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  • Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political by Peter DeGabriele
  • Rebecca Anne Barr
Peter Degabriele, Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2015. Pp. xxxiv + 142. $70.00.

If Habermas was once the presiding genius of eighteenth-century studies, Hobbes now oversees the latest critical turn in the field. Mr. DeGabriele unpacks eighteenth-centuryists' self-aggrandizing adoption of the Habermassian public sphere as a liberal myth that obscures the persistence of sovereign power and violence and a subject "not reducible" to its laws. Sovereign Power challenges accounts of the novel as the "triumph of the individual," exploring moments when eighteenth-century fiction produces "subject positions not reducible to that of the self-sufficient liberal individual and … cannot be contained within the terms of the social contract." Such an argument will be welcomed by a scholarly audience increasingly suspicious of histories of the period that fail to take account of the generically uncertain, distinctly odd, and downright unpleasant aspects of the age of Swift. The work's argument, that arbitrary power permeates the social, sensible, and domestic realms, is characteristically post-Foucauldian. Its ambitious critical aim and distinctly political charge will appeal to those academics uncomfortable with an eighteenth century sometimes enlisted to confirm the cultural apotheosis of "hegemonic liberalism." Given the rise of the Leviathan during this past year, such whiggish histories seem increasingly quaint. Sovereign Power's concern for the vulnerability of subjects, analysis of the threat of violence by political authorities, and understanding of literature's arsenal of resistance is indeed timely.

However, Mr. DeGabriele's introduction suffers from some ideological pitfalls. Dense, [End Page 160] repetitious, and abstract, its overinvestment in theory sacrifices clarity for abstruse critical language, losing focus from the central arguments it could be pursuing. When the author does turn to the primary texts, his prose loses some critical energy but retains jargon. This slight sense of detachment is problematic, given that the texts he chooses are an interpretational portmanteau rather than a coherent selection. The readings of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, Richardson's Clarissa, Hume's History of England, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and Radcliffe's The Italian contain many sound insights, but they are intermittent and disjointed, rather than additive and unified. Mr. DeGabriele is aware of this, warning that the works here are "exceptional rather than exemplary and … divided against themselves." But this can lead to special pleading, as well as forcing the author to belabor what can seem like tenuous connections between sections and themes. Major critical claims are made from textual evidence too thin to support them. The discussion of intimacy and survival in Defoe's Plague Year, for instance, is negotiated through Robert Esposito's immunitary paradigm, Arendt's analysis of intimacy, and Werner Hamarcher's theory of speech act and promise—to name but a few of the philosophical frameworks. As a result, the haunted compulsiveness of H. F.'s survivor narrative and its inherent generic strangeness is submerged beneath overarticulated critical constructions, with only a faint impression emerging of Defoe's actual text.

Nevertheless, Mr. DeGabriele offers many genuinely sensitive and productive interpretations. The chapter on Clarissa interrogates competing notions of property, consent, and consciousness. Lovelace's febrile tactility prompts Mr. DeGabriele to explore the ways in which the novel is invested in the "external limits of selfhood": bodies which rub up and off each other in an eternal friction of conflict and eroticism. Using Locke's and Hume's materialist theories of contiguity, solidity, and annihilation (filtered through Derrida), he argues that Lovelace's violent desire to penetrate Clarissa is a fantasy of power in which his "sovereign touch" will produce a "relationship of propriety" between the two bodies. Sandra Macpherson's Harm's Way is a significant critical interlocutor. By qualifying her use of strict liability to incriminate Lovelace, Mr. DeGabriele's focus on Clarissa's "insensibility" and "stupefaction"—what he calls the "intimate distance between a subject and her own body"—allows the reader to witness the political and interpretive dividends of his method of analyzing the subject...

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