Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care by John T. Hamilton (review)

What is security? What does security secure? Does it have an end? In an age haunted by insecurity, these are pressing questions but also difficult ones. As John T. Hamilton observes in the introduction to this timely book, the slipperiness of the concept is due to a constitutive tension: “Security almost always works at a cross-purpose because the concern for security is at bottom a concern to be without concern” (10).

The originality of Hamilton’s project stems from the crucial coupling of the term security and its etymological root cura (“concern,” “care”) as his object of study. Indeed, the ambiguity and ambivalence of the term security “stems from the varying values of cura, the ‘concern’ that security appears to eliminate” (10). The ultimate end of security is thus a condition that is either carefree or careless. And what separates us from this condition is our humanity and a life of care. Approached this way, different formulations of security and cura throughout the long Western tradition offer a promising starting point for a meditation on the different meanings and values of the word and the thing. Hence Hamilton’s central premise that security is an urgent philological problem, against the all too casual and hollow use of the term, both within present-day security projects and their consideration in academic studies. And hence the project of the book: “In tracing the word’s historical, metaphorical and cultural paths, the following chapters focus less on what security is and more on the shifting ideas, meanings, and figurations associated with the term” (20).

In delivering on this promise, Hamilton offers a superb example of the work philology can do today. This work is not only a philology having care as its object, but philology practiced with exemplary care, philology as care. The enterprise is certainly executed with supreme erudition and displays a breathtaking scope in the variety of discourses, languages, and contexts studied, from ancient Greek poetry and Roman Stoicism, via Augustine, Luther, and Hobbes, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Blumenberg (among many others). However, this mastery of contexts and secondary texts is always second to the attentiveness to the complexities and the layers of meaning in the text at hand. The philology of care as practiced here operates with a programmatic slowness that (pace Said) disrupts traditional “humanist” overarching narratives toward a “more human humanism” (21), thereby instantiating, as provocatively formulated against the Kantian sapere aude, a pre-enlightened “refusal to dare to know” (24).

The result is a wonderfully rich volume that makes punctual yet decisive incursions leading to brilliant new readings of canonical texts, including the final words of Voltaire’s Candide and Goethe’s Faust, and the overall project of Descartes and Michelet. For this reviewer, however, the main take-away from the book was elsewhere. Through the cornucopia of its corpus and the generosity of its gesture, Security is above all an invitation to think along, to think further and deeper, to pursue the project of the book on a yet wider corpus. It invites us to practice the philology of care in our approach to books but also to the world.