READING T. S. ELIOT READING SPINOZA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Yoshiaki Mihara January 2013 © 2013 Yoshiaki Mihara READING T. S. ELIOT READING SPINOZA Yoshiaki Mihara, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 “[The ordinary man] falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other” – a good reader of T. S. Eliot’s criticism probably knows this famous passage; a good researcher on Eliot’s apprenticeship in philosophy perhaps knows that he did actually read Spinoza; and yet, in the current Eliot studies, reading Eliot and reading Spinoza seem to have nothing to do with each other. In this dissertation, I attempt to reconstruct Eliot’s reading of Spinoza as faithfully and comprehensively as possible, by closely analyzing the marginalia in Eliot’s copy of Spinoza’s Opera, housed in the Archive Centre of King’s College, Cambridge. At the same time, the Spinozist context for Eliot’s apprenticeship at Harvard and Oxford (with the intermission of “a romantic year” in Paris) is also to be presented, which is, in fact, a glaring absence in the philosophical branch of Eliot studies. In addition to these positivistic contributions, I also take a theoretical approach so as to demonstrate how illuminative Eliot’s reading of Spinoza can be for understanding the characteristic style (or “ethology”) of Eliot’s reading in general (i.e., Theory), by way of extensively analyzing the unpublished as well as published materials of Eliot’s “academic philosophizing” that culminated in his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley. Furthermore, theories of reading are to be provided mainly by the (New) Spinozist tradition, e.g., Deleuzean “double reading” and Althusserian “symptomatic reading”. With these theoretical weapons in hand, I examine the ways in which Eliot’s repression, or symptomatic oversights, of the Ontological question in his “systematic reading” of Spinoza (hence his Theory in general) is dogged by the return of the repressed “affective reading”, while his evasion of the Ontological question leads to an epistemological deadlock over the issue of solipsism, which is only to be resolved, rather violently, by a “leap” at an imagined commonality based on “essential kinship” that Eliot has contrived for himself – in sharp contrast to the idea of an “inessential commonality” that Agamben derives from Spinozian “common notions”. Finally, the political afterlives of Eliot’s Theory are problematized through the analysis of several uncanny mis/readings, or appropriations, of Eliot’s celebrated essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. Those politicized mis/readings by Nishida Kitarō (arguably the greatest philosopher of Imperial Japan) and Ch’oe Chaesŏ (a most prominent “pro-Japanese” intellectual in Colonial Korea) as well as that by the later Eliot himself will, in turn, illuminate the idea of Empire and its logic that are latent in Eliot’s ostensibly “purely literary” theory of “Tradition”. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Yoshiaki Mihara was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1974. He attended Musashi Junior and Senior High School from 1987 to 1993, during which time he spent a “romantic year” at Eton College (U.K.) from 1991 to 1992. He then entered the University of Tokyo in 1993, earning his B.A. (1997) and M.A. (2000) in English. Having briefly worked as a Research Associate at his alma mater, he left his home country as a Fulbright scholar and joined the doctoral program in English at Cornell University in 2001, where he was admitted to candidacy in 2004. He returned to Japan in 2005 to take up teaching positions at Ochanomizu University (Tokyo) and then at Doshisha University (Kyoto), where he is now an Associate Professor. iii For my grandpa, Prof. Yoshi’ichirō Hashimoto in memoriam (1912 - 1995) iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I arrived in the United States of America for the first time in my life – several weeks before 9.11, 2001. Born and bred in postwar Japan, I had not imagined that I would ever be living in a nation or empire at war. Those were difficult times for the world and the country in which I had chosen to live as a metoikos, albeit a very privileged one. Privileged indeed, for I was entirely free to fully enjoy the intellectual community at Cornell, “far above the busy humming of the bustling town”, while, at the same time, I was fortunate enough to make so many precious friends not only in the seminar rooms up on the hill but also in the anti-war rallies down in the town of Ithaca and in the city of New York. Had I not lived those difficult times there with them, I would never have known that side of “the land of the free”. For that, I am grateful to History’s “cunning passages” and “contrived corridors” that led me to Ithaca, New York, at that particular time. And yet, there was another turn. It turned out that I had to return to my home country much earlier than I had expected, without knowing how difficult it would be to complete a dissertation and how long it would take. This dissertation is indeed a bittersweet fruit of prolongation and procrastination on my part, and only the abiding support from numerous teachers, friends, and institutions could have brought it to fruition before it got overripe. I would first like to thank my Committee: Profs. Jonathan Culler, Natalie Melas, Geoffrey Waite, Douglas Mao, and Naoki Sakai. Without Jonathan’s patience, precise critique and practical advice (plus a bit of prodding) all through these years, this dissertation would never have come into existence. Natalie taught me the true meaning of two English words, “comparative” and “compelling”, which I cannot quite translate into my mother tongue. Geoff trapped me in the Spinozist spider web, in which I am still joyfully tangled up. Doug joined the team later, fresh and full of energy, who was, v for me, like a smart and smashing older brother. Finally, it was a great honor for me to ask Naoki, whom I was too shy to talk to when I sneaked into his lectures in Tokyo long before I met him in Ithaca, to take part in the already very diverse group. I would also like to thank my former teachers at the University of Tokyo, Profs. Yoshiyuki Fujikawa, George Hughes, the late Hiroshi Izubuchi, Nicholas Midgley, Yōichi Ōhashi, Kazuhisa Takahashi, and Hisaaki Yamanouchi, who first taught me the joy of studying English Literature and Literary Theory, and who have always been supportive of my research and career, no matter how far my erratic, errant nature let me drift away from their expectations. So many names of my dear friends and esteemed colleagues in so many places through so many years are inscribed on this dissertation that I must only despair of naming all in this limited space. I can name but a few, to whom my heartfelt gratitude is particularly due, ordine geographico: [Ithaca:] Aaron Moore, Akiko Ishii, Akin Adesokan, Alex Papanicolopoulos, Angela Naimou, Ben Middleton, Brett deBary, Chi-ming Yang, Constantinos Papadakis, David Rando, Esther Hu, Hideyuki Sadakane, Hyowon Kim, Iftikhar Dadi, Jade Ferguson, Javier Lezaun, John Noyes, Kyōko Selden, Laura Brown, Meg Wesling, Michael Shin, the late Mihoko Kajikawa, Mimi Yu, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Ogaga Ifowodo, Paola Iovene, Pedro Erber, Roger Gilbert, Ryan Canlas, Sheetal Majithia, Sze Wei Ang, Takeshi Kimoto, Travis Workman; [New York et al.:] Chizuru Kaneko, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Nehal Bhuta, Nida Alahmad, Yasushi Katsume, Yuki Watanabe; [Tokyo:] Michiko Nishio, Noriko Imanishi, the late Kazuko Takemura, Keiko Nitta, Tadashi Tsuda, Kazuyoshi Ōishi, Haruko Takakuwa, Takashi Ōnuki, Shintarō Kōno, Naoki Watanabe, and the “Shokkinken” folks – Masafumi Yonetani, Hideaki Tobe, Hong Jong-wook, Choi Jin-seok; [Seoul:] Cha Seung-ki, Cho Kang-sok, Hwang Ho-duk, Kim Dong-shik, Ryu Jun-pil, Yi Young-jae; [Kyoto:] Master Akira Ono of the Kanze Noh school, Tatsuo Murata, Tae Yamamoto, Gengo Ito, Satoshi Mizutani, Silvio Vita, Makoto Hayashi, Jun’ichi Isomae, and “il Gruppo che viene” collective – Akio Tanabe, Yumiko Tokita, Takeshi Matsushima, Taiju Ōkōchi, Akihiro Kanabishi, Kōsuke Akamine. vi I am grateful to the generous support of the Japan-U.S. Educational Commission (Fulbright Commission), Honjo International Scholarship Foundation, JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 18720066 and 24720137, the Cornell Department of English and the Cornell Graduate School, Ochanomizu University, and Doshisha University at various stages of the dissertation process. I am also grateful to Patricia McGuire of King’s College Library, Cambridge University, and Leslie A. Morris of Houghton Library, Harvard University. I particularly thank Dr. McGuire for her indispensable support via e-mails, even several years after my visit to the Archive Centre. Last but not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mrs. Valerie Eliot for her generous permission to quote extensively from Eliot’s unpublished typescripts, manuscripts and marginalia. The members of my family – whose latest comer, my nephew Kōsei, was born, safe and sound, shortly after the Great Earthquake on 3.11, 2011 – have always been a source of support and encouragement. They include, of course, dear ones who have passed away, among whom, to my late grandpa, especially, this dissertation is dedicated. He once tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade me from pursuing a career in literary study – “Listen to your grandpa, Yocchan, I know the business. .” – but he would, I believe, be happier than anyone else about his grandson’s achievements in his footsteps. I take it as good karma that this long-delayed dissertation was finally completed on his 100th anniversary. Ithaca – Tokyo – Kyoto, 2001-2012 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Table of Contents viii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 Chapter One “falls in love, or reads Spinoza” 42 Chapter Two “See l’évolution créatrice” 79 Chapter Three “La grosse difficulté de Spinoza” (I) 117 Chapter Four “La grosse difficulté de Spinoza” (II) 152 Chapter Five Tradition and the Metic Empires 260 Conclusion 337 Works Cited 348 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS < T.