Scholastic Etiologies: The Writing Subject in Early Modern Europe

??? COHPAnATIST around this epistemological dilemma. In its inadequacy and powerlessness, the subject is drawn inexorably to the outer world; yet its sense ofwholesomeness and adequacy makes it retreat from and eventually feel threatened by that world. (113) Paradoxes are tricky things: well handled, they reveal a fascinating complexity; inexpertly handled, they are liable to erase whatever comprehension ofthe subject the reader may have acquired. On the other hand, at its best, Denton's search for paradoxes scintillates with intertextual insights, as in the following: Modem notions oftransforming consciousness through contact with the objective world, like that in Hu Feng's creative process, would seem to have a strong attachment to [. . .] neo-Confucian epistemology and the process ofself-cultivation ofwhich it is a part. Hu Feng's notion of"enlarging the self" through knowledge ofthe external world resonates with the early neo-Confucian Zhang Zai's notion of "enlarging the mind" (da qi xin) through a "moral spiritual intuitive knowledge ." (Hao Chang, 1 1 1 - 1 1 2) This is an instance that illustrates two neglected truisms: (1) that one cannot understand the modern period without reference to the past; and (2) that the modern period should not be denigrated in favor ofthe past. In citing the pitfalls of"presentism "—the overemphasis on the present—we must also acknowledge the equal and opposite misjudgment of what might be called "pastism"—reflected in the literati disdain for the modern period in China cited at the outset of this review. "Pastism" is the nostalgic and ultimately antiheuristic overappreciation ofthe traditional canon. For the teacher and the scholar, the past must never be a refuge, a locus amoenus in which to escape the present, but a reference point from which to understand the present. As T. S. Eliot said, deathlessly: "the historical sense involves a perception, not only ofthe pastness ofthe past, but ofits presence." Eugene EoyangIndiana University/Lingnan University, Hong Kong JACQUES LEZRA. Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy ofthe Event in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. ix + 413 pp. SCHOLASTIC ETIOLOGIES: THE WITiNG SUBJECT IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE UnspeakableSubjects explores the protomodem European discourse ofidentity embedded in the profoundly self-conscious early modern practice of writing. .The presiding aim is to show how acts ofliterary composition rely on a doctrine ofhistorical events that critically interrogates the emergent modern sense ofpersonal agency it helps produce. This indicates Lezra's far-reaching historical ambitions. As one ofhis title's punning senses suggests, his ultimate theme is something like the advent ofHistory itself. Though a specifically early modem historical consciousness comes explicitly to light only with the climactic reading ofthe paronomastic "appearance ofhistory" in Shakespeare's Measurefor Measure, the book's deepest, most "unspeakable" subject is the early modem encounter with historical events as both irresistible and incorrigible contingency. However, history as Lezra presents it is not a transparent extraliterary window in which texts reveal their independent and invariant historical reality or truth; it is a by-product of texts themselves in their dialectical relation to VcH. 24 (2000): 161 REVIEW ESSAYS external conditions they simultaneously picture and shape, in part as a function of the constructive interpretations we ourselves perform in reading them. This defines the book's considerable theoretical as well as historiographical potential . Lezra's goal is the synthesis of two apparently irreconcilable styles of reading: "formalism," with its minute attention to the immanent figurai, intertextual , and automimetic properties ofindividual texts engaged in their own right, and "materialism," with its reductive insistence on seeing cultural forms as mystified by-products ofthe underlying ideological and socioeconomic forces that determine them. This reflects the author's dual allegiance as an expressly left-wing intellectual. On one side is the legacy of Parisian Marxism (Althusser, Balibar, Macherey) commemorated in his earlier edited volume, Depositions (Yale UP, 1995), on the "labor ofreading." But on the other side is his debt to high theory in Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, or de Man. To the Marxist side we owe the saturnine rigor with which history is seen, precisely, as "unspeakable": the underlying cultural pathology that texts register without being able to bring themselves to look at or name it—the vehicle moreover ofan "etiology" (for characteristic, sometimes tendentious uses...