Arnold I. Davidson
         Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to
            Pierre Hadot
         Pierre Hadot, whose inaugural lecture to the chair of the History
            of Hellenistic and Roman Through at the Collège de France we are
            publishing here, is one of the most significant and wide-ranging
            historians of ancient philosophy writing today. His work, hardly
            known in the English-reading world except among specialists,
            exhibits that rare combination of prodigious historical scholarship
            and rigorous philosophical argumentation that upsets any
            preconceived distinction between the history of philosophy and
            philosophy proper. In addition to being the translator and author
            of monographs on Plotinus, Vitorinus, Porphyry, and many others,
            Hadot's most important general philosophical work is entitled
            Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.1 Combined with
            detailed studies of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, this work
            presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early
            Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and
            a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have
            companied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of
            spiritual exercises. Hadot's "Forms of Life and Forms
            of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy" provides an overview of
            his major themes and preoccupations, and gives some indication of
            the historical scope of his work. This lecture also illuminates the
            methodological problems one faces in studying the history of
            thought, especially problems concerning the evolution,
            reinterpretation, and even misunderstanding of the meaning and
            significance of philosophical terminology. In this brief
            introduction, I can do no more than attempt to provide a context
            for Hadot's inaugural lecture, by way of summary of his major
            work, and, more specifically for reader's of Critical
            Inquiry,to sketch the profound importance that Hadot's
            writings had for the last works of Michel Foucault.
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of ,is
            associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on
            the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the
            Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited
            the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism" (Critical
            Inquiry15 [Winter 1989]). He is currently working on the history of
            horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations.
Pierre Hadot
         Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in_Ancient_Philosophy
         Here we are witness to the great cultural event of the West, the
            emergence of a Latin philosophical language translated from the
            Greek. Once again, it would be necessary to make a systematic study
            of the formation of this technical vocabulary that, thanks to
            Cicero, Seneca, Tertullian, Victorinus, Calcidius, Augustine, and
            Boethius, would leave its mark, by way of the Middle Ages, on the
            birth of modern thought. Can it be hoped that one day, with current
            technical means, it will be possible to compile a complete lexicon
            of the correspondences of philosophical terminology in Greek and
            Latin? Furthermore, lengthy commentaries would be needed, for the
            most interesting task would be to analyze the shifts in meaning
            that take place in the movement from one language to another. In
            the case of the ontological vocabulary the translation of ousia by
            substantia,for example, is justly famous and has again recently
            inspired some remarkable studies. This brings us once more to a
            phenomenon we discretely alluded to earlier with the word
            philosophia,and which we will encounter throughout the present
            discussion: the misunderstandings, shifts or losses in meaning, the
            reinterpretations, sometimes even to the point of misreading, that
            arise once tradition, translation, and exegesis coexist. So our
            history of the Hellenistic and Roman thought will consist above all
            of recognizing and analyzing the evolution of meanings and
            significance.
             
            Pierre Hadot holds the chair of the History of Hellenistic and
            Roman Thought at the Collège de France. He is the author of many
            books and articles on the history of ancient philosophy and
            theology. Among his works are Plotin et la simplicité du regard,
            Porphyre et Vitctorinus, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie
            et ses oeuvres,and Exercises spirituels et philosophie
            antique.Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of ,is
            associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on
            the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the
            Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited
            the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism" (Critical
            Inquiry 15 [Winter 1989]). He is currently working on the history
            of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and
            deviations. Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has
            recently translated Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant's
            The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks(1989). She also
            contributed translations of articles by Maurice Blanchot, Philippe
            Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas for the "Symposium on
            Heidegger and Nazism."
Mieke Bal
         De-Disciplining the Eye
         In this essay I will explore a mode of reading I call
            "reading for the text." A text is what we make of a
            work when reading it: roughly, a meaningful, well-structured whole
            with a beginning and an end. But as a mode of reading, textuality
            allows for constant activity, a continual shaping nd reshaping of
            sign-events. I will argue that reading for a sense of textuality,
            and for the wholeness this simple textuality entails, does not
            necessarily preclude awareness of a fundamental lack of unity,
            while reading for the effect of the real, in spite of the promotion
            of the "realistic detail," tends to do so. The two
            modes of reading are fundamentally different; yet the conflict
            between them is not necessarily obvious, nor should such conflict
            be avoided, ignored, or smoothed out.
            The goal of this confrontation is not to promote textual reading at
            the expense of realistic reading. It is the conflict between them I
            wish to promote. The two modes of reading can be brought to bear on
            the same work, although they are incompatible. As a result,
            activating both modes is in itself a critical endeavor: their very
            combination helps one to avoid the unifying fallacy. Textual and
            realist readings are a problematic and thereby productive
            combination.
             
            Mieke Bal is professor of comparative literature and Susan B.
            Anthony Professor of women's studies at the University of
            Rochester. The author of Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of
            Coherence in the Book of Judges (1988), her forthcoming book is
            Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition.
Daniel Boyarin
         The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in_Midrashic_Hermeneutic
         My construction of the position of the eye in Rabbinic Judaism (and
            Christianity) represents almost a reversal of the roles
            "Hebraic" and "Hellenic." A powerful case
            can be made that only under Hellenic influence do Jewish cultures
            exhibit any anxiety about the corporeality of visibility of God;
            the biblical and Rabbinic religions were quite free of such
            influences and anxieties. Thus I would identify Greek influences on
            Judaism in the Middle Ages as being the force for repressing the
            visual. The Neoplatonic and Airstotelian revision of Judaism
            undertaken by the Jewish scholastics was so successful that it has
            resulted in the near-total forgetting of the biblical and Rabbinic
            traditions of God's visibility. W. J. T. Mitchell's
            characterization of the Rabbinic tradition is a perfect example of
            this "forgetting." In order to position Judaism in a
            typology of cultures, Mitchell cites Moses Maimonides.
            Mitchell's reading of Maimonides is well-founded; the problem
            lies rather in the identification of Maimonides as if he typified
            the old Rabbinic tradition. In my view, he represents a distinct
            departure from that tradition. This Platonic departure was indeed
            marked and condemned as such by many of his contemporaries, but it
            has become the almost unchallenged orthodoxy of later Judaism as
            well as of the critical tradition. The memory of having seen God in
            the Bible and the desire to have that experience again were a vital
            part of Rabbinic religion. They constituted, moreover, a key
            element in the study of Torah, the making of midrash.
             
            Daniel Boyarin,associate professor of Talmud and midrash at Bar-
            Ilan University, has published essays on midrash and literary
            theory. His book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash is
            forthcoming. This essay is part of a larger project tentatively
            entitled Bodies of Torah: Language, Sex and God in Talmudic
            Judaism.
Cheryl Walker
         Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author
         The issues that Foucault raises about reception and reading are
            certainly part of the contemporary discussion of literature.
            However, they are not the only issues with which we, as
            today's readers, are concerned. Discussions about the role of
            the author persist and so we continue to have recourse to the
            notion of authorship.
            For instance, in her recent book Sexual / Textual Politics(1985),
            the feminist critic Toril Moi feels called on to return to these
            twenty-year-old issues in French theory to tell us what it has
            meant to speak of the author, when she says: "For the
            patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin and meaning of
            the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of
            authority,we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland
            Barthes the death of the author."3
            In the course of this essay I wish to reopen the (never fully
            closed) question of whether it is advisable to speak of the author,
            orof what Foucault calls "the author function," when
            querying a text, and I wish to reopen it precisely at the site
            where feminist criticism and post-structuralism are presently
            engaged in dialogue. Here in particular we might expect that
            reasons for rejecting author erasure would appear. However,
            theoretically informed feminist critics have recently found
            themselves tempted to agree with Barthes, Foucault, and the Edward
            Said of Beginnings that the authorial presence is best set aside in
            order to liberate the text for multiple uses.4
             
            4. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York,
            1975), p. 162.
             
            Cheryl Walker is professor of English and humanities at Scripps
            College. She is the author of The Nightingale's Burden: Women
            Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982) and Masks Outrageous
            and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets
            (forthcoming). She is currently editing an anthology of nineteenth-
            century women poets and a book of essays about feminist criticism
            in the wake of post-structuralism.
Marilynn Desmond
         The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and_the_Anonymous
            Anglo-Saxon Elegy
         In order to recuperate these two representatives of medieval
            frauenlieder, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer,a
            feminist poetics must acknowledge the medieval attitudes toward
            authority and authorship that allow the medievalist to privilege
            the voice of the text over the historical author or implied author.
            The modern concept of authorship, derived from a modern concept of
            the text as private property, valorizes the signature of the author
            and the author's presumed control over and legal
            responsibility for his or her text. With reference to modern
            literature, contemporary theory has interrogated this
            "author-function" quite aggressively in an attempt to
            pry the text away from the author and to valorize the functions of
            the reader, as Roland Barthes's "Death of the
            Author" illustrates,13 or to reconsider the privileges of the
            subject, in order to "seize its functions, its interventions
            in discourse, and its system of dependencies," as Michel
            Foucault's essay "What Is an Author?" propoes.14
            Foucault's proposals concerning the place of the subject and
            the author-function directly challenge modern assumptions about the
            text as the property of an author: "We can easily imagine a
            culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an
            author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value,
            regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a
            pervasive anonymity."15
             
            13. See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author,"
            Image, Music, Text,trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 142-
            48.
            14. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" Language,
            Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,trans.
            Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.,
            1977), p. 137.
            15. Ibid., p. 138. Indeed, Foucault does press his argument to the
            limits of its implications for the subject, and he ends his essay
            with a question that challenges the voice of a text as well as its
            author: "&lsquo;What Matter who's
            speaking?'" (Foucault, "What Is an Author?"
            p. 138). Nancy K. Miller engages directly in the implications of
            this position for feminist theory. She states: "What matter
            who's speaking? I would answer it matters, for example, to
            women who have lost and still routinely lose their proper name in
            marriage, and whose signature not merely their
            voice has not been worth the paper it was written on"
            (Miller, "The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her
            Fictions," Diacritics 12 [Summer 1982]: 53).
             
            Marilynn Desmondis an assistant professor of English, general
            literature, and rhetoric at the State University of New
            York Binghamton. She is the author of Reading Dido:
            Textuality and Sexuality in the Late Medieval Reception of Aeneid 4
            (forthcoming); her current work is a study of ekphrasis in late
            medieval literature.
Vincente L. Rafael
         Nationalism, Imagery, and the Filipino Intelligentsia
         To see nationalism as a cultural artifact is to argue against
            attempts at essentializing it. Anderson claims that nationalism can
            be better understood as obliquely analogous to such categories as
            religion and kinship. Membership in a nation draws on the
            vocabulary of filiation whereby one comes to understand oneself in
            relation to ancestors long gone and generations yet to be born. In
            addressing pasts and futures, nationalism resituates identity with
            reference to death, one's own as well as others'.
            Herein lies nationalism's affective appeal, that which makes
            it possible to sacrifice oneself for the "motherland."
            It lends to the accident of birth the sense of continuity and
            converts mortality into something that is meant for as much as it
            is realized by one. By placing one in a certain relationship to
            death and generativity, nationalist discourse therefore frames the
            arbitrariness of existence. "It is the magic of nationalism
            to turn chance into destiny" (IC,p. 19).
            However, while nationalism tends to mine the idioms of kinship and
            religion, the historical conditions of its emergence undermine the
            logic and stability of these inherited categories. Thus Anderson
            defines nations as "imagined communities." Built on the
            rubble of traditional polities, the nation invokes a radically
            secular subjectivity that sets it apart from its predecessors.
            Dynastic states presumed power and privilege as functions of the
            purity of bloodlines guaranteed by a divine order. Colonial states
            as dynastic states in drag replicate the obsession with hierarchy
            by reorganizing social and epistemological categories according to
            a metaphysics of race and progress. By contrast, the nation
            envisions a more egalitarian community. "Regardless of the
            actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the
            nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship"
            (IC,p. 16). It thus reveals the mutability of all sorts of
            hierarchies. Rather than take power for granted as natural and
            inherited, nationalism asks about "rights" and thereby
            opens up the problem of representation: who has the right to speak
            for whom and under what circumstances?
             
            Vincente L. Rafael is assistant professor in the department of
            communication, University of California, San Diego. He is the
            author of Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian
            Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare
         "The Avoidance of Love" is Cavell's magic looking
            glass onto Shakespeare, where the idea of missing something, not
            getting what is obvious, is, on Cavell's reading, very close
            to a philosophical obsession. Shakespeare here means besides
            Lear Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale,and
            Antony and Cleopatra,and what Cavell finds in these plays is an
            attempt to think through what elsewhere, in the formation of the
            modern philosophical tradition, was getting formulated as the
            problem of skepticism, or not being able to know that we know (not
            being able to be certain). It is not easy to say what this means.
            As if executing a skeptical decorum, Cavell's writing does
            not try for transparency, nor does it always coincide with itself,
            and anyhow Shakespeare is not so much an object as a region of
            Cavell's thinking, so everyday (nonphilosophical) readers are
            apt to find themselves a bit at sea with him. Without claiming to
            match Cavell's views point for point, I would like to give
            something like a para-Cavellian commentary that tries to say what
            his thinking, with respect to Shakespeare, seems to be getting at,
            and also where it leaves us.
             
            Gerald L. Brunsis William and Hazel White Professor of English and
            Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most
            recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth,
            and Poetry in the Later Writings(1989).
Richard Rorty
         Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy
         McCarthy thinks truth more important than I do. Specifically, he
            thinks that " &lsquo;truth' … functions as an
            &lsquo;idea of reason' with respect to which we can criticize
            not only particular claims within our language but the very
            standards of truth we have inherited" (p. 369). By contrast,
            I think that what enables us to make such criticism is concrete
            alternative suggestions suggestions about how to redescribe
            what we are talking about. Some examples are Galileo's
            suggestions about how to redescribe the Aristotelian universe,
            Marx's suggestions about how to redescribe the nineteenth
            century, Heidegger's suggestions about how to redescribe the
            West as a whole, Dickens's suggestions about how to
            redescribe chancery law, Rabelais's suggestions about how to
            redescriibe monasteries, and Virginia Woolf's suggestions
            about how to redescribe women writing.
            Such fresh descriptions, such new suggestions of things to say,
            sentences to consider, vocabularies to employ, are what do the
            work. All that the idea of truth does is to say, "Bethink
            yourself that you might be mistaken; remember that your beliefs may
            be justified by your other belies in the area, but that the whole
            kit and caboodle might be misguided, and in particular that you
            might be using the wrong words for your purpose." But this
            admonition is empty and powerless without some concrete suggestion
            of an alternative set of beliefs, or of words. Moreover, if you
            have such a suggestion, you do not need the admonition. The only
            cash value of this regulative idea is to commend fallibilism, to
            remind us that lots of people have been as certain of, and as
            justified in believing, things that turned out to be false as we
            are certain of, and justified in holding, our present views. It is
            not, as McCarthy says, a "moment of unconditionality that
            opens us up to criticism from other points of view" (p. 370).
            It is the particular attractions of those other points of view.
             
            Richard Rorty is University Professor of Humanities at the
            University of Virginia. His most recent book is Contingency, Irony,
            and Solidarity (1989).
Thomas McCarthy
         Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to_Rorty's_Reply
         I find myself in the odd position of trying to convince someone who
            had done as much as anyone to bring philosophy into the wider
            culture that he is wrong to urge now that its practice be consigned
            to the esoteric pursuits of "private ironists." The
            problem, I still believe, is Richard Rorty's all-or-nothing
            approach to philosophy ("Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas
            McCarthy," pp. 633-43): foundationalism or ironism; and this,
            I think, is encouraged by his selective reading of
            philosophy's history. On that reading, modern philosophy
            "centered around a discussion of truth" (p. 634); it
            was preoccupied with foundationalist claims of one sort or another.
            But that preoccupation was permanently discredited by Friedrich
            Nietzsche and his descendants, especially Martin Heidegger and
            Jacques Derrida, leaving philosophy with nothing to do but pick the
            bones of its own carcass. What is missing from this story is
            precisely the line of thought extending from the left
            Hegelians to Jürgen Habermas I sought to develop in my paper.
            That line is defined by, among other things, the primacy of
            practical reason and the rerouting of philosophical inquiry in
            sociohistorical directions. One of its high points is American
            pragmatism, which, pace Rorty, does not lie along the
            Nietzsche Heidegger Derrida line.
             
            Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern
            University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen
            Habermas(1978) and editor of the series Studies in Contemporary
            German Social Thought. His work-in-progress concerns the relation
            of philosophy to social theory.
Robert Lecker
         The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into_Value
         It is startling to realize that Canadian literature was canonized
            in fewer than twenty years. Here is how it happened.
            At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as
            an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon. In
            1957, the publishing firm McClelland and Stewart introduced its
            mass-market paperback reprint series entitled the New Canadian
            Library. It allowed teachers to discuss the work of many Canadian
            authors who had never been the subject of formal academic study.
            This New Canadian Library was truly "new": prior to its
            conception, there was no "library" in use. There were
            no Canadian classics. Northrop Frye recalls that at that time the
            notion of finding a classic Canadian writer remained but "a
            gleam in a paternal critic's eye."1
            Frye's comment must be placed in context: he was remembering
            the efforts that produced the first Literary History of Canadain
            1965. In T. D. MacLulich's words, its publication "gave
            a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of
            Canadian writing."2 It made a Canadian canon seem possible;
            to many, it made the canon seem real. With the advent of this
            history, the institution called Canadian literature was born.3
             
            1. Northrop Frye, "Conclusion," in Literary History of
            Canada: Canadian Literature in English,2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck
            et al., 3 vols. (Toronto, 1976), 3:319.
            2. T. D. MacLulich, "What Was Canadian Literature? Taking
            Stock of the Canlit Industry," Essays on Canadian Writing 30
            (Winter 1984-85): 19; hereafter abbreviated "WWCL."
            3. My use of the term "Canadian literature" applies to
            English-Canadian literature; the canonization of French-Canadian,
            or Québecois literature, invokes another story and another set of
            political imperatives that cannot be adequately treated within the
            scope of this discussion.
            4. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of
            the Current Debate," ELH 54 (Fall 1987): 483.
             
            Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is
            the author of several critical studies, including On the Line
            (1982), Robert Kroetsch (1986), and An Other I (1988), and coeditor
            of Essays on Canadian Writing,the multi-volume Canadian Writers and
            Their Works(1983  ), and the eight-volume Annotated
            Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors (1979  ). Lecker
            is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian
            canon.
Frank Davey
         Canadian Canons
         Although canon-formation is, as Lecker suggests, a product of
            rhetoric and textual choices of critics, it is also a product of
            economic forces, political conflicts, and cultural expectations of
            coherence, "order," and unitary explanation.
            Conditioned by some or all of these, an essay ostensibly skeptical
            of canons, as this one appears to be, can find itself nevertheless
            contributing to the thing it questions. In attempting to attribute
            the formation of a single national canon to a specific period
            ("since 1965" [p. 657]), to a specific and allegedly
            homogeneous group of actors ("Canadian academic
            critics" [p. 661]), and to a specific social phenomenon (the
            teaching of Canadian literature "as an independent subject in
            Canadian schools" [p. 656]), Lecker's essay becomes
            another constructor of canonical text and theory. Behind its
            arguments that a canon suddenly came into being are fairly precise
            assumptions not only about "Canadian critics" (p. 657)
            but also about what constitutes canonicity, and about the relative
            legitimacy of canonicity claims. "At the end of World War II,
            Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in
            Canadian schools. There was no canon," his essay begins (p.
            656). Is a school curriculum the only possible context for the
            attainment of literary "legitimacy"? Can there be no
            canon if a literature has no curriculum, education publishers, or
            "academic critics," or if it has not been
            institutionalized as an "independent" subject?
             
            Frank Davey,chair of the department of English at York University,
            is the author of From There to Here: A Guide to English Canadian
            Literature Since 1960 (1974), Surviving the Paraphrase (1983),
            Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (1984), and Reading Canadian
            Reading(1988). He is also the editor of Open Letter and the on-line
            magazine Swiftcurrent.He is currently working on a study of
            nationalist ideologies in Canadian fiction entitled National
            Arguments.
Robert Lecker
         Response to Frank Davey
         I know that my view offends those who would prefer a noncentrist,
            or antifederalist, notion of Canadian literature. Davey has
            repeatedly expressed such a preference in his own criticism. It
            similarly offends those who believe that new critical voices are
            beginning to change our perceptions of the canon. I recognize these
            voices and grant that they may eventually alter our values. So far,
            very little has changed. It is this assertion that troubles Davey
            and prompts his central objection: my concept of the canon is
            unitary, centralist, conservative, monolithic, distorted, and
            misleading. It is all of these, insofar as it represents my attempt
            to describe the concept as it has been transmitted in works of
            Canadian criticism that promote the idea of coherence by arguing
            the validity of tradition, influence, pattern, or literary
            solidarity among authors in different eras. Such criticism imagines
            a unified view of Canadian literature as the reflection of a
            unified country. It projects a dream of what Northrop Frye called
            "the peaceable kingdom."1 In my essay, I emphasize the
            fictiveness of this dream. Yet this is the fiction that seems to
            have inspired most Canadian criticism. Although Davey might object
            to the expression of this dream, the objection doesn't come
            to terms with my assertion that the dream of national unity remains
            the driving force behind the literary and critical values we seek
            out and support. This force is not rational or empirical, as Davey
            would have us believe. It is a matter of faith. We create the canon
            in order to embody a vision of something larger we want to sustain.
             
            Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is
            the author of several critical studies, including On the Line
            (1982), Robert Kroetsch (1986), and An Other I (1988), and coeditor
            of Essays on Canadian Writing,the multi-volume Canadian Writers and
            Their Works(1983  ), and the eight-volume Annotated
            Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors(1979  ). Lecker
            is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian
            canon.
