Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar

10. Kidnapping

163 10 Kidnapping Quid enim furantur, alienum auferunt, verbum autem Dei non est ab eis alienum qui obtemperant ei. What is stolen is alienated, but the word of God cannot be alienated from those who obey him. Augustine here (De doctrina christiana 4.29.62) identifies theft with alienation, with removing something from its proper place to another, and thus making it alien to its rightful owner —and, by implication, to the place in which it now finds itself. Doing this with words would be a strange act, and Augustine here gives a hint of what it would mean by saying that the word of God cannot be alien to or alienated from those who obey it. This suggests that it could be alien to and alienated from those who do not obey it: they would then be its thieves, and they would become so by the fundamental act of expropriation, which is the attempt to hold to themselves— to privatize—the supremely and unchangeably public thing, which is God’s own word. The attempt fails because it must: whatever you get when you steal God’s word cannot, by definition , be what you attempted to steal. w 164 S kidn apping w The curious and the studious share the judgment that the figure of the plagiarus, the kidnapper or body-thief who became, sometime in the eighteenth century, the plagiarist or word-thief, is a threatening one and therefore to be shunned. But they differ deeply about what is wrong with this figure, and about how to avoid his clutches. The studious find him absurd because what he attempts is performatively incoherent : stealing words is something that, when attempted, guarantees its own failure in much the same way as does asserting the impossibility of assertion. The studious are therefore embarrassed and amused by those who think word theft possible, whether they like and practise it or not. For them, it is the very idea of plagiarism that needs criticism , not its practice. But for the curious, the plagiarist is a real threat because they think that what he attempts can be done; for them, the plagiarist must be opposed with his own weapons and defeated, if he can be, by outperforming him at his own game. This difference about plagiarism shows with considerable clarity how Christians and pagans differ in their understanding of the relations between the work of their own hands and minds and that of others. But what is it, exactly, that the word-thief attempts? Plagiarus is a Latin word, pre-Christian in origin and use, whose primary meaning is body-thief or kidnapper. It denotes a figure who makes off with your offspring or someone else close to you—or even with yourself. What the plagiarus does, then, is to expropriate something of great value and intimacy—your child is the gift of your body, after all, and typically someone with whom you are very closely intertwined . And the plagiarus is a violent figure: he will often need to use or to threaten violence in order to achieve his theft. He takes from you something you are very unwilling that he should have, and keeps it from you as long as he has the power to do so. Gradually, the word’s meaning relaxed and expanded, until the plagiarus became not just a thief of human bodies, but also an expropriator of other things, includ- kidn apping S 165 ing—and this is the meaning that interests me here—words owned by others. The body-thief became a word-thief, and the plagiarus became the more familiar, and more English, plagiarist. This word-history is not irrelevant to the word’s current meaning, and you should keep it in mind if you are fully to understand what is now meant by plagiarism, and what is the significance of the different reasons the studious and the curious have for opposing it. Especially important are the connotations of theft-by-violence, and of losing something very close to you. Both are at play in the idea of plagiarism, though a little excavation is needed if this is to be made evident. There is no uncontroversial definition of plagiarism, which is, as will become apparent, not surprising; but this may serve as a first approximation : you act as a plagiarist when you knowingly make public use of an ensemble of words without acknowledgment of the place...