Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things by Anders Engberg-Pedersen (review)

Empire of Chance investigates the codependence of the transformation of chance into an organizational principle of modern reality and the cultural predominance of war in European cultural memory. Engberg-Pedersen opts to demonstrate that the state of war—an epistemological mode whose origins he locates in the Napoleonic and Revolutionary Wars—has become emblematic of the modern perception of the world. The cipher of war, he argues, has had far-reaching ramifications, which can be scrutinized in literary texts negotiating this epistemic transition. To Engberg-Pedersen, literature fills two roles in the kind of discourse analysis that he proposes: first, “literature as a medium plays a privileged role because it conjures a dynamic empirical field” (246). Aesthetic choices, such as replacing the traditional sequence of narrative with an unpredictable set of events, evince a new perception of reality. Thus, in his reading of Tristram Shandy, Engberg-Pedersen argues that the novel, which refers to battles in its plot, “develops a poetics of contingency that makes chance its organizational principle” (27). Second, concurrently to its experimentation with a given discourse, literature negotiates the cultural influence of this discourse by challenging the conditions that gave rise to its centrality: “within the military discourse literature also occupies the position of the outsider. It is itself a prism in which the military discourse is broken into the different rays by way of a metareflection on its claims and suppositions” (247).

The first chapter presents the state of war in the eighteenth century as a catalyst of narratological innovations in the modern novel. Chapter 2 centers on the influence of the state of war on German idealism in challenging Kantian thinking, whose dogmatism appeared to pertain to times of peace. Chapter 3 examines how war provoked skepticism about the ability of the subject to apprehend the empirical world and question the validity of human sensibilities and the effectiveness of human judgment. Chapter 4 seeks to connect emerging pedagogic strands in modernity, such as antidogmatic education tuned toward real-life circumstances, to lessons learned on the battlefield. Chapters 5 and 6 center on changes in cartography in the nineteenth century. They propose that the state of war evinced a new perception of space as territories to be invaded, fought over, and ultimately conquered. Literature radically amends the functional use of objects instrumental for warcraft, as seen in the appearance of maps in literary texts, thereby employing its critical role as an “outsider” to the discourse on war.

War diverges significantly from other ciphers that have been described as important for modernity: war undergirds the perception that disorder is inherent to human existence by challenging the ability of the subject to understand reality. This assumption underlies the book’s approach to discourse analysis. The author takes issue with Foucault’s description of the epistemological disjunction that occurred with the rise of history as a leading paradigm around 1800, which dictated a radical turn from metaphysics to a focus on empirical objects. Reiterating the view of modern epistemology as disrupted, Engberg-Pedersen contends that chance refutes the apprehension of the world through empiricism: “The state of war is articulated in a diverse range of forms, materials, and genres that all, with shifting emphases, respond to the disappearance of a secure foundation of knowledge” (246). The disruption of reality is the logical result of the loss of the ability to make sense of the world altogether. It can thus be inferred that the uniqueness of modernity stems from the fact that its main cultural figure (the figure whose epistemic role is to establish order) disrupts rules of logics and war. With this inner tension that lies at its core, modern Zeitgeist amounts not to an epistemological disjunction but to the disjunction of epistemology: “Epistemology suffered a concussion at Austerlitz, at Wagram, at Borodino, and the effects of the impact can be measured in the texts that subsequently try to make sense of the situation” (5).

The...