’ ibid., 1.19. 71  ‘[A]urum, praedia, mancipia,’ ibid. 72  ‘Mater autem vitiorum omnium incontinentia.’ Augustine quotes this sentence from Ambrose’s De sacramento regenerationis sive de philosophia in Contra Iulianum 2.7.20, PL 44, 641–874, 687. Augustine then continues to quote: ‘Intemperans enim in coniugio, quid aliud nisi quidam adulter uxoris est?’ What is then the one who is incontinent within marriage, if not an adulter of the wife? This use of a cascade procedure may appear to predate the structure of Calvin’s injunctions. On this regard, see Augustine’s subtler treatment of religious chants in Confessiones 10.33. 73  ‘[I]gnoratione lapsos esse.’ In Pope Siricius, Epistula 1 ad Himerium Episcopum Tarraconensem, PL 13, 1131-1147, 1140. This sentence shows - I would be tempted to write ‘demonstrates’— the lack of a clear demarcation of practices. 74   In Paul, 1 Timothy 3.2 (Nestle-Aland), the word is in the accusative case, episkopon. We may translate episkopos with ‘overseer’: Paul ignores both the word ‘Christian’ and the notion of Christian priesthood, and the letter to Titus that goes under his name and mentions πρεσβυτέρους [presbyterous] is most probably apocryphal. 75  Paul’s expression μιᾶς γυναικὸς ἄνδρα [mias gynaikos andra], ibid., is quoted by Siricius as ‘unius uxori virum’ in Epistula 1, PL 13, 1141.

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his choice of celibacy, he remains unrepentant of such a double unrecoverable human damage. The fact is that Augustine’s late espousal of Ambrose’s rigorist stance towards sexual activities allows him to reconstruct the events of his first forty years of life within a clear-cut framework of repentance for his evil practices, of which sex is the major feature. It is possible to follow this dynamic of fall and atonement also beyond its individual and religious boundaries, because Augustine steps further back in time to evoke a few significant aspects of his mother’s life. The young child Monica is described as subjected to a shockingly strict drinking discipline by a female slave: the woman, having nursed Monica’s father, is entrusted with the care of his daughters, who are forbidden to drink ‘except at the time when they were fed very temperately at their parents’ table, however parched they were with thirst.’76 Even more shocking is Augustine’s approving description of the motivation for this regime of deprivation, which is meant to build in the girls the habit of drinking self-control that in the future they will apply to wine. All the naïveté (at best) of the believers in authoritarian control is revealed by Augustine’s surprise that the prohibition soon produces its transgression as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Monica gets addicted to wine well before adulthood. It matters little that the girl somewhat gets over it: the pattern of prohibition, transgression, and repentance is established as a veritable family trait, which Augustine duly repeats, and which the young Adeodatus, who is even forbidden to cry for the death of his beloved grandmother,77 is likely to carry into the fourth generation. Augustine’s depiction of the reactions to the death of his mother Monica is spine-chilling: As soon as she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus burst out crying; but he was coerced by us all, and kept silent. Likewise, my own childish feeling which was, through the youthful voice of my heart, seeking escape in tears, was coerced and silenced.78 76 ‘[P]raeter illas horas, quibus ad mensam parentum moderatissime alebantur, etiamsi exardescerent siti.’ In Augustine, Confessiones 9.8. 77   Ibid., 9.12. 78  ‘[U]bi efflavit extremum, puer Adeodatus exclamavit in planctu, atque ab omnibus nobis coercitus tacuit. Hoc modo etiam meum quiddam puerile, quod labebatur in fletus iuvenali voce, voce cordis, coercebatur et tacebat.’ Ibid.

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We do not need to impose any interpreting framework onto such a dry and masterly dramatization of parallel coercions, which are brought to act on Adeodatus from without, and on Augustine from within: poor Augustine later confesses with pitiful sense of guilt his subsequent yielding to tears.79 At least, Augustine is not ashamed to look, as he previously writes, ‘into that great brawl within my inner house.’80 He sees as an ‘inner sickness’81 this conflict of wills: and he goes as far as affirming that ‘if these contrasting natures are as many as the resisting wills, they will not be just two, but many.’82 One of these uncontrollable wills seems to be still at work in Augustine’s narration, when he recalls that an old physician friend warns him against horoscopes: a sentence casually picked up from a book may well be consonant (consonus83) with the reader’s concerns, though ‘not by art but by chance.’84 This previous recollection is a veritable unwitting prefiguration of the solution to Augustine’s violent psychological crisis in the garden of his Milanese dwelling: the chance reading of a sentence from the Bible relieves Augustine from his excruciating distress by leading him towards his conversion.85 Following the unnamed old physician’s wisdom, we may describe this reading as the chance opportunity to unblock Augustine’s unbearable inner stalemate by slightly altering his inner balance of power. However, whilst Augustine’s conversion seems to reconfigure his relational body, it does not substantially alter his relation with his desires: though they are no longer simply caught in the cycle sin-repentance-sin, their redirection towards an unreachable object keeps granting Augustine his ongoing dose of frustration. The recollection of the last decisive conversation with Monica is generally described by later commentators as the Ostia vision.86 Yet, it rather appears not only as the ex post facto rationalization of the trauma of his mother’s death, 79   By contrast, we saw how medieval stories are often soaked with tears. Here we may recall Nietzsche’s cursing of Luther for leading the reconstruction of the crumbling church, and for reviving the Augustinian stern approach to emotions, which keeps contaminating modernities: see, for example, Henry James’ ‘inconsequence of tears,’ which Marta Nussbaum still nowadays sees as ‘refusing the easy yielding to tears that might have cheapened it.’ In Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 154. 80  ‘[I]n illa grandi rixa interioris domus meae.’ In Augustine, Confessiones 8.8. 81  ‘[A]egritudo animi.’ Ibid., 8.9. 82  ‘Nam si tot sunt contrariae naturae, quot voluntates sibi resistunt, non iam duae, sed plures erunt.’ Ibid., 8.10. Of course, in this pluralization there is more than a hint of anti-Manichean polemic. 83 Ibid., 4.3. 84  ‘[N]on arte sed sorte.’ Ibid. 85  See ibid., 8.8. 86   From the place where the narration is staged, namely, Ostia, which at that time is the port of Rome.

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but, more important, as the articulation of Augustine’s new desire: an unfulfillable longing for an ‘invisible God’87 who never speaks in his own voice.88 Augustine’s literary voices spell out this yearning in a language of closeness. He not only asks, predating Dante: ‘Let me know you, my knower, let me know in the way I am known,’89 but he also repeatedly tells his god his desire: being ‘coram te,’90 in your presence. Moreover, at last he drops the fiction of his exclusive conversation with god, and he admits that he is confessing not only in god’s presence, ‘but indeed in my written text in the presence of many witnesses.’91 Here, Augustine’s metalanguage calls on stage, together with the only alleged reader of his heart, also us as readers of his pages: this call is indeed a summoning, which is issued with the authority of the narrator. As a narrator, Augustine can realize in his text the incorporation that he powerfully describes as the desire of the cheering Christians, who gather to celebrate the public profession of faith of the famous rhetorician Victorinus: ‘And all wanted to kidnap him into each one’s heart.’92 Augustine does not even need to kidnap his god into his heart: apparently, the god is already there, though his presence, at least in the Confessions, is not openly manifested in words. This incorporation not only dynamizes the relation of Aristotelian inclusion, as construed in the Categories: it also keeps expanding the notion of participation beyond the limits of Aristotelian logic: and whilst these limits are challenged by Augustine in the creature, they will be soon challenged in the creator by John of Damascus’ notion of περιχώρησις93 [perikhōrēsis], the circulating participation of the three divine persons. However, as compared with Gargantua’s claim of participation with Pantagruel (and possibly, his genus), Augustine’s incorporation of his own creator per ‘Deus invisibilis.’ Ibid., 9.11.   Ibid., 9.10. 89  ‘Cognoscam te, cognitor meus, cognoscam, sicut et cognitus sum.’ Ibid., 10.1. 90   Ibid. 91  ‘[I]n stilo autem meo coram multis testibus.’ Ibid. 92  ‘[E]t volebant eum omnes rapere in cor suum.’ Ibid., 8.2. 93   The word perikhōrēsis already appears in Anaxagoras with the sense of ‘rotation.’ It maintains the sense of (metaphorical) circular motion in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, whilst John of Damascus turns it into the notion of a continuous process of interpenetration, which defines the dynamic relation between the three divine persons: καὶ τὴν ἐν ἀλλήλαις περιχώρησιν ἔχουσι [kai tēn en allēlais perikhōrēsin ekhousi], and having (the hypostases) circulation in each other. In Hermann Diels und Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 Banden, 5 Aufl. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1934–1937), hereinafter DK, 59 B13; in John of Damascus, De Recta Sententia, PG 94, 1421–1432, 1424; see also Leonard Prestige, ‘ΠEPIXΩPEΩ and ΠEPIXΩPHΣIΣ in the Fathers,’ in The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 29, n. 115 (April 1928), 242–252. 87 88

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forms a veritable bootstrap operation, which predates Catherine of Siena and outdoes in advance Baron Münchausen’s self-sustaining performance. This narrative of incorporation is probably Augustine’s main theoretical contribution,94 rather than his famed application of the Socratic-Platonic enquiring apparatus to the notion of time. In the latter case, Augustine just turns the Platonic Socrates’ dialogical questioning about the meaning of his newly abstracted predicates into an inner dialogue about the meaning of an already abstract subject: ‘What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I don’t know.’95 It will be for Stirner, Nietzsche, and in more operative terms, Wittgenstein, to render theoretically productive this shift from predicates to subjects, by generalizing it as the acknowledgement of the semantic elusiveness of any subject whatsoever.

94   As Erasmus writes, ‘Plus me docet Christianae philosophiae unica Origenis pagina quam decem Augustini,’ I learn more of Christian philosophy from a page by Origen than from ten by Augustine.’ In Desiderius Erasmus, Epistola 844 to John Eck, in id., Opus Epistolarum, P. S. Allen with H. M. Allen eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), vol. 3, 330–338, 337. Abelard, who considers Origen maximus Christianorum philosophus, the greatest Christian philosopher, would not disagree. In Abelard and Heloise, The letter collection, 104. 95  ‘[Q]uid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.’ In Augustine, Confessiones 11.14.

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Chapter Six

Roman Legal Actors The Ordered Permutation of Personae

Two centuries before Augustine calls as witnesses his god and his readers, another powerful and long-lasting summoning comes from the first page of Ulpian’s Institutiones, The Institutions, which Byzantine jurists later turn into the first page of the Justinianic Digestum: Ulpian begins his tract with a definition of ius, ‘of which,’ he writes, ‘rightly some call us priests.’1 Ulpian derives the word ius from iustitia, justice. A modern reader would not notice the enormity of his claim, which presents the then unusual legal term iustitia, justice, as the source for the fundamental Roman notion of ius. It matters little whether this etymology is tenable (and it hardly is, as it is actually reversed): the fact is that such a language operation subordinates an almost millennial tradition of law to an abstract notion, namely, justice. Ulpian even relies upon an apparently innocuous statement: ‘ius, as elegantly Celsus defines it, is the art of the good and the fair.’2 It is not easy to render the Latin word ius in modern European languages. Most current translations are language calques of the Late Latin word directum, which is a nominalization of the adjective directus, that is, straight: this word replaces the term ius in Romania’s authoritative texts such as, for example, the sixth-century Frankish edict of Chilperic.3 When the word ius re-emerges in the eleventh century within the recovered Byzantine collations  ‘Cuius merito quis nos sacerdotes appellet.’ In D 1.1.1.1.  ‘[U]t eleganter celsus definit, ius est ars boni et aequi.’ Ibid. The association of ius with the the good and the fair is already common in Republican Rome: see, for example, the line ‘Quid cum illis agas, qui neque ius, neque bonum atque aequum sciunt?’ What are you to do with those who know neither law, nor the good and the fair? In Terence, Heautontimoroumenos 4.1.29. 3   Chilperic I, Chilperici Edictum, c. 8, in Capitularia Regum Francorum, Alfred Boretius ed., tome 1 (Hannover: Hahn, 1883), 8–10, 10. 1 2

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of Roman law, French authors translate it into vernacular as dreit or droit, following their traditional rendering of the locution directum.4 Similar is the path of the Spanish derecho, of the Portoguese dereito, then direito, and of the German Recht, among others: the Italian term diritto is a partial exception, because up until the eighteenth century it either coexists or alternates with the Latinism gius, and with the word ragione, that is, reason. The real exception is the English word ‘right,’ which only describes a legal entitlement: in turn, the English notion of legal apparatus follows a peculiar language path. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the prehistoric Old Norse neuter noun lag, that is, ‘something laid or fixed,’ in the plural form *lagu has the collective sense of ‘law’: both in Old Norwegian and in Old English this form becomes the feminine singular definition of the body of legal rules. The OED specifies that ‘[a]s the word was in Scandinavian a plural, though adopted in Old English as a singular, this collective sense is etymologically prior to that of “specific enactment”.’5 Its Middle English form ‘laue’ then becomes ‘law,’ which is the general English rendering of the recovered Latin word ius. Regardless of its later translations, the word ius acquires different senses in the course of more than a millennium of continuous use in ancient Rome: these various senses do not include that of systematic legal structure, which first appears only as a boastful claim in Justinian’s sixth-century preface to his scholars’ arrangement of Roman law codes,6 and which then resurfaces in the eleventh century as a hermeneutic approach to this recovered collation.7 In the meantime, whilst Ulpian knows nothing of his own systematicity, as we saw he proudly affirms for himself, his fellow jurists, and his readers (mostly imperial administrative clerks) the role of sacerdotes, that is, officiants of legal rites. A modern reader would probably understand this statement as a metaphorical juridical appropriation of a religious role: on the 4   See, for example, the ninth-century Strasburg Oath, whose Old Gallo-Romance and Old High German versions have dreit and rehtu respectively. In Nithard, De dissensionibus filiorum Hludovici Pii libri quatuor, manuscript Latin 9768, fol. 13r., Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 5   In “law, n.1,” OED Online, acc. Dec. 11, 2018, at: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/106405?rskey=f4KqJQ&result=2 With a hilarious reversal of perspectives, which reduces historical complexity to a logical formula, Pennington renders English exceptionality as ‘[t]he word for Law in Latin and in most European languages is equivocal.’ In Kenneth Pennington, ‘The History of Rights in Western Thought,’ review of Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, in Emory Law Journal 47 (1998), 237–252, 237. 6  ‘Et cum sacratissimas constitutiones antea confusas in luculentam ereximus consonantiam,’ having raised up in splendid consonance the most sacred constitutions, hitherto confused. In Constitutio Imperatoriam maiestatem, in Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1, Institutiones. 7  See supra, pag. 94.

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contrary, Ulpian rhetorically restates for his renewed guardians of the law the traditional Roman association between ius and religio8: the latter word long predates its Christian appropriation, and the much later invention of religion as a general notion. Moreover, Ulpian’s shift from legal practices to principles is confirmed by his description of jurists as ‘striving after true and not feigned philosophy, if I am not mistaken.’9 According to our contemporary perspective, it may appear that both moves follow a long-term juridical drift from the performance of ritual legal procedures to their motivated determination, which also shifts the object of legal interpretation from the agent’s action to the agent’s intention. Yet, this veritable retreat towards interiority only becomes visible for us because of its success in philosophical and then religious texts. A direct impact of these literatures has been suggested on Ulpian himself10: for sure, that which we may perceive as a long march towards interiorization, and which I have been tracing so far in the reverse order, cannot but influence our reconstructions of the past. In the current book, the narrative reconstruction of the past through its textual evidence11 is chronologically reversed in order to show how much any reading of a text owes to a series of previous readings of this and other texts: in other words, the reversal of the chronological order may help to show that  8   A rendering of the Latin term religio in modern European languages is even more challenging than that of ius: in this case, the problem is not the lack of a directly derived word, but rather the late superimposition of the Christian use of the term religio, whose calques then enter modern European languages with the sense of ‘faith,’ as in the case of the English word ‘religion.’ If we were to choose an English translation for the word religio before its Christian appropriation, we would need to use a periphrasis such as ‘complex of civic rites and ceremonies, which also involve deities.’ This is why still in the fifth century Augustine feels uncomfortable with the use of the word religio to describe the Christian faith: ‘tamen quia latina loquendi consuetudine, non imperitorum, verum etiam doctissimorum, et cognationibus humanis atque affinitatibus et quibusque necessitudinibus dicitur exhibenda religio, non eo vocabulo vitatur ambiguum, cum de cultu deitatis vertitur quaestio, ut fidenter dicere valeamus religionem non esse nisi cultum Dei.’ However, in the Latin linguistic usage, not only of the illiterate but also of the most cultured, we say that religio is due to human bonds of kinship, affinity and any other social bond: with this word [religio] the ambiguity is then not avoided, when it comes to the problem of the worship of the deity, so as to confidently affirm that religio is nothing else than the worship of God. In Augustine, De Civitate Dei 10.1.  9  ‘[V]eram nisi fallor philosophiam, non simulatam affectantes.’ In D 1.1.1.1. 10   These suggestions include the Neoplatonist philosopher Alcinous and, much less plausibly both in theoretical and chronological terms, Origen. 11   The term ‘evidence’ may evoke that ‘traditional form’ of history, which Foucault describes as committed to transforming the monuments of the past into documents, as opposed to the contemporary historical effort that ‘transforme les documents en monuments’ transforms documents into monuments.’ In Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 15. Yet, it may be time to go further, and rescue the notion of evidence from its Cartesian and then positivist appropriation, by recovering its juristic sense of information to be evaluated in court, that is, a possible tool for monumentalization, as it were.

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the reconstruction of the past always happens in some of the past’s futures, which inevitably project back onto this past an accumulated concretion of anachronistic considerations and concerns.12 Whilst we cannot reverse the effect of this layering by removing the hermeneutic strata, we may certainly make them visible13 on the page, as components of our production of the past as memory, or better, memories, in the plural. In turn, the production of the past as memories may at last emerge as a field of different, diverging, and competing appropriations. From this point of view, Ulpian’s combination of creative etymology and traditional juridical language may be understood as part of his (successful) attempt at reshaping the role of legal experts, after the autocratic turn of Imperial rule disrupted the interaction between the various legislative agents and the jurisprudential interpreters of the law. The opening of the abstract dimension of justice behind the practices of ius thus allows Ulpian to reposition jurists (and possibly imperial bureaucrats too) as justice’s priests. The very success14 of this invention renders it invisible to modern eyes: and now likewise invisible is the novelty of its textual expression, which follows the innovative format of Gaius’ second-century legal textbook, the Institutes. The content of Gaius’ manual is widely known as a major contribution to the Justinianic compilation since its eleventh-century rediscovery: however, the text of the Institutes is retrieved only in the early nineteenth century as the lower script of a palimpsest, or rewritten manuscript, in the library of the Cathedral Chapter at Verona.15 The canonical status of Gaius’ Institutes obscures for us its fundamental novelty as a Roman juridical written text: possibly because of the educational na12   We may expand these considerations with the help of Bergson, who contends that ‘le possible est l’effet combiné de la réalité une fois apparue et d’un dispositif qui la rejette en arrière,’ the possible is the combined effect of a reality once it has appeared, and an apparatus that projects it backward. In Bergson, La Pensée et le Mouvant, 129. 13   The metaphoric use of the visual dimension is the main Platonic rhetorical trope: we may somewhat reverse Plato’s metaphorization of vision by making it visible on the page. 14   The later ideological success of Ulpian’s apparatus is preceded by his personal success as jurist and administrator: yet, this success comes at the cost of his life, as he is killed in his role of Praetorian prefect by his Guard. 15   Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, manuscript XV (13). The fifth-century text is written on parchment in an uncial hand: all except about a twelfth of it has been read. Apart from the Justinianic collation, other sources of the Institutes are the third-century Papyrus Oxyrhynchus XVIII, 2103 (Oxford, Egypt Exploration Society), which is written in a cursive hand and contains a fragment of the text; and the fifth- or sixth-century papyrus fragment P.S.I. 1182 (Florence, Mediceo-Laurenziana), which is written in uncial.

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ture of his work, Gaius organizes all its content by successive divisions. This approach is not completely new, as Pomponius recalls that already two and a half centuries before Gaius, Quintus Mucius Scaevola is ‘the first to order civil law by genera.’16 Yet, Gaius’ divisions are so thorough that they even precede the text’s content matter, namely, ius civile17 or civil law, which is itself an outcome of a first general partition of ius, together with ius gentium,18 which we may render in English as ‘law of nations.’ The second division too does not concern the text matter but the sources of Roman law, which Gaius mentions with the plural form of ius: ‘the juridical orders (iura) of the Roman people consist of statutes, plebiscites, senatusconsults, constitutions of the emperors, edicts of magistrates authorized to issue them, and opinions of jurists.’19 We may observe that in Gaius’ time, that is, mid-second century, probably the only extant source of law is the emperor, who promulgates edicts, inspires senatusconsults, and graciously invests jurists with the faculty to give official responsa,20 answers or, less literally, interpretations of the law. The third division gives us at last the structure of the work: ‘all the law of which we make use applies (pertinet) either to persons, or to things, or to actions.’21 And its first part, which concerns persons (de personis22), is a veritable Western book of changes,23 as it meticulously maps the possibilities to lawfully move from a category to another within a composite human classification: first, from slave to free person; then, within the category of free  [I]us civile primus generatim constituit.’ D 1.2.2.42.  Gaius, Institutes 1.1. 18   Ibid. In a Ciceronian stoicizing fashion, Gaius considers ius gentium as an effect of naturalis ratio, natural reason. This derivation predates Ulpian’s abstraction of iustitia from ius, and it rationalizes the historical path of ius gentium, which is the accretive outcome of the work of the praetor peregrinus, that is, the Roman magistrate who deals with strangers and their legal systems. 19  ‘Constant autem iura Populi Romani ex legibus, plebicitis, senatusconsultis, constitutionibus principum, edictis eorum qui ius edicendi habent, responsis prudentium.’ In Gaius, Institutes 1.2. 20   Ibid., 1.7. The word responsa, answers, harks back to the traditional oral expression of the advice offered by the pontifices, that is, the co-opted magistrates who deal ‘mostly with problems involving the validity of norms across clan or family boundaries,’ and, later on, are described as interpreters of ius. In Jörg Rüpke, Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion, David M. B. Richardson trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 119. More in general, we may observe that modern categories hardly fit ‘a city where the peasants were soldiers, and the soldiers filled the priesthoods.’ In Arnaldo Momigliano, Georges Dumézil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization, in History and Theory, vol. 23, n. 3 (Oct. 1984), 312–330, 322. 21  ‘Omne autem ius quo utimur uel ad personas pertinet uel res uel ad actiones.’ In Gaius, Institutes 1.8. 22   Ibid. The word persona is possibly of Etruscan derivation and it is already attested in Plautus (Persa 5.2.6) and Terence (Eunuchus Prol. 26, 32): here, it is deployed in a sense that appears very close to our modern notion of ‘human being.’ 23   易經 [I Ching], the divination text that is the oldest of the Chinese classics, is also known as Book of Changes. 16 17

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persons, from Latin to Roman citizen; and within the category of citizens, from being subject to someone else’s authority (alieni iuris) to being legally autonomous (sui iuris). Moreover, these individual trajectories are also determined by legal rules that regulate marriage and adoption and their effects, and the effects of procreation in general: Gaius even traces some recent modifications of these rules. We may consider in more detail this veritable prototype of European individuation by juridical means. Gaius begins by confidently stating: ‘And certainly the highest division (summa diuisio) concerning the law of persons (de iure personarum) is that all men [sic] are either free or slave.’24 ‘In turn,’ Gaius adds, ‘part of the freemen are freeborn (ingenui) and part freedmen (libertini).’25 As if the latter Latin terms were not immediately understandable, Gaius explains: ‘Ingenui (freeborn) are those who are born free: libertini (freedmen) are those who are made free from lawful slavery.’26 Gaius specifies that freed slaves are assimilated either to Roman citizens, or to Latins, or to dediticii,27 that is, the enemies of Rome who surrendered after being defeated. We may observe that the condition of dediticii plays the punitive role of a social dead end, which forecloses its bearers from further ascending the social ladder.28 This closure emphasizes by contrast the overall porous nature of the Institutes’ other human categories, which instead allow for further sociolegal improvement. After enumerating a series of these lawful changes of status, Gaius comes across another division: persons are either under their own jurisdiction (sui iuris), or subjected to the jurisdiction of another (alieni iuris).29 In particular, among the subjected persons, some are said to be in someone else’s power (in potestate), some in someone else’s hand (in manu), and some in a condition of acquired property (in mancipio).30 Gaius sets to examine first the three groups of subjected persons, as he argues that if we understand who they are

24  ‘Et quidem summa diuisio de iure personarum haec est quod omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut serui.’ In Gaius, Institutes 1.9. 25  ‘Rursus liberorum hominum alii ingenui sunt, alii libertini.’ Ibid. 1.10. 26  ‘Ingenui sunt qui liberi nati sunt; libertini qui ex iusta seruitute manumissi sunt.’ Ibid. 1.11. 27  Ibid., 1.14. 28   Ibid., 1.26. 29   Ibid., 1.48. 30   Ibid., 1.49.

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that are under the jurisdiction of another, we will likewise get to know who they are that are under their own jurisdiction.31 Slaves are surely in the power of their masters. Yet, Gaius notices, whilst this power is acknowledged by the law of nations, within Roman law it is no longer unlimited: the emperor Antoninus Pius forbade masters to kill their slaves, and even to act towards them with excessive severity and cruelty. The children of a lawful Roman marriage are likewise in the power of their father: women may be rather said to be in the hand of their husbands or fiduciaries, though the Twelve Tables already provide grounds for at least one exception within marriage. Gaius’ description of the third kind of legal subjection, namely, that of being in mancipio of someone else, exceeds the limits of his classification: he describes mancipatio, that is, the procedure of giving and taking in mancipio, as ‘an imaginary sale,’32 which applies not only to persons, but also to certain animals,33 and to land. Here Gaius has to constrain within his synchronic arrangement the act of mancipare, which during hundred years of juridical practice comes to apply to various relevant transactions in Roman society. Another (and last) division in the law of persons concerns those who are not subjected to someone else’s jurisdiction: of these, ‘some are under tutory or curatory, and others under neither of those guardianships.’34 Gaius goes on: ‘Let us see, therefore, who are under tutory, and who under curatory; for thus we shall understand who they are that are in neither.’35 After considering a variety of ways of entering and exiting tutorial relations, Gaius admits that jurists do not agree on the number of genera of guardianships. Moreover, he affirms that whilst the guardianship of underage persons is widespread because ‘it is conform to natural reason,’36 he can’t find any good reason for extending it to adult women: in particular, he reckons as

  Ibid., 1.50.  [I]maginaria quaedam venditio.’ Ibid., 1.119. 33  Gaius lists ‘boues equi muli asini,’ oxen, horses, mules, and asses, which are all relevant assets in Roman traditional agriculture. Ibid., 1.120. 34  ‘[Q]uaedam uel in tutela sunt uel in curatione, quaedam neutro iure tenentur.’ Ibid., 1.142. 35  ‘[U]ideamus igitur quae in tutela, quae in curatione sint: ita enim intellegemus ceteras personas quae neutro iure tenentur.’ Ibid. 36  ‘[N]aturali rationi conueniens est.’ Ibid., 1.189. 31 32

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‘more specious than true’37 the common justification for the tutelage of women of full age, namely, their alleged ‘lightness of mind.’38 Whilst dealing with guardianships, Gaius also maps the legally prescribed possibilities to descend the sociolegal ladder: he describes the highest (maxima), lesser (minor) or intermediate, and lowest (minima) occurrence of capitis deminutio, that is, the diminution of civil status: the first involves the loss of both liberty and citizenship, the second the loss of citizenship only, and the third a diminution of legal status as citizen respectively. Yet, unlike the notion of capitis deminutio, no genus encompasses the various lawful ways of improving one’s civil status: this absence may appear surprising, because most of Gaius’ law of persons is devoted to these sociolegal upgradings. One may even suppose that the absence of an encompassing genus for the improvement of status shows the sociolegal ascending path as a shared perspective, which somewhat extends to all persons under Imperial jurisdiction the traditional logic of political advancement of the Republican cursus honorum, that is, the progress of public offices. However, in his probably new organization of legal matter, Gaius makes a sparing use of definitions: he neither defines his three main ordering notions, to wit, persona (person), res (thing), and actio (action), nor the more general notions of the law of persons, namely, those ones of liberi (free) and serui (slaves). As we saw, definitions only appear at the next—and logically lower —level of the process of progressive division, when Gaius explains the meaning of the terms ingenui, freeborn, and libertini, freedmen. Yet, as both these terms are in current use at least since the third century BCE,39 Gaius’ specifications are probably less a definition than a didactic illustration of the possible ways of acquiring the status of free person. We saw that Gaius’ further explication of the status of dediticii, that is, surrendered enemies, underscores by contrast the sociolegal ascending mobility of the other freed persons, namely those endowed with Latin or Roman citizenship: if we may generalize, Gaius is less interested in defining a sociolegal status than in describing the ways of acquiring it. If this holds true, despite the use of Greek-inspired tools, such as the logical division and the relation of genus and species, Gaius’ legal survey of the  ‘[M]agis speciosa (. . .) quam uera.’ Ibid., 1.190.  ‘[L]euitate animi.’ Ibid. 39  ‘[I]ngenuamne an libertinam?’ [Is she] free born or a freedwoman? In Plautus, Miles gloriosus 3.1.187. 37 38

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law of persons is not so much a taxonomy of personal sociolegal status, but rather a guide to personal sociolegal transformations: in the un-Roman terms of Greek speculation, we might say that Gaius focuses less on the being of his sociolegal subjects than on their coming-to-be.40 As compared with the Boethian notion of persona, which constructs the person as a Platonic abstraction by Aristotelian logical means, Gaius’ multiplicity of personae does not need to rely on individuating qualities such as substance and reason: it rather multiplies in a variety of further determinations41 (male, female, slave, etc.), which themselves do not require definitions. Only when the word persona is not related to a clearly individuated person it falls outside the reach of law: ‘a legacy to an uncertain person is uselessly bequeathed.’42 We may juxtapose Gaius’ map of personal transformations with the Platonic and Aristotelian charting of the inhabitants of the polis: the comparison would highlight by contrast the peculiar logic of analogy that underlies the Institutes, and possibly, Roman legal thinking and acting. However, for the moment, it will suffice to underline that Roman law as represented in words by Gaius owes its effectiveness, orderliness, and flexibility neither to definitions as theoretical cornerstones, nor to a hierarchical conceptual structure, as in Roman law’s late reconstructions. Gaius’s very major partition of law relies not on principles but on law’s pertinence to its objects: in turn, his personae bear a relation of reciprocal similarity, which is also the more general way of connecting (and, in a historical perspective, expanding and transforming) the various objects of law. We may understand Gaius’s use of the term persona as a powerful illustration of a specific relational body, of which the first book of the Institutes traces lawful and unlawful (incest, bigamy, etc.) permutations. At the beginning of this narration, we met one of these permutations in the person of Ovid’s wounded body. The exile of the poet to Moesia is directly ordered by Augustus, at the time in which the will of the emperor first appears as another source of law: the very imperial authority is yet to be legally established through the legal fiction of Vespasian’s Lex de Imperio.43 However, Ovid’s relegatio, that

40   It is ironical that, as a result of the anachronistic concerns of its medieval and modern readers, Gaius’ textbook is so often searched for definitions. 41   In the text of the Digest, this variety even transcends the boundaries of human life, as in the expressions defuncti persona (D 31.55.1), the person of the deceased, and persona mortui (D 46.1.72), the person of the dead. 42  ‘Incertae personae legatum inutiliter relinquitur.’ In Gaius, Institutes 2.238. See also 2.287. 43  See supra, chapter 4, note 26.

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is, banishment, similarly to the lowest capitis deminutio neither deprive him of his free status nor of his citizenship. Yet, Ovid’s confinement to the least Romanized44 province of the empire empties his relational body of relatives (including his wife45), friends, and literary sources, not to speak of all sorts of social engagements that fill the daily life of an upper-class Roman dweller. Moreover, Ovid complains that no one can speak Latin in Tomis.46 Unlike Augustine, it is Ovid’s forced condition of linguistic island that pushes him towards soliloquy, ‘so that,’ he writes, ‘I do not lose the use of the Ausonic [Italic, that is, Latin] tongue.’47 It is certainly not surprising that the Latin language is an essential component of Ovid’s relational body: moreover, even his extraordinary wordsmith powers need to be exercised lest they disappear. In other words, Ovid not only considers his Latin skills a fundamental enthesis within his relational body, but he is also well aware of the processual and dynamic nature of his linguistic ability. The porosity of the relational body does not allow the capture, as it were, of language skills once and for all: these skills can only be maintained through exercise, that is, by repeated incorporations. Together with his writing activity, Ovid’s verbal soliloquies predate the inner split suggested by Evagrius to the depressed monks, and they relieve him of another kind of distress, which gives the wasting of his relational body the cognitive shape of the waning of language. However, with time other languages too make their way within the exiled ‘Roman bard’48: though Ovid hopes for a pardon until the end of his life, he accepts at last to negotiate with his own expectations and his metropolitan biases, and he renovates his relational body with local vernaculars and acquaintances. Ovid’s partially renewed persona anticipates Gaius’ dynamic sociolegal mapping: in particular, his forced relocation exemplifies the centrifugal movement from the physical and legal centres of the empire, namely, Rome 44  Ovid writes to Atticus ‘a male pacatis (. . .) Getis,’ from the poorly pacified (. . .) Getae. In Ovid, Ex Ponto 2.7.2. 45  Ovid recalls that his unnamed wife wants to go with him: ‘te sequar et coniunx exulis exul ero,’ I will follow you and be an exile’s exiled spouse’ (Tristia 1.3.82). She reluctantly accepts Ovid’s request to remain in Rome in order to plea on his behalf. Later on, Ovid even urges her (with detailed instructions) to implore the Empress Livia to intervene in his favor (Ex Ponto 3.1.97–170). 46  [U]nus in hoc nemo est populo, qui forte Latine / quaelibet e medio reddere verba queat.’ No one in this people there is, who in Latin / may perchance express any words whatsoever. In Ovid, Tristia 5.7.53–54. 47  ‘[N]e tamen Ausoniae perdam commercia linguae.’ Ibid., 61. 48  ‘Romanus vates.’ Ibid., 55.

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and Roman citizenship, which are at once the focus of a corresponding centripetal flow of persons and things both corporeal and incorporeal.49 Since Republican times, this double movement is mainly propelled by war spoliations, and juridical thought strives to keep up with the Roman geographical, demographic, and administrative expansion. In Gaius’ time, the transformations of law are tangible enough to be the object of intellectual debate: Gellius narrates a discussion between the Celtic philosopher Favorinus and the African jurist Sextus Caecilius about the then mostly obsolete laws of the Twelve Tables.50 Though Favorinus recalls to have read the text of the Twelve Tables ‘not less eagerly’51 than that of the twelve books of Plato’s Laws, he complains that some parts of it are out of phase with contemporary sensitivity52: in fact, Favorinus argues, the Roman people let these parts of the law ‘die out from disuse and old age.’53 Sextus acknowledges Favorinus’ uncommon familiarity with both Greek thought and Roman law. Yet, he invites the philosopher to relinquish for a moment the adversarial mode of academic debate and ponder the matter more seriously (gravius54): in particular, Sextus reminds Favorinus that ‘the opportunities and the remedies offered by law (. . .) like the faces of heaven and sea, vary according to the seasons of circumstances and fortune.’55 Though Sextus’ arguments end up meeting Favorinus’ approval too,56 their exchange is to become a paradigmatic representation of the uneasy relationship between philosophical and juridical thought. At the end of the eighteenth century, the German jurist Hugo plainly states that Favorinus (mis)treated the Law of the Twelve Tables ‘in the way since then many a philosopher treated positive law, because he understood it just as little.’57 49   Compare Gaius’ definition of things corporeal and incorporeal, as resulting from the relational practice of touching (Institutes 2.12–14), and Cicero’s construction of a similarly major division as the difference between things that exist (sunt), and things that are apprehended (intelleguntur) or distinguished by the mind (cerni animo), in Topica 5.26. 50   Unfortunately, the text of the Twelve Tables, which already at the time of Favorinus is partly left ‘to die out of disuse and old age,’ does not pass the bottleneck of Christian copyists, so that we have to rely on its quoted fragments. See infra, chapter 6, note 53. 51  ‘[N]on (. . .) minus cupide.’ In Aulus Gellius, Noctes Acticae 20.1.4. 52   According to Favorinus, these parts are either obscurissima, most obscure, or durissima, most severe, or lenia, lenient and remissa, slackened, or not to be taken at face value. Ibid. 53  ‘[S]inu et senio emori.’ Ibid., 20.1.10. 54   Ibid., 20.1.21. 55  ‘[L]egum oportunitates et medellas (. . .) ut facies caeli et maris, ita rerum atque fortunae tempestatibus varientur.’ Ibid., 20.1.22. 56  Ibid., 20.1.55. 57  ‘[W]ie seitdem schon mancher Philosoph das positive Recht behandelt hat, weil er sie eben so wenig verstand.’ In Gustav Hugo, Lehrbuch der Geschichte des Römischen Rechts bis auf Justinian [1790] (Berlin: Mylius, 1824), 79.

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Hugo does not have to wait long before an irritated philosopher, in the person of Hegel, turns the tables on him: the understanding that results from a ‘purely historical effort,’58 Hegel contends, is not to be mistaken for the understanding of that which is ‘truly essential, the concept of the thing.’59 Though ‘we speak of Roman (. . .) juridical concepts,’60 Hegel remarks, ‘here there are no concepts at all, but only general juridical determinations, propositions of the understanding, maxims, laws, and the like.’61 It would be difficult to disprove Hegel’s assertion: concepts62 begin to emerge in the course of the medieval dispute on universalia, that is, universal notions, and they possibly only first appear on the page of the fourteenth-century text of Ockham63 (though Hegel himself would dismiss this merely historical demonstration). However, Hegel appears to follow Hugo (and implicitly, Savigny) in likening the reasoning of Roman jurists to that of mathematicians. This comparison probably originates from a Leibnizian bon mot: One can even boldly advance a pleasant but truthful paradox, that there are no authors whose manner of writing resembles the style of the Geometers more than that of the ancient Roman Jurisconsults, whose fragments are in the Pandects.64

This appraisal well fits a thinker such as Leibniz, who is himself a great mathematician, and whose ecumenical motto is an irenic invitation to negotiate by mathematical means: ‘calculemus,’65 let’s calculate. Yet, for Hegel 58  ‘[R]ein geschichtliche Bemühung.’ In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in id., Werke, Band 7, 2 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), 35. 59  ‘[D]as wahrhaft Wesentliche, der Begriff der Sache,’ ibid., 36. 60  ‘Man pflegt (. . .) von den römischen (. . .) Rechtsbegriffen (. . .) zu sprechen,’ ibid. 61  ‘[D]abei nichts von Begriffen, sondern allein allgemeine Rechtsbestimmungen, Verstandessätze, Grundsätze, Gesetze u. dgl. vorkommen.’ Ibid. 62   Just like the perfect participle contractum, stipulated, in the Institutes the perfect participle conceptum, conceived (both as literally engendered and as thought) appears as a predicate, for example in the sentence ‘per concepta uerba, id est per formulas,’ by set forms of word, that is, by formulas. In Gaius, Institutes 4.30. 63   Ockham frees the participle conceptus from its usual adjectival function, so that it acquires a nominal function, and its sense shifts from ‘conceived’ to ‘concept.’ In William of Ockham, Summa Logicae 1.1. 64  ‘On peut même avancer hardiment un paradoxe plaisant, mais véritable, qu’il n’y a point d’auteurs dont la manière d’écrire ressemble d’avantage au style des Géomètres que celui des anciens Jurisconsultes Romains, dont les fragmens se trouvent dans les Pandectes.’ In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Préceptes pour avancer les sciences, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 1 (Berlin: Eichler, 1840), 165–171, 168. 65   Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Guilielmi Pacidii initia et specimina Scientiae Generalis sive de instauratione et augmentis scientiarum in publicam felicitatem, in id., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, C. I. Gerhardt ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1890), vol. 7, 124–126, 125.

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logical consistency is not only the essential characteristic of mathematics and jurisprudence, but also of every other science.66 Moreover, Hegel specifies: [B]ut with the satisfaction of the demands of reason and with philosophical science, this logical consistency has still nothing to do. Besides, the inconsistency of the Roman jurists and the praetors must be respected as one of their greatest virtues, by which they deviated from unjust and abominable institutions.67

It is difficult to ignore not only Hegel’s Christian and modern bias towards Roman ‘pagan’ institutions, but also his inability to think beyond the binary opposition68 of consistency and inconsistency: at least, we may appreciate his twisted recognition of Roman jurist and praetors’ reasoning practices, which escape the apparatus of capture of old and new dialectics. Hegel’s ad hoc examples of Roman inconsistent logic and his mention of Roman legal fictio together with the Greek term ὑπόκρισις69 [hypokrisis] would surely elicit Sextus’ invitation to ponder more seriously the function of legal fictio as an explicitly fictive construction, and not to mistake it for the later70 sense of the Greek word hypokrisis, that is, simulation. Moreover, Roman jurists’ logic of analogy does not just happily do without concepts, both in the historical and the Hegelian sense: it also sidelines definitions, which since the Socratic-Platonic enquiries are the veritable core of Greek speculation. We will soon see how both tools of definition and speciesgenus relation are imported into Roman legal texts. For the moment, from the perspective of our retrograde path through the constructions of individuation, it is worth remarking the highly significant absence of the definition of persona in Gaius’ text. More than two centuries before the publication of the Institutes, Cicero indirectly confirms the attitude of Roman jurist towards generalizations: in his 66   In this way, Hegel weakens the significance of Savigny’s famous dictum on Roman jurists: ‘sie mit ihren Begriffen rechnen,’ they calculate with their concepts. In Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1814), 29. 67  ‘[A]ber mit der Befriedigung der Forderungen der Vernunft und mit der philosophischen Wissenschaft hat diese Verstandeskonsequenz noch nichts zu tun. Außerdem ist aber wohl die Inkonsequenz der römischen Rechtsgelehrten und der Prätoren als eine ihrer größten Tugenden zu achten, als durch welche sie von ungerechten und abscheulichen Institutionen abwichen.’ In Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in id., Werke 7, 2 Aufl., 41. 68   Hegel’s major theoretical feat is the shift of the relation of opposition from the outside to the inside of individuated entities. Whilst this shift is possibly the most relevant logical theorization after Aristotle, it restates the relation of opposition as the insurmountable horizon of reality. 69  Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in id., Werke 7, 2 Aufl., 42. 70   The Greek term hypokrisis is first documented in Herodotus (1.49) with the sense of ‘reply.’

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dialogue De legibus, which is modelled on Plato’s Laws,71 he laments that ‘jurisconsults (. . .) often distribute among innumerable cognitions that which is based on one principle’72: and as an example of this behaviour, he names the Scaevolas, ‘both pontifices and at the same time most learned in the law!’73 Here Cicero blames the jurists’ supposed teaching incompetence,74 which renders them unable to operate a synthesis between the various juridical objects: Cicero instead proposes to use the tools of Greek philosophical abstraction to reform law education. In his previous dialogue De Oratore, Cicero makes his character Crassus sketch this ordering: if the task of law, similarly to the other artes, disciplines, is the conservation of uniformity (aequabilitatis conservatio75), ‘[t]hen genera must be designated and reduced to a certain and limited number.’76 Nine years later, Cicero takes up the issue again in his dialogue Brutus, where he polemically praises the jurist Servius Sulpicius by comparison with Quintus Mucius, the younger of the Scaevolas.77 Cicero’s reiterated attacks on Mucius throw a different light on Pomponius’ previously recalled remark, which credits Mucius with the introduction of genera in Roman legal writing. We may suppose that from the perspective of the homo novus78 Cicero, who enthusiastically embraces both (Greek) arts of rhetoric and philosophy,79 Mucius’ innovations are at best timid, and at worst, counterproductive. Unfortunately, Mucius’ writings only survive in fragments: yet, a mention by Augustine may fit both the specific issue of Mucius’ position and our general path. In the fourth book of De Civitate Dei, Augustine recalls that ‘the very learned pontifex Scaevola’80 compares the kinds of gods introduced by the poets, the philosophers, and the statesmen respectively. Whilst the gods of the poets often display inappropriate behaviour, the gods of the philosophers are either superfluous or unsuitable for the people: in particular, according to Augustine, Scaevola rejects as dangerous both the belief that some of the gods were   See Cicero, De Legibus 2.4.  ‘Sed iuris consulti (. . .) saepe quod positum est in una cognitione, id in infinita dispertiuntur.’ Ibid., 2.47. 73  ‘[P]ontifices ambo et eidem iuris peritissimi!’ Ibid. 74  ‘[I]gnoratione docendi.’ Ibid. 75  Cicero, De Oratore 1.188. 76  ‘Tum sunt notanda genera et ad certum numerum paucitatemque revocanda.’ Ibid., 1.189. 77   See Cicero, Brutus 41. 78  See supra, chapter 4, note 15. 79   At least, Cicero has the good grace to admit that ‘philosophandi scientia concedens multi,’ he is yielding to many in knowledge of philosophy. In Cicero, De Officiis 1.2. 80  ‘[D]octissimum pontificem Scaevolam.’ In Augustine, De Civitate Dei 4.27. 71 72

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previously human beings, and the habit of representing the gods with human features.81 We are not able to assess the authenticity of the considerations that Augustine ascribes to Mucius. Nevertheless, we may notice the association of Mucius, qua authoritative representative of Roman traditional culture, with the stances of the Greek philosophical critique of Homeric poetry: Xenophanes not only blames the shameful behaviour of Homer’s and Hesiod’s gods,82 but, as previously recalled, he also reproaches the widespread anthropomorphic representation of the deities.83 I anticipate that such criticism of the traditional Greek gods may be better understood on the horizon of the shift from orality to literacy: in this context, the narrative openness of oral recitations is replaced by the textual (and thus, normative) closure of written redactions. As another anticipation of our narrative path, I recall that Plato captures the ambivalence of the advent of literacy within a short narration in his dialogue Phaedrus. The story is well known: the god Theuth presents his new inventions84 to the god Ammon, the king of Egypt. Theuth describes one of them, namely, writing, as a ‘remedy (pharmakon) for memory and wisdom,’85 but Ammon retorts that the innovation will have in fact the opposite effect, because as an outer reminder it will discourage inner active memorization. Plato here relies on the ambivalence of the very word pharmakon, which already Homer deploys in both senses of ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’: whilst in the Iliad pharmaka, that is, officinal plants are the ingredients of the remedies applied to the bodies of wounded warriors,86 in the Odyssey they are the components not only of Circe’s evil potions,87 but also of Hermes’ and Circe’s antidotes.88 Plato skilfully merges the different and even opposite89 effect of pharmaka with the different modes of recollection before and after writing, namely   Augustine does not explicitly engage with the third narration.   See Xenophanes, DK 21 B11. 83   Ibid., DK 21 B15 and B16. 84  Plato describes Theuth’s relation with the new arts with the word εὑρεῖν [heurein], which can be used in both senses of ‘having invented’ and ‘having discovered.’ In Plato, Phaedrus 274c. 85   μνήμης (. . .) καὶ σοφίας φάρμακον [mnēmēs (. . .) kai sophias pharmakon]. Ibid., 274e. 86   See Homer, Iliad 4.191, 4.218, 5.401, 5.900, 11.515, 11.741, 11.830, 15.394. 87   See Homer, Odyssey 10.213, 10.236, 10.290, 10.317, 10.326, 10.327, 10.394. 88   For Hermes’ antidote, see ibid., 10.287, 10.292, 10.302; for Circe’s one, 10.392. 89   I sketched the later capture of the ambivalence of pharmaka under the category of opposition in my essay ‘La farmacia di Elena: Molteplicità e dividui in una farmacologia differenziale’ [The pharmacy of Helen: Multiplicity and dividuals in a differential pharmacology], in Il senso sociale, Sara Baranzoni and Paolo Vignola eds. (Napoli: Kaiak, 2016). 81 82

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μνήμη [mnēmē], memory, and ὑπόμνησις90 [hypomnēsis], that is, mere reminding: we may well relate these antithetic constructions to a change in memorizing processes, from the re-enacting of oral recitation to the retrieval of written information. Nowadays, we can only91 recover the former mode of recollection by retrieving its traces, which are inscribed in the written versions of oral texts as patterns of repetition, such as the rightly famous Homeric formulas. We may compare these previously aural techniques with the visually oriented mnemonics that is described in the early first-century BCE Rhetorica ad Herennium, the Rhetoric to Herennius: the still unidentified author of the book92 —the oldest extant Latin treatise of rhetoric—constructs a biunivocal relation between the loci, that is, places in a visualized space, and the images of the objects to be memorized, be they subject-matters or words.93 Bergson notoriously observes that we are used to construct time on the model of space94: for sure, writing contributes to produce time as a spatial extension by visualizing words on a spatial support. We may say that memorization techniques of written rhetorical texts double writing’s spatialization of time, by associating the already spatialized written text with a virtual threedimensional space. The rhetorical organization of texts produces a similar doubling, by associating the spatialized script with the virtual space of its various rhetorical orderings. In the dialogue De Oratore, the Ciceronian character Crassus recalls that such orderings are the effect of ‘an art from a somehow other genus of knowledge, which philosophers take wholly to themselves.’95 Crassus understands the philosophical notions of definitions, genera, and species as the ordering tools with which the various elements of an art are conclusa,96 that is, rounded up together. This spatial image overlaps with 90   Ammon defines writing as ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον [hypomnēseōs pharmakon], a remedy for reminding, in Plato, Phaedrus 275a. 91  This restriction only applies to the European context, where, for example, Milman Parry’s rediscovery of oral poetry in 1930s Yugoslavia, however theoretically relevant, may be likened to the finding of an oral island in a sea of literacy. See, by contrast, Jack Goody’s studies on the West African Bagre epic. 92  The Rhetorica ad Herennium was long ascribed to Cicero. 93   Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.16.29-3.24.40. 94   See, for example, Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1888). 95  ‘[A]rs quaedam extrinsecus ex alio genere quodam, quod sibi totus philosophi adsumunt.’ In Cicero, De Oratore 1.188. We may observe that, for example, the Rhetorica ad Herennium draws from various Greek sources including Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Chrysippus, Hermagoras, and possibly Epicurus. 96   Ibid., 1.187. Conclusa is the perfect participle form of the verb concludo, whose etymology is ‘to close together.’  

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that of definitio, with which it also shares the semantic shift in time from the sense of setting physical boundaries to that of producing a metaphorical closure. We will soon see that a similar shift takes place in Aristotle’s use of the word ὅρος [horos], which he turns from its concrete sense of boundary to the abstract one of definition.97 Mucius uses the Greek word horos as part of the title of one of his works, the Liber singularis horōn,98 which is generally rendered as ‘Book of definitions’: yet, the fragments of the text that survive in the Justinianic compilation99 do not allow us to decide whether this rendering of the word horōn is preferable to that of ‘limits.’100 For sure, right after Mucius’ death, the word definitio is attested with the sense of ‘definition’ in a rhetoric textbook, the already recalled Rhetorica ad Herennium: the author even gives his readers a definition of definitio as ‘that which in brief and clear-cut fashion encompasses the peculiar properties of a thing.’101 Few decades later, the Ciceronian Crassus will nearly repeat: ‘For the definition is a concise and limited exposition of those things that are peculiar to the thing that we want to define.’102 I already recalled that, shortly after, Cicero takes issue with Mucius himself. Probably, in the absence of ample documentary evidence, the best appreciation of Mucius’ innovative recovery, as it were, of the tradition of ius is the very Ciceronian description of that which Mucius (‘and many jurists’103) has not: [A]n art, which teaches us to divide a whole into parts, to unfold that which is implicit by defining it: to explain what is obscure, by a clear interpretation; and first to recognize what is ambiguous, then to operate distinctions; and lastly, which provides us with a rule by which we may judge the true and the false, and from which premises there may or there may not be consequences.104

 97   We will soon also deal with Aristotle’s construction of the notion of abstraction, which is itself first an example of the shift from concrete to abstract notions, before becoming the description of this very shift.  98   In the title of the book, the term appears in the genitive plural form ὅρων [horōn].  99   See D 41.1.64, D 43.20.8, D 43.24.1.5, D 43.24.5.8, D 50.16.241, D 50.17.73pr., D 50.17.73.1-4. 100   Whilst Stein too renders Mucius’ book title as ‘Book of definitions,’ he also insists on the sense of limits, fines in Latin, of the word horoi. In Peter Stein, Regulae Iuris: From juristic rules to legal maxims (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 38. 101  ‘Definitio est quae rei alicuius proprias amplectitur potestates breviter et absolute.’ In Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.25. 102  ‘[E]st enim definitio rerum earum, quae sunt eius rei propriae, quam definire volumus, brevis et circumscripta quaedam explicatio.’ In Cicero, De Oratore 1.189. 103  ‘[E]t apud multos,’ In Cicero, Brutus 41.152. 104  ‘[A]rtem, quae doceret rem universam tribuere in partes, latentem explicare definiendo, obscuram explanare interpretando, ambigua primum videre, deinde distinguere, postremo habere regulam, qua vera et falsa iudicarentur et quae quibus propositis essent quaeque non essent consequentia.’ Ibid. Cicero’s tirade prefigures the modern endeavours of Pufendorf and Wolff.

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Mucius neither refuses to engage with the novel role of written jurisprudence,105 nor to deploy the new classification tools: yet, he seems (at least, de facto) aware of their ambivalence,106 which is not limited to writing as such, but also encompasses writing ordering devices. Whilst these devices operate on the written text, their action also ascends, so to speak, up to very activity of theoretical elaboration, on which they exert a powerful feedback. This inevitable feedback is the issue at stake in the adoption of a new device, as the Platonic Ammon warns: the performance of a new tool simply cannot be limited to the remedial sphere. We may understand the effect of writing upon recollection as the entering of reading practices qua entheses in the relational body: indeed, this entrance reconfigures the relational body itself, as it modifies the construction of its memories. Theuth and Ammon focus on the impact of writing on readers: Plato and Mucius have instead to face writing from the perspective of writers because of a compelling political reason, namely, their commitment to the city.107 Both authors share an aristocratic concern for threatening political novelties. Yet, apparently Plato never accepts to directly commit his thought to writing,108 to which he prefers his personal engagement as teacher of old and new leaders: Mucius deals instead with the impersonal medium of legal texts with a careful dosage of the new shortcut of rhetorical tools. Plato’s and Mucius’ political efforts meet the double spectacular failure of the subsequent fall of the Greek poleis and the immediate disaster of the Social Wars, which are even triggered by the conservatism of the law Licinia Mucia.109 However, eventually Mucius’ prudent updating of the jurisprudential tradition will help it to better resist the double pressure of the rhetorico-philosophical ordering tools and of the un-Roman notion of natural law, which

105   Mucius even takes charge, probably in collaboration with Marcus Junius Brutus, for the only edition of Annales maximi, the annals of the pontifex maximus, which is a collection of the pontifical day-to-day records of the main events since possibly as early as 400 BCE. See Cicero, De Oratore 2.52; Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.5. 106   Ambivalence is an important aspect of Roman culture, and it affects law since before Mucius’ times: see the adagio ‘ius summum saepe summa malitia est,’ supreme law is often supreme wickedness. In Terence, Heautontimoroumenos 4.5.48. 107   Unlike Mucius though, Plato’s travels to Syracuse show that the object of his commitment is not just one specific polis. 108   See Plato, Seventh letter 341c. 109  The Lex Licinia Mucia is established in 95 BCE by Mucius, together with the other consul at the time, Lucius Licinius Crassus. It questions the registration as Roman citizens of the socii, that is, Latin and Italian allies, and it is considered as an immediate cause of the eponymous Social War (91–88 BCE).

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are both strongly propounded by the ‘most eloquent of the descendants of Romulus.’110 Only in the eleventh century, the Papal Revolution will revive the principlebased Platonic approach to politics. This approach will also become the cornerstone of European thought to come, because the principled theoretical framework of juridical theology will also have a decisive influence on lay jurists’ new attitude to the rediscovered Roman law codes.111 At that time, by the irony of history, the only non-narrative European theoretical alternative to Greek metaphysics and science,112 namely, jurisprudence, will have again to subordinate both its attention to transformations in time and its analogical reasoning to an alien structure of definitions, and then concepts. At least, the notion of persona will coexist for a long time with the new theological foundation of law, until in 1667 the young Leibniz will boldly discredit both Roman law categories of persona and res, person and thing, as mere facts.113 The horror that even the compassionate Leibniz feels for all that comes ‘from the entrails of fact’114 is revealed by his telling list of examples of factual expressions of humanity: ‘deaf, mute, blind, hermaphrodite, perfect, male, female, prepubertal, underage, adult, rich, poor, noble, Magistrate, rural, heretic, schismatic human beings, etc.’115 Because also the Roman legal notion of auctio, action, appears superfluous to Leibniz, he proposes to replace Gaius’ legal triad with the more detached dichotomy of subiectum,116 subject, and obiectum,117 object. We will face the former and his (and sometimes her) modern vicissitudes, after completing our retrograde path towards the Greek sources of European individuation.

110  ‘Disertissime Romuli nepotum,’ Oh most eloquent among the descendants of Romulus: in this way Catullus, who is no lesser wordsmith than Cicero, subtly addresses the latter’s wordiness. In Catullus, Carmina 49. 111  See supra, pag. 94. 112   Of course, this is a sweeping generalization, as Greek ancient thought is rife with divergent approaches: for example, Hippocratic authors reject the medical deployment of Empedocles’ philosophical hypotheses, and also within the sciences, Archimedes’ analogical use of mechanics takes mathematics on a different path from Euclidean geometry. 113  ‘[P]ersonae enim et res sunt facti,’ for persons and things are facts. In Georg Wilhelm Leibniz, Nova methodus discendae docendaeque jurisprudentiae (Frankfurt: Johann David Zunner, 1667), 45. 114  ‘[E]x (. . .) facti visceribus.’ Ibid. 115  ‘Surdos, mutos, coecos, hermaphroditos, perfectos, viros, foeminas, impuberes, minores, adultos, divites, pauperes, nobiles, Magistratus, rusticos, peregrinos, hæreticos, schismaticos, &c.’ Ibid. Leibniz’s actual inventory of people is no less hilarious than Borges’ fictional Chinese classification of animals. 116   Ibid., 51. 117   Ibid., 52.

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Chapter Seven

Keys to Greek Individuation Oikeiōsis, Ousia, Autos

The alien conception of natural law enters the Roman world as a component of ius through a rhetorical text, the already recalled Rhetorica ad Herennium.1 Whilst the author of the treatise understands natural law as a ‘duty towards parents, gods, and fatherland,’2 the notion has a wider sense in its previous Greek sources: for example, the Roman jurist Marcianus quotes the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, who expands on Pindar’s line νόμος ὁ πάντων βασιλεύς3 [nomos ho pantōn basileus], law the king of all, as a description of the universal natural order.4 Diogenes Laërtius recalls that Chrysippus draws from Zeno both notions of natural law and οἰκειῶσαι5 [oikeiōsai], a verbal predicate that is related to the term οἶκος [oikos], house6: Stoic thinkers such as Zeno and Chrysippus contrast it with the verb ἀλλοτριῶσαι [allotriōsai], to render alien, in order to describe the supposed natural endearment of each living being to itself. Plutarch previously mentions this self-endearment as οἰκείωσις7 [oikeiōsis]. In turn, Porphyry writes that Zeno and his followers regard oikeiōsis as the basis of justice, as opposed to ἀλλοτρίωσις8 [allotriōsis], estrangement (which is later rendered in Latin as alienatio): according to Diogenes Laërtius, ‘they  ‘Natura ius,’ in Rhetorica ad Herennium 2.13.19.  ‘[I]us in parentes, deos, patriam.’ Ibid., 3.3.4. 3  Pindar, fragment 169. 4  Chrysippus (Marcianus), in Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta 3.314. 5   Oikeiōsai is the aorist infinitive form of the verb οἰκειόω [oikeioō], to make familiar. In Diogenes Laërtius 7.85. 6   The sense of the Greek term oikos is still carried by numerous English compound nouns that are formed with the prefix ‘eco-,’ such as, for example, ‘economy’ and ‘ecology.’ 7  Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 12. 8  Porphyry, De abstinentia ab esu animalium 3.19. 1 2

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say that an animal’s first impulse (hormē) is to preserve itself, because nature endears (oikeiousēs) it to itself from the outset.’9 The effect of the Stoic notion of natural self-endearment is thus the impulse of each animal to preserve itself. This impulse is to be restated by Cicero,10 and turned into a universal law of nature by Boethius and Aquinas: ‘any substance whatsoever desires the conservation of its own being according to its nature.’11 Aquinas also uses the Latin word praeservatio,12 which he may have coined, and which in the fifteenth century will be rendered with the English word ‘preseruacioun.’13 Petrarch’s 1345 recovery of some previously lost letters of Cicero at Verona inaugurates the medieval rediscovery of Stoicism. However, only after the Reformation, in the late sixteenth century, Justus Lipsius adopts Stoic thought as an anti-Catholic alternative to Aristotelian Scholasticism: in his 1589 Politicorum, Lipsius allows the Prince to (slightly) depart from law ‘sui seruandi causa,’14 which in the 1594 English translation is rendered as ‘for his own conseruation.’15 Shortly after, in 1605, the Anglican bishop Thomas Morton, whilst turning a series of Catholic quotes against their authors, declares: ‘For this being an inbred law of *Nature, to studie for a selfe preseruation.’16 The latter expression becomes widespread: we find it in Donne,17 Milton,18 and Dryden19 among others. However, it is Hobbes who gives the notion of self-preservation a  9   Τὴν δὲ πρώτην ὁρμήν φασι τὸ ζῳον ἴσχειν επὶ τὸ τηρεῖν ἑαυτό, οἰκειούσης αὑτῷ τῆς φύσεως ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς [Tēn de prōtēn hormēn phasi to zōon iskhein epi to tērein heauto, oikeiousēs hautὸ tēs physeōs ap’ arkhēs]. In Diogenes Laërtius 7.85. 10  ‘Omne animal se ipsum diligit, ac simul est ortum id agit ut se conservet,’ every animal loves itself, and since its birth it strives to preserve itself. In Cicero, De Finibus 5.24. 11  ‘[Q]uaelibet substantia appetit conservationem sui esse secundum suam naturam.’ In Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1-2.94.a2co. For Boethius, see supra, pag. 102–103. 12  Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales 2.8.2; see also Scriptum super Sententiis 4.15.1.a1.3co. 13   The word ‘preseruacioun’ is attested in the 1425 anonymous translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Grande Chirurgie, New York Academy of Medicine, MS 12, f. 44v. 14   Justus Lipsius, Politicorum, sive Civilis Doctrinae libri sex (Leiden: Officina Plantin/François van Raphelengien, 1589), 222. 15   Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, William Jones trans. (London: William Ponsonby, 1594), 123. 16   Thomas Morton, An Exact Discoverie of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracie and Rebellion (London: Felix Kyngston, 1605), 39. 17   ‘It is onely upon this reason, that selfe-preservation is of Naturall Law.’ In John Donne [1608], Βιαθανατος [Biathanatos] (London: John Dawson, 1647), 44 (1.2.2). 18   ‘Repent the sin, but if the punishment / Thou canst avoid, self-preservation bids;’ in John Milton (1671), Samson Agonistes 504-505. 19   ‘Self-preservation is the first of Laws:’ in John Dryden, The Spanish Fryar (London: Richard Tonson and Jacob Tonson, 1681), 54 (4.2).

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distinctive turn, as in De Cive he claims as ‘ius primaeuum’20—which the English translator of the second edition renders as ‘primitive Right of selfedefence’21—the ‘Ius in omnia,’22 that is, the ‘Right to every thing.’23 In the Leviathan, Hobbes confidently explains the ‘Difference of Right and Law’: For though they that speak of this subject, use to confound Ius, and Lex, Right and Law; yet, they ought to be distinguished; because Right, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbeare; Whereas Law, determineth, and bindeth to one of them: so that Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation, and Liberty; which in one and the same matter are inconsistent.24

Hobbes’ definitions of law and right boldly reduce more than two millennia of legal history to a dichotomic conceptual couple: more in general, definitions are fundamental elements of the Hobbesian scientific program, which is perhaps unsurprisingly close to the Ciceronian methodological proposal in the Brutus: [W]hen the Discourse is put into Speech, and begins with the Definitions of Words, and proceeds by Connexion of the same into generall Affirmations, and of these again into Syllogismes; the End or last summe is called the Conclusion; and the thought of the mind by it signified, is that conditionall Knowledge, or Knowledge of the consequence of words, which is commonly called Science.25

According to the Hobbesian ‘politicall science,’26 ‘[t]he right of nature, which Writers commonly call Jus naturale, is the Liberty each man [sic] hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature.’27 In turn, Hobbes constructs his new definition of liberty by analogy with the behaviour of physical bodies in the new Galilean science. Nevertheless, he presents such analogy as an identity: ‘Liberty, or Freedome, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by Opposition, I mean externall Impediments of motion;) and may be applyed no lesse to Irrationall, and Inanimate creatures, than to Rationall.’28  Hobbes, De Cive, 52 (5.1).   Thomas Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London: R. Royston, 1651), 74. Possibly, the translator is Charles Cotton. 22  Hobbes, De Cive, 52 (5.1). 23   This is the English expression in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of A Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), 64 (1.14). In the (authorized) 1649 French translation of the second edition of De Cive (1647), Sorbière (75) writes: ‘ce premier droict que la nature nous donne sur toutes choses,’ this first right that nature give us over all things. 24  Hobbes, Leviathan, 64 (1.14). 25   Ibid., 30-31 (1.7). For Cicero’s Brutus, see supra, pag. 129. 26  Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, 46 (3.13). 27  Hobbes, Leviathan, 64 (1.14). 28   Ibid., 107 (2.21). 20 21

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In other words, Hobbes turns the notion of self-preservation into the entitlement of each individual to everything: this untenable claim at once severs human beings from each other and sets them in reciprocal conflict. We saw that Luther and Calvin both produce a similar atomization and endorse a strongly negative view of the atomized individual’s moral attitude.29 By naturalizing conflict and thus subtracting it to moral judgement, Hobbes recasts individual atomization as a supposedly objective statement of fact: in this form, it is still available today to neoliberal rhetoric. On the contrary, neither Aquinas, nor Boethius, nor Cicero, nor the Stoics understand their respective notions of self-preservation as absolute principles, as they relate such notions to some more general conception of the Good. Probably, this relation makes Cicero ascribe to Aristotle the principle of animal self-endearment.30 Yet, we have no extant endorsement of any notion of self-preservation by Aristotle, and we can reasonably doubt that such notion could fit Aristotle’s theoretical constructions. Arguably, the Aristotelian statement that may be more closely related to the notion of self-preservation is in the treatise Περί Ψυχής [Peri Psykhēs], which is best known by its Latin title De Anima. The Greek words psykhē (and its Latin translation anima) is generally rendered in English with the word ‘soul,’ which, nonetheless, bears for us a strong Christian overtone: in Aristotle’s classical Greek, psykhē has rather the literal sense of ‘enlivening force,’ which is still clearly expressed by the English verb ‘to animate.’ In De Anima, Aristotle emphasizes the necessary link between this enlivening force and nutrition: ‘the animated (empsykhon) body would be nourishing itself, qua (hēi) animated body.’31 We may notice the use of the pronominal form ᾗ32 [hēi]: in English we render this Greek term with the Latin-derived word ‘qua,’ which bears the sense of ‘in capacity of,’ or ‘as being.’ Plato only occasionally deploys the word hēi in this sense,33 which is instead extremely frequent in the Aristotelian text, from where it passes into Latin as the literal translation qua.

 See supra, chapter 3.   See Cicero, De Finibus 2.33–34. 31   τὸ ἔμψυχον ἂν εἴη σῶμα τὸ τρεφόμενον, ᾗ ἔμψυχον [to empsukhon an eiē sōma to trephomenon, hēi empsukhon]. In Aristotle, De Anima 416b. 32   The word hēi is the dative singular feminine form of the relative pronoun ὅς, ἣ, ὅν, [hos, hē, hon], and it is used in an adverbial sense. 33   See, for example, Meno 72b: ᾗ μέλιτται εἰσίν [hēi melittai eisin], (bees) insofar as they are bees. 29 30

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The phrase empsykhon hēi empsykhon, animated body qua animated body, may seem just a writing mannerism, which Aristotle utilizes to emphasize a subject: yet, the crucial role of the word hēi may be clarified by comparison with its occurrence in another and well-known sentence. This sentence appears at the very beginning of the book Gamma, which is part of the group of texts that probably Andronicus of Rhodes collates under the title τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ34 [ta meta ta physika], namely, (the books) that come after those ones on physics: Latin scholiasts then mistake the latter positional label for the definition of the subject matter of the supposed treatise, which we now know as Metaphysics. The book Gamma, or, in contemporary terms, the fourth chapter35 of the Metaphysics opens with a triumphant statement: ‘There is a knowledge that contemplates being qua being.’36 The targets of such a general inquiry ‘must be elements of being not by accident, but qua being.’37 Here Aristotle pits the expression ‘qua’ (hēi) against the phrase κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς [kata symbebēkos]: we translate the latter phrase as ‘by accident,’ that is, in a contingent way, because Aristotle gives the perfect participle symbebēkos,38 namely, joined together, the sense of something added, and thus, contingent.39 On the contrary, Aristotle associates the word hēi to a subject in order to focus on what characterizes that subject in a non-contingent way. By doing so, at the same time the Stagirite is surreptitiously affirming that there is something that characterizes a subject in a non-contingent way.

34   The phrase μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ [meta ta physika] first appears in relation to Aristotle’s work in the first century, as it is quoted by Plutarch in Alexander 7; Plutarch also mentions Andronicus’ feat in Sulla 26. Still in the late second century, Alexander of Aphrodysia writes in his commentary (In Metaph. 137.2 Hayduck) Τὸ ἔλαττον ἄλφα τῶν Μετὰ τὰ Φυσικὰ [To elatton alpha tōn Meta ta Physika], the book lower-case alpha of the (Books) After the Books on Physics. Boethius possibly first translates the title into Latin as Metaphysica in De Interpretatione 1.5. 35   The partitions of ancient Greek and Latin texts are defined not as chapters but as βιβλία [biblia] and libri respectively, that is, books. While books (in this sense) are identified by capital letters in the alphabetical order, the addition of a second book with the title of alpha elatton, lower-case alpha, makes shift of one unit the sequence of the books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: in modern parlance, the fourth chapter of the book is thus associated with the third (capital) letter of the Greek alphabet, namely, Gamma. 36   ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν [Estin epistēmē tis hē theōrei to on hēi on]. In Aristotle, Met. 4.1003a. The Greek word on, being, or better, that which is, is the present participle form of the verb εἰμί [eimi], to be: I previously recalled that it is first nominalized by Parmenides, in its Ionic version ἐόν [eon]. In Parmenides, DK 28 B2 (negative form), DK 28 B4 (positive form). 37   ἀνάγκη καὶ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ ὄντος εἶναι μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς ἀλλ᾽ ᾗ ὄν [anagkē kai ta stoikheia tou ontos einai mē kata symbebēkos all’ hēi on]. In Aristotle, Met. 4.1003a. 38  Aristotle, Topica 102b4. 39   We may consider Aristotle’s modified sense of the word symbebēkos—from ‘that which is joined’ to ‘later addition’—as another evidence that ontological constructions rely on temporalizations.

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In the book Alpha, that is, the first chapter of the Metaphysics, Aristotle attempts to show that his investigation takes further previous philosophical inquiries on the non-contingent elements of beings (in the plural form): his shift of focus from beings to being (in the singular) relies on a unifying notion, which allows him to encompass all beings: ousia. It is not easy to translate the term ousia. We already met with both its Boethian Latin renderings: essentia, essence, and the ambiguous40 substantia, substance, which ends up determining ousia’s medieval language path. We may try to approach the Aristotelian sense of ousia by setting it into context: if we come back to De Anima, we may now appreciate the relation between the various historical notions of self-preservation and Aristotle’s contention that ‘the animated body (. . .) preserves its ousia and exists as long as it is fed.’41 Here, Aristotle does not seem to be describing an impulse towards the preservation of one’s own self, more than reckoning that one’s preservation is conditional on feeding oneself. In other terms, Aristotle is not looking for a principle that binds the behaviour of the living, but he is rather stating the necessary connection between the enlivening force, the incorporation of food, and the living body: this relation preserves the living body’s ousia, which is a wider notion than life, inasmuch as it is shared by each and every being. Aristotle does not invent the word ousia, which is possibly Herodotus’ coin, in the Ionic form οὐσίη42 [ousiē]. Both the word ousiē and its Attic version ousia are nominalized form of the verb οὖσα [ousa], that is, being, which is the feminine present participle of the verb εἰμί [eimi], to be. Nevertheless, Herodotus uses ousiē with the sense of ‘material substance,’ that is, possessions: by doing so, he gives us one of the clearest examples of how in European languages the verbs expressing the conditions of having and being cross each other’s path.43 However, right after Herodotus’ death, and within two years’ time, Euripides shifts the sense of ousia from ‘material substance’44 to ‘substantial quality.’45 Some fifteen years later, the Platonic character 40   As previously recalled, Boethius translates as substantia both Greek words hypostasis and ousia. See supra, page 101. 41   τὸ ἔμψυχον (. . .) σώζει γὰρ τὴν οὐσίαν, καὶ μέχρι τούτου ἔστιν ἕως ἂν τρέφηται [to empsykhon (. . .) sōzei gar tēn ousian, kai mekhri toutou estin heōs an trephētai] In Aristotle, De Anima 416b. 42  Herodotus 1.92; 6.86A; 7.28. 43   The semantic drift in the opposite direction is exemplified by the verb προσήκω [prosēkō], which in Aeschylus (Persians 143) means ‘to be present,’ and which then becomes a theoretical cornerstone of Plato’s Republic with the meaning of ‘befitting.’ However, the shift from being to having is only completed through the epithet ἴδιος [idios], which is already attested in Homer (Odyssey 3.82; 4.314) in the sense of ‘private,’ and which Thucydides (1.141) associates with economic possession. 44  Euripides (c. 416 BCE), Herakles 337. 45  Euripides (c. 414 BCE), Ion 1288.

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Socrates takes ousia in its new sense as his object of inquiry, when he thus rebukes his interlocutor: ‘and it seems, Euthyphro, that when asked what the pious is, you were not willing to disclose to me its ousia,’46 namely, what we would anachronistically call ‘the essence of piety.’47 Aristotle—also qua Plato’s pupil—knows well that ousia is said in many ways,48 that is, it may be used in various senses: [O]usia is said at least in four principal ways, if not more; for to ti ēn einai, the universal (katholou), and the genus are held to be the ousia of each thing, and the fourth of them [is] that which underlies (hypokemeinon).49

I haven’t yet given an English version of the Aristotelian formula ‘to ti ēn einai,’ which modern translators generally replace with ‘essence’50: for the moment, I would recall Willem de Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century Latin translation ‘quod quid erat esse,’51 which is at least a respectful attempt at a literal rendering of Aristotle’s Greek expression. Moerbeke skilfully bypasses the lack of articles in Latin, and his sentence may be somewhat rendered in English as ‘that which was to be.’ A more understandable translation will require a more detailed analysis of the Aristotelian phrase, of which I will propose a possible interpretation after further considering Aristotle’s construction of ousia. Here, my delay in defining both ousia and to ti ēn einai follows the inquiring path of Aristotle, who turns the Socratic-Platonic dialogical investigations into a soliloquy: Aristotle himself both raises and answers questions as the unnamed and omnipresent character of a virtual dialogue. 46   καὶ κινδυνεύεις, ὦ Εὐθύφρων, ἐρωτώμενος τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ποτ᾽ ἐστίν, τὴν μὲν οὐσίαν μοι αὐτοῦ οὐ βούλεσθαι δηλῶσαι [kai kindyneueis, ō Euthyphrōn, erōtōmenos to hosion hoti pot’ estin, tēn men ousian moi autou ou boulesthai dēlōsai]. In Plato, Euthyphro 11a. 47   However, another fifteen years later, in the dialogue Gorgias, Plato still deploys the word ousia both in the sense of possessions (486c) and in the new sense of substantial quality (472b). 48   In the Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the phrase πολλαχῶς λέγεται [pollakhōs legetai], is said in many ways, with several words, whose polysemy he thus acknowledges. See, for example, the opening of the book Zeta of Metaphysics: τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς [to on legetai pollakhōs], being is said in many ways. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1028a. 49   λέγεται δ᾽ ἡ οὐσία, εἰ μὴ πλεοναχῶς, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τέτταρσί γε μάλιστα: καὶ γὰρ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι καὶ τὸ καθόλου καὶ τὸ γένος οὐσία δοκεῖ εἶναι ἑκάστου, καὶ τέταρτον τούτων τὸ ὑποκείμενον [legetai d᾽ hē ousia, ei mē pleonachōs, all᾽ en tettarsi ge malista: kai gar to ti ēn einai kai to katholou kai to genos ousia dokei einai hekastou, kai tetarton toutōn to hypokeimenon]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1028b. 50   See, for example, Aristotle, Metaphysica, J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 1028b. The modern debate on the translation of the phrase to ti ēn einai goes back at least to Trendelenburg: a historical survey can be found in Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian ‘Metaphysics,’ 3rd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 180–188. 51  Aristotle, Metaphysica, lib. I-XIV. Recensio et Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka, G. Vuillemin-Diem ed., 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1995), vol. 1, 135.

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We can no longer notice the novelty of Aristotle’s writing style, simply because it became a writing standard: this new style realizes the Platonic Socrates’ definition of thinking as ‘a discourse that psykhē goes through with itself.’52 Aristotle turns the performance of this inner split into a writing device: though the distribution of parts is less clear than in Platonic dialogues, the pace of the exchange is faster, and several lines of argument are often brought together. The quest for definition no longer follows the merely sequential order of oral exchange, but it produces a semantic network, whose nodes jointly drift in the course of the inquiry as the result of reciprocal adjustment. Hence, Aristotle’s lexicon is a work in progress: we may follow the trajectories of its elements, if we use as clues Aristotle’s quotations of his previous works.53 The route of ousia may thus be traced to an early treatise that we know as Κατηγορίαι54 [Kategoriai], Categories. In this work, which is one of the most widely read and commented upon nonreligious text during late antiquity and early medieval times, Aristotle examines the ways in which ‘each of the things said that are in no way composite (. . .) σημαίνει [sēmainei],’55 that is, signifies. Aristotle lists ten alternative modes of signification, or, after him, categories, each of which signifies ‘either ousian (. . .), or of what quantity, or of what kind, or in relation to what, or where, or when, or being posited, or having, or doing, or suffering.’56 He immediately gives examples for each category: [O]usia (. . .) viz. (a) man, (a) horse; of what quantity viz. two cubits long, three cubits long; of what kind viz. white, grammatical; in relation to what viz. double, half, greater; where viz. in the Lyceum, in the market place; when viz. 52  See supra, chapter 2, note 34. On the contrary, we will soon consider the actual inner dialogue of the Homeric hero with his thymos. Following the example of Hesiod, the lyric poets then directly step in: for example, Archilocus sings Θυμέ, θύμ᾽ [Thume, thum’], oh (my) thymos, (my) thymos. In Archilochus fragment 128, quoted in Stobaeus 3.20.28. 53   Nevertheless, as Düring points out, we need to consider that ‘Aristotle, for his part, never left his school texts in an unchanged form (. . .); in all writings there are more or less long additions, and we will never be able to establish the extent of these additions.’ In Ingemar Düring, Aristoteles: Darstellung und Interpretation seines Denkens (Heidelberg: Winter, 1966), 49. 54   The word kategoria is already attested in Herodotus (6.50) with the sense of ‘accusation’: we use to render in English its use in Categories as ‘predication.’ The compiler may have considered in his choice of the title the frequent Aristotelian reference to the σχήματα τῆς κατηγορίας [skhēmata tēs katēgorias], forms of predication. 55   Τῶν κατὰ μηδεμίαν συμπλοκὴν λεγομένων ἕκαστον (. . .) σημαίνει [Tōn kata mēdemian symplokēn legomenōn hekaston (. . .) sēmainei]. In Aristotle, Categories 1b (4). Aristotle previously makes a distinction between verbal expressions that are composite (that is, phrases), and those which are ἄνευ συμπλοκῆς [aneu symplokēs], without composition. Ibid., 1a (2). 56   οὐσίαν (. . .) ἢ ποσὸν ἢ ποιὸν ἢ πρός τι ἢ ποὺ ἢ ποτὲ ἢ κεῖσθαι ἢ ἔχειν ἢ ποιεῖν ἢ πάσχειν [ousian (. . .) ē poson ē poion ē pros ti ē pou ē pote ē keisthai ē ekhein ē poiein ē paskhein]. Ibid., 1b (4). In this sentence Aristotle uses ousia in its singular accusative form ousian.

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yesterday, last year; being posited viz. lying, sitting; having viz. shod, armed; doing viz. cutting, cauterizing; suffering viz. being cut, being cauterized.57

Aristotle is categorical: ‘Ousia is the supreme and primary and highest thing said, which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual man or horse.’58 It is worth specifying that for Aristotle ousia’s primacy among τά λεγόμενα [ta legomena], the things that are said, is not simply an issue of language: in anachronistic modern terms, ousia is both semantically and ontologically prior to the other categories, because it is a ὁρισμὸς59 [horismos], that is, a definition of what a thing is. We may understand Aristotle’s inquiry in the Categories both as an analysis60 of Greek language and an expansion of the Socratic-Platonic interrogations: for example, we know that Socrates asks Euthyphro ‘what the pious is.’61 In the Categories, the most important question is still τί ἐστι; [ti esti?], what is (it)? Yet, the Platonic Socrates questions his interlocutors about unprecedented objects, which he constructs by nominalizing epithets.62 On the contrary, Aristotle first turns his attention to subjects whose existence is commonly accepted, such as a man, or a horse: ousia is thus the answer to the same Socratic-Platonic question ‘what is (it)?,’ which, nonetheless, Aristotle primarily addresses to ‘individual (atoma) and numerically singular entities.’63 In the fourth chapter of this book, I gave a few anticipations about the word atomos: I considered its use before Aristotle, and its Ciceronian Latin translation individuum, which is the source of the English word ‘individual.’ However, in the Categories Aristotle does not limit his investigation of ousia to in57   οὐσία μὲν (. . .) οἷον ἄνθρωπος, ἵππος· ποσὸν δὲ οἷον δίπηχυ, τρίπηχυ· ποιὸν δὲ οἷον λευκόν, γραμματικόν· πρός τι δὲ οἷον διπλάσιον, ἥμισυ, μεῖζον· ποὺ δὲ οἷον ἐν Λυκείῳ, ἐν ἀγορᾷ· ποτὲ δὲ οἷον χθές, πέρυσιν· κεῖσθαι δὲ οἷον ἀνάκειται, κάθηται· ἔχειν δὲ οἷον ὑποδέδεται, ὥπλισται· ποιεῖν δὲ οἷον τέμνειν, καίειν· πάσχειν δὲ οἷον τέμνεσθαι, καίεσθαι [ousia men (. . .) hoion anthrōpos, hippos; poson de hoion dipēkhy, tripēkhy; poion de hoion leukon, grammatikon; pros ti de hoion diplasion, hēmisy, meizon; pou de hoion en Lykeiō, en agora; pote de hoion khthes, perysin; keisthai de hoion anakeitai, kathētai; ekhein de hoion hypodedetai, hōplistai; poiein de hoion temnein, kaiein; paskhein de hoion temnesthai, kaiesthai]. Ibid., 1b–2a (4). 58   Οὐσία δέ ἐστιν ἡ κυριώτατά τε καὶ πρώτως καὶ μάλιστα λεγομένη, ἣ μήτε καθ› ὑποκειμένου τινὸς λέγεται μήτε ἐν ὑποκειμένῳ τινί ἐστιν, οἷον ὁ τὶς ἄνθρωπος ἢ ὁ τὶς ἵππος [Ousia de estin hē kyriōtata te kai prōtōs kai malista legomenē, hē mēte kath’ hypokeimenou tinos legetai mēte en hypokeimenō tini estin, hoion ho tis anthrōpos ē ho tis hippos]. Ibid., 2a (5). 59   Ibid., 8a (7). Aristotle seems to be the first author to deploy the word horismos, definition, as a specific alternative to the more generic word logos. 60   The word ἀνάλυσις [analysis], which is already attested in Sophocles (Electra 142) with the sense of ‘deliverance,’ is not used by Aristotle in the Categories but in the Prior Analitics (49a) with the sense of ‘resolution.’ 61   This is the literal translation of the Platonic quote, as Socrates has no words for the notion of piety that he is producing. See supra, chapter 7, note 46. 62   We will soon examine this construction in detail. 63   τὰ ἄτομα καὶ ἓν ἀριθμῶ [ta atoma kai hen arithmō]. In Aristotle, Categories 1b (2).

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dividual entities, and he secondarily addresses generalizations such as species and genus: ‘these are thus said secondary ousiai,64 viz. man and animal.’65 Moreover, in the Categories, Aristotle does not yet use the phrase to ti ēn einai, which only appears without apparent motivation in the first book of the Posterior Analytics.66 Here, Aristotle equates two hypothetical conditions, namely ‘if there is (the possibility) to define,’67 and ‘if to ti ēn einai is knowable.’68 As ousia answers the question ti esti?, what is (it)?, by defining the object of the question, we may understand the innovative formula to ti ēn einai as a further definition of this very object. In order to comprehend Aristotle’s new language construction, we may first compare it with similar Aristotelian expressions. Aristotle often uses the phrase τὸ τί ἐστι [to ti esti], the what is (it?), which turns into a grammatical subject the object of the Socratic-Platonic question ‘what is (it)?’ More precisely, the Aristotelian to ti esti is an attempt to give the answers to the previous question a general form: the what it is, indeed. The verbal sequence to ti ēn appears to shift the phrase to ti esti, ‘the what is (it?)’ towards the past, as the three words to ti ēn literally mean ‘the what was (it?)’ Moreover, if we consider the structure of other Aristotelian expressions such as τὸ λευκὸν εἶναι [to leukon einai], being white, and τὸ ἄνθρωπον εἶναι69 [to anthrōpon einai], being human, the whole phrase to ti ēn einai may be literally translated as ‘the being what was (it?),’ that is, being the same that one previously was: following English usage, I will elide the article and render the phrase as being-what-one-was. My translation shows that the new Aristotelian formula intends to capture what does not change over time in each entity. However awkward it may appear to modern eyes, the Greek locution keeps a clearly detectable link with the Socratic-Platonic inquiries, which Aristotle directs towards time-bound beings too. This redirection allows Aristotle to reshape pre-Socratic investigations with the theoretical tools of the new Pla-

  Ousiai is the nominative plural form of ousia.   δεύτεραι οὖν αὗται λέγονται οὐσίαι, οἷον ὅ τε ἄνθρωπος καὶ τὸ ζῷον [deuterai oun hautai legontai ousiai, hoion ho te anthrōpos kai to zōon]. In Aristotle, Categories 2a (5). 66   See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 82b (1.22). In the Bekker edition of Aristotle’s works, the treatise Posterior Analytics comes after Categories, De Interpretatione, and Prior Analytics, and right before Topica, where the phrase to ti ēn einai likewise suddenly appears in the first book (101b). 67   εἰ γὰρ ἔστιν ὁρίσασθαι [ei gar estin horisasthai]. In Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 82b (1.22). 68   εἰ γνωστὸν τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι [ei gnōston to ti ēn einai]. Ibid. Plato already uses the term gnōstos in the sense of ‘knowable,’ for example, in Republic 5.477a. 69  Aristotle, Met. 4.1007a. 64 65

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tonic lexicon: yet, Aristotle not only applies Platonic terms such as ousia and eidos, form, to mutable entities too, but he also modifies their use. In the Categories, Aristotle utilizes the term eidos in a sense that we render with the term ‘species’: in the Metaphysics, when he deploys eidos in relation to his new notion of ὕλη70 [hylē], matter, we translate it as ‘form.’ In the book Lambda, which is one of the earliest texts of the Metaphysics,71 Aristotle uses the word in both the old and new senses: [A]nd the causes of things which are in the same species (eidei) are different, not in species, but because the causes of individuals are different: your material and form (eidos) and moving cause being different from mine, although in their universal expression they are the same.72

I need to anticipate that Plato constructs his notion of form by giving a technical meaning to the already current term eidos, which is derived from the Homeric lexicon of vision73: the Platonic Socrates uses the word eidē,74 forms, to describe his newly invented nominalized epithets—such as the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good75—which he supposes metaphorically visible only to a likewise metaphorical contemplative view.76 Actually, in the Platonic dialogues the status of eidē is somewhat paradoxical: despite they are the main object of inquiry of the character Socrates, neither he nor his interlocutors ever manage to define any of them.77 On the contrary, the recasting of form as the key characteristic of both immutable and mutable beings allows Aristotle to provide for their general definition: ‘I call form to ti ēn einai of each thing and its primary ousia.’78 The Aristotelian form is thus the being-what-one-was, that is, the permanent  See infra, pag. 144.  See Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles; Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923). 72   καὶ τῶν ἐν ταὐτῷ εἴδει ἕτερα, οὐκ εἴδει ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι τῶν καθ᾽ ἕκαστον ἄλλο, ἥ τε σὴ ὕλη καὶ τὸ εἶδος καὶ τὸ κινῆσαν καὶ ἡ ἐμή, τῷ καθόλου δὲ λόγῳ ταὐτά [kai tōn en tautō eidei hetera, ouk eidei all᾽ hoti tōn kath᾽ hekaston allo, hē te sē hylē kai to eidos kai to kinēsan kai hē emē, tō katholou de logō tauta]. In Aristotle, Met. 9.1071a. 73   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 2.58. 74   Nominative plural form of eidos. 75   δικαίου τι εἶδος αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ καὶ καλοῦ καὶ ἀγαθοῦ καὶ πάντων αὖ τῶν τοιούτων [dikaiou ti eidos auto kath᾽ hauto kai kalou kai agathou kai pantōn au tōn toioutōn], the form itself by itself of the just and of the beautiful and of the good and of all such notions. In Plato, Parmenides 130b. 76   Forms are νοούμενα μόνον [nooumena monon], objects of thought only. In Plato, Timaeus 51d. 77   If we manage to escape the retrospective projection of Kantian noumenal ideas on the Platonic eidē, here we may even appreciate the gift of Plato’s extraordinary irony. 78   εἶδος δὲ λέγω τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι ἑκάστου καὶ τὴν πρώτην οὐσίαν [eidos de legō to ti ēn einai hekastou kai tēn prōtēn ousian]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1032b. 70 71

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aspect of each specific entity. Moreover, Aristotle also links both notions of form and being-what-one-was to that of ousia, albeit qualified as primary. I recalled that in the Aristotelian text arguments unfold as a virtual dialogue, which produces a network of notions in reciprocal and dynamic relation: these notions get modified and refined in the course of the exposition. To complicate things further, Aristotle is acutely aware that each general notion has various senses or, in his characteristic expression, is said in many ways. We saw that Aristotle recalls that the very word ousia can be used in four main different senses79: in turn, each of these senses can be expressed in words that have multiple senses too. In order to stem such an unmanageable proliferation of words and senses, Aristotle recurs to a hierarchical ordering of this multiplicity of uses: he looks for which is which ‘especially and primarily and simply.’80 We saw that Aristotle defines form as being-what-one-was and primary ousia81: yet, if ousia were just the immutable form, it could not also account for each specific mutable being. Precisely in order to account for the specificity and the mutability of individual beings, Aristotle gives a new sense to the term hylē, which in the Homeric text designates the forest82 and then wood,83 and which we now generally translate as ‘matter’: the Aristotelian hylē is the absolutely indeterminate stuff (both in the material and immaterial modern senses) on which the form exerts its ongoing in-forming action.84 The presence of matter, which for Aristotle is the ingredient of all transformations, further defines the relation between being-what-one-was and ousia: ‘I call being-what-one-was ousia minus matter.’85 In other words, being-

 See supra, pag. 139.   μάλιστα καὶ πρώτως καὶ ἁπλῶς [malista kai prōtōs kai haplōs]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1031a. 81  Whilst this definition may seem to reverse the priority of individual ousiai in the Categories, it rather expresses the priority of form in its new relation to matter. Aristotle explains: λέγω δὲ πρώτην ἣ μὴ λέγεται τῷ ἄλλο ἐν ἄλλῳ εἶναι καὶ ὑποκειμένῳ ὡς ὕλῃ [legō de prōtēn hē mē legetai tō allo en allō einai kai hypokeimenō hōs hylē], I call primary that which does not imply the presence of something in something else as a matter. Ibid., 7.1037b. 82   See Homer, Iliad 2.455. 83   Ibid., 7.418. For example, Plato uses the word hylē in the sense of ‘forest’ in Critias 107c, and in the sense of ‘wood’ in Timaeus 69a. 84   Frede and Patzig, regardless of their identification of the individual with the form, well render this ongoing activity: ‘the individual consists in an organizing form that always takes on new matter and properties in order to persist.’ In Michael Frede and Günther Patzig, Aristoteles “Metaphysik Z.” Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2 vols. (München: C. H. Beck, 1988), vol.1, 45. 85   λέγω δὲ οὐσίαν ἄνευ ὕλης τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι [legō de ousian aneu hylēs to ti ēn einai]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1032b. 79 80

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what-one-was is the immutable form of the species,86 which sets the limits for the engagement of any individual ousia of that species with matter. Such limits of the species are most appropriately expressed by the new notion of definition, namely, horismos, which Aristotle derives from the word ὅρος87 [horos], limit or boundary: ‘definition is the proper articulation (logos) of being-what-one-was.’88 Moreover, being-what-one-was, qua form, is not only the program, so to speak, of the possible individual transformation, but also its end: Aristotle expresses the realization of this program of transformation with another new notion, which he derives from the lexicon of practices: ἐνέργεια89 [energeia], a word that is generally rendered with the Latinate term ‘actuality.’90 Actuality, or, in a more comprehensible English translation, activation, is the accomplishment of an individual’s δύναμις [dynamis], potentiality. Such an accomplishment may appear to chronologically follow its specific potentiality: on the contrary, according to Aristotle, because activation is the ultimate end of the transformation itself, it pre-exists and thus precedes potentiality, which is just a means to this end.91 Apparently, the claim of actuality’s priority over potentiality reverses the contention of the Platonic Foreign guest in the Sophist dialogue: I suggest that everything which possesses any power (dynamin) of any kind, either to produce a change in anything of any nature or to be affected even in the least degree by the slightest cause, though it be only on one occasion, has real existence.92

86   I previously recalled that Aristotle, following Plato, uses the word eidos in both senses of ‘species’ and ‘form.’ 87   In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle already uses the word horos in the sense of ‘definition,’ as he even proposes ὅρος (. . .) ὅρου [horos (. . .) horou], a definition of definition. In Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 93b. 88   ἐστὶν ὁ ὁρισμὸς ὁ τοῦ τί ἦν εἶναι λόγος [estin ho horismos ho tou ti ēn einai logos]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1031a. 89   See, for example, ibid., 9.1048a. 90   Sachs suggests to translate the Aristotelian term energeia as ‘being-at-work.’ In Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Joe Sachs trans. (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1999). 91   See Aristotle, Met. 9.1049b on. 92   λέγω δὴ τὸ καὶ ὁποιανοῦν τινα κεκτημένον δύναμιν εἴτ᾽ εἰς τὸ ποιεῖν ἕτερον ὁτιοῦν πεφυκὸς εἴτ᾽ εἰς τὸ παθεῖν καὶ σμικρότατον ὑπὸ τοῦ φαυλοτάτου, κἂν εἰ μόνον εἰς ἅπαξ, πᾶν τοῦτο ὄντως εἶναι [legō dē to kai hopoianoun tina kektēmenon dynamin eit᾽ eis to poiein heteron hotioun pephykos eit᾽ eis to pathein kai smikrotaton hypo tou phaulotatou, kan ei monon eis hapax, pan touto ontōs einai]. In Plato, Sophist 247d-e. Here Plato uses the word dynamis in its singular accusative form dynamin.

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Nevertheless, though the Aristotelian relation of actuality versus potentiality may appear to vindicate the priority of practices over possibilities, it actually constructs transformation as imperfection93: the amount of potentiality measures the lack of perfection of perishable beings. On the contrary, ‘all [imperishable beings] are actualizations.’94 It will then not be difficult for Aquinas to describe the Christian god as ‘actus primus et purus,’95 primary and pure act. However, the very individual features and their transformations are the key to Aristotle’s notion of ousia: ousia is neither one of these antithetic features (in Aristotelian terms, διαφοραί [diaphorai], differences), nor a combination of two or more of them, but it is ‘in each being, the proportion.’96 In this proposition, which Düring acknowledges as ‘der Kernsatz der aristotelischen Ontologie,’97 the core of Aristotelian ontology, Aristotle nominalizes the epithet analogon, proportional, as ‘the proportional,’ that is, proportion. Aristotle draws the term analogon98 from Plato,99 who also borrows from mathematical language the nominalized form ἀναλογία100 [analogia], proportion.101 Szabó suggests that in pre-Platonic mathematical language the phrase ana logon is an ellipsis for ‘equal (when taken) in logoi,’102 that is, equivalent in ratio. Following Plato, this is how the Stagirite describes proportion: ‘as this one is in this other one or to this other one, so that one is in that other one or to that other one.’103 Unfortunately, after stating that ousia is the proportion in each being, Aristotle does not explicitly mention the terms between which each ousia is the proportion: yet, we may attempt to clarify this point by comparing the notion  93   In the lexicon of the book Delta, Aristotle states: ἔτι οἷς ὑπάρχει τὸ τέλος, σπουδαῖον ὄν, ταῦτα λέγεται τέλεια [eti hois hyparkhei to telos, spoudaion on, tauta legetai teleia], things which have attained their end, being (the end) good, are called perfect. In Aristotle, Met. 5.1021b.  94   ἐνεργείᾳ ἄρα πάντα [energeia ara panta]. Ibid., 9.1050b.  95  Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia 4.3.  96   τὸ ἀνάλογον ἐν ἑκάστῳ [to analogon en hekastō]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1043a.  97  Düring, Aristoteles, 619.  98  Aristotle also uses the word analogon (without the article) in an adverbial sense. See, for example, Nicomachean Ethics 1103b.  99  Plato, Republic 508b. Plato either borrows the term analogon, or derives it from the phrase ἀνὰ λόγον [ana logon], which already appears in a fragment by Archytas, DK 47 B2. 100   Plato, Republic 534a. The term analogia is attested in Archytas, DK 47 B2. 101   Cicero translates the Platonic term analogia into Latin as proportio (Timaeus 14), which is the predecessor of the English word ‘proportion.’ The English word ‘analogy’ is instead related to the later use of the word analogia by Hellenistic grammarians. 102  Szabó, The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics, 154. 103   ὡς τοῦτο ἐν τούτῳ ἢ πρὸς τοῦτο, τόδ᾽ ἐν τῷδε ἢ πρὸς τόδε [hōs touto en toutō ē pros touto, tod᾽ en tōde ē pros tode]. In Aristotle, Met. 9.1048b. See also the later formulation of Definition 7.21 in Euclid’s Elements.

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of ousia as proportion with the similar Aristotelian definition of τὸ δίκαιον [to dikaion], the Just, or, in later terms, justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: ‘The Just is therefore a proportion (analogon ti); for proportion is not a property of abstract numerical quantity only, but of quantity in general, proportion being equality of relations (logōn), and involving four terms at least.’104 In the case of each specific ousia, it is tempting to construct it as the unique equal balance between the individual processes of informing matter and activating potentiality: in other words, we may suppose that for Aristotle each ousia is the individual proportion between the two relations of form to matter, and actuality to potentiality. In this case, the Aristotelian term ousia would name both the notion of equal balance between the informing of matter and the activation of potentiality, and the particular balance between these processes in each individual: in fact, the traditional translation of ousia as ‘substance’ can render this double use, which instead escapes more accurate modern renditions such as ‘beingness’ and ‘thinghood.’ An alternative translation to ‘substance’ should retain the double sense of ousia, which, to say it in modern terms, Aristotle uses both as an abstract notion,105 and as a specific instance of this notion.106 Here, I may venture to propose as an English rendering of the word ousia the hyphenated form ‘being-something,’107 which can rely on the gerund and participle uses of the word ‘being’ to express ousia’s general and particular senses: this translation renders ousia both as the notion of being-something and as the individual that is being-something. The conception of ousia, or being-something, as a proportion between processes of informing matter and activating potentiality can account for the specificity of individuals qua individuals: this is a major achievement of Aristotelian speculation. Yet, the two dynamic relations of form versus matter and activation versus potentiality, which allow Aristotle to address transformation

104   ἔστιν ἄρα τὸ δίκαιον ἀνάλογόν τι. τὸ γὰρ ἀνάλογον οὐ μόνον ἐστὶ μοναδικοῦ ἀριθμοῦ ἴδιον, ἀλλ᾽ ὅλως ἀριθμοῦ: ἡ γὰρ ἀναλογία ἰσότης ἐστὶ λόγων, καὶ ἐν τέτταρσιν ἐλαχίστοις [estin ara to dikaion analogon ti. to gar analogon ou monon esti monadikou arithmou idion, all᾽ holōs arithmou: hē gar analogia isotēs esti logōn, kai en tettarsin elakhistois]. In Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1131a. 105   See, for example, Aristotle, Met. 7.1028a. 106   See, for example, ibid., 5.1015b. 107   τὸ χωριστὸν καὶ τὸ τόδε τι ὑπάρχειν δοκεῖ μάλιστα τῇ οὐσίᾳ [to khōriston kai to tode ti hyparkhein dokei malista tē ousia], it is reputed that the conditions of being separated and being something belong especially to the ousia. Ibid., 7.1029a.

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in its individual occurrences, depend (not unlike Platonic views) on invariable benchmarks: unchanging forms and eternal objects.108 Permanence is the yardstick of Aristotelian transformations, which are measured against the horizon of the everlasting: I anticipate that the Platonic world is likewise structured according to a hierarchy of decreasing presence, from the unchanging form down to its improper copies. This priority of the eternal is to be revived by the medieval recasting of Aristotelian theories in Christian terms, with the construction of the creature as the imperfect image of the creator. Not even the celebrated early modern move from the closed world to the infinite universe—to quote Koyré109—is to alter the priority of permanence, which is given by seventeenth-century natural philosophers the more prosaic shape of inertia.110 However, the priority of the everlasting is not the only framing principle of the Aristotelian individual: the universal categories of doing and suffering,111 which Aristotle shares with his master Plato, produce the absolute separation of the active individual from the passive one. Aristotle’s notion of dynamis even introduces this separation within the individual itself: whenever the latter exerts a power (dynamis) on itself, it does it ‘insofar as other.’112

108   τὰ μὲν γὰρ ἀΐδια πρότερα τῇ οὐσίᾳ τῶν φθαρτῶν, ἔστι δ᾽ οὐθὲν δυνάμει ἀΐδιον [ta men gar aidia protera tē ousia tōn phthartōn, esti d᾽ outhen dynamei aidion], since that which is eternal is prior in regard to the ousia to that which is perishable, and nothing eternal is potential. Ibid., 9.1050b. 109   Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). 110   Galileo first contends that a body, ‘rimossi tutti gl’impedimenti esterni,’ all external impediments removed, ‘in quello stato si conseruarà, nel qual vna volta sarà stato posto,’ will remain in the state in which it will have been placed. In Galileo Galilei, 14 August 1612 letter to Mark Welser, in id., Istoria e Dimostrazioni intorno alle Macchie Solari e loro Accidenti (Roma: Giacomo Mascardi, 1613), 50. In 1644, Descartes produces a more general formulation: ‘unamquamque rem, quatenus est simplex & indivisa, manere quantum in se est in eodem semper statu, nec umquam mutari nisi à [sic] causis externis.’ Everything, insofar as it is simple and undivided, remains, as far as is in its power, always in the same state and never changes except by external causes. In Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, 54 (2.37). ‘When a Body is once in motion, it moveth (unless something els hinder it) eternally,’ writes Hobbes seven years later in Leviathan, 4 (1.2). Finally, Newton defines matter’s ‘potentia resistendi,’ power to resist, as ‘vis inertiae,’ force of inertia, and he gives it a general form as the first law of motion: ‘Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare,’ every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change that status by impressed forces. In Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London: Joseph Streater, 1687), 2 and 12. We may well notice the similarity of the seventeenth-century notion of inertia to the coeval notion of self-preservation. 111  See supra, pag. 140. 112   ᾗ ἕτερον [hei heteron], in Aristotle, Met. 5.1019a; ᾗ ἄλλο [hei allo], 5.1020a. Aristotle mentions as an example the case of a physician that practices his art on himself.

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Moreover, the very ousia is prior to the other categories because it is not predicated of another. This priority is also expressed by the locution καθ᾽ αὑτὸ [kath’ hauto], by itself, which already Plato pits against κατ’ ἄλλο [kat’ allo], in relation to other, and which in Aristotle is also opposed to the previously recalled expression kata symbebēkos, that is, accidental. Self-referentiality also impacts on the ranking of human practices: Aristotle prioritizes πρᾶξις113 [praxis], namely, activity that has an end in itself, over ποίησις114 [poiēsis], productive activity, whose scope falls outside itself.115 It is thus not difficult to see that the Stoics construct the joint notions of oikeiōsis, making-kin or self-endearment, and allotriōsis, making-other or estrangement, on this separation of the individual from the other (however understood): yet, they also isolate the individual from the frame of the Aristotelian species and its never-ending cycle of self-reproduction, where animal begets animal, and plant begets plant, ‘so that they may partake in the eternal and the divine insofar as they can.’116 Here Aristotle appears to follow the Platonic female character Diotima, who contends that mortals strive for immortality, and they only succeed ‘by generation.’117 More than that, Diotima argues that replacement is the only way to permanence not only within the species, but also within the very individual: ‘Every mortal being is preserved in this way; not by keeping it wholly the same for ever, like the divine, but with other new parts similar to the original, by leaving behind what goes off or is antiquated.’118 Considering the previous Platonic picture of the ceaseless transformation of mortal beings, we may appreciate Aristotle’s effort to theoretically grasp these very beings with his notion of ousia, or being-something. However, the Aristotelian feat owes Plato not only his previous notion of ousia, but, more important, that of eidos, form.   See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1140a.   Ibid. 115   Of course, the Aristotelian prioritization of praxis over poiēsis is not simply the effect of the notion of self-referentiality, but it also follows Plato’s redistribution of faculties and roles in the psykhē and in the polis by demoting faculties and activities of traditional Homeric culture. Unsurprisingly, Aristotle also subordinates praxis, and a fortiori poiēsis, to θεωρία [theōria], contemplation, as ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐνέργεια [ē tou theou energeia], the activity of the divine (and the philosopher). Ibid., 1178b. 116   ἵνα τοῦ ἀεὶ καὶ τοῦ θείου μετέχωσιν ᾗ δύνανται [hina tou aei kai tou theiou metekhōsin hēi dynantai]. In Aristotle, De Anima 415a. See also supra, chapter 3, note 101. 117   τῇ γενέσει [tē genesei]. In Plato, Symposium 207d. 118   τούτῳ γὰρ τῷ τρόπῳ πᾶν τὸ θνητὸν σῴζεται, οὐ τῷ παντάπασιν τὸ αὐτὸ ἀεὶ εἶναι ὥσπερ τὸ θεῖον, ἀλλὰ τῷ τὸ ἀπιὸν καὶ παλαιούμενον ἕτερον νέον ἐγκαταλείπειν οἷον αὐτὸ ἦν [toutō gar tō tropō pan to thnēton sōzetai, ou tō pantapasin to auto aei einai hōsper to theion, alla tō to apion kai palaioumenon heteron neon enkataleipein hoion auto ēn]. Ibid., 208a–b. 113 114

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In the Platonic dialogue Parmenides, the character of the young Socrates takes responsibility for the invention of the notion of forms that are severed from the things that participate in them119: nevertheless, the term ‘form’ is not attested in the Socratic recollections by his pupil Xenophon.120 However, already Herodotus deploys in the sense of ‘forms’ or ‘kinds’ the word εἴδεα121 [eidea], which appears with a similar sense in the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine,122 and, later on, in the pseudo-Hippocratic work On the Art of Medicine.123 Also the phrase αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ [auto kath’ hauto], itself by itself, which Aristotle borrows from Plato,124 is attested in Aeschylus,125 and before him in Parmenides,126 and possibly, first in Epicharmus127: before Plato, it also appears in Aristophanes’ Clouds,128 as a mockery of Socratic jargon. Nevertheless, in his dialogues Plato deploys the word autos within a new language apparatus, which allows his character Socrates to name any form whatsoever. Unfortunately, the innovative grammatical construction that introduces Plato’s unheard-of abstract notions to Socrates’ interlocutors is generally lost in translation, and so is Plato’s extraordinary effort: but even more than the language barrier, it is the likewise extraordinary success of Plato’s new ideas that makes their novelty invisible to his late readers, who cannot imagine doing without notions as (apparently) indispensable as goodness, beauty, devotion, equality, justice, and of course, self.129 119   See Plato, Parmenides 130b. The claim of the young Socrates may or may not be an expression of Platonic irony, as in the case of the similar boasting of geometrical inventiveness by the character of the young Theaetetus in the eponymous dialogue. 120   In his dialogue Symposium, Xenophon mentions the Socratic discussion about τί τὸ δίκαιον [ti to dikaion], what the just is (4), and τὸ καλὸν [to kalon], the beautiful (5): these phrases express the new abstract notions that are the object of Socrates’ inquiry simply by nominalizing the epithets dikaios, just, and kalos, beautiful. 121  Herodotus 1.94.3. 122   See Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine 15. 123   See Pseudo-Hippocrates, On the Art of Medicine 4. 124   See, for example, Plato, Republic 2.358b. 125   αὐθαδία (. . .) αὐτὴ καθ᾽ αὑτὴν [authadia (. . .) authē kath’ hauthēn], stubborness (. . .) in itself and by itself. In Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 1012-1013. Whilst the authorship of the tragedy is now disputed, its date of composition is not later than 430 BCE, because in the following year Cratinus parodies in his comedy Ploutoi the tragedy Prometheus Unbound, which is part of the same trilogy as Prometheus Bound. 126   Ταὐτόν τ΄ ἐν ταὐτῶι τε μένον καθ΄ ἑαυτό τε κεῖται [Tauton t’ en tautōi te menon kath’ heauto te keitai], it rests the same in itself and abiding by itself. In Parmenides, DK 28 B8. 127   Diogenes Laërtius (3.12) quotes Alcimus, who quotes Epicharmus as mentioning (in remarkably Platonic terms ante litteram) τό ἀγαθόν (. . .) καθ᾽ αὑθ᾽ [to agathon (. . .) kath’ hauth’], the good (. . .) by itself. 128   αὐτὸς καθ᾽ αὑτὸν [autos kath’ hauton], himself by himself. In Aristophanes, Clouds 194. 129  Nietzsche would comment: Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben . . . I am afraid we will not let go of God because we still believe in grammar...

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It is all the more important, then, to show the process of production of these now venerable ideas, which may thus be given back their historical status of intellectual products. Moreover, by narrating how these new theoretical tools take shape so as to gain access to the discursive space of the Greek polis, we may also help illustrate their entrance as entheses into the relational bodies of Socrates’ interlocutors, of Plato’s readers, and of innumerable human beings that then come to incorporate them. Of course, this is not a reversible process: the display of an enthesis’ way into a relational body does not grant this enthesis any way out.130 On the contrary, as narrations can only add themselves to other narrations,131 I can just hope that the rendering of Platonic entheses in this narration of mine may find its way as a further enthesis in the relational bodies of my readers. However, before addressing the Platonic text, I would consider the term whose innovative use allows Plato to put on paper (or, more precisely, on the wax of the writing tablets) his new abstract entities: autos. At the very beginning of the Greek narrative tradition, this word appears in its plural accusative form autous in the fourth line of the Iliad132: πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι (. . .)

pollas d᾽iphthimous psykhas Aidi proiapsen hērōōn, autous de helōria teukhe kynessin oiōnoisi te pasi (. . .)

and many brave shades it sent forth to Hades of heroes, then them prey it made for the dogs and for the birds all (. . .)

In Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung: Die “Vernunft” in der Philosophie, § 5, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GD-Vernunft-5 130   On the contrary, in the words of the Platonic Socrates, the good orator ἀδικία δὲ ἀπαλλάττηται [adikia de apallattētai], removes injustice (from the psykhē). In Plato, Gorgias 504e. Unfortunately, the metaphor of enlightenment, which modern thinkers naively believe to be separable from its Platonic roots, still raises the expectation that the disembodied view of understanding would overrule bodily practices. 131   Narrations may well be compared to paintings rather than sculptures—in the words of Leonardo, who modifies an image by Leon Battista Alberti—‘perchè esso scultore solo leva, ed il pittore sempre pone di varie materie,’ because the sculptor only removes, and the painter always adds various materials. In Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura, Guglielmo Manzi ed., 2 vols. (Roma: De Romanis, 1817), vol. 1, 41. 132  Homer, Iliad 1.3-5.

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I rendered with ‘them’ the word autous, which relates the heroes to their condition of corpses, as distinct from their psykhas, ghostly shades.133 It is worth noticing that in the Platonic dialogues the word psychē, which is often rendered as ‘soul,’ expresses a notion that is the dichotomous counterpart of σῶμα [sōma], the body: on the contrary, in the Homeric world the term psychē denotes the pale image of the living human that flees to the underworld at the moment of death. We will see that the Platonic inner functions (from which our psychological notions derive) in the Homeric world are not performed at all by this ghostly trace of the living character, but by several bodily acting forces 134: θυμός135 [thymos], the feeling body, νόος136 [noos], the considering body, and other similar bodily apprehensions, such as φρένες137 [phrenes], κῆρ138 [kēr], ἦτορ139 [ētor], μένος140 [menos], and κραδίη141 [kradiē].142 Back to the word autos, Risch suggests as its possible etymology the combination of the particle αὗ [au], which conveys the sense of repetition, and the determinate article τόν [ton]143: he also relates it to the Mycenaean form au-to-, which is part of the compound au-to-jo144 that Ventris and Chadwick translate as ‘and of the same.’ This may well account for the reflexive aspect

133   Here Homer uses the word psychē in its plural accusative form psykhas. We may measure, so to speak, the distance between the Homeric, and the Platonic and Christian understanding of human beings by comparing these Homeric lines with a Shakespearean line: ‘Some haunted by the Ghosts they haue depos’d.’ In William Shakespeare, Richard II, 3.2.1518. 134   In the words of Bolling, ‘[i]n Homeric Greek one does not speak to himself, he speaks to his θυμός [thymos]; one does not bid himself act, his θυμός [thymos] bids him.’ In George Melville Bolling, ‘Personal Pronouns in Reflexive Situations in the Iliad,’ in Language, vol. 23, n. 1 (Jan–Mar 1947), 23–33, 29 note 4. 135  See, for example, Homer, Iliad 1.24. Snell renders thymos as Organ der Regung, organ of movement, which his English translator Rosenmeyer felicitously turns into ‘organ of (e)motion.’ In Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, T. G. Rosenmeyer trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 9. 136   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 1.132. 137   See, for example, ibid., 1.103. Onians documents phrenes’ possible identification with the lungs as the seat of both thymos and its features: yet, one may doubt the absolute priority of their anatomical location, which rather fit the modern scientific construction of the body. See Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1951). 138   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 1.44. 139   See, for example, ibid., 1.188. 140   See, for example, ibid., 1.103. 141   See, for example, ibid., 1.225. 142   Generic translations of the Homeric terms psychē, thymos, noos, phrenes, kēr, ētor, menos, and kradiē are inevitably inaccurate, as these words do correspond to processes in action, and they have to be considered in their specific context of use. 143   Ernst Risch, Wortbildung der homerischen Sprache (Berlin: de Gruyter & Co, 1937), 312. 144   The word appears on the tablet Eb156 from Pylos. In Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 537.

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of the term autos, which at once expresses the sense of both English words ‘self’ and ‘same.’145 That which we understand as a semantic duality of the term autos is instead subsumed by Aristotle under the same notion, which he names as ταὐτότης [tautotēs], that is, autos-ness. The word tautotēs expresses at once the sameness of multiple beings and the identity of each being with itself: ‘tautotēs is a oneness of what is multiple, or treated as multiple, such as when one declares a thing the same as itself (auto hautō tauton): for it is treated as two.’146 The Aristotelian phrase auto hautō tauton puts us in front of a vertiginous game of reflections, which I tentatively rendered with both English words ‘same’ and ‘(it)self,’ as no English term can fit the triple near-repetition147 of the Greek word autos.148 Yet, the task of translation becomes almost impossible when the sense that is supposedly in place before the deployment of a phrase is irreversibly modified by the very theoretical strategy of which the phrase is the expression: this is the case of the literal repetition of the word autos in the first Alcibiades dialogue, which is (at least) traditionally ascribed to Plato.149 In the dialogue, the character Socrates argues that in order to improve autos, that is, oneself, one should first know ‘the self itself’: the latter phrase is my translation of the expression αὐτὸ τὸ αὐτό150 [auto to auto], which may be understood as the first step towards the Platonic apparatus of production of abstract terms. Let’s analyse this apparatus in detail. We saw that the word autos is attested in Homer, who nonetheless seldom uses it with a reflexive function151: he instead often deploys the term autos 145   Unlike Greek language, Latin distributes, so to speak, these features of the term autos between the two words idem and ipse, which are the predecessors of the notions of identity and ipseity. 146   ἡ ταυτότης ἑνότης τίς ἐστιν ἢ πλειόνων τοῦ εἶναι ἢ ὅταν χρῆται ὡς πλείοσιν, οἷον ὅταν λέγῃ αὐτὸ αὑτῷ ταὐτόν: ὡς δυσὶ γὰρ χρῆται αὐτῷ [hē tautotēs henotēs tis estin ē pleionōn tou einai ē hotan khrētai hōs pleiosin, hoion hotan legē auto hautō tauton: hōs dysi gar khrētai autō]. In Aristotle, Met. 5.1018a. Here Aristotle uses the word autos in its singular accusative neuter form auto. 147   The second and third words in the phrase, namely, heautou and tautos respectively, are both construed with the term autos. 148   The French word même and the Italian word stesso may prove themselves more apt to the task. 149   Whilst the dialogue is traditionally considered as the starting point for the study of Plato, its authenticity is currently disputed. 150  Plato, Alcibiades 1 130d. Here Plato uses the word autos in its singular nominative neuter form auto. 151   Bolling notices that in the Iliad ‘[r]eflexive constructions (. . .) are very rare.’ And he specifies in the relative note: ‘This is due partly to the competition offered by the middle voice (cf. Brugmann 104; Wackernagel, Syntax 2.90), partly to the psychological beliefs then current.’ In Bolling, ‘Personal Pronouns in Reflexive Situations in the Iliad,’ 29 note 4.

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to give emphasis to a pronoun or a noun, such as, for example, in the phrase αὐτὴν Χρυσηΐδα152 [autēn Khrysēida], Chryseis herself. In the texts of fifth-century BCE writers, the word autos sometimes appears before an article and a noun153: for instance, Herodotus writes αὐτὸ τὸ τεῖχος154 [auto to teikhos], which we may translate as ‘the wall itself.’ Thucydides then applies this construction not only to concrete objects, but also to notions, as in the phrase αὐτὸ τὸ ἔργον155 [auto to ergon], which we may render as ‘the very facts.’ Plato deploys the same construction with existing nouns that describe qualities and conditions, such as ἀνδρεία156 [andreia], courage, ἐπιστήμη157 [epistēmē], knowledge, and ὁσιότης158 [osiotēs] piety: moreover, he also uses in this construction some possible coins of his, such as καρτέρησις159 [kartēresis], patience, and λογιστική160 [logistikē], calculating art, among others. However, his language innovations do not stop at neologisms: in the previously recalled phrase auto to auto, which I rendered as ‘the self itself,’ the character Socrates modifies the very grammatical construction, by putting the word auto, which we would now classify as a pronoun, in the position of the noun. By doing so, he directs the emphasis of the first pronoun auto towards the second pronoun auto, which is turned into the subject of predication of the first one. Yet, the rendering of the phrase auto to auto as ‘the self itself’ risks to make this language operation disappear, because in English the word ‘self’ is not only a reflexive particle but also a noun: the self,161 indeed. Perhaps, this language operation may be better hinted to by translating the phrase as ‘the same same,’ whose ungrammaticality at least underlines the grammatical

152  Homer, Iliad 1.143. Here Homer uses the word autos in its singular accusative feminine form autēn. 153   In modern grammars, this is defined as predicate position. 154  Herodotus 1.179.2. Here Herodotus uses the word autos in its singular accusative neuter form auto. 155  Thucydides 6.86.1. Here Thucydides uses the word autos in its singular nominative neuter form auto. 156  Plato, Laches 190d. 157  Plato, Charmides 166a. 158  Plato, Laches 199d. 159   Ibid., 194a. 160  Plato, Charmides 166a. The word λογιστικὰ [logistika] is attested in Stobaeus’ supposed quote of Archytas, DK 47 B4. For Plato’s later use of the term λογιστικόν [logistikon] to define the higher portion of psykhē, see supra, chapter 1, note 123. 161  As Spenser would specify, ‘inward selfe I meane.’ In Edmund Spenser, Amoretti xlv, in Amoretti and Epithalamion (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sign. C8r.

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shift produced by the character Socrates.162 At any rate, the expression auto to auto may be considered the first expression of the self as a notion,163 and, provided the dialogue’s authenticity, of the Platonic apparatus of production of abstract notions. However, this apparatus is to fully emerge only as a result of a further and decisive grammatical shift. If we follow Thesleff’s chronology of Platonic works,164 it is in the dialogue Symposium that such a further shift first occurs with the phrase αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν165 [auto to kalon], which we may translate as ‘the Beautiful itself.’ I took the liberty of capitalizing the word ‘beautiful,’ in order to underline the Platonic use of the epithet kalos as a noun and a subject of predication. Plato gives the epithet kalos the role of subject by inflecting it in the neuter singular nominative case kalon, and by adding the determinate article τὸ [to]. In Greek language, the neuter gender allows speakers to address subjects that share the same predicate via the predicate itself, with the addition of the determinate article: for example, in the very Symposium the Platonic Socrates repeatedly mentions τὰ καλά166 [ta kala], the beautiful things. From our contemporary (and unwillingly teleological) perspective, this possibility to name the whole lot of beautiful things may appear as a step towards the notion of ‘what is the same in all of these cases,’167 in the words of the Platonic Socrates. The use of an epithet in the singular neuter form is a way of hinting to such a notion: for example, even after Pindar presumably coins the word eleutheria, freedom, Herodotus still uses the epithet ελεύθερος [eleutheros], free, in the neuter form τὸ ελεύθερον168 [to eleutheron], in a sense that we render as ‘freedom’ too. We saw that Plato is not contented with just nominalizing the epithet kalos, beautiful, as to kalon, the beautiful: he also removes the semantic ambiguity of to kalon qua nominalized epithet, by deploying it within his modified predicative construction auto to kalon, the Beautiful itself. 162   The grammatical shift follows a semantic one, as the author of Alcibiades 1 relies on the faulty analogy between making a better shoe, that is, producing a new entity, and making oneself better, that is, improving an existing entity. In Plato, Alcibiades 1 128e. 163   As Havelock remarks, ‘[t]he discovery of self which is ascribed to the lyric poets by Snell (Discovery, cap. 3: ‘The Rise of the Individual in Early Greek Lyric’) is undocumented so far as vocabulary is concerned.’ In Havelock, Preface to Plato, 211 note 6. However, as Plato soon after (Alcibiades 1 130c) also identifies this self with psykhē, the soul, the novelty of his double operation disappears because of its subsequent extraordinary success. 164   See Holger Thesleff, ‘Platonic Chronology,’ in Phronesis vol. 34, n. 1 (1989), 1–26. 165   In Plato, Symposium 211e. 166   See, for example, ibid., 202c. Kala is the neuter plural nominative form of kalos. 167   τί ὂν ἐν πᾶσι τούτοις ταὐτόν ἐστιν [ti on en pasi toutois tauton estin]. In Plato, Laches 191e. 168  Herodotus 7.103.

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Within this Platonic construction, the word auto keeps performing its function of emphasizing its object: yet, this object is the result of an operation of nominalization, which turns the language operator of a potential predication, namely, the epithet kalos, beautiful, into an actual entity, namely, to kalon, the Beautiful. The language construction auto to kalon pushes further this operation of entification, by emphasizing its result, namely, the Beautiful, regardless of its possible instantiations. We may say that when the Platonic Diotima first uses the expression auto to kalon, the Beautiful itself, she actually produces the new notion of beauty,169 as a result of her new grammatical apparatus: in turn, this very notion allows her—that is, her author Plato—to proclaim that beautiful bodies are inadequate objects of love, if compared to auto to kalon, beauty, or more literally, the Beautiful itself, which is ‘not infected with human bodies and skins.’170 Since its first appearance in the Symposium, the Platonic apparatus of construction of abstract notions thus reveals itself as a device for demoting transient entities. Of course, it may be observed that the divide between mortal and immortal beings cuts across Greek texts ever since Homer: yet, the very erotic love, which the Platonic Diotima downgrades, traditionally bridges the gap between mortals and immortals, and it leaves behind the enduring trace of a hybrid breed.171 In the dialogue Republic, the Platonic Socrates mentions again auto to kalon,172 the Beautiful itself: moreover, he also puts forth in a similar way other notions such as αὐτὸ τὸ δίκαιον173 [auto to dikaion], the Just itself, and αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθὸν174 [auto to agathon], the Good itself. In the Phaedo, the Platonic Socrates adds αὐτὸ τὸ ἴσον175 [auto to ison], the Equal itself: he also

  Of course, here the very word ‘beauty’ is an anachronism.   μὴ ἀνάπλεων σαρκῶν τε ἀνθρωπίνων καὶ χρωμάτων [mē anapleōn sarkōn te anthrōpinōn kai chrōmatōn]. In Plato, Symposium 211e. We may notice that Sophocles previously uses the similar word pleōn in relation to the utterly disgusting ulcer on Philoctetes’ foot. In Sophocles, Philoctetes 39. 171  Achilles, who is the main character of the Iliad, is himself the son of the goddess Thetis. Odysseus shares for seven years the bed of the goddess Calypso: he rejects her offer to make him immortal and ageless though. However, it is worth underlying that male gods often rape women. See, for example, the Hesiodic Catalogues of Women. Moreover, at least until the Aristotelian closure, also human and animal species cross-breed, and so do gods (see, for example, Boreas and the mares of Erichthonius in Homer, Iliad 20.221–229). 172  Plato, Republic 6.493e. The character Socrates also considers the question τί ἐστι τὸ καλόν [ti esti to kalon], what is the Beautiful. Ibid., 7.538d. 173   Ibid., 5.479e, also as τὸ αὐτὸ δίκαιον [to auto dikaion], 1.339a. 174   Ibid., 7.534c; also as αὐτὸ ἀγαθόν [auto agathon], 6.507b, and τὸ ἀγαθὸν αὐτό [to agathon auto], 7.540a. 175  Plato, Phaedo 74a. 169 170

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suggests as a summarizing shortcut the general expression αὐτὸ ἕκαστον ὃ ἔστιν176 [auto ekaston ho estin], each veritable entity that is. Unfortunately, no Platonic dialogical persona ultimately spells out what these entities are. In the Parmenides, the eponymous character explicitly questions about this issue the young Socrates, who has no doubt about the existence of the forms of likeness, unlikeness, the One, the Many, the Just, the Beautiful, the Good, ‘and all such conceptions’177: yet, whilst the young Socrates rejects the presence of forms of beings as vile as hair, mud, and dirt,178 he is perplexed about the possible existence of forms of entities such as man, fire, and water.179 Plato (or perhaps just his followers) seems then to overcome this doubt, as Aristotle blames ‘those who talk of forms’180 because ‘they make them the same in kind as perishable things—for these we know—Man-itself (autoanthropon) and Horse-itself (autohippon), by adding the word auto to the names of sensible things.’181 However, whatever the reach of the Platonic Socrates’ nominalizing apparatus, it allows him to produce new objects for the question ti esti?, what is (it?): the Beautiful, the Good, the Just, the Equal, and, provided the authenticity of Alcibiades 1, the Self. I described these new objects as abstract notions: yet, the use of the anachronistic adjective ‘abstract,’ however appropriate to our understanding, projects onto Plato’s writings a theoretical horizon yet to come. This projection risks to erase Plato’s extraordinary effort: he pushes to expand the Greek theoretical sphere by tinkering with Greek language, which he enriches with new words and grammatical combinations. Though I credited the Platonic Socrates with the first apparatus of production of abstract notions, in the Platonic lexicon there are no words for ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’: Plato still uses the term ἀφαίρεσις182 [aphairesis] with the concrete sense of ‘removal.’ Only later on, Aristotle is to utilize aphairesis in a figurative sense: he mentions in the Posterior Analytics ‘the things obtained

  Ibid., 78d.   καὶ πάντων αὖ τῶν τοιούτων [kai pantōn au tōn toioutōn]. Plato, Parmenides 130b.  See ibid., 130c–d. 179  See ibid., 130c. 180   οἱ τὰ εἴδη λέγοντες [hoi ta eidē legontes]. In Aristotle, Met. 7.1040b. 181   ποιοῦσιν οὖν τὰς αὐτὰς τῷ εἴδει τοῖς φθαρτοῖς (ταύτας γὰρ ἴσμεν), αὐτοάνθρωπον καὶ αὐτόϊππν, προστιθέντες τοῖς αἰσθητοῖς τὸ ῥῆμα τὸ αὐτό [poiousin oun tas autas tō eidei tois phthartois (tautas gar ismen), autoanthrōpon kai autoippon, prostithentes tois aisthētois to rhēma to auto]. Ibid. 182  Plato, Laws 11.914d. 176 177 178

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by subtraction (aphairesis),’183 which, he explains in the Metaphysics, are the objects of observation of the mathematician, ‘who removes everything that is sensible, such as weight and lightness, hardness and its contrary, and also heat and cold and all other sensible contrarieties, leaving only the amount and the continuous.’184 This subtractive (in Aristotle’s view) character of mathematical entities, writes the Stagirite in the Nicomachean Ethics, explains why ‘though a boy may be a mathematician, he cannot be a philosopher or a physicist.’185 We may consider the Aristotelian aphairesis, subtraction, as the predecessor of the later notion of abstraction. Yet, Aristotle uses it to define mathematical entities as subtractive results in contrast to Plato, who instead holds mathematical objects as an inspiration, and possibly as a model, for his forms. However, even if according to Aristotle the operation of aphairesis has a limited scope, in his view it can isolate essential aspects of reality such as quantity and continuity: we may well say that in a similar way, the SocraticPlatonic inquiries seek to single out ‘the same in all cases.’ It is not surprising that whilst the Platonic Socrates devises and puts to work a language apparatus for producing abstract notions, he still has no words to describe his novel operation and its products186: nor it is surprising that such absence impacts Plato’s ability to evaluate his own innovative tools and their effects. In this respect, we may compare the new Platonic grammatical technologies with writing technologies at large. As we saw, the Platonic Thamus warns Theuth that his new pharmakon, that is, writing, will inevitably have poisonous effects too. On the contrary, no Platonic persona cautions about the most relevant outcome of the construction of Greek writing: abstractions.

  τὰ ἐξ ἀφαιρέσεως [ta ex aphaireseōs]. In Aristotle, Posterior Analitics 81b.   περιελὼν γὰρ πάντα τὰ αἰσθητὰ θεωρεῖ, οἷον βάρος καὶ κουφότητα καὶ σκληρότητα καὶ τοὐναντίον, ἔτι δὲ καὶ θερμότητα καὶ ψυχρότητα καὶ τὰς ἄλλας αἰσθητὰς ἐναντιώσεις, μόνον δὲ καταλείπει τὸ ποσὸν καὶ συνεχές [perielōn gar panta ta aisthēta theōrei, hoion baros kai kouphotēta kai sklērotēta kai tounantion, eti de kai thermotēta kai psykhrotēta kai tas allas aisthētas enantiōseis, monon de kataleipei to poson kai synekhes]. In Aristotle, Met. 11.1061a. 185   διὰ τί δὴ μαθηματικὸς μὲν παῖς γένοιτ᾽ ἄν, σοφὸς δ᾽ ἢ φυσικὸς οὔ [dia ti dē mathēmatikos men pais genoit᾽ an, sophos d᾽ ē physikos ou]. In Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1142a. Here we may suspect a hint of sarcasm towards the mathematical achievements of the young slave in the Platonic dialogue Meno, and of the character Theaetetus in the eponymous dialogue. According to Aristotle, the principles of philosophy and physics are instead derived from experience, which, in turn, is produced as the layering, or better, the iteration of perceptions in the psykhē: αἱ γὰρ πολλαὶ μνῆμαι τοῦ αὐτοῦ πράγματος μιᾶς ἐμπειρίας δύναμιν ἀποτελοῦσιν [hai gar pollai mnēmai tou autou pragmatos mias empeirias dynamin apotelousin], the multiple memories of the same occurrence realize the potential of one single experience. In Aristotle, Met. 1.980b. 186   Havelock argues that ‘[d]oxa or “opinion” (or “belief”) is the word which in the Republic is preferred as the label of the non-abstract state of mind.’ Its counterpart epistēmē would thus express the new Platonic abstract state of mind. In Havelock, Preface to Plato, 248. 183 184

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One may object that if the notion of abstraction is absent from Plato’s vocabulary, it cannot be legitimately deployed in the interpretation of the Platonic text: yet, I did not credit Plato (or Socrates) with the invention of the notion of abstraction, but only of a language apparatus that produces what we would now call abstract notions. Of course, the previously recalled tripartition of forms in the Parmenides clearly shows that neither the notion of abstract entity nor its complementary notion of concrete one has a place in Plato’s theoretical apparatus: the closest relation to the dichotomy of abstract versus concrete187 only emerges in the Platonic text when he pits the noun σώματα188 [sōmata], bodies, against another momentous neologism, the nominalized epithet ἀσώματα189 [asōmata], things without body.

187  Platonic forms are not only asōmata, bodiless, but also νοήματα [noēmata], things one think, as opposed to either πράγματα [pragmata], things that happen, or αἰσθητά [aisthēta], perceived things. 188   It is worth noticing that in Homer, sōma is always a dead body. See Homer, Iliad 3.23, 7.79, 18.161, 22.342, 23.169; Odyssey 11.53, 12.67, 24.187. Whilst the aspect of the living body is addressed as δέμας [demas], bodily frame (see, for example, Homer, Iliad 8.305), there is no single word that gathers together, so to speak, all bodily parts and features. Only in the written Hesiodic text the word sōma stands for ‘body’ tout court. See Hesiod, Works and Days 540. 189   See, for example, Plato, Statesman 286a. Plato’s probable construction of the asyndetic, privative epithet asōmatos, bodiless, follows a practice that harks back to Homer: see, for example, the alliterative and paratactic sequence ἀφρήτωρ ἀθέμιστος ἀνέστιός [aphrētōr athemistos anestios], clanless, lawless, hearthless, in Homer, Iliad 9.63.

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According to extant texts, the word sōma, body, is first considered in relation to abstract objects by Melissus less than a century before Plato. Melissus discusses the features of a new entity, which Parmenides devises by nominalizing the present participle form of the verb eimi, to be, as to eon1: we may translate to eon as ‘Being,’ or, more precisely, ‘That-which-is.’ Before considering Parmenides’ fundamental invention, it is worth recalling Melissus’ argumentation. As Parmenides affirms that That-which-is is one, Melissus infers that ‘it must have no body,’2 because ‘if it had thickness, it would have parts, and it would not be one.’3 We may observe that Melissus operates on an abstract notion with the reasoning techniques derived from bodily practices, as construed by the Homeric language: Melissus follows in the footsteps of Parmenides, whose tinkering with language predates Plato’s constructions. Parmenides not only produces the notion of That-which-is by nominalization, but he also defines his novel entity with likewise new privative epithets4 such as ἀγένητον5 [agenēton], unbegotten, ἀνώλεθρόν6 [anōlethron], indestructible, ἀτρεμὲς7 [atremes], unmoved, and ἀτέλεστον8[ateleston], without further end. 1  See supra, note chapter 2, note 72. Greek verbs are generally listed in the first singular present indicative form, which, in the case of the verb ‘to be,’ is eimi, ‘I am.’ 2   δεῖ αὐτὸ σῶμα μὴ ἔχειν [dei auto sōma mē ekhein]. In Melissus, DK 30 B9. 3   εἰ δὲ ἔχοι πάχοs, ἔχοι ἂν μόρια, καὶ οὐκέτι ἓν εἴη [ei de ekhoi pakhos, ekhoi an moria, kai ouketi hen eiē], ibid. 4  See supra, chapter 7, note 189. 5  Parmenides, DK 28 B8. Parmenides’ strategy of negative definition of That-which-is and its lexicon will be revived by Christian authors. 6   Ibid. 7   Ibid. 8   Ibid.

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Following Hesiod’s bold example,9 Parmenides casts himself as a character in his poem in hexameters On Nature: his literary persona is welcomed and instructed by Δίκη [Dikē], the eponymous goddess of justice. It may be worth noticing that the goddess is neither mentioned in the Homeric poems nor in the Homeric Hymns: she first appears in Hesiod’s written poetry. Dikē’s new teaching revolves around a previously unheard of notion, which Parmenides renders with the available forms of the verb eimi, to be: not only the previously recalled nominalized present participle to eon,10 that which is, but also the infinitive einai,11 being. In the poem, both these verb forms are made to perform as nouns. We may add that nowadays Parmenides’ new entity may appear deceptively familiar also because of the re-emergence of the term ‘Being’ in twentieth-century philosophical jargon. Whatever its sense, Dikē insists that the new entity has no contrary: τό μὴ ἐὸν12 [to mē eon], That-which-is-not, can neither be known, nor shown. This is why she equates the new notion with νοεῖν [noein], which is the infinitive form of a verb that in Homer has the sense of ‘becoming aware,’13 and which then comes to denote thinking in general: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι14 [to gar auto noein estin te kai einai], for thinking is the same thing as Being. This is a crucial point, which Dikē explains by directing Parmenides’ attention to the power of thinking: ‘see how though absent (apeonta), things are constantly present (pareonta) to thought.’15 Here, Parmenides’ novel uses of the verb ‘to be’ allow him to recast Hesiod’s metaphorical stretching of the Homeric vocabulary of actions. For example, Hesiod writes of Perseus that ‘he was flying like thought’16 with his winged sandals. Hesiod takes further the epic construction of mythological devices as hyperbolic expansions of ordinary tools and actions, such as a bird’s flight: following Homer, who says that ‘thinking (noos) darts,’17 Hesiod compares the extraordinary speed of thought to the likewise extraordinary divine speed.  See infra, pag. 170.  Parmenides, DK 28 B4. 11   Ibid. 12   Ibid. 13   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 1.522. 14  Parmenides, DK 28 B3. Dikē specifies later on: Ταὐτὸν δ΄ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκεν ἔστι νόημα [Tauton d’ esti noein te kai houneken esti noēma], thinking is the same thing as that on account of which thought is. Ibid., B8. 15   Λεῦσσε δ΄ ὅμως ἀπεόντα νόωι παρεόντα βεβαίως [Leusse d’ homōs apeonta noōi pareonta bebaiōs]. Ibid., B4. 16   ὃ δ᾽ ὥς τε νόημ᾽ ἐποτᾶτο [ho d’ hōs te noēm’ epotato]. In Hesiod, The Shield of Heracles 222. 17   ἀΐξῃ νόος [aixē noos]. In Homer, Iliad 15.80.  9 10

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Parmenides takes the Homeric and Hesiodic image of thought to the limit of infinite speed,18 so to speak. This operation eliminates action and time: things are ‘constantly present’ in thought. More in general, Parmenides takes to its limits Homeric poetry, whose prosody and lexicon he deploys to construct his new language of being that replaces action with presence. It may not be by chance that Parmenides is taught by an immortal goddess the new temporalization that substitutes the Homeric flow of ‘the things that are, and that will be, and that has been before,’19 as they appear to the unobstructed view of the seer Calchas: That-which-is, Dikē instead reveals, ‘neither was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, one, continuous.’20 The goddess’ revelation of the universal continuity of That-which-is relies on her previous considerations on thought. A few lines before, Dikē puts into verse her understanding of thought and its relation to That-which-is: ‘it [thought] is not to cut That-which-is from That-which-is, / either properly spread in all ways everywhere / or combined.’21 The absolute connection of That-which-is with That-which-is implies a complementary and likewise absolute κρίσις22 [krisis], namely, the cutting judgement that must sever Thatwhich-is from That-which-is-not. Two similarly fundamental and complementary operations appear in the nearly contemporary Heraclitean texts. In several of his extant fragments, Heraclitus focuses on oppositional pairs, such as concordant and discordant,23 day and night,24 good and bad,25 straight and curved,26 up and down,27 clean

18   This image is not so anachronistic, as the verb ἀίσσω [aissō], to dart, describes also the flashing of a beam of light. 19   τά τ᾽ ἐόντα τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα [ta t᾽ eonta ta t᾽ essomena pro t᾽ eonta]. In Homer, Iliad 1.70. 20   οὐδέ ποτ΄ ἦν οὐδ΄ ἔσται, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν, / ἕν, συνεχές (. . .) [oude pot ēn oud estai, epei nyn estin homou pan, / hen, synekhes (...)]. In Parmenides, DK 28 B8. 21   οὐ γὰρ ἀποτμήξει τὸ ἐὸν τοῦ ἐόντος ἔχεσθαι ou gar apotmēxei to eon tou eontos ekhesthai οὔτε σκιδνάμενον πάντηι πάντως κατὰ κόσμον oute skidnamenon pantēι pantōs kata kosmon οὔτε συνιστάμενον. (. . .) oute synistamenon. (. . .) Ibid., B4. 22   Ibid., B8. Parmenides possibly borrows this recent neologism from Pindar, who describes the Olympic Games as ἁγνὰν κρίσιν [hagnan krisin], hallowed trial, in his 476 BCE Olympian 3 (21). 23   συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον [sympheromenon diapheromenon]. In Heraclitus, DK 22 B10. 24   ἡμέρην καὶ εὐφρόνην [hēmerēn kai euphronēn]. Ibid., B57. Euphronē, that is, literally, kindly time, is a poetic euphemism for ‘night.’ 25   ἀγαθὸν καὶ κακὸν [agathon kai kakon]. Ibid., B58. 26   ὁδὸς εὐθεῖα καὶ σκολιὴ [hodos eutheia kai skoliē], straight and curved path. Ibid., B59. 27   ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω [hodos anō katō], upward (and) downward path. Ibid., B60.

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and polluted,28 immortal and mortal,29 war and peace,30 arbitration and contention,31 awake and asleep,32 and old and young.33 Heraclitus claims that the elements of these couples are one,34 one and the same thing,35 or the divine36: from a modern perspective, it may certainly appear that Heraclitus is attempting at overcoming the fixity of given categories of thought.37 Yet, if we chronologically reverse our point of view and observe these fragments from their past, as it were, we realize that Heraclitus cannot dynamize categories that do not yet exist: he rather works with the language material that he inherits from the Homeric tradition, whose ‘panorama of narrativized actions and events’38 he rearranges in antithetical pairs.39 Heraclitus at once constructs and deconstructs the antithetical relation between these pairs as examples of ‘the nexus that appears,’ of which instead ‘the nexus that does not appear is stronger.’40 The affirmation of such an invisible nexus motivates Heraclitus’ otherwise puzzling double gesture of showing antitheses and undermining them: he makes visible contradictions in order to resolve them into a common order. Heraclitus confidently writes: ‘This order (kosmon), the same for all, neither one of the gods nor of men 28   καθαρώτατον καὶ μιαρώτατον [katharōtaton kai miarōtaton], the most clean and the most polluted. Ibid., B61. 29   ἀθάνατοι θνητοί [athanatoi thnētoi], immortals (are) mortals. Ibid., B62. 30   πόλεμος εἰρήνη [polemos eirēnē], war (and) peace. Ibid., B67. 31   δίκην ἔριν [dikēn erin] arbitration (is) contention. Ibid., B80. 32   ἐγρηγορὸς καὶ καθεῦδον [egrēgoros kai katheudon]. Ibid., B88. 33   νέον καὶ γηραιόν [neon kai gēraion]. Ibid. 34   ἕν [hen]. Ibid., B57. 35   μία (. . .) καὶ ἡ αὐτή [mia (. . .) kai hē autē], one and the same thing, ibid., B59; μία καὶ ωὑτή [mia kai ōutē], one and the same thing, ibid., B60; ταὐτὸ [tauto], the same thing, ibid., B88; 36   ὁ θεὸς [ho theos]. Ibid., B67. 37   For example, Hegel writes: ‘es ist kein Satz des Heraklit, den ich nicht in meine Logik aufgenommen,’ there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, in id., Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), Band 18, 320. Hegel’s enthusiastic reading of the Heraclitean fragments is clearly related to his own theoretical task: ‘die festen Gedanken in Flüssigkeit zu bringen,’ to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in id., Werke, Band 3, 2 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), 37. At least, Hegel knows that the modern theoretical endeavour is more ‘das abgeschnittene Erzeugen des Allgemeinen als ein Hervorgehen desselben aus dem Konkreten’ the dimidiated production of the universal than the emergence of it from the concrete, as it occurs in Antiquity. Ibid. 38   Eric Havelock, ‘The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics,’ in Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, Kevin Robb ed. (LaSalle, IL: Hegeler Institute, 1983), 7–82, 34. Havelock further comments: ‘It is tempting to see this kind of arrangement as a visual one prompted by the conversion of spoken speech to alphabetic shape. It may at the same time respond to the previous oral and acoustic habit of narrating events in patterns of echo.’ 39   This operation is probably predated by the Pythagorean selection of opposites. See Aristotle, Met. 1.986a. 40   ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων [harmoniē aphanēs phanerēs kreittōn], the nexus that does not appear is stronger than that which appears. In Heraclitus, DK 22 B54.

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has made, but ever was and is and will be ever-living fire, in due proportion kindled and quenched.’41 Whilst Heraclitus names the order with the Homeric term kosmos, he also highlights the identity of the likewise Homeric word xunos, common or general, with the Hesiodic term koinos, which we translate as ‘common’ or ‘general’ too42: διὸ δεῖ ἕπεσθαι τῶι ˂ ξυνῶι, τουτέστι τῶι ˃ κοινῶι· ξυνὸς γὰρ ὁ κοινός. τοῦ λόγου δ᾽ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἱδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν.

dio dei hepesthai tō ˂ xynōi, toutesti tōi ˃ koinōi; xynos gar ho koinos. tou logou d᾽ eontos xynou zōousin hoi polloi hōs hidian echontes phronēsin.

so we must follow the ˂ general, that is, the ˃ common; for the common is general. Though logos is general, the many live as if they had their own wisdom.

Here I rendered the word koinos as ‘common,’ as opposed to idios, ‘one’s own,’ which already in Homer stands in opposition to dēmios,43 of the people, that is, of common interest. Yet, I did not translate the word logos, on which Heraclitus operates instead a transformation that predates in the reverse the Platonic demotion of the Homeric term thymos. I anticipate here that both in Homer and Hesiod, the term logos is used in the sense of ‘word,’ and it is mostly associated with the epithet αἱμύλος44 [haimylos], wily: more in general, Fowler recalls that ‘the leg/log- stem occurs several times in conjunction with the word pseudea, “lies”.’45 On the contrary, it is the term μῦθος [mythos] that conveys the sense of authoritative, powerful, or reliable speech in the epic.46 41   κόσμον τόνδε, τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ᾽ ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα [kosmon tonde, ton auton hapantōn, oute tis theōn oute anthrōpōn epoiēsen, all᾽ ēn aei kai estin kai estai pyr aeizōon haptomenon metra kai aposbennymenon metra]. Ibid., B30. Here Heraclitus uses the word kosmos in its singular accusative form kosmon. 42   Ibid., B2. 43   ἰδίη, οὐ δήμιος [idiē, ou dēmios], personal, not of (my) people, says Telemachus to Nestor. In Homer, Odyssey 3.82. 44   αἱμυλίοισι λόγοισιν [haimylioisi logoisin], in Homer, Odyssey 1.56; Hesiod, Theogony 890, Works and Days 78, 789. Homer also uses logos to denote Patroclus’ talk to distract the wounded Eurypylus in Iliad 15.393. 45   Robert L. Fowler, ‘Mythos and logos,’ in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 131 (November 2011), 45–66, 53. See Homer, Odyssey 19.203; Hesiod, Theogony 27, 229. 46   For example, Martin reports that 155 out of 167 occurrences of the words mythos and mytheomai in the Iliad describe orders (but also boasts) uttered by male powerful characters. In Richard Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 22.

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In 476 BCE, which is the possible date of composition of Pindar’s first Olympian ode, the Homeric relation of mythos and logos appears completely reversed: Pindar denounces ‘mythoi embellished with embroidered multicoloured lies’47 that goes beyond alathē, unconcealed, that is, true logos.48 As Heraclitus dies around the time of composition of Pindar’s ode, his use of the word logos to define the common order may express the first and programmatic reversal of the relation between mythos as speech backed by an acknowledged authority and logos as self-sustaining discourse: ‘By listening not to me but to logos is clever to agree [homologein, literally, to say the same thing] that all things are one.’49 Heraclitus’s unifying gesture also appears to predate Dikē’s revelation to Parmenides that That-which-is is one, and it is the same as thinking: however, Heraclitus and Parmenides’ shared operation of reduction to unity most probably derives from a common source, namely, Xenophanes’ poems.50 As previously recalled, Xenophanes questions Homer and Hesiod’s traditional depiction of the gods, and in so doing he lays the groundwork for the procedure of reduction to absurdity.51 Xenophanes argues that generally the representations of the gods are not reliable, as they simply mirror human features: ‘The Aethiops snub-nosed and black, the Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired.’52 Moreover, he pushes further his argument by spearheading also the practice of Gedankenexperiment, the thought experiment53:

47   δεδαιδαλμένοι ψεύδεσι ποικίλοις ἐξαπατῶντι μῦθοι [dedaidalmenoi pseudesi poikilois exapatōnti mythoi]. In Pindar, Olympian 1.29. 48   ὑπὲρ τὸν ἀλαθῆ λόγον [hyper ton alathē logon]. Ibid., 28. 49   οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι [ouk emou, alla tou logou akousantas homologein sophon estin hen panta einai]. In Heraclitus, DK 22 B50. The verb homologein is probably a Heraclitean coin. 50  Aristotle acknowledges that Ξενοφάνης δὲ πρῶτος τούτων ἑνίσας [Xenophanēs de prōtos toutōn henisas], Xenophanes before them [Parmenides and Melissus] reduces to unity. In Aristotle, Met. 1.986b. 51  See supra, pag. 91. 52   Αἰθίοπές τε σιμοὺς μέλανάς τε / Θρῆικές τε γλαυκοὺς καὶ πυρρούς [Aithiopes te simous melanas te / Thrēikes te glaukous kai pyrrous ]. In Xenophanes, DK 21 B16. 53   Ibid., B15.

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άλλ’ εἰ χεῖρας ἔχοv βόες ἠὲ λέοντες ἢ γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες, ἵπποι μέν θ’ ἵπποισι βόες δέ τε βοuσὶν ὁμοίας καί θεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ’ ἐποίουν τοιαῦθ’ οἷόν περ καὐτοi δέμας εἶχον .

all’ ei kheiras ekhon boes ēe leontes ē grapsai kheiressi kai erga telein haper andres, hippoi men th’ hippoisi boes de te bousin homoias kai theōn ideas egraphon kai sōmat’ epoioun toiauth’hoion per kautoi demas eikhon.

but if oxen and lions had hands or by hand they drew and made works that men make, horses to horses and oxen to oxen similar images of gods would draw and shape bodies such as the same bodily frame had.

Given these premises, Xenophanes proclaims his alternative view54: εἷς θεὸς ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος, οὔτι δέμας θνητοῖσιν ὁμοίιος οὐδὲ νόημα.

heis theos en te theoisi kai anthrōpoisi megistos, ou ti demas thnētoisin homoiios oute noēma.

one god, the greatest among gods and men, neither the same as mortals in bodily frame nor in thought.

Moreover, Xenophanes’ god ‘sees all, thinks all, and hears all.’55 Whilst these powers may appear as an enhanced version of those traditionally attributed to Zeus, Xenophanes also ascribes a completely novel feature to his god: ‘he always remains in himself (tautōi) not moving, / nor it fits him to go at one time one way, at another another.’56 It may be argued that Xenophanes takes further Pherecydes’ supposedly allegorical interpretation of the Homeric deities: according to Celsus as quoted by Origen, Pherecydes, ‘whilst describing Homeric verses, says that the

  Ibid., B23.   οὖλος ὁρᾶι, οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οῦλος δέ τ᾽ ἀκούει [oulos horai, oulos de noei, oulos de t᾽ akouei]. Ibid., B24. 56   αἰεὶ δ᾽ ἐν ταὐτῶι μίμνει κινεύμενος οὐδέν, / οὐδὲ μετέρχεσθαί μιν ἐπιπρέπει ἄλλοτε ἄλληι [aiei d᾽ en tautōi mimnei kineumenos ouden, / oude meterkhesthai min epiprepei allote allēi]. Ibid., B26. If we consider the sentence on Xenophanes’ god aiei d᾽ en tautō mimnei, he always remains in himself, we may notice its similarity not only to Parmenides’ description of That-which-is (DK 28 B8), ταὐτόν τ’ ἐν ταὐτῶι τε μένον καθ’ ἑαυτό τε κεῖται [tauton t’ en tautōi te menon kath’ heauto te keitai], it (is) in itself, and remaining by itself, and (it) lies, but also to the moral prescription in Euripides’ fragment 963 (Nauck), αὐτὸς ἀεὶ μίμvε [autos aei mimne], always remain yourself. 54 55

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words of Zeus to Hera are the words τοῦ θεοῦ πρὸς τὴν ὕλην57 [tou theou pros tēn hylēn].’ The latter phrase is generally rendered as ‘of god to matter.’ Nevertheless, as the word hylē is given the generic sense of ‘matter’ only later on by Aristotle, it may be rather Theagenes of Rhegium who opens the way for the allegorical58 reading of the Homeric text,59 possibly as a defensive reaction to Xenophanes’ criticism. The reading of Homeric narrations through an allegorical ‘knowing from underneath’ (hyponoia)60 is then to become a strategic approach to texts: for example, in the Derveni papyrus, which is possibly the first extant European manuscript, the author—perhaps the fifth-century BCE thinker Diagoras of Melos—calls Orpheus ἱερολόγος [hierologos], a word that literally means ‘one who tells a holy tale,’ but which, according to Janko, in this case denotes ‘one who deliberately conveys hidden truths through a story about the gods.’61 The doubling of the Homeric text into a literal and an allegorical narration may be related to the first appearance of the Homeric epic in written form. In this case, it is worth considering that the auditive experience of recitation only slowly gives way to the merely visual practice of reading: for instance, still in the fourth century, Augustine is taken aback by Ambrose’s silent reading,62 and, later on, the medieval scriptoria keep resounding with the monks’ mumbling reading and writing.63 Yet, the permanent written text is a momentous presence, no less than the presence of things in thought that the goddess Dikē wants Parmenides to notice. It may not be by chance that the duplication of the world into thoughts 57   Καὶ διηγούμενός γε τά Ὡμηριχὰ ἔπη, φησὶ, λόγους εἶναι τοῦ θεοῦ πρὸς τὴν ὕλην τοὺς λόγους τοῦ Διὸς πρὸς τὴν Ἥραν [Kai diēgoumenos ge ta Hōmērikha epē, phēsi, logous einai tou theou pros tēn hylēn tous logous tou Dios pros tēn Hēran]. In Origen, Contra Celsum 6.42. 58   The term ἀλληγορία [allēgoria], allegory, is probably a later Alexandrian coin. 59  Porphyry claims that Theagenes πρώτος ἔγραψε περὶ Ὁμήρου [prōtos egrapse peri Homērou], first wrote about Homer. In Theagenes, DK 8 A2. 60  Plato well recognizes this doubling, when his character Socrates bans from in his ideal city the Homeric narrations of the battles of the gods, οὔτ᾽ ἐν ὑπονοίαις πεποιημένας οὔτε ἄνευ ὑπονοιῶν [out᾽ en hyponoiais pepoiēmenas oute aneu hyponoiōn], whether conceived with deeper senses or without a deeper sense. In Plato, Republic 2.378. Philo is then to project these deeper senses (hyponoiai) into religious texts and practices: άλλά χρή ταύτα μέν σώματι έοικέναι νομίζειν, φυχή δέ εκείνα [alla khrē tauta men sōmati eoikenai nomizein, pshykhē de ekeina], we ought to look on the outward commandments as resembling the body, and the latter [hyponoiai, the deeper senses] as resembling the soul. In Philo, On the Migration of Abraham 93. 61   Richard Janko, ‘The Derveni Papyrus (Diagoras of Melos, Apopyrgizontes Logoi?): A New Translation,’ in Classical Philology, vol. 96, n. 1 (Jan. 2001), 1–32, 19. 62   See Augustine, Confessiones 6.3. Per contra, our possibly earliest evidence for silent reading is in Euripides’ Hippolytus 856ff. 63   Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 90.

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is powerfully claimed right when another duplication nails the spoken word to the writing surface.64 This very practical presence allows readers first to match a part of the written text with another part of it, and then, by analogy, with itself. The exercise of this checking operation on written texts, which Goody describes as ‘backward scanning,’65 may be related to the collection of antithetic and synonymous couples. For sure, as the presence of the written text allows the detection of hardly compatible statements in the Homeric epic, committed interpreters such as Stesimbrotos and Hippias try to overcome inconsistencies ‘by over-ingenious rearticulation of the written words.’66 Whilst the allegorical reinvention of the Homeric narration seems to express a similar apologetic intention, the very reappropriation of poetic fabulation as αἰνίττεσθαι67 [ainittesthai], veiled speaking also produces a novel effect on the word that, inasmuch as logos, is no longer backed by a legitimating authority: the renewed distancing of this new logos from hoi polloi, the many, by virtue of the new power of hermeneutic knowledge. We may notice that Hesiod already exploits the polysemic surcharge of αἶνος68 [ainos], namely, a tale with a subtext, for example in his apologue of the hawk and the nightingale: yet, he himself suggests a link between the bird of prey and the kings to whom the tale is explicitly addressed. The relative tension that the Hesiodic veiled narration produces is meant to be released for all readers.69 Hesiod not only directs himself to the many: he also recasts70 the Homeric images of the tribes of men and women.71 He traces the genealogy of the latter   Of course, the written word is reinventing, rather than simply immobilizing, the spoken one.   Jack Goody, The domestication of the savage mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 128. 66   Martin L. West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (München: K.G. Saur, 2001), 24. 67   The author of the Derveni papyrus (col. 9) claims that Orpheus ἠινίττετο [ēinitteto], spoke in riddles. 68  Hesiod, Works and Days, 202. The word ainos occurs four times in Homer (Iliad 23.652, 23.795; Odyssey 14.508, 21.110), and only in the third case its sense shifts from ‘praise’ to something like ‘suggestive tale,’ which is close to its Hesiodic use. 69   The subsequent shift towards obscurity is witnessed, for example, by the word αἴνιγμα [ainigma], riddle, which is first attested in Pindar, fragment 164. In the Hesiodic text, the beginning of this drift may be detected in the use of kenningar such as ἀνόστεος [anosteos], boneless for octopus (Works and Days 524), and ἄτριχος [atrikhos], hairless for snake (fragment 204.129). 70   I suppose the chronological priority of Homeric poems over Hesiod’s ones. According to Gellius, this opinion was already shared by Xenophanes: ‘alii Homerum quam Hesiodum maiorem natu fuisse scripserunt, in quibus Philochorus et Xenophanes,’ some wrote that Homer was born before Hesiod, among whom Philochorus and Xenophanes. In Xenophanes, DK 21 B13. 71   γένος ἀνδρῶν [genos andrōn], race of men, in Homer, Iliad 12.23; ἀνδρῶν γένος [andrōn genos], race of men, Odyssey 4.63; γένος (. . .) ἀνθρώπων [genos (. . .) anthrōpōn], race of humans, 64 65

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to Pandora: ‘of her is the deadly race and tribe of women.’72 Whilst Hesiod considers women crooked right from the beginning, he depicts the history of humanity as a series of degenerating ages and relative races: his current one γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρεον73 [genos esti sidēreon], is an iron race and the worst of all. Such a dark scenario is partially enlightened by the intervention of a brood of divine sisters, namely, the Muses, who bring into the world the gift of dances and songs. They appear in Hesiod’s poem Theogony, which inaugurates at once European written literature, poetry, and autobiography with a veritable coup de théâtre: the Muses turn Hesiod himself, who performs the role of a shepherd, into a poet. This mirror game is partially predated by the Homeric description of how Odysseus is moved to tears while he listens to the sung narration of his own endeavours.74 Yet, in the Odyssey it is just a character who faces the duplicate rendering of his previous adventures75: on the contrary, in the Theogony the mirror game trespasses the limits of the narration, as the double of the author enters the story to be endowed with the ability to narrate the story itself.76 Right after mentioning himself by name as the receiver of the Muses’ gift, Hesiod suddenly turns to the first person: ‘this word (mython) first of all the goddesses told me.’77 Hesiod then recalls in detail that the Muses award him a wooden σκήπτρον78 [skeptron], that is, a sceptre (which in Homer is the badge of command, and it is also borne by soothsayers, heralds, and speakers in the assembly); moreover, he adds that the goddesses inflate him with divine speech.79 Hesiod is clearly aware of the novelty of his self-representative intrusion, which he deceptively downplays as irrelevant.80 Iliad 6.180; φῦλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων [phyl’ anthrōpōn], tribes of humans, Iliad 14.361, Odyssey 3.282, 7.307, 15.409; φῦλα γυναικῶν [phyla gynaikōn], tribe of women, Iliad 9.130, 9.272. 72   τῆς γὰρ ὀλώιόν ἐστι γένος καὶ φῦλα γυναικῶν [tēs gar olōion esti genos kai phyla gynaikōn]. In Hesiod, Theogony 591. 73   In Hesiod, Works and Days 176. 74   See Homer, Odyssey 8.72–86. 75   Cervantes is to masterly push further this wondrous narrative circularity with the reinsertion in the Don Quixote of the previous part of the narration as the material of a printed book, which some of the characters have read. In Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote 2.3. 76   This reciprocal compenetration of the paths of narrator and narration is a universal literary device: for example, the supposed author of the Indian poem उत्तरकाण्ड [Uttarakāṇḍa], Valmiki, is also a character of the story, and his pupils greet Rāmā with a narration from the poem Rāmāyaṇa, of which the Uttarakāṇḍa itself is the epilogue. See also in the भक्तमाल [Bhaktamal] the tale of the liberation of the writer Tulsidās by an army of monkeys, which are the characters of one of his narrations. 77   τόνδε δέ με πρώτιστα θεαὶ πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπον [tonde de me prōtista theai pros mython eeipon]. In Hesiod, Theogony 24, my italics. 78   Ibid., 30. 79   αὐδὴν θέσπιν [audēn thespin]. Ibid., 31–32. 80   Ibid., 35.

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Only later on, in the Works and Days, Hesiod is to work extensively with his new device of first-person narration. In the Theogony, he rather breaks new ground in the way he puts into verse the birth of the gods, which is the literal sense of the poem’s title: he arranges in a complex genealogical narration81 the Homeric deities, to whom he also adds a further series of divine persons. One of these novel characters is the goddess Μνημοσύνη [Mnēmosyne], who personifies the homonym Homeric notion of μνημοσύνη82 [mnēmosyne], remembrance: Hesiod recalls that as a result of nine nights of sex with Zeus, the goddess conceives nine divine daughters, the Muses indeed.83 In Greek, also the names of the daughters of Mnemosyne speak by themselves: ‘Celebrator, and Well-pleasing, and Luxuriator, and Singer-and-Dancer, / and Delighting in Dancing, and Enrapturer, and Many-hymning, and Heavenly, / and Beautiful-voiced.’84 Hesiod replicates Homer’s technique of personification, which, for example, turns the din of battle into a warring participant in Hector’s deadly and vociferous offensive, namely, Κυδοιμός85 [Kydoimos]. Homer also presents Φόβος86 [Phobos], who personifies panic flight, as the son of the god Ares. In a similar way, Hesiod produces plenty of divine personifications of notions, which he genealogically links together: we may well read his lines as composing a sort of encyclopaedia in the form of a family tree. The Bœotian writer modifies and extends the range of application of Homeric narrative devices, such as genealogies and enumerations: for Hesiod, genealogies are no longer a means to introduce the warrior to both friends and enemies by situating him within a genos,87 and enumerations are no longer, 81   Havelock claims that in the Theogony ‘semantically, one vital step is taken which points forward to the future substitution of a vocabulary of the abstract. (. . .) The genos is on the way to becoming the “genus” or class.’ in Havelock, Preface to Plato, 296–297. 82   In Homer, the word ‘mnēmosyne’ is a hapax (Iliad 8.181), and there is no goddess Mnēmosyne, who only appears in the Hymn to Hermes (429), which is most probably written well after Hesiod. See Athanassios Vergados, The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Introduction, Text and Commentary (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). 83  Homer sparingly names the Muse in the singular: the Muses are also mentioned in the plural, first in the proem of the Iliad (1.604), and then as ‘nine Muses’ at the very end of the Homeric epic, in the last book of the Odyssey (24.60). 84   Κλειώ τ᾽ Εὐτέρπη τε Θάλειά τε Μελπομένη τε / Τερψιχόρη τ᾽ Ἐρατώ τε Πολύμνιά τ᾽ Οὐρανίη τε / Καλλιόπη θ᾽ (. . .) [Kleiō t᾽ Euterpē te Thaleia te Melpomenē te / Terpsichorē t᾽ Eratō te Polymnia t᾽ Ouraniē te / Kalliopē th᾽ (. . .)], Kleio, and Euterpe, and Thaleia, and Melpomene, / and Terpsichore, and Erato, and Polyhymnia, and Urania, / and Calliope (. . .). In Hesiod, Theogony 77–79. 85  Homer, Iliad 5.593. 86   Ibid., 13.299. 87   See, for example, the mutual introduction of Glaucus and Diomede right on the battlefield. Ibid., 6.119–236.

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as in the case of the Homeric Catalogue of Ships,88 an adaptation of a kingly directive to muster for war. In the words of Havelock, ‘a vocabulary of the semiabstract grows out of epic concreteness, not by substituting new words for old, but by altering the syntax in which the old words are found.’89 Moreover, Hesiod’s theopoiēsis,90 as it were, not only produces divine personifications of pre-existing notions, such as, for example, the three Ὥραι [Hōrai], Hours, who in Homer are never mentioned individually: Εὐνομίη [Eunomiē], (Good) Order, Δίκη [Dikē], Justice, and Εἰρήνη [Eirēnē], Peace.91 Hesiod also derives the names of new gods and goddesses from epithets that describes their features, as in the case of the Muses: from our retrospective view, this operation appears to open the way for later productive interventions, such as Parmenides’ and Plato’s nominalizations. The quarry from which is extracted the material for these new constructions is, of course, the Homeric epic: as Xenophanes remarks, ‘since from the beginning all have learned according to Homer.’92 Xenophanes is probably also the first to reject this common horizon: several other rejections are then to follow, and defensive reactions too. However, both attacks and defences focus on Homeric supposed excesses, which benevolent readers recover through interpretive transpositions. Many an actor of the celebrated Greek enlightenment, to which we traditionally ascribe the birth of philosophy and science, appear then to be challenged by the openness of Homeric narrations.93 A telling example is the locus classicus of the third line of the Odyssey: πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω94 [pollōn d’ anthrōpōn iden astea kai noon egnō], of many people he [Odysseus] saw the cities and came to know minds and ways. Similarly to other translators,95 here I rendered the singular noun noon with a hendiadys in   Ibid., 2.494-759.  Havelock, Preface to Plato, 298. 90   The word θεοποίησις [theopoiēsis], that is, deification or, more literally, production of god is a later Christian coin (possibly as Athanasius’ anti-Arian theoretical tool). 91   See Hesiod, Theogony 902. 92   ἐξ ἀρχῆς καθ’ Ὅμηρον ἐπεὶ μeμαθήκασι πάντες [ex arkhēs kath’ Homēron epei memathēkasi pantes]. In Xenophanes, DK 21 B10. 93   We may notice that the openness of the Homeric narration is matched by the morphological variety of its text: as van der Valk observes, ‘[t]he language of Homer, as it has been handed down to us in the text, knows a greater variety of forms than Attic and shows us forms betraying a great freedom.’ In Marchinus van der Valk, Textual Criticism of the Odyssey (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1949), 69. 94  Homer, Odyssey 1.3. The word noos is deployed here in its singular accusative form noon. 95   See, for example, Homer, Homer’s Odyssey, L. Bigge-Wither trans. (Oxford: J. Parker and Co., 1869); Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, Earl of Carnarvon trans. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886); Homer, The Odyssey, Samuel Butler trans. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1900). 88 89

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the plural, namely, ‘minds and ways,’ in order to express the implied variety of world-views that corresponds to the variety of peoples and places.96 We previously met several attempts, from Xenophanes on, to force this variety within the bottleneck of a reduction to unity, which, in this case, is well exemplified by Parmenides’ notion of noein. In the third century BCE, the semantic singularization of the Homeric word noon is even supported by a morphological transformation in the hands of the grammar zealot Zenodotus,97 who is in charge of the library of Alexandria: Zenodotus understands the correct Ionic term noon as a corrupted version of the Attic word nomon,98 law, and his rectified version lives enough to be misused by Schmitt.99 Schwyzer relates the word noos to the root snu, ‘to sniff’100: whilst this possibly previous olfactory sense is superseded in time first by a visual and then by a cognitive one, von Fritz points out that we still speak of ‘smelling a danger.’101 Moreover, he underlines that Nestor concludes his instructions for the battle with this final remark: ‘Thus men of old too walls and cities laid waste, / by having this voos and thymos in breast.’102 Here the words voos and thymos, regardless of their rendering in English, clearly express a specific disposition, which varies with circumstances also within the same person. Yet, a more threatening variety affects even divine decisions over alternative ways of action: Zeus himself is still awake late at night as he μερμήριζε κατὰ φρένα103 [mermērize kata phrena], is in doubt in his phrenes about how

 96   As Darcus notices, ‘the plural of νόος is not found.’ In Shirley M. Darcus, ‘How a Person relates to νόος in Homer, Hesiod, and the Greek Lyric Poets,’ in Glotta 58, 1/2 (1980), 33–44, 33.  97 Zenodotus also extensively bowdlerizes the Homeric text, probably whenever he deems a passage ἀπρεπὲς [aprepes], improper: for example, van der Valk recalls, among other occurrences, Zenodotus’ textual manipulations ‘for reasons of decency’ of Iliad 3.422, 6.135, and 14.437. In Marchinus van der Valk, Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad (Leiden: Brill, 1964), vol. 2, 14.  98  Homerus, Odyssea, Martin West ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 1.  99   See Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Köln: Greven, 1950). 100  See Eduard Schwyzer ‘Beiträge zur griechischen Wortforschung,’ in Festschrift für Paul Kretschmer: Beiträge zur griechischen und lateinischen Sprachforschung (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1926), 244–251, 247 ff. 101   Kurt von Fritz, ‘ΝΟΟΣ and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems,’ in Classical Philology, vol. 38, n. 2 (Apr. 1943), 79–93, 93. 102   ὧδε καὶ οἱ πρότεροι πόλεας καὶ τείχε᾽ ἐπόρθεον hōde kai hoi proteroi poleas kai teikhe᾽ eportheon τόνδε νόον καὶ θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἔχοντες. tonde noon kai thymon eni stēthessin ekhontes. In Homer, Iliad 4.308–309. 103   Ibid., 2.3. See also supra, note chapter 7, note 137.

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to honour Achilles, until a course of action οἱ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀρίστη φαίνετο104 [hoi kata thymon aristē phaineto] looks to him in his thymos as the best one. The same verb mermērizō105 describes the similar anxious uncertainty that the furious Achilles experiences during the previous day, when he is torn between the choice of either killing the Greek commander-in-chief Agamemnon or restraining his own thymos. Right when he is drawing his great sword from its sheath, the goddess Athena grabs him by the hair, and she orders him to taint Agamemnon just with words: Achilles obeys, ‘for it is better so.’106 Between the extreme cases of Zeus’ autonomous choice and Athena’s decisive injunction to Achilles, stands Diomedes’ divinely induced decision. Threatened by Zeus’ lightning, the warrior faces a difficult choice between fight and flight, as he is personally addressed and insulted by Hector107: τρὶς μὲν μερμήριξε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν, τρὶς δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἀπ᾽ Ἰδαίων ὀρέων κτύπε μητίετα Ζεὺς σῆμα τιθεὶς Τρώεσσι μάχης ἑτεραλκέα νίκην.

tris men mermērixe kata phrena kai kata thymon, tris d᾽ ar᾽ ap᾽ Idaiōn oreōn ktype mētieta Zeus sēma titheis Trōessi makhēs heteralkea nikēn.

thrice [Diomedes] wavers in phrenes and thymos, thrice Zeus the wise thunders from mountainous Ida, giving sign that the victory swings to the Trojans.

Diomedes eventually bows to Zeus’ warning and gets to safety: whilst autonomous decision is a godly prerogative, for Diomedes divine hints may be enough. More often, the gods intervene into human affairs with their undisputable verbal commands. Moreover, divine interventions may be for the better, but also for the worse: for example, Athena pushes Hector to his death by appearing to him in the shape of his brother Deiphobus.108

104   Ibid., 2.5. In the Odyssey, Odysseus describes his own decision with the same words (apart from the first-person pronoun moi): ἥδε δέ μοι κατὰ θυμὸν ἀρίστη φαίνετο βουλή [hēde de moi kata thymon aristē phaineto boulē]. In Homer, Odyssey 9.318. 105   The verb mermērizō is rarely used after the Homeric epic. 106   ὧς γὰρ ἄμεινον [hōs gar ameinon]. In Homer, Iliad 1.217. Ameinos is the comparative form of agathos, good: Zeus’s choice is rather aristē, the best, as aristos is the superlative form of agathos, good. 107   Ibid., 8.169–171. Here I translated mermērixe, which is the third person singular of the aorist indicative active of the verb mermērizō, as ‘wavers’ for euphonic reasons. 108   Ibid., 22.226–330.

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However, Homeric characters are not only subjected to divine interference: a closer interpellation comes from the inside, as it were. In the Iliad, one such interpellation is iterated as a formula, which, as we may expect from an oral narration, traverses characters and circumstances. We may say that the hero expresses his surprise for the inner emergence of some unforeseen alternative with the question: ‘but why does my beloved thymos discuss these things with me?’109 These same words repeat to themselves and to others Odysseus, Menelaus, Agenor, Hector, and Achilles.110 From a modern perspective, the previous Homeric sentence shows a disconcerting distance between the character, as rendered by the personal pronoun ‘me’ (moi111), and his thymos. The gap between the (grammatical) character and his inner actions is felt by modern interpreters as a lack: in Snell’s telling words, ‘there is in Homer no genuine reflexion, no dialogue of the soul with itself,’112 as if reflection as a merely virtual dialogue and its virtually split subject could appear before their Platonic invention. The fact is that Homeric characters are not affected by that which we may call Plato’s animism,113 namely, the reduction of each Platonic character to her psykhē, which is then to be rendered in Latin as anima. Homeric narrations show that before the Platonic reduction, a real inner dialogue may occur and consider different and non-hierarchized options. These options are expressed with names that we tend to understand, after Plato, as inner agents or functions: thymos, noos, phrenes, kēr, ētor, menos, and kradiē. Yet, still in the Odyssey, Odysseus’ use of the word thymos clearly exceeds its singularization: ἕτερος δέ με θυμὸς ἔρυκεν114 [heteros de me thymos eryken], another thymos restrained me. We may well translate the previous sentence as ‘another consideration restrained me,’ because in this case Odysseus is probably using the epithet heteros, that is, other of two, to describe as an alternative (of two) thymos 109   ἀλλὰ τί ἤ μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός; [alla ti ē moi tauta philos dielexato thymos?] Ibid., 22.385. 110   Ibid., 11.407, 17.97, 21.562, 22.122, and 22.385 respectively. 111   The term moi is the singular dative form of the pronoun ἐγώ [egō], I. 112  Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 19. 113   By the irony of history, whilst the word ‘animism’ appears in modern times as a classical echo in the work of Stahl, it is then projected as a demoting category on both the European outside (by Tylor as an anthropological notion, upon so-called primitive populations), and its inside (as the notion of a psychological stage by Freud and Piaget). See Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871); Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker (Leipzig: Heller, 1913); Jean Piaget, La causalité physique chez l’enfant (Paris: Alcan, 1927). 114  Homer, Odyssey 9.302.

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the alternative way of action that results from his further consideration: in modern terms, Odysseus is not employing the word thymos to denote an inner faculty (or agent), but rather a specific outcome of the latter’s action. If it seems impossible to render at once these two senses of the term thymos, it is because we try to force them into an extraneous order of language, which constructs both the inner agent and the effects of its action as things that are. On the contrary, the Homeric world is action-oriented: the word thymos only appears as a verbal evocation of an action. Thymos, noos, phrenes, kēr, ētor, menos, and kradiē are evidence of processes that are taking place, and which these words’ audible (visible, for us readers) quality allows to share beyond each character’s inner sphere. Homeric recitations construct a participatory setting, in which the narration of the events is enriched with the verbal rendering of the inner experience of the characters: inasmuch as (reading) audience, we gain access to this experience in the way the narrator imagines it unfolds for the characters themselves. According to Auerbach, the fundamental impulse of this narrator is not only ‘to present the [external] phenomena wellarticulated, tangible and viable and well-determined in all their spatial and temporal relations. The situation is not different with inner processes: none of their parts must remain concealed or undescribed.’115 While these inner processes are not directly shared with the other characters, their generally unobstructed expression emerges through the character’s actions: Odysseus’s calculated behaviour is an exception to the general rule and a source of amazement.116 The outer sphere of action actually defines the character at once to himself and to the others: the grammatical subject, inasmuch as he is the agent of detectable outer actions, is the one who asks the thymos about its inner actions in the sentence that is shared by the five Homeric heroes.117 From our contemporary perspective, the gaze of the others may thus appear as the key to Homeric subjectivity: a character’s evaluation by the others, and her anticipation of this evaluation, may seem to be the guide to her behaviour. Nevertheless, this feedback (be it direct or just supposed) does not at all exhaust the field of interactions of the character herself: we may then attempt to grasp this plurality of interventions by understanding Homeric characters as relational bodies.   Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Bern: Francke, 1964), 8.  Odysseus’ typical epithets are πολυμήχανος [polymēkhanos], of many contrivances, and πολύτροπος [polytropos], of many ways (only in the Odyssey): both words have the sense of ‘versatile’ and ‘of many wiles.’ 117  See supra, pag. 175. 115 116

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We may first recall that already in the second century BCE, Aristarchus of Samothrace notices that his contemporary Greek word for ‘body,’ namely, sōma, in Homer only describes corpses.118 Though Aristarchus believes that the Homeric term demas, that is, bodily frame, describes the body tout court, Homeric narrations do very well without a general notion of the body: they instead recur to generic terms such as μέλεα119 [melea], γυῖα120 [guia], and ῥέθη [rhethē],121 all of which we may translate as ‘limbs.’ Homer’s attitude to what we would call physical body is thus not too different from his treatment of what we would call bodily psychological traits: there is neither a Homeric body nor a Homeric psyche in the sense of a unified and all-encompassing entity. Moreover, Homeric epic obviously knows nothing of Platonic, Christian, and modern dichotomies, and of their double lexicon of visible and invisible bodily features. A single sphere of action is enough for the Homeric character: the interface of this sphere with the others is not what the (grammatical) subject is, but rather what the (grammatical) subject does. It is this sphere of action that is emphasized by adding to the grammatical subject the word autos. For example, Agamemnon, whilst speaking in front of Achilles and the assembled Greeks, admits that his phrenes were blinded when he himself (autos122) took away from Achilles the latter’s war booty, namely, the princess Briseis. This is an important admission, as the act of Agamemnon triggers Achilles’ wrath, and thus determines the subsequent unfavourable (for the Greeks) course of the events. Nonetheless, whilst Agamemnon does not deny that he made perform the baleful action, he does not accept responsibility for it, as he publicly declares: ‘I am not the cause (aitios), / but Zeus and the Moira and the Erinys walking in darkness.’123 Here, Agamemnon is not simply deflecting his accountability, but he is rather describing a wider causality, as it were: Zeus, Moira, and the Erinys made the goddess Ate enter his relational body and blind his phrenes.124   Karl Lehrs, De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882), 86.   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 7.131. 120   See, for example, ibid., 3.34. 121   See, for example, ibid., 16.856. 122   Ibid., 19.89. 123   ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὐκ αἴτιός εἰμι, / ἀλλὰ Ζεὺς καὶ Μοῖρα καὶ ἠεροφοῖτις Ἐρινύς [egō d᾽ ouk aitios eimi, / alla Zeus kai Moira kai ēerophoitis Erinys]. Ibid., 19.86–87. 124   In a similar way, Havelock recalls how in Iliad 12.17–33 a long-term phenomenon of natural erosion is recast as a god-driven event. In Eric Havelock, ‘Pre-literacy and the Pre-Socratics,’ in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 13 (1982), 44–67, 48–49. 118

119

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This is because in the Homeric world—as Fränkel writes—‘[t]he person has no impenetrable membrane and a God is not at all something alien. Forces freely enter a human being.’125 ‘That which he [sic] experiences—Otto observes—is not a property of his soul, anchored in profound isolation or in a soul-related formless beyond, but a portion of the world.’126 The boundary of the relational body is thus not only porous to gods, but also to other humans and things. For example, Diomedes’ concern for his reputation makes Hector enter his relational body. Diomedes depicts an event to come, which we may understand as a virtual memory of the future: ‘Hector at some time will say, telling the gathered Trojans, / has reached the ships the Tydides [Diomedes himself], by me put to flight.’127 Then Diomedes, who can witness the nightmarish scene only inasmuch as it is construed within his own relational body, utters in anguish: ‘at that time, let the wide earth gape for me.’128 This sudden invasion of Diomedes’ relational body by people and scenarios is not surprising, as we saw that relational bodies of both gods and humans are put under stress by the choice between alternative ways of action: in these circumstances, only immortals and exceptional mortals can do without help. We may illustrate the effect of uncertainty with a physical metaphor: the lowering pressure of the void of direction may suck in the relational body a congeries of both helpers and disruptors. At the same time, inner instability activates inner processes too, so that, as we saw, the thymos may directly interpellate its bearer. However, inner processes are not only activated by anxiety: in the Odyssey, Odysseus recalls that after he and his companions successfully blind and escape Polyphemus, his fellows are not able to prevail upon his μεγαλήτορα θυμόν129 [megalētora thymon], literally, big-ētor-ed thymos. It is nearly impossible to render in English the latter phrase, which combines two markers of inner processes, namely, ētor and thymos, as an epithet and a noun: if we rely on physical and psychological references in our contemporary language, we may obtain something like ‘great-hearted heart.’   Hermann Fränkel, Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968), 168.   Walter Friedrich Otto, Die Götter Griechenlands. Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes (Bonn, Friedrich Cohen, 1929), 228. 127   Ἕκτωρ γάρ ποτε φήσει ἐνὶ Τρώεσσ᾽ ἀγορεύων: Hektōr gar pote phēsei eni Trōess᾽ agoreuōn: Τυδεΐδης ὑπ᾽ ἐμεῖο φοβεύμενος ἵκετο νῆας. Tydeidēs hyp᾽ emeio phobeumenos hiketo nēas. In Homer, Iliad 8.148-149. 128   Ibid., 8.150. 129   In Homer, Odyssey 9.500. 125

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In the Iliad, a hero’s great-hearted thymos impersonates his magnanimity, which may either support him or push him to act less considerately130: in the latter case, an excess of pride, which in modern terms we would call selfinflation, may affect the behaviour of characters such as Agamemnon and Achilles.131 In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ likewise rash disclosure of his real identity to Polyphemus exposes him and his companions to the revenge of the Cyclops and of his father, the mighty god Poseidon. However, whilst a divine order may drive out of the impasse a puzzled character, gods in general can be understood neither just as ‘supermen (. . .) put there to supply the need,’132 nor simply as ‘what we now call hallucinations,’133 as result of the stress of decision-making. These interpretations, though interesting, construct Homeric gods and goddesses as replacements in advance of later categories. We may certainly accept that a godly intervention allows a Homeric character to imagine another course of action, beyond the behavioural patterns already at hand: this intervention may be then understood as a device to produce novelty. Yet, such a dynamic is at work in the imaginative evocation of any character, be she divine or human, inasmuch as the imaginative effort is part of the possibly most flexible tool of an oral culture, namely, the narrativization of realities. Such imaginative effort is surely no less refined than ours: it is different. This difference is already clearly detectable in late Antiquity: for example, we may compare the immediate divine interference as experienced by Homeric characters with the mediate effect of the written word of god on Augustine during his crisis in the Milanese garden.134 Apparently, in both cases the divine catalyses a decisive reaction. Yet, whilst the oral injunction of the Homeric goddess or god prescribes a course of action to be followed, the inspired reading of the scriptural passage suddenly eases Augustine from his uncertainty about alternative constructions of reality: Augustine’s anxiety no longer directly concerns his actions, but his choice between competing beliefs, because, in his view, only belief can motivate and validate his actions. 130   In the Iliad, the expression is associated with an inner dialogue of Odysseus at 11.403, Menelaus at 17.90, Achilles at 18.5, 20.344, and 21.54, Agenor at 21.552, and Hector at 22.98. 131   In the Iliad, an excess of pride is claimed to have overwhelmed the great-hearted thymos of Agamemnon at 9.109, and of Achilles at 9.255, 9.629, and 9.675. 132   Havelock, ‘Pre-literacy and the Pre-Socratics,’ 49. 133   Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 74. 134  See supra, pag. 109.

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Augustine inherits this theoretical and existential framework as a Plotinic and then Christian recasting of Platonic doctrines: in turn, it is probably not by chance that Plato prioritizes principles over actions in his political blueprint Republic, in which he also rekindles Xenophanes’ attack on Homeric poetry. Havelock convincingly shows that Plato’s censure of Homer is part of his construction of an alternative παιδεία [paideia], that is, education: Plato’s new principle-based approach is meant to replace the embodied and participatory residues of traditional Homeric oral recitations.135 This move results in a series of theoretical bottlenecks, which include the reduction of the characters of the Platonic dialogues to their hierarchically ordered psykhē. In turn, we saw that the Platonic psykhē is the culmination of centuries-long transformations of Homeric notions, and of their commitment to writing. Writing makes emerge the author’s reflexive duplication, which even allows Hesiod to take position as a literary character from within his text: this necessarily unbalanced, and thus productive relation is then to further thrive in Greek literature, and in literatures to come. Yet, we also saw that in the hands of Plato reflexive devices—such as the term autos—become fundamental tools for the construction of his new notions: Plato even turns the very word autos into a notion, namely, auto to auto, the Self itself. Within this new inner sphere, Platonic self-reflexivity replaces with a merely virtual dialogue the actual dialogue between the multifarious Homeric inner processes. As Adkins remarks, ‘it is not the fragmentation of the Homeric personality, but the development in other cultures of the ego-centred personality, that requires explanation.’136 We may observe that probably only from the perspective of an ego-centred culture the inner multiplicity of Homeric characters appears as a kind of fragmentation. However, I hope to have produced at least an illustration not only of the osmotic multiplicity of Homeric characters, but also of the Platonic text as the main contributor to the construction of our ego-centred personality: I recalled that such a construction required language tools, which may well be understood as the first technologies of the self. In previous chapters, I also traced some possibly fundamental steps in the development of these and other technologies of the self: I went through them in the reverse chronological order, so as to better show that they are the effect of chance or, if one likes to play with abstractions in Platonic fashion, history.

  See Havelock, Preface to Plato.   Arthur William Hope Adkins, From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 44. 135 136

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I will now come back where we started our retrograde path, namely, modern times. Yet, this time I will mostly search the European text for theoretical contributions that exceed the reductionism of Platonic individuation and its developments: such an exploration will follow the chronological order because it is meant not only to map relevant attempts to bypass the technologies of the self, but also to connect these attempts in a historical narrative, which may help to provincialize both the technologies of the self and their products. It may be objected that such a decentring move is an unreasonable task. In this case, we may consider that just half a century ago the fading away of man ‘as a face of sand at the edge of the sea,’137—as confidently predicted by Foucault—seemed utterly impossible too: yet, nowadays in the European text the waves of history no longer threaten man but his human replacement. We may perhaps be likewise confident that our digging into ‘this deep history of the Same’138 of which l’homme, that is, man, was but a recent result, will accelerate the displacement of at least the youngest offshoot of such history, namely, the neoliberal individual.

137  ‘[C]omme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable.’ In Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 398. 138  ‘[C]ette profonde histoire du Même.’ Ibid.

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Chapter Nine

Not Just Autos The Reinvention of Abundance

Our new path starts right when Leibniz proposes to erase from legal literature Gaius’ tripartition of person, thing, and action, and to replace it with the dichotomy of subject and object.1 The new legal subject carries the legacy of her Platonic identification with her psykhē: yet, Leibniz also somewhat follows Aristotle, who considers psykhē as the ousia (or being-something) and the form of each living being, that is, its principle of unity and its final cause. Leibniz looks for a word that may express this sense of unity in German language, and he tries first the term Einigkeit,2 and then Einheit: but it is only when he writes a synthesis of his thought in French that he finds the term Monade,3 that is, Monad. Leibniz specifies that Monads are ‘the veritable Atoms of nature, and in a word, the Elements of things.’4 These atoms, unlike the elements of classical and early modern atomism, are different from each other: in Leibniz’s terms, ‘[t]here are no two indiscernible Individuals.’5 In turn, ‘the body belongs to a  See supra, pag. 131.  Leibniz dictates to his amanuensis the word Einigkeiten, unities, and he then adds the term Einheiten as its possible substitute in a note in the 1696 paper that the copyist entitles Leibnitii lene iudicium de Fr. Mercurii Helmontii doctrinis, Leibniz’s gentle opinion about the doctrines of Francis Mercury van Helmont (389 Niederslichsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover). In Allison P. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), 187. 3  Leibniz, La Monadologie (1714), in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 705-712, 705. The word μονάδος [monados], genitive form of monas, is used by Plato with the sense of ‘unity’ in Phaedo 101c; there is instead probably no direct link between Leibniz’s notion of monad and Giordano Bruno’s 1591 De Monade, Numero et Figura. 4  ‘[L]es véritables Atomes de la Nature et en un mot les Elémens des choses.’ In Leibniz, Monadologie, in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 705. 5  ‘II n’y a point deux Individus indiscernables.’ In Leibniz, Fourth letter to Clarke, in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 755–758, 755. Leibniz’s indiscernibles make redundant the medieval notion of haecitas, i.e. thisness, which Duns Scotus uses in the sense of the individual’s individuality, and 1 2

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Monad, which is its entelechy6 or Soul: it makes with the entelechy that which may be called a living being, and with the soul that which is called an animal.’7 However, Leibniz moves away from Aristotelian constructions when he specifies that ‘Monads have no windows, through which something could enter or exit.’8 This is possibly the most extreme form of closure of an individuated entity, insofar as its external boundary is absolutely impenetrable: nevertheless, each monad has a direct optical relation9 with its outside, as all animal monads or ‘souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of creatures,’10 and the human monads or ‘minds (esprits) are also images of the Deity itself, or of the very Author of nature.’11 Apart from this reflection, there is no other relation between a monad and a body: those which appear as actions by monads on bodies (and vice versa) are actually concerted parallel activities that result from god’s ‘pre-established harmony’12 between the two independent spheres of monads and bodies.13

which in its posthumous version haecceitas will be referred to as Scotus’ principle of individuation. In Duns Scotus, Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, Libri VI–IX, G. Etzkorn, R. Andrews, G. Gál, R. Green, F. Kelly, G. Marcil, T. Noone, and R. Wood eds. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute Press, 1997), 240, 278 (7.13.61, 7.13.176).  6  Aristotle invents the word ἐντελέχεια [entelekheia], which we translate as ‘entelechy,’ to define a completely realized potentiality: the sense of the term entelekheia thus converges towards that of energeia: see Aristotle, Met. 9.1047a.  7  ‘Le corps appartenant à une Monade, qui en est l’Entéléchie ou l’ame, constitue avec l’Entéléchie ce qu’on peut appeler un vivant, et avec l’ame ce qu’on appelle un animal.’ In Leibniz, Monadologie, in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 710.  8  ‘Les Monades n’ont point de fenètres, par lesquelles quelque chose y puisse entrer ou sortir.’ Ibid., 705.  9   Despite the emergence of a corpuscular theory of light, early modern optics is mostly a geometrical construction, which is not too far from that which is put to rhetorical use by Plato. 10  [L]es ames en général sont des miroirs vivans ou images de l’univers des créatures.’ In Leibniz, Monadologie, in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 712. 11  [L]es esprits sont encore des images de la Divinité même, ou de l’auteur même de la nature.’ Ibid. 12  ‘Harmonie préétablie.’ Ibid., 711. 13  ‘Car entant que l’âme a de la perfection, et des pensées distinctes, Dieu a accommodé le corps à l’âme, et a fait par avance que le corps est poussé à exécuter ses ordres: et entant que l’âme est imparfaite, et que ses perceptions sont confuses, Dieu a accommodé l’âme au corps, en sorte que l’âme se laisse incliner par les passions qui naissent des représentations corporelles: ce qui fait le même effet, et la même apparence, que si l’un dépendoit de l’autre immédiatement, et par le moyen d’une influence physique.’ For inasmuch as the soul has perfection, and distinct thoughts, God has accommodated the body to the soul, and has established in advance that the body is urged to execute its orders: and inasmuch as the soul is imperfect, and its perceptions are confused, God has accommodated the soul to the body, so that the soul is inclined by the passions which are originated from bodily representations: that which makes the same effect, and the same appearance, as if the one depended on the other immediately, and by means of physical influence. In Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée, in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 521.

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Yet, within this predetermined settlement, a surprising proliferation takes place14: 67. Chaque portion de la matière peut être conçue, comme un jardin plein de plantes, et comme un étang plein de poissons. Mais chaque rameau de la plante, chaque membre de l’animal, chaque goutte de ses humeurs est encore un tel jardin, ou un tel étang. (. . .) Car tous les corps sont dans un flux perpétuel comme des rivières; et des parties y entrent et en sortent continuellement.

67. Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But each bought of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humours is still [another] such garden, or [another] such pond. (. . .) Because all bodies are in perpetual flux just like rivers; and some parts enter and leave them continuously.

Leibniz’s ichthyic image seems to unfold the circular relation between fish and sea in Catherine of Siena’s metaphor,15 and to project it as a linear relation of inclusion into the microcosm, as a veritable anticipation of fractal geometry. However, it is rather his Heraclitean16 body in flux that is soon to be set free from both divine and human control by Hume. Hume is ready to accept that someone ‘may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself. (. . .) But setting aside metaphysicians of this kind,’17 he sardonically adds, human beings ‘are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.’18 According to Hume, perceptions are thus the stuff we are made of: for sure, they are the leitmotiv of his Treatise, as just in its first book they are evoked in writing 271 times. Perhaps, it may be useful to recall that though perceptions first enter the English corpus in 1398 as the ‘percepcioun of God,’19 only 14  Leibniz, Monadologie, in id., Opera Philosophica, vol. 2, 710–711. Here I kept the text format of the 1714 manuscript, though I did not include the strikethrough text. 15  See supra, pag. 82. 16   See Heraclitus DK 22 B12 and B49a. 17   David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: John Noon, 1739), vol. 1, 439. 18   Ibid. 19   ‘Denys seiþ þat it nediþ [þat] þe ouer aungels alwey teche and lede þe neþir aungelis, þat þey mowe be knowinge, to þe bischinynge and illuminacioun, adduccioun and comunicacioun, induccioun, conuersioun, cognicoun, and percepcioun of God.’ In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, J. Trevisa tr., f. 14rb-14va, in id, On the Properties of Things, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 69.

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in 1611 Cotgrave’s Dictionarie20 translates the French term Perception as ‘A perception,’ with our familiar senses of ‘a perceiuing, apprehension, understanding’: in 1689, Locke declares perception ‘the inlet of all Knowledge.’21 Similarly to Aristotle, Locke supposes that ‘in bare naked Perception, the Mind is, for the most part, only passive,’22 and thus he accepts the mind’s porosity, which Leibniz strives to seal with his impermeable monad: on the contrary, according to Locke, what the mind perceives, ‘it cannot avoid perceiving.’23 Nevertheless, if we rephrase both Locke’s statement and Leibniz’s notion of reflection in the terms of relational bodies, the difference between their stances becomes less an opposition than a complementarity: in the Hobbesian world where absolute individuality is construed as the other side of the coin of absolute totality, Locke’s isolated perception is the reverse side of Leibniz’s monadic reflection of the universe and god. The Lockean relational body lets the world penetrate itself on the scale of individual perception, and the Leibnizian relational body lets the reflection of the world permeate itself as the double totality of creation and creator: however, in both cases, it is as if the relational body did not exert any selective intervention. In other words, whether the relational body is pierced by local stimuli or global arrangements, it appears to be in denial of the specific features of its osmotic relation with the world. As early modern writers who keep enacting the Aristotelian dichotomy of activity and passivity, Locke and Leibniz reduce the porosity of the relational body to its predisposition to be acted upon by specific stimuluses and by the image of totality respectively. In the case of Locke, the alleged passivity of perception is counterbalanced by the likewise alleged activity of consciousness. We saw that for Locke, this consciousness is the seat of personal identity as maintained by the memory of oneself24: yet, according to Hume, memory rather produces this personal identity as a relation of resemblance among perceptions.25 Hume revives (without quoting them) Platonic Diotima’s and Plutarch’s arguments on the transformation of bodies and objects,26 in order to show that the identity of things, plants, 20  Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionaire of the French and English Tongves (London: Adam Aslip, 1611), sign. Oooÿv. 21  Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, 64. 22   Ibid., 61. 23   Ibid. 24  See supra, pag. 45. 25   ‘[T]he memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production, by producing the relation of resemblance among the perceptions. The case is the same whether we consider ourselves or others.’ In Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, 453. 26   For the Platonic Diotima, see supra, pag. 149; for Plutarch, see infra, pag. 227.

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and animals does not rely on the continuous presence of the same material elements. He then applies this approach to human individual identity: I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity.27

This simile brings back into the inner dimension a long-forgotten openness: in later Kantian terms,28 we may say that Hume not only dismisses any ultimate heteronomous control over the soul, but also any autonomous continuity of self-direction, given the unceasing turnover of the soul’s inner components and rules. Hume is painfully aware of the radicality of his theoretical position, as he himself makes clear in the heartfelt conclusion to the first book of the Treatise, right after his considerations on identity. He openly declares: ‘I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy,’29 because, as he admits, ‘I have expos’d myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians.’30 But what is worse is that unlike dogmatic thinkers, Hume cannot put forth an ultimate justification for his own stance: ‘After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou’d assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they appear to me.’31 For sure, it strongly appears to Hume that ‘when we say we desire to know the ultimate and operating principle, as something, which resides in the external object, we either contradict ourselves, or talk without a meaning.’32 As 27   Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, 453–454. Hume’s powerful image seems to conflate in advance Reid’s metaphor of the ‘rope made up of many slender filaments twisted together,’ and Nietzsche’s image of the self as a republic of masters. In Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1785), 690; for Nietzsche, see infra, pag. 200. 28   Kant recovers the Stoic notion of autonomy with his term Autonomie, on whose model he constructs the opposite notion of Heteronomie, heteronomy, by conjoining the Greek words heteros, other (of two), and nomos, law. In Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AA 4, 385–463, 433. 29  Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, 458. 30   Ibid., 459. 31   Ibid., 460. 32   Ibid., 463.

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this Humean consideration, if accepted, would undermine the early modern scientific and philosophical horizon,33 the existential toll of Hume’s intellectual isolation is ‘the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness’34: a ‘splenetic humour,’35 a ‘philosophical melancholy and delirium,’36 which only ‘nature herself’37 can cure. Luckily, Hume’s rising recognition joins nature in helping him to recover his good disposition,38 which not even his terminal cancer can eventually alter39: on the contrary, the propositions of his Treatise keep haunting Kant. It is not an overstatement to describe the Kantian critical project as a theoretical strategy to neutralize the virulence of Humean thought. In his Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics, Kant himself acknowledges the role of Hume in awakening him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’40: here the adjective ‘dogmatic’ plays a strategic role, as it allows Kant to position himself and his novel critical endeavour as a balanced middle ground between the extreme poles of scepticism and dogmatism.41 This rhetorical strategy mutatis mutandis harks back to Plato, whose character Socrates in the dialogue Theaetetus42 just apparently dismisses as ludicrous the middle path between the philosophical approaches of Heraclitus and Parmenides.43 33   As we saw, Hume’s contention would also undermine most post-Homeric theoretical constructions. 34  Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, 467. We may observe that Hume’s confession predates that of Christian Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, but only partially, as the Scottish writer’s persona shares the latter’s feeling of being sick, but not of being wicked. See infra, pag. 195. 35   Ibid., 468. 36   Ibid., 467. 37   Ibid. 38   In his autobiography, Hume recalls: ‘These symptoms of a rising reputation gave me encouragement, as I was ever more disposed to see the favourable than unfavourable side of things; a turn of mind which is more happy to possess, than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year.’ In David Hume, Life of David Hume Esq. Written by Himself [My Own Life] (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 15. 39   See the moving letter of Hume’s close friend Adam Smith to William Straham. Ibid., 37-62. 40  ‘Ich gestehe frei: die Erinnerung des David Hume war eben dasjenige, as mir vor vielen Jahren zuerst den dogmatischen Schlummer unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen im Felde der speculativen Philosophie eine ganz andre Richtung gab.’ I freely admit: it was the recollection of David Hume that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave an entirely different direction to my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy. In Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, AA 4, 253-383, 260. 41  ‘Beides [sceptisch Hoffnungslosigkeit oder dogmatisch Trotz] ist der Tod einer gesunden Philosophie.’ Either alternative [sceptical hopelessness or dogmatic stubbornness] is the death of a healthy philosophy. In Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787), AA 3, 282. 42   See Plato, Theaetetus 179d-181b. The Platonic Foreign guest follows a similar path in the Sophist, 237a on. 43   In the Theaetetus, the Platonic Socrates suggests to examine both Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ stances, and to use the one that seems more credible as a refuge from the other one: Kant similarly constructs his inquiry as a path, whose first but temporary step is the sceptical dismissal of dogmatism.

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Kant faces Hume’s construction of the soul as a bundle of perceptions by reinventing the unity of consciousness as a condition (Bedingung) that grants the potentiality (Möglichkeit) of understanding as ‘composition of the manifold in a cognition.’44 In other words, Kant turns the Aristotelian notion of specific potentiality into a generic condition of potentiality, which he locates not in knowable things, but in the knowing subject: this internalization45 of the source of objectivity as inner conditions of potentiality is meant to avoid the Humean considerations on external objects. Moreover, as Kant gives a reflexive sense to the term Apperception, which he understands as ‘consciousness of one’s own self,’46 he defines such a priori condition of possibility as ‘transcendental Unity of Apperception.’47 Here again, it is the adjective ‘transcendental’ (transscendentale) that marks this Kantian variation on the endlessly repeated Platonic theme of individuation: in Kant’s own words, ‘I believe that I recognize the substantial in me as transcendental subject.’48 As to the new sense of the late Scholastic term ‘transcendental,’49 Kant declares: ‘I call transcendental all knowledge that deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of knowing objects in general insofar as that way of knowing is to be possible a priori.’50 We may observe that the Kantian notion of transcendental produces a completely new space within the relational body, which potentially embraces the whole of reality as its own potentially legislated matter.51 Such a prodigious expansion occurs at the price of a radical depersonalization though, because 44  ‘Zusammensetzung des Mannigfaltigen in einer Erkenntniß.’ In Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), AA 4, 1-252, 88. 45   We may notice the similarity between Luther’s Augustinian retreat towards interiority and the Lutheran Pietist Kant’s gnoseological inner retreat. 46  ‘Das Bewußtsein seiner selbst (Apperception).’ In Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787), AA 3, 70. Leibniz uses the term apperception, apperception, in the wider sense of conscience, consciousness. In Leibniz, La Monadologie, 706. 47  ‘[T]ransscendentale Einheit der Apperception.’ In Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), AA 4, 82. This notion only appears in the two version of the first Critique, but not in Kant’s subsequent works. 48  ‘[Ich] glaube das Substantiale in mir als das transscendentale Subject zu erkennen.’ In Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787), AA 3, 278. 49   The Latin word transcendentalis appears in the plural neuter ablative form transcendentalibus in the last page of Wyclif’s De Materia et Forma (c1365). 50  ‘Ich nenne alle Erkenntniß transscendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnißart von Gegenständen, so fern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt.’ Ibid., 43. 51  ‘[D]ie Gesetze der Natur eigentlich im Verstande ihren Ursprung haben, und eben so wenig wie Raum und Zeit außer ihm angetroffen werden.’ The laws of nature properly have their origin in the understanding, and they are just as little to be encountered outside it as space and time are. From the note added by Kant on page 125 of the copy of the first edition of the first Critique. In Kant, AA 23, 26.

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Kant asks for something in return for this inflation: ‘Act as though the maxim of your action were to become, through your will, a universal law of nature.’52 The Kantian rescue of individual identity and objectivity by means of universalization is to have an extraordinary and enduring success: we may detect its pervasive effects in expressions as diverging as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1961 Eichmann’s declaration at his Jerusalem trial, where he claims to follow the version of Kant ‘for the household use of the little man.’53 At least in this case, one can’t help noticing a disquieting convergence between this version and ‘the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys.’54 Regardless of its later effects, the Kantian transcendental Unity of Apperception is soon subjected to the mocking critique of Hegel, together with the whole Kantian apparatus of pure reason. Hegel remarks: But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument [of knowledge] means nothing else than to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus to learn to swim before venturing into the water.55

Hegel does not dismiss altogether the Kantian attempt to give a general shape to human subjectivity though: he rather maintains that such a generalization cannot be cast as an ahistorical transcendental dimension, because human subjectivity comes to be as activity. Such a dynamic reconsideration of the subject bears for Hegel a wider philosophical sense, inasmuch as he understands ‘truth not so much as Substance but as Subject.’56 This living Substance, which Hegel identifies as Subject and

52  ‘[H]andle so, als ob die Maxime deiner Handlung durch deinen Willen zum allgemeinen Naturgesetze werden sollte.’ In Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AA 4, 421. 53   Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2nd ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 136. 54   Ibid., 137. 55  ‘Aber die Untersuchung des Erkennens kann nicht anders als erkennend geschehen; bei diesem sogenannten Werkzeuge heißt dasselbe untersuchen nichts anderes, als es erkennen. Erkennen wollen aber, ehe man erkenne, ist ebenso ungereimt als der weise Vorsatz jenes Scholastikus, schwimmen zu lernen, ehe er sich ins Wasser wage.’ In G.W.F Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1, in id., Werke, Band 8, 2 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), 54. Scholasticus is a fictional character traditionally ascribed to the Pythagorean Hierocles of Alexandria. 56  ‘[D]as Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern ebensosehr als Subjekt.’ In G.W.F Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in id., Werke 3, 2 Aufl., 23.

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Truth, is the Whole that ‘is its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and has its end as its beginning.’57 Here Hegel recuperates for his Subject the Aristotelian telos as ‘purposive activity’58: and he appears to hark back to Aristotle also when he pits against the modern logical formalism another formalism, which ceases to be external since ‘the form is the innate development of the concrete development itself.’59 More than that, Hegel pushes further Aristotelian constructions, inasmuch as he grounds activity not only on an inner telos, but also on a relocated notion of contradiction. We may recall that according to Aristotle, ‘[w]hat is most proper of beingsomething (ousia) appears to be that, while being numerically one and the same, it is capable of receiving contraries.’60 Aristotle only sets two limitations to this capability of the ousia: ‘it is impossible for the same quality at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation.’61 Moreover, he further remarks that ‘it is indeed impossible for anyone to suppose that the same thing is and is not, as some think Heraclitus says.’62 It is rather Hegel who claims the alleged Heraclitean compresence of being and not being, as he understands determinateness as not being the result of a relation to another, because ‘it has its own otherness in itself.’63 Determinateness, Hegel ironically remarks, ‘just where it fancies it is pursuing its own self-preservation and particular interest, is in fact doing the very opposite, is an activity that results in its own dissolution, and makes itself a moment of the whole.’64

57  ‘Es ist das Werden seiner selbst, der Kreis, der sein Ende als seinen Zweck voraussetzt und zum Anfange hat.’ Ibid., 11. 58  ‘[Z]weckmäßige Tun.’ Ibid., 26. 59  ‘[D]ie Form das einheimische Werden des konkreten Inhalts selbst ist.’ Ibid., 53. 60   Μάλιστα δὲ ἴδιον τῆς οὐσίας δοκεῖ εἶναι τὸ ταὐτὸν καὶ ἓν ἀριθμῷ ὂν τῶν ἐναντίων εἶναι δεκτικόν [Malista de idion tēs ousias dokei einai to tauton kai hen arithmō on tōn enantiōn einai dektikon]. In Aristotle, Categories 4a. 61   τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό [to gar auto hama hyparkhein te kai mē hyparkhein adynaton tō autō kai kata to auto]. In Aristotle, Met. 4.1005b. 62   ἀδύνατον γὰρ ὁντινοῦν ταὐτὸν ὑπολαμβάνειν εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι, καθάπερ τινὲς οἴονται λέγειν Ἡράκλειτον [adynaton gar hontinoun tauton hypolambanein einai kai mē einai, kathaper tines oiontai legein Hērakleiton]. Ibid. 63  [S]ie ihr Anderssein selbst an ihr hat. In German the word Bestimmtheit is feminine. In Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in id., Werke 3, 2 Aufl., 54. Hegel previously identifies his notion of Bestimmtheit, that is, determinateness, with the Aristotelian notion of horos, definition. Ibid., 17. 64  ‘[D]ie Bestimmtheit (. . .), daß es seine Selbsterhaltung und besonderes Interesse zu treiben vermeint, das Verkehrte, sich selbst auflösendes und zum Momente des Ganzen machendes Tun ist. Ibid., 53–54.

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More in general, the Hegelian Subject, both as ‘general Individual’65 and ‘particular Individual,’66 has in itself the principle of its self-transformation: yet, unlike Aristotle, Hegel constructs this principle not only as telos but also as inner contradiction. In other words, Hegel internalizes negation as the necessary counterpart of any positing activity, be it in fact or in thought: and by constructing negativity as inner otherness, Hegel produces a temporalization alternative to the temporalization upheld by Aristotle, when the latter rules out the contemporary presence of opposite predicates in the same beingsomething (ousia). The effect of the new Hegelian temporalization is a radically new ontology, which no longer relies on the Platonic and Aristotelian self-reflexivity as the seat of identity, because ‘the relation to itself is rather a self-splitting, or simply the very self-identity is inner difference.’67 Hegel’s construction of reflexivity may be understood as a speculative (and unwitting) deconstruction of the effects of Greek writing, and in particular, of the opportunity to match textual portions with backward scanning.68 Hegel’s refusal to conceive of the True as ‘an original or immediate unity as such’69 radically undermines any claim of the original and immediate unity of the subject. Nevertheless, Hegel’s pupil Stirner complains that such a dynamization of the subject comes at the price of the latter’s haunting by concepts: Concepts are to decide everywhere, concepts to regulate life, concepts to rule. This is the religious world, to which Hegel gave a systematic expression, bringing method into the nonsense and completing the conceptual precepts into a rounded, firmly-based dogmatic. Everything is sung according to concepts, and the real man, I, am compelled to live according to these conceptual laws.70

Stirner understands the Hegelian conceptual domination as a side-effect of a more general Lutheran strategy, which ‘tries to bring spirit into all things as far as possible, to recognize the holy spirit as an essence in everything, and  ‘[D]as allgemeine Individuum.’ Ibid., 31.  ‘[D]as besondere Individuum.’ Ibid., 32. 67  ‘[D]as Beziehen auf sich selbst ist vielmehr das Entzweien, oder eben jene Sichselbstgleichheit ist innerer Unterschied.’ Ibid., 132. 68  See supra, pag. 169. 69  ‘[E]ine ursprüngliche Einheit als solche oder unmittelbare als solche. In Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in id., Werke 3, 2 Aufl., 23. 70  ‘Begriffe sollen überall entscheiden, Begriffe das Leben regeln, Begriffe herrschen. Das ist die religiöse Welt, welcher Hegel einen systematischen Ausdruck gab, indem er Methode in den Unsinn brachte und die Begriffssatzungen zur runden, festgegründeten Dogmatik vollendete. Nach Begriffen wird Alles abgeleiert, und der wirkliche Mensch, d. h. Ich werde nach diesen Begriffsgesetzen zu leben gezwungen.’ In Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 126–127. Eng. trans. id., The Ego and Its Own, 88. 65 66

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so to hallow everything worldly. (. . .) Hence it was that the Lutheran Hegel (. . .) was completely successful in carrying the idea through everything.’71 Moreover, despite the alleged discontinuity with theology of the new secular interpretations of notions such as ‘man’ and ‘nature,’ Stirner detects the continuity of human domination by ‘the world of mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences, etc.’72 He denounces: ‘Language or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas.’73 Stirner’s radical countermeasure relies on a somewhat parodic analogy to the Christian strategy towards appetites: ‘As we there had to say, “we are indeed to have appetites, but the appetites are not to have us,” so we should now say, “we are indeed to have spirit, but spirit is not to have us”.’74 Stirner also indicates the ground of his different perspective: ‘“I,” from whom I start, am not a thought, nor do I consist in thinking.’75 Nor this I consists in a continuity of actions, as Stirner is ready to jettison his ‘will of yesterday’76: otherwise, Stirner explains, ‘[m]y creature—namely, a particular expression of will—would have become my commander.’77 From this perspective, Stirner assures his readers, ‘[y]ou are then not merely called to everything divine, entitled to everything human, but owner (Eigner) of what is yours (Deinigen), that is, of all that you possess the force to make your own (eigen); you are appropriate (geeignet) and capacitated for everything that is yours.’78 71  ‘[D]as Lutherthum hingegen sucht wo möglich in alle Dinge Geist zu bringen, den heiligen Geist in Allem als Wesen zu erkennen, und so alles Weltliche zu heiligen. (. . .) Daher gelang auch dem Lutheraner Hegel (. . .) die vollständige Durchführung des Begriffs durch Alles.’ Ibid., 121–122. Eng. trans. ibid., 84–85. 72  ‘[D]ie Welt des Geistes, der Ideen, Gedanken, Begriffe, Wesen u.s.w.’ Ibid., 82. Eng. trans. ibid., 59. 73  ‘Die Sprache oder “das Wort” tyrannisirt Uns am ärgsten, weil sie ein ganzes Heer von fixen Ideen gegen uns aufführt.’ Ibid., 463. Eng. trans. ibid., 305. 74  ‘Wie es dort heißen mußte: Wir sollen zwar Begierden haben, aber die Begierden sollen Uns nicht haben, so hieße es nun: Wir sollen zwar Geist haben, aber der Geist soll Uns nicht haben.’ Ibid., 83. Eng. trans. ibid. 59, modified translation. 75  ‘[D]enn “Ich,” von dem Ich ausgehe, bin weder ein Gedanke, noch bestehe Ich im Denken.’ Ibid., 196. Eng. trans. ibid. 132. 76  ‘[M]einen gestrigen Willen.’ Ibid., 258. Eng. trans. ibid. 175. 77  ‘Mein Geschöpf, nämlich ein bestimmter Willensausdruck, wäre mein Gebieter geworden.’ Ibid. Eng. trans. ibid. 78  ‘Du bist dann nicht bloß berufen zu allem Göttlichen, berechtigt zu allem Menschlichen, sondern Eigner des Deinigen, d. h. alles dessen, was Du Dir zu eigen zu machen Kraft besitzest, d.h. Du bist geeignet und befähigt zu allem Deinigen.’ Ibid., 483. Eng. trans. ibid. 318. Schmitt not only treasures Stirner’s reassurance, but he expresses his acknowledgement (albeit limited) of Stirner’s insight in a lapidary statement: ‘Max weiss etwas sehr Wichtiges. Er weiss, dass das Ich kein Denkobjekt ist.’

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Yet, as Stirner draws a clear-cut boundary between himself and all the potentially estranged human products (including his own), he ends up inhabiting his relational body in the only capacity of owner of what is his, like an absolute sovereign of a plentiful but solitary kingdom. Not that the Hegelian self-splitting path is necessarily comfortable though: in 1846 (just one year after the publication of Stirner’s Einzige), Dostoyevsky, who at that time frequents Belinsky at the acme of his engagement with Hegel, puts into writing a disturbing if masterful duplication. The eponym character of his novella Двойник79 [Dvoynik], The Double, appears to its original model Goliadkin as a terrifying doppelgänger. ‘The pages of The Double are filled,’ Bakhtin observes, ‘with the hero’s dialogues with himself.’80 At the beginning, the double is just part of these dialogues as a second inner voice, which has the role of inner surrogate for another person. In the course of the narration, Dostoyevsky almost imperceptibly makes shift this inner voice towards the outside, first as the voice of the narrator, and then as the voice of another character, namely, the duplicate junior Goliadkin. Bakhtin relates the appearance of the double to a traumatic overexertion of the excessively confident second inner voice, which thus can no longer cohabit within Goliadkin with his other inner voice that instead capitulates to the world. Bakhtin’s reading somewhat resonates with Bateson’s clinical interpretation of schizophrenic behaviour as the effect of a double bind, which Bateson defines as the repeated combination of two contradictory injunctions with a third one that forbids any escape from the field.81 However, we saw that opposition is invented in Greece as a grammatical operator and then as a theoretical category: hence, both in the case of Dostoyevsky and Bateson (no less than in Hegelian dialectic) one may suspect that opposition at work is the expression of a re-enacted contextual limitation, rather than the effect of an ahistorical logical rule.

Max knows something that is very important. He knows that the I is not an object of thought.’ In Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus (Koln: Greven Verlag, 1950), 81. 79  Dostoyevsky’ Dvoynik first appears in print in 1846 on the literary magazine Отечественные записки [Otechestvennye Zapiski], Annals of the Fatherland. 80   Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson ed. and trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 212. 81   Ibid., 215. Whilst the notion of double bind is elaborated by Bateson in the 1930s during his anthropological researches in New Guinea, it first appears in print some twenty years later. See G. Bateson, D. D. Jackson, J. Haley and J. H. Weakland, ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,’ Behavioral Sciences, vol. 1, n. 4 (1956): 251–64.

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In The Double, this oppositional construction may be seen in action as the polarization between Goliadkin’s first and second inner voice. When the latter is externalized as narrator and as the double, it keeps shouting ‘into Golyadkin’s ear Golyadkin’s own words and thoughts, but in another, hopelessly alien, hopelessly censuring and mocking tone.’82 We may compare this frequent aural and then visual interventions to the intrusion of Homeric gods and goddesses into human auditive and visual space. Voices and images of the immortals easily find their way through the Homeric characters’ multifarious inner sphere, which instead Dostoyevsky reconstructs through the filter of abstraction and its categories: the double thus impersonates one of Goliadkin’s reciprocally incompatible inner voices. Whilst strained inner voices cannot ultimately coexist within Goliadkin, their ongoing unresolvable conflict takes the shape of a confession in the novella Notes from the Underground, which Dostoyevsky writes after his Siberian deportation: ‘I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man,’83 claims the unnamed narrator in the novella’s memorable opening, which anticipates the endless series of his failed attempts to reposition himself. These attempts are part of the Underground Man’s self-defeating endeavour to demonstrate to his readers his independence from the judgement of others.84 Though the Underground Man strives to keep for himself the last word about himself, his very words reveal his possible negative evaluation by another: the endless repetition of this pattern exposes the futility of his efforts, inasmuch as they are driven by his will to be in control of his intercourse with the world. As in the case of Goliadkin’s reciprocally incompatible voices, the Underground Man’s utterances are implacably met by their determinate alteration, which is not simply a logical contradiction but a malevolent distortion. In anachronistic terms, Goliadkin seems to have internalized both roles that Bateson describes at play in schizogenic families: a ‘covert schizophrenic,’85 who is systematically successful in ‘putting the other in the wrong,’86 and an  Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 221.   Я человѣкъ больной... Я злой человѣкъ [Ya chelovek bol’noy...Ya zloy chelovek]. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Записки изъ подполья [Zapiski iz podpol’ia], Notes from Underground, first published in 1864 on the journal Эпоха [Epoca], Epoch, directed by Dostoyevsky’s brother Mikhail. 84   Here is an example of the Underground Man’s attempts and their spiralling down, as it were: ‘And what’s vilest is that I’ve now started justifying myself before you. And viler still is that I’m now making this remark. Enough, however; otherwise there will be no end to it; things will go on getting viler and viler . . .’ In Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky trans. (London: Vintage Books, 1993), 58. 85   Gregory Bateson, ‘Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia,’ in id., Steps to an ecology of mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 244–270, 262. 86   Ibid. 82 83

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‘overt schizophrenic,’87 who defends herself from the previous intervention by grossly distorting the messages that she produces and receives. In Bateson’s terms, Goliadkin confuses imagination with perception as his internal messages are confused with external ones. Whilst the Underground Man seems to be able to keep this split within himself, both him and Goliadkin share with schizogenic families the same determination to close themselves to the world. However, in Dostoyevsky’s later works inner voices are not always trapped within the same character: they begin to resonate within other characters, and they take the shape of actual alternatives. For example, in the novel The Brothers Karamazov,88 Alyosha repeats to his brother Ivan Ivan’s own words with a different accent, so as to deliver him from his circular reasoning. Bakhtin remarks: ‘Here Dostoevsky’s device is laid bare and exposed to full view in the very content itself. Alyosha says openly that he is answering a question that Ivan has asked himself in an internal dialogue.’89 It is not a minor question, that which passes, so to speak, from brother to brother, because it concerns the responsibility for the murdering of their father. Alyosha has no doubt when he tells Ivan: ‘You have accused yourself and have confessed to yourself that you are the murderer and no one else. But you didn’t do it: you are mistaken: you are not the murderer.’90 Dostoyevsky stages here an attempt to deliver his character from both sense of guilt91 and individual isolation.92 When the devil pours into Ivan’s ear Ivan’s own distorted words, the young man is at least able to reply to his malevolent interlocutor: ‘You are me, myself, only with a different mug.’93 Yet, despite his awareness, just like the Underground Man, Ivan is still trapped within himself, and only the visit of his brother Alyosha makes temporarily disappear the evil visitor and his hostile duplication of Ivan’s own words.  Ibid.   Братья Карамазовы [Brat’ya Karamazovy], The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky’s last work, and it first appears on the journal Русскій Вѣстникъ [Russkiy Vestnik], The Russian Messenger, between January 1879 and November 1880. 89  Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 255. 90   Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky trans. (London: Vintage Books, 1990), 510. 91   Alyosha here speaks in the name of the Christian god: yet, unlike Ivan’s devil, god entrusts him with a message of deliverance: ‘It was not you! God has sent me to tell you so.’ Ibid. 92   In the notes for the revision of his book on Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin writes: ‘In actuality a person exists in the forms I and another (я и другой, ya i drugoi).’ In Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 293. 93  Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 541. 87 88

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In the Iliad, we found a sentence that passes from hero to hero and gives voice to a common concern with one’s thymos and its demands94: in the Homeric world, the sharing of the same words expresses both a formulaic necessity and a sense of immediate participation. Dostoyevsky not only recovers this forgotten possibility of partaking, but he shows that when the practice of reflexivity trespasses the apparently insurmountable threshold of individual boundaries, it no longer entraps the relational body within itself, as it allows it to compenetrate95 other relational bodies. This is why in Dostoyevsky’s later works, the characters’ inner and outer dialogue come to be intertwined, sometimes to the point of becoming indistinguishable. We may compare the ability of Dostoyevsky’s characters to become somewhat other than themselves to Rimbaud’s contemporary claim of being other than himself: ‘Je est un autre,’96 I is an other, writes the very young poet in two of his letters. Inner otherness seems to erupt at once through the words of Dostoyevsky and Rimbaud, who writes his two letters between the publication of the Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov. Nevertheless, the Underground Man takes great pains to convince his readers that he somewhat enjoys his contradictory and counterproductive behaviour97: on the contrary, Rimbaud admits that the price for ‘reaching the unknown through the derangement of all senses’98 is enormous suffering. And according to Rimbaud, this suffering has to be endured: [O]ne has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I acknowledged myself as a poet. It is not at all my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought of (On me pense).99  See supra, pag. 175.  Hegel describes a similar reciprocal compenetration as ‘Durchdringen des Durchdringens,’ penetration of the penetration, in the section of the Science of Logic that is entitled Die Auflösung des Dings, the dissolution of the thing: in this section, Hegel develops a notion of reciprocal porosity, which appears to challenge the Aristotelian assumption (Physics 209a6–7) that two bodies cannot at once occupy the same place. In G.W.F Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in id., Werke, Band 6, 6 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 146. 96   The first letter is addressed to his former teacher and mentor Georges Izambard (May 13th, 1871). In Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 249. Rimbaud repeats the sentence in his May 15th, 1871 letter to his friend Paul Demeny (250). 97   ‘I’ll explain to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall.’ In Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 8. 98  ‘[A]rriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens.’ In Rimbaud, Œuvres Complètes, 249.   99  ‘[I]l faut être fort, être né poëte, et je me suis reconnu poëte. Ce n’est pas du tout ma faute. C’est faux de dire: Je pense. On devrait dire: On me pense.’ Ibid. The last sentence cannot be properly rendered in English, which lacks impersonal expressions such as the French on, the German Man, and the Italian si. 94 95

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Here, Rimbaud recurs to the French impersonal form on to underline that his visionary powers as a poet are neither a merely subjective achievement nor a merely objective endowment100: moreover, because not even the impersonal construction does justice to his condition (which he previously writes he almost can’t explain), he feels compelled to do violence to grammar in order to describe it. ‘I is,’ pens the poet, who appears to sense the necessity to force the preliminary settlement that grammatical constructions surreptitiously impose on any discourse whatsoever, and which philosophers from Aristotle to Kant portray as unchangeable categories of thought. Whilst Rimbaud opens the way for a radical dislocation of the self, he is not the first to seek for an impersonal dimension of thought. In the late eighteenth century, Lichtenberg annotates in one of his Sudelbücher,101 scrapbooks, which are to be widely read in Germany after his death: We become aware of certain ideas that do not depend on us; others we believe at least depend on us; where is the limit? We know only the existence of our sensations, representations, and thoughts. It thinks (Es denkt), one should say, the way one says: it flashes.102

In his 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche not only recovers in print Lichtenberg’s formula (without quoting its author), but he also raises the stake: [A] thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks (Es denkt): but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I”—well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore—.” (. . .) [P]erhaps one day even logi100  ‘Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon,’ too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin, adds Rimbaud without much regard for himself, ibid. In the 15 May letter to Paul Demeny, he makes the gentler remark that it’s not the brass’ fault if it wakes up a trumpet. 101   Lichtenberg himself explains his extended use of the term: ‘Die Kaufleute haben ihr Waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch glaube ich im Deutschen) (. . .). Dieses verdient von den Gelehrten nachgeahmt zu werden.’ Tradesmen have their waste book (scrapbook, composition book I think in German) (. . .). This deserves to be imitated by scholars. In Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, Band 1 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1968), 352 (Sudelbüch E 46). 102  ‘Wir werden uns gewisser Vorstellungen bewußt, die nicht von uns abhängen; andere glauben, wir wenigstens hingen von uns ab; wo ist die Grenze? Wir kennen nur allein die Existenz unserer Empfindungen, Vorstellungen und Gedanken. Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt.’ In Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, Band 2 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971), 412 (Sudelbüch K 76).

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cians will get used to making do without this little “it” (into which the honest old I has disappeared).103

Perhaps, the claim of the disappearance of the ‘old I’ into the ‘little it’ may appear premature, as it has yet to happen: we may say that Nietzsche is either being sarcastic or, as always, ahead of the times. However, he is also actively anticipating the times to come: a few pages before, he puts forth a reconsideration of the notion of the soul that connects and rekindles Lichtenberg’s and Hume’s reflections. After praising the Italo-Croatian Boscovich (whom Nietzsche enlists into his imagined Polish community) for helping him to renounce the belief in matter qua physical atoms, he takes the argument further: [W]e must also put an end to that other and more disastrous atomism, the one Christianity has taught best and longest, the atomism of the soul. Let this expression signify the belief that the soul is something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, that it is a monad, an atomon: this belief must be thrown out of science! Between you and me, there is absolutely no need to give up “the soul” itself, and relinquish one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses—as often happens with naturalists: given their clumsiness, they barely need to touch “the soul” to lose it. But the path lies open for new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesis—and concepts like the “mortal soul” (sterbliche Seele) and the “soul as subject-multiplicity” (Seele als Subjekts-Vielheit) and the “soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects” (Seele als Gesellschaftsbau der Triebe und Affekte) want henceforth to have civil rights in the realm of science.104

103  ‘[E]in Gedanke kommt, wenn “er” will, und nicht wenn “ich” will; so dass es eine Fälschung des Thatbestandes ist, zu sagen: das Subjekt “ich” ist die Bedingung des Prädikats “denke.” Es denkt: aber dass dies “es” gerade jenes alte berühmte “Ich” sei, ist, milde geredet, nur eine Annahme, eine Behauptung, vor Allem keine “unmittelbare Gewissheit.” Zuletzt ist schon mit diesem “es denkt” zu viel gethan: schon dies “es” enthält eine Auslegung des Vorgangs und gehört nicht zum Vorgange selbst. Man schliesst hier nach der grammatischen Gewohnheit “Denken ist eine Thätigkeit, zu jeder Thätigkeit gehört Einer, der thätig ist, folglich —.” (...) [V]ielleicht gewöhnt man sich eines Tages noch daran, auch seitens der Logiker ohne jenes kleine “es” (zu dem sich das ehrliche alte Ich verflüchtigt hat) auszukommen.’ In Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 17, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-17 104  ‘[M]an muss zunächst auch jener anderen und verhängnissvolleren Atomistik den Garaus machen, welche das Christenthum am besten und längsten gelehrt hat, der Seelen-Atomistik. Mit diesem Wort sei es erlaubt, jenen Glauben zu bezeichnen, der die Seele als etwas Unvertilgbares, Ewiges, Untheilbares, als eine Monade, als ein Atomon nimmt: diesen Glauben soll man aus der Wissenschaft hinausschaffen! Es ist, unter uns gesagt, ganz und gar nicht nöthig, “die Seele” selbst dabei los zu werden und auf eine der ältesten und ehrwürdigsten Hypothesen Verzicht zu leisten: wie es dem Ungeschick der Naturalisten zu begegnen pflegt, welche, kaum dass sie an “die Seele” rühren, sie auch verlieren. Aber der Weg zu neuen Fassungen und Verfeinerungen der Seelen-Hypothese steht offen: und Begriffe wie “sterbliche Seele” und “Seele als Subjekts-Vielheit” und “Seele als Gesellschaftsbau der Triebe und Affekte” wollen fürderhin in der Wissenschaft Bürgerrecht haben.’ Ibid., § 12, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-12

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Unfortunately, Nietzsche does not follow this promising new path, apart from an extraordinary series of questions that take at face value Hume’s comparison between the soul and the polity, but which only appear in a contemporary note: The assumption of the single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps, is it just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects on whose team-play and competition our thinking and our consciousness in general is based? A kind of  aristocracy of ‘cells’ in which mastery resides? Certainly [an aristocracy] of equals which are used to ruling with one another and know how to command? My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity (. . .).105

We may compare Nietzsche’s proliferation of inner subjects with the contemporary narration of the split subjectivity of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Stevenson’s eponym novella, which is published in the same year of Beyond Good and Evil. The varying multiplicities in Hume’s, Lichtenberg’s, and Nietzsche’s rendering of the soul seems here reduced to ‘those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.’106 However, Stevenson gives an innovative narrative shape to the inner strife between the traditional Christian principles of good and evil, which he constructs as a wondrous alternation of identities within the same character: in fact, readers are led to understand Jekyll and Hyde as autonomous characters, rather than alternative embodiments of the same persona, nearly up until Jekyll’s final statement of the case. We may read the novella not only as a ferocious satire of Victorian clear-cut moral dichotomies, but also as a more general parody of the edifying stories of spiritual rebirth, which is here prosaically determined by the appearance and the disappearance of the metabolic effects of a chemical compound. Moreover, despite the temporalization of the main character only allows the two identities to alternate, Stevenson uncannily recasts the mortal bond that binds Iacopone’s body and soul: Jekyll’s awareness that Hyde is ‘co-heir with him to death’107 is fully shared by his companion, who is terrified by Jekyll’s ‘power to cut him off by suicide.’108 105  ‘Die Annahme des Einen Subjekts ist vielleicht nicht nothwendig; vielleicht ist es ebensogut erlaubt, eine Vielheit von Subjekten anzunehmen, deren Zusammen-Spiel und Kampf unserem Denken und überhaupt unserem Bewußtsein zu Grunde liegt? Eine Art Aristokratie von ‘Zellen,’ in denen die Herrschaft ruht? Gewiß von pares, welche mit einander an’s Regieren gewöhnt sind und zu befehlen verstehen? Meine Hypothesen: das Subjekt als Vielheit (. . .).’ Nachgelassene Fragmente August– September 1885, 40[42], eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,40[42] 106  Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 107. 107   Ibid., 137. 108   Ibid., 139. Jekyll and Hyde are aware of each other, as they have ‘memory in common’ (124). In Iacopone’s text, the body is likewise afraid to be killed by the soul: see supra, pag. 84.

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The same Jekyll recalls that his endeavour is an attempt to deal with ‘that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion,’109 namely, the polarization between good and evil: this is why he claims that ‘man [sic] is not truly one, but truly two.’110 Nevertheless, he also recognizes the limitation of his approach, and he ventures into forecasting the acknowledgement of further inner dimensions: ‘I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.’111 The fictional alternation of Jekyll and Hyde does not stray too much from the actual symptoms of so-called hysteria, which is also claimed by contemporary practitioners to entail reversible psychosomatic alterations. Following Charcot and Janet, Breuer and Freud use hypnosis to tackle hysterical behaviour: in their 1895 joint work Studies on Hysteria, Breuer unwittingly re-enacts the Platonic metaphor of memory as a writing on the soul,112 as he maintains the incompatibility of the operations of perception as a constantly renewed engraving, and memory as a (relatively) permanent inscription. Given this supposed contradiction, Breuer proposes a duplication of the psychic apparatuses dealing with perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) and memory (Erinnerung) respectively113: Freud is then to build upon this bipartition his tripartition of inner systems (Systeme), namely, the conscious (bewusst, bw), the unconscious (unbewusst, ubw), and the preconscious or foreconscious (vorbewusst, vbw). In this linear succession, perceptions (Wahrnehmungen, W) are the entry point and they coincide with the conscious, whilst memories (Erinnerungen, Er) share the middle point with the unconscious.114 Freud proposes the previous conjectures (Vermuthungen115) in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, which generalizes the theme of alternation by shifting it from the supposedly limited field of pathology to the universal cycle

  Ibid., 107.   Ibid., 108. 111   Ibid. 112   ὃς μετ᾽ ἐπιστήμης γράφεται ἐν τῇ τοῦ μανθάνοντος ψυχῇ [hos met᾽ epistēmēs graphetai en tē tou manthanontos psykhē], [the word] that is knowledgeably written in the psykhē of the learner. In Plato, Phaedrus 276a. 113  Josef Breuer, ‘Theoretisches,’ in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studien über Hysterie (Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1895), 161–221, 164. 114   See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1900), 315–318. Freud first uses the Scholastic term Instanzen, instances, to which he adds ‘systems’ as a synonym ‘for the sake of clarity.’ He specifies further on that such systems ‘nichts Psychisches sind und nie unserer psychischen Wahrnehmung zugänglich werden,’ are not psychical entities and can never be accessible to our physical perception.’ Ibid., 364. 115   Ibid., 299. 109 110

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of sleep and wakefulness.116 By putting forth his threefold apparatus, Freud recurs to that which he will later refer to as ‘[t]he Witch Metapsychology’117: we may wonder whether we can include this case in Freud’s later acknowledgement that ‘[u]nfortunately, the information from the Witch are also this time neither very clear nor very detailed.’118 However, Freud not only successfully puts on the map a long discarded inner plurality in a novel shape, but he also pleads for a dynamic rather than topographic construction of this very multiplicity. Already in the Studies on Hysteria, Freud contrasts the dynamic character with the morphological one, in order to show how several different paths converge towards a single symptom, which is thus ‘overdetermined’119: in The Interpretation of Dreams, he not only recalls that ‘illness (. . .) is explained on a dynamic basis,’120 but he also keeps replacing ‘a topographic mode of representation with a dynamic one.’121 According to this dynamic representation of inner activities, ‘the unconscious idea is excluded from consciousness by living forces which oppose themselves to its reception, while they do not object to other ideas, the foreconscious ones.’122 However, three years later, Freud recomposes the topographical and the dynamic descriptions, to which he adds an economic one so as to constitute a ‘metapsychological presentation.’123 We may ask ourselves whether this composition is meant ‘to transform metaphysics into metapsychology,’124 which is a task that Freud suggests in The Psychopathol116   Freud underlines that the dream qua psychical product ‘presents a very striking analogy to the wildest productions of insanity.’ In Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,’ in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 26 (Glasgow: Robert MacLehose & Co., 1913), 312–318, 317. We may also notice that Stevenson gives the cycle of sleep and wakefulness a twisted reversal, when he makes Jekyll recall: ‘if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened.’ In Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 136–137. 117  ‘Die Hexe Metapsychologie.’ In Sigmund Freud, ‘Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse,’ in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 2 (23) 1937, 209–240, 217. 118  ‘Leider sind die Auskünfte der Hexe auch diesmal weder sehr klar noch sehr ausführlich.’ Ibid. Freud’s sense of humour, which following his lead we may understand as his more powerful defence mechanism, would probably allow this consideration. However, one may wonder instead whether Freud’s metapsychological constructions are too clear. 119  ‘[Ü]berstimmt.’ In Breuer and Freud, Studien über Hysterie, 255. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud also uses the term überdeterminirt. See, for example Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 195. 120  ‘Krankheit (. . .) ist dynamisch aufzüklaren.’ Ibid., 362. 121  ‘[E]ine topische Vorstellungsweise durch eine dynamische.’ Ibid., 363. 122   Freud, ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,’ 316. 123  ‘[M]etapsychologische Darstellung.’ In Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unbewussten,’ in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 4 (3), 1915, 189–203 (Teil 1), 200. 124  ‘[D]ie Metaphysik in Metapsychologie umzusetzen.’ In Sigmund Freud, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, in Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, Bd. 10, 1901, 1–32 (Teil 1), 95–143 (Teil 2), 135. In the same page, Freud previously clarifies: ‘Ich glaube in der That, dass ein grosses Stück der mythologischen Weltauffassung, die weit bis in die modernsten Religionen hinein

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ogy of Everyday Life. However, in 1923, following Groddeck’s insistence on the general passivity of what we call our I (Ich),125 Freud introduces a novel inner lexicon: I propose to take it [Groddeck’s stance] into account by calling the entity which starts out from the system W [perception] and begins by being vbw [foreconscious], the I (Ich), and by following Groddeck in calling the other part of the psyche, into which this entity extends and which behaves as though it were the ubw [unconscious], the It (Es).’126

Freud adds to the word Es, that is, It in the previous sentence a significant note: ‘Groddeck himself no doubt followed the example of Nietzsche, in which this grammatical expression is quite customary for what in our being is impersonal and, as it were, of natural necessity.’127 The partial merging of the I and the It in this new model of the psyche (of which Freud also draws a famous diagram128) resonates with the line of speculation of which Groddeck’s perspective is but the last expression. This relative indistinction involves also the object of another lexical innovation, namely, Über-Ich,129 Over-I, which Freud introduces here as a synonym for the Ich-Ideal, Ideal I. The Over-I, which in Freud’s patriarchal vision ‘is to retain the character of the father,’130 keeps standing in contrast to the representative of the external world, namely, the I, as the representative of the internal world, and thus, of the It itself. The distinction between the internal and the external world already shapes Bergson’s 1889 Essay on the immediate data of consciousness,131 which

reicht, nichts anderes ist als in die Aussenwelt projicierte Psychologie.’ In fact, I believe that a large part of the mythological conception of the world, which extends far into most modern religions, is nothing other than psychology projected into the external world. 125   See Georg Groddeck, Das Buch vom Es (Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1923). 126  ‘Ich schlage vor, ihr Rechnung zu tragen, indem wir das vom System W ausgehende Wesen, das zunächst vbw ist, das Ich heißen, das andere Psychische aber, in welches es sich fortsetzt, und das sich wie ubw verhält, nach Groddecks Gebrauch das Es.’ In Sigmund Freud, Das Ich und das Es (Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1923), 25. 127  ‘Groddeck selbst ist wohl dem Beispiel Nietzsches gefolgt, bei dem dieser grammatikalische Ausdruck für das Unpersönliche und sozusagen Naturnotwendige in unserem Wesen durchaus gebräuchlich ist.’ Ibid. Unfortunately, the standard English translations of the Freudian terms Ich and Es, namely, ‘Ego’ and ‘Id’ respectively, erase at once these terms’ essential grammatical and cultural links. 128   Ibid., 26. 129   Ibid., 31. 130  ‘Das Über-Ich wird den Charakter des Vaters bewahren.’ Ibid., 41. 131   See Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience.

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appears in English translation with the title Time and free will.132 Whilst Bergson associates the features of extension, quantity, and impenetrability with the outer dimension, he relates the inner dimension to the features of intension, quality, and penetrability. Bergson also brings this split into moi, the I133: he points out ‘under the I with well-defined states, an I in which sequencing entails fusion and organization.’134 Whilst he concedes that ‘[a]n inner life with well distinct moments, with clearly defined states, will respond better to the demands of social life,’135 he also warns about such a simplistic psychology: ‘if it [this psychology] presents the concrete and living self as an association of terms which, distinct from each other, juxtapose themselves in a homogeneous environment, it will have to face insurmountable difficulties.’136 On the contrary, according to Bergson, we need to distinguish between the multiplicity of external facts and that of internal facts, that is, ‘between the multiplicity of juxtaposition and that of reciprocal penetration.’137 In the external world, he argues, facts are distributed in space: they can be matched and counted. In the inner world, psychic facts merge with each other: they cannot be dealt with as extensive magnitudes, but rather as ‘intensities, which are not superposable things.’138 In particular, Bergson stresses the ‘radical heterogeneity of deep psychological facts, and the impossibility for any two of them to be completely similar, because they are two different moments in a story.’139 Here Bergson appears to transpose Leibniz’s notion of indiscernibility from the static dimension of logic to the dynamic perspective of narrations.

132   Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, F. L. Pogson trans. (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1910). 133   The compresence in modern French of the two words Je and moi is an example of the survival of both cas sujet, the subjective case, and the case régime or cas objet, the objective case of ancient French. 134  ‘[A]u-dessous du moi aux états bien définis, un moi où succession implique fusion et organisation.’ in Bergson, Essai sur les données, 96. 135  ‘Une vie intérieure aux moments bien distincts, aux états nettement caractérisés, répondra mieux aux exigences de la vie sociale.’ Ibid., 104. 136  ‘[S]i elle nous présente le moi concret et vivant comme une association de termes qui, distincts les uns des autres, se juxtaposent dans un milieu homogène, elle verra se dresser devant elle d’insurmontables difficultés.’ Ibid., 105. 137  ‘[E]ntre la multiplicité de juxtaposition et celle de pénétration mutuelle.’ Ibid., 57 note 1. 138  ‘[I]ntensités, qui ne sont pas choses superposables.’ Ibid., 2. 139  ‘[L]’hétérogénéité radicale des faits psychologiques profonds, et l’impossibilité pour deux d’entre eux de se ressembler tout-à-fait, puisqu’ils constituent deux moments différents d’une histoire.’ Ibid., 152.

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We may compare Bergson’s double construction of multiplicities to Riemann’s mathematical notion of continuous and discrete multiplicities, which are composed by points and elements respectively. Portions of both Riemann’s multiplicities can be quantified, ‘in the case of discrete magnitudes by counting, in the case of continuous magnitudes by measuring. Measure consists in the superposition of the magnitudes to be compared.’140 We may observe that both Riemann and Bergson recast notions that emerge as theoretical alternatives in the course of the historical development of mathematical and philosophical inscriptions: by deploying the ahistorical languages of mathematics and philosophy,141 Riemann and Bergson turn these notions into the detemporalized categories of discrete versus continuous,142 and extension versus intension143 respectively. However, in his subsequent works Bergson attempts to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative multiplicities: he proposes to reposition ourselves in ‘the duration wherein we act.’144 Such a duration is not a represented and quantified time, but the time in which bodies are immersed qua centres of action rather than perception: ‘if the divisibility of matter is entirely relative on our action thereon,’145 the absolute opposition between the inextensive facts of consciousness and the outer extended multiplicities gets blurred. Moreover, Bergson does not limit the osmotic merging of psychic facts to the individual inner sphere: ‘it is quite possible—he suggests—that between the various personalities are constantly occurring exchanges, which are comparable to the phenomena of endosmosis.’146 This suggestion of the ongoing occurrence of external osmosis, which is not unlike the internal one, is to

140  ‘[B]ei den discreten Grössen durch Zählung, bei den stetigen durch Messung. Das Messen besteht in einem Aufeinanderlegen der zu vergleichenden Grössen.’ In Bernhard Riemann, ‘Ueber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen,’ in Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Band 13 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1868), 133–152, 135. 141   However, unlike mathematics, philosophical speculations may engage with time and history, since temporalizations become a matter of concern in the writings of Vico. 142   We may recall the failed discretizing approach of Pythagorean geometry, which is overcome by the Euclidean measuring approach, at least up until the early modern invention of the technology of calculus opens the way for an analytical treatment of the continuum. 143   It would not be difficult to show that the Bergsonian split of extension from intension bears the legacy of the early modern dichotomic construction of primary and secondary qualities. 144  ‘[L]a durée où nous agissons,’ in Henri Bergson, Matiére et Memoire (Paris: Alcan, 1896), 205. 145  ‘Mais si la divisibilité de la matière est tout entière relative à notre action sur elle,’ ibid., 245. 146  ‘[I]l est fort possible qu’entre les diverses personnalités s’accomplissent sans cesse des échanges comparables aux phénomènes d’endosmose.’ In Henri Bergson, ‘Presidential address,’ in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 26 (Glasgow: Robert MacLehose & Co., 1913), 462–479, 476.

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assume a conceptual shape as the transindividual dimension in the work of Gilbert Simondon. In the meantime, Wittgenstein painstakingly analyses language tools, as if tracing in the reverse the path that leads from Plato to Aristotle. We saw that Aristotle gives the word horos, boundary, a sense close to our understanding of the term ‘definition’: he also constructs for this purpose the neologism horismos, which he considers ‘the right articulation (logos) of being-whatone-was (to ti ēn einai),’147 that is, the proper expression of the unchangeable form of the species. Wittgenstein instead invites his hypothetical interlocutor to observe whether this boundary exists in practice, by examining, for example, the proceedings that we call ‘games’: Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’”—but look whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but (. . .) a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: general similarities, and similarities of detail.148

This is a practical and powerful deconstruction of the notion of definition, which allows Wittgenstein to ask (and answer): ‘Can you specify the boundary? No, you can draw one.’149 On the contrary, he observes that ‘we are dazzled by the ideal’150 of a perfect definition, so that we suppose that ‘[a]n indefinite boundary is not really a boundary at all.’151 More in general, Wittgenstein remarks: ‘One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.’152 He thus concludes: ‘An image held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to relentlessly repeat it to us.’153 Though he does not specifically target written  See supra, pag. 145.  ‘Sag nicht: “Es muß ihnen etwas gemeinsam sein, sonst hießen sie nicht ‘Spiele’”—sondern schau, ob ihnen allen etwas gemeinsam ist.—Denn, wenn du sie anschaust, wirst du zwar nicht etwas sehen, was allen gemeinsam wäre, aber (. . .) ein kompliziertes Netz von Ähnlichkeiten, die einander übergreifen und kreuzen. Ähnlichkeiten im Großen und Kleinen.’ In Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, 2 Aufl./2nd ed., G. E. M. Anscombe trans. (London: Blackwell, 1958), 31. 149  ‘Kannst du die Grenzen angeben? Nein. Du kannst welche ziehen.’ Ibid., 33. 150  ‘[S]ind wir vom Ideal geblendet.’ Ibid., 45. 151  ‘Eine unscharfe Begrenzung, das ist eigentlich gar keine Begrenzung.’ Ibid. 152  ‘Man glaubt, wieder und wieder der Natur nachzufahren, und fährt nur der Form entlang, durch die wir sie betrachten.’ Ibid., 48. 153  ‘Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen. Und heraus konnten wir nicht, denn es lag in unsrer Sprache, und sie schien es uns nur unerbittlich zu wiederholen.’ Ibid. 147 148

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language, it may be not surprising that he suggests an alternative illustration of the written word as a pictorial image of multiplicity: [E]very familiar word, in a book for example, actually carries a surrounding haze with it in our minds, a ‘halo’ of lightly indicated uses. Just as if each figure in a painting were surrounded by delicate shadowy drawings of scenes, as it were in another dimension, and in them we saw the figures in different contexts.’154

Our practice of digital hypertexts gives us an immediate grasp of Wittgenstein’s imaginative recasting of medieval pictorial tools: the same word is no longer the same in different textual contexts, to which we now have nearly immediate access. Of course, this browsing opportunity may be used just to verify and enhance the consistent use of words, similarly to the deployment of the technique of backward scanning in the reading of early written texts: yet, we may rather choose to put to work the productive, or, in Austin’s terms, performative power of our novel tools. In 1951, right after Wittgenstein’s death, Austin begins delivering a series of lectures that are to be published posthumously under the title of How to do things with words155: this title well illustrates the book’s theme, which is the effect of words on things. More precisely, the lectures deal with the attempt at classifying utterances or, in Austin’s terminology, speech acts, on the basis of what these acts do. Austin begins by contrasting constative utterances, which just say something, with performative utterances, which are supposed to do something more than that: as an example of performative, he quotes the sentence ‘“I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”—as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem.’156 The previous sentence (and its context) is a performative inasmuch as it does not simply say something, but it also does something, namely, it christens the ship. Nevertheless, in the course of the lectures Austin has to admit not only that ‘very commonly the same sentence is used on different occasions of ut-

154  ‘[J]edes uns wohlbekannte Wort, eines Buchs z.B., habe in unserm Geiste schon einen Dunstkreis, einen “Hof” schwach angedeuteter Verwendungen in sich.—So, als wäre auf einem Gemälde jede der Figuren auch von zarten, nebelhaft gezeichneten Szenen, gleichsam in einer anderen Dimension, umgeben, und wir sähen die Figuren hier in andern Zusammenhängen.’ Ibid., 181. 155   John Langshaw Austin, How to do things with words, J. O. Urmson ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 156   Ibid., 5.

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terance in both ways, performative and constative,’157 but also that ‘a straightforward constative utterance’158 is a rather elusive animal: thus, he decides ‘to make a fresh start on the problem,’159 and he introduces a novel tripartition. Austin defines as locutionary act an act of saying something, as opposed to the illocutionary act in saying something, and to the perlocutionary act by saying something. He explains: With the constative utterance, we abstract from the illocutionary (let alone the perlocutionary) aspects of the speech act, and we concentrate on the locutionary: moreover, we use an over-simplified notion of correspondence with the facts (. . .). We aim at the ideal of what would be right to say in all circumstances, for any purpose, to any audience, &c.160

It is possible to read Austin’s previous considerations also as an unflattering depiction of the scientific language of objectivity (which, by the way, only differs from the language of objectivity of classical philosophy and medieval theology because of its alleged rejection of teleology): in this case, we may say that science’s claim to objectivity relies on an operation of over-simplification, which is not too far from the subtractive intervention of the Aristotelian aphairesis, inasmuch as it produces its locutionary facts as a mutilation by the loss of the illocutionary body of circumstances.161 But it is also possible that Austin may seem to follow in the steps of Riemann and Bergson, as he may appear to rationalize the ongoing violent intervention of scientific exclusion as a detemporalized classification of utterances. Yet, Austin is keen to concede that ‘in general the locutionary act as much as the illocutionary is an abstraction only: every genuine speech act is both’162: more important, he suggests that ‘perhaps we have here not really two poles, but rather an historical development.’163

157   Ibid., 67. Austin’s observation appears to extend to sentences Wittgenstein’s acknowledgement of the various uses of the same word. 158   Ibid., 109. Austin is also soon to admit that he is quite keen to play Old Harry with the dichotomy of value and fact that is here involved (150). 159   Ibid., 91. 160   Ibid., 144–145. 161   It may be argued that just like repression is but a different construction, the alleged subtractive character of abstraction is just a disguise for a different composition. When Aristotle presents quantity and measure as the outcome of the subtraction of all features but ‘the amount and the continuous’ from an entity, he surreptitiously affirms, in Pythagorean fashion, that both quantity and measure are already in the entity before the (allegedly) subtractive operation. 162  Austin, How to do things with words, 146. 163   Ibid., 145.

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Austin himself does not follow this last suggestion, because historical dimensions exceed his theoretical approach: on the contrary, his hint to history fits very well the genealogical perspective of the current narration. From this perspective, we do not even need to endorse Austin’s contention that ‘the familiar contrast of “normative or evaluative” as opposed to the factual is in need, like so many dichotomies, of elimination.’164 If, as Austin points out, ‘truth and falsity are (. . .) names (. . .) for a dimension of assessment,’165 we do not need to eliminate this and other modern dichotomies so as to replace them with other theoretical arrangements: such a replacement—which Derrida would call a substitution of centre for centre166 —would restate the claustrophobic erasure of the outside dimension by the totalizing operation of the ideal, as described by Wittgenstein: ‘You can never get outside it [the ideal]; you must turn back again and again. There is no outside; outside the breathing air is missing.’167 If the obliteration of the outside is a performative effect of the ideal, it would be enough to provincialize modern dichotomic couples, so as to defuse their claim to totality without claiming another totalizing approach. Yet, this provincialization cannot be produced by logical and philosophical means: inasmuch as philosophical discourse relies on totalizing conceptual tools, it is simply unable, to put it in Wittgenstein’s terms, to breathe outside of totality. Out of metaphor (or to better say, shifting to another metaphor), provincialization is not just a spatial settlement, but the historical result of political processes: the resettling of theoretical tools as contextual tools would likewise require the reconnection of notions, concepts, and theories to their processes of production and transformation. Following Nietzsche, we may define the outcome of these practices of reconnection as ‘genealogy.’ The English noun ‘genealogy’ is a loan word from the Greek term γενεαλογία168 [genealogia], with which Plato describes Hesiod’s tracing of descent, γένος [genos], of gods and goddesses. Whilst the use of the word genos does not substantially change from Homer on, the second component   Ibid., 148.   Ibid. 166   See Derrida, ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ in id., L’écriture et la différence. 167  ‘Du kannst nicht aus ihm heraustreten. Du mußt immer wieder zurück. Es gibt gar kein Draußen; draußen fehlt die Lebensluft.’ In Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, 45. 168  Plato, Cratylus 396c. 164 165

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of the compound word, namely, logos, as we saw undergoes remarkable semantic transformations.169 Here we may add that the word logos is derived from the verb λέγω [legō], which in the Homeric text is mostly used with the meaning of ‘picking up,’ and thus ‘gathering.’170 However, already in Homer, the sense of the verb legō begins shifting towards the notion of ‘enumerating,’ and then, with the turn from orality to literacy, ‘mentioning.’ Hesiod opposes to this bare enumeration the truthful singing of the Muses171: ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι

idmen pseudea polla we can list many false legein etymoisin homoia, things that look true, idmen d᾽, eut᾽ ethelōmen, but we can, when we alēthea gērysasthai want, the true ones sing

Unfortunately, this option is generally rendered as the alternative between telling and singing, so that the contrast between a mere accumulation of objects and the skilful poetic construction of truth is lost in translation. Moreover, in the fifth century BCE, Democritus turns the Hesiodic choice between different uses of words into the contrast between discourses and actions by affirming that ‘the false and the seeming-good are those who do all in word (logōi), not in deed (ergōi).’172 Plato rather follows Heraclitus’ resemantization of the word logos,173 which he deploys with its new sense of ‘reliable discourse’: we saw that he also constructs with the suffix -logia compound words which bear the same sense. When the Greek suffix -logia is transferred into other European languages, as in the case of the English suffix ‘-logy,’ it maintains the sense of ‘reliable knowledge.’ The current use of terms such as, for example, ‘sociology,’ ‘psychology,’ ‘biology,’ and ‘cosmology,’ keeps reproducing at once the classical sense of logos and the modern model of knowledge as the description of reality.

 See supra, pag. 165–166.   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 21.27. 171  Hesiod, Theogony 27–28. 172   κίβδηλοι καὶ ἀγαθοφανέες οἱ λόγωι μὲν ἃπαντα, ἔργωι δὲ οὐδὲν ἔρδοντες [kibdēloi kai agathophanees hoi logōi men hapanta, ergōi de ouden erdontes]. In Democritus, DK 68 B 82. 173  See supra, pag. 165–166. 169 170

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If we appreciate Austin’s doubts about the existence of merely constative utterances, we may likewise doubt the suitability of labelling disciplines with a descriptive marker such as the suffix ‘-logy’: a more appropriate indicator of the performative effect of language upon its objects would be the suffix ‘-urgy,’ which inherits from its Greek source ergon the sense of ‘making.’ English words such as ‘dramaturgy,’ ‘liturgy,’ ‘metallurgy,’ and (with a twist) ‘surgery’ are actual examples of a much wider potential use of the suffix ‘-urgy’: English language also recently imported the Foucauldian neologism alèthurgie174 as ‘alethurgy,’ which properly labels the processes of construction of truth. By the same token, the word ‘genealogy’ may be replaced by the neologism ‘geneurgy,’ which would certainly suit my painstaking construction175 of past textual objects with the help of their physical remnants. Moreover, the label ‘geneurgy’ would fit my tracing of the semantic and morphological drift of words not only from a text to another, but also within the same text. Unfortunately, these intratextual alterations are often stigmatized in the name of consistency, on the (inadequate) model of mathematical operations176: whilst the latter are mostly governed by the very poor relation of equivalence,177 verbal texts operate according to various and more complex modes of transformation. Austin’s published lectures are a felicitous example of this complexity: the word ‘performative’ appears in the text with a sense that shifts in the course of the exposition, as the utterances it describes shift in sense and relative

174   Michel Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979 (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 8. 175   It may be at last time, to say it with Latour, to draw our attention ‘away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed.’ In Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”,’ in New Literary History, 2010 (41), 471–490, 474. However, it would be difficult to be shown something that is not constructed, inasmuch as deixis operates as a construction. 176   We may trace the last European wave of mathematical modelling at least to Frege’s 1879 Begriffsschrift, which develops a new logical conceptual notation following the example of arithmetics: in particular, Frege requires that ‘[b]ei aller Unbestimmtheit muss aber daran festgehalten werden, dass ein Buchstabe die Bedeutung, welche man ihm einmal gegeben hat, in demselben Zusammenhange beibehält,’ no matter how indeterminate the meaning of a letter, we must insist that throughout a given context the letter retains the meaning once given to it. The word beibehält, retains, is italicized in the original text. In Frege, Begriffsschrift, 1. 177   We may understand the relation of equivalence as the (hardly possible) zero degree of transformation: ‘S’il y a des équivalences, c’est qu’elles sont fabriquées de bric et de broc, à force de sueur et de grands travaux, et qu’on les maintient par violence.’ If there are equivalences, it is because they are made of odds and ends, by dint of sweat and heavy labor, and they are maintained by violence. In Bruno Latour, Les microbes. Guerre et Paix: suivi de Irréductions (Paris: Editions A. M. Métailié et Association Pandore, 1984), 181.

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amount too.178 It is a sort of controlled drift though, as Austin at once produces and maps these transformations. More than that, as Austin exposes, as it were, the sensitivity of things to words, he also implicitly shows the sensitivity of words, qua things, to words. We may also describe this sensitivity in different terms. Wittgenstein affirms that ‘[f]or a large class of cases of use of the word “meaning” (. . .) the meaning of a word is its use in the language’179: if this is the case, the very use of a word, inasmuch as it exposes this word to other words, modifies the word’s meaning, or, as I would prefer, its sense. This ongoing drift of sense is responsible for the Wittgensteinian halo around words: it produces language games and it leaves family resemblances as traces of this production. For example, if we consider the word ‘phone,’ its shift of sense allows us to use it to mention a device for watching movies: this is a sense that was unthinkable for a phone until few years ago. Following Hegel, we may also depict such sensitivity as the porosity180 of things to words: for instance, we may depict the powerful effects of specific performatives, namely, insults, as the porosity of relational bodies to (swear) words. In this case, words may be held responsible for at least a part of the phenomena of interpersonal exosmosis that Bergson highlights. I anticipated that such phenomena find a more general conceptualization as Simondon’s transindividual dimension, which appears in his two 1958 doctoral theses: Simondon deals in parallel with the apparently unrelated notions of individuation and technical object. The link, as he explains in a 1965 essay, is human activity: Man [sic], voluntarily or not, is a technician of the human species; (. . .) “culture” and “technique” are both management activities, and thus, techniques: they are even techniques of human management, because they exert an action on man, through a medium in the case of the activities generally named technical, and directly in the case of culture.181 178   In a 1958 note in the manuscript, Austin even considers an extreme case: ‘won’t all utterances be performative?’ Quoted in note by the editor Urmson, in Austin, How to do things with words, 103. 179  ‘[F]ür eine große Klasse von Fällen der Benützung des Wortes “Bedeutung” (. . .) die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.’ In Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, 20. 180  See supra, chapter 9, note 95. 181  ‘L’homme, volontairement ou non, est technicien de l’espèce humaine; (. . .) la “culture” et la “technique” sont l’une et l’autre des activités de maniement, donc des techniques: elles sont même des techniques de maniement humain, car elles exercent une action sur l’homme, par l’intermédiaire du milieu dans le cas des activités nommées généralement techniques, et directement dans le cas de

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Simondon attempts at ‘knowing the individual through individuation instead of knowing individuation from the individual’182 His polemical target is the predetermined Aristotelian hylomorphic structure, and the (Scholastic) reduction of the subject to ‘a substance, that is, a term that has absorbed the relation within itself; substance is an extreme case of the relation, that of the inconsistency of the relation.’183 Moreover, Simondon complains that ‘the name individual is improperly given to a more complex reality, that of the complete subject, who comprises, in addition to the individuated reality, an unindividual, pre-individual, or still natural aspect.’184 This not yet individuated aspect, which Simondon also describes with the Greek term ἄπειρον185 [apeiron], ‘is the principle of the transindividual; it directly communicates with the other preindividual realities contained in the other individuals, just like each mesh of a network communicates with the other meshes by going beyond itself into the following mesh.’186 Simondon conceives of the preindividual as a kind of reservoir of potentials, which coexist within the subject together with the latter’s (provisionally) individuated aspect: this is more a temporal than a spatial plurality, as it ‘is not the plurality of the parts,’187 but of different phases of being. In other words, for Simondon ‘the transindividual and the individuated [being] are not of the same phase of being: there is a coexistence of two phases of being, just like amorphous water within a crystal.’188

la culture.’ In Gilbert Simondon, ‘Culture et technique,’ in Bulletin de l’Institut de philosophie morale et enseignement. Université libre de Bruxelles, XIV année, t. 55–56 (1965), 3–16, 5. 182  ‘[C]onnaitre l’individu à travers l’individuation plutôt que l’individuation à partir de l’individu.’ In Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 4. 183  ‘[U]ne substance, c’est-à-dire un terme âyant absorbé la relation en lui; la substance est un cas extrême de la relation, celui de l’inconsistance de la relation.’ Ibid., 275. 184  ‘[L]e nom d’individu est abusivement donné à une réalité plus complexe, celle du sujet complet, qui comporte en lui, en plus de la réalité individuée, un aspect inindividué, pré-individuel, ou encore naturel.’ In Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Paris: Millon, 2005), 310. 185  The term apeiron appears in Simplicius’ quotation of Theophrastus’ supposed quotation of Anaximander. In Anaximander, DK 12 B1. Havelock challenges the philosophical vulgate and he convincingly doubts Anaximander’s authorship of the nominalized term. In Havelock, ‘The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics.’ 186  ‘[Le préindividuel] est le principe du transindividuel; elle communique directement avec les autres réalités préindividuelles contenues dans les autres individus, comme les mailles d’un réseau communiquent les unes avec les autres en se dépassant chacune dans la maille suivante.’ In Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 249. 187  ‘[Elle] n’est pas la pluralité des parties.’ Ibid., 268. 188  ‘[L]e transindividuel et l’individué ne sont pas de la même phase d’être: il y a coexistence de deux phases d’être, comme l’eau amorphe dans un cristal.’ In Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 304.

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More precisely, ‘the preindividual being is the being in which there is no phase; (. . .) individuation corresponds to the appearance of phases in being which are the phases of being.’189 According to Simondon, each of these phases of being is only temporarily stable though: [T]he stable equilibrium is perhaps only an extreme case. The general case of states is perhaps that of metastable states: the equilibrium of a realized structure is stable only within certain limits and in a single order of magnitude, without interaction with others; it hides potentials which, if released, can produce a sudden alteration leading to a likewise metastable new structuring.190

The preindividual is the source of each new structuring, that is, each new phase of the individuated being: yet, as we saw, the preindividual is not a simply inner source, because it is linked to other preindividual components in the transindividual dimension, which transcends the limits of the subject. This interhuman relation is mediated by technical objects, both as products of human practices and as catalysts of further practices. Simondon specifies: The technical object taken according to its essence, that is to say the technical object as it was invented, thought, and wanted, assumed by a human subject, becomes the support and the symbol of this relationship that we would like to name transindividual.191

Simondon later describes this impact of a technical apparatus on a human group as ‘the incorporation of the effect within the collective organism (. . .) as if the bodily schema of the human species is modified, expands, and reaches new dimensions.’192 Because Simondon also observes that ‘the individual’s actual body extends to the limits of the in-group,’193 that is, the group with which the individual 189  ‘[L]’être préindividuel est l’être en lequel n’existe pas de phase; (...) [l]’individuation correspond à l’apparition de phases dans l’être qui sont les phases de l’être.’ In Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 5. Original italics. 190  ‘[L]’équilibre stable n’est peut-être qu’un cas limite. Le cas général des états est peut-être celui des états métastables: l’équilibre d’une structure réalisée n’est stable qu’à l’intérieur de certaines limites et dans un ordre de grandeur unique, sans interaction avec d’autres; il masque des potentiels qui, libérés, peuvent produire une brusque altération conduisant à une nouvelle structuration également métastable.’ Ibid., 285. 191  ‘L’objet technique pris selon son essence, c’est-à-dire l’objet technique en tant qu’il a été inventé, pensé et voulu, assumé par un sujet humain, devient le support et le symbole de cette relation que nous voudrions nommer transindividuelle.’ In Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier et Montaigne, 1958), 247. Original italics. 192  ‘[L]’incorporation de l’effet à l’organisme collectif (. . .) comme si le schéma corporel de l’espèce humaine avait été modifié, s’était dilaté, avait reçu des dimensions nouvelles.’ In Simondon, ‘Culture et technique,’ 12. 193  ‘[L]e corps propre de l’individu s’étend jusqu’aux limites de l’in-group.’ In Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 294.

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identifies herself, we may well understand this incorporation of technical apparatuses as taking place likewise within the subject. This insertion (which, following Wiener, Simondon would probably call ‘prosthetic’194) may be easily understood as the entrance of an enthesis within a relational body. For example, we saw that each evening Margery Kempe makes room within her relational body for a heterogeneous human collection that also includes ‘jewys, and sarazinys, and alle hethen pepil.’195 Simondon acknowledges that ‘charity is the expanding force of the personality which does not want to recognize any limit to the in-group and considers it as coextensive with the whole humanity, or even with all creation.’196 He also recalls that ‘for Saint Francis of Assisi not only men [sic] but animals themselves were part of the in-group, the group of interiority.’197 In the case of Margery, we may observe that whilst her inner expansion is justified by a Plato-like abstract tool such as charity, it is actually produced by deploying another carefully crafted technical object, namely, prayer.198 Simondon’s shift of focus from the individual to individuation may be understood as an instance of the more general attempt at producing theoretical constructions in terms of processes rather than entities199: this is the task of authors such as Nietzsche, Whitehead,200 and Bergson. Yet, whilst Bergson underlines the continuity of processual transformations, Simondon also con194   Gilbert Simondon, ‘Entretien sur la mécanologie: Gilbert Simondon et Jean Le Moyne (1968),’ in id., Sur la technique (1953-1983) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 405–443, 414. 195  See supra, pag. 80. 196  ‘La charité est la force d’expansion de la personnalité qui ne veut reconnaître aucune limite à l’in-group et le considère comme coextensif à l’humanité entière ou même à toute la création.’ In Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 295. 197  ‘[P]our saint François d’Assise non seulement les hommes mais les animaux eux-mêmes faisaient partie de l’in-group, du groupe d’intériorité.’ Ibid. 198   Perhaps one may doubt the assimilation of prayer to a technical object in a Simondonian sense. For sure, in dealing with ancient Roman prayers, it would be difficult to question, for example, the technical orientation of the invocation to the three di certi (certain gods, according to Varro), or Sondergötter (particular gods, according to Usener) Veruactor, Reparator, and Inporcitor, who preside over three subsequent and different ploughings. See Servius, In Vergilium, Aeneis 2.141; see Hermann Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: Verlag von Friedrich Cohen, 1896), 76. However, whilst Simondon does not give a definition of technical object, he insists on its detachment from its producer(s), and on the inner coherence of its components: prayer in general may well fit both requirements. Following Simondon’s considerations on the current categories of culture and technique, one may object that prayer seems to act directly on humans as a cultural technique, rather than impacting indirectly on them as a technical intervention through a medium: yet, even in this case, Simondon’s acknowledgement of the technicality of culture may support the understanding of cultural objects as technical objects. See Simondon, ‘Culture et technique.’ 199  This is the sense in which Stiegler suggests the neologism ‘transindividuation.’ In Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 2. La désorientation (Paris: Galileé, 1996), 278. 200   See, for example, Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan Company, 1929).

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siders the discontinuity of individuation201: this understanding of transformation as the result of discontinuous processes too is shared by Foucault, who also turns his attention from subjects to subjectivation. Foucault first considers subjectivation under the shape of assujettissement, the subjugation of the inmates of total institutions202 such as the asylum, the hospital, and the prison.203 He then focuses on ancient Greek and Roman texts in order to explore processes of subjectivation in the proactive sense of the care of the self.204 Foucault observes that ‘the epimeleia heautou, the cura sui [care of oneself], is an injunction that one rediscovers in many philosophical doctrines.’205 However, it is easy to trace its first and crucial appearance to the same text where, as we saw, Plato possibly produces the notion of the Self by linguistic means206: the first Alcibiades dialogue. Here, the Platonic Socrates questions Alcibiades on the importance of σαυτοῦ (. . .) ἐπιμεληθῆναι207 [sautou (. . .) epimelēthēnai], to take care of oneself for an aspiring political leader. Before Plato, Herodotus recalls Themistocles’ invitation to his fellow Athenians after defeating the Persians: αὐτῶν ἐπιμεληθῆναι καὶ τῶν οἰκετέων208 [autōn epimelēthēnai kai tōn oiketeōn], let’s take care of ourselves and our households: yet, the Platonic Socrates gives the reflexive object of care a novel and specific sense, when he urges young and old Athenians ‘to care

201  ‘Ceci ne signifie nullement que le temps de l’individuation vitale soit continu, comme l’affirme Bergson; la continuité est un des schèmes chronologiques possibles, mais elle n’est pas le seul; des schèmes de discontinuité, de contiguïté, d’enveloppement, peuvent être définis en chronologie comme en topologie.’ This does not mean that the time of vital individuation is continuous, as Bergson asserts; continuity is one of the possible chronological schemes, but it is not the only one; patterns of discontinuity, contiguity, wrapping can be defined in chronology as in topology. In Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 228. 202   The notion of ‘total institution’ is popularized by Erving Goffmann, who possibly derives it from Everett Hughes: ‘A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.’ In Erving Goffman, Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), xiii. 203   See Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961); Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 204   See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–1984). 205  ‘L’epimeleia heautou, la cura sui est une injonction qu’on retrouve dans beaucoup de doctrines philosophiques.’ In Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité III. Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 59. 206  See supra, pag. 153ff. 207  Plato, Alcibiades I 120c. 208  Herodotus 8.109.

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(epimeleisthai) neither for bodies nor properties primarily and not as much as for the soul, so that it is as good as possible.’209 It would be difficult not to recognize such a novel Platonic sense as the root of that ancient attitude towards the self, which Foucault describes as ‘an intensification of one’s relation to oneself by which one constitutes oneself as the subject of one’s acts.’210 Moreover, Foucault underlines that in Hellenistic and imperial times, ‘during the refinement of the arts of living and the care of the self, some precepts emerge that seem to be rather similar to those that will be formulated in later moral systems.’211 Foucault also cautions that despite the analogies, the (generally Christian) recastings of the technologies of the self ‘will derive from a profoundly altered ethics and a different way of constituting oneself’212: yet, whatever the motivation, I hope to have clearly shown some relevant links between the series of reflexive gestures that produce over time the variety of individual selves as their objects, and the Platonic construction of that which Deleuze calls ‘the principle of the Same.’213 Deleuze does not limit himself to depicting the Platonic logic of the Same: he also puts forth an alternative construction, which sets difference as the core of reality.214 We may compare Deleuze’s theoretical operation to Hegel’s likewise ambitious insertion of contradiction within each and every being: we saw that the Hegelian gesture displaces self-reflexivity as the seat of identity. Nevertheless, inasmuch as Hegel extends the range of contradiction to the inner sphere, he confirms this logical tool as the general principle of reality: on the contrary, whilst the Deleuzean notion of difference likewise radically undermines self-reflexivity, it also displaces the cornerstone of Aristotelian logic, namely, contradiction itself.215 209   μήτε σωμάτων ἐπιμελεῖσθαι μήτε χρημάτων πρότερον μηδὲ οὕτω σφόδρα ὡς τῆς ψυχῆς ὅπως ὡς ἀρίστη ἔσται [mēte sōmatōn epimeleisthai mēte khrēmatōn proteron mēde houtō sphodra hōs tēs psykhēs hopōs hōs aristē estai]. In Plato, Apology 30a–b. 210  ‘[U]ne intensification du rapport à soi par lequel on se constitue comme sujet de ses actes.’ In Foucault, Le souci de soi, 55. 211  ‘Ainsi, dans le raffinement des arts de vivre et du souci de soi, se dessinent quelques préceptes qui semblent assez proches de ceux dont on trouvera la formulation dans les morales ultérieures.’ Ibid., 274. 212  ‘Ils relèveront alors d’une éthique profondément remaniée et d’une autre manière de se constituer soi-même.’ Ibid. 213  ‘[L]e principe du Même.’ In Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 349. 214   Deleuze is predated by Tarde, who, in 1893, boldly writes: ‘Exister, c’est différer,’ existing is differing. In Gabriel Tarde, ‘Les monades et la sociologie,’ in Revue internationale de sociologie, 1(3), 1893, 231–246 (2me partie), 236. Deleuze explicitly acknowledges his debt to Tarde: see, for example, Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 38–39. 215  More precisely, in the Metaphysics Aristotle deals with a family of notions of opposition: ἀντίκειται μὲν ἀντίφασις καὶ στέρησις καὶ ἐναντιότης καὶ τὰ πρός τι [antikeitai men antiphasis kai sterēsis kai enantiotēs kai ta pros ti], the types of opposition are contradiction, privation, contrariety

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Deleuze’s starting points are ‘un moi dissous,’216 a dissolved I, and ‘un Je felé,’217 a fractured I: he pushes further Simondon’s transindividual opening, and postulates ‘a world where individuations are impersonal, and singularities pre-individual.’218 Together with Guattari, he then plainly affirms: ‘there is no subject, there are only collective compositions of enunciation.’219 In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari give as an example of these compositions the band of seven Musikerhunde,220 the musical dogs in Kafka’s tale Forschungen eines Hundes, Investigations of a dog: moreover, they specify that such a composite nature does not belong only to collectives: ‘Even when the animal is unique, its burrow, it is not, it is a multiplicity and a composition.’221 Deleuze and Guattari recover from Bergson ‘the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and exceeding the multiple no less than the One.’222 However, they do not reproduce Bergson’s early distinction between qualitative and quantitative multiplicities, but they take further his later questioning of the radical heterogeneity of inner psychic and outer physical phenomena: their multiplicities no longer concern numerical unity ‘as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.’223 More than that, they turn their construction into an invitation to their readers: ‘Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities!’224

and relation (10.1055a). Moreover, τὰ δ᾽ ἐναντία διάφορα, καὶ ἡ ἐναντίωσις διαφορά τις [ta d᾽ enantia diaphora, kai hē enantiōsis diaphora tis], contraries are different, and contrariety is a kind of difference (10.1054b). In particular, ἡ ἐναντιότης ἐστὶ διαφορὰ τέλειος [hē enantiotēs esti diaphora teleios], contrariety is maximum difference (10.1055a). Furthermore, as ἀντιφάσεως δὲ μηδέν ἐστι μεταξύ, τῶν δὲ ἐναντίων ἐνδέχεται, ὅτι μὲν οὐ ταὐτὸν ἀντίφασις καὶ τἀναντία δῆλον [antiphaseōs de mēden esti metaxy, tōn de enantiōn endechetai, hoti men ou tauton antiphasis kai tanantia dēlon] an intermediate is impossible in contradiction but possible between contraries, obviously contradiction is not the same as contrariety (10.1054b). 216  Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 4. 217   Ibid., 220. 218  ‘[U]n monde ou où les individuations sont impersonnelles, et les singularités, pré-individuelles.’ Ibid., 4. 219  ‘Il n’y a pas de sujet, il n’y a que des agencements collectifs d’énonciation.’ In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), 33. Original italics. The term agencement in Deleuze and Guattari’s texts is often rendered in English as ‘assemblage.’ 220   In Franz Kafka, Forschungen eines Hundes, in id., Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Hrsg. von Max Brod und Hans Joachim Schoeps (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931), 154–211, 172. 221  ‘Même quand l’animal est unique, son terrier, lui, ne l’est pas, c’est une multiplicité et un agencement.’ In Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 68. 222  ‘[L]a catégorie de multiplicité, employée comme substantif et dépassant le multiple non moins que l’Un.’ In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 50. Original italics. 223  ‘[L]’Un comme sujet ou comme objet, comme réalité naturelle ou spirituelle, comme image et monde.’ In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 2 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980), 14. 224  ‘Ne soyez pas un ni multiple, soyez des multiplicités!’ Ibid., 36.

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Provincializing the Individual The Perdividuation of Relational Bodies

Deleuze and Guattari’s joyous invitation to be multiplicities as an alternative to both the Platonic dichotomy of the One and the Many, and the modern one of the individual and the group, is exemplified by their notion of Dividuel,1 the Dividual: they devise this notion in Mille Plateaux, whilst considering a specific group, namely, the musical chorus. Deleuze and Guattari recall that Debussy poses the problem when he complains about Wagner’s musical treatment of the group: ‘As to the people of the Master Singers, it is not a crowd, it is an army.’2 Debussy opposes to the disciplined mass of Wagnerian singers the voice of the crowd. Deleuze and Guattari call ‘Dividual’ this One-Crowd (Un-Foule), as opposed to the OneAll (Un-Tout) of the compact group: [T]he crowd must be fully individuated, but through group individuations, which cannot be reduced to the individuality of the subjects with which it is composed. The people must not be identified according to the single persons, but according to the affections that it feels, both simultaneously and sequentially.3

  Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 421.  ‘Quant au peuple des Maîtres chanteurs, ce n’est pas une foule, c’est une armée.’ Debussy adds: ‘Ce que je voudrais, c’est quelque chose de plus épars, de plus divisé, de plus délié, de plus impalpable, quelque chose d’inorganique en apparence et pourtant d’ordonné dans le fond.’ What I would like is something more scattered, more divided, more untied, more impalpable, something inorganic in appearance and yet ordered in the background. In Claude Debussy, letter to Laloy quoted in Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 159. 3  ‘[I]l faut qu’une foule soit pleinement individuée, mais par des individuations de groupe, qui ne se réduisent pas à l’individualité des sujets qui la composent. Le peuple doit s’individuer, non pas d’après les personnes, mais d’après les affects qu’il éprouve simultanément et successivement.’ In Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 421. 1 2

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Only ten years pass between this construction of the Dividual as multiplicity in music and the publication of Les sociétés de contrôle,4 the societies of control, a short article in which Deleuze relates the notion of dividual to a new mode of social production. In the article, Deleuze announces the epochal transition from the disciplinary societies, as theorized by Foucault,5 to the societies of control6: this announcement is less a description than a strategic move, which Deleuze graphically summarizes as ‘searching for new weapons.’7 Deleuze refurbishes his theoretical arsenal by appropriating and redirecting the Simondonian extreme cases in the processes of taking form, namely, the stable moulage, moulding, and the variable modulation, modulation. In Simondon’s words, ‘[t]o mould is to modulate in a definitive manner: to modulate is to mould in a continuous and perpetually variable manner.’8 Deleuze describes the intervention of disciplinary societies’ apparatuses as a moulding, and that of societies of control’s apparatuses as a modulation. In the societies of control, Deleuze argues, ‘[o]ne is no longer facing the mass/ individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks”.’9 Some twenty years later, by tinkering with the Foucauldian lexicon,10 Rouvroy and Berns characterize as ‘algorithmic governmentality’11 a novel form of social control, which relies on datamining. Rouvroy recalls that data are not what they pretend to be: ‘data (données) in their proliferation, effectively, are

  Gilles Deleuze, Les sociétés de contrôle, in L’autre journal, n. 1, Mai 1990, 110–113.   Deleuze recalls from the outset that the notion of disciplinary societies is associated with the work of Foucault. Ibid., 110.  6   The whole pamphlet has the tone of an announcement: ‘Ce qui compte, c’est que nous sommes au début de quelque chose.’ What is important, is that we are at the beginning of something. Ibid., 113.  7  ‘[C]hercher de nouvelles armes.’ Ibid., 111.  8  ‘Mouler est moduler de manière définitive: moduler est mouler de manière continue et perpétuellement variable.’ In Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 42.  9  ‘On ne se trouve plus devant le couple masse-individu. Les individus sont devenus des “dividuels,” et les masses, des échantillons, des données, des marchés ou des “banques.”’ In Deleuze, Les sociétés de contrôle, 111. 10  ‘J’appelle “gouvernementalité” la rencontre entre les techniques de domination exercées sur les autres et les techniques de soi.’ I call ‘governmentality’ the encounter between the techniques of domination exercised over others and the techniques of the self. In Michel Foucault, ‘Les techniques de soi’ (1982), in id., Dits et Écrits, Daniel Defert et François Ewald avec la collaboration de Jacques Lagrange eds., vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 783–813, 785. 11  ‘[G]ouvernementalité algorithmique.’ In Antoinette Rouvroy et Thomas Berns, ‘Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation. Le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?’ In Réseaux 2013/1 (n. 177), 163–196, 163.  4  5

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not given (données)’12: on the contrary, they are the result of ‘an operation of depuration in which data are expurgated from all that makes their context.’13 One important effect of this operation is the redefinition of its human target, which is similar to the Deleuzean ‘man [sic] of control.’14 According to Rouvroy, this target is no longer a subject: ‘the notion of subject is completely emptied thanks to this collection of infra-individual data, which are recomposed at a supra-individual level in the form of profile.’15 The emptying of the subject may appear to frustrate Simondon’s and Foucault’s efforts to produce a processual construction of individuals and subjects. One may even read big data’s radical operation of fragmentation and reconstruction as a Dostoyevskian malevolent parody of Deleuze and Guattari’s opening to and between inner and outer multiplicities. In the case of Dostoyevsky, the voice of characters such as Goliadkin and Alyosha is redoubled as a distorted and hostile copy: in the case of the French writers, the distorted replica of their primary voice seems not to be produced by deforming additions, but rather by a subtractive depuration, which resembles the Aristotelian aphairesis. On the horizon of the processes of individuation and subjectification, big data’s violent reduction of human subjects to their re-aggregated calculable features may be conceived of as a process of desubjectification,16 or of disindividuation.17 We may notice that such words are construed with the prefixes ‘de-’ and ‘dis-,’ which are imported into modern European languages from Latin with their previous function of undoing or reversing the action of a verb: their intervention may be compared to the effect of the Greek privative alpha. 12  ‘[L]es données, dans leur prolifération, effectivement, ne sont pas données.’ In Antoinette Rouvroy et Bernard Stiegler, ‘Le régime de vérité numérique. De la gouvernementalité algorithmique à un nouvel État de droit,’ in Socio, 4(2015), 113–140, 116, retrieved 11/07/2019 at https://journals.openedition.org/socio/1251 13  ‘[U]ne opération de purification dans laquelle les données sont expurgées de tout ce qui fait leur contexte.’ Ibid. 14  ‘[L]’homme du contrôle.’ In Deleuze, Les sociétés de contrôle, 111. 15  ‘[L]a notion de sujet est elle-même complètement évacuée grâce à cette collecte de données infra-individuelle, recomposée à un niveau supra-individuel sous forme de profil.’ In Rouvroy et Stiegler, ‘Le régime de vérité numérique,’ 122. 16  ‘[D]esoggettivazione.’ In Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo (Roma: Nottetempo, 2005), 30. Agamben uses the term in relation to apparatuses in general. 17  In L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Simondon describes emotion as ‘la capacité de l’être individué de se désindividuer provisoirement pour participer à une individuation plus vaste,’ the capacity of the individuated being to temporarily disindividuate itself in order to participate in a wider individuation (167). In turn, he affirms that the relation between the biological being and the transindividual ‘ne peut plus intervenir que par une désindividualisation de l’individu’ can but happen through a disindividualization of the individual (283).

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We saw that Parmenides turns this grammatical tool into a veritable dispositif avant la lettre, that is, a language apparatus far in advance of its own French definition18: by conjoining the letter alpha with a series of epithets, Parmenides constructs the privation of a feature or a missed action as an atemporal quality of That-which-is, or Being.19 On the contrary, the terms ‘desubjectification’ and ‘disindividuation’ suggest a process rather than a quality or an entity. Yet, they still appear to evoke an oppositional horizon, which may include two aspects of its Aristotelian quadripartition20: being or not being a subject (or an individual), and being more or less a subject (or an individual). We may recall that already in 1887, Nietzsche jots down an enlightening note: ‘There is no opposite: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposite – and from these we erroneously (fälschlich) transfer it to the thing.’21 Moreover, we saw that Deleuze displaces the category of opposition: in doing so, he also follows Tarde, who not only reconsiders opposition, but also proposes a language shift for preventing the long-lasting complicity of opposition and being: All philosophy has hitherto been based on the verb To Be, whose definition seemed to be the philosopher’s stone to be discovered. It can be said that, if it had been based on the verb To Have, many sterile debates, many a trampling on the spot of the spirit would have been avoided. From this principle, I am, is impossible to deduce, despite all the subtlety of the world, any other existence than mine; hence the negation of external reality. But first put this postulate: “I have” as a fundamental fact, the had [that which is had] and the haver are given at the same time as inseparable.22

18   The French word dispositif appears in the seventeenth century as a juridical term: see Estienne Pasquier, Les Recherches de la France (Paris: Laurens Sonnius, 1621), 476. However, we may trace its use as (language) apparatus at least to the text of Bergson. See supra, chapter 1, note 140. 19  See supra, pag. 161ff. 20  See supra, chapter 9, note 215. 21  ‘Es giebt keine Gegensätze: nur von denen der Logik her haben wir den Begriff des Gegensatzes—und von denen aus fälschlich in die Dinge übertragen.’ In Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887, eKGWB/NF-1887,9[91], http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1887,9[91] 22  ‘Toute la philosophie s’est fondée jusqu’ici sur le verbe Être, dont la définition semblait la pierre philosophale à découvrir. On peut affirmer que, si elle eût été fondée sur le verbe Avoir, bien des débats stériles, bien des piétinements de l’esprit sur place auraient été évités.—De ce principe, je suis, impossible de déduire, malgré toute la subtilité du monde, nulle autre existence que la mienne; de là, la négation de la réalité extérieure. Mais posez d’abord ce postulat: “J’ai” comme fait fondamental, l’eu et l’ayant sont donnés à la fois comme inséparables.’ In Gabriel Tarde, ‘Monadologie et sociologie,’ in id., Essais et mélanges sociologiques (Paris: G. Masson, 1895), 309–389, 371.

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Tarde’s surprising suggestion exposes at once the privileged position accorded to the various versions of the verb ‘to be’ in the European text, and its often intractable side-effects. Yet, the substitution of ‘to be’ with ‘to have’ would not always produce the same result, as we saw that in European languages the paths of the two auxiliary verbs show substantial semantic overlappings.23 However, if we accept Tarde’s invitation, we still have to consider the Aristotelian advice: ‘to have is said in a good many ways.’24 In the Categories, after listing eight kinds of uses of the verb ‘to have,’ Aristotle admits that ‘other ways of having may perhaps be shown.’25 We may fulfil the (rhetorical) expectation of Aristotle, as expressed by the optative mood of his verb phaneiēsan,26 by acknowledging that novel uses of the verb ‘to have’ do continuously appear: of course, they are brought to light not simply as pre-existing and yet unrecognized varieties—as Aristotle would understand—but as new productions. In this book, a novel use of ‘having’ appeared as relational bodies’ activity of incorporation27: for example, we met Ovid’s fear of losing his sophisticated language skills for lack of practice.28 Of course, no one can doubt the poet’s language habit, which is a word that describes a (gained) possession: this is the literal meaning of its Latin predecessor habitus, which Boethius uses to translate the Aristotelian term ἕξις [hexis]. Nevertheless, the porosity of the relational body that allows the acquisition of Ovid’s wordsmithery can likewise let it disappear. Exercise has then to produce a repeated incorporation of the enthesis of language skills, and the re-enactment of the latter’s grafting power. The Aristotelian hexis, and the corresponding Latin noun of action habitus, together with their English calque ‘habit,’ are less suitable to express this activity of incorporation than the Greek and Latin present participles ἔχον29 [ekhon] and habens, and their English rendering as the present participle  See supra, pag. 138.   Τὸ ἔχειν κατὰ πλείονας τρόπους λέγεται [To echein kata pleionas tropous legetai]. In Aristotle, Categories 15b. 25   ἴσως δ’ ἂν καὶ ἄλλοι τινὲς φανείησαν τοῦ ἔχειν τρόποι [isōs d’ an kai alloi tines phaneiēsan tou ekhein tropoi]. Ibid. 26   The term phaneiēsan is the 3rd person plural aorist optative passive form of the verb φαίνω [phainō], to appear. 27   In my previous book, I introduced a similar notion of incorporation, which was not yet associated with relational bodies. See Baldissone, Farewell to Freedom, 148. 28  See supra, pag. 122. 29   See the Aristotelian description of one of the two parts of psykhē as λόγον ἔχον [logon ekhon], having logos, that is, word or discursive ability, which instead shifts the use of the present participle ekhon from the expression of a course of action to the definition of a permanent feature. In Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1102a. 23 24

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form ‘having.’ Inasmuch as this form portrays incorporation as an activity, similarly to the nutritional practices of eating and drinking (and their correlative practices of urinating and defecating), it is particularly apt to evoke the non-permanent character of relational bodies’ acquisitions.30 We saw that such acquisitions modify and qualify relational bodies: if I may attempt a local generalization within the text of this book, relational bodies owe their specificity to what they incorporate: in the language of Tarde, ‘having’ defines relational bodies rather than ‘being.’ In turn, incorporation gives at the same time ‘l’eu et l’ayant,’31 the had and the haver: the incorporated enthesis and the incorporating relational body cannot be separated as object and subject. Moreover, as we saw, the incorporation—albeit non-permanent—of entheses is not reversible, inasmuch as it is a production of novelty, whose annihilation only works in algebraic sums and in (ideal) transformations as construed by classical physics and chemistry. Whilst the grafting effects of incorporations cannot be erased, they are constantly modified by the incorporation of other entheses. As previously recalled, this necessarily additional process (as erasures are only obtained at a cost, that is, the superposition of blanking agents) is somewhat counterbalanced by a likewise ongoing dissipation, which is allowed by the constitutive porosity of the relational body. This double flow needs not to be understood as the effect of the limited capacity of a relational body. For example, we saw how much relational bodies can be inflated by Stoic cosmopolitanism, or Christian charity: not to mention the

30   The construction of relational bodies’ incorporations as non-permanent havings, as it were, may help to reconfigure, for example, the notion of memory as an activity rather than a faculty, or even worse, a reservoir. Plato’s metaphor of writing shapes memorization processes as inner inscriptions (see supra, chapter 9, note 112): possibly, the only relevant innovation in the series of repetitions of the Platonic image is Galileo’s claim of the mathematical nature of the language of the inscription: ‘Egli [il libro dell’universo] è scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi, & altre figure Geometriche,’ It [the book of the universe] is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. In Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (Roma: Giacomo Mascardi, 1623), 25. However, unlike most of his followers, Galileo does not forget that we render this mathematical language ‘con i varj accozzamenti di venti caratteruzzi sopra una carta,’ with the various assemblages of twenty little characters on a paper. In Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano (Firenze: Giovanni Battista Landini, 1632), 98. A different construction of memory would question its modern use as a justification of a singular and permanent personal identity, as exemplified by the Lockean self. For sure, this reconstruction would profit from the transcriptions of oral texts such as the Homeric poems, which depict inner processes with a vocabulary of actions. 31  See supra, Epilogue, note 22.

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more recent feats of astrophysics, which pursues the expansion of relational bodies towards the spatial and temporal limits of the universe.32 As this expansion cannot be understood in merely physical terms, it is worth specifying that I put to work the relational body not just as a variety of the numerous notions of the body. On the contrary, in my text the relational body emerges as a reoccupation of the semantic space33 of a double constellation of words. The first group includes Greek words in use before the invention of the body such as the Homeric thymos, noos, phrenes, kēr, ētor, menos, kradiē, demas, melea, guia, and rhethē. The second group encompasses the replacements of the Homeric lexicon after the invention of the body: Plato’s dichotomy of sōma and psykhē and its Latin rendering as corpus and anima, to which European Vernaculars add spirit, Geist, and ‘mind’34 among others. I borrowed again the term ‘reoccupation’ from Blumenberg, who deploys the correspondent German term Umbesetzung to describe the substitution of medieval theological notions with modern nonreligious concepts: ‘In the case of systems of Goethean notions of man and the world, “reoccupation” means that different statements can be understood as answers to identical questions.’35 More precisely, in the previous sentence by Blumenberg I would replace the adjective ‘identical’ with ‘similar,’ as answers are additions to the space of enquiry, because they inevitably alter questions: this alteration is indeed the task of my reoccupation of the Homeric constellation of bodily actions and features, and of the dichotomic settlements of sōma versus psykhē, corpus versus anima, and body versus mind, with the singular image of the relational body. Of course, the composition into a single relational body of either the Homeric constellation of limbs and inner actions, or its post-Homeric dichotomous (and trichotomous, when the soul is distinct from the mind) settlements, may appear to take even further the Platonic reduction: yet, the oneness of the rela32   We may consider the astrophysical hypothesis of the big bang as a temporal terminus a quo, and that of the expanding universe as a dynamic spatialization: even a physical multiverse is recently taking shape, as an unwitting reductionist version of William James’ pluralizing theoretical tool. 33   ‘Semantic space’ is a neat but poor image: considering the ongoing drift of the sense of words, it would be more accurate (but also more obscure) to write of bundles of semantic trajectories, or better, series. 34   The Old English word ‘gemynd/gemynde’ precedes the form ‘mind,’ which the OED first traces in its current orthography to John Bunyan, Light for them that sit in darkness: or, A discourse of Jesus Christ (London: Francis Smith, 1675), 35 (the word is already in the address and in the first page in the plural form ‘minds’). 35  ‘Für den Fall, daß Systeme aus Goethes Welt- und Menschenansicht werden, bedeutet “Umbesetzung,” daß differente Aussagen als Antworten auf identische Fragen verstanden werden können.’ In Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 541.

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tional body undermines the severance of psykhē from sōma—and mind from body—and its porosity openly questions any clear-cut separation between inner and outer dimensions. However, we saw that the boundary between the inner and the outer sphere has almost never been claimed as an absolute one: though the very notion of interiority takes shape as the Christian restatement of the Platonic severance of psykhē from sōma, it also recasts the link of the Platonic inner dimension with the forms, whose position in this respect is reoccupied by the Christian god. Even the unprecedented solitude of the Reformed Christian finds some relief in the possibility for her soul to be coram Deo, in the face of god: this transcendent link prevents the reduction of the relational space to the simplistic three-dimensional geometry of the material body. Unfortunately, the modern path of evacuation of the transcendent sphere— which includes the Kantian attempt at salvaging it by its internalization as an inner transcendental dimension—only produces as an alternative horizon its immanent dichotomic counterpart: on the residual horizon of immanence, the subject is construed by modern sciences as the mere biological body. Without a transcendent way out (also in the shape of grand narratives, to say it with Lyotard36) individual isolation can thus become absolute: the individual in her neoliberal version is plunged again in ‘bellum omnium contra omnes,’37 a war of all against all, but this time, with no divine supervision. Though Simondon’s construction of the transindividual predates the neoliberal upholding of individual absolute atomization, it may be read as the opening of a different perspective: it not only bypasses Aristotelian hylomorphism, but also the Platonic apparatus of individuation and its vertical way out towards the forms—which is to become Christian transcendence—with a transversal intraconnection. Simondon’s transindividual is nothing less than a potential horizon of constitutive participation of humans and things. In this book, the image of the relational body allowed me to reorient key European texts and reposition their characters according to a participative horizon: on this background, the historical, that is, fortuitous paths that lead to the modern European individual appear less as an actualization of potentialities than as a series of constraints and mutilations upon the historical variety of European relational bodies. 36   See Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1979). 37  Thomas Hobbes, Elementa Philosophica De Cive, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Lodewijk Elzevir, 1647), sign. **4r.

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The term ‘mutilation’ evokes a violent and disabling intervention on a human body: we saw how often in modern times this operation is invoked to (improperly) justify the supposed radical heterogeneity of body and mind. Nevertheless, as applied to a relational body, the notion of mutilation no longer refers to a violent partition of a body, but to a likewise violent interdiction of an incorporation38: its sphere of action is not the being of entities, but the performing of practices. Within the sphere of practices, we are no longer forced to deploy the language of being: transformation may replace being as the key language tool. Of course, the novel priority of transformation, similarly to the priority claimed by Hegelian contradiction and Deleuzean difference, entails a transformation of transformation itself: in the sphere of practices, transformation is no longer just the becoming of an entity as in the sphere of being, but it may be construed as the double movement of quitting some kind of sharing and entering some other one. European languages express actions with verbs, which mostly require a grammatical subject: in the sphere of being, the grammatical identity of the subject who quits a sharing, and of the subject who enters another sharing, can produce their common substantial identity: the ship of Theseus is a famous example of this language effect. Plutarch recounts that the Athenian vessel that has had all of its parts replaced for some philosophers remains the same ship of Theseus, whilst for other philosophers it is not the same ship. We may notice that Plutarch mentions the context and the subjects for whom the ship becomes an example (paradeigma39) of more general theoretical concern: on the contrary, the ship of Theseus is generally evoked simply as a representative of the issue whether a completely renovated entity is or is no longer the same. That which the language of being allows to erase (apparently without effort) is the philosophers’ incorporation of the ship(s) within their relational bodies. Plutarch instead narrates this incorporation, whilst incorporating both philosophers and ship(s) as entheses within his relational body. In turn, as a reader of Plutarch I incorporate him, the philosophers, and the ship(s), and as a writer of these lines I allow you, as a reader, to incorporate this (partial) series of incorporations at once, just like a set of Russian dolls. 38   For example, we saw the different effects of the different interdictions imposed by August and Boniface VIII on the different relational bodies of Ovid and Iacopone. 39  Plutarch, Theseus 23.1.

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The language of being pretends to capture such never-ending series: in this book, we met many clever apparatuses of capture, such as Plato’s forms (which put an end to the infinite regression of incorporations) and Aristotle’s cyclical actualization of potentialities: we may add the Kant-derived asymptotic approximation to the truth of being, which still rationalizes the practices of many scientific endeavours. If we leave the sphere of being for that of practices, the grammatical identity of the subject who quits a sharing and of the subject who enters another sharing can only be turned into a substantial identity through an operation of incorporation of the two subjects as the same one: this operation is similar to that of the philosophers who incorporate the series of Theseus’ ships as the same ship. Moreover, one may also incorporate the two subjects as similar ones, just like other philosophers incorporate the series of Theseus’ ships as similar ships. Yet, in the sphere of practices, it would not be enough to ‘look and see,’ as recommended by Wittgenstein, to discover the similarity between the ships. Only in the sphere of being, the alleged objectivity (whether external or transcendental) of both identity and similarity grants these relations the possibility to be merely detected. On the contrary, in the sphere of practices, similarity—just like identity—has to be produced as the result of a specific operation of making-similar: this operation, analogously to the operations of making-identical and making-opposite, is performed as an incorporation. We may compare the image of incorporation to Tarde’s concept of possession, on which relies his unusual definition of society: ‘the reciprocal possession, under extremely various forms, of all by each one.’40 It is not difficult to recognize in the Tardean formula tous par chacun, all by each one, a translation of Leibniz’s image of the human monad as a living mirror of both god and the universe. Tarde consciously plays the role of traduttore traditore, translator traitor of Leibniz’s monad, which no longer reflects, that is, duplicates the being of reality, but owns it. We saw that before Tarde, the category of ownership is given theoretical relevance by Stirner: whilst Stirner’s ownership replaces the notion of being, his absolute focus on the unique owner paradoxically (and for sure, unwittingly) risks producing a closure similar to that of the Lutherinspired Leibnizian monad though.

40  ‘[L]a possession réciproque, sous des formes extrêmement variées, de tous par chacun.’ In Tarde, Essais et mélanges sociologiques, 370.

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On the contrary, Tarde’s notion of reciprocal possession—and the variety of its forms—bypasses all the barriers set by the language of being: not only having qua practice produces at once its terms and their inseparability, but uneven reciprocal having also produces a compenetration that is forbidden under the regime of being, where one should not be something and something else at once.41 Nevertheless, despite the discourse of being and its interdictions, we observed this compenetration at work as a multifarious trespassing of individual boundaries: for instance, the soul of the Sienese Catherine hosts god as surprisingly as the fish hosts the sea; Dante wishes to enter his heavenly interlocutor just as easily as the latter enters him; Gargantua envisages his death as a transmigration into his son’s body; Alyosha answers questions that Ivan asks himself in his inner dialogue. We saw that Simondon extends this compenetration to technical apparatuses, and that he describes their impact on human groups as an incorporation by the collective organism: in this book, the impact of both (so-called) material and immaterial technologies upon, for example, Robinson and Bunyan’s Christian is likewise construed as an incorporation within their relational bodies. Following Wittgenstein’s advice, we should probably consider a plurality of resembling incorporations, which, in the sphere of practices, produce constellations of relational bodies. This derivation of relational bodies from practices of incorporations may be compared with a similar but ontologically clear-cut relation between doers and deeds: ‘there is no “being” behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it—Nietzsche claims—“the doer” is just added to the doing, the doing is everything.’42 At least with respect to a particular doing, namely, thinking, Nietzsche even goes as far as declaring that ‘both doing and doer are fictive.43 In both previous cases, the language of being appears to force Nietzsche into the bottleneck of oppositional alternatives: everything (Alle) versus nothing, fictive (fingirt) versus real. Of course, Nietzsche himself teaches us to mistrust opposition in general, and in particular, the opposition between fic41   In my previous book, I argued that Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of mystical participation is less a description of the so-called primitive mentality than of the limitations imposed on European texts by the language of being. See Baldissone, Farewell to Freedom, 148–150. 42  ‘[E]s giebt kein “Sein” hinter dem  Thun, Wirken, Werden; “der Thäter” ist zum  Thun bloss hinzugedichtet—das Thun ist Alles.’ In Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral I § 13; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GM-I-13 43  ‘[S]owohl das Thun, als der Thäter sind fingirt.’ In Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente November 1887–März 1888, N. 11[113]; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1887,11[113]

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tion and truth: nonetheless, as he carries his deconstruction of the theoretical language of being with the historically sedimented tools of the grammatical language of being, he seems to confirm Derrida’s disheartening acknowledgement that ‘we have no language—no syntax, no lexicon—which is extraneous to this history.’44 Yet, if this book succeeded in showing that even the history of being can be told in a different way with different tools, that is, without retrospectively colonizing its historical proliferations with even the best intentioned conceptual apparatus, Derrida’s pessimistic statement may be provincialized: we may use the Derridean powerful warning as a specific antidote to the specific modern hybris that underlies the construction of modern thought as an alleged absolute novelty and a radical theoretical refoundation of European thought. In this case, whilst we may well endorse Nietzsche’s emphatic dismissal of thinking as the main articulation of dichotomous settlements such as inner versus outer, and mind versus body, we may also embrace some Derridean caution over the Saṃsāra45 of theoretical recentring, which hardly knows a way out: deflation is more than enough. In other words, we may be contented with the (huge) task of provincializing concepts and dichotomies by way of their contextualization. The provincialization of a totality implies also the appearance of new territories: this is not the result of an act of creation, but of production. Creation boasts to be a production ex nihilo, as if novelty relied more on difference than repetition: production instead is contented with tinkering (even, pace Lévy Strauss, under the shape of planning46) or, in the nearly unpronounceable words of Deleuze and Guattari, with a double and concurrent intervention of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This book may be understood as a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization of the European textual canon, in the light of the variety of its processes of individuation; it may also be read as a geneurgical (if I may) exploration of the language of identity, and of personal identity as its specific outcome.

44  ‘[N]ous ne disposons d’aucun langage—d’aucune syntaxe et d’aucun lexique—qui soit étranger à cette histoire.’ In Derrida, ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,’ in id., L’écriture et la différence, 412. 45  Here I stepped out of the European text because at least Gautama (possibly, among others) preaches detachment as a way out of संसार [Saṃsāra], the wheel of reincarnation: yet, my European upbringing makes me suspect a recentring strategy around his telos of annihilation. 46   Lévy Strauss explores the dichotomy of savage versus civilized through the relation of tinkering (bricolage) versus engineering. See Claude Lévy Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).

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The revisitation of the Greek sources of the narrative of whatness may be appreciated as a historical sketch of the constitution of philosophical discourse from the perspective of its specific technology, namely, written language tools: the narrative of whatness, in both its semantic variety of philosophical discourse and its supposedly asemantic (or semantically controllable) variety of formal languages, is shown to bend these powerful language tools towards abstraction and generalization as allegedly subtractive operations. Kleist depicts this historical occurrence with the image of two classes of humans, ‘those who understand metaphors and (. . .) those who understand formulas.’47 Of course, the alternative between metaphors and formulas is as dubious as any synchronic representation of diachronic processes: it may be conveniently replaced, if any, by the choice between two different images, which only in the timeless sphere of mathematical operations are construed as opposites, namely, addition and subtraction. This couple of images allows Freud to draw a simile between sculpture and psychoanalysis, which he contrasts with painting and hypnosis. In his 1905 essay On Psychotherapy, he recalls a description that Leonardo da Vinci derives from Leon Battista Alberti 48: whilst Alberti, somewhat following Pliny, distinguishes between the modelling masters who adds and subtract matter, the sculptors who only subtract, and the silversmiths (and the painters) who only add matter, Leonardo shifts the image and writes that ‘the sculptor only subtract, and the painter always adds various matter.’49 According to Freud, just like sculpture psychoanalysis ‘does not seek to add or to introduce 47  ‘[D]ie sich auf eine Metapher und (. . .) die sich auf eine Formel versteh.’ Kleist’s aphorism is published on 10 December 1810 by the newspaper Berliner Abendblättern. In Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke Brandenburger Ausgabe, Hrsg. von Roland Reuß und Peter Staengle, Band 2/7: Berliner Abendblätter 1 (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1997), 310. 48  ‘Die Malerei, sagt Leonardo, arbeitet per via di porre; sie setzt nämlich Farbenhäufchen hin, wo sie früher nicht waren, auf die nichtfarbige Leinwand; die Skulptur dagegen geht per via di levare vor, sie nimmt nämlich vom Stein so viel weg, als die Oberfläche der in ihm enthaltenen Statue noch bedeckt.’ Painting, Leonardo said, works per via di porre; that is to say, it places little heaps of paint where they have not been before on the uncoloured canvas; sculpturing, on the other hand, goes per via di levare, that is to say, it takes away from the stone as much as covers the surface of the statue therein contained. In Sigmund Freud, Über Psychotherapie, in id., Gesammelte Werke, unter Mitwirkung von Marie Bonaparte hrsg. von Anna Freud, Band 5, 4 Aufl. (Frankfurt: S. Fisher Verlag, 1968), 13–26, 17. 49  ‘[E]sso scultore solo leva, ed il pittore sempre pone di varie materie.’ In Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura, vol. 1, 41. Here is the Italian version of Alberti’s whole sentence, which bears a clear Aristotelian flavour: ‘Alcuni altri incominciarono a far questo solo con il levar via, come che togliendo via quel che in detta materia è di superfluo, scolpiscono, e fanno apparir nel marmo una forma, o figura d’uomo, la quale vi era prima nascosa, ed in potenza,’ some others began to do this [shaping] just by taking away, so that by taking away the superfluous material, they sculpt, and they make appear in the marble a shape, or a human figure, which was hidden there before, and in potency. In Leon Battista Alberti, Della Statua, in id., Della Pittura e Della Statua (Milano, Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1804), 107–136, 108.

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anything new, but to take away something, to bring out something.’50 Freud seems here striving to bring the representation51 of analytische Therapie, analytical therapy into line with the modern scientific narrative of the extraction of unaltered facts from their context. Back to Kleist’s alternative between formulas and metaphors, it would be difficult to deny the latter’s additional character: in the case of formulas, we saw instead that the Aristotelian polemical statement of the subtractive nature of mathematical entities is to turn into Galileo’s Platonic acknowledgement of mathematics as the language of nature, and later on, into the depurated objectivity of big data. Formulas’ side-effects, in the shape of technical additions, may certainly be valuable entheses in the relational body: yet, formulas in the role of depurated subtractions, such as the Aristotelian aphairesis, the Galilean and Cartesian reduction of reality to its primary qualities, and the decontextualized and reaggregated big data, rather seem to produce mutilations of the relational body.52 However, we saw that the association of formulas with their supposed subtractive nature is just a historical construction, and it may hopefully begin to be discontinued right where it took shape: as mathematicians long renounced to represent reality with their formulas, they may possibly reach the enlightenment of Borges’ Giovambattista Marino, who at end of his life is visited by the thought that his renowned poems are not ‘a mirror of the world, but one more thing added to the world.’53 If we join Marino and understand thinking, and doings and doers in general, as additions, we no longer need to expose their fictive character, nor to replace them. The notion of incorporation is not a substitute for thinking, but an additional image for a much wider range of activities of appropriation, which, in turn, out of the sphere of being and its permanent entities, are also activities of production. 50  ‘Die analytische Therapie dagegen will nicht auflegen, nichts Neues einführen, sondern wegnehmen, herausschaffen.’ In Sigmund Freud, Über Psychotherapie, in id., Gesammelte Werke, hrsg. von Anna Freud unter Mitwirkung von Marie Bonaparte, Band 5, 4 Aufl. (Frankfurt: S. Fisher Verlag, 1968), 13–26, 17. 51  Here, if Freud were not too fascinated by the modern paradigm of scientific objectivity, he would appreciate and possibly orient the actual productivity of psychoanalytical practices, rather than denying it. 52  For example, Galileo and Descartes’ prioritization of primary over secondary qualities constructs human and nonhuman bodies and their relations according to this hierarchization of qualities. 53  ‘[U]n espejo del mundo, sino una cosa más agregada al mundo.’ In Borges, Una rosa amarilla, in id., Obras Completas I, 795.

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For example, we saw that abbot Suger absorbs into his tiny body, as Gurevich suggests, the church of Saint Denis and its renovation to come: in turn, the incorporation produces the novel complex not just as an architectural project, but as a series of embodied practices, such as Suger’s surprisingly successful search for unusually tall trees in the depth of the woods.54 Christine de Pizan’s incorporation of technical and relational skills that emulate and exceed male competences produces her sarcastic metamorphosis into a man; Machiavelli’s incorporation of the parallel experiences of the Roman and Florentine republics produces his unexpected role of advisor to a Prince to be. Even the Aristotelian distinction of poiēsis as productive activity, praxis as activity with an end in itself, and theōria as the contemplation of the divine, may be blurred, if we recast all these activities as variously productive incorporations. Yet, this rearrangement would not simply construct praxis as a self-productive activity, and theōria as the contemplator’s self-producing incorporation of the divine itself, because it would also undermine these very reflexive operations by shifting their subject: an incorporation only retrospectively produces a relational body as distinct from an enthesis, whilst dissolving the distinction itself. A relational body could operate self-reflexively only if incorporated by something else as the same relational body both before and after it incorporates an enthesis55: in other words, a relational body could be self-reflexive only if recast as a permanent entity in the language of being. On the contrary, an incorporation generates a relational body as an already overcome appearance: we may say that incorporations realize the intuition of Rimbaud by producing the relational body as another. If we may push the correspondence with threedimensional images, an incorporation may be visualized as the act whereby a relational body invaginates an enthesis and takes its shape. The act of invagination that produces a relational body, an enthesis, and their merging, does not just turn upside down the legacy of the Greek archaic language of war: the image of invagination not only reverses that of the hostile penetration of a generally metallic object into a human body, but it

  See Panofsky, Meaning in the visual arts, 142–143.   In the sphere of practices, even the Platonic notion of thinking as a dialogue of psykhē with itself posits both psykhē and her reflexive duplication as incorporated entheses. Moreover, unlike Galilean (and Hobbesian) inertial bodies, a relational body cannot be severed from ‘all external impediments,’ so that it can but incessantly incorporate (and being incorporated): hence, it would be enough to say that a relational body could operate self-reflexively only if incorporated by something else as the same relational body. 54 55

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also replaces the intrusive incursion of the weapon in the flesh with an act of absorption.56 The resilience of the metaphors of cutting is witnessed instead by the legacy of the Greek verb κρίνειν (krinein), whose sense already in Homer shifts from ‘severing’ to ‘choosing,’57 and through its derivative epithet κριτικός58 (kritikos), towards the ability to discern. These senses survive in the now dormant metaphors ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’: Foucault somewhat revives their etymological links when he proclaims that ‘knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting.’59 Of course, it is fair to say that Foucault modifies the notion of knowledge, which is the result of the Platonic cut that absolutely severs epistēmē, knowledge, from doxa, opinion: Foucault turns knowledge itself into a cutting tool. Nevertheless, his choice of the image of cutting at the same time exposes and embraces the male vocabulary of war, which is hidden behind its Platonic and Aristotelian rationalizations. We may certainly appreciate Foucault’s motivation for evoking knowledge’s cutting power, which he claims as a tool for disrupting the (teleological) continuity of most of his contemporary historical reconstructions: yet, we may now rely also on Foucault’s widely influential work to pursue the more ambitious task of constructing another theoretical horizon, which may allow us to sideline the language of continuity and being. Only the continuity of entities in the sphere of being justifies the Foucauldian call for the introduction of ‘discontinuity into our very being.’60 On the contrary, if we move to the chaotic sphere of practices, the very notion of discontinuity becomes useless, as it always applies to everything everywhere: in this

56   The image of absorption may include a hostile phagocytosis: it does not reverse the hostility of the weapon’s penetration, but the metaphorical priority of its severing effect. 57   See, for example, Homer, Iliad 1.309; 2.362. 58  Plato nominalizes the epithet kritikos to depict the art of judging as a spectator: ἆρ᾽ ἐν τῇ κριτικῇ, καθάπερ τινὰ θεατήν, ἢ μᾶλλον τῆς ἐπιτακτικῆς ὡς ὄντα αὐτὸν τέχνης θήσομεν, δεσπόζοντά γε; (ar en tē kritikē, kathaper tina theatēn, ē mallon tēs epitaktikēs hōs onta auton tekhnēs thēsomen, despozonta ge?) Shall we assign him to the art of judging, as a kind of spectator, or rather to the art of commanding, inasmuch as he is a ruler? In Plato, Statesman 260c. 59  ‘[L]e savoir n’est pas fait pour comprendre, il est fait pour trancher.’ In Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,’ in Suzanne Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, François Dagognet, Michel Foucault, Martial Gueroult, Michel Henry, Jean Laplanche, Jean-Claude Pariente, and Michel Serres, Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 145–172, 160. 60  ‘[L]e discontinu dans notre être même.’ Ibid.

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sphere, it is rather continuity (and identity, and permanence, and opposition) that waits for the illustration of the painful costs of its specific constructions. This book illustrates some of the relevant costs of continuity by exploring the construction of the identity of humans, gods, and things in the European text. On the one side, the image of the relational body lets emerge the costs of human individuations as painful mutilations; on the other side, it allows the display of an extraordinary variety of incorporations, which twist, bypass, and exceed the constraints set upon human activities. Incorporations reveal an expanding series of allies, which in their role of entheses graft relational bodies and keep blurring the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. This discontinuous process of embodiment of the (previously) disembodied goes through periods of sudden acceleration. Today, the logic of individual appropriation, in its especially ferocious and myopic neoliberal variety, acts as a pervasive pre-emptive mutilation of the relational body: hence, we are yet to exploit the grafting power of a number of potential entheses, which already populate our world as prosthetic extensions.61 For example, as previously recalled, hypertextual links can be applied to verify and enhance the consistent use of words in digital texts, not unlike the much slower method of backward scanning, which works on all written texts. Yet, hypertexts may also not contribute to the Sisyphean task of containing the inevitable drift of the sense of words, but they may rather help to modulate this drift. An art of modulation may be appealed to, rather than the rudimentary notion of consistency, which improperly applies the simplistic checking methods of accountancy to written texts. The appeal to an art of modulation may appear surprising, considering that, as we saw, Deleuze describes modulation as the current main tool for social control: yet, we may reconsider the Deleuzean description in the light of a series of incorporations. We may say that whilst the enthesis of the blacksmith’s mold helps Aristotle to conceive of the stable notion of form, the enthesis of the electrical circuit helps Simondon to conceive of modulation as a variable in-forming operation. The enthesis of the telematic network then 61   Simondon too expresses this gap in temporal terms: ‘L’individu technique n’est pas de la même époque que le travail qui l’actionne et le capital qui l’encadre.’ The technical individual is not of the same period as the work that drives it and the capital that frames it. In Simondon, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques, 119. In the sphere of being, the prosthetic character may belong to an entity: on the contrary, from the perspective of practices, merely prosthetic replacements can only result from an activity of making-equal, and prosthetic enhancements from an activity of making-better. There is no need for specific activities of making-different, because the notion of difference is instead superfluous, as it always applies to everything everywhere, just like the notion of discontinuity.

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inspires Guattari, and, after him, Deleuze, who conceives of the apparatuses of the societies of control as ‘the metastable and coexistent states of the same modulation, like a universal deforming device (un déformateur universel).’62 It would be easy to retort with Latour that ‘“[u]niversality” is as local as the rest. Universality exists only “in potentia.” It cannot be enforced unless one pays the high price of costly and dangerous liaisons, as well as of those ones who maintain them.’63 By constructing the notion of a universal modulation already in place, we spare those ones who profit from the current uses of modulation the building and maintaining costs of modulations themselves.64 For sure, neoliberal policies keep translating the long wave of long sixties’ anti-authoritarian loosening of disciplinary practices into the language of accountancy as the profitable reduction of the costs of production of individual identities (the moulding by disciplinary apparatuses, in Deleuze’s rendering of Foucault). The effect of the reduction of authoritarian containment appears as a fragmentation of individual identities: in turn, the proliferation of dividual sub-identities and their modulation multiplies the opportunities for both direct and marketing exploitation.65 62  ‘[L]es états métastables et coexistants d’une même modulation, comme d’un déformateur universel.’ In Deleuze, Les sociétés de contrôle, 111. 63  ‘“L’universel” est aussi localisé que le reste. Il n’y a d’universel qu’“en puissance” seulement. En force, il ne peut y en avoir, à moins que les coûteuses et dangereuses liaisons ne soient payées au prix fort ainsi que ceux qui les entretiennent.’ In Latour, Microbes, 248. Latour describes a similar approach towards the notion of the modern world as a disastrous retreat, which ‘désarme ceux qui auraient le courage, le seul courage, d’aller voir de plus près les rapports de force qui créent les équivalences, les machines et les savoirs, ceux qui auraient peut-être eu assez de force pour modifier ces savoirs et ces machines,’ disarms those who might have the courage, the only courage, to have a closer look at the power relations that create equivalences, machines, and knowledges, those who might have had enough strength to modify these knowledges and these machines.’ Ibid., 234. 64   As neoliberal rhetoric insists on the alleged rational character of modulation, it is important to underline its ridiculously huge social costs: for example, if we consider the modulation of consumer prices, not only the attention of consumers is forced into the bottleneck of accountancy criteria, but its exercise is erased as a mere externality to economic processes, which don’t account for the consumers’ ongoing processing of the costs of commodities and services as actual working time. Of course, current economic categories can at best provide us with an (unsustainable) accounting of this shadow work, which would rather require an ecology (or better, an ecourgy) of relational bodies to reduce their waste. 65   At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that modulating interventions do allow—at a cost —a more flexible extraction of human resources, but only insofar as these modulations are operated within practices that are construed as individual (and dividual) appropriations: these appropriations keep producing subjectivities that are unfairly fractured according to their double role of resources and beneficiaries of the resources themselves. At least up until the neoliberal revolution, a series of painfully acquired social mediators somewhat throw a (cultural, political, legal, and economic) bridge over this split: on the contrary, the neoliberal planned disruption of the mediation between the different roles of each individual tends to transform the articulation between these increasingly modulated subjectivities into a mere clustering of dividual components. The only commonality to dividual roles that is still needed by neoliberal disruptive processes is the thin anthropology of rational choice, which is supposed to guide the behaviour of each component of each dividual constellation: the pupil of

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Yet, the dividual dispersion may be understood not so much as the operation of a different model of society, but as the spreading of another phase of individuation, which coexists with individual constructions as a further shrinkage of the relational body: this novel stage is but the effect of historical contingency, as dividuals result from the enactment of neoliberal strategies. However, the drift towards fragmentation neither questions the construction of individual isolation, nor the individual’s alleged rational and conscious capacity to fulfil her likewise supposedly natural impulse towards selfpreservation: dividual fragmentation only multiplies the atomization of the individual and her supposed self-preserving drive along the various dividual avenues. This book attempted at provincializing such simplistic but performatively powerful narrations by exploring their historical construction with new theoretical tools: I would invite you, as a reader, to be no less concerned for such new tools’ performative power than for their analytical capabilities. A novel language of subjectivity is needed not to better describe our (supposed) current human condition, but to work as a better tool for our ongoing joint construction: this is a task for which neither notions of individual nor dividual seem to be fitted. As previously recalled, the image of the relational body is meant as a tool for overcoming not only the inner dichotomous split between mind and body, but also the outer split between the individual and the outside world: we saw that Simondon conceives of the transindividual for similar tasks. However, the very word ‘transindividual’ reveals a contradictory stratification, which makes the Latin prefix trans, beyond, precede the Latin negative prefix in, not. We saw that Simondon devises this linguistic concretion to define a theoretical tool that bridges the gap between individuals by traversing, so to speak, individuals themselves. Yet, Simondon does not disassemble the Ciceronian apparatus that is to identify the subject with its indivisibility.66 On the contrary, long after the scarcely successful attempt by Gilbert de la Porrée, Deleuze and Guattari repeat and modify his language operation: their notion of ‘dividual’ detaches at last the expression of subjectivity from the visible interdiction of subdivision. Unfortunately, as Deleuze himself observes, this dissemination of subjectivities soon becomes an opportunity for a novel expropriation. Forty years later, we may consider Deleuze and Guatlife-long education, the worker-entrepreneur of herself, the voting and tax-paying citizen, the fully responsible juridical subject, and, last but not least, the consumer. 66  See supra, pag. 87–88. However, Simondon is aware that ‘il reste trop d’individualité dans la conception du transindividuel,’ there is still too much individuality in the conception of the transindividual. In Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, 283.

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tari’s notion of dividual as a precious witness of a forcibly redirected social transformation, which includes their theoretical work. The resuming of this work demands nothing less than the production of a theoretical vocabulary that exceeds the language of identity. This book may be read also as a contribution to such a novel language: we may then consider adding two more words to its lexicon. Following Serres’ insistence on the importance of grammatical prepositions, we may use the Latin preposition per, through, as a prefix before the word ‘dividual,’ in order to produce the new word ‘perdividual’: we may construct in a similar way the verb ‘perdividuation.’ According to Serres, prepositions precede any possible position.67 This precedence is also visually expressed by the position of the Latin preposition per in the new English words ‘perdividual’ and ‘perdividuation’: here, the Latin preposition per (through) declares, before any possible position, that our inside is always already traversed by the outside, and that we can neither choose all that enters us nor all that we enter. Whilst the dispersed dividuals are easily hijacked by neoliberal apparatuses, perdividuals may trace together68 paths of perdividuation that bypass old and new identities. Perdividuals, rather than individuals, can at last properly populate a sentence that Rousseau unfortunately erases from the final text of Du contrat social, and in which he wisely invites Hobbes ‘to multiply his being and his happiness, by sharing them with his fellows.’69 Perdividuations may not necessarily realize this multiplication of happiness, but this is not excluded: after all, no one yet knows what a relational body can do. γελοῖοι ἐσόμεθα ἡγούμενοι ἡμᾶς μὲν τὶ λέγειν φαύλους ὄντας, παμπαλαίους δὲ καὶ πασσόφους ἄνδρας ἀποδεδοκιμακότες.70

67   In Michel Serres, Éclaircissements: Cinq entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1992), 157. 68   The togetherness of the reciprocal and asymmetric incorporations of perdividuals is more similar to the variable geometry of the participants to the Occupy movement than to the compactness of Wagner’s Master Singers. 69  ‘[À] multiplier son être et sa félicité, en les partageant avec ses semblables.’ In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Première version de Du contrat social (manuscrit de Genève), in id., Œuvres complètes, tome 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 288. 70  [G]eloioi esometha hēgoumenoi hēmas men ti legein phaulous ontas, pampalaious de kai passophous andras apodedokimakotes. We shall be ridiculous if we think that we, who are of no account, can say something, after having rejected as unfit very ancient and very wise men. In Plato, Theaetetus 181b.

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As a Conclusion

‘To conclude, I am sensible that I have written this too hastily and too loosely; I fear I have been tedious, and which is worse, it comes out from the first draught, and uncorrected. This I grant is no excuse; for it may be reasonably urg’d, why did he not write with more leisure, or if he had it not (which was certainly my case) why did he attempt to write on so nice a subject? The objection is unanswerable, but in part of recompence, let me assure the Reader, that in hasty producteons, he is sure to meet with an Authors present sence, which cooler thoughts wou’d possibly have disguisd.’1

1   John Dryden, Preface, in id., Sylvae: or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London: Jacob Tonson, 1685), sign. a8v.

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Appendix A Note on Paradigms (and Relational Bodies)

In 1965, Popper, who probably feels even more directly threatened by Kuhn’s dismissal of abstract rationality on historical grounds than by Wittgenstein’s notorious iron poker, is celebrated in a colloquium2 that also includes a symposium, which ends up targeting the recently (1962) published Kuhnian Structure3: in particular, the intervention of Margaret Masterman focuses on the definition of the notion of ‘paradigm,’ which the scrupulous enquirer claims is used in Kuhn’s brief text in no less than twenty-one different ways. This neat semantic exercise is at once a brilliant, if unwitting, demonstration of the operativity of the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances by one of Wittgenstein’s pupils, and a good example of the bad use of the notion of consistency. I hope this example will help spare my family of relational bodies a similar treatment, also bearing in mind Bergson’s wise words: ‘I reckon that the time devoted to refutation, in philosophy, is usually wasted time.’4 2   ‘The colloquium was organized jointly by the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and the London School of Economics and Political Science, under the auspices of the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. It was held at Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, from 11 to 17 July 1965, and was intended to be a tribute to Sir Karl Popper. During the Colloquium, a symposium was held on “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge,” in which Professors Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos were to be the main speakers. Neither Feyerabend nor Lakatos were able to submit their contributions for the symposium, thus Kuhn became the primary speaker (Feyerabend and Lakatos were replaced by John Watkins, who responded to Kuhn’s paper). Those also presenting papers included Professor Sir Karl Popper, who chaired the session, Professor Steven Toulmin, Professor Pearce Williams, and Miss Margaret Masterman. The proceedings of the symposium, along with later contributions by Lakatos and Feyerabend (as well as the cited response by Kuhn) were published as Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Lakatos and Musgrave 1970).’ In Rebecca E. Wayland, The Historical Developmental Perspective of Thomas S. Kuhn, PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 2003, 7 note 4. 3   Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 4  ‘J’estime que le temps consacré à la réfutation, en philosophie, est généralement du temps perdu.’ In Bergson, ‘Presidential address,’ 463.

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——, La querelle des universaux. De Platon à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). ——, Les sociétés de contrôle, in L’autre journal, n. 1, Mai 1990, 110–113. Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972). ——, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975). ——, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 2 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). Derrida, Jacques, ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ in id., L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 409–429. Descartes, René, Discours de la méthode (Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637). ——, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Paris: Soly, 1641). ——, Principia Philosophiae (Amsterdam: Louis Elzevir, 1644). ——, Letter CCXIX, 14 November 1640 to Andreas Colvius, in id., Œuvres de Descartes, Ch. Adam and P. Tannery eds., vol. 3 (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1899), 247–248. ——, Cogitationes Privatæ, in id., Œuvres de Descartes, Ch. Adam and P. Tannery eds., vol. 10 (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1908), 213–248. Diderot, Denis, Principes de Politique des Souveraines in id., Œuvres complètes, J. Assézat et M. Tourneux eds., vol. 2 (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 459–502. Diels, Hermann, und Kranz, Walther, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 Banden, 5 Aufl. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1934–1937). Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Tiziano Dorandi ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Doucet, Dominique, and Koch, Isabelle eds., Autos, idipsum: Aspects de l’identité d’Homère à Augustin (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2014). Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky trans. (London: Vintage Books, 1990). ——, Notes from Underground, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky trans. (London: Vintage Books, 1993). ——, The Double and the Gambler, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky trans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Dryden, John, The Spanish Fryar, or, The Double Discovery (London: Richard Tonson and Jacob Tonson, 1681). ——, Sylvae: or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London: Jacob Tonson, 1685). Duns Scotus, Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, Libri VI–IX, G. Etzkorn, R. Andrews, G. Gál, R. Green, F. Kelly, G. Marcil, T. Noone, and R. Wood eds. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute Press, 1997). Düring, Ingemar, Aristoteles: Darstellung und Interpretation seines Denkens (Heidelberg: Winter, 1966).

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Fränkel, Hermann, Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968). Frede, Michael and Patzig, Günther, Aristoteles “Metaphysik Z.” Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2 vols. (München: C. H. Beck, 1988). Frege, Gottlob, Begriffsschrift, Eine der Arithmetischen Nachgebildete Formelsprache des Reinen Denkens (Halle: Louis Nebert, 1879). Freud, Sigmund, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1900). ——, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, in Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, Bd. 10, 1901, 1–32 (Teil 1), 95–143 (Teil 2). ——, ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,’ in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 26 (Glasgow: Robert MacLehose & Co., 1913), 312–318. ——, Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker (Leipzig: Heller, 1913). ——, ‘Das Unbewussten,’ in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 4 (3) 1915, 189–203 (Teil 1). ——, Das Ich und das Es (Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1923). ——, ‘Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse,’ in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 2 (23) 1937, 209–240. ——, Über Psychotherapie, in id., Gesammelte Werke, hrsg. von Anna Freud unter Mitwirkung von Marie Bonaparte, Band 5, 4 Aufl. (Frankfurt: S. Fisher Verlag, 1968), 13–26. Fritz, Kurt von, ‘ΝΟΟΣ and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems,’ in Classical Philology, vol. 38, n. 2 (April 1943), 79–93. Gaebelkhover, Oswald, The boock of physicke, A. M. trans. (Dorte: Isaack Caen, 1599). Gaius, Institutes, manuscript XV (13), Biblioteca Capitolare, Verona. ——, The Institutes of Gaius. Part 1: Text with critical notes and translation by Francis De Zulueta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). Galenus, Claudius, De Locis Affectis, in Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, C.G. Kühn ed., vol. 8 (Leipzig: C. Cnobloch, 1824), 1–452. Galilei, Galileo, Istoria e Dimostrazioni intorno alle Macchie Solari e loro Accidenti (Roma: Giacomo Mascardi, 1613). ——, Il Saggiatore (Roma: Giacomo Mascardi, 1623). ——, Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano (Firenze: Giovanni Battista Landini, 1632). Garbe, Detlef, Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Gellius, Aulus, A. Gelli Noctes Atticae, Peter K. Marshall ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Gilbert de la Porrée, Commentarium in librum de Trinitate, PL 64, 1255–1310. Goffman, Erving, Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).

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Goody, Jack, The domestication of the savage mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Gower, John, Confessio Amantis, Russell A. Peck ed., 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications 2000–2005). Grandgeorge, Léon, Saint Augustine et le Néo-Platonisme (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896). Gregory of Rimini, Super Primo et Secundo Sententiarum, Augusto Montefalco ed., 2 vols. (Venezia: Lucantonio Giunti, 1522). Gregory the Great, Pope, Magna Moralia XVII–XXXV, PL 76, 9–782. Gregory VII, Pope, Dictatus papae, in Registrum, PL 148, 407–408. Groddeck, Georg, Das Buch vom Es (Leipzig, Wien, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1923). Gurevich, Aaron, The Origins of European Individualism, Katharine Judelson trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Guy de Chauliac, Grande Chirurgie, MS 12, New York Academy of Medicine. Hardin, Richard F., ‘Bunyan, Mr. Ignorance, and the Quakers,’ in Studies in Philology, vol. 69, n. 4, Oct. 1972, 496–508. Harrison, Frank Mott, ‘Editions of the Pilgrim’s Progress,’ in The Library, volume s4-XXII, issue 1, 1 June 1941, 73–81. Havelock, Eric A., Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). ——, ‘Pre-literacy and the Pre-Socratics,’ in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 13 (1982), 44–67. ——, ‘The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics,’ in Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, Kevin Robb ed. (LaSalle, IL: Hegeler Institute, 1983), 7–82. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, in id., Werke, Band 18 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986). ——, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in id., Werke, Band 3, 2 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). ——, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in id., Werke, Band 7, 2 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). ——, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse I, Die Wissenschaft der Logik, in id., Werke, Band 8, 2 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). ——, Wissenschaft der Logik, in id., Werke, Band 6, 6 Aufl. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). Herder, Johann Gottfried, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, in id., Ausgewählte Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1844), 1109–1244. Herodotus, Herodoti Historiae, Nigel Guy Wilson ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Hugh G. Evelyn-White ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). ——, Fragmenta Hesiodea, R. Merkelbach and M. L. West eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

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Hilberg, Raul, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). Hippocrates, Die hippokratische Schrift von der Siebenzahl, W. H. Roscher ed. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1913). ——, Hippocrates, W. H. S. Jones, E. T. Withington, Paul Potter and Wesley D. Smith. eds., 11 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923–2018). Hobbes, Thomas, Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia De Cive (Paris: 1642). ——, Elementa Philosophica De Cive, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Lodewijk Elzevir, 1647). ——, Le Citoyen [De Cive, 2nd ed.], Samuel de Sorbière trans. (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu, 1649). ——, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London: R. Royston, 1651). ——, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of A Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651). Hölder, O., Die Mathematische Methode (Berlin: Springer, 1924). Homer, Homer’s Odyssey, L. Bigge-Wither trans. (Oxford: J. Parker and Co., 1869). ——, The Odyssey of Homer, Earl of Carnarvon trans. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886). ——, The Odyssey, Samuel Butler trans. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1900). ——, Homeri Opera in five volumes, David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920). ——, Homeri Ilias. Volumen prius rhapsodias I-XII continens, Martin L. West ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1998). ——, Homeri Ilias. Volumen alterum rhapsodias XIII-XXIV continens, Martin L. West ed. (Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000). ——, Odyssea, Martin L. West ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). Honoratus, Maurus Servius, In Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen eds., vol. 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1884). Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon, PL 176, 741–838. Hugo, Gustav, Lehrbuch der Geschichte des Römischen Rechts bis auf Justinian (Berlin: Mylius, 1824). Humbert of Silva Candida, Adversus Simoniacos Libri Tres, PL 143, 1007–1212. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature: being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, vol. 1 and 2 (London: John Noon, 1739), vol. 3 (London: Thomas Longman, 1740). ——, Life of David Hume Esq. Written by Himself (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777). Ibn Bājjah, El regimen del solitario [Tadbīr Al-Mutawaḥḥid], Miguel Asín Palacios ed. (Madrid: Escuelas de Estudios Árabes, 1946). ——, Tadbīr Al-Mutawaḥḥid, in Maʻan Ziyadah, Ibn Bājjah’s Book Tadbīr AlMutawaḥḥid, M.A. Dissertation, McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies, 1968.

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Ibn Sīnā, Al-Shifā’: Al-Ilāhīyāt, M. Y. Moussa, S. Dunya, and S. Zayed eds., 2 vols. (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1960). ——, Avicenna Latinus: Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina, S. Van Riet ed., 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1977–1983). Ibn Ṭufayl, Philosophus Autodidactus, sive Epistola Abi Jaafar, Ebn Tophail de Hai Ebn Yordhan, Edward Pococke trans. (Oxford: H. Hall, 1671). ——, An Account of the Oriental Philosophy shewing the wisdom of some renowned men of the East and particularly the profound wisdom of Hai Eb’n Yokdan (London: 1674). ——, The history of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, an Indian Prince, or, The self-taught philosopher, George Ashwell trans. (London: Richard Chiswell, 1686). ——, Roman philosophique d’Ibn Thofail. Texte arabe avec les variantes des manuscripts et de plusieurs editions et traduction francaise, Léon Gauthier trans., 2e ed. (Beyrouth: Imprimerie Catholique, 1936). ——, The Story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, in Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn Rushd, Two Andalusian Philosophers, Jim Colville trans. (London: Kegan Paul International, 1999), 3–66. Iacopone, Laude, Franco Mancini ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1974). ——, London manuscript, in Works of St. Bernard and St. Francis etc., British Museum additional manuscript 16567, British Library, London. Illich, Ivan, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Jaeger, Werner, Aristoteles; Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923). James I, The True Lawe of free Monarchies: or, the reciprock and mutuall dutie betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subiectes (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegraue, 1598). Janko, Richard, ‘The Derveni Papyrus (Diagoras of Melos, Apopyrgizontes Logoi?): A New Translation,’ in Classical Philology, vol. 96, n. 1 (Jan. 2001), 1–32. Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Jeremiah, Edward T., The Emergence of Reflexivity in Greek Language and Thought: From Homer to Plato and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, MS. Bodleian 717, Bodleian Library, Oxford. John of Damascus, De Recta Sententia, PG 94, 1421–1432. Juan de la Cruz, Cántico espiritual: segunda redacción, Eulogio Pacho ed. (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 1998). Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, manuscript Sloane 2499, British Library, London. Kafka, Franz, Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Hrsg. von Max Brod und Hans Joachim Schoeps (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931). Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [1787] in id., Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe, hereinafter AA), Band 3 (Berlin: Reimer, 1911). ——, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [1781], AA 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1911), 1–252. ——, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, AA 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1911), 253–383.

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——, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AA 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1911), 385–463. ——, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,’ AA 8 (Berlin: Reimer, 1923), 33–42. ——, Selbständige Reflexionen im Handexemplar der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (A), AA 23 (Berlin: Reimer, 1955), 20–43. Kleist, Heinrich von, Sämtliche Werke Brandenburger Ausgabe, Hrsg. von Roland Reuß und Peter Staengle, Band 2/7: Berliner Abendblätter 1 (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1997). Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). La Boétie, Étienne de, De la servitude volontaire ou Contr’un, Malcolm Smith ed. (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1987). Labbé, Philip and Cossart, Gabriel, eds., Sacrosancta Concilia ad Regiam Editionem Exacta, tome 4 (Paris: Societatis Typographicae Librorum Ecclesiasticorum, 1671). Lakatos, Imre, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). ——, Mathematics, science and epistemology: Philosophical Papers Volume 2, John Worrall and Gregory Currie eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Landes, Richard, ‘The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern,’ in Speculum, vol. 75, n. 1 (Jan. 2000), 97–145. Langland, William, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, A. V. C. Schmidt ed., 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2011). Latour, Bruno, Les microbes. Guerre et Paix: suivi de Irréductions (Paris: Editions A. M. Métailié et Association Pandore, 1984). ——, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”,’ in New Literary History, 2010 (41), 471–490. Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1979). Lehrs, Karl, De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Nova methodus discendae docendaeque jurisprudentiae (Frankfurt: Johann David Zunner, 1667). ——, Leibnitii lene iudicium de Fr. Mercurii Helmontii doctrinis, Niederslichsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover. ——, Préceptes pour avancer les sciences, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 1 (Berlin: Eichler, 1840), 165–171. ——, Nouveaux essais, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 1, 194–418. ——, Essais de Théodicée, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 2, 468–629.

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——, La Monadologie, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 2, 705–712. ——, Quatrième écrit de mr. Leibniz, in id., Opera Philosophica, J. E. Erdmann ed., vol. 2, 755–758. ——, Guilielmi Pacidii initia et specimina Scientiae Generalis sive de instauratione et augmentis scientiarum in publicam felicitatem, in id., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, C. I. Gerhardt ed., Band 7, 2 Abt. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1890), 124–126. ——, September 1677 letter to Jean Gallois, in id., Philosophischer Briefwechsel, Band 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 566–571. Lemaire de Belges, Jean, Les Illustrations des Gaules et Singularitez de Troye, in id., Œuvres, J. Stecher ed., vol. 1 (Louvain: J. Lefever, 1882). Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura, Guglielmo Manzi ed., 2 vols. (Roma: De Romanis, 1817). Lévy Strauss, Claude, La Pensée Sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, Schriften und Briefe, Band 1 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1968). Lincoln, Bruce, Theorizing Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Lipsius, Justus, Politicorum, sive Civilis Doctrinae libri sex (Leiden: Plantin, 1589). ——, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, William Jones trans. (London: William Ponsonby, 1594). Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690). ——, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, 2nd ed. (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, and Samuel Manship, 1694). ——, An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, R. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). ——, Draft B of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter H. Nidditch ed. (Sheffield: University of Sheffield Printing Unit, 1984). Lombard, Peter, Commentaria in Epistulas d. Pauli, PL 191, 1297–1696. ——, Sententiarum libri quatuor, PL 192, 521–1112. López de Córdoba, Leonor, ‘Memorias,’ in Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux, ‘Las memorias de doña Leonor López de Córdoba,’ in Journal of Hispanic Philology 2 (1977), 11–33, 16–25. Lucas, Robert E., Studies in Business-Cycle Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). Luther, Martin, Sermo de duplici iustitia, in id., D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe, hereinafter WA), 120 Banden (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2009), Band 2, 145–152. ——, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung, WA 6, 404–469. ——, Von der Freiheit eines Chistenmenschen, WA 7, 20–38. ——, De Libertate Christiana, WA 7, 49–73. ——, Römervorlesung, WA 56.

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Lyotard, Jean-François, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1979). Machiavelli, Niccolò, Istorie Fiorentine (Roma: Antonio Blado, 1532). ——, Lettere, Franco Gaeta ed. (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1961). Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, James Willis ed., 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970). ——, Saturnalia, Robert A. Kaster ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Maitre Simon et son groupe, De Sacramentis, Henri Weisweiler ed. (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1937). Mayor, Adrienne, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological & Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2008). Marguerite Porete, Speculum simplicium animarum; Le mirouer des simples âmes, Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen eds. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986). Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, Ulrich Friedrich Kopp ed. (Frankfurt: F. Varrentrapp, 1835). Martin, Richard, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Meyerson, Ignace, ed., Problémes de la Personne (Paris: Mouton, 1973). Migne, Jean Paul, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 217 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1844–1864). ——, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 161 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–1866). Milton, John, Paradise lost (London: Peter Parker, Robert Boulter and Matthias Walker, 1668). ——, Paradise Regaind. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes (London: John Starkey, 1671). ——, Paradise lost, 2nd ed. (London: S. Simmons, 1674). Misch, Georg, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols., E. W. Dickes trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950). Momigliano, Arnaldo, Georges Dumézil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization, in History and Theory, vol. 23, n. 3 (Oct. 1984), 312–330. Montaigne, Michel de, Essais, 5th ed. (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1588). ——, Essais, Fortunat Strowsky et al. eds., 5 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nouvelle F. Pech et C.ie, 1906–1933). More, Hannah, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808). More, Henry, Opera Theologica (London: J. Macock, 1675). Morton, Thomas, An Exact Discoverie of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracie and Rebellion (London: Felix Kyngston, 1605). Nagy, Gregory, Homer’s Text and Language (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Nauck, Augustus, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 2 Auf. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889). Neale, Tom, An Island to Myself (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). Neidl, Michael, De ligandi arteriis laesis et dissectis (Landshut: J. Thomann, 1816).

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Nemerov, Howard, Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Neumann, John von and Morgenstern, Oskar, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944). Newton, Isaac, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London: Joseph Streater, 1687). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe (hereinafter eKGWB), http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-Titelblatt ——, Zur Genealogie der Moral, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GM-Titelblatt ——, Götzen-Dämmerung: Die “Vernunft” in der Philosophie, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GD-Titelblatt ——, Nachgelassene Fragmente Sommer 1875, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1875,9 ——, Nachgelassene Fragmente August-September 1885, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,40 ——, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1887,9 ——, Nachgelassene Fragmente November 1887-März 1888, eKGWB, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1887,11 Nithard, De dissensionibus filiorum Hludovici Pii libri quatuor, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 9768, fol. 13r, Paris. Nongbri, Brent, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 28th ed., Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M. Martini and Bruce M. Metzger eds. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012). Novum Testamentum Latine. Novam Vulgatam Bibliorum Sacrorum Editionem secuti apparatibus titulisque additis. Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland eds., 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1992). Nussbaum, Martha C., Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Ockham, William, Summa Logicae, Philotheus Boehner, Gedeon Gál, Stephanus Brown eds. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1974). Onians, Richard Broxton, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1951). Origen, Contra Celsum Libri VIII, M. Marcovich ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Otloh of Saint Emmeram, Liber de tentationibus suis, PL 146, 29–58. ——, De Tribus Quaestionibus, PL 146, 112. 59–136. ——, Liber visionum, PL 146, 341–390. Otto, Walter Friedrich, Die Götter Griechenlands. Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes (Bonn, Friedrich Cohen, 1929). Outremeuse, Jean d’, Ly Myreur des Histors, tome 5 (Bruxelles: M. Hayez, 1867).

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Ovidius, Publius Naso, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, R.J. Tarrant ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ——, P. Ovidi Nasonis Tristium libri quinque, Ibis, Ex ponto libri quattuor, Halieutica, Fragmenta, S. G. Owen ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915). ——, Fastorum libri sex, E.H. Alton, D.E.W. Wormell and E. Courtney eds. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1986). Owens, Joseph, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian ‘Metaphysics,’ 3rd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978). Panofsky, Erwin, Abbot Suger. On the abbey church of St.-Denis and its art treasures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). ——, Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). Pareto, Vilfredo, Trattato di Sociologia Generale (Firenze: Barbera, 1916). Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, opuscules et lettres, Philippe Sellier ed. (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 1976). Pasquier, Estienne, Les Recherches de la France (Paris: Laurens Sonnius, 1621). Pennington, Kenneth, ‘The History of Rights in Western Thought,’ in Emory Law Journal 47 (1998), 237–252. Pessoa, Fernando, Livro do Desassossego (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). Petrarca, Francesco, Canzoniere, Gianfranco Contini ed. (Torino: Einaudi, 1974). Petronius, Petronii Arbitri Satyricon Reliquiae, K. Müller ed., 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1995). Philips, Gérard, L’Église et son mystère au IIe Concile du Vatican, 2 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1968). Philo of Alexandria, ‘Every good man is free’, in id., Philo, vol. 9, F. H. Colson trans. (London: Heinemann, 1985), 10–101. ——, On the Migration of Abraham, in id., Philo, vol. 4, F. H. Colson trans. (London: Heinemann, 1985), 132–267. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 6, 1671. Piaget, Jean, La causalité physique chez l’enfant (Paris: Alcan, 1927). Pindar, The Odes of Pindar, John Sandys trans. (London: Heinemann, 1937). Plato, Platonis Opera, John Burnet ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900-1907). ——, Platonis Timaeus. Interprete Chalcidio cum eiusdem Commentarius, Johan Wrobel ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1876). Plautus, Titus Maccius, T. Macci Plauti Comoediae, Wallace Martin Lindsay ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904–1905). Plotinus, Plotini Opera, Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer eds., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964–1984). Plutarch, ‘On Stoic Self-Contradictions’ [De Stoicorum repugnantiis], in id., Moralia, vol. 13b, Harold Cherniss ed. (London: Heinemann, 2004), 412–603. ——, Theseus, in id., Plutarch’s Lives, B. Perrin ed., vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1914), 2–87. ——, Sulla, in id., Plutarch’s Lives, B. Perrin ed., vol. 4 (London: Heinemann, 1959), 324–445.

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Rouvroy, Antoinette et Stiegler, Bernard, ‘Le régime de vérité numérique. De la gouvernementalité algorithmique à un nouvel État de droit,’ in Socio, 4(2015), 113–140, https://journals.openedition.org/socio/1251 Rüpke, Jörg, Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion, David M. B. Richardson trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Russell, Gül A., ed., The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Sallustius Crispus, Gaius, The War Against Jugurtha [Bellum Iugurthinum] M. Comber and C. Balmaceda eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1814). Scaevola, Quintus Mucius, Quintus Mucius Scaevola: Opera, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Aldo Schiavone and Emanuele Stolfi eds. (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2018). Schiavone, Aldo, Alle origini del diritto borghese: Hegel contro Savigny (Bari: Laterza, 1984). ——, Ius: L’invenzione del diritto in Occidente (Torino: Einaudi, 2005). Schmitt, Carl, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950). ——, Ex Captivitate Salus (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1950). Schnabel, Johann Gottfried, Insel Felsenburg (Nordhausen: J.H. Gross, 1731). Schwyzer, Eduard, ‘Beiträge zur griechischen Wortforschung,’ in Festschrift für Paul Kretschmer: Beiträge zur griechischen und lateinischen Sprachforschung (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1926), 244–251. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, L.D. Reynolds ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). ——, De Constantia Sapientis, Pierre Grimal ed. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1953). Serres, Michel, Éclaircissements: Cinq entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1992). Shakespeare, William, The Tragedie of King Richard the second (London: Andrew Wise, 1597). ——, The Tragedie of Macbeth, in id., Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), [Tragedies] 131–151. Siegfried, Georg, Philosophia quinque-partita (Wien: Susanna Rickesin, 1662). Simondon, Gilbert, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier et Montaigne, 1958). ——, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964). ——, ‘Culture et technique,’ in Bulletin de l’Institut de philosophie morale et enseignement. Université libre de Bruxelles, XIV année, t. 55–56 (1965), 3–16. ——, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Paris: Millon, 2005). ——, Sur la technique (1953-1983) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014). Siricius, Pope, Epistula 1 ad Himerium Episcopum Tarraconensem, PL 13, 1131– 1147.

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Snell, Bruno, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, T. G. Rosenmeyer trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Sophocles, Sophocles, Francis Storr trans., 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1912–1913). Spenser, Edmund, Amoretti and Epithalamion (London: William Ponsonby, 1595). ——, The Faerie Queene (London: Richard Field for William Ponsonbie, 1596). Spinoza, Baruch, Opera, C. Gebhardt ed. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925). Stein, Peter, Regulae Iuris: From juristic rules to legal maxims (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966). Stevenson, Robert Louis, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886). Stiegler, Bernard, La technique et le temps 1. La faute d’Épiméthée (Paris: Galileé, 1994). ——, La technique et le temps 2. La désorientation (Paris: Galileé, 1996). Stirner, Max, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (Leipzig: Wigand, 1845). ——, The Ego and Its Own, David Leopold ed., Steve Byington rev. trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Stobaeus, Joannes, Ioannis Stobaei Anthologium, Curt Wachsmuth and Otto Hense eds., 5 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884–1912). Szabó, Árpád, The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics, A. M. Ungar trans. (Dordrecht: D. Reisel, 1978). Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, Dialogus. Agricola. Germania, William Peterson and Maurice Hutton trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). ——, The Annals of Tacitus Book 11, S. J. V. Malloch ed. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Tarde, Gabriel, ‘Les monades et la sociologie,’ in Revue internationale de sociologie, 1(2), 1893, 157–173 (1re partie); 1(3), 1893, 231–246 (2me partie). ——, ‘Monadologie et sociologie,’ in id., Essais et mélanges sociologiques (Paris: G. Masson, 1895), 309–389. Terentius, Publius Afer, P. Terenti Afri Comoediae, Robert Kauer and Wallace M. Lindsay eds., Otto Skutsch rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). The Book of Margery Kempe, British Library MS Additional 61823, London. The Holy Bible, Contenyning the Old Testament, and the New [King James Bible] (London: Robert Barker, 1611). The Lives of the Saints, codex 127, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Geneva. The Qur’an, M.A.S. Abdel Haleem ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Thesleff, Holger, ‘Platonic Chronology,’ in Phronesis vol. 34, n. 1 (1989), 1–26. ——, Platonic Patterns (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2009). Thucydides, Historiae, Henry Stuart Jones and John Enoch Powell eds., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942). Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871). Usener, Hermann, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: Verlag von Friedrich Cohen, 1896). Valk, Marchinus van der, Textual Criticism of the Odyssey (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1949).

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 78, 85–88, 91, 94, 111, 243 absorption, xviii, 234 abstract, xiv, xvii, 2, 3, 7, 20, 22, 33, 35, 38, 74, 92, 111, 113, 116, 129, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155–59, 161, 171, 208, 215, 241 abstraction, xiv, 3, 22, 23, 34, 55, 69, 74, 82, 91, 117, 121, 126, 129, 157– 59, 180, 195, 208, 231, 248 Achilles, 156, 174, 175, 177, 179 actuality, 145–147, 196 addition, xv, 52, 66, 69, 70, 79, 88, 137, 140, 155, 213, 221, 225, 231, 232 Adkins, Arthur William Hope, 180, 243 Aeschylus, 3, 4, 138, 150, 243 Agamemnon, 3, 174, 177, 179 Alberti, Leon Battista, 151, 231, 243 Alighieri, Dante, xvi, 75, 76, 94, 95, 110, 229, 243 Ambrose of Milan, 106–108, 168, 243 analogon, 146, 147 analogy, 25, 32, 47, 77, 101, 121, 125, 135, 146, 155, 169, 193, 202, 217 anima, xviii, 5, 18, 26, 61, 64, 81, 83, 86, 89, 90, 95, 104, 136, 138, 149, 175, 225, 244, 257 Anselm of Canterbury, xvi, 82, 90–92, 243

anxiety, 6, 9, 50, 51, 54, 57, 178, 179 apatheia, 9, 11 aphairesis, 157, 158, 208, 221, 232 apodeixis, 32–35, 42 apparatus, xiv, xvi, xvii, 21, 23, 34, 35, 39, 51, 54, 56, 57, 90, 111, 114, 116, 125, 150, 153, 155–59, 190, 201, 202, 214, 215, 220–22, 226, 228–30, 236–38 Aquinas, Thomas, 20, 37, 83, 84, 105, 134, 136, 146, 243 Arendt, Hannah, 190, 244 Aristotelian, xvi–xviii, 27, 28, 32, 37–39, 41, 43, 63–65, 83, 84, 87, 88, 95, 101, 102, 110, 121, 134, 136, 138–40, 142–49, 153, 156, 158, 184, 186, 189, 191, 192, 197, 208, 213, 217, 221–23, 226, 231– 34, 259 Aristotle, xvii, 4, 26, 31, 32, 34, 37, 41, 43, 63–65, 71, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 95, 99, 101, 105, 125, 128, 129, 136–50, 153, 157, 158, 164, 166, 168, 183, 184, 186, 191, 192, 198, 206, 208, 217, 223, 228, 235, 244 Arnobius Afer, 9, 43, 244 atomization, 27, 136, 226, 237 atomon, 87, 88, 141, 199 Auerbach, Erich, 176, 244

265

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Augustine of Thagaste, xvi, 5, 11, 17, 52, 53, 57, 61, 62, 76, 78, 79, 90, 93, 103–11, 113, 115, 122, 126, 127, 168, 179, 180, 244, 252 Austin, John Langshaw, 207–9, 211, 212, 245 auto to, 153–57, 180 autobiography, 31, 50, 80, 170, 188, 257 autonomy, 10, 72, 187 autos, xi, xvii, 26, 35, 133, 150–54, 167, 177, 180, 183, 249 backward scanning, 169, 192, 207, 235 Bacon, Francis, 43, 245 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 64, 66, 194–96, 245 Baldissone, Riccardo, 223, 229, 245 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 74, 245 Bateson, Gregory, 194–96, 245 Bayle, Pierre, 106, 245 being-something, 147, 149, 183, 191, 192 being-what-one-was, 142–45, 206 Benedict of Norcia, 11, 85, 246 Bergson, Henri, xviii, 21, 116, 128, 203–205, 208, 212, 215, 216, 218, 222, 241, 246 Berman, Harold J., 94, 246, Bernard of Clairvaux, 82, 89, 94, 246, 254 Blumenberg, Hans, 35, 225, 246 body, xiii, xv–xviii, 1, 4–6, 8–10, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25–27, 40, 45, 63–66, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78, 81–87, 90–95, 99, 103, 114, 121, 127, 135–38, 148, 152, 156, 159, 161, 167, 168, 177, 183–86, 197, 200, 205, 208, 214, 217, 225–27, 229, 230, 232, 233, 237, 258 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, xvi, 32, 87, 88, 97–103, 134, 136– 38, 223, 246 Bolling, George Melville, 152, 153, 246 Boniface VIII, Pope, 5, 12, 15–17, 21, 61, 93, 227, 246 Borges, Jorge Luis, 26, 79, 131, 232, 246

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boundary, xiv, xvi, 19, 36, 41, 49, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 76, 84, 90, 108, 117, 121, 129, 145, 178, 184, 194, 197, 206, 226, 229, 235 Breuer, Josef, xviii, 201, 202, 246 Bunyan, John, xvi, 47–53, 67, 225, 229, 246, 252 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 71, 72, 246 Burckhardt, Jacob, 72, 246 Burdach, Konrad, 72, 247 Burke, Edmund, 18, 19, 247 Butler, Judith, 7, 22, 23, 247 Caesar, Julius, 32, 79, 247, 260 Calcidius, 89, 247 Calvin, Jean, xvi, 52–57, 62, 63, 66, 77, 107, 136, 247 Canistris, Opicinus de, 81, 82, 90, 97 Cardano, Gerolamo, 79, 247 Cassianus, Johannes, 10, 11, 247 Catherine of Siena, 82, 83, 111, 185, 229, 247 Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 131, 247 Cellini, Benvenuto, 79, 247 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 33, 247 Christine de Pizan, 80, 81, 91, 233, 247, 248 Chrysippus, 42, 128, 133 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, xvii, 2, 17, 43, 87, 88, 94, 95, 97, 101, 105, 123, 125, 126, 128–31, 134–36, 146, 248 cognitive dissonance, 81 colonization, 51, 59 compenetration, xvi, 76, 170, 197, 229 composition, xv, 29, 30, 140, 150, 166, 189, 198, 202, 208, 218, 225 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 17, 18, 248 consciousness, 40, 45, 47, 179, 186, 189, 197, 200, 202, 203, 205, 254 contempt, 5, 6, 9, 13, 15 contextualization, 230 contradiction, xviii, 14, 164, 191, 192, 195, 201, 217, 218, 227, 259 coram Deo, 61, 226

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Crusoe, Robinson, xv, 25, 28–31, 36, 229, 248 cutting, xii, xviii, 8, 82, 141, 163, 234 da Vinci, Leonardo, 151, 231, 256 definitio, 129 definition, xvi–xviii, 1, 6, 12, 13, 20, 28, 30, 33–35, 41, 43, 52, 54, 65, 71, 72, 76, 88, 91, 93, 97, 100–102, 113, 114, 120, 121, 123, 125, 128, 129, 131, 135, 137, 140–47, 161, 191, 206, 215, 222, 223, 228, 241 Defoe, Daniel, xv, 29–31, 36, 50, 248 Deleuze, Gilles, xviii, 9, 30, 94, 217–22, 230, 235–37, 249 demon, 11, 15, 16, 89 demonstratio, 32, 34, 35, 66 demonstration, xv, xvi, 31–34, 36, 40, 43, 49, 55, 56, 81, 92, 124, 241 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 209, 230, 249 Descartes, René, 25–27, 43, 45, 77, 104, 105, 148, 232, 249 desire, 3, 4, 9, 10, 59, 99, 107, 109, 110 Diderot, Denis, 249 difference, 12, 25, 40, 45, 57, 59, 123, 135, 146, 179, 186, 192, 211, 217, 218, 227, 230, 235 Dikē, 162, 163, 166, 168, 172 Diogenes Laërtius, 9, 10, 42, 102, 133, 134, 150, 249 Diogenes the Cynic, 9, 10 Diomedes, 174, 178 Diotima, 149, 156, 186 dividual, 88, 89, 127, 220, 236–38 Dividual, 219, 220 dividuum, 87–89 doppelgänger, 194 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, xviii, 188, 194– 97, 221, 245, 249 doxa, 35, 234 Dryden, John, 134, 239, 249 Duns Scotus, John, 183, 184, 249 Dürer, Albrecht, 70 Düring, Ingemar, 140, 146, 249 dynamis, 145, 148

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eidos, 88, 143, 145, 149, 157 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 20, 250 embodiment, 6, 44, 82, 200, 235 energeia, 145, 146, 149, 184 enthesis, xv, xviii, 30, 49, 52, 56, 62, 73, 98, 122, 130, 151, 215, 223, 224, 227, 232, 233, 235 Epictetus, 9, 10, 250 epistēmē, 35, 137, 154, 158, 201, 234 Erasmus, Desiderius, 103, 111, 250 essentia, 83, 89, 101, 102, 138, 146, 243 ētor, 152, 175, 176, 178, 225 Euclid, 33, 34, 65, 146, 250 Euripides, 8, 138, 167, 168, 250 Evagrius Ponticus, 10–12, 15, 16, 26, 30, 61, 85, 98, 122, 250 exosmosis, xviii, 212 al-Fārābī, Abū Naṣr, 38–40, 250 fear, 9, 27, 31, 49–51, 53, 223, 255 flesh, 9, 10, 29, 59, 60, 93, 234 flock, 17, 50, 51 form, xiii, 2–4, 7, 10–12, 22, 30, 34, 37, 38, 40, 43, 55, 66, 82–84, 88, 91, 94, 114, 115, 117, 124, 128, 129, 133, 136–38, 140, 142–155, 157–59, 161, 162, 165, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 183, 184, 189, 191, 196, 198, 206, 220, 221, 223–26, 228, 229, 235 Foucault, Michel, 9, 115, 181, 211, 216, 217, 220, 221, 234, 236, 245, 250 Fowler, Robert L., 165, 250 Francis of Assisi, 12, 215, 254 Fränkel, Hermann, 178, 251 Frege, Gottlob, 83, 211, 251 Freud, Sigmund, xviii, 175, 201–3, 231, 232, 246, 251 Fritz, Kurt von, 173, 251 Gaius, xvii, 116–25, 131, 183, 251 Galilei, Galileo, 27, 36, 148, 224, 232, 251 Gargantua, 64–66, 110, 229, 260 Gellius, Aulus, 100, 123, 169, 251

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genealogy, 13, 15, 74, 169, 209, 211, 245 generation, 29, 40, 52, 54, 64, 77, 88, 95, 108, 149 geneurgical, 230 geneurgy, 211 Gilbert de la Porrée, 88, 89, 237, 251 Goody, Jack, 128, 169, 252 Gower, John, 33, 252 grafting, xv, 30, 223, 224, 235 Gregory of Rimini, 20, 252 Gregory the Great, Pope, 11, 252 Gregory VII, Pope, 17, 20, 21, 252 Guattari, Félix, xviii, 9, 30, 94, 218, 219, 221, 230, 236, 237, 249 guilt, 50, 107, 109, 196 Gurevich, Aaron, 72, 90, 103, 233, 252 happiness, 49, 99, 238 Hardin, Richard F., 49, 252 Havelock, Eric, 98, 155, 158, 164, 171, 172, 177, 179, 180, 213, 252 Ḥayy, xvi, 25, 36, 37, 39–45, 49, 54, 248, 254 Hector, 171, 174, 175, 178, 179 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xviii, 14, 124, 125, 164, 190–194, 197, 212, 217, 252, 261 hēi, 64, 136, 137, 148, 149 Heloise, 78, 85–87, 111, 243 Heraclitus, xvii, 163–166, 185, 188, 191, 210 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 103, 252 Herodotus, 4, 32, 34, 35, 99, 125, 138, 140, 150, 154, 155, 216, 252 Hesiod, xvii, 4, 5, 38, 91, 127, 140, 159, 162, 165, 166, 169–73, 180, 209, 210, 248, 252 Hilberg, Raul, 253 Hill, Christopher, 49, 253 Himmler, Heinrich, 12, 13 Hippocrates, 3, 30, 63, 64, 81, 150, 253 Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 28, 73, 74, 134– 36, 148, 226, 238, 253

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Homer, xii, xiii, xvii, 1, 3, 8, 35, 91, 95, 127, 138, 143, 144, 151–54, 156, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168–75, 177, 178, 180, 209, 210, 234, 248, 253, 254, 257 Homeric, xii–xiv, xvii, xviii, 3, 7, 18, 35, 61, 98, 104, 127, 128, 140, 143, 144, 149, 152, 161–80, 188, 195, 197, 210, 224, 225, 251, 252, 263 horismos, 141, 145, 206 horos, 129, 145, 191, 206 Hugh of Saint Victor, 89, 94, 168, 253, 254 Hugo pictor, 76 Hugo, Gustav, 123, 124, 253 Humbert of Silva Candida, 93, 253 Hume, David, xviii, 45, 185–189, 199, 200, 253 hylē, 143, 144, 168 hypokeimenon, 28, 100, 139, 141, 144 hypostasis, 101, 102, 110, 138 Iacopone of Todi, xv, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14–17, 21, 26, 61, 67, 84, 85, 200, 227, 254 Ibn Bājjah, 37–39, 253 Ibn Sīnā, 37, 41, 43, 254 Ibn Ṭufayl, xvi, 36, 37, 39–41, 43, 48, 49, 254 identity, xi, xiv, xv, xviii, 6, 45, 47, 65, 67, 74, 78, 93, 135, 153, 165, 179, 186, 187, 190, 192, 200, 217, 224, 227, 228, 230, 235, 236, 238 Iliad, 1, 3, 8, 35, 127, 143, 144, 151–154, 156, 159, 162, 163, 165, 169–71, 173–75, 177–79, 197, 210, 234, 246, 257, 263 Illich, Ivan, 168, 254 impersonal, 64, 130, 197, 198, 203, 218 incorporation, xviii, 110, 111, 122, 138, 214, 215, 223, 224, 227–29, 232, 233, 235, 238 individual, xv, xvi, xviii, 9–11, 15, 18, 19, 20, 27, 31, 39, 40, 47, 50, 54, 60,

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Index 269

62–67, 70–74, 77, 87–89, 100, 108, 118, 136, 141–149, 155, 181, 183, 186, 187, 190, 192, 196, 197, 205, 213–22, 226, 229, 235–38 individuation, 11, 27, 45, 65–67, 103, 118, 125, 131, 133, 181, 184, 189, 212–16, 218, 219, 221, 226, 230, 235, 237 individuum, 87–89, 141 indivisible, 25, 26, 87, 88, 199 inner, xvi–xviii, 9, 10, 14, 26, 29–31, 44, 49, 50, 54, 58–63, 69, 74, 76, 89, 104, 105, 109, 111, 122, 127, 140, 152, 175, 176, 178–80, 187, 189, 191, 192, 194–197, 200–5, 214, 215, 217, 218, 221, 224–26, 229, 230, 237 interiority, 63, 97, 115, 189, 215, 226 invagination, xviii, 233 invulnerabilis, 2, 8 invulnerability, 2, 4, 7, 12 ius, 113–117, 129, 130, 133, 135, 261 iustitia, 62, 113, 117, 256 Janko, Richard, 168, 254 Jaynes, Julian, 179, 254 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 12, 13, 22, 251, 263 Jerome of Stridon, 11, 19, 59, 76, 92, 106, 254 John of Damascus, 110, 254 Julian of Norwich, 82, 254 juridical theology, xvi, 19, 74, 131 juridico-theological, 20, 21, 62, 74, 94 Kafka, Franz, 218, 249, 254 Kant, Immanue, l 45, 59, 67, 187–90, 198, 228, 254 kat’ allo, 149 kath’ hauto, 149, 150 Kempe, Margery, 79, 80, 215, 262 kinēsis, 95 Kleist, Heinrich von, 231, 232, 255 Koyré, Alexandre, 148, 255 krisis, 163

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La Boétie, Étienne de, 77, 78, 255 Lady Philosophy, 98, 99, 102 Lakatos, Imre, 42, 43, 241, 255 Langland, William, 13, 255 Latour, Bruno, 21, 211, 236, 238, 248, 255, 261 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, xviii, 50, 102, 105, 124, 131, 183–86, 189, 204, 228, 248, 255, 256 Leviathan, 74, 135, 148, 253 Lévy Strauss, Claude, 27, 230, 256 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 198–200, 256 Lipsius, Justus, 78, 134, 256 Locke, John, 27, 33, 44, 45, 47, 105, 186, 256 logos, 141, 145, 146, 165, 166, 168, 169, 206, 210, 223, 250, 254 Lombard, Peter, 51, 93, 94, 256 Luther, Martin, xvi, 50, 52, 56–62, 66, 67, 69, 109, 136, 189, 228, 256 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 72–74, 87, 233, 257 Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius, 85, 86, 94, 95, 257 matter, xvii, 9, 37, 56, 117, 120, 123, 128, 135, 137, 143–45, 147, 148, 168, 185, 189, 199, 205, 231, 253 Maurus, Rabanus, 93, 260 memory, 28, 86, 87, 116, 127, 128, 130, 158, 178, 186, 200, 201, 224, 253 Milton, John, 50, 57, 134, 257 mind, xviii, 11, 25–27, 55, 56, 69, 78, 86, 91, 99, 102, 104, 105, 120, 123, 135, 152, 158, 169, 172, 173, 175, 179, 184, 186, 188, 193, 195, 207, 225–27, 230, 237, 241, 244, 245, 252, 254, 258, 262 mirror, 18, 70, 72, 79, 82, 94, 170, 184, 228, 232 modulation, 220, 235, 236 Moerbeke, Willem de, 139, 244 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 117, 257

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270

Index

monad, 183, 184, 186, 199, 228 Montaigne, Michel de, xvi, 70, 77–79, 214, 257 Morgenstern, Oskar, 23, 85, 258 multiplicity, xviii, 22, 40, 61, 77, 121, 127, 144, 180, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 207, 218–21 Muses, 98, 170–172, 210 mutilation, 10, 17, 25, 26, 73, 87, 208, 226, 227, 232, 235 mystical body, xvi, 19, 69, 74, 93 mythos, 165, 166, 170, 250 natural order, 20, 21, 133 nawābit, 38, 39 neoliberal, 10, 11, 27, 28, 57, 136, 181, 226, 235, 236–38 Nestor, 1, 165, 173 Neumann, John von, 23, 85, 258 Newton, Isaac, 148, 258 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xviii, 13, 14, 77, 109, 111, 150, 151, 187, 198–200, 203, 209, 215, 222, 229, 230, 234, 258 Nithard, 114, 258 nominalization, xvii, 34, 38, 113, 156, 161, 172 noos, 152, 162, 172, 173, 175, 176, 225 objectivity, 14, 27, 55, 189, 190, 208, 228, 232 Ockham, William, 124, 258 Odysseus, 156, 170, 172, 174–76, 178, 179 Odyssey, 1, 35, 127, 138, 159, 169–72, 174–76, 178, 253, 262 oikeiōsis, 133, 149 opposition, 23, 53, 125, 127, 135, 165, 186, 194, 205, 217, 222, 229, 235 orality, 67, 127, 210 Origen of Alexandria, 57, 85, 111, 115, 167, 168, 258 osmosis, 205 ostensive, 20, 32, 34 Otloh of St. Emmeram, 89, 90, 258

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Ouranos, 3, 4, 22 ousia, xvii, 101, 133, 138–144, 146–49, 183, 191, 192 outer, 9, 29, 30, 58–60, 63, 74, 105, 127, 176, 197, 204, 205, 218, 221, 226, 230, 237 Ovid of Sulmo, xv, 1, 2, 8, 16, 17, 121, 122, 223, 227, 259 Panofsky, Erwin, 72, 103, 233, 259 Panurge, 63 Papal Revolution, 17, 21, 57, 61, 62, 69, 74, 75, 93, 94, 131 Parmenides, xvii, 38, 65, 83, 91, 137, 143, 150, 157, 159, 161–163, 166– 68, 172, 173, 188, 222, 262 participation, xviii, 62, 65, 71, 76, 82, 99, 100, 110, 197, 226, 229 Pascal, Blaise, 9, 26, 259 Paul of Tarsus, 5, 10, 18, 19, 34, 49, 58–60, 62, 75, 82, 84, 92, 93, 106, 107, 256 perdividual, xviii, 238 perdividuation, xviii, 219, 238 performative, 17, 19, 20, 207–9, 211, 212, 237 permanence, 148, 149, 235 person, xvi, xvii, 15, 29, 31, 37, 45, 47, 48, 50, 57, 62, 63, 78, 79, 88–90, 92, 99–102, 110, 117–21, 123, 124, 131, 170, 171, 173, 174, 178, 183, 187, 194, 196, 219, 223, 248 persona, 31, 88, 100–102, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120–22, 125, 131 Pessoa, Fernando, 106, 259 Petrarca, Francesco, 82, 103, 134, 259 pharmakon, 127, 128, 158 Philo of Alexandria, 8, 107, 168, 259 Philoctetes, 1, 156 phrenes, 152, 173–77, 225 Pindar, 3, 133, 155, 163, 166, 169, 259 Plato, xvii, xviii, 8, 9, 18, 19, 30, 32–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43–45, 61, 65, 71, 84, 89, 95, 98, 116, 123, 126–28, 130, 136, 138, 139, 142–146, 148–51,

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Index 271

153–59, 161, 168, 171, 172, 175, 180, 183, 184, 188, 201, 206, 209, 210, 215–17, 224, 225, 228, 234, 238, 246–48, 252, 254, 259 Platonic, xvii, xviii, 18, 19, 26, 27, 30–32, 37, 39, 43, 45, 61, 65, 83, 84, 89, 98, 99, 102, 111, 116, 121, 125, 130, 131, 138–43, 145, 146, 148– 153, 155–59, 165, 175, 177, 180, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 192, 201, 216, 217, 219, 224–26, 232–34, 262 Platonism, 43 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 28, 88, 117, 120, 259 Plotinus, 9, 10, 37, 40, 84, 106, 259 Plutarch, 133, 137, 186, 227, 259, 260 poiēsis, 30, 31, 149, 233 porosity, 122, 186, 197, 212, 223, 224, 226 Porphyry, 9, 37, 40, 100, 101, 133, 168, 260 potentiality, 62, 145–147, 184, 189, 226, 228 practice, xv, xvii, xviii, 8, 12, 20, 22, 23, 31, 33, 40, 42–44, 52, 55–57, 59, 61, 62, 72, 75, 84, 94, 107, 108, 115, 116, 119, 123, 125, 130, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 159, 161, 166, 168, 197, 206, 207, 209, 214, 223, 224, 227–29, 232–36, 246 praxis, 31, 149, 233 predestination, 50, 53, 54 presence, xiii, 1, 12, 25, 29, 49, 61, 62, 70, 76, 83, 93, 106, 110, 144, 148, 157, 163, 168, 169, 187, 192 privation, 3, 89, 217, 222 proof, 32–34, 42, 43, 255 proportion, 146, 147, 165 Propp, Vladimir, 47, 48, 260 prosōpon, 100, 101 prosthesis, xv, 29, 30 provincialization, 209, 230 psykhē, xviii, 11, 18, 26, 30, 32, 61, 84, 136, 140, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155,

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158, 175, 180, 183, 201, 217, 223, 225, 226, 233 Quaker, 44, 49, 50, 245 Rabelais, François, xvi, 63–67, 245, 260 reductio ad absurdum, 81, 91 reflexive, 5, 97, 98, 105, 152–54, 180, 189, 216, 217, 233, 246 Reformation, 47, 51, 54, 57, 60, 67, 69, 70, 134 Reid, Thomas, 187, 260 relational body, xv, xvi, xviii, 1, 2, 11, 17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 49, 52, 56, 61, 62, 64–66, 70, 73–75, 80–82, 84–86, 89, 90, 92, 98, 103, 104, 109, 121, 122, 130, 151, 176, 177, 178, 186, 189, 194, 197, 212, 215, 219, 223–27, 229, 232, 233, 235–238, 241 religio, 115 reoccupation, xviii, 35, 225 ressentiment, 13, 14 revolution, 17–19, 49, 94, 236, 241, 246, 247, 253, 255, 260 Riemann, Bernhard, 42, 205, 208, 260 Rimbaud, Arthur, 197, 198, 233, 260 Risch, Ernst, 152, 260 Romania, 97, 113, 263 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 17, 18, 260 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 41, 238, 260 Rouvroy, Antoinette, 220, 221, 260, 261 Russell, Gül A., 44, 261 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 124, 125, 261 Scaevola, Quintus Mucius, 117, 126, 127, 129, 130, 261 Schiavone, Aldo, 261 Schmitt, Carl, 173, 193, 194, 243, 261 self, xvi–xviii, 5, 6, 25, 40, 41, 43–45, 48, 50, 75, 86, 102, 103, 106, 138, 150, 153–55, 157, 180, 181, 187, 189, 198, 204, 216, 217, 220, 224 self-portrait, 70, 71, 76, 79, 81

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272

Index

self-preservation, xvii, 134, 136, 138, 148, 191, 237 self-reflexivity, xviii, 70, 180, 192, 217 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 2, 6, 8, 101, 261 Serres, Michel, 234, 238, 245, 261 Servet, Miguel, 53 Shakespeare, William, 6, 152, 261 sharing, xviii, 16, 197, 227, 228 similarity, 104, 121, 148, 167, 189, 206, 228 Simondon, Gilbert, xviii, 206, 212–16, 218, 220, 221, 226, 229, 235, 237, 261 Siricius, Pope, 107, 261 Snell, Bruno, 152, 155, 175, 262 Socrates, 26, 30, 31, 71, 83, 111, 139–41, 143, 150, 151, 153–59, 168, 188, 216 sōma, xviii, 9, 10, 26, 63, 84, 136, 152, 159, 161, 167, 168, 177, 217, 225, 226 Sophocles, 35, 63, 88, 141, 156, 262 soul, xvi, xviii, 5, 6, 11, 16–18, 32, 37, 60, 61, 65, 73, 74, 82–87, 89, 90, 95, 98, 136, 152, 155, 168, 175, 178, 184, 187, 189, 199–201, 217, 225, 226, 229, 248, 258 species, 40, 63, 64, 88, 100, 120, 125, 128, 142, 143, 145, 149, 156, 206, 212, 214 Spinoza, Baruch, 38, 50, 106, 262 spirit, 5, 10, 55, 59, 60, 62, 75, 84, 192, 193, 222, 225 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 26, 200, 202, 262 Stiegler, Bernard, 29, 215, 221, 261, 262 Stirner, Max, xviii, 55, 56, 111, 192– 194, 228, 262 Stoic, xvii, 9, 10, 11, 27, 102, 105, 133, 134, 136, 149, 187, 224, 259 subiectum, 85, 100, 131 subjectivation, 12, 56, 62, 67, 216 substantia, 89, 100–2, 134, 138

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subtraction, 158, 208, 231, 232 Suger of St. Denis, 72, 103, 233, 259 sympatheia, 11 Szabó, Árpád, 42, 146, 262 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 5, 32, 262 Tarde, Gabriel, 217, 222–224, 228, 229, 262 Telemachus, 1, 35, 165 temporalization, 17, 60, 84, 137, 163, 192, 200, 205 Theogony, 4, 5, 38, 165, 170–172, 210 theory, 23, 26, 28, 31, 65, 75, 105, 106, 117, 148, 184, 194, 195, 209, 245, 256–58 theōria, 31, 149, 233 Thesleff, Holger, 155, 262 thought experiment, xv, 42, 43, 104, 166 Thucydides, 30, 32, 35, 73, 138, 154, 262 thymos, 18, 140, 152, 165, 173–76, 178, 179, 197, 225 to eon, 161–163 to ti ēn einai, 139, 142–144, 206 Toulmin, Stephen, 27, 77, 241, 262 transcendental, 189, 190, 226, 228 transformation, xii–xv, xvii, xviii, 14, 17, 21, 35, 57, 70, 76, 80, 81, 95, 121, 123, 131, 144–149, 165, 173, 180, 186, 192, 209–212, 215, 216, 224, 227, 238 transindividual, xviii, 206, 212–14, 218, 221, 226, 237 trauma, 3, 109 truth, 14, 32, 42, 78, 94, 168, 190, 191, 209–11, 228, 230 Ubaldis, Baldus de, 74, 75, 245, 247 Ulpian, xvii, 113–17 Valk, Marchinus van der, 172, 173, 262 Vasari, Giorgio, 70, 71, 263 Villani, Giovanni, 17, 263 Virgil, 2, 95

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Index 273

Voltaire, 41, 50, 263 vulnerabilis, 2, 8 vulnerability, xv, 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 22, 23, 247 vulnerable, 2, 3, 6, 16, 21, 25 vulnerare, 6, 13 vulneratus, 2 vulnus, 1–3, 8, 17, 98 war, xiv, xviii, 1, 8, 14, 17, 23, 26, 27, 59, 62, 73, 74, 123, 130, 164, 172, 177, 188, 226, 233, 234, 261 weapon, 12, 15, 16, 17, 21, 26, 39, 57, 82, 220, 234

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Weber, Max, 48, 50, 54, 55, 263 whatness, 231 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111, 206, 207– 209, 212, 228, 229, 241, 263 wound, xiv, xv, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 17, 21–23, 25, 98 wounded, 2, 5–7, 13, 16, 21–23, 25, 121, 127, 165 wounding, xiv, xv, 1, 7, 8, 15–17, 21, 22, 25 Xenophanes, xvii, 91, 127, 166–69, 172, 173, 180 Xenophon, 150, 263

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