Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription (review)

By definition, book history deals with processes of textual production, dissemination, and circulation that are historical. Such processes are usually reflexive, and the people behind them are often unconscious of the wider repercussions. A sixteenth century printer would, for example, have thought in terms of profit and offsetting cost against risk, as we have been told by numerous scholars including Peter Blayney. It is doubtful that many printers would have rubbed their hands in glee at the prospect of future generations reading the texts that they produced, and in fact many early modern printed texts were ephemeral: such texts really were not intended to last more than a day, a fortnight, or — the case of almanacs — a year before they were out of date and, consequently, destroyed.

To one intellectual group of people throughout Renaissance Europe, however, the means by which texts were produced and disseminated shaped the way that they defined the world. This group was the era’s philosophers: notably, as Daniel Selcer observes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bayle, as well as, among others, Hobbes, Valla, and Gassendi. For a number of Continental Europe’s philosophers, print, inscription, and reading provided useful metaphors by which they might construct arguments that organized and discussed a number of topical issues central to their publications, lectures, and letters.

Through five chapters, Selcer’s Philosophy and the Book attempts to examine how the materiality of the text influenced materialist discourses. Even so, the first two chapters are largely theoretical, with little analysis of the materiality of the books in question. In chapter 1, ‘The Allegorical Library’, Selcer discusses Leibniz’s elaboration of the so-called ‘infinite library’ in his Theodicy. This metaphorical library — a ‘phantasmagoria of the automatic and total library’ (p. 27) that would, therefore, hold all the world’s possible books and, by extension, all of its possible histories — is connected to Leibniz’s engagement with the continuum: the idea that small and discrete material objects might inherently and collectively become uninterrupted reality. Despite being of a material and organic nature — stitched and bound by leather, governed by the limitations of a codex — books, Leibniz has argued, become hypostated. Selcer’s focus on Leibniz is continued in chapter 2, ‘The Uninterrupted Ocean’, particularly on Leibniz’s attempts to create methods for the construction of a metaphysical encyclopaedia. In an epistemological transformation of chapter 1’s continuum theory, Leibniz attempted to establish a taxonomy of human knowledge in the face of its fluidity and mutability. The outcome, as Selcer discusses, would have been an infinitely referential encyclopaedia in which every entry points to others.

Chapter 3, ‘The Materialist Encyclopaedia’, explores Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, together with its style of infinite reference, similar to that of Leibniz. Here, Selcer begins to get a grip on his proposed linking of the materiality of the book to certain related philosophical concepts. Paying attention to Bayle’s use of typography, Selcer looks with some depth into the organization and structure of the text as a means to support the author’s complex system of referencing. This analysis of the physicality of scriptive matter is then explored further in chapter 4, ‘Reading and Repetition’, analysing it in relation to several episodes in the history of Cartesian reading and a number of ways in which these readings evoke the materiality of the book. This Selcer achieves by using the texts of Descartes and his mobilizing of the figures of writing itself. Chapter 5, ‘The Body and the Book’, looks at Spinoza’s exposition of Cartesian philosophy. Specifically, Selcer explores Spinoza’s philosophical posed problem of distinguishing between two books written in an identical hand — an allegorization of the Cartesian distinction between formal and objective reality. Selcer also assesses Spinoza’s elaboration of a dynamic, materialist theory of meaning directly through an engagement with the materiality of writing.

The problem is that Selcer’s...