UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title "According to my bond": Intimacy and Attachment in Early Modernity Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hn4r324 Author Gadberry, Andrea Lauren Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California “According to My Bond”: Intimacy and Attachment in Early Modernity By Andrea Lauren Gadberry A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Victoria Kahn, Chair Professor Timothy Hampton Professor Judith Butler Professor Oliver Arnold Professor Susan Maslan Spring 2014 “According to My Bond”: Intimacy and Attachment in Early Modernity © 2014 by Andrea Lauren Gadberry 1 Abstract “According to My Bond”: Intimacy and Attachment in Early Modernity by Andrea Lauren Gadberry Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Victoria Kahn, Chair This dissertation studies the history of intimacy from late humanism through the Enlightenment by examining how the abstract concept of attachment becomes both a primary preoccupation and a crucial stumbling block in imagining subjectivity throughout the period. Examining a series of authors (Shakespeare, Descartes, Milton, and Rousseau) who ask what it would mean to be essentially without social ties, this project reveals the early modern period’s ongoing conflict between a primary solitude associated with autonomy, isolation, and detachment and a primary sociality that assumes a natural order of attachments, bonds, and interdependence. This dissertation challenges the conventional story of the birth of “interiority” or “the invention of the human” with Shakespeare (or even Montaigne) by revealing a resistance to a conception of attachment that assumes inwardness; instead, it uncovers a more gradual historical shift in models of primary attachment from external to internal bonds, from attachments understood to occur outside the subject to those forged by an immanent or internal principle of relationship. Chapter one argues that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Lear reveal a commitment to exteriority rather than the interiority so often attributed to Shakespeare as it attempts to conceal the fragility of social bonds and the ease with which they – and social life – can be destroyed. Chapter two examines Descartes’ Meditations and locates in the defensive strategies of the meditator an attempt to evade the threats of attachment through a negotiation with poetics that leaves dependency precariously outside the self. Chapter three finds in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained a turn to an immanent sociality in the figure of the Son; in Milton’s monism, a principle of relation inheres in all matter, suggesting that even total isolation is attended by this principle of relation. Chapter four studies Rousseau’s Émile and shows how the autonomy and even the solitude of the subject is secured by placing a relational principle around the subject’s soul. Finally, a speculative coda turns to Kant to consider the legacy of solitude and autonomy in the Enlightenment’s most famous moral philosopher. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Every Man Alone”: The Eclipse of Attachment ................................................................. ii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................ xv Chapter One: “No more nor less”: Shakespeare’s Theatre of the Bond ................................................... 1 Chapter Two: “As if it were only me in the world”: Cartesian Poetics and Solitude in the Meditations .......................................................................................................................................................... 23 Chapter Three: “Solitude is Best Society”: On Milton’s Immanent Attachments ................................ 48 Chapter Four: In Secret Society: The Soul of Émile .................................................................................. 69 Coda .................................................................................................................................................................... 96 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................................... 100 ii INTRODUCTION “Every Man Alone”: The Eclipse of Attachment ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a Phoenix… - John Donne, “The First Anniversary, An Anatomy of the World”1 Years after John Donne wrote his “First Anniversary” in 1611, he and his fellow wits incurred Samuel Johnson’s wrath for a body of work Johnson dismissed for only “say[ing] what they hoped had never been said before.”2 But what Donne may have lacked in sincerity, he made up for with the acuity of his cultural critique: Something had shattered, and all Relation was in flux. Donne’s verse imagines a Humpty Dumpty of relation, “all in peeces” and, worse, lacking the etymological glue necessary for reassembly – with all “coherence” gone, the possibility of “sticking together,” co-haerere, abandoned. Whatever Relation stood for, it failed to provide cohesion enough. This dissertation will suggest that the concerns voiced in this moment of Donne’s elegy are not particular to him but are an ongoing preoccupation of his moment. What Donne thinks “are things forgot” are remembered consistently in the vexed relationship to relationship that appears in works of the period, works which, I will show, engage the theme of relation and attachment – and, curiously enough, often do so in pursuit not of relation but, rather, of an autonomy that depends upon the attempt to forget Relation. The individual that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century is often thought of as autonomous, secular, and atomic. But independent it is not. The story of individuation that my account traces exposes the difficulties and the compromises involved in declaring the self autonomous. Implicit in my argument is the assumption that the process of becoming individual, or of seeming to, is inseparable from our bonds and attachments. Following the work of Gilbert Simondon,3 I investigate individuation before the individual, a project made possible in large part 1 John Donne, “The First Anniversary, An Anatomy of the World” in Selected Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 156-169. 2 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 15. 3 See Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective : à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989). describes the common approaches to this problem as follows: “Il existe deux voies selon lesquelles la réalité de l’être comme individu peut être abordée : une voie substantialiste, considérant l’être comme consistant en son unité, donné à lui-même, fondé sur lui-même, inengendré, résistant à ce qui n’est pas lui-même ; une voie hylémorphique, considérant l’individu comme engendré par la rencontre d’une forme et d’une matière. Le monisme centré sur lui-même de la pensée substantialiste s’oppose à la bipolarité du schème hylémorphique. Mais il y a quelque chose de commun en ces deux manières d’aborder la réalité de l’individu : toutes deux supposent qu’il existe un principe de l’individuation antérieur à l’individuation elle-même, susceptible de l’expliquer.” The problem with this approach is that it limits what is “interesting” to the individual alone: “Cette manière de poser le problème de l’individuation à partir de la constatation de l’existence d’individus recèle une présupposition qui doit être élucidée, parce qu’elle entraîne un aspect important des solutions que l’on propose et se glisse dans la recherche du principe d’individuation : c’est l’individu en tant qu’individu constitué qui est la réalité intéressante” (9). In contrast, Simondon asks, as Sean Bowden puts it, if it is possible to think about “individuation without recourse to an already constituted individual” and, further, to make “relation…not iii by the fallout of the very common project of the early modern period of imagining individuals in total isolation. In looking at the nebulous stuff of relation that seems to fall in between solitary individuals, I explore the strategies of engagement, the ties and attachments, that might make a self possible in the first place but that also challenge a subject’s independence and freedom. Imagining men who spring from the earth like fungi, as Hobbes’ state of nature in De Cive would imagine it, or even as second Adams4 (born without mothers), puts in relief the ties, affective and psychic, that must be shed to make solitary selves in the first place. Like Donne, I put Relation before the offices it oversees, but in doing so, what I uncover across a range of works from early modernity to the Enlightenment is a sense of uncertainty about how to handle the very concept of “relation” – about where to put it within or near the self, about what to do with it in light of the vulnerabilities it seems to ensure. Before turning to the primary authors of this project