The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist by Zachary Sng (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 473 As these scenes of eighteenth-century spectacle come to an end, we are given a glimpse of the figures of independence and solitude that “call forth the performance of Romanticism” (371). Shorn of the branches that con­ stituted its imperial holdings, William Cowper’s national figure of the “Yardley Oak” becomes a Lear-like ruin that is at once a symbol of the devastation wrought by war and an opportunity for an enterprising speaker to inaugurate his own “performance” ofpoetry. Both here and in the book as a whole, O’Quinn’s authoritative synthesis of theatricality and audience response gives us a deep and refreshing understanding of how a culture constitutes itselfthrough creative expression and thoughtful mediation, and ultimately, how it knows that despite defeat, the show must still go on. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel Suffolk University Zachary Sng. The Rhetoric of Errorfrom Locke to Kleist. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. 216. $50. With clarity, precision, and deftness, Zachary Sng analyzes in The Rhetoric ofErrorfrom Locke to Kleist the topic of error as it is thematized and figured in an array of philosophical and literary texts from Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century. The topic is of core importance to a century pre­ occupied with the function and aims of reason in grounding, guiding, and organizing discourses and modes of knowledge and, as a corollary, with identifying sources of error that could corrupt, contaminate, derail, misdi­ rect, or redirect the seemingly progressive and cumulative trajectories of such knowledge. The topic is a demanding and potentially unwieldy one that Sng handles with athleticism and elegance. An example of rigorous exegetical work backed by erudition in eighteenth-century British and German philosophy and literature and, more widely, the history ofphiloso­ phy and contemporary literary theory, Sng’s book employs critical modes ranging from monetary theory to etymology to political thought, opening up new ways of thinking about knowledge-production and its entangle­ ment with movements of error during and since the eighteenth century. As his point of departure, Sng takes Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Hu­ man Understanding, which he privileges in the design of the book as raising first a question all the texts analyzed share in common, serving for certain texts as an explicit source of derivation and contention and for others as one that implicitly articulates and stages resonant concerns. That common question is the relationship between language and thought, with Locke arguing that language, construed as the means of distribution of ideas, be subject to regulation and clarification so as not to corrupt or obscure the SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 474 BOOK REVIEWS understanding. It is specifically to language, wherein words are made arbi­ trarily the signs of ideas, that Locke traces the origin of error. The launch­ ing of his empiricist program necessarily involves, then, an effort to regu­ late language. Citing a recent study, Sng attributes to Locke “the first linguistic turn not only in the modern period but in the history ofphiloso­ phy” (45). The priority or “firstness” credited here is one that Locke’s Es­ say self-consciously claims for itself as a hallmark of its modernity: just as the understanding is supposed to begin ab ovo, severed from any history that might compromise its originality, so too does the Essay aim to make a new beginning in the history ofphilosophy with its propositions concerning the understanding and, consequently, the origination of agendas and itineraries of knowledge. While Sng analyzes how philosophical and literary writers grapple with the relationship between language and thought in the wake of Locke, the account he produces is not a linear one in which Locke’s 1690 text simply serves as the genesis of a history bookended by Kleist’s 1808 Penthesilea. As he writes in the Introduction, “The figuration of knowledge as an itinerary assumes the coherence, systematicity, and productivity ofmovement, mak­ ing it amenable to historical description, but this is precisely what error does not allow” (4). Rather, Sng shows how each text in question stages a repetition ofLocke’s preoccupation with identifying the source of error in language, a repetition that occasions variant movements of error rather than accretes into a coherent...