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NOTES Introduction: Conceptual Personae 1. Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections in Four Parts: Written in French by the Duke of Rochefoucault, Now Made in English (London: M. Gillyflower, 1694), no. CCCLXXX. 2. Odo Marquard, In Defense of the Accidental: Philosophical Studies, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 7.84 [p. 65]. 4. Francesco Petrarch, “Preface: To the Noble and Distinguished Azzo Da Correggio,” Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 1. An early fifteenth-century English translation of a small part of the work survives in Cambridge University Library MS Ii. VI.39; see F. N. M. Diekstra, ed., A Dialogue between Reason and Adversity: A Late Middle English Version of Petrarch’s De Remediis (Assen: Royal Vangorcum, 1968). 5. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 127. 6. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, VI.1569–70, in The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900; reprinted 1979). 7. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27; reprinted 1967), 1.54; Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, vol. 3, ed. Eugene Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 1233. 8. François Dastur, “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise,” Hypatia 15.4 (2000), p. 182. 9. The standard works to consult are Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la Tradition Littéraire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967); Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); and Jerold C. Frakes’s The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987). See also the special issue edited by Catherine Attwood on “Fortune 132 NOTES and Women in Medieval Literature” in Nottingham French Studies 38.2 (1999). An exhibition showing artifactual materials held at the Folger Shakespeare Library has resulted in a sumptuous illustrated book edited by Leslie Thomas, Fortune: “All Is but Fortune” (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2000), suggesting that the iconography has wider public appeal. 10. Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 3. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 73. 12. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 75–76. 13. Jacques Derrida, “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 1–32. The paradox is one Derrida addresses in the punning neologism destinerrance, the letter addressed but not guaranteed to reach its destination. For some commentary on this area of Derrida’s thought, see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Destinerrance,” MLN 121.4 (2006), pp. 893–910. 14. François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 75. 15. Paris, B. N. lat. 6765, fol. 58v, a codex containing verses thought to have been authored by Serlo of Wilton. Excerpted and translated in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, vol. 2, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 496–97. 16. Vox Clamantis II.69–70, in The Complete Works of John Gower, Vol. 4, The Latin Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). Eric W. Stockton, trans., The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), pp. 99–100. 17. These poets echo the paradoxes of Matthew 16:25 (“For he that will save his life shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake shall find it”) and 25:29 (“For to every one that hath shall be given, and he shall abound; but from him that hath not, that also which he seemeth to have shall be taken away”), in The Holy Bible: Douay Version Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed. Richard Challoner (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1956). 18. Dante, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 1: Inferno, 7.84 and 94 [pp. 64–67]. 19. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), 1.6 [p. 149]. 20. Love is one of four instances of fidelity to the event discussed in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005): “it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event, the dialectic whose temporal ordination is proposed by fidelity” (232). NOTES 133 21. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 54–72; and Derrida, “Mes Chances,” pp. 20–22, 22. Hanna F. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 23. Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 24. Most recently, Michael Witmore’s Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) has given an adroit treatment of the supposed watershed. While he observes that the earliest recorded instance of accident in English is found in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (III.918), Witmore’s purpose is to show that it becomes a powerful sign of the times in the Renaissance stage and study. A much more important recent book is Jacques Lezra’s Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). In his brilliant but mercurial exposition Lezra pursues a cluster of textual events transmitted through the works of Lucretius, Descartes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare among many others, tracing a line of descent within which textual events (e.g., translations and adaptations) introduce something accidental into the system, gen- erating early modern history. Other examples include Frederick Kiefer’s Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1983), and as mentioned already Pitkin’s Fortune Is a Woman, both of which indi- cate again where the privileged site of analysis lies. 25. John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 26. Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 1. 27. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 1 On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event 1. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), IV.pr.7. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 2. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), 2.9 [p. 269]. 3. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), IV.33 [p. 176]. 4. Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1968), p. 7 [I.i.2]. 5. Augustine, City of God, p. 176 [IV.33]. 134 NOTES 6. Cicero, De Divinatione II.7, as translated by William Armistead Falconer, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923). Cited in Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 68. 7. The distinction comes down to which causes escape human foresight. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Dominican Editors, vol. 5 (New York: Blackfriars, 1964), 1a Q. 22 art. 2: “The uni- versal cause is one thing, a particular cause another. An effect can be haphazard with respect to the plan of the second, but not of the first.” 8. Alberti Magna Opera omnia, 1:423. Translated in Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, p. 25. 9. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 181. See also, for a considerably reduced version of his doctrines, Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002). 10. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1984), p. 108. 11. Cited in Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation, p. 75. Gracia is translating Boethius’s second edition from Samuel Brandt, ed., In “Isagogen” Porphyrii commenta, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 48 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1906). 12. Cited in Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation, p. 77. 13. Boethius, De Trinitate 1.24–31 in H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, eds. and trans., Boethius: The Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 6–8. See Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individua- tion, p. 98. 14. There are several circumstantial details that make the work richly ambiguous (and perhaps flawed). Henry Chadwick, in Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), argues that the work progresses from stoic moralism to pla- tonic metaphysics. Seth Lerer, in Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), speaks of the movement from “extrinsic” rhetorical to “intrinsic” philosophical demonstrations keyed to the gradual understanding of the prisoner.