Friends of Interpretable Objects

FRIENDS

OF

INTERPRETABLE

OBJECTS

FRIENDS

OF

INTERPRETABLE

OBJECTS

Miguel Tamen

HARVARD

Cambridge, Massachusetts

UNIVERSITY

London, England

PRESS

2001

Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tamen, Miguel. Friends of interpretable objects / Miguel Tamen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–674–00646–1 (alk. paper) 1. Interpretation (Philosophy). 2.Anthropomorphism. I.Title. B824.17 .T36 2001 121'.68—dc21 2001024945

IN

MEMORIAM

M . J. T., M . B. C., M . C. C. B.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote the bulk of what is now this book at Stanford University in 1996–97, during a sabbatical generously engendered by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Versions of most chapters have been presented as lectures and have benefited from public discussions. A previous, more compact version of Chapters 4 to 6 appeared in Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 10:1, 1–32 (1998). Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. I was very fortunate to have benefited from the input of a few friends of this intractable object. This latter society shall nevertheless remain anonymous.

CONTENTS

Introduction 1 1 Sensible Economics 8 2 Iconoclasm 28 3 Preservation 50 4 Persons 76 5 Rights 87 6 Bodies 99 7 Hostility to Interpretation 117 8 Deference 130 Notes 147 Index 185

FRIENDS

OF

INTERPRETABLE

OBJECTS

INTRODUCTION

A good way of describing some of the things we do to things would be to say that, all over the world, different groups of people gather around various bits and pieces of the same world, attributing to them intentions, dispositions, and even languages. Some of these activities appear to be, to me at least, a little eccentric (for example, talking to trees or reading tea leaves or interpreting cold fronts), but this may only mean that I am not a member of certain groups. A tree-talker can, by contrast, be defined as someone who does not think it eccentric to talk to trees (and goes about doing so). Some tree-talkers (though perhaps not all), on the other hand, might find it odd that I am a member of a group of people, a true society of friends, who gather around certain bits of stone, wood, or metal (and call them “statues”), believing that they can sort of “answer back” their admiring, or otherwise merely descriptive, comments. The problem, however, is not with admiration or description, or even with membership. It is with phrases such

as “sort of answer back” and with claims such as “I know what the statue (or the tree) means (or needs).” These phrases suggest that there is a distinction between answering back and sort of answering back. Given certain conditions, most people I know (but virtually no trees) are capable of doing the former. However, both people and trees appear to be capable of doing the latter. As sound as that distinction may seem, it will only make sense if prefaced by something like “in my book,” that is, if referred back to some such society of friends (in this case one of the many of which I am a member).1 So perhaps the distinction between answering back and sort of answering back is merely a distinction between societies of which most of my acquaintances are members (for example, the society of those who gather around Jim [but not Larch], say things to him, and believe he can answer back) and societies of which very few of my acquaintances are members, or societies that have been led to extinction owing to a lack of members. To a friend of trees, and certainly to a friend of cats or holy images, cats and trees and holy images do not necessarily sort of answer back. To say that in some places most people appear to believe that cats, rather than holy images, don’t sort of answer back is meanwhile a powerful, if indirect, description of those places. Three very general claims (the first two of which are closely interrelated) are implied in what I have just said. Because they are so general they will not be discussed I N T R O D U C T I O N

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in this book, but they should still be made explicit. The first claim is that something becomes interpretable, and describable in an intentional way, only in the context of what I have been calling a society of friends. This I take to be a consequence of the uncontroversial fact that, in the apt formula of O. K. Bouwsma, language is “one community of agreement within which we understand and misunderstand one another,”2 perhaps because, as W. V. Quine has remarked, “in acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when.”3 My second claim is that there are no interpretable objects or intentional objects, only what counts as an interpretable object or, better, groups of people for whom certain objects count as interpretable and who, accordingly, deal with certain objects in recognizable ways. Even if there appear to be many, if not always so formally constituted, kinds of such groups, I submit that what allows us to speak of the existence of such societies is roughly the empirical resemblance between what certain people do in relation to tea leaves, and what certain (other or the same) people do in relation to cold fronts, novels, or statues. The third claim is that such groups are societies of friends. Despite its title, this book presupposes no special doctrine on friendship, only a few very general metaphysical assumptions. For instance, it appears to be compatible with Aristotle’s gnomic remark that “friendship would I N T R O D U C T I O N

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seem to hold cities together,” 4 that is, to phrase it tamely, compatible with the notion that a certain measure of agreement is indispensable to every community. By contrast, it does not appear to be compatible with Aristotle’s remark that “love for a soulless thing is not called friendship, since there is no mutual loving.”5 A surprising amount of what will be assumed to count as friendship in what follows indeed appears to exclude reciprocation, if by reciprocation we understand “Aristotle-like answering back.”As it happens, this affection for notoriously unresponsive objects, splendidly instanced by many kinds of contemporary societies of friends (from art critics to animal-rights activists), was not wholly unknown to Aristotle’s Greece. My main purpose is to offer a characterization of language, interpretation, and intention-attributing activities through the description of certain societies of friends, without aiming at any kind of sociological accuracy, and indeed harboring no sociological (or anthropological) ambitions. Among those will be societies of people who can make certain objects in places such as churches speak; societies of people who can make certain (often similar) objects in places such as museums (but not churches) speak; societies of people who know how to attribute intentions to statues (irrespective of the place where they are found); and societies of people who know what is in the best interest of corporations, imbeciles, and works of art. I N T R O D U C T I O N

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The sheer exuberance of the catalogue above might upset some readers. Given the great diversity of the fields involved in such a project (philosophy, art history, law, Byzantine theology, to name just a few), no one I know, and certainly not myself, could presume to be a specialist in all of them. It might turn out, however, that the very relation among the disparate fields and areas of concern therein is simply too problematic to be left to one field, or simply too exotic to be assumed by a typical specialist. This is therefore an autobiographical book in a special sense: it indirectly describes kinds of languages and problems the conjunction of which, under the shape of a sustained argument, one could, without any special emphasis, call “the author.” To be sure, I am not asking readers to identify with my own idiosyncratic interests; but it is nevertheless my hope that readers will be able to recognize in what I write some of their own problems or at least some of their interests. Here again I am appealing to many different societies of friends: those interested in minute and historical descriptions of Iconoclasm, in museums, in the theory of liability, those interested in discussions of interpretation, those interested in the relation between medieval doctrines of the senses and science, or in some, but plausibly not in all, of the above. The chapters of this book are as diverse as the range of fields it encompasses. The different chapters, in fact, correspond to different kinds of chapter, possibly at odds with I N T R O D U C T I O N

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one another. Certain chapters rely heavily on the close reading of a great deal of material and therefore risk being thought of as “erudite” (Chapters 2 through 6 in particular); others rely on little or no material and may be seen as “analytic” (Chapters 7 and 8); certain others are antimonographic and panoramic in nature, relying on very different kinds of material (Chapter 1, primarily). Yet it is my intention to put forth a running argument that will persuade readers that the variety of fields and styles in this book is necessary, at least up to a certain point. Throughout the eight chapters I follow a path that leads from the notion of seeing something as something else (the technical term for which, in late medieval philosophy, was “reduction”) to the notion that there is not a “theoretical” level at which the intricacies of reduction can be illuminated. As the primary candidates for reduction were historically the senses, the thread that leads from Chapter 1 to Chapter 8 also leads from the senses to sense, making in the process the hardly original suggestion that there is a connection between how one describes the senses and how one makes sense of the world. On a closer look, more than a few continuities appear to be woven among the different chapters. Chapter 1 contrasts reduction with the refusal of reduction, for which the technical term was at one point the Greek word oikonomia; Chapter 2 relates the emergence of the notion of oikonomia to the controversies and conflicts of eighthI N T R O D U C T I O N

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and ninth-century Iconoclasm in Byzantium; Chapter 3 relates Iconoclasm (that is, the impulse to destroy certain images, or the refusal to deal with them in certain ways) with preservation (that is, the impulse to keep things like the originary targets of Iconoclasm in places, such as museums, where they would be dealt with in unobjectionable ways). Chapter Four both amplifies the field of objects assumed to behave in ways not unlike those of the objects that so upset Iconoclasts (say, statues in ancient Greece, running bears, and moving automobiles in 1916), and suggests that the legal preservation of such objects was achieved through the concept of “person.” Chapter 5 relates the notion of “having legal rights” to the notion of “being thought of (in some respects) as a person”; Chapter 6 disconnects the notion of “being a person” from the notion of “having a body” or, rather, talks about many different kinds of bodies, such as those of corporations, infants, and landscapes; Chapter 7 develops a metatheoretical suggestion (the only such suggestion in the book), namely, that “interpretation,” minimally defined as the attribution of language and intentions, is simply shorthand for the process of person-making; finally, Chapter 8 suggests that interpretation works by attributing to, for instance, bits and pieces of the world properties independent from interpretation, so that a person is both made and not-made.

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1 SENSIBLE

ECONOMICS

Two days before he died, and twenty lines before completing, uolens nolens, his work, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that there are “certain types of case in which I rightly say I cannot be making a mistake.”1 Although fully Cartesian, the remark alluded to an example by G. E. Moore of one such case: the sentence “Here’s one hand and here’s another.”2 For Moore, the notion that one might be misled by one’s senses in relation to things as close as one’s own two hands was utterly unthinkable. In this, Moore was merely reiterating an opinion attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Epicurus, for whom “nothing can refute the sensations.”3 And yet, to believe the best historians of the sciences, the notion that our senses are primarily trustworthy is only a late Renaissance discovery (or should we say invention) and belongs fully in very widespread fables concerning the birth of modern science.According to these fables, modern science (or “science,” for short, as a very important ingredient of such fables was that there was not a non-

modern science) was born out of a series of technological innovations that have led to, or have derived from, what Heidegger once famously called the “mathematical nature” of physics, which is in turn conducive “to interpreting the fragment-things [Splitterdinge], the sensations, as effects of a cause.” 4 Such a nature, so the story goes (albeit not Heidegger’s story, which suggests instead that what one calls “sensory evidence” is merely the unreserved trust in technological artifacts innocently conceived as extensions of the senses), is thus inseparable from a new role for the senses and, especially, for sensory evidence. These fables are of course not necessarily false.They can even be substantially true. The matter of their putative truth will be of no interest to us here, though. More interesting is that they all leave out some puzzling facts or events.The first is a remark, essentially Platonic but memorably formulated by Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics,5 according to which, even if the desire for knowledge is instanced by “the delight we take in our senses,” 6 knowledge proper, that is, wisdom (sophia), which is a science (episte¯ me¯ ),7 has nothing to do with the senses because the latter “do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything.”8 The second fact, perhaps more puzzling, is that all the very important scientific developments of the late Middle Ages, for example, those from Robert GrosseTeste and Roger Bacon, to William of Ockham, as well as the very sophisticated pronouncements on the nature of S E N S I B L E

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cognition, knowledge, and science that one finds in many of these authors, often claimed as the precursors of science proper, leave out any explicit theory about the senses and, especially, about the evidentiary role of the senses. It might be that such a theory or such roles were simply taken for granted. Still, many theologians and philosophers notoriously uninterested in what one could call science (that is, for example, those interested in the relation between the sciences and theology, such as Saint Bonaventure or Saint Thomas Aquinas) have seen fit to offer doctrines on the senses, which very often are at odds with the Platonic and Aristotelian heritage. So we have our problem cut out for us here. On the one hand, episte¯ me¯ appears to be divorced from sensorial cognition. On the other hand, doctrines on the senses appear to lack any interest for epistemological discussions. Later, after the sixteenth century, Aristotle was claimed as the forefather of experimental knowledge, and such a genealogy is still taken for granted in many quarters, notably among philosophers, Analytic and Continental alike. The fact remains that in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, an interest in applied knowledge appears in notoriously antiAristotelian thinkers, such as Bacon or Ockham. Historians of the sciences such as Pierre Duhem (who in other respects has been claimed by contemporary philosophers interested in the sciences, including W. V. Quine) often resort to the explanation that Aristotelianism had graduF R I E N D S

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ally “infiltrated” (Duhem’s term) “Latin scholasticism.” 9 How, therefore, might one explain that, as Anthony Kenny suggests,10 Aquinas, despite his lack of interest in, say, matters of physics, and his later acquired role of bête noire of obscurantism, can be claimed as a proto-empiricist, not to mention the fact that in him the philosophy of the schools coincides precisely with Aristotelianism? This situation presents a very practical difficulty, namely, where to look up the texts and the problems for my topic.To find elements for a doctrine on the senses one has to look for philosophers for whom what later was called “scientific” knowledge (in short, the interest in explaining things such as the movement of bodies, or the system of the Universe) coincided with theology. Contrary to the situation after the sixteenth century, there are almost no documented cases of people for whom those interests were predicated on a doctrine of the senses. The appeals of sensoriality have been left unanswered in the rather stern, if admirable, prose of Bacon or Ockham or Plato or, for that matter, in the less admirable prose of Aristotle. It is as if for five hundred years people spoke of “Aristotle” when they meant “Epicurus.” Consequently, my topic becomes rather that of the absence of the senses in medieval science (or, better but not quite the same, the absence of what is now called “the science” from medieval doctrines of the senses). Because the body of texts is immense and little known—and has come down to us S E N S I B L E

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mediated by historians and commentators, often as important and brilliant as Pierre Duhem, Étienne Gilson, and Alexandre Koyré, who basically take for granted the equivalence between knowledge and sensory evidence and certainty—all the quotes one can provide are awkwardly exemplary and possibly misleading. My own attempts will do little more than reiterate Sherlock Holmes’s famed remark about nonbarking dogs. One looks at a text and says, “See, no senses,” or, alternatively, “See, no science,” and therefore exhausts, triumphantly albeit melancholically, all there is to say about the topic. The discussion that follows, therefore, will be brief but admittedly preliminary. I will contrast only two uses of the senses that were described in texts written between 476 and 1453 (this is my pragmatic notion of “The Middle Ages”). The first use will be briefly characterized with the help of a fairly well known passage in Bonaventure in which the senses get placed at the lower ranks of a hierarchy of “lights,” as he calls them, and sensory cognition becomes the object of a process he refers to as “reduction.” The point of my analysis here is almost purely negative for the reasons stated above, namely, that interest in the sciences is divorced from interest in experimental science. (A more predictable procedure would have been, say, to look at Ockham on movement and say, “There is nothing that can be of interest to us here.”) The second use is much harder to understand and characterize. This difficulty is F R I E N D S

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also of a disciplinary nature, given that the descriptions do not belong in medieval science, in philosophy, or even in theology proper (for reasons that will be explained). My suggestion is that to find information about the understanding of sensory evidence in the Middle Ages one might do well not to limit one’s search to the most frequented sections of our libraries. And perhaps not to the strict European West, either. S E N SAT I O N R E D U C E D

Saint Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam11 begins with a quote by James (Ep. 1:17). According to his text, “every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of lights.” Bonaventure then goes on to distinguish among four kinds of light or illumination (which intriguingly enough he will turn into six sources of knowledge a little further down— the Scriptures [that is, theology], sensory knowledge, the mechanical arts, rational philosophy, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy). The second of those lights he calls “inferior light [lumen inferius],” which he characterizes as the light of cognitio sensitiua, sensory cognition. Given that, predictably enough, Bonaventure also describes a “superior light” (the fourth and last kind of light) as the light of gratia et Sacra scriptura, one would be tempted to see in this hierarchy yet another instance of the subordination of sensory knowledge to other, preferable, forms of knowledge, S E N S I B L E

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namely, to that of “the truth that saves.” We are thus presented with the perfect context in which to rehearse the customary complaints about the repression of the senses by theology (which are usually paralleled by complaints about the repression of the sciences by religion, and about the repression of everything by Platonism). Three details are ignored by such complaints. The first is that, for Bonaventure, the light of sensory cognition remains just that, a light (and not, say, a form of misleading or misled knowledge). The second is that sensory cognition, just like all other sorts of cognition, proceeds from God and so cannot, for instance, be intrinsically evil. The third is that the text discusses in detail sensory cognition, ending emphatically with a hymn to “the admirable contemplation of the five spiritual senses in conformity with the bodily senses,” and so with the acknowledgment that “divine knowledge is hidden in sensory cognition.” Thus deprived of our last excuses, we had better turn to the organizing trope of Bonaventure’s hierarchy, namely, reduction. What does it mean, for Bonaventure, to reduce sensory cognition to theology or to scriptural cognition? To answer this question one first needs to characterize Bonaventure’s doctrine on sensory cognition, whose formulation, in spite of some differences we need not go into, he attributes to Augustine. Such is the object of section 3 of De reductione. Sensory cognition, according to Bonaventure, illuminates the apprehension of “natural forms” and is F R I E N D S

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said to be “inferior” in the special sense that it “originates in the lower part [ab inferiori incipit]” and “is achieved with the help of bodily light.” Moreover, it is fivefold, each of its aspects corresponding both to one of the five senses and to one of the five elements (or, as Bonaventure puts it, “the four elements and the fifth-essence”). Sensory apprehension is therefore made possible “by some similitude and adequation [per aliquam similitudinem et convenientiam] between organs and objects,” that is, the nature of each sense renders it appropriate for the apprehension of objects of a similar nature. This solution is of course well known to readers of both Plato and Augustine. A very important problem arises here, however—the problem of explaining how such similitude and adequation function, that is, the problem of explaining how, given the previous selection and adjustment of an object to a sense—or perhaps the other way around, or perhaps mutual adjustment (the alternatives are not important here, although they will be crucial shortly)—an object is sensorially apprehended. In comes what one might call, without any noticeable anachronicity, Bonaventure’s neurological theory of sensory cognition. In fact, in order to explain the “how” of cognition, Bonaventure has to postulate, in addition to the five senses, a sixth, crucial, ingredient, which he calls the “sensitive spirit [spiritus sensibilis],” and which “also possesses the nature of the light,” that is, a metasense. Such metasense, however, is no mere concept, S E N S I B L E

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and certainly not a faculty. It very definitely “resides in the nerves [in nervis viget],” whose nature “is clear and transmissive [clara et pervia].” Just as, say, the eye is the organ of vision, so the nerves are the organ of transmission, that is, the organon of resemblance. We can now return to the unanswered question regarding the reduction of sensory cognition to theology (or to “the light of the Holy Scripture”). “Reduction,” in Bonaventure’s text, is both a methodological procedure and a way of understanding through substitution, that is, a way of redescribing his explanation of transmission in a theological vocabulary. In sections 8–10 of De reductione, Bonaventure comes up with three possibilities of reduction: the first has to do with the means of sensorial cognition, the second with the exercise of sensorial cognition, and the third with the pleasures of sensorial cognition.The last two forms of reduction are perhaps less interesting for our problem than the first, in that they basically consist in a series of compliments directed at sensorial cognition, both in its use and in its effects (although Bonaventure’s disquisition on the pleasures of sensorial cognition, in section 10, is singularly at odds with most things we think we know about the asceticism of theology, that is, with most things we admire in the Song of Songs ever since it ceased to be considered merely true—for example, “our hearts must ardently, joyfully, and ceaselessly look for what is beautiful, harmonius, odoriferous, and soft”). F R I E N D S

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The first form of reduction is a direct redescription of what I called above Bonaventure’s neurological theory of sensorial cognition. His point is that in that form of cognition so described one finds “the Verb eternally generated and incarnate in Time.” According to the analogy thus established, nervous transmission, in itself the possibility of similarity, is the very principle of the “supreme Intelligence.” This is the precise point where, in order to undertake the purported movement of reduction, Bonaventure has to commit to a realist epistemology, that is, he has to conceive of the apparatus of sensorial cognition as determined by features of the objects.The object, one realizes at this point, is what determines the means and form of cognition, namely, the sense. The resemblance between “object” and “senses” is therefore determined by the object itself.Why is this so? Simply because, for Bonaventure, the proposition according to which “resemblance proceeds from the object,” through reduction, becomes “the offspring proceeds from the Father.” Realism is therefore the label I use for a stance in which resemblance is the offspring of things, both when talking about sensory cognition and when talking about God. Analogously, “nervous system” is simply another name for “incarnation,” for the explanation of how the analogy between objects and senses becomes at all possible: “resemblance, image and offspring have . . . emanated from the supreme intelligence [suprema mente] . . . [which] was united to spirit and flesh and has S E N S I B L E

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taken the form of man.” The disturbing conclusion of this movement of sensorial reduction is therefore that, in a theological vocabulary, just as sensory cognition is incarnation, so sensory knowledge is Christ, the product of incarnation. Reduction is, finally, the movement through which neurology becomes theology, the positing of an absolute equivalence between talking about relationships between objects and the senses and talking about relationships between God and ourselves. S E N SAT I O N , I R R E D U C I B L E

My discussion of reduction above has put a certain emphasis on “substitution.” Indeed, I have ventured to suggest that, for Bonaventure, talking about nerve endings can be replaced, at a certain level, by talking about incarnation, and, indeed, that for him neurology as a whole stands for theology. It would seem that this is one of the two great available alternatives for talking about the senses (the other being the refreshing but rather discredited Moorelike acceptance of sense-data at face value), and I am not merely referring to the Middle Ages here. In fact, the reduction of sensory cognition to something else, with the correlative reduction of neuroscience to something else, is the hallmark of many thriving activities. Just in the last hundred years, one has only to think of the different but equally ardent hopes harbored by people like Sigmund

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Freud, I. A. Richards, Noam Chomsky, and John Searle, who at certain points in their careers believed that talking about nerves and brains would illuminate the ultimate mysteries in their pet domains (say, the mind, art, language, knowledge), only to show an all-too-eager readiness to translate what they took to be the results of neuroscience into the vocabularies of their own disciplines. An equally interesting, if only apparently converse, case, is the reduction of our own pet domains to neuroscience, and the familiar image of a neuroscientist finally proving Descartes (or Kant, or Baudelaire, or Bonaventure, or the Grimm brothers) wrong. And still, the alternative between face value and substitution does not portray a complete picture of the uses of sensory cognition, or, perhaps better, a few historical uses of sensory cognition do not accommodate themselves easily to the alternative of literality and reduction.What I will describe now is one such use, that is, a case in which the senses are understood neither for what they are nor for what they mean. Arguably, this might be a very uncommon case. Nevertheless, it might give me an opportunity to discuss matters more fully, as well as to introduce a problem I will follow in the next few chapters. My text is a series of three refutations, Antirrhetici, by Saint Theodore of Studion, possibly written in the early ninth century, and directed against Iconoclasm.12 Unlike Bonaventure,

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Theodore is little known in the West and is remembered chiefly for reforming monastic life in Byzantium and for introducing the minuscule hand in the transcription of Greek texts. I will leave until the next chapter a wider characterization of the Iconoclastic controversies, as well as all attempts to summarize Theodore’s intricate technical arguments. Suffice it to say that, given that Christ has two natures, and given that only one of His natures is, to use the technical term, “circumscribable,” that is, as Saint John of Damascus remarked, susceptible to being put “in place, in time, or in the perception of the soul [katale¯ psei],”13 it would seem that, as the Iconoclasts had maintained, all icons are, at best, faulty imitations, and, at worst, heretical. In fact, so the line goes (for instance in the Iconoclastic Emperor Constantine V’s first Peusis, quoted by Theodore’s contemporary Saint Nicephorus in his own Antirrhetici),14 (i) icons are “inscriptions”; (ii) in inscriptions something is “circumscribed”; (iii) certain things (say, the nature of Christ) cannot be fully circumscribable; and so (iv) no icon of this class of things succeeds as inscription and therefore (v) no such icon should be allowed. This line of argument depends heavily on step (iii), a crucial theological point accepted both by Iconoclasts and by anti-Iconoclasts. For our purposes it should be noted that step (iii) implies that no form of aisthe¯ sis, of sensorial perception, is adequate to the incircumscribable nature of Christ, and so ultimately F R I E N D S

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there is no way of ascending from the senses to the contemplation of Christ, from aisthe¯ sis to theo¯ ria if by that we mean that the knowldege of Christ (or God) can be sensorially produced. Consequently, no form of reduction is possible, given that no discourse on sensorial cognition can here be said to stand for a discourse on the contemplation of God, that is, for theology. The similarities between Inconoclasts and anti-Iconoclasts stop here, however. In fact, whereas Iconoclasts are interested in underlining the impossibility of reduction of aisthe¯ sis to theo¯ ria in order to discredit images, antiIconoclasts, while recognizing that impossibility, are of course interested in exalting the virtues of certain images. It is therefore not surprising that they have been led to develop an alternative mode of relationship between aisthe¯ sis and theo¯ ria that, while aimed at integrating sensory cognition and theological knowledge, could not be that of theology proper. To proceed, I quote in full a seemingly obscure and inconspicuous passage in which Theodore’s brilliant solution to the problem is outlined: The prototype and the image [eiko¯ n] belong to the category of related things, like the double and the half. For the prototype always implies the image of which it is the prototype, and the double always implies the half in relation to which it is called double. For there would not be a protoype if there were no image; there would not even be any double, if some S E N S I B L E

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half were not understood. But since these things exist simultaneously, they are understood and subsist together. Therefore, since no time intervenes between them, the one does not have a different veneration from the other, but both have one and the same.15

Some preliminary difficulties in this passage, such as the bewildering Platonic talk of images and protoypes, can easily be dispelled if one recognizes the problem dealt with here as a problem that affects what Theodore calls “the category of related things.” The reference is of course to the seventh chapter of Aristotle’s Categories16(6a–8b), in which Aristotle deals with “things as are said to be just what they are . . . in relation to something else,”17 and in which the example of “double” and “half ” (6b30) originates. “Image” and “prototype” are one such pair, that is, two terms that can only be defined in relation to each other (among Aristotle’s other examples are “master” and “slave,” “greater” and “less,” “equal” and “unequal,” and so forth). However, whereas Aristotle’s problem in this chapter of the Categories is a problem of definition and explanation, Theodore’s is an ontological problem proper. In fact, from “codefinition” Theodore infers “coexistence.” Images and prototypes are related to each other in the special sense that they “exist simultaneously, they are understood and subsist together” and also in the sense that, as he remarks shortly afterward, they “have their being in each other.”

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And, finally, for Theodore, “coexistence” also implies simultaneity. I will return to these points below. The passage in Theodore is part of a series of demonstrations placed in his treatise under the heading of a thesis, according to which “Christ is the prototype of His own image [eiko¯ n].” This seemingly innocuous Platonic point, however, is deeply affected by the introduction of the category of relation and by all its implications. Indeed, to suggest that “Christ” and “image of Christ” are, in a technical sense, co-related, coexistent, and simultaneous, amounts to saying that (i) “Christ” can only be defined in its relation to “image” (and vice-versa); (ii) the being of Christ lies in His image (and vice-versa); and (iii) Christ is not the model (in the sense of “previously existent object wherefrom a reproduction is made”) for its own image (and viceversa). Theodore is thus saying that the image of Christ is not an imitation of Christ but rather that it partakes from the being of Christ. Nor is he saying, of course, that Christ is produced by images of Christ. Indeed, Theodore’s text tends to be far removed from all the typical Platonic solutions for the problem of imitation, especially whenever Plato’s vocabulary is explicitly invoked. In his rather muddled typology of images, Theodore is inclined to distinguish natural images from artificial images (for example, Christ is a natural image of His Father, whereas an icon of Christ is an artificial image of

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Christ). But in both cases, given that all images imply circumscription, any eiko¯ n is also an eidos, that is, something that appears to the senses.18 Here we rejoin the original problem in Theodore’s passage, namely, that the notion of “sensorial perception of Christ” is required to define “being of Christ.” Just as icons are not reducible to their true theological meaning, so sensorial perception is not reducible to the status of reflection of what is perceived, but indeed is a necessary condition not only for the definition but also for the very existence of what is defined. In sum, the extension of the term “Christ” includes “sensory appearance of Christ,” which is to say that, much to our Western theological horror, there is a very important sense in which an image of Christ is already Christ, and a very important sense in which Christ is already an image of Christ. Given “that the whole is signified by its most important part through synechdoche [ek tou kurio¯ terou merous sunekdochikos to holon epise¯ me¯ namenos, trans. modified]” (1.340c), Theodore announces apropos the Eucharist (the only eiko¯ n of Christ allowed by his opponents), “there is the mystery of economy [oikonomia].” The word oikonomia here denotes a domain where the terms to be explained can only be understood in terms of one another, and so the domain where, unlike in strict theological discourse, no reduction of sensorial cognition to meaning is ever fully possible. As Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet remarks in relation to F R I E N D S

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Nicephorus, “in this opposition between economy and theology, the totality of the visible world is glorified and legitimized in the designs of incarnation.”19 One is thus forced to read Theodore’s signifying the whole “by its most important part through synechdoche” in opposition to, say, Bonaventure’s “admirable contemplation of the five spiritual senses in conformity with the bodily senses.” In the latter case, the conformity of “the spiritual” and “the bodily” is what allows for the meaning of the second term to be found in the first, and so for sensorial cognition to be seen as a figure of theology and for aisthe¯ sis to be seen as a promise of theo¯ ria. This process undoubtedly corresponds to a certain understanding of incarnation. In the former case, however, the phrase “through synechdoche” is particularly misleading. In fact, it cannot possibly mean “through a reduction,” that is, “tropologically,” since signification, for Theodore, is always a matter of co-relation, and the relation between “part” and “whole” is two-sided. An icon, indeed, is not an image of Christ, a replacement for Christ, but a part of Christ. In this special sense, an icon of Christ is not a sensorial sign of Christ, or any “sensation of ” Christ, but (minus the distasteful pun) sensational Christ. This rhetorical procedure, which is often confused with synechdoche, and which is certainly not a trope whereby reduction and replacement become possible, corresponds, of course, to metonymy. S E N S I B L E

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Sensing (and being frightened by) the ghost of Gilles Deleuze, I will have to refrain from characterizing economy as the discourse on the sensorial disiecta membra of God, for which the technical term in Byzantine theology is sarko¯ sis, that is, incarnation.And yet I would like to emphasize that economy implies an understanding of “incarnation” that is altogether different from Bonaventure’s. In a description of the martyrized body of Saint Artemios, John of Damascus remarks: “the human form has vanished. He is naked, his bones are crushed, his members disjointed. One could see in bare daylight the economy of his human nature.”20 Recalling Bonaventure’s remark that the object of sensorial cognition lies in the perception of natural form, one has all the measure of the difference between theology and economy: economy begins with the disappearance of form, whose likeness is already a part of God. This kind of inquiry has almost completely disappeared from the West. It definitely is not preserved in contemporary Western theologies, either Catholic or Protestant. Nor, of course, does its understanding of sensory cognition correspond to any of the ways in which we usually characterize serious science, for in economy effect and cause always coexist at a sensorial level. It may be that economy has survived in the West only in the shape of a few not-so-respectable activities: the rightly called dismal science, that is, economics, and, perhaps, ecology. Indeed, theological temptations have typically been short-lived in F R I E N D S

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either of these fields. In the case of ecology, their failure is currently instanced in the outcome of every international conference on ecological issues; in the case of economics, by the demise of the last remnants of centrally planned economies.

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2 ICONOCLASM

Nowhere is the argument concerning the near-disappearance of economy more plausible than in doctrines about art. By this I mean simply that the kinds of things we do with what we call “art” are closer to what Bonaventure did to sense-data than to what John of Damascus did with the corpse of Saint Artemios. Doctrines about art, and indeed the only concept of art that ever was available, appear to require strong assumptions about the reducibility of appearing objects to their meaning, “by some similitude and adequation,” as Bonaventure puts it. In other words, the notion of art is inseparable from the existence of doctrines about art: “aboutness” and “reduction” are in this case synonymous. Conversely, no opportunities are generally provided for one to contemplate the economy of the artwork in the spectacle of its disjointed parts. Such spectacle, on the contrary, is unanimously deplored and held to be the exact opposite of what the contemplation of art consists in. The notion of art, together with most things

done in relation with it, one could say, appears to exclude the possibility of destruction, let alone the desirability of martyrdom. A FA B L E A B O U T S TAT U E S

In the third of his Commentarii, written toward the middle of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Ghiberti, “pittor fiorentino,” as Vasari calls him (even if he is now primarily known as a sculptor), tells the story of a lost statue, attributed to Lysippus, that was found in Siena some hundred years before.1 The statue, Ghiberti says, attracted the attention of Sienese artists and connoisseurs, who decided to place it on a fountain “as the very egregious thing it was,” indeed as a “statue of much marvel and art [statua di tanta marauiglia et di tanta arte].”2 A few years later, after several defeats by the Florentines, a citizen of Siena, speaking at a town council meeting, remarked that “since we have started honoring that statue, things have gone from bad to worse [di male in peggio].”3 He concluded that things would not change so long as the statue remained in Siena. He then proposed some measures to remedy the situation, and they were eventually enacted on November 7, 1357.4 The proposed measures are paraphrased in Ghiberti’s Commentario as follows: that the statue “si ponesse et tutta si lacerasse et spezassesi et mandassei a soppellire in sul terreno de’ Fiorentini.”5 In his important book on Ghiberti, Julius von Schlosser translates the passage as “dass I C O N O C L A S M

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man sie herabnehme, gänzlich in Stücke zerschlage und auf dem Gebiete der Florentiner verscharren lasse.” 6 Something is missing in this otherwise accurate translation: a straightforward equivalent for the Italian verb lacerare (to lacerate). A literal English translation of the passage might be something like: “[that the statue] would be brought down, and wholly lacerated and broken into pieces, and ordered to be buried on Florentine ground.” Perhaps the omission of a verb corresponding to lacerare was due not to a defective knowledge of either the language or the text, but to common sense: statues are not things one ought to go about lacerating or, more to the point, things one believes can be lacerated. A more adventurous hypothesis might be that the omission was due to the very profession of Schlosser, to art history itself. Not that art history is inevitably hostile to gory or indecorous descriptions; rather, it might be that the possibility of a statue’s being lacerated is foreign to art history (just as the notion of divine intervention is foreign to computer science, or margarine is foreign to culinary art). I do not mean to imply, of course, that the problem of the destruction of works of art, like the problem of preservation, is not central to art history.What I mean is that terms such as “laceration” appear to be absent from narratives of destruction by art historians. As zerfleischen, the German verb that Schlosser did not use in his translation, reminds us, to lacerate implies the existence of flesh.And it may be F R I E N D S

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that for art historians statues cannot have flesh, except perhaps as occasional trite or trendy metaphors. And yet the question raised by Ghiberti’s text was precisely the nonmetaphorical status of actions such as lacerating, breaking into pieces, and burying. The story about the Sienese statue is indeed a story about a fight concerning the statue or, rather, about conflicting ways of treating a statue. Whereas for the narrator the statue is a “wonderful work,” whereas “all of those who understood and knew the art of sculpture . . . ran to see [corsono a uedere] this statue of much marvel and art,” whereas “to all great painters who were in Siena at the time . . . there seemed to be the greatest perfection in it,” and whereas all of the above concurred in placing the statue, “amid great celebrations and honors,” on a fountain, the citizen who speaks at the town council meeting retrospectively describes the actions of such individuals as “idolatry” and proposes the laceration, destruction, and burial of the statue. Although we no longer tend to associate such actions with statues, art history is, needless to say, the heir to Ghiberti’s intendenti et dotti, and just as it cannot take seriously the notion that a statue has flesh, so it cannot imagine that honoring a statue can be thought of as a form of idolatry. Ghiberti’s little anecdote can too easily be turned into a fable of historical modes of dealing with art and, indeed, into the very fable of the birth of the notion of “art.” An attractive way of doing so would be to say that art was I C O N O C L A S M

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born when and where devotion to sculptures ceased to be considered idolatrous, when the laceration of sculptures became not only an unacceptable but an unbelievable practice, when, concerning certain bits of matter, technical considerations by experts such as critics, dilletanti, and historians proved more able than theological considerations to influence public policies and private decisions alike. Even if we disregard the fact that what happened to the statue in Siena is a moment of regression, however untypical, in such a narrative (after all, the statue begins as art and ends up as the body of a false prophet, as pre-art), it is my contention that to think that there was such a momentous break that turned false images into art objects, attractive as it may be, is misleading and, especially, cannot account for many of the things we currently do with and to art. It might be that only in a very few, and perhaps unrepresentative, instances is art connected to “idolatry” nowadays. But anger and impatience and dislike are still expressed at what we now call artworks, and all sorts of literal terms recur in our discussions about art, for example, when individual works of art are assigned protection, rights, or intentions, both ominous and virtuous. Instead of assuming the universality of bliss and aesthetic pleasure as outlined in Chapter 1, that is, the notion that art as appearance can be reduced to a doctrine about the meaning of art (as, for Bonaventure, sensory knowledge

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could be reduced to theology), then, we shall proceed in a different way, by trying to redescribe recurrent modes of hostility directed at certain bits and pieces of the world, namely, sculptures and painted images. Predictably enough, this redescription will include a fuller characterization of what I called in Chapter 1 “economy,” to be offered in the context of the intricate debates that took place during the two Iconoclastic crises in Byzantium. I will leave for the following chapter an argument about the admittedly more debatable connection between Iconoclasm and preservation, that is, between displays of hostility and displays of concern for art. REMARKS ON ICONOCLASM

A significant obstacle to our understanding of those modes of hostility is the tendency to overuse the notion of “Iconoclasm” to denote a general attitude, if not a mind-set, of hostility to images and, lato sensu, to art.7 The term, however, was coined to describe a specific set of events in eighth- and ninth-century Byzantium8 that can only retrospectively be considered to have anything to do with art. Moreover, students of Byzantine theological controversies, who could never be accused of generalizing the term, are faced with important preliminary difficulties in their explorations of Iconoclasm. The first is the fact that, with the exception of about a dozen cases,9 the objects of the

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Iconoclasts’ hostility, the icons themselves, have disappeared. The second is the fact that all major coeval defenses of Iconoclasm have been lost. This intriguing historical irony is a powerful temptation for an extended use of the term. Indeed, it looks as if both Iconoclasm, albeit historically defeated, has triumphed, and also as if the justifications of Iconoclasm have met the destiny of the objects proscribed by Iconoclasts. The fact that one does not yield to these transcendental ironies may diminish one’s own historical explanations, but in fact the situation of the Iconoclasts is far from unique. The pre-Socratic philosophers (just as the very imprecise idea of a “preSocratic philosophy”), for instance, appear to be in a similar situation: they managed to erase virtually everything that preceded them, and their writings were in turn almost completely lost, known only through fragments, transcriptions, and commentaries made by subsequent authors. Analogously, the two most crucial extant defenses of Iconoclasm are known to us only in the context of refutations of Iconoclasm. The first is the Horos or “Definition” of the 754 Iconoclast Council of Hiereia, quoted in full only in the Acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, in 787, which marked the end of the first phase of Iconoclasm.10 The second, already mentioned in Chapter 1, are the Peuseis or “Enquiries” of Emperor Constantine V (741–775), only partially quoted and paraphrased in Saint

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Nicephorus’s fervently anti-Iconoclastic Antirrhetici, composed in the ninth century.11 As our purpose is neither historical, philological, nor theological, we can safely skip the long Christian tradition of hostility to images and ornaments, to “dead colors and inanimate delineations [skiagraphiai],”12 and indeed to matter “inanimate and dead [apsucha kai nekra].”13 The Horos and particularly the Peuseis interest us primarily as modes of hostility and as prescriptions for actions concerning certain bits of the world such as icons and images. One should, in any case, bear in mind that the extant traces of both pieces are texts quoted in refutations, that is, refutable texts. And yet Constantine’s Peuseis are far from mere unsophisticated doctrinary pronouncements. Granted, both Nicephorus’s Breviarium,14 written presumably at the end of the eighth century, and his later Antirrhetici15 abound in hostile, even bestial, descriptions of Constantine, and indeed, in Theophanes’s Chronicle,16 the emperor’s death is attributed to a “God-sent plague.”17 Constantine’s nicknames became legendary,18 but unfavorable references to him notwithstanding, the thirty-six questions concerning images that have survived in the three Antirrhetici19 testify to a dialectic talent one would not associate with most Byzantine emperors, let alone wild beasts.20 Constantine’s major arguments deal with icons or, to be more precise, with icons of Christ. One of his main

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concerns is whether such icons can be produced by depiction. Depiction is considered to be a mode of inscription (graphe¯ ), or, as Nicephorus puts it, “inscription to which is given a visible form, and which is imprinted in tokens made according to a model.”21 The effect of produced inscription is usually called “circumscription” (perigraphe¯ ). Through inscription, then, something is circumscribed or, in John of Damascus’s formula, is put “in place, in time, or in the perception of the soul.”22 It is easily understandable that Constantine’s arguments concentrate on the question of Christ. According to what gradually became the standard Christian theological doctrine in major Eastern and Western churches, both the Father and all creatures have only one nature.The former’s nature is “uncircumscribable [aperigraptos]” and, therefore, not susceptible to being used as a model and hence to being depicted. The latter’s nature is “circumscribable [perigraptos]” and, therefore, consensually reproducible although not, of course, venerable. Yet Christ, as God incarnate, has a double nature, making Him both circumscribable and uncircumscribable. Produced icons can therefore present the circumscribable nature of Christ.23 Most important, moreover, they cannot possibly do justice to the object portrayed, given that they cannot present the other, uncircumscribable, nature of Christ. Therefore, Constantine can ask (rhetorically) whether “He who is a person in two natures could be put into an icon, given that F R I E N D S

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one of these natures is not circumscribed.”24 In the terms of the tenth canon of the Council of Hiereia, the other major defense of Iconoclasm, “anyone who attempts to describe by means of an image the inseparable hypostatic union of the nature of God the Logos with the flesh, that is, of the one unconfused and undivided product from two [natures], calling it ‘Christ’ . . . thus produces a monstrosity, a confusion of the two natures.”25 Every existing icon of Christ is therefore not only not what it pretends to be, but also a direct heretic revision of the orthodox doctrine of Incarnation. In such a revision, the double nature of Christ is reduced to the single, inanimate, and mute nature of “material colors.”26 The general question therefore arises, for Constantine, of the possibility of depicting double-natured objects, and indeed of the possibility of icons for objects of an uncircumscribable nature. An affirmative answer would require a justification for the veneration of certain, if not necessarily all, icons. Constantine’s standard answer, as one would expect it, is negative through and through, but it is not his only answer. Indeed, one important case requires a different kind of justification, namely, that of the consecrated host in the Eucharist. In strict terms, of course, it would be inaccurate to say that for Constantine the host is an icon proper. Rather, the host is a crucial ingredient in a process that Constantine, while discussing the icon, deemed contradictory. Such is the presentation of the I C O N O C L A S M

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uncircumscribable. In the Eucharist, however, the presentation of the uncircumscribable is nevertheless achieved by a process known as “participation.”27 It is therefore the Eucharist, rather than the consecrated host per se, that can be considered a “true icon [eiko¯ n apseude¯ s].”28 In the Eucharist, participation involves not the replacement by material representation of Christ’s body, but the presence of such a body, its very “form-ness [morpho¯ sis].”29 A true icon, for Constantine, would have to be part of the thing it denotes, rather than a representation of what it denotes. Nothing is therefore put into place (or, in spite of some conceptual hesitations on Constantine’s part,30 into any other mode of circumscription) by the Eucharist.31 This emphasis on participation over representation and circumscription is certainly not a disagreement about a kind of art, nor does it belong in the canon of aesthetic discussions, even as a precursor to such disagreements.32 It is rather a disagreement about ways of treating matter and indeed about what counts as matter. When around 726 Constantine’s father, Leo III, replaced an icon of Christ with a cross in the Great Palace of Constantinople, he added an acrostic poem in which he deplored the “speechless nature [aphono¯ n eidos]”33 of the image that had previously stood there. Despite the seemingly Iconoclastic nature of Leo’s action, however, many of the adversaries of the Iconoclasts are the first to acknowledge that most venerable things, including icons, temples, and relics, are F R I E N D S

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“inanimate and manufactured [apsucha kai cheiropoie¯ ta].”34 The fact that the icon of Christ was replaced by an aniconic piece such as a cross, and that the whole process would set a precedent that Constantine would later follow, cannot therefore be seen as evidence that, say, one kind of art had replaced another, that a replacement in modes of representation was concomitantly taking place. Indeed, if one is to give credit to Stephen’s Life of Saint Stephen the Younger, composed early in the ninth century, in which several of Constantine’s Iconoclastic replacements are enumerated,35 one very soon realizes that before and after the switch the same mimetic principle applies.36 That is to say, for instance, that the replacement of a Pentecostal scene by trees and wild animals37is not to be understood as an attack on mimesis, as a preemptive strike against the possibility of certain instances of speechless matter being treated as participants in the uncircumscribable, that is, against certain possibilities of veneration. This also makes clear why even Iconoclasts still have to argue for true iconicity, no matter how restrictive, how purely formal, the criteria for such a possibility might be. To deny the possibility of true iconicity would amount indeed to a denial of the possibility of participation altogether. What I am suggesting is that our displeasure with icons would be better construed as an expression of our displeasure with certain things people do with icons, rather than as the application of a preexistent theory about I C O N O C L A S M

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iconicity, participation, imitation, and so on. Such preexisting theories follow, rather than precede, our displeasure. It is in this sense that moments of displeasure are instrumental in the possibility of a discussion of icons, inanimate objects, or art, and also why what is usually called theory, no matter how apologetic in nature or rhetoric, is the offspring of, rather than the ground for, modes of hostility. In this respect, the emphasis on veneration in the major anti-Iconoclasts was forced upon them by Iconoclasm itself. The tradition has laid down for us many allegories of this purely reactive dialectic, apparent in the numerous narratives concerning the revenge of desecrated icons and relics.The authors of Ad Theophilum, for instance, tell what Stephen Gero nicely calls “a rather grisly retributive miracle,”38 the story of a priest of Lemnos, who, “due to madness or devilish instigation,” took the right eye of an image of Saint Andrew with the Eucharistic lance, immediately after which “divine justice” caused the priest’s right eye to escape from its orbit and replace the destroyed eye of the apostle.39 “Divine justice” is in this short narrative a figure for the theoretical justice after which antiIconoclasts will strive, a figure for retribution (incidentally giving new meaning to “an eye for an eye”), of course, but, most of all, a figure for correction of perspective (whereby the eye of the beholder literally is made to experience the vision of the saint).

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The most comprehensive doctrine on attitudes toward icons can be found in John of Damascus’s De imaginibus.40 The general topic is proskune¯ sis, “a sign of submission [se¯ meion hupopto¯ seos],” 41 which I will translate as “prosternation.” 42 John starts by distinguishing among five kinds of prosternation, as a rule owed only to God. However, he then unexpectedly proceeds to characterize seven additional kinds of prosternation that are due not to God proper43 but to “created things”:44 holy places where God has “rested,” 45 holy places and things “by which God has accomplished our salvation,” 46 “objects dedicated to God,” 47 such as the Scriptures, “images seen by prophets,” 48 “other people,” 49 the authorities,50 and masters.51 Although John does not say so explicitly, prosternation before icons appears to fall into the fourth of these categories, which includes, for instance, “the likeness of the physical features of our God”52 and the cross. This form of prosternation John distinguishes from prosternation before hule¯ , before matter, for, in the words of St. Basil, which he quotes, “any honor given to an image is therein transferred to its prototype.”53 A problem then arises as to the specific mode of transference achieved through prosternation. In any case it is clear why discussions of the problem tend to produce doctrines concerning uses of icons rather than doctrines about intrinsic properties of images. Given that icons should be

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venerated, and that the veneration of icons is independent from the properties of icons (indeed, as John remarks often, bad icons and ruined icons are still to be venerated), redescriptions of the justifiability of veneration can only be descriptions of the effects of icons, built in such a way that their true properties are deduced from their effects rather than the other way around. Perhaps this specific feature marks the inescapable difference between discussions of proskune¯ sis and aesthetic discussions in the modern sense of the term. Even when aesthetic discussions produce phenomenologies of aesthetic perception and, therefore, appear to concentrate on the effects that certain objects have on certain people, the cause of such effects, if described at all, is invariably thought to be a property of the object. Theodore of Studion in his own Antirrhetici makes this conceptual distinction very clear when he writes that “it is not the essence of the image [eikonos ousia] which we venerate, but the form of the prototype [charakte¯ r tou pro¯ totupo¯ n] which is stamped upon it . . . Nor is it the material [hule¯ ] that is venerated: the prototype is venerated together with the form and not the essence of the image.”54 Bad art, or deficient execution, are therefore not a problem for Theodore, as “veneration is given to the image not insofar as it falls short of similarity, but insofar as it resembles its protoype.”55 Resemblance to the prototype is thus not merely a matter of theology and mimesis, but a matter of what Theodore calls “economy,”56 in respect to F R I E N D S

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which bodies and images alike not only represent more or less accurately their types but literally are such types according to a “principle of distribution of the divine in the visible.”57 As we have already seen, and as Theodore writes, “the prototype and the image belong to the category of related things [ton pros ti estin], like the double and the half.”58 John’s transference from image to prototype as the structure of prosternation is therefore explained, in Theodore, not by any mimetic considerations or indeed by the evocational powers of the icon, “but by a relative participation, because they share in the grace and the honour.”59 The relation between icon and prototype thus does not presuppose a Platonic theory of ideas, whereby icons would be imperfect illustrations of their denotata, just as it does not presuppose any tropology proper. Rather, relation, in this quasi-Aristotelian sense, is, as noted in Chapter 1, metonymical rather than synecdochial: the icon is already a part of its denotatum. The Iconoclasts’ standard objection concerning the essential imperfection of all representations of the uncircumscribable, therefore, does not apply here, for one cannot say that God is at all represented or instanced by an icon. Owing to the principle of divine economy, the veneration of images is the veneration of God, as God is present in all creations, which, in turn, are relative only to God, fractions of the prototype, as it were. This is why, in the Iconoclastic tradition, even when the relationship between icon and protoype is fashioned as a I C O N O C L A S M

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relationship between the sensible and the intelligible (which is, of course, the quintessential Platonic metaphor for mimesis), even when the stress appears to fall on the elevation to “the contemplation [theo¯ ria] of things spiritual by means of sensory symbols [aisthe¯ to¯ n sumbolo¯ n]” (as the authors of Ad Theophilum have it),60 one still has to understand such a relationship as a weakened equivalent for the literal formulation, also found in Ad Theophilum, according to which “the true is known in the similar, the archetype in the image.” 61 In a letter to Naucratius, Theodore describes the icon as a “self-manifested vision . . . almost like the moonlight to the sunlight,” 62 meaning of course that moonlight, rather than an image of sunlight, is still or already sunlight.63 Léonide Ouspensky, writing about the theology of icons, converts the centrality of this principle into a structural principle for the very production of the icon: “Linear perspective and chiaroscuro alike, although not excluded from the icon, are not employed therein to create an illusion of the visible word.” 64 Rather, in the icon, “the represented space is included in the real space, no rupture exists between them. The people figured by the icon and those who are in front of it are united in a same space.” 65 Prosternation cannot therefore be described as a symbolic rite proper, since nothing that had not already been present is brought together by it. What one has, instead, is a series of actions that restate the participation of their protagonists in the archetype, rather than constiF R I E N D S

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tute a conceptual connection among different spheres, spaces, or entities. Perhaps this is why the emphasis on the didactic virtues of icons, which later became prominent as a practical Counter-Reformation argument against Protestants, is so subdued in the Iconoclastic controversies.66 Indeed, the Eastern emphasis on economy precludes the attribution of any instrumental, mediational role to images, as it precludes any decisive opposition between theo¯ ria and aisthe¯ sis. Such an opposition (like the opposition between sense-data and meaning) is the justification par excellence of the necessity of apprenticeship, the process that converts one’s perceptions into a general insight on essences. As Louis Bréhier remarks, once the value of images is thought to be purely didactic, one can distinguish between more and less accurate representations, but one cannot understand the dogmatic value of icons.67 This Western emphasis on didacticism indeed predates the Iconoclastic controversies. Early in the seventh century, Pope Gregory I, writing to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, who had reacted to what he perceived to be the inordinate devotion of his congregation to pictures and images of saints by ordering their destruction, distinguished between the adoration of images and their instructional value. “It is one thing,” Gregory writes, “to offer homage to a picture [picturam adorare], and quite another thing to learn, by a story told by a picture, to what homage ought I C O N O C L A S M

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to be offered [per picturam historiam quid sit adorandum addiscere].” 68 “Even those who do not know the alphabet,” Gregory adds, “can read there [in ipsa (pictura) legunt qui litteras nesciunt].” 69 Only in this sense of “reading” is it possible to establish a bridge between the two otherwise different uses of words such as “aesthetics”: between aisthe¯ sis used to refer to the domain of sensory perception, and aisthe¯ sis used to refer to the domain of a special category of experiences associated with art. In fact, in both cases the aesthetic moment is associated with a moment of apprenticeship, as well as described with the help of categories such as experience. That we appear to be singularly unable to describe experiences independent from a teleology of apprenticeship, even when experiences are felt to be the mere confirmation of previous expectations or knowledge, only goes to show that the appeal to the senses and the appeal to the virtues of artistic objects have a deeper affinity that lies beyond etymology or the incidents of philosophical history, a point that Kant once made in a famous footnote at the beginning of the Transcendental Aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason.70 By contrast, it would be overhasty, I believe, to oppose the Byzantine emphasis on proskune¯ sis and the Western emphasis on addiscere and conclude that the role of the senses, subsidiary in the former case, acquired in the latter case, enjoyed a prominence parallel to that of dotrines on the didactic role of images.71 MoreF R I E N D S

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over, to complicate matters even further, Protestant theology has often associated proskune¯ sis and aisthe¯ sis, repeatedly using the conjunction of these two features to describe what Protestants feel is most deplorable about the two Catholic traditions, Eastern and Western.72 None of this precludes a general description of the relationship between two attitudes toward certain objects. According to such a description, whenever one does not take too seriously the doctrine of the divine economy, one tends to describe things such as icons as means of access (therefore reducible) to, rather than parts of, something. Indeed, it may be that venerating something is somewhat at odds with believing that one can learn from that thing. Bréhier seems to me to be making a related point when he suggests that the difference in attitude toward icons in the East and in the West allowed for “a free development of religious art in the West.” 73 Indeed, I would take Bréhier’s point one step further and underscore the word “art” in his formulation. The set of activities one calls (perhaps unproblematically) the Western attitude toward images (including the ultimate impertinence of the question of Iconoclasm for the Western Christian traditions) is indistinguishable from the emergence of what one now calls “art,” a broad concept that denotes complex classifications of objects, practices and activities, and professions.74 I conclude this chapter with two suggestions, the consequences of the second of which I will explicitly develop in I C O N O C L A S M

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the next chapter. The first suggestion is a purely historiographic one. Instead of looking for a crucial, momentous break in the late eighteenth century and in the appearance of what is now called aesthetics, one should perhaps try to link aesthetics to the kinds of attitudes best captured more than a thousand years earlier by the Gregorian emphasis on the docent virtues of images. The second suggestion concerns the relationship of Iconoclasm, didacticism, and “art.” What I have called above “the impertinence of the question of Iconoclasm for the Western Christian traditions” has of course to be qualified. Indeed, in the West there emerged a simultaneous alternative to both proskune¯ sis and Iconoclasm, which, in that measure, is closely tied with the two sides of the Iconoclastic controversies. The result was the literal preservation of things like icons, which became far removed from the radicality of the controversy; at the same time, other objects joined the category of preserved things, objects whose relationship with the original conflict was, at best, tenuous, and soon became altogether lost. Preservation appears to have been accompanied by the disappearance of certain attitudes, and indeed it seems to be connected with the fall into disgrace of economic ways of thinking and acting. Such a fall resulted in the emergence of many new attitudes and practices, which I will discuss in Chapter 3. What faded away, however gradually, was any serious possibility of treating objects as parts, rather than images, F R I E N D S

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of God, and so any serious consideration given to the possibility of not expecting anything from objects. In this process objects like statues became the equals of their meaning and ceased to be considered susceptible to laceration.

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3 PRESERVATION

The description of Iconoclasm in Chapter 2 does not tell the whole story. Indeed, it does not account for the fact that currently many seemingly opposed families of explanations deal in very different ways with the hostility toward what we now call artworks. Two such families appear particularly prominent. On the one hand are those who subscribe to a transhistorical treatment of the question of Iconoclasm, which, even when carefully qualified, filiates contemporary cases of willful or wanton destruction of artworks in the tradition of Iconoclasm.1 On the other hand are those who subscribe to a narrative of progress and emancipation, according to which the dark days of Iconoclasm have definitely been overcome by new modes of awareness, which in turn have made hostility toward certain things, namely, artworks, appear to be unjustifiable (which is not to say that hostility as such has been definitely overcome). According to the first version, Iconoclasm is a persistent drive that, often under other

names (such as “vandalism,” or “ignorance,” or “bigotry”), and in spite of the putative obsolescence of certain conditions that marked Byzantine Iconoclasm proper (for example, religious motivations, the importance of icons, the availability of certain technical procedures, and so forth), still affects and threatens certain objects.2 According to the second version, meanwhile, we have reached a position in history from which we can derive an acute awareness of the importance of art and therefore an equally acute sense of the need to protect artworks. Another, very important, difference between the two kinds of explanation concerns the very notion of “artwork.” One can indeed say that the first kind of explanation tends to assimilate “artwork” to “non-artwork” under the general category of destructible things, and so to relativize the importance of the notion of “art,” to which, if at all, it attributes mere pragmatic content (for example, “things such as paintings treated in a certain way after 1750”). The second kind of explanation, by contrast, is unthinkable without the very notion of “art,” and it is often synonymous with a specific mode of awareness thought to have overcome, and to be preferable to, certain other past modes of awareness.3 VANDALISM

The second kind of explanation only appears to be a recent trend. In an anonymous French revolutionary tract entitled “Pratique du bon Français,” published around 1794,4 P R E S E R VAT I O N

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the author proceeds piously to rewrite two canonic pieces of the Christian theological tradition, the Credo and the Ten Commandments. In his rewriting, the Sixth Commandment becomes “Thou shalt cultivate the fine arts / As they are the ornament of a State [Les beaux arts tu cultiveras; / D’un État ils sont l’ornement].”5 As it happens, the relation among duties toward art, a doctrine of art as ornament, and the presence of the state, which pervades this not excessively elegant distich, still seems to mark powerfully what is felt to be a prevailing attitude toward art, complete with arguments and disagreements. To the first aspect belong contemporary discussions of art as the subject of duties and, therefore, of rights;6 to the second aspect belong the discussions of the political and moral value of art, that is, of what is often called “culture.” And finally, to the third belong the discussions of the role of the state in the promotion, protection, and diffusion of the arts, namely, but not exclusively, through the creation of specific institutions such as museums and official agencies. The first aspect will be discussed in detail in Chapters 4 to 6; the last two aspects will be dealt with in what follows. One may of course wonder whether the discrepancy between the two major versions above is not simply the effect of an undesirably general use of “we.” If so, the “we” of those of us who believe Iconoclasm is still alive, and the “we” of those of us who believe Iconoclasm has been overcome, would simply denote different sets of persons, or F R I E N D S

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persons talking about different things. And yet one may also wonder whether these two available versions are really opposed at all. Given that the notion of a threat against art seems to loom over all apologies for protection, and also that the notion of the special, indeed also threatening, importance of art often seems to be used to explain the cause for the notion of a recurrent hostility against art, it may very well be that the two sorts of argument are at bottom inseparable from the very notion of a threat. If so, the fact that such a threat is envisioned differently as deriving from art or as being directed at art would turn out to be surprisingly irrelevant. Moreover, by concentrating on the ubiquitousness rather than on the source or on the aim of the threat, the discussion is displaced into the realm of actions, attributed or performed, instead of being confined to the realm of properties of objects and persons. Many other possible virtues aside, such a displacement again turns our discussion into a discussion of ways of treating things, objects and persons alike. There appears to be a relation between the ubiquitousness of threat and the conception of agonic, and often picturesque, modes of explanation according to which the forces of “destruction” are (and indeed always have been) engaged in a mortal fight with the forces of “preservation.” And yet such modes of explanation do not seem to originate indifferently in any of the two great available versions of destruction. In fact, they presuppose as acquired a P R E S E R VAT I O N

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standpoint for which the intrinsic worth of “art” has been firmly established, and so they tend necessarily to imply the kinds of narratives of progress one finds in the second (but not in the first) version. I am thus indirectly, if uncontroversially, suggesting that the conflict between destruction and preservation requires the centrality of notions such as “art.” It is therefore not surprising that the term “Iconoclasm,” whose original context was generally perceived to have only a very dim relation to the questions that interested the believers in art (such as beauty, utility, and virtue), came gradually to be subsumed by terms such as “Vandalism,” where the conflict could be made much more immediately present, without any unnecessary theological intricacies. As the creator of the term “Vandalism,” Abbé Henri Grégoire, famously remarked in his memoirs, “I created the word to kill the thing.” 7 The term occurs for the first time in Grégoire’s four 1794 reports to the Convention, which are remarkable not so much for their conceptual sophistication as for the slightly over-emphatic grandiosity of a political and historical description in which, in a dizzying succession of superimposed analogies, Republican France becomes the Roman Empire, the Ancien Régime becomes the Barbarian invaders, art becomes virtue, and so, perhaps, the Roman Empire becomes the Roman Republic (in the process, rather undesirably for Grégoire, the Republic also becomes the Ancien Régime). However, unlike the origiF R I E N D S

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nal Vandals, the neo-Vandals denounced by Grégoire are attributed not just destructive actions but also conspiratorial intentions. In his third report, he confesses to his utter fear of “the quickness with which, in a moment that called for total regeneration, the conspirators have demoralized the nation, and through barbarity were taking us back to slavery.”8 In his second report, “barbarity” is again explicitly associated with “the counter-revolutionary spirit,” 9 a phrase that also occurs in the first report. In that first report Grégoire, in a tone anticipating that of Ezra Pound, suggests that “behind ignorance, malice and the counterrevolutionary spirit lie hidden.”10 The remedies for this deplorable state of affairs seem to consist in equal doses of “instruction”11 and “civic delation,”12 as these have become two staple ingredients in further developments of the genre. The writer on Vandalism is typically a person who, when given to theoretical pronouncements, regrets general ignorance and, when given to empirical descriptions, denounces shocking instances of the effects of ignorance.13 And yet, in many other passages, Grégoire appears to acknowledge that the relation between “barbarity” and “art,” just like that between “counter-revolution” and “French Republic,” is not that of an uncomplicated opposition mediated by metaphysical narratives of conspiracy. The same could be said about many of his opponents. In several extant coeval justifications for the destruction of works of art, the very act of destruction is fashioned as a P R E S E R VAT I O N

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mode of doing away with an all-too-present conflict, rather than as a way of disposing of undesirable objects. Around the time of Grégoire’s reports, the minutes of a session of the Societé Populaire et Républicaine des Arts (for involuntary allegorical purposes held in the very room where the statue of Laocoön, the emblem of a conflict if ever there was one, was displayed) show several members “ardently” demanding that the Society ask the Convention “that all works of [counter-revolutionary] artists be burned by the Tree of Liberty, in order to extinguish the struggle [lutte] between the god of genius [le Dieu du génie] and that of patriotism.”14 And indeed, as Gabrièle Sprigath remarks, the cultural policies of the French Convention turned around the need to “conciliate . . . the abolition of the emblems of royalty with the safeguard of works of art and precious objects.”15 Of course, it could be argued that even if the causes of vandalism are complex, the acts themselves are rather uncomplicated. Writers like Louis Réau, however, have repeatedly pointed out that there is a “residual form of idolatry . . . of revenge by proxy”16 implicit in such actions, while other writers have stressed the importance of the model of Erostratus, who, according to the tradition, destroyed the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus to achieve fame for himself.17 Conversely, all forms of idolatry notwithstanding, there is another level at which the destruction of an object is no more than the destruction of a token, whose type remains F R I E N D S

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unscathed, if not actually aggrandized by its own, inevitable, survival. Indeed, the “barbarous rage against the dead,” as the English writer John Weever described the destruction of funeral monuments in sixteenth-century England,18 often brings within itself an awkward reassertion of the supremacy of the objects of rage. I suggest, therefore, that merely talking about “making plain the ordinary materiality of the sign”19 through destruction tells us more about the redemptive hopes of those who use such formulae, the hopes to extinguish a conflict, than about the grim, ironical way in which destruction inevitably becomes a mode of preservation, however messy and equivocal. Another way of putting it would of course be to say that all apologies for material destruction remain theological in nature, as the Byzantine episodes discussed in Chapter 2 clearly show. MUSEUMS

The complexity of the relation between preservation and destruction has come to define different kinds of institutions and institutes, from the monumentalized preservation of destroyed or fragile objects as sites, to the collection of otherwise destructible objects in museums. In either of these cases, the distinction between caring for an endangered thing and avoiding what are perceived to be negative uses of such a thing is as a rule extremely thin. It is, of course, tempting to see in preservation the dialectic P R E S E R VAT I O N

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solution for the antagonism of idolatry and Iconoclasm, and indeed to see preserving institutions such as museums as invested in this salvational function. The role of the modern state, often associated to the foundation of such institutions, would then be to arbitrate and bring to a fruitful end a conflict of opposite tendencies. Yet to consider, as I have been doing, that idolatry and Iconoclasm are both forms of preservation seems to require a redescription of the crucial role of the state in the process of preservation. Such a role can no longer be thought of as purely arbitral. Rather, with such a redescription, what would be contained in institutes and institutions such as museums and sites would resemble both an Iconoclastic version of idolatry, whereby objects of idolatry are refused any economic status, any nonsymbolic participation in the world of creation, and an idolatrous version of Iconoclasm, whereby objects to which any economic status is refused become subsequently objects of special cults, namely, the cults of art and nature. In the notoriously elliptic discourses concerning the justification of museums and similar institutions, the appeal to notions such as “value,” “usefulness,” and “interest” is pervasive. However, rather than adventurously explaining the cause of preservation or collection, their originary impulse, as it were, such notions are more often than not retrospective justifications, a posteriori pseudosyntheses of an unsolvable dilemma, as well as oblique if F R I E N D S

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precious descriptions of the otherwise implausible coexistence of proskune¯ sis and the disbelief in oikonomia, descriptions of what the cults of both art and nature are: prosternation for no particular purpose. It is not so much that in museums and sites the wrong images are venerated, as that in those places images get venerated in antieconomic ways. This is to say that to talk about the usefulness of a museum is to talk about the usefulness of prosternation before imitations, and hence about the promise of intelligibility brought about by sensible images. Indeed, there can be no economic conception of a museum, since that would mean the notion of an uninterpretable and unconditionally present collection of the disiecta membra of God. And of course interpretation—not so much, as one sometimes hears, the acknowledgment of specific enigmas presented by the exhibited works, as a series of operations directed at the suppression of the difference between perception and meaning—is coextensive with the very notion of a museum. Museums are indeed places where the use of exhibited objects is inseparable from the basic assumption that objects therein “have been made in order to signify something other than what the eye sees”:20 museums are places where bits of matter are reduced (in the technical sense I have used the term in Chapter 1) to meaning and subsequently defined as “art.” Some of the best available pieces on the history of museums, since the seminal work of Julius von Schlosser, agree P R E S E R VAT I O N

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in filiating their origin in the tradition of Mannerist Wunderkammern and Kunstkammern, in collections of series of originally disparate objects such as images, shells, books, and stones. The reason for the collection itself is generally left unexplained or considered to be the result of a Sammeltrieb or collecting drive characteristic of animals in general.21 Undoubtedly, some major contemporary museums were formed as aggregations of such collections.22 And yet, as Douglas Crimp writes, “anyone who has ever read a description of a Wunderkammer, or cabinet de curiosités, would recognize the folly of locating the origin of the museum there.”23 Crimp’s point is that modern museums differ from Mannerist cabinets in that they are organized differently; that is, series of objects that in the latter would merely correspond, say, to the rough concepts of being wondrous, artful, or artistic, have found their way into different kinds of museums or museum departments, organized, for example, according to different fields or spheres of activity. The opposition between Crimp’s remarks and the Schlosserian tradition on the same subject is nevertheless not as decisive as it looks. In fact, each of these explanations seems to apply better to one specific kind of contemporary museum. Crimp appears to be primarily concerned with the difference between kinds of museums that of course did not exist as such in the late sixteenth century, that is, as he says, with the fact that the contents of the Wunderkammern were dispersed into several types of F R I E N D S

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modern museums. Schlosser’s remarks, by contrast, better describe certain other museums in which the organization of the collections in kinds is nonexistent (the case of personal collections and historical houses, where ownership is the metataxonomic principle) or comparatively weak (the case of museums where kinds correspond to departments, and departments do not correspond to systems of genera consensually held to be mutually compatible).24 Moreover, there seems to be a tempting coincidence between museums that have lost all connection to the cabinet of antiquities and museums in whose foundation the state participated actively. Tempting as the coincidence may be, of course, one does not need to imagine that there was a rule at work, let alone a general principle. In 1765, in the Encyclopédie, under “Louvre,” the author of the article wished for the eponymous Parisian Palace to be completed so it could include “the most beautiful statues in the kingdom . . . all the paintings that belong to the king . . . a gallery of maps . . . cabinets of natural history and coins . . . [and the] different academies.”25 The contents so described are still very much those of a cabinet of cabinets, and the wished-for agent of change is left unspecified in the article. Twelve years later, however, the developing project of what would later become the Louvre Museum is straightforwardly described as “an emanation of the throne.”26 As Andrew McClellan remarks, the difference between museums and large collections (and indeed even P R E S E R VAT I O N

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large art collections) in France is that “the search for criteria of display in late eighteenth-century Paris was predicated on the assumption that the purpose or ‘mission’ of the museum was . . . to educate and conserve.”27 The close relationship between the Louvre and the state (both under the late Ancien Régime and after the Revolution) can help explain the fact that one of the self-avowed chief goals of the museum was “the glorification of French art and history” or, in a more picturesque later vocabulary, the hope that, through the museum, “the Revolution should impose on Europe the yoke of admiration [le joug de l’admiration].”28 The Louvre as such was of course inaugurated only in 1793 (as Muséum Français), and, even in that period, decisions were made to preserve the delicate balance between politically undesirable pieces and the fully national educational and apologetic objectives of the museum as such. Surrounded by a city from which all symbols of the monarchy had been erased, the Louvre could show, for instance, parts of the Medici cycle by Rubens, a triumphant allegory of Henri IV and Marie de Medici, even if some details had been painted over (and most of the series had been kept from the public).29 What Stanley Idzerda calls, referring precisely to the birth of the French museum, “iconoclasm without destruction”30 is not explained by some mysterious affinity between the Revolution and the arts, between values and objects.31 Rather, as Idzerda does not fail to note, it is explained by the constiF R I E N D S

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tution of certain objects as art. A scepter from one of the desecrated royal tombs of Saint Denis that deserves to be preserved in a museum, as the Commission des Monuments put it in 1793, “is not a scepter but [an] example of fourteenth-century goldsmith work.”32 “Immure a political symbol in a museum,” Idzerda remarks, “and it becomes merely art.”33 From the famous letters that Quatremère de Quincy wrote (to no avail) in 1796 against the removal of Italian artworks from their original context, to contemporary writers on the subject such as Theodor Adorno, and perhaps as a reaction to the apologies for collections that one finds more recently in Schlosser or Benjamin,34 the usual complaint against the notion of the museum has been a complaint against immuration, a holistic lament over “dismemberment” and the loss of “the whole and the basis that can give the due value to these fragments.”35 Such complaints are very often (though not always) supplemented by a thesis that links immuration to the modern concept of art, if not outright to the end of art as such.36 Not only do these purely institutional explanations tend to rely heavily on the redemptive value of an opening up of the otherwise closed walls of the museum, but they also appear to participate in what one could call a provincial nostalgia of totality. They tend to trust unreservedly the exemplary, illustrative value of things whose alleged intrinsic features are made to voice the history of their own misfortunes. In P R E S E R VAT I O N

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the case of things-in-museums, this is the melancholy story of their moving away from their origins (which, of course, here means their essence). All these versions are but variations both on the subject of the mimetic link between an object as a sum of properties and its meaning, to be found in a larger context,and on the subject of the perfect adequation between the features of the object and the true description of a context, vanished or otherwise still discernable. Conversely, the problem of the description of actions and beliefs connected to certain things is bound to appear utterly irrelevant or, at most, to hold mere historical interest. Nowhere does the fact that in those narratives certain objects are invariably attributed a meaning come up as a problem. And, indeed, this kind of holism tends to describe the lost whole, not as an antimuseum, but as the true, albeit lost, museum, to whose paltry sepulchral equivalent we are now reduced (“we kill Art to write its history,” Quatremère writes, anticipating similar Nietzschean pronouncements),37 and for whose primitive grandeur we ought to strive. Quatremère’s Rome, for instance, is a “true museum” composed of artworks, of course, but also of architectural monuments, utensils, and “sites, paths, ancients roads, the relative position of ruined cities, geographical relations [rapports géographiques], relations of objects to one another [relations de tous les objets entr’eux], memories, local tradi-

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tions, extant customs, parallels and connections [rapprochemens].”38 More to the point, even, Italy itself is already “some kind of general museum, a complete warehouse [un depôt complet] of all objects pertaining to the study of arts.”39 All differences of vocabulary notwithstanding, this is still Adorno’s point in his well-known essay on museums. His initial remark that “museum” and “mausoleum” are connected by more than family association,” 40 and the memorable formula according to which “museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art,” 41 hide the nostalgia for a natural world that he mistakenly attributes to Proust, in which “works of art . . . are no more objects of delight than [one’s] own breathing.” 42 Since for Adorno there are no ideal Italies, there is no going back, and so he has grudgingly to acknowledge that “works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set along the path to their own destruction.” 43 This point, which is all too obviously a reversal of Quatremère’s insistence on the rootedness of art, is in fact a mere extension of a metaphor one can find all over Quatremère (and indeed all over), used to describe a posteriori the otherwise puzzling cult of art: the metaphor of the promise, identified to the question of the value of art.That what is expected from artworks is the denotation of their unapparent full meaning is perhaps not

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as strange as the overarching tone of epistemological certainty according to which that happiness, cognitive, aesthetical, or moral, will come, and is indeed already portrayed in certain special things. Hence Adorno’s injunction that one “treats works of art with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today.” 44 And yet, in Quatremère or Adorno, in the Louvre, in Italy or in the world at large, what never gets doubted is precisely the relationship between promesse de bonheur (“the promise of a condition in which freedom were realized”)45 and works of art, between the intelligible and the sensible, in short, reducibility. Such a relation, I suggest, is historically accompanied by the presence of the state in the foundation of institutions like museums and indeed in the very notion that would come to embody such presence: the notion of culture. “ C U LT U R E ” A N D T H E S TAT E To be sure, the Encyclopédie’s suggestion that “the governors of men have always made use of painting and sculpture in order to inspire in their subjects the religious or political sentiments they desire them to hold,” 46 as well as the similar, though overtly optimistic, references we find in Grégoire apropos “the patriotism of words and stones,” 47 are not taken seriously anymore, except on an anecdotal level.Their more diaphanous version, according to which the state “can promote every expression of artisF R I E N D S

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tic creativity which expresses what millions feel, and that which endows artistic style upon the uninformed, yet living feelings of millions of human hearts,” 48 however, became synonymous with what currently is called “cultural policies” and indeed with the very notion of a cultural policy. Such a notion I take to be inseparable from the idea of a “promise of happiness,” from what André Malraux, referring to modern art, calls “faith” and “refusal of appearance,” 49 either the promise of the union of aesthetics and morals (“the feeling of the beautiful is naturally connected to the rightness of heart,” Grégoire writes in a Platonic moment),50 or that of a general theory on the value of art, cognitive, anthropological, or documental, lato sensu. Just as for Malraux bad art is the kind of art “rejected by our living culture,” “born wherever values die,”51 so for him a powerful culture “conveys an exemplary image of Man.”52 A general theory on the value of art is therefore never so much a theory on the uses of art as it is a theory on the essential transitivity of the objects that count as art. Such objects are invariably described as exemplary. In the structure of the exemplum, the actual values count for less than the absolute certainty concerning the possibility of deriving them from given individual things, and so most forms of cultural fideism such as the one found in Malraux and even in Adorno are also forms of antiskepticism. Reduction, one could say, is always antiskeptical. Given that, as P R E S E R VAT I O N

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Malraux sometimes admits, a culture is “made out of irreconcilable parts of the past,”53 the heterogeneity of things nevertheless is not that of a mere inventory contained in a Wunderkammer organized through the empirical urges of individuals. Rather, the reference to a culture produces “the revelation of lost fragments of the mesmerizing [obsédante] human plenitude, united in their invincible presence,”54 and is therefore essentially connected to the notion of museum, that is, to the prestige of and to an emphasis on the absolute coherence of the fragments. For Malraux, however, such an operation remains primarily a function of imagination (and hence his famous notion of an “imaginary museum”), for indeed no actual museum, not even the Louvre, could ever quite overcome the awkward objecthood of its collections—the Wunderkammer in itself, in any all-encompassing notion analogous to the notion of practical application, profusely used by scientists. In this way, one could therefore say that “culture” became a powerful exception to the otherwise dominant basic skepticism of epistemology, a form of protection, albeit restricted to certain kinds of objects, against doubts concerning the attribution of meaning and position to things. Only in this sense can “science” and “culture” be said to be complementary. In everything else, as of course in their institutional connection to the state, they differ widely. By contrast, the close connection between “culture” and the state, of which Malraux’s public career is a convenient F R I E N D S

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emblem, implies what one could call a nationalization, not just of the concept of work, but also of the concept of person. Culture is an example of Man, and the most illustrious tokens of Man belong to the state (in the lapidary emphatic formulation of Grégoire, “a great man is national property”).55 The point is well known, yet it is often taken to correspond to an early, strictly nationalistic, notion of culture, whose undesirable parochialism has been overcome by history. However, only apparently is it the opposite of the now more frequent references to transnational notions of culture, of what Quatremère called “an electrical current that unites the world of knowledge . . . [and that] can receive and communicate only simultaneous impressions,” that would render useless the distinction between local and nonlocal. “A similar movement,” he adds, “carries Europe nowadays into the culture of the arts [dans la culture des arts]; this impetus acts in direct proportion to the central power emanating from Italy and Rome; if such power is reduced, so the former impetus is weakened.”56 It may be, in fact, that both in Italy and at home art under the species of culture remains primarily a form of property, that is, a connection thought to be proper between things and meanings. What is specifically cultural about this idea is that such a connection is thought to be a priori. It may be that Dante is not the exclusive property of Florence anymore. It is not true, however, that Dante has P R E S E R VAT I O N

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ceased to be considered property (what perhaps is true is that one wouldn’t know how to start to explain what Dante-as-non-property would look like). It is in this context that very often terms such as “common heritage” and “common interest” occur. “What interest is this?,” Quatremère asks, only to answer that “it is that of civilization, of the perfecting of the means of happiness and pleasure, of the advancement and progress of education and reason, in sum that of the improvement of humankind.”57 Quatremère’s definition of this type of interest, while of course implying a doctrine on the ends of art (whose comment has been made useless by the widespread belief that the Enlightenment has been definitely overcome), is primarily remarkable for its vagueness concerning the domain of the subject of interests, that is, the domain of “humankind.” One would imagine that the last two centuries would have eradicated such vagueness from theories and legislation concerning “culture.” Nothing could be further from the truth.The founding legal text of what Sharon Williams approvingly calls “the theory that cultural property is the heritage of mankind,”58 the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, offers, in its very preamble, a thesis that is a mere restatement of Quatremère’s electrical and physical metaphors: “damage to the cultural property belonging to any people

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whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world.”59 Impervious to the attractions of cultural universality, some have recently rehearsed an argument according to which the alleged universality of the subject of cultural interests cannot help being predicated on exclusions. All appeals to universality, so the line goes, hide unavowable (and usually reprehensible) particularistic interests. Consequently, to talk of the “culture of X” would really be nothing more than to talk about the “culture of x.”And yet there is a difficulty common to both these formulations. All pious intentions notwithstanding, the grammar of the word “culture” remains unchanged. Indeed, it occurs to no one to omit the corresponding genitive, as if one would be able to use the word at all without it. That “culture” or “cultural heritage” is typically used as if the thing had to belong to someone or something seems to indicate a way in which to talk about culture is to talk about the transitivity of certain objects, in this case under the metaphor of possession. If anything, the determination of cultural property is not enforceable at very general levels (or at very restricted ones), and so all talk of “world culture” or of “Finnish-female-overweight-speech-impaired-scentsensitive culture” is either nonsensical or contradictory. International conventions on “cultural heritage,” even if

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they intermittently pay homage to notions such as that of “a new sort of property owned by the international community as such, administered by an international agency . . . and made available to all persons for them to enjoy,” 60 have resolutely chosen the second way and entrusted each individual state with powers such as the power “to identify and delineate the different [cultural] properties situated in its territory.” 61 Analogously, manifestos for the preservation of particular cultures usually predicate the responsibility of preservation on intitutions that do not quite correspond to the presumable heirs to the cultural patrimony in question. The state indeed is normally assigned both by conventions and by manifestos an enforceable custodial responsibility, as it were, rather than full ownership. And yet in both cases, no matter how reluctantly, the state is also recognized for all practical purposes as indissolubly linked to the constitution of relations of property, in that hopes for enforcement have come to be identified with hopes in the state. In all culture-talk there can therefore very well be an essential disparity between subjects of interests (from humankind to universes of one) and subjects of obligations (the state, as a rule). If I am correct, such a disparity is a convenient way of accommodating the interests at the expense of the vacuity of their subjects, which is to say that all culture-talk implies a doctrine according to which semantic consistency is less important than the protection of certain kinds of property. F R I E N D S

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My claims about the relationship between “state” and “culture” are not meant to imply any doctrinary ambitions concerning connections between the existence of the state and certain “superstructural” phenomena thought to be consequences of that existence (let alone a distinction between good and bad connections between the state and culture).62 By claiming that, when it comes to obligations, all cultural property belongs to the state, I am only implying that it is currently difficult to use the word “culture” without reference to some role that only a state can perform. In doing so, I am also suggesting that there is a link between valuing something for its exemplary properties and not being able to justify the desirability of its preservation without referring to notions such as that of the state. Veneration without oikonomia, indeed veneration without participation, requires a role for the state, one could say. A parallel connection could be suggested between the way “culture” appears to denote a form of property and the way things that qualify for that kind of property are typically analyzable in terms of properties. I am not trying to get extra conceptual credit out of a mere lexical play but merely suggesting an analogy between a given configuration of interests and responsibilities and certain descriptions of things, certain ways of describing things. This seems to me to be a particular case of the conjunction of the general notion that connects the attribution of rights to the existence of interests, with the notion that criteria for P R E S E R VAT I O N

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preservation require descriptions of objects to be preserved in terms of analyzable properties (rather than, for example, in terms of effects). To talk about art, to talk about culture, and to talk about properties should therefore be understood against the emphasis economic modes of behavior put on effects of objects and on their nonexemplarity. Even if this connection cannot be proven (and indeed it need not be real at all), it can perhaps explain the way in which the former kinds of talk have coincided with increased reservations as to certain modes of hostility: as if the becoming property of a thing, the attribution to that thing of the ability to denote its absent value, would indeed, as Marx famously remarked, turn that thing into “a sensory suprasensory thing [ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding],” 63 and so considerably displace the point of material anger. We know well how to get angry at denotations; we know less well, however, how to get angry at denotata. It is not that anger has subsided or had been sublated in institutions such as museums. Rather, it seems that the relationship between Iconoclasm and preservation is far too complex and pervasive for one to speak about museums as the embodiment of a synthesis between wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy something, let alone of an opposition between the barbaric endeavors of Constantine V and the enlightened spirit that presides over modern museums.

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One thing, if I am right, can be inferred from the preceding discussion: preservation seems to flow directly from Iconoclasm, for the disappearance of the kinds of activities against which Iconoclasm fought had been thoroughly achieved as soon as the economic ingredient in veneration disappeared. It would be beside the point to try to locate such an event in time. One can only say that institutions such as museums already presuppose it in the way they function. The same could be said of churches and temples where participants and spectators can mingle, however awkwardly. A good way of putting it would be to say that where only sensory-suprasensory things exist, Iconoclasm is the only possible attitude, and so Iconoclasm and the need for preservation appear to go hand in hand.

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4 PERSONS

The preceding discussion of modes of hostility toward what we now call artworks, and my argument for a connection between wanting to destroy certain bits and pieces of the world (artworks) and wanting to preserve them in special places or institutions (museums), raise some further problems that require separate treatment. This treatment entails a discussion of three notions: “person,” “rights,” and “body.” Complicating my task is the fact that there is wide agreement as to the meaning of these words. “Person” appears to be just another synonym for “human being,” and “rights” and “body” appear to denote intrinsic properties of all persons, that is, things that all persons have in common. In addition, persons and bodies (and perhaps also rights) are widely held to be more than mere pieces of the world, and in that respect are very much unlike statues or images. Nevertheless, in the following three chapters I will show that there are contexts in which none of these assumptions is true.

This chapter discusses circumstances in which nonhuman beings can be defined, and have indeed been defined, as persons. Chapter 5 describes discussions about the acquisition of rights by certain objects (if rights were intrinsic properties of certain objects, such discussions would have been as idle as debating whether one should add “gold” to the list of the intrinsic properties of granite). These two chapters lead into Chapter 6, in which several opposed uses of the word “body” in legal discussions are examined at some length. I am therefore inclined to talk not about “the person,” “rights,” or “the body,” but, if only to make the point that many things are left undreamed by our philosophies, legal and otherwise, about kinds of persons (indeed about kinds of “person”), kinds of rights, and kinds of bodies. I include all of the above, uncontroversially, I hope, into the world. I am also inclined to describe statements or phrases like “She is a person,” “The Rights of Man,” or “All persons have bodies” as honorary terms of praise, or implicit descriptions of certain kinds of future behavior, that is, as promises rather than as retrospective descriptions of facts or states of things. A S E C O N D FA B L E A B O U T S TAT U E S

Clement of Alexandria, writing in the first half of the third century, remarked that a certain man “fell in love with [a marble statue of Aphrodite] and had intercourse with the marble,” just as “pigeons have been known to fly towards P E R S O N S

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painted doves.”1 Both the man and the pigeons, Clement claims, were misled by the power of “art” (the word techne¯ , in the original, can mean in this case both “art” and “craftsmanship”).A statue is, as he puts it, “dead matter shaped by a craftsman’s hand.”2 Given that the chapter of Clement’s Exhortation from which I have been quoting is directed against the adoration of images, his conclusion cannot fail to be that one should never “entrust the hopes of the soul [psuche¯ ] to souless things [apsucha].”3 The pun on psuche¯ does not hide, indeed it underlines, a conceptual distinction between soul-endowed objects and soul-deprived objects. Statues belong in the second category. Unlike rocks, stones, trees, and other things found in nature, however, statues are things made, productions, products of a sculptor, or, as the Greek has it, a statuemaker who knows and masters a techne¯ . The sculptor is therefore responsible for the making of the statue, for the reshaping of otherwise dead matter. According to this way of thinking, then, the intentions one attributes to the soulless objects themselves are attributed to their creators, either because, as Aristotle suggested, soulless objects are voiceless objects,4 or because, as Benjamin Cardozo soberly implied, whoever makes a “thing of danger,” a potentially dangerous object, is responsible for that product and what the product then does in (and to) the world.5 By reading Aristotle and Clement, however, it is easy to forget that soulless objects were for a long time attributed F R I E N D S

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intentions and responsibilities, and even liability, to the point that one can legitimately ask whether the attribution of intentions or actions to something, rather than the attribution of a soul, is not a sufficient condition for its being considered liable at all. This is also what the animus of Clement’s attack against the Greeks reminds us of, namely, what he perceives to be a misplacement of the object of devotion, a peculiar perversion that leads people to concentrate their attentions on “masks.” 6 I do not mention this point in order to arouse historical or anthropological speculation on “animistic conceptions of nature . . . characteristic of the Greek mind,” 7 given that such speculation here would serve as an attempt to do away with the very uncomfortable notion that it is possible to be guilty without a seat for guilt, namely, a soul. The fact remains that objects endowed with intentions (but not with a soul), and, presumably, with language (as they were considered to be in a certain sense nonmute), used to be sued, tried, convicted (but probably not acquitted), exiled, executed, and rehabilitated. Nor was this a practice superseded or forgotten by the advent of “philosophy,” of what Nietzsche used to call the “Socratic Man.” E. P. Evans remarks that, as late as 1892, a Russian bell was brought back from the Siberian exile to which it was sentenced in 1591.8 The sentence of the Russian court was in itself no eccentric innovation; Indeed, Polydeukes earlier refers to a special class of Athenian judges (the phulobasileis, who P E R S O N S

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presided over the prutaneion, a special court in charge of cases brought against unknown agents and inanimate objects) as having the “duty to cast beyond the frontier the object which had fallen on someone.” 9 Plato in the Laws uses the verb exorizein in approximately the same sense, to characterize what, in his opinion, should be done with a guilty apsuchon.10 Six centuries later, Pausanias tells how a rival of Theagenes, an athlete from the island of Thasos, whipped Theagenes’s bronze statue every night, until the statue, presumably upset, fell on him and crushed him to death.The statue was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be cast into the sea, though the Oracle later advised that it be reinstated to its previous site.11 P E R S O N I F I C AT I O N

As most statues were probably heavy enough to kill people, and enough like people to be paradigms of intentionbearing soulless objects, they were frequently used as examples of the class of guilty soulless objects. Of a wider scope, and not necessarily related only to statues, is what Oliver Wendell Holmes termed “the desire of retaliation against the offending thing itself,”12 the fact that, as he remarked, “liability seems to have been regarded as attached to the body doing the damage, in an almost physical sense.”13 Curiously enough, for Holmes as for Clement, the physical nature of the liable body is inseparable from the peculiar ability of the statue-maker to mask F R I E N D S

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the physical. For Clement, every statue is a proso¯ pon daimonio¯ n, the mask of demons. The technique involved in bringing a statue “out of matter,”14 and indeed the technique that ultimately causes the statue-maker to be liable at all, is proso¯ popoiia, the making of a mask. Holmes uses “personification,” from the Latin translation of proso¯ popoiia made known by Quintilian, to explain precisely the way in which the desire for retaliation against the offending object became a form of legal procedure: “without . . . personification, anger towards lifeless things would have been transitory, at most.”15 Two important if contradictory consequences follow from this point. First, personification is a technique for preservation, indeed for legal preservation, of both an archaic desire for revenge16 and the material origin of such a desire. Second, what is preserved is never quite what is personified but personification itself: the institute, not my anger. It is then as if personification would outlive and indeed supersede its cause in order for that cause to be preserved at all. The physical body that is the cause of my desire for revenge can become an object of revenge only as long as it is embodied by personification, that is, made into a persona (if not a person).The law can only operate on such embodiments. As Holmes puts it, “the hatred for anything giving us pain, which wreaks itself on the manifest cause, and which leads even civilized man to kick a door when it pinches his finger, is embodied in . . . doctrines.”17 P E R S O N S

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In fact, Holmes’s theory is that both the civil and the criminal liability of human beings in cases of nonintentional acts originated as “merely a way of getting at the [object] which was the immediate cause of offence.”18 In such cases, the owner of the object or person responsible for the act in question would be held liable only insofar as he would not surrender that object or person to the offended party. The earliest forms of monetary indemnity were meant to compensate someone not for incurred damages but for the temporary or permanent, intentional or nonintentional, unavailability of the guilty object, that is, for difficulties in exacting revenge. In some special cases, however, the ownership of the guilty object was automatically surrendered, such as when, for instance, the object happened to be a wild animal on the run. Running away would be considered in the animal’s nature, and so would take precedence in relation to the mere accidents of ownership.19 This practice perhaps extends to cases in which the ownership of an object is still considered to be relatively unimportant, should the nature of that object “give warning of the consequences to be expected” and thus impose special duties on its manufacturer or its seller. An example of such a case would be that of a 1909 Buick Model 10 Runabout, heard by Judge Cardozo.20 According to Holmes, the major evidence for the persistence of personificatory practices in contemporary law can be found in the domain of maritime law. Two generaF R I E N D S

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tions before, Supreme Court Justices including Chief Justice Marshall, “although of course aware that a ship is no more alive than a mill-wheel, thought not only [that] the law did in fact deal with it as if it were alive, but that it was reasonable that the law should do so.”21 Emerson remarked once that “it is impossible not to personify a ship,” and indeed Holmes concurs in his opinion when he states that “a ship is the most living of the inanimate things.”22 According to Holmes, however, Chief Justice Marshall’s point was rather that, for all practical purposes, it is preferable to treat a ship as you would treat a living thing. “It is true,” Chief Justice Marshall writes, “that inanimate matter can commit no offence. But this body [that is, the ship] is animated and put in action by the crew, who are guided by the master. The vessel acts and speaks by the master. She reports herself by the master. It is, therefore, not unreasonable that the vessel should be affected by this report.”23 To this point, Justice Story adds: “the thing is here primarily considered as the offender, or, rather the offence is primarily attached to the thing.”24 For all practical purposes, then, a ship is both inanimate matter, that is, apsuchon, indeed a “thing,” and a putative offender, rendering it liable. And, as Holmes remarks, “it is only by supposing the ship to have been treated as if endowed with personality, that the arbitrary seeming peculiarities of the maritime law can be made intelligible, and on that supposition they at once become consistent P E R S O N S

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and logical.”25 That consistency is not so much historical or conceptual as it is purely pragmatic. There have been numerous attempts to procure a swift derivation from person to ship, and animate to inanimate, such as considering that omne illud quod movet, “all that moves” (hence ships, vehicles, or falling houses, trees, or statues) can be liable. Nevertheless, Holmes writes, if the seemingly exotic doctrine of maritime law “were not supported by an appearance of good sense, it would not have survived.”26 If, for instance, an offense is, in Justice Story’s sense, “attached to” a foreign ship, “the ship is the only security available in dealing with foreigners, and rather than send one’s own citizens to search for a remedy abroad in strange courts, it is easy to seize the vessel and satisfy the claim at home.”27 In spite of all common-sense and pragmatic motives and reasons, of what Holmes called “the hidden ground of policy,”28 all the puzzles relating to personification remain intact. The thought of Holmes’s judges “still clothes itself in personifying language.”29 We could perhaps amplify Holmes’s point by adding that in the mere seizure of a ship, or indeed of anything, there is still an echo of the typical ancient Greek sentence for soulless objects (and only soulless objects are seizable, so to speak). Unthinkable as it may seem, from the point of view of the thing (even if, as we shall see in the next chapter, this metaphor is particularly misleading), being seized is still a form of being cast out of one’s borders. Meanwhile, perhaps personification F R I E N D S

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in a court of law should be defined in this sense as the kind of talk that makes exile possible: if Holmes’s metaphor is true, clothing appropriate to exile. The argument about the connection between liability and personification is hardly new. There are nevertheless three possible developments of that argument implied in much of what I have said up to this point. The first is the fable of personification: becoming a person (which is here the equivalent of acquiring a mask) means, among many other things, being considered liable—and anything can in principle be treated as liable. The reason (and here is the second development) is simply that being liable is a matter not of possessing certain features such as a soul, the ability to move, or a language, but of being dealt with in a certain way. The possession of certain features is a characteristic only in some stories about the acquisition of liability. The third development is perhaps more momentous. Although we know how to tell the story of certain objects that, for certain purposes, were attributed or denied personality or, to use another metaphor, legal standing (or whose standing suffered variations in time), such as statues, ships, or slaves, we are notoriously reluctant to tell our own story in those terms. The fact that former slaves, not to mention ungarrulous former statues, fashion their personal stories as Bildungsromane, structured by a dialectics of remembrance and progress, points perhaps to a peculiar manner of dealing with the first-person singular that is P E R S O N S

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inseparable from personification: that the “I” cannot remember what I cannot remember, cannot go beyond its origin. The curious thing is that nothing, at least certainly not grammar, prevents me from starting my autobiography with the words “I was born a ship and owe my personhood, and my voting rights, to Chief Justice Marshall,” or “I was born a nonperson, to a family of nonpersons.” In the first case my sincere autobiography would be treated as a joke; in the second, as yet another trite metaphorical usage of personhood for laudable emancipatory purposes. My literal autobiography of a former nonperson would be a story whose initial chapter would be about how my own story is permeated by the possibility, to which I am now quite foreign, of not being able to tell it at all. One should like to ask: who was the first to have had the brilliant idea of personifying us? But then again the answer could only be “some other person.” Only someone else could have had that idea.

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5 RIGHTS

There is an important difference between claiming that a soulless object has liability and claiming that it has rights. The latter claim entails some measure of belief in the interests of inanimate objects, and so in the possibility of inanimate objects’ making their interests known. That Theagenes’s statue can be sentenced is not quite the same as its being able to indicate what its own best interest is.1 Such is the claim, however, of an influential 1972 essay entitled Should Trees Have Standing? by the law professor Christopher Stone. Stone’s essay is primarily known, however, for its forceful defense of the idea that rights should be extended to inanimate (or “non-human,” as he puts it) objects. In an inconspicuous footnote referring to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Early Forms of Liability,” Stone remarks that “perhaps the liability of non-human matter is, in the history of things, part of a paranoid, defensive phase in man’s development; as humans become more abundant,

both from the point of view of material health and internally, they may be willing to allow an advance to the stage where non-human matter has rights.”2 The change Stone is advocating is here seen not only as progress (which is not surprising) but also as a revisionary development of the Greek notion of “liability of non-human matter.” Implicit in that passage is also a thesis on the need to overcome the post-Roman notion of exclusive liability of human matter. Stone can therefore describe his own task in the following terms: “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal right to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”3 Of course, there is a sense in which giving the oceans rights might not appear to be very different from treating statues as liable objects (or not). In fact, the granting of rights, all effusive considerations on the intrinsic excellences of emancipation notwithstanding, is not substantially different from any other description (true, false, sincere, insincere, misleading, infelicitous) of someone’s future behavior. In either case I am describing how I will behave in the future toward X, should certain circumstances arise: “I will hold you liable,” “I will not hold you liable,” “I will grant you rights” (whatever “holding liable” or “granting rights” means).4 It may be that the whole idea of a promise concerning future behavior toward X has become one with the very idea of “rights.” However, that F R I E N D S

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does not account for the difference between the trial of a merely liable statue of Theagenes and the trial of a rightsendowed ocean (or of a rights-endowed statue of Theagenes, for that matter).5 Perhaps this difference is easier to describe than one might think. That a statue is merely liable means that, in court, statues are either ornamental objects or defendants. There are no testimonies about Theagenes’s statue’s having sued Theagenes’s rival for statue-molesting practices, let alone for destruction of valuable Greek art; nor are there any testimonies of a statue having sued, say, another statue. Moreover, according to most (though not all)6 testimonies, ephetai, that is, jurors, did not intervene in trials at the prutaneion (including trials of inanimate objects). This fact suggests that the evidence was already considered to have been produced (and so the guilt established) before the trial.7 If this is the case, objects that are merely liable are never in a position to make their interests known.As it happens, in Stone’s version rights-endowed objects are in such a position. According to Stone’s idea of “legal rights,” three conditions have to be met in order to “mak[e] a thing count jurally”: “that the thing can institute legal actions at its behest; . . . that in determining the granting of legal relief, the court must take injury to it into account; . . . that relief must run to the benefit of it.”8 Stone’s vision of a rightsendowed environment is therefore inseparable from the R I G H T S

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epistemological problem of how to know what the interests of the environment are,9 namely, from the problem of the indication of interests, through actions, requests, selfassessments, and so on, or, more simply, from a problem of meaning. The epistemological question proper is, for Stone, “How can I know what a natural object needs?” His answer is refreshingly unequivocal: natural objects can communicate their wants (needs) to us, and in ways that are not terribly ambiguous. I am sure I can judge with more certainty and meaningfulness whether and when my lawn wants (needs) water, than the Attorney General can judge whether and when the United States wants (needs) to take an appeal from an adverse judgment by the lower court. The lawn tells me that it wants water by a certain dryness of the blades and soil—immediately obvious to the touch—the appearance of bald spots, yellowing, and a lack of springiness after being walked on; how does “the United States” communicate to the Attorney General?10

This argument, which, as we shall soon see, Stone extends to what for him are all the possible plaintiffs in a court of law, is open to an objection that should not be disregarded at this point. Indeed, the fact that he interprets certain features or occurrences in his lawn as communication does not amount to the existence of independent interests of talking-lawns or talking-countries. Communicative intentions and, lato sensu, the expression of interests

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and the existence of an autonomous point of view, are, as it were, predicated by the very act, an interpretive act, through which they are made to conform to the interests of the predicating party. What lawns and countries can “communicate” is typically what the believers in the communicative virtues of lawns and countries expect them to communicate (a point to which I will return in Chapter 8). This perhaps explains why statues, lawns, and countries, as communicating objects, can never prove their interpreters wrong (let alone talk about novels). Compare, for example, Stone’s description of a successful decoding of the wants of his lawn with the implausible situation in which Stone would say, “I thought that, according to what I knew about the signs of lawn-language, my lawn needed water. And yet I was wrong, it didn’t. Therefore, my lawn must have been lying to me (or perhaps is sick).” For analogous reasons, politicians running for office never change their minds about the needs of their constituents before what is taken to be yet another sign of the communicative intentions of the talking country (for example, an election) is interpreted. Here I am not making the standard argument against the self-serving nature of interpretation, as if choosing an alternative for this embarrassing state of affairs would be feasible. Rather, I am arguing against the intrinsicality of interests and the autonomy of points of view, and so

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against having a theory on the needs of natural objects (and, of course, not against treating lawns in such-and-such a way). An important feature of Stone’s theory is the extension to human beings of what he believes is the ontological status of countries and lawns in a court of law. One is tempted to say that not only, as he declares, is “the world of the lawyer . . . peopled with inanimate right-holders [such as] trusts, corporations, joint-ventures, municipalities, Subchapter R partnerships, and nation-states,”11 but also that no noninanimate rightsholders are indeed possible in the legal world. In fact, as his essay progresses, Stone raises the suspicion that even “individual human plaintiffs” are but “an afterthought” of legal cases, suggesting in addition that “the legal system does the best it can to maintain the illusion of the reality of the individual human being.”12 Taken by itself, this latter idea might simply mean that, as Donald Davidson has remarked, there is no better way of describing or predicting the action of certain things (in this case a legal system) than by attributing propositional attitudes to them.13 However, taken together, the two ideas expressed by Stone are hardly just that. If “individual human plaintiffs” are defined as “afterthoughts” of the legal system and, moreover, as an illusion consciously maintained by that system, the legal system, for Stone, is in fact ascribed what Dennett calls “second-order intentions” (for example, as in intending someone to believe not-P while F R I E N D S

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oneself believing P)14 and perhaps even, if Davidson is right, a language.15 For Stone, the “legal system,” whatever the expression may mean, produces, as if in a postscript, the concept of “individual human being.”16 The problem is that the scene of the production of the notion of “human being” at the hands of the legal system (assuming for a moment that such a system has hands) reproduces the features that ipso facto are being dened to the version of the concept that is being revised. In Stone’s case, in order for the “individual human being” to be seen as an afterthought, the legal system has to be seen as an “individual human being,” capable of intentions and language, and endowed with the kind of autonomy that is being refused to it at a “lower” level.To pun, personality is a persona of the law. The concept of “legal representation” appears to be, in Stone’s theory, the concept through which the epistemological uncertainties of language-attribution procedures are bypassed: “it is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them, as they customarily do for the ordinary citizen with legal problems.”17 Two sorts of problems arise here. The first, which we may safely ignore at this point, has to do with the status of representatives, in this case of lawyers, with the conventional procedures of certification, through which a certified R I G H T S

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technician is opposed to a technician-at-large, and with the constitution of the relation of representation, through a contract or something of that kind. The second family of problems, which concerns this discussion directly, has to do with the analogies above between streams and forests, on the one hand, and corporations, states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, and universities, on the other.The important question here is neither the adolescent epistemology of “Can a lawyer understand a corporation?” nor even its denial by people like Stone, whereby the question of understanding is pragmatically overcome by the question of representation. Rather, the question seems to be “Can a lawyer misunderstand or misrepresent a corporation?” Even if “misunderstand” (just as “understand”) is suspiciously metaphorical in such contexts, the answer must be affirmative. A corporation can fire a lawyer, and that action is often interpreted as a complaint about the quality of representation it is receiving. In short, there are accepted ways for corporations (albeit perhaps not for infants or incompetents) to prove their lawyers wrong. In the case of streams, forests, infants, and incompetents, the ways of representation appear to be more circuitous. In order for Stone to conceive of a lawyerspeaking-for-a-forest, he has to devise a way of initiating the relation of legal representation. He does this through the supposition of a second instance of representation, F R I E N D S

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which he calls the “friend of the natural object.”18 The figure of the friend of the natural object is comparable to the figure of the lawn-owner above, in that it is seen as the agent of a special kind of perception. When the friend “perceives [the natural object] to be endangered, he can apply to a court for the creation of a guardianship.”19 All arguments about the lawn-owner, however, also apply to the friend of the natural object. In fact, no friend of a natural object can ever be wrong, let alone be deceived by a natural object (perhaps only in this sense are true friends always right). A solution could be, I suppose, to have rules for an automatic processing of guardianship: when the waters of the river R show the property X, a bell rings and a lawyer is called in. But, of course, that would still not be very different from the lawn-owner model. More than the installation of sensors and bells would be required, for, most important, both cases rely on the uncontroversial nature of the exhibition of properties such as X. When it comes to meaning-attribution, no exhibition of the properties upon which such meaning is predicated, even by lawns and rivers, can indeed ever be wrong. Nevertheless, the fact remains, as Roderick Nash remarks, that “countless times in history concerned people have stood up for what are called the rights of an inarticulate and oppressed group.”20 Without disputing the fact, it is interesting to note that this sort of statement is usually made to enhance a particular form of representation in R I G H T S

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which the price of the hiring of representation is paid in a convergence of opinions or interests, putative and real alike, between the parts. That friends (from l’ami du peuple to the professional friend of natural objects) are usually not paid in cash is taken to mean that a more genuine form of representation can be obtained thereby.As it happens, if the ground of all forms of representation is pragmatic, there are no more (or less) genuine forms of representation, as each form is bound up with the contingencies of its very origin.What is singular in all invocation of the various duties of friendship in this context is therefore the deletion from representation of the very fact of representation, that is, the deletion of all references to the existence of two different parts whose interests are temporarily brought together by a carefully bound contract. Such duplicity is typically explained away by the consideration of an overarching moral dimension. Formulae such as Ralston’s “duties to the vulnerable mute,”21 purported to express the moral implications of certain kinds of representation, are usually more efficient at suppressing the perception of contingency in the relationship between the subject and the object of duty than at grounding any actions. Yet it is inaccurate to suppose that the figure of the “friend” is a last resort, an expedient for us to legitimate a universal possibility of representation in notoriously reluctant cases, such as those of streams, forests, and statues (as opposed to corporations and states, which need no F R I E N D S

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friends, as they have the means to hire their own legal representation). There is a sense in which the function of Stone’s “friend of the natural object,” as the basic, prejural, so to speak, instance of representation, is also crucial to thinking about representation in the cases of corporations, states, estates, municipalities, universities, or even ordinary citizens. Prima facie, in all these cases but the last one, there are always rules (or at least principles of exclusion) that determine what counts as a meaningful sentence that will be, in certain contexts (namely, but not exclusively, in courts of law), attributed to them.22 These rules are primarily rules of representation, which can help us to distinguish between statements by the king-as-king, statements by the king-as-aspiring novelist, and statements by the friend of the king’s statue. The fact that “country” is often used as “speaking person” (even if only in the name of one’s “duties to the vulnerable mute”) is a feature of a certain type of actions, for which there does not seem to be an easy alternative at present. These actions include not only the prediction of a country’s behavior and the account of the so-called country’s history but also the possibility of a special perception of the evidence of its intentions and needs. The foreign affairs expert, the economist, the journalist, and the historian are therefore in a position that is not substantially different from that of the lawn-owner, the friend of the natural object, and the literary critic. Their special knowledge or expertise is analogously marked by R I G H T S

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the one epistemological problem they know, namely, the problem of being able to tell what counts as legitimate “communication” of their object’s needs (as well as by their incapacity to be deceived by their objects). Rules of representation, as I see them, are therefore rules of thumb that can be used to mark the uncontroversial character of certain exhibited properties of talking objects.

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6 BODIES

In early 1886, Chief Justice Wait, writing a decision for the United States Supreme Court, included the following interpretation: “We are all of the opinion . . . that the XIV Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to . . . corporations.”1 Fifty-two years later, in 1938, Justice Black expressed regret that, although the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect the rights of black persons, in the great majority of cases it had been invoked to protect the rights of corporations. And yet, he added, “corporations have neither race nor colour.”2 Clearly, Justice Black was objecting to the fact that the term “person” had been extended to include corporations as well as human beings, and also (perhaps) that the term was being perversely used by jurists. That a certain concept of person was developed by jurists is perhaps not as important as the fact that it had to be defined independent from the assumption of common

features shared by all the individuals denoted by “person” (say, a former slave and the Southern Pacific Railroad Company). In other words, “person” is used in certain contexts as more than an abbreviation for the common properties of all individuals defined as “person.” Indeed, as we will see, perhaps “person” can only be defined as a certain kind of muteness. To the reader used to the logical aspects of this argument in the wake of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I have a surprise in store, for my arguments will deal mostly with debates made possible in the thirteenth century by Pope Innocent IV. universitates Innocent IV is most famous for having refused to grant collective entities, what were then called universitates, the status of human beings.3 Such a refusal occurs in the context of lively legal discussions on the liability of universitates. “A universitas,” writes Innocent, “cannot harm anything [nihil potest facere dolo],” as it is an “incorporeal thing [res incorporalis].” In consequence, it “can neither be accused nor punished [non potest accusari vel puniri].” 4 For Innocent, a universitas can at the most be metaphorically sentenced to death or metaphorically excommunicated (in civil suits), that is, can only be fined.5 It is also in this sense that, to use Ernst Kantorowicz’s motto, universitas non moritur—the universitas does not die. It would seem, therefore, that the medieval theory on the nature of corporations is simultaF R I E N D S

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neously, as Kantorowicz also remarks, a theory on time. “The essential feature of all corporate bodies,” he writes, “was not that they were a ‘plurality of persons collected in one body’ at the present moment, but that they were a ‘plurality’ in succession, braced by Time and through the medium of Time.” 6 The body, the corpus, of corporations is thus lacking only in the sense that corporations are not supposed to be afflicted by bodily corruption and death.7 Innocent’s distinction thus leaves the door open for a theory on the juridical difference between persons and bodies stricto sensu and persons and bodies that are, as he says, nomina juris, names of Law.8 Such is not a difference between real bodies and fictional bodies, between literal and metaphorical persons, at least if one understands the difference to be one between genuine and false bodies, even if the verb fingo, sparingly used by Innocent himself has led many historians and commentators astray.9 Nomina juris are fictional only in the sense of being formed and indeed granted,10 that is, of having a historical origin.The same sense of formation also applies to universitates and so to corporations, as the condition for their specific bodiliness is dependent on a foundational act that institutes such bodiliness as a historical product (and only in this sense as a fiction). The intriguing thing is that such an act, what we call “incorporation,” denotes simultaneously the creation of a body and the construction of a body. It cannot, therefore, be thought of as an organic event; nor B O D I E S

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are the organic metaphors particularly apt for this kind of body,11 since the incorporated body can only become a body through art and in the course of time. Fiction is thus the production of an ahistorical body, which has inscribed in itself its very historical origin. In a more sober language, this simply means that corporations as persons are potentially eternal products,12 indeed one of the very few eternal productions possible. It is thus not surprising that an unintended consequence of Innocent’s efforts in rigorously distinguishing universitates and human beings has been the conceptual union of corporations and human beings as a priori possibilities of the body, that is, within an ontology of historical objects. One can witness such a confluence, as we shall see later in this chapter, in the topic of the juridical person. Be that as it may, and given that there seems to be a close relationship between ontologies of historical objects and ontologies of liable objects (as the moment of origin also signals a moment of debt, an originary sin), Innocent’s efforts were paradoxically the basis for theories that denied the crucial postulate of his own doctrine of liability, namely, of theories about forms of collective guilt, crime, and responsibility. The problem there, of course, was to find kinds of crimes unsusceptible to being committed by human beings or, at least, susceptible to being committed by nonhuman bodies.

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Although the first hints of a theory on corporate liability predate Innocent’s glosses,13 it was not until the fourteenth century that a full-fledged theory on corporate liability emerged in the writings of Bartolus of Sassoferrato. It is significant that such a theory was grounded on two crucial distinctions. The first one, as Walter Ullmann observes, is the distinction “between the corporate capability to commit a crime, and the corporate capability to suffer punishment.”14 Such a distinction makes conceivable the notion of an object that, to put it paradoxically, is both liable (because it is considered to have caused a crime) and nonliable (because it is considered not to be punishable). More important, however, it breaks the otherwise takenfor-granted causal connection between being susceptible to punishment and being the author of a crime. In fact, the capability to suffer punishment does not follow, once this distinction is made, from the capability to commit a crime (the non sequitur entailing a somewhat different notion of “responsibility”). This first distinction is therefore an important revision of the more strictly antifictionalist doctrines of Innocent, as it suspends the penal question proper in order to concentrate on the question of authorship.15 Bartolus’s second distinction is thus a distinction of authorship, namely, a distinction between crimes that can be authored by corporations and crimes that cannot a priori be authored by corporations. It is Bartolus’s opinion

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that crimes of omission, peccata omissionis, can be committed by corporations. The failure of a corporation to fulfill its own duties and obligations “makes it legitimate to say that [not just its officials but also] the very corporation is guilty of negligence [ipsa (universitas) dicitur negligere].”16 But this is the simplest case, or at least a case to which there is a certain symmetry, as it is the case of a body by default committing a crime by omission.The most delicate case is that of crimes of commission, that is, the case for which the paradigm of human authorship and indeed of liability proper was established (that the statue of Theagenes could be convicted of a crime of omission would perhaps strike us as less surprising than its actual conviction of a crime of commission). Bartolus’s theory is, however, that corporations can be guilty of crimes of commission, that is, that being human is not a sufficient condition for being able to commit a crime (and indeed to commit a crime that involves commission). Examples of crimes of commission with a corporate authorship are crimes through the “making of legislation [facere statuta], the conferring of jurisdictional powers [dare jurisdictionem], the imposition of taxes [imponere collectas], and similar cases.”17 The corollary of this second distinction takes place in this context. Indeed, for Bartolus, as Ullmann writes, “a corporation was held liable . . . only for those crimes which the corporation qua corporation could commit, or,

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in other words, which ordinary citizens were incapable of committing.”18 Bartolus’s repertoire of possibilities of authorship is here further refined not so much by including the possibility of “corporate commission” as by defining “corporate commission” as “non-individual commission.” For authorship purposes, therefore, a corporate body is capable of all the crimes unsusceptible to being committed by an individual person, which allows for automatic inferences (of little practical use, I grant) such as “If the crime was X, then N could not have committed it.” Thus the notion of authorship is here built in the case of crimes of commission not through an analogy between corporations and individual human beings but by a deep realist principle— which one would not readily associate with Bartolus—that puts actual crimes (that is, the consideration of something as a crime) first and only subsequently defines the different regimes of authorship for crimes. If a given crime could only have been committed by a being with such-and-such features, and if the only instance of such a being were a statue, then there would be a given crime whose authorship could only belong to a statue. Appealing as may sound all narratives of a progressive extension of bodily attributes from the singular body stricto sensu to objects with multiple bodies (such as the medieval king) and to complex juridical “fictions” which depend,

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however remotely, on the notion of a body (such as modern corporations), there are some difficulties with this kind of explanation. Even if the version itself is typically presented as an exuberant metamorphosis, it presupposes a literal starting point, that is, the notion of an idealized body proper.The notion of, say, “corporation” is therefore, in such a version, both dependent on and an extension of a certain self-evident sense of bodiliness, as if the history of juridical concepts would in this respect repeat Hegel’s well-known explanation of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Mind. The problem is that such histories of extension and progressive complexifying of sense-data into juridical, “superstructural” constructs are, among other things, unable to account for liability as an assumption. I suppose one can always imagine that liability has emerged at some point in history out of a pristine world of literal bodiliness, or perhaps that it was brought about by some extraterrestrial influences. Or else one can complicate the notion of “literal body” through some gnostic duplication of the body into body-proper and body-improper.This latter notion, however, would require a theology of an original Fall to which all the problems of the first alternative would still apply. Perhaps then we should discard the tropological narratives and the Bildungsroman of the law altogether and try instead for some blessed counterintuitive explanation that, ignoring even the strength of ety-

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mology, would be blind to all putatively real human bodies lurking behind the notion of a corporation. We return here, of course, to my belief that words like “body” or “person” are first and foremost compressed descriptions of certain intricate practices. If the reiteration of an empty formula would be of some help at this juncture, I would say that it seems to me that the treatment of something as liable is what determines the constitution of a set of liable objects as liable bodies, and, indeed, as persons. This point can nevertheless be made in a much more forceful way by following closely, if briefly, the pitfalls of what is probably one of the most brilliant explanations available of the notion of juridical body and juridical person out of some notion of body-proper. I refer to Friedrich Karl von Savigny’s doctrine of what he calls juristische Personen, juridical persons. JURIDICAL PERSONS

In Das Recht des Besitzes, originally published in 1803, Savigny is primarily concerned with a theory of possession (Besitz), indeed with the conditions for possession itself. The “first condition for possession [die erste Bedingung alles Besitzes]” he calls “bodily acting [das körperliche Handeln].”19 “Bodily act [körperliche Handlung]” is usually associated with the “unmediated touch by one’s own body.”20 And yet, adds Savigny, “no other point of Roman Law has been so

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generally misunderstood,”21 for many cases arise in Roman Law in which possession is brought about by bodily action without “unmediated touch.” These are cases of “symbolical actions [symbolische Handlungen],”22 that is, of actions in which the bodily touch is mediated and in which, “by the means of a juridical fiction [vermittelst einer juristischen Fiction,]23 the real apprehension [die wahre Besitzergreifung] is represented (actus adscititii, apprehensio ficta).”24 A juridical fiction is, in this context, no less than the means for the symbolic representation of real possession.25 And since many kinds of genuine possession are in Savigny’s sense symbolically mediated, many kinds of possession maintain only a mediated relation with the “first condition for possession,” namely, “bodily acting.”The adjective “juridical” is therefore used by Savigny as a rough equivalent of “symbolic” and of “mediated.” Through “juridical fictions,” one has a kind of possession in which the bodily action is represented a priori rather than immediately present to the senses. As has very often been remarked, here, too, the sphere of the juridical is a sphere of bodies symbolical. Things get much more complicated than this, however, albeit not conspicuously so.After discussing at some length the first condition of possession (what he calls the factum), in what actually amounts to a phenomenology of possession, Savigny, in a very brief section, deals with the second condition of possession. He refers to this condition as das Wollen, the animus, intention, or desire for possession.26 F R I E N D S

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We seem to move here from phenomenology into psychology, as the two animi described by Savigny are primarily forms of behavior and mental states. Savigny mentions first the animus domini, exhibited by the way in which “the possessor of the thing handles the thing as its own,”27 and then the “simple animus possidendi,”28 that is, the general intention to acquire possession. Sensibly enough, Savigny does not seem to have much to say about matters psychological (this whole development takes place within less than twenty lines).What interests him, rather, are the special cases in which one or both forms of animus are absent, that is, cases of derivative forms of possession in which there is no animus domini (the most important question for him, and the object of three full sections), cases of things that one cannot possibly wish to acquire (and so in which no animus possidendi can arise), and, finally, cases of persons who have neither form of animus. The question that announces this last problem is rather straightforward: “What persons,” Savigny asks, “are incapable of acquiring possessions because they are absolutely incapable of desiring or having intentions [weil sie überhaupt nicht wollen können]?”29 The section that follows is dedicated to this matter. In his answer, Savigny has to distinguish between two senses of “person” and so between two kinds of persons. In the order of the text the second sense is instanced by “physical persons.”30 Indeed, certain “physical persons” such as “lunatics [Wahnsinnige]” and “wards [Pupille]” are incapable B O D I E S

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of acquiring possessions because they are incapable of desiring or intending to acquire property. Certain other persons, however, are also incapable in this sense without being “physical persons.” The adjective that Savigny employs in this context to signify an opposition to “physical” is again juristisch, or “juridical.” “Juridical persons,” he writes, are “those who can be considered to be rightholders [Subjecte von Rechten] only through a juridical fiction.”31 He then gives two examples of juridical persons: “inherited estates [Erbschaften]” and “corporations [Corporationen].”32 In a footnote to his discussion, Savigny adds: “all these persons (corporations, lunatics, children) cannot acquire any possession by themselves alone; the extent to which this can be possible by proxy or through representatives [durch Stellvertreter] will be determined below.”33 The model for the general description of juridical representation seems therefore to be not so much that of the physical body as that of particular disturbances (such as the conditions of being a child, or being a lunatic), which are not primarily, and not even necessarily, physical.The notion of a self-evident physical body is thus inadequate to describe the notion of a rightsholder, just as from the purely physical no mediation seems to follow. In this sense, the juridical relation is not so much a stage in a purported evolution of the concept of body as the only possibility for mediation. No narrative of apprenticeship will, in Savigny’s sys-

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tem, lead from the physical to the symbolic. At most, in the specific case of children, the opposite could be true. In his subsequent (and monumental) work System des heutigen römischen Rechts, published between 1840 and 1849, Savigny upholds these basic principles concerning the notion of juridical person. He still connects the notion to the right of possession, which again raises the known difficulty of understanding how a person incapable of intending can acquire something. “This contradiction,” writes Savigny, “must be solved through representation as an artificial institute [muß . . . durch eine Vertretung, als künstliche Anstalt, aufgelöst werden].”34 In this sense, of course, “the corporation is similar to a minor.”35 Unlike his treatise on possession, however, Savigny’s System makes clear why juridical persons are not to be thought of as a development or an extension of the notion of “individual person,” as a further stage in the narrative that sees human history as a series of increasingly complex processes of mediation. But to the reader of the System this fact is not immediately apparent. The introductory section of the second book (the volume entitled Persons as Rightsholders or, perhaps better, Persons as Protagonists of Juridical Relationships [Die Personen als Träger der Rechtsverhältnisse]) makes clear that behind the relatively neutral term “person” stands a reference to the “individual man,” der einzelne Mensch: “the originary concept of person or of the subject of rights must coincide

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with the concept of man, and this originary identity between the two concepts can be expressed in the following formula: each individual man, and only the individual man, has juridical capacities [ist rechtsfähig].”36 This formula seems to make it absolutely clear that there is a biological, if not outright anthropological, and in any case physical, substratum to the notion of “juridical capacity” that leaves outside the realm of legal subjecthood not only statues, of course, but also corporations and lunatics. Much later in the argument Savigny feels compelled to modify slightly his initial assertion. In the section devoted to the concept of “juridical person,” after recalling the earlier passage about the coincidence between juridical capacity and the individual human being, he adds: “we are now to consider such a capacity in an extended and artificial sense [als ausgedehnt und künstliche] in the case of subjects assumed to be so through mere fiction.”37 This first modification introduces a possibility denied by the original formula, namely, the possibility of being the subject of juridical relationships, in however extended a sense, without any biological conditions attached. Indeed, the adjectives “extended” and “artificial” describe the price that has to be paid for this de-anthropologization of subjecthood, that is, for the breaking of the connection between being capable of subjecthood and being a human being. One cannot say whether the stress falls here on the demotion in rank of certain possible subjects through a well-known F R I E N D S

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opposition between proper sense and figurative sense, or on the extended notion of being a rightsholder that is being proposed. What does seem to be clear is that the original formula will never recover from this seemingly innocuous extension, as juridical persons (that is, artificial persons or, should we say, persons that are not human) will acquire an overwhelming protagonism in the rest of the volume. Three pages later Savigny already feels free to enumerate the juridical relations of which juridical persons are capable of being part. Significantly enough, he begins with Eigenthum, that is, property or possession. I am not suggesting here that the notion of juridical person is just a dialectical embarrassment for Savigny, let alone the product of a lack of rigor on his part. Rather, what is interesting is that, for Savigny, there is not much to be said about nonjuridical persons, about the hitherto sole bearer of juridical capacities. This fact has perhaps to do with the way in which juridical persons require the kind of process that is constitutive of the law itself, namely, the process of mediation, and so with the incompatibility between the notion of self-evident, unmediated attributes and the practice of the law. Where there is no mediation there is not much to interest a lawyer. Indeed, what interests Savigny in the notion of person is the way in which such a notion seems to require representation, and not so much that such representation is essentially of a fictional nature.After having described all that juridical persons are B O D I E S

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capable of, Savigny concludes the section with an appeal to the Romans, as well as with an interesting translation: “Not even the Romans have a universal name for all the instances of this kind. Where they want to express the character of such subjects in a general way, they merely say that they represent positions of persons [die Stelle von Personen vertreten], that is . . . as if they were fictional persons.”38 Although Savigny is alluding explicitly to the Roman notion of personae vice fungitur,39 he is also, in his pairing off of representation and fiction, echoing the venerable confusion between fungor and fingo, to perform (through representation, that is, Vertretung) and to pretend. In any case, both fiction and representation refer here to a structural possibility rather than to a substance. “Juridical person” is not so much a trope for “individual man” as a trope for a position in certain contexts. It refers, then, to a place that is presupposed by certain activities, indeed to the terminus of certain activities, rather than to the ground or the reason for these activities. The juridical person, so to speak, does not have a substance (the fact that “not even the Romans” were able to find a common designation for all its instances should not come as a surprise). Not having a substance, however, should not be confused with the trivial assumption that all representation is fiction. Indeed, in a very important sense representation cannot be here defined as fiction, for there does not seem to be room for the opposite of fiction in the system of juridical persons; if such F R I E N D S

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were the case, we would not be able to make juridically interesting and useful the notion of nonjuridical person, that is, the notion of nonrepresented person. Nonrepresented persons would be merely unreal. We should now be able to see why Savigny’s system not only rejects the notion of progress in relation to a typology of personhood but also implicitly denies the existence of any juridical opposition between “individuals” and universitates. Even if Savigny makes explicit the opposition between universitas and singularis persona, the two expressions translating respectively as Corporation and der einzelne Mensch, “corporation” and “individual man,” 40 the weight he seems to put on representation as not merely an instance of mediation but as an instance of production shows that for him individuals are perhaps little more than the most general instances of the universitates inordinatae, of informal corporations. In any case, individuals can only participate in juridical relationships through representation, and representation represents a position rather than a substance, that is, it describes a possibility for action and intention. Perhaps it is the awareness of this difficulty that has led many people to go out on the limb of fiction whenever the question was that of the possibility of the juridical representation of something that can only emerge as already represented. But, of course, the most general implication of Savigny’s emphasis on representation concerns his doctrine of Rechtsfähigkeit (that is, of the capacity to have B O D I E S

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rights). Indeed, once the emphasis is put on mediation, the status of “rights” becomes not so much that of an intrinsic property, some sort of moral or juridical universal attribute that defines persons (or, for that matter, statues and corporations) as that of a form of action, namely, the kind of action that implies what we currently call “legal representation.” The ontology of rightsholding is defined by the exercise of representation, which, in turn, is defined by assumptions and expectations about juridical capability.

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7 HOSTILITY

TO

INTERPRETATION

Chapters 2 to 6 took the somewhat unusual approach of describing collections of objects in the process of performing certain actions. Indeed, the very idea of an object’s performing an action is already quite extraordinary. And yet, to speak of talking corporations, communicating lawns, scheming statues, and moving icons makes a certain sense, at least in some well-defined contexts. Conversely, the first six chapters challenged some widely shared assumptions about the grammar and the use of “language,” “being able to speak,” and “being capable of having intentions,” such as saying that these are the sorts of things only human beings can do. Both the former descriptions and the latter assumptions need not be incompatible. In fact, it may be that language or intentions are not so much a property of a motley collection of objects such as Great Expectations, Simon, The United States, A Runaway Bear, or St. Andrew’s Icon, as ways for human beings to come to terms, through descriptions, with these objects.

This process of attributing language and intentionality to objects can be referred to as “interpretation.”1 The question arises, however, whether interpretation so defined is the only available way for humans to come to terms with all kinds of bits and pieces of the world, and also whether there is more than an insubstantial difference between attributing language and intentions to Great Expectations, which after all is uncontroversially made out of language, and doing the same to runaway bears (which are no less uncontroversially not). Should one answer the first of these questions negatively, the matter of an alternative for interpretation would arise. Thus there are at least two possible notions of “interpretation,” depending on whether one does or does not acknowledge an alternative to interpretation. A LT E R N AT I V E S T O I N T E R P R E TAT I O N

If one considers that there is an alternative to interpretation, “interpretation” becomes ipso facto understood as a certain kind of description, that is, a description among others. Also, complaining about interpretation in this context becomes synonymous with suggesting, for example, that there is no special necessity to the attribution of intentions and linguistic abilities to things that, plausibly enough, have neither. If, by contrast, one considers that there are no alternatives to interpretation, complaints about interpretation are no different from complaints about F R I E N D S

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the law of gravity. In this second scenario, interpretation thus understood is no less than the very form of all possible descriptions, and complaints about interpretation are simply complaints about certain interpretations. In this chapter I will argue that whenever one does suggest that there is no necessity to interpretation one is really only reacting against certain interpretations so that, despite their claims to the contrary, alternative theorists are ultimately undistinguishable from nonalternative theorists. And still, one could say, there are certain conspicuous differences between those two tribes. Those who believe in the alternative theory, for one, tend to express outrage, rather than delight, at Savigny’s suggestion, discussed in Chapter 6, that, from the point of view of how the law works, there are no deep ontological differences between Simon, handicapped-Simon, infant-Simon, and Simon, Inc., in that, irrespective of their condition, they all require representation to become parties in a system of legal relationships. Rather, the proponents of alternative theories would like to believe that there is such a thing as a Simon-an sich that can be predicated language, intentions, and so on, opposed to all kinds of derivative Simons that can only be predicated language and intentions in a derivative sense. “Interpretation,” therefore, often becomes in their idiolects a derogatory term, used to qualify the sort of funny thing that goes on whenever one says things like “Simon, Inc., believes X is not in its best interest.” H O S T I L I T Y

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Analogously, Christopher Stone’s suggestion, discussed in Chapter 5, that there are no deep ontological differences among Simon, Simon the Bear, and the River Simon, and the practices in Ancient Greece, discussed in Chapter 4, that refused to see all but practical differences between what Simon does and what the statue of Simon does, are held by believers of the alternative theory to be no more than interpretations (and false interpretations, at that), whereby the simonness of Simon is unduly extended to un-Simon-like objects. Before we proceed, I should point out that, even to those believers, Simon-an sich appears to have something like a history, even if only a history of progressive revelation of the meaning of “simonness”: otherwise believers would not be able to explain how Simon-the-slave became at a certain point in time a token of Simon-an sich. The problem, however, is that, as we shall see in Chapter 8, once we admit improvements in the notion of “simonness,” we leave the door open to the possibility that the collection of Simon-tokens may be extended indefinitely (to Simone, to Simon the Bear, to River Simon, to Statue of Simon, and so on). Perhaps we can find a convenient model for the assumptions of the alternative theory already at work in the standard defenses of Iconoclasm discussed in Chapter 2. Iconoclasm is in this sense a form of skepticism directed at

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the possibility of attributing meaning and intentions (even if only the restricted intention of describing—or “circumscribing,” as the technical jargon has it—the attributes of the persons of the Trinity) to certain images or even to images in general. No talking images are allowed into the alternative theorists’ version of such descriptions and, accordingly, prosternation before talking images would denote misled expectations as to the speaking abilities of pieces of “dead matter.” Needless to say, my argument in Chapter 3, according to which there might be a connection between denying any special powers to images and storing them in places where prosternation is of a mere aesthetical variety (that is, zwecklos, or unintentional prosternation), would be equally unacceptable to proponents of the most stern varieties of the alternative theory. What would be the point, they would ask, of allocating funds for the collection and storage of large sets of meaningless, indifferent objects? The less extreme varieties of the theory (say, those that refuse prosternation before icons but allow prosternation before icons-in-museums), meanwhile, are afflicted by an important inconsistency. Indeed, the activities they so deeply deplore at one level, namely, the attribution of language and intentions to certain artifacts, are thought to be praiseworthy at another. The fact that an icon speaks not about God but only about, say, beauty, class struggle in

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ninth-century Byzantium, or the religious illusions of humankind, does not change things in the least, but actually suggests that soft Iconoclasts have special access to a translation device that allows them to develop true insights into the intentions of icons. Still, if I am right, this important inconsistency is constitutive of the very concepts of “museum,” and of how museums should be used. Contemporary notions of “culture” (which imply the belief in something like a language of certain objects) are therefore dependent on the inconsistencies of soft Iconoclasm as well as fully compatible with the alternative theory. For them, in fact, Simon can speak in a proper sense, whereas Simon-depictions speak only, if not in a derogatory, at least in a purely honorific, sense. Nevertheless, it is often very hard to tell in the context of contemporary culture the difference between speaking honorifically and speaking properly: rather, very often words and intentions attributed to Simon, Inc., or to Portrait of Simon are held to be more relevant than the words and intentions of merely-Simon, or Simon proper. To suggest that there are a priori proper and improper contexts for the attribution of language and intentions, indeed to suggest that proper contexts are not contexts of attribution at all—in short, to complain about interpretation by assuming that there is a noninterpretive realm of some kind—amounts to a curious blend of reductionism and hostility to reduction, whereby interpretations are F R I E N D S

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said both not to be what is the case, and to be particularly one-sided and misleading statements about what is the case. Conversely, in a world populated by speaking statues, imbeciles, and corporations, one loses, in this generous flood of intentionality, the plain notion that there is a sense in which statues cannot speak or have intentions, that is, the sense that some interpretations are plainly wrong. The solution to this kind of difficulty seems to me to consist in refraining from all talk about intrinsic connections between different kinds of objects and different kinds of human behavior, and concentrating instead on complaints both about interpretation and about complaints about interpretation. In the former case, that of the alternative theory, interpretation is typically opposed to some kind of allegedly independent evidence (very often also to an allegedly noninterpretive discourse), whereas in the latter the notion of “allegedly independent evidence” is opposed to the interpretive nature of all evidence. The alternative theory, therefore, depends on a deep antinomy between interpretation and not-interpretation, as well as on a suggestion according to which notinterpretation has a special kind of sublimity of its own. Very often, this is the sublimity of a world from which all the uncertainties and agonies of language and intentionattribution have been eradicated, the sublimity of a world purified of meaning and language. As Hilary Putnam remarks, “what troubles people about interpretation . . . H O S T I L I T Y

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[is] its lack of convergence.”2 Again we should distinguish here between alternative as a wish and the perhaps more familiar notion that in some cases at least what one usually calls interpretation is perhaps not required. Most people (and even a few corporations and imbeciles) appear to oscillate in the vast continuum between strict alternativism and pantheistic interpretationalism, between, say, Iconoclasm and Iconophilia, rather than situating themselves at its extreme points. Accordingly, it would perhaps be preferable to say that hostility to interpretation describes a way of complaining about certain interpretations that often presents itself as a complaint about interpretation lato sensu, and that it can coexist side by side with all sorts of more homely complaints about certain interpretations. So much for what I called earlier the difference between two notions of “interpretation.” TWO WAYS OF COMPLAINING A B O U T I N T E R P R E TAT I O N

One could proceed by contrasting more fully these two concepts of interpretation, concentrating primarily on the different modes of hostility to interpretation they display. The first one consists in seeing interpretation as something we can, if not do completely without, at least grow out of, a bothersome symptom as well as an occasion for therapy. The second concept consists in seeing interpretation as a set of practices and attitudes that one has some reasons to F R I E N D S

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consider inadequate at times, and hence about which to recommend changes of attitude.Whereas the first concept implies a narrative, however attenuated, of emancipation and progress, the second concept sees interpretation as a convenient label for a whole series of exercises, some of which (but never all of which), at least in certain contexts, are simply useless, or pointless, or unintelligible, or unrecognized, and which we therefore should try to avoid. The first concept of interpretation, in fact, can create many unnecessary problems. The main problem is the allegedly conceptual one of a transcendental metadistinction between interpreting something and not-interpreting something (the word “describing” often acquires the meaning of “not-interpreting” in this context). One can praise the powers of noninterpretive ways of doing things, one can talk about the automatic uninterpreted application of rules, and one can even talk about the virtues of description. In every case, one tends to resurrect the awkward talk of metacategories, metapossibilities of discourse, metavocabularies, and indeed Dilthey-like dubious methodological distinctions between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften. Worse, one makes oneself vulnerable to the most demolishing of all standard objections to Dilthey’s distinction between erklären and verstehen, which consists in seeing all attempts to conceive of a realm independent from verstehen as yet another product of interpretation, and thus merely as forms of interpretation that dare not speak H O S T I L I T Y

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their name (there are, of course, ways to dispose of this form of self-righteousness, but I will not address them here). By contrast, the mere recommendation for localized changes of attitude is both less ambitious and less problematical than the concept just discussed. Instead of jumping to the jugular of conditions of possibility, and talking about transcendental metadistinctions, one could perhaps start by remarking that very often the learning of certain activities appears to include one’s refraining from certain more ostensible displays of hermeneutic bravado, also in the sense that those who indulge in that kind of bravado are typically not recognized as having mastered that particular skill, and often not recognized as participants at all. The mistake here would be to assimilate interpretation to, say, literary or political commentary, which defines clubs whose membership fee is typically paid in heavy hermeneutic currency (that is, clubs in which statements such as “The ultimate meaning of X is . . .” get used very often). The definition of interpretation given above is indifferent to the kind of hermeneutic currency that is used and so logically independent from formulae such as “The ultimate meaning of X is . . .”This seems to suggest that the holders of certain beliefs can often recognize other holders of the same beliefs by their refusal to engage in certain kinds of (interpretive) argument. On the contrary, interpretation,

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in these contexts, would imply a measure of skepticism that appears to exclude participation. In saying this, however, I am claiming not that certain activities are incompatible with interpretation, but that certain people would tend to say things like “The ultimate meaning of X is . . . ,” whereas certain other people would tend to say things like “Here I have no use for the phrase ‘The ultimate meaning of X is . . .’” Perhaps the whole issue can be conveniently abbreviated in a description of contingent anthropological contrasts: certain tribes would use “X is Y” whereas certain other tribes would use “X means Y,” supplementing their utterances with all sorts of unpleasant epithets directed at the other tribe. And one could even say that you cannot be recognized as a member of tribe A if you persist, in certain contexts, in saying B-things such as “X means Y.”This second concept of interpretation, therefore, can often evolve into specific recommendations, not wholly unlike Wittgenstein’s famous don’t-think-but-look advice, without, for that matter, embracing any alternative theory. Two very different difficulties arise at this point. The first has to do with context. One could be tempted to say that one refrains from B-talk whenever in a given context one can discern certain signs, or properties that function as signposts, as it were, wherever one would be able to read things like “A-talk unadvisable.” And still this won’t

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do, for the ability to perform such actions is contingent upon the specific way in which someone has been taught to do so.The universalization of one’s learning experiences is very often what leads one into the arms of unrestrained realism. Nevertheless, as we shall see in Chapter 8, no appeal to interpretation-independent properties will be useful in justifying interpretation-independent talk. The second difficulty is more serious and has to do with the notion of “recommending an attitude.” That notion presupposes the fact that one can choose between two different attitudes. And yet this metaphor seems to be, more often than not, totally inadequate. I would almost be tempted to say that, apart from a small number of cases, there are no unconditionally valid recommendations, and, moreover, that the scenario of deliberation never quite materializes. Most of the time, one just knows, or learns how to behave, and that is all.This is a most fortunate coincidence, for of course the model of deliberation has often been used, in the wake of Hans Georg Gadamer, to explain immoderately ambitious and fuzzy concepts such as that of a “hermeneutic claim to universality.”3 Deliberation, however, even in Gadamer’s sense, is not about whether one ought to interpret but rather about whether a certain interpretation matters to oneself. One cannot, therefore, embrace an alternative to interpretation as a result of a deliberation; nor can one even ground one’s nonhermeneutic recommendations on any a priori knowledge. F R I E N D S

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Rather, one realizes retrospectively and piecemeal that not much can be gained from embarking on a certain course of action, and is very often guided in the process by the puzzled or outraged faces, as well as by the ever-fallible advice, of surrounding people. And still, when one gives advice on the topic one tends to act as if one possesses some kind of a priori knowledge of it (“Do [or, rather, don’t] do this, and you will achieve supremely pleasant mental state A.”). The suggestion that there is an a priori knowledge of the effects of commending the virtues of purified description is at one with the notion that such recommendations are therapeutic in nature. All these problems and questions require a more concentrated, indeed a more systematic, mise-au-point of the matter of interpretation. What is finally implied by attributing meaning and intentions? Such will be the object of my final chapter.

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8 DEFERENCE

The most popular notion concerning interpretation is that things are “interpretable.”According to this notion, certain properties of certain objects render those objects especially apt to mean. As shown in previous chapters, however, the collection of those objects is desperately large, indeed too large to define the search for any features common to them all. For example, what could be common to, say, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Raphael’s Transfiguration, what I am writing right now, Simon’s having committed simony, a certain dog’s having not barked on a particular night, Finland’s having signed several commercial trade agreements with the former Soviet Union, and so on? Alas, perhaps things are no more and no less interpretable than they are, for instance, knowable. No special anxiety (except in the rarefied world of epistemologists) is usually connected to the belief that we can know and say true things about yellow patches on leaves, Great Expectations, or the causes of insomnia. Indeed, such anxiety-free beliefs we usually call

“facts.”What I am suggesting, and what has been suggested by many others, in sum, is that there might be some advantages to describing interpretation as a set of complex actions performed in connection to a motley collection of things rather than as an attempt to capture the intrinsic properties of things. The fact remains, nevertheless, that more often than not such actions are described as attempts to capture the intrinsic properties of things, although it is perfectly possible that all such descriptions are misleading and confused. I will not try to settle this issue here (frankly, because I do not believe there is an issue to be settled), but I will talk about the attribution of features to things, leaving aside all discussion about the reality of such features. Some of us would be surprised by the fact that some people think that the actions of a person born in April 1976 were affected by the reciprocal position of Neptune and Pluto in late December 1994, just as some others would be surprised by the fact that some people see the future of Western music in the first part of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue K546, or by the fact that in some quarters unusual verbal contortions are performed in relation to a set of marks on a page, known, for short, as the Bible, or Finnegans Wake, or “Der Atlas,” or Meditationes de prima philosophia. Indeed, it is conceivable that what most of us would call interpretation could be described by others precisely as a D E F E R E N C E

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strange, incomprehensible exercise, perhaps akin to what we in turn would consider a rain dance, or a complex ceremony in a physics laboratory. I suspect that one can learn more about the problems of interpretation from the puzzled descriptions of those for whom certain kinds of interpretation are incomprehensible than from the authorized voice of the participants in those interpretive exercises. I can very well imagine a puzzled report in which the author describes a room in a building (decorated with an insignia and a motto in overly perfect Latin) where twelve people gather around a set of marks on a page (call them X) and debate theses such as “X says that love is utterly impossible.” I can even imagine that the author of the report knows and masters a certain use of the verb “to say” in which sentences like “Simon says that love is utterly impossible” pose no special problems. Interpretation as it is practiced in such rooms could, after all, be described as a slightly odd use of verbs like “to say,” connected to subjects unlike “Simon.” Such subjects often, but not always, correspond to Clement of Alexandria’s “dead matter.” However, one can argue not that the proper construction of verbs like “to say” requires subjects like “Simon,” but that one will be admitted to or excluded from certain places on grounds apparently as thin as one’s own proclivities regarding the syntax of “to say.” Even sentences like “Simon said P” are regarded as ungrammatical

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in certain quarters, for instance, at a professional gathering of Lacanian criminologists (for whom, in general, “P said Simon” is the proper way to speak). Several not necessarily incompatible definitions of “interpretation” can follow. The slightly odd use of verbs like “to say” above allows us, as shown in Chapter 7, functionally to describe interpretation as a set of actions that, by attributing language and intentions to certain objects, also skip all further consideration of finer ontological distinctions between those objects, which is only a way of saying that they don’t recognize any appeals to differences between Simon and Simon, Inc., as a ground for distinguishing processes such as interpretation-of-Simon and interpretation-of-Simon, Inc. Consideration of differences in modes of being between Simon and Simon, Inc., by contrast, usually implies the kind of outraged complaint about interpretation according to which interpretation is described as nothing but an elaborate exercise designed to make Simon, Inc., and other unspeaking objects speak. The problem, however, is that at this level even Simon has to be attributed intentions, qualifying him as an unspeaking object. In a world in which language-noises were to be treated as peristaltic movements, that is, as purely physiological events, there would be no temptation whatsoever to speak of ontological differences between Simon and Simon, Inc., just as in a world in which Simon would speak

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only Finnish and I wouldn’t, I would have no way of telling whether Simon was only making noises by appealing to either of us. To explain these actions, which are both absolutely current and, when under descriptions such as mine above, absolutely exotic, one often appeals to sets of putative beliefs by their protagonists. One then says that those protagonists believe certain pieces of matter to be interpretable, in the special sense that they believe they are themselves in a position such that they can understand them. These are very often beliefs in certain special abilities, acquired through repeated experience, innate intuition, and so on, as well as beliefs about the virtues of certain kinds of specialized knowledge that can be learned and taught, often in special places: in the case of Great Expectations, knowledge about other opinions about Great Expectations, about The Pickwick Papers, about a man known as Charles Dickens, about a complex set of descriptions known as “marriage in Britain in the first part of the nineteenth century,” about certain recognizable ways of constructing sentences in English, and so on. At a less obvious level, this also means what one could call a belief in a common language—a putative language that is common both to the objects one makes speak and to one’s own language. That things like Great Expectations, or dogs, or Finland, always speak to us in our own language (that is, that they say things we can understand) is something that has F R I E N D S

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received very little attention and that, I believe, is nevertheless crucial. Were dogs to speak only in Cynic, and Finland in Finnic (I do not mean Finnish), and Great Expectations in Great-expectationese, interpretation would never have been an activity or a problem. It is clear, of course, that I am using the word “language” in a sense that is not that of linguists. In this latter sense, neither dogs, nor Finland, nor Great Expectations can speak. In the sense I am using the word, though, they can and do. But then again, perhaps the fact that Simon and I speak the same language (in a linguist’s sense of “language”) is ultimately irrelevant to the fact that I believe that I can understand what simple Simon says. What matters is what I do to Simon, or Finland, or Great Expectations, or dogs: and whereas it generally seems sensible to ascribe propositional attitudes and mental states to Simon, and only marginally more outlandish to do the same to Finland, there is no difference, at this level, between interpreting Simon and interpreting Finland. Indeed, we know how to do so in both cases, although perhaps some of us do not know how to do so to quarks, or stones, or trees, and some of us have forgotten how to do so to two-year-old Simons, God, and certain reciprocal positions of Neptune and Pluto. There are, in fact, several available histories of what counts as susceptible to meaning something, supplemented by several available histories about the places one goes or the persons one talks to in order to acquire what is variably recognized D E F E R E N C E

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as the ability to do so. Not all of these are cumulative histories: disappearances, as well as accumulation, are always possible. Perhaps understanding Great Expectations is only possible after having forgotten how to understand twoyear-old Simons, or perhaps, as one of my professors used to say, understanding Heidegger’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes is only possible after having remembered how we used to understand two-year-old utterly simple Simon. All these questions allow us into a further point, which is also not known for having received the attention of those who deal with these questions, and indeed is very little known. Such is the fact that whatever is thought to deserve interpretation is also thought to matter to those who engage in that kind of exercise. I do not mean that one has to like what one interprets, although, especially in the case of art, that inference is usually tacitly granted. There does not seem, however, to be a necessary connection between liking X and treating X as being interpretable, just as there does not seem to be a connection between eating and liking what one eats. Nor does “mattering to” seem necessarily to imply the presence of any shivering of an existential sort, although of course it can sometimes imply that.What it most often seems to imply, rather, is the consideration (and the not always explicit claim) that one is in a special position to do so, either because one has a certain specialized knowledge or because one happens to be in a special place at a special time. At some point or another F R I E N D S

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everybody has claimed to be in a position such as knowing that one’s lemon tree needs watering, that Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch needs to be connected to the hierarchies of urban power in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, that one needs to know Finnish to understand certain noises coming out of Simon’s mouth, and even that one needs to know Finnic (an unspeakable language, if ever there was one) in order to do certain things in relation to Finland. It is in this sense that “mattering” was used above. There are numerous formal and informal societies of friends of interpretable objects. Some of them have been mentioned in previous chapters (Stone’s “friends of the natural object” in Chapter 5, the various kinds of amis du peuple in Chapter 3). Many others, of course, haven’t: and yet one could very well see philologists and philosophers as belonging to multiple comparable societies. The sole business of the various societies of friends of interpretable objects consists in attributing intentions and language to various bits and pieces of the world, making what nonmembers call “all kinds of unexpected things” speak. The fact remains that members of societies of friends are essentially amateurs, although few like to describe themselves as such. It might be that this vis amatoria can be more soberly paraphrased as “one’s not being indifferent to certain things” taking place, namely, the destruction of what one believes are the things one is in the position to interpret. A cynic could say that were such things to be D E F E R E N C E

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destroyed, one would be out of business, and that would be a regrettable event. The cynic’s thesis would be true were the matter merely a professional one. However, the notion that the murder of my dog would be regrettable because I would be deprived of an opportunity to do some things I do well, namely, to care for him, to exercise my English skills, or to interpret what he does, strikes me as mildly inadequate, at best. Being affected by a loss is not strictly comparable to unemployment. Moreover, this nonindifference that I claim is connected to interpretability is very often accompanied by a certain form of deference toward the object so constituted. My next argument will be that specific forms of that deference consist in describing those objects as possessing properties independent from what I do to and with them, namely, rights or physical, intrinsic features. Words like “reality,” one could say, denote forms of deference. But an intermediate step is still needed. This step has to do with the vexata quaestio of representation, which has already been discussed at some length in Chapters 5 and 6, albeit in a different context. When discussing interpretation, “representation” often appears as shorthand for a property that proper interpretations should display, namely, that they should be capable of standing for whatever it is they are discussing. Such a property is more often than not predicated on notions such as resemblance and correspondence. This need not depend F R I E N D S

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on any theory about truth as correspondence, and I would not like to contrast at this point the now notorious, allegedly Cartesian doctrine on truth with some preferable doctrine emancipated from the errors of Western metaphysics. For my point it is enough to indicate that more often than not the satisfactory nature of interpretation is thought through notions such as that of adequate representation. One derives therefrom the idea of representationality as the uncontroversial property par excellence of every interpretation. If my arguments in what precedes this step are correct, this description will not do, for my arguments appear to exclude the very notion of “the uncontroversial property par excellence of every interpretation,” and so every “more-representational-thanthou” type of polemics. A second sense of “representation,” however, is wholly compatible with what I have been saying and seems helpful in this description of interpretation. Such is the sense in which the person who believes she is providing accurate descriptions of Great Expectations, of Finland, or of insomnia (call her Simon) usually also believes she is talking for the object, very much in the sense that a political official, elected or not, believes he or she is talking for his or her real or putative constituency. Now of course being a representative of Great Expectations is not an elected function, unlike perhaps being the representative of the 160,000 residents of an electoral district in India. And yet the D E F E R E N C E

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means of representation, or the process through which one becomes the representative of something else, is oddly irrelevant to the specific pathos of representatives. One might talk of democracy in the latter case and of elective affinities in the former. Nonetheless, even notions such as “elective affinities” contain a powerful doctrine about representation, and this in spite of the fact that “elective” actually means “unelected” there (the only difference between systems of representation is a difference between ways of getting rid of representatives, not a difference between more or less perfect forms of representation). In both cases above, justifications boil down to justifications of special abilities, which in turn are usually the antecedent in narratives about “how I became the representative I now am.” Representation, in this second sense, is merely a dignified paraphrase of the fact that one is not an interpreter for no special reason, as well as a devious equivalent of a strange claim, according to which one sees oneself as the best available speaker for whatever one is interpreting. One is now in a much better position to understand the implications of claiming, as I did above, that there is a connection between deferring to an object and ascribing intrinsic properties to it. Deferring to objects is a description of certain activities, namely, interpretation, that consist in the ascription of intrinsic properties to those objects.These activities I then went on to call “representation.” In this sense, therefore, intrinsic properties have F R I E N D S

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been described as a function of representation, not, as is customarily the case, as its antecedent. This point, it should be added, is both a point in political philosophy and a point in discussions about interpretation. As such, it becomes vulnerable to a well-known line of attack: if neither textual features nor human rights are intrinsic properties of objects such as books or human beings, does that mean that they are merely fictional constructs? Does that mean, horribile dictu, that, despite the eponymous Declaration, there is no such thing as Human Rights? My answer to this line of attack is, I’m afraid, “yes,” and then again “no.” The answer is “yes” in the sense that intrinsic dignity and meaning are bestowed goods, very much like compliments or honors, retrospective forms of acknowledgment that the disappearance of a certain object would matter to us. The answer is also “yes” in the sense that there are no a priori restrictions as to things unsusceptible to being bestowed these kinds of honors (who would have thought, after all, that the bald eagle, the ozone layer, or two-yearold Simon would ever have acquired their current dignity?). In the end, however, the answer has to be “no,” in the sense that the notion that I am not indifferent to the destiny of X seems to be tied in with the notion that I did not make up my difference, my deference. It would seem that properties of texts, just like properties of human beings, are things made that no one can make on one’s own, things made by no one. There is no peculiar paradox D E F E R E N C E

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to this situation, as several well-known parallel cases can attest: this, after all, is the case of anonymous jokes and customs in general, the case of most objects about whose historical origin we have little doubt, about whose originators we have little knowledge, and about whose production we can plausibly entertain no ambitions whatsoever. The kind of prosaic explanation I am providing here has many things to do with what Robert Nozick (after Adam Smith) has memorably called “invisible-hand explanations.”1 Such explanations show that, according to Nozick, “some overall pattern or design, which one would have thought had to be produced by an individual’s or group’s successful attempt to realize the pattern, instead was produced and maintained by a process that in no way had the overall pattern or design ‘in mind.’”2 The kind of explanation I have provided, again in Nozick’s words, “explains what looks to be the product of someone’s intentional design, as not being brought about by anyone’s intentions.”3 As one can see from the development of both the previous chapter and this chapter (and this is hardly an unequivocal moment of self-flattery), there do not seem to be very interesting and general things one can say about interpretation, and especially not many things one can say about interpretability and interpretable objects, let alone about common features of interpretable objects, except perhaps that there are no such things, or at least that there is not F R I E N D S

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much need for those entities to characterize what I have been calling “interpretation.” And yet most people who write on the subject behave as if there were indeed things such as interpretability, interpretable objects, and common features of interpretable objects, and so in the end I might very well be wrong—at least on statistic grounds. Or then again, perhaps saying general things about interpretation is an example of the performing of a function Kant famously described at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely, a function performed by philosophers as “the law-givers of humankind.” 4 The author of the first thorough revision of Kant’s philosophy, Fichte, at the very beginning of his career felt awkward about such a picture (perhaps this was due to the coldness of the reception he got from Kant when he visited him in Königsberg in 1792). Be that as it may, in a course description written about 1794, Fichte declared: “We are not the law-givers of human spirit, but its historiographers; perhaps not journalists proper, but at least pragmatic history writers.”5 Not many philosophers (and certainly not Fichte, who then went to Jena to become more of a law-giver than Kant ever was) have taken this picture seriously. In my view, this accounts for the little that can be expected from most philosophers in regard to the matter of interpretation.

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NOTES

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INDEX

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. I leave out of the argument of this book detailed discussions of membership and the formulation of criteria for describing and comparing societies of which I am (or am not) a member. 2. O. K. Bouwsma, Without Proof or Evidence, J. L. Craft and R. E. Hustwit, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 28. 3. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), ix. 4. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, T. Irwin, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 8.1155a23. 5. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 8.1155b28–29. The example Aristotle gives is that of love for wine. 1

SENSIBLE

ECONOMICS

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit, G. E. M.Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, eds.; D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans., On Certainty (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), sect. 674.

2. The example occurs in so many words in G. E. Moore, “Proof of an External World” (1939), Philosophical Papers (New York: Collier, 1966), 126–148. Perhaps it alludes to the wellknown example in the fourth paragraph of Descartes’s first Metaphysical Meditation. 3. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus, C. Bailey, trans., in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, W. J. Oates, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1940), 53–64, quote from p. 60. 4. Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding. Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätze. Gesammtausgabe. II Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923–1944 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984), vol. 41, 211. 5. All quotes are from Metaphysics, W. D. Ross, trans., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, J. Barnes, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 2:1552–1728. 6. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a. 7. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982a. 8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 981b. 9. Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (1913; Paris: Hermann, 1973), 5:233–260. 10. For instance, in Anthony Kenny, Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 68. 11. Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, College of St. Bonaventure, ed., in Opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1891), 5:317–325. 12. Theodore of Studion, Antirrhetici. Patrologia Graeca (hereafter PG; Patrologia Latina hereafter PL), 99:327–436; C. P. Roth, trans., On the Holy Icons (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981).

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13. John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, PG, 94:789–1228, 1:853b. 14. Nicephorus, Antirrhetici, PG, 100:206–533, 1.232a ff., 1.236c ff. 15. Theodore, Antirrhetici, PG, 3.429b. 16. All quotes are from Categories, J. L.Ackrill, trans., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1:3–24. 17. Aristotle, Categories, 6a. 18. This is of course not the only translation of eidos, but it does capture the implications of Aristotle’s use of the term in, for example, De anima, 432a4–5. See De anima, J. A. Smith, trans., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1:641–692, where eide¯ is rendered as “sensible forms.” 19. Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet, Preface to Nicéphore, Discours contre les iconoclastes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1989), 1–34, quote from p. 24. 20. S. Artemii passio, PG, 96:1252–1320, quote from p. 1309a. 2

ICONOCLASM

1. Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii. Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten. Julius von Schlosser, ed. (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1912), 1:63, 3.3.14v. Schlosser remarks that the events must have taken place before 1348 (Ghiberti, 2:190), and also that the statue was probably a Roman copy; see Schlosser, Leben und Meinungen des florentinischen Bildners Lorenzo Ghiberti (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1941), 154. “This statue,” Ghiberti confesses, “I would not have seen if it had not been drawn by a very great painter of the city of Siena, whose name was Ambruogio Lorenzetti” (Ghiberti, 1:63, 3.3.14v. For details of the now lost

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drawing, see Schlosser, 156). Had it not been described by Ghiberti, one could add, we would not have known about the statue at all, because, in fact, Lorenzetti’s drawing was also lost. Ghiberti’s description of the statue, however, is rather succinct, and the only specific detail he mentions is the existence of a dolphin on a leg. This somewhat peculiar attribute has led several art historians to take it for a statue of Venus. For this example and many hours of illuminating discussion I thank Hellmut Wohl. 2. Ghiberti, Commentarii, 1:63, 3.3.14v. 3. Ghiberti, Commentarii, 1:63, 3.3.14v. 4. The text of the decision is collected by Lisini in the Miscellanea Storica Senese, 5:175–176 (1898), and transcribed by Schlosser, Leben und Meinungen, 153. 5. Ghiberti, Commentarii, 1:63, 3.3.14v. 6. Schlosser, Leben und Meinungen, 153. Italics in the original. 7. See, for example, Martin Warnke, ed., Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks (Munich: Hanser, 1973), which collects otherwise excellent essays on what are taken to be instances of a general transhistorical phenomenon termed “Iconoclasm.” 8. Brief introductory historical descriptions can be found in John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983), 42–53, and Cyril Mango’s “Historical Introduction,” in Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin, eds., Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977), 1–6. 9. Ernst Kitzinger, “On Some Icons of the Seventh Century,” in K.Weitzmann, ed., Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Albert Matthias Friend, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 132–150. Estimates vary, however. See Jaroslav N O T E S

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29–33

Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 4. 10. The full text was first published by Mansi in 1767 and can be found in H. Hennephof, ed., Textus byzantinos ad iconomachiam pertinentes (Leiden, 1969), 61–78. S. Gero translated it in his Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Constantine V, with Particular Attention to the Oriental Sources (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 1977), 68–94. 11. The full text of the Antirrhetici is in PG, 100:206–533.A recent French translation and extended discussion by MarieJosé Mondzain-Baudinet can be found in Nicéphore, Discours contre les iconoclastes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1989); hereafter Antirrhetici. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 37–52, paraphrases and also discusses the text. 12. The expression was used by Eusebius in the fourth century [Letter to Constantia], PG, 20:1545ff. A partial translation can be found in C. Mango, ed. and trans., The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972), 16–18. 13. Justin, Apolog. 9, quoted in the still exceptional Edwyn Bevan, Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and Christianity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), 94. 14. Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople, Short History, C. Mango, ed. and trans. (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990), par. 56ff. 15. For example, Antirrhetici, 3.504c ff. 16. Theophanes, The Chronicle, H.Turtledove, ed. and trans. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 17. Theophanes, The Chronicle, 135, s.v.Annus Mundi 6267. N O T E S

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18. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 169–175. For a general vocabulary of anti-Iconoclastic terms in Nicephorus’s Antirrhetici, see Mondzain-Baudinet, Antirrhetici, 327–350. 19. Questions 1–24 (in the first two Antirrhetici) were first compiled by Georg Ostrogorsky, Studien zur Geschichte des byzantinischen Bilderstreites, Historische Untersuchungen, 5 (Breslau, 1929). A complete, more accessible list has been published by Mondzain-Baudinet, in Antirrhetici, 297–302. 20. For a general overview, see Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 143–151. 21. Antirrhetici, 2.356a. 22. John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, PG, 94, 853b. Theodore the Studite, in his third Antirrheticus, offers an even longer list of modes of circumscription: “comprehension [katale¯ psis], quantity, quality, position [thesis], places [topoi], times, figures [sche¯ mata], and bodies [so¯ mata].” Antirrhetici tres aduersus Iconomachos, hereafter Th., Antirrhetici, 396a–b. The full text is in PG, 99.328b–436a. Unless otherwise indicated, I follow the English translation by C. P. Roth, On the Holy Icons (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981). Page numbers refer to the PG text. 23. On this particularly sensitive issue, the standard antiIconoclastic answer (although by no means the only answer) as we find it in Nicephorus, for example, consists in distinguishing sharply between “depicting” and “circumscribing.” Cf. the opposition between zo¯ graphein and zo¯ perigraphein in Antirrhetici, 2.365a. 24. Antirrhetici, 2.332b. 25. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 90. 26. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 91. The sixteenth canon mentions again setting up “the forms of all the saints in lifeless N O T E S

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and dumb icons, made of material colours [hagion ideas he¯ n eikosin apsuchois kai anaudois ex hulikon chro¯ mato¯ n].” 27. Antirrhetici, 2.333b. 28. Mondzain-Baudinet, n9 to Antirrhetici, 2.336a. 29. Antirrhetici, 2.336a. For a brief summary of the Byzantine displacement of the Classical analogy between methexis (participation) and mime¯ sis (representation) see Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 7–8. “Form” for the Iconoclasts is discussed by Ambrosios Giakalis, Images of the Divine:The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 70–74. 30. For example, Antirrhetici, 2.337a: “this bread . . . figures His flesh as it becomes a sign [tupon] of His body.” 31. Nicephorus shrewdly points out, in his criticism of this particular fragment, that for Constantine, this means that “image and prototype do not differ between each other.” Antirrhetici, 2.337a. For the theological contradictions entailed by this perspective see, for example, Giakalis, Images of the Divine, 68–69. 32. For a different position see Pelikan, Imago Dei, 67ff. Pelikan argues that “the Iconoclastic controversy was the first thoroughgoing debate in the history of the church about the nature and function of religious art and the possibility of a Christian aesthetics” (67). 33. The poem is translated by C. Mango in Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, 185. The text is quoted by Theodore of Studion in his Refutatio et subversio impiorum poematum, PG, 99, 437c. 34. The phrase was used in the letter Ad Theophilum, published by Louis Duchesne, 1912–13, “L’Iconographie byzantine dans un document grec du IXe siècle,” Roma e l’Oriente. Rivista N O T E S

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criptoferratense per l’unione delle chiese (1912–13), 5:222–239, 273–285, 349–358, esp. 353. 35. Stephen, Vita Sancti Stephani Junioris, PG, 100, 1069a ff. The adjective “aniconique” is used by Louis Bréhier (1904), La Querelle des images (VIIIe–IXe Siècles) (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 47. And yet, Bréhier is the first indirectly to acknowledge that, in spite of the numerous replacements of icons, there is no Iconoclastic “art” proper in Byzantium. 36. For example, Mango, Art, xiv–xv. 37. Stephen, Vita Sancti Stephani Junioris, 1120c. 38. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 159, n42. 39. Ad Theophilum, 351. 40. Saint John of Damascus, De imaginibus, PG, 94, 1232– 1420.The text has been translated into English by David Anderson, On the Divine Images:Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980). 41. De imaginibus, 1348d. 42. Proskune¯ sis is usually translated as adoratio or “worship.” I find the term “prosternation,” used in English in a similar sense, to be preferable. However, in contexts where I feel “prosternation before” tends to overcomplicate the text and its syntax, I use “veneration” for proskune¯ sis. 43. David Anderson, in his otherwise excellent translation, feels the need to overclarify this fact, and translates proskune¯ sis both as “absolute worship” (prosternation owed to God) and as “relative worship” (prosternation not owed to God). And yet, the only distinction John makes between these two types of prosternation is that the second type refers to “things found in the Scriptures that are susceptible to adoration” (De imagi-

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nibus, 1352a). In Nicephorus, by contrast, there is a much clearer distinction between prosternation out of latreia (adoration) and forms of prosternation out of time¯ (honor). Antirrhetici, 2.392c. 44. De imaginibus, 1353a. 45. De imaginibus, 1352a. 46. De imaginibus, 1353a. 47. De imaginibus, 1353c. 48. De imaginibus, 1353d. 49. De imaginibus, 1356a. 50. De imaginibus, 1356b. 51. De imaginibus, 1356b. 52. De imaginibus, 1356a. 53. De imaginibus, 1357c. 54. Th., Antirrhetici, 3.421a. 55. Th., Antirrhetici, 3.421c. Contrast with Quentin Bell, “Bad Art” (1962), in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 160–171, particularly with his emphasis on a “sentiment” that accompanies the experience of “bad art” (162.) 56. Th., Antirrhetici, 2.353d. For a discussion of the concept of “economy” in the context of a “management of the universe,” see Mondzain-Baudinet, Antirrhetici, 21, and Chapter 1 above. 57. Mondzain-Baudinet, Antirrhetici, 22. 58. Th., Antirrhetici, 3.429b. 59. Th., Antirrhetici, 1.344c. 60. Ad Theophilum, 278. 61. Ad Theophilum, 278. Emphasis added. 62. Theodore, Ep. 2.36, PG, 99, 1220a. Giakalis, Images

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of the Divine, 91, calls attention to the first formula (selfmanifested vision) and comments on it in passing. 63. Cyril Mango seems to be suggesting something similar when, against all attempts to “impose on Byzantine authors categories of thought and awareness that they did not possess,” he remarks that in Byzantine art there is only perfect resemblance: “whenever St. John chose to appear in a vision to a saintly man, he looked exactly like his image, and was, in fact, recognized by virtue of this resemblance.” Mango, Art, xv. 64. Léonide Ouspensky, La Théologie de l’icône dans l’Église orthodoxe (Paris: Éditions du Cerf ), 1980, 469. 65. Ouspensky, Théologie, 472. 66. Although it has been used in contemporary Christian Orthodox justifications of the icon; see, for example, Giakalis, Images of the Divine, 54–59. However, other, more conservative Orthodox scholars rightly point out that the success of the argument in the West hides the fact that in the Eastern traditions it has always been deemed insufficient. See also Ouspensky, La Théologie, 182–183, for sources. 67. Bréhier, La Querelle des images, 56. 68. Gregory, Ep., 9.105, quoted from PL by Bevan, Holy Images, 126. 69. Quoted in Bevan, Holy Images, 126. 70. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (hereafter KrV), A21/ B35–6. 71. Pelikan, Imago Dei, 99–119, provides a useful summary of the oscillations in importance of aisthe¯ sis in Eastern Christian theological debates that decisively complicates the idea of a mere opposition between and economic and a mimetic version of Christianity. This, of course, as pointed out earlier, does not make him right in suggesting that Eastern Christian theological N O T E S

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debates concerning icons were aesthetic debates, in the postSchillerian sense of the term. 72. Conversely, one very often senses in Protestant writers (as well as in contemporary Catholic writers) a certain nostalgia for a purely aesthetic reduction of Christianity, which very often translates into an aesthetization of proskune¯ sis. See, for instance, the barely repressed admiration of Edwyn Bevan for the way in which the Roman Catholic Church managed not to “eliminate from religion the part played by material things in stimulating the senses” (Holy Images, 167). Bevan indeed suggests that “we may be ready to allow any amount of sensestimulation in religion, and not to abandon Protestant principles” (168). American Evangelism, rather than High-Church Anglicanism or Scottish Presbyterianism, has, of course understood well and incorporated thoroughly the consequences of the conflation of proskune¯ sis and aisthe¯ sis. 73. Bréhier, La Querelle des images, 61. 74. This point I take to be implicit in, for example, Hans Belting, Bild und Kult.Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (1990), trans. E. Jephcott, Likeness and Presence:A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). One of Belting’s main historical claims is that “[in the Renaissance] the cult of the work of art . . . replaces the cult of the holy image” (489–490). To this claim, Belting adds a metahistorical claim according to which “art” means a “loss of power” for the image (14–16).Within Belting’s historical eschatology, all references to a fullness of power have to be understood as references to an originary moment in the history of the power of images, which history is compelled to repeat in an ever more weakened way. For reasons that will become apparent below, I am reluctant to endorse this latter claim. N O T E S

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3

PRESERVATION

1. The tendency to see events subsequent to the Iconoclastic crises as recurrences of a phenomenon thus termed Iconoclasm is particularly noticeable in Abbé Grégoire’s inaugural treatment of the topic of “Vandalism.” For Grégoire, indeed, those whom he calls “Vandals” (this description is again an instance of explanation through recurrence, since by “Vandals” he really means neo-Vandals) are “the new Iconoclasts.” Henri, Abbé Grégoire, Rapport sur les destructions opérées par le vandalisme et sur les moyens de le réprimer (21 nivôse an II/Jan. 10, 1794), in Oeuvres de l’Abbé Grégoire (Nendeln-Paris: KTO P-EDHIS, 1977), 2:257–278, esp. 260; Hereafter Report, 1. Only apparently is the treatment of Iconoclasm as a species of Vandalism the converse case. For authors like Dario Gamboni, who at times subscribe to this latter theory, Iconoclasm remains a type, rather than a localized event, a characterizable “species” of Vandalism. See Dario Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne. Théorie et pratiques contemporaines du vandalisme artistique (ZurichLausanne: Institut Suisse pour l’Etude de l’Art—Les Editions d’En-Bas, 1983), 7. More recently, Gamboni has come to question the possibility of a type/token relation between Iconoclasm and Vandalism (whichever term happens to be the type) and to characterize the two terms independently of each other. This, however, has not prevented him from resorting time and again to the discarded structure, as when he opposes intentional forms of destruction, which he associates with Iconoclasm, to “gratuitous” forms of destruction typical of Vandalism. See Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 18–19. This

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sort of approach should not be confused with that of authors such as David Freedberg, whose descriptions of localized events subsequently brought together under the label “Iconoclasm” are aimed at showing the way in which “iconoclasm crucially exposes the dialectic of the relationship between image as material object and beholder, and painfully sears away any lingering notion we may still have of the possibility of an idealistic or internally formalist basis for the history of art.” David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarsen: Gary Schwartz, 1985), 7. 2. See especially, for example, Colin Ward, ed., Vandalism (London: The Architectural Press, 1973), especially Stanley Cohen’s essay, “Property Destruction: Motives and Meanings,” 23–53. The obsolescence argument has been made, for instance, by Martin Warnke in Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks (Munich: Hanser, 1973), 8. 3. John Phillips, for instance, who uses the term “Iconoclasm” in reference to Reformation England, remarks that these latter-day Iconoclasts “did not predicate their destruction of objects in terms of an identifiable aesthetic governing works of art/artifice, as we now understand such aesthetics and such works.” John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), xi. 4. Chénier and Dusausoir et al., Office des décades ou discours, hymnes et prières en usage dans les Temples de la Raison (Paris: Dufart and Basset, 1793–1794,), 86–88; hereafter Pratique. I owe the reference to this text to Stanley J. Idzerda’s still very useful article “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 60:1 (1954), 13–26, esp. 23.

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5. Pratique, 88. 6. See, for example,Alan Tormey, “Aesthetic Rights,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 32:2 (1973), 163–170; David A. Goldblatt, “Do Works of Art Have Rights?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35 (1976), 69–77; Richard Brilliant, “Editorial: Do Art Objects Have Rights?” The Art Bulletin, 73:4 (1991), 534–535. 7. Henri, Abbé Grégoire, Mémoires, M. Carnot, ed. (Paris, 1837), 1:345. For the origin of the term Vandalisme, the classic text is still Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme. Les Monuments détruits de l’art français (1958), M. Fleury and G.-M. Leproux, eds. (Paris: Laffont, 1994), 9–13. 8. Henri, Abbé Grégoire, Troisième rapport sur le vandalisme (8 brumaire an III/Oct. 29, 1794), in Oeuvres de l’Abbé Grégoire, 2:338; hereafter Report, 3. 9. Henri, Abbé Grégoire, Second rapport sur le vandalisme (14 fructidor an II/Aug. 31, 1794), in Oeuvres de l’Abbé Grégoire, 2:322; hereafter Report, 2. 10. Report, 1:264. 11. Report, 2:330. 12. Report, 3:354. 13. Which is perhaps why, even in the best cases (for example, Réau), theories on Vandalism tend to be disappointing, whereas reports on certain actions thought to be deplorable tend to be useful. 14. Henry Lapauze, ed., Procès-verbaux de la Commune génerale des arts de peinture,sculpture,architecture et gravure [1793–4] et de la Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts [1794–5] (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1903; Session of the 6 Pluviôse,Year II), 213. 15. Gabrièle Sprigath, “Sur le vandalisme révolutionnaire,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 242 (Paris, 1980), N O T E S

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523–524. This predicament Stanley Idzerda calls “the tension between iconoclasm and the need to preserve the heritage of the arts,” which, as he adds, “remained a fact even during the most destructive periods during 1793–4.” Idzerda, “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” 22. 16. Réau, Histoire du vandalisme, 16. See also Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives, 17, on what he calls the “elision . . . of image and prototype” in portraits of sovereigns, even if he suggests, immediately afterward, that “we can always stand back, take hold of ourselves, aesthetically differentiate, and argue with ourselves against that elision.” 17. Julius S. Held, “Alteration and Mutilation of Works of Art,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 62 (1963), 4. 18. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments within the United Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the islands adjacent, with the dissolved Monasteries therein contained . . . (London: Thomas Harper, 1631), 51. 19. Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives, 35. 20. The quote translates the well-known definition of “image” by Cesare Ripa: images are “fatte per significare una diversa cosa daquella, che si vede con l’occhio.” Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall’antichità, e di propria inventione (1603; rpt., Olms: Hildesheim, 1970), 1. 21. My reference, of course, is to his ever-fascinating Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Leipzig: Klinchardt and Biermann, 1908), 1–2. For a recent example of the state-of-the-art in this kind of discussion see Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1985. 22. Most notoriously the British Museum, formed through N O T E S

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the acquisition—the funds for which were raised by a public lottery—of three private cabinets. Until 1963, its Board of Trustees included representatives of the three original collectors. See Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974). 23. Douglas Crimp, “This is Not a Museum of Art,” in Marge Goldwater, ed., Marcel Broodthaers (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 89. 24. The archetypal case again is that of the British Museum, organized into departments such as Manuscripts, Ethnology, Natural History, and Medieval and Later Antiquities. See Miller, That Noble Cabinet, 364–368. For a compressed recent discussion of the problems raised by the organization of museums, see David Carrier, “Restoration and Interpretation: A Philosopher’s Viewpoint,” in Wendy M.Watson, ed., Altered States:Conservation, Analysis, and the Interpretation of the Works of Art (South Hadley, Mass.: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1994), 25–26. 25. Encyclopédie, s.v. “Louvre, le” (Neuchâtel: Faulche, 1765), 9:707. 26. The phrase occurs in the Journal de Paris (March 31, 1777), 2, and is quoted in Andrew McClellan’s very useful Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. 27. McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 2. 28. McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 81, and the June 17, 1793, report by the Commission du Museum, quoted by Edouard Pommier, “Idéologie et musée à l’époque révolutionnaire,” in Michel Vovelle, ed., Les Images de la Révolution française (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988), 65.

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29. See McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 109–111, for the controversy over the Rubens cycle. 30. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” 26. 31. The traditional revolutionary argument notwithstanding, according to which (i) the Revolution belongs together with philosophy; (ii) the arts belong together with philosophy; and therefore (iii) the arts belong together with the Revolution. See Pommier, “Idéologie et musée à l’époque révolutionnaire,” 64, even if Pommier then goes on (wrongly, in my view) to say that, unlike the situation during the Ancien Régime, “the arts are part and parcel of the foundational culture of the Revolution.” It seems to me that the arts were already part of the foundational culture of the late Ancien Régime, as is abundantly shown by the role that d’Angiviller, as Directeur-Général des Bâtiments between 1774 and 1789, played in the constitution of the collections and indeed in the designing of what would become the Musée National. See McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 49–90. 32. Procès-verbaux de la Commission des monuments, 2:211, quoted by Idzerda, “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” 25. 33. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” 26. While implicitly in agreement with this point, McClellan suggests that in the process that he terms “displacement to a museum,” the “secularizing power” of the museum produced “a transformation from imago agens to work of art, a shift in emphasis from function to form, from signified to signifier.” McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 112–113. Against McClellan it can be remarked first that, as he himself points out (201), the “aestheticization of religious art” began much earlier, and is

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indeed already at work in Vasari’s Vite, and, second, that works of art, that is, imagines agentes in museums, are matter-of-factly attributed functions and meanings, rather than being miraculously preserved in a world of functionless form. Such a world exists only in the minds of those who persist in linking nebulous concepts such as “emergence of aesthetics” and “formalism.” 34. For a different version, which nevertheless attributes to Quatremère a crucial role, see Daniel J. Sherman, “Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism,” in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, D. J. Sherman and I. Rogoff, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 123–143. 35. Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres sur le projet d’enlever des monumens de l’Italie. Sur le préjudice qu’occasioneroient aux arts et à la Science, le déplacement des monumens de l’art de l’Italie, le démembrement de ses Ecoles, et la spoliation de ses Collections, Galeries, Musées, etc. (1796; Rome: 1815), 46. 36. See, for example, Jean-Louis Déotte, Le Musée, l’origine de l’esthétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 339: “such a system of fragments . . . aestheticizes what it exposes.” In a different vocabulary, Douglas Crimp, referring to the relation between Hegel’s Aesthetics and the founding of the Berlin Museum in 1829 (when the word “museum” acquired its current meaning as opposed to the older meaning, closer to “studio” or “academy”), argues that the founding of the modern museum “represented not the possibility of art’s rejuvenation but the irrevocability of art’s end,” and defines what he calls “a materialist aesthetics” as a “struggle . . . against the power of [this] legacy.” Douglas Crimp, “The End of Art and the Origin of the Museum,” Art Journal, 46:4 (1987), 265. This is of course also the tenor of the secular Hegelian brand of nostalgia of André N O T E S

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Malraux: in museums we have “not color but paintings, not sculpture but statues.” André Malraux, Les Voix du silence (Paris: NRF-Gallerie de la Pléiade, 1951), 13. Museums, for Malraux, are instances of a particular form of disease whose “virus dissolves [désagrège] everything into style” (44); “The representation of the world is succeeded by its annexation” (117). Malraux’s use of “style” above can be opposed to his use of “true style”: “the reduction of the eternal world to human perspective” (321). 37. Quoted in Sherman, “Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx,” 137. 38. Quatremère, Lettres, 27–28. 39. Quatremère, Lettres, 12. 40. Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in S. M. Weber and S. Weber, trans., Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 175. 41. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 175. 42. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 179. 43. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 185. 44. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 185. 45. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” trans. as “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, 23. 46. Encyclopédie, s.v. “Peinture,” 12:267, quoted in Idzerda, “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” 13. 47. Grégoire, Report, 3:353. 48. Alfred Rosenberg, “Weltanschauung und Kunst” (1935), in Selected Writings, Robert Pois, ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 163. 49. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 599. 50. Grégoire, Report, 3:357. 51. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 528. 52. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 629. N O T E S

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53. Malraux, Les Voix du silence, 631. 54. Malraux, Les Voix du silence 637. 55. Grégoire, Report, 1:269. 56. Quatremère, Lettres, 91. The full passage reads: “Il est évident qu’on ne peut pas diminuer autour de soi les lumières, les connoissances, les talens, le goût et l’amour des arts, sans les diminuer aussi chez soi. Il y a ici réciprocité d’action. La chaine électrique qui unit aujourd’hui le monde savant, ne peut recevoir et communiquer que des impressions simultanées. Un même mouvement entraîne aujourd’hui l’Europe dans la culture des arts; cette impulsion agit en raison directe de la puissance centrale qui émane de l’Italie et de Rome; diminuez celle-ci, vous affoiblissez celle-là.” 57. Quatremère, Lettres, 5. 58. Sharon A.Williams, The International and National Protection of Movable Cultural Property: A Comparative Study (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1978), 170. For a summary of the history of the concept see esp. 52ff. 59. The text of the Convention and its adjacent Regulations and Protocols are quoted in full in Williams, International and National Protection, 203–219. For the Preamble, see 203. This principle also figures prominently in the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1985): “Deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world” (Preamble). See also, for example, references to “property most representative of a natural environment or of the genius and the history of the peoples of the world” (Para. 13, 4). 60. Williams, International and National Protection, 202. N O T E S

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61. UNESCO Convention, Para. 3. 62. As, for example, in Marc Fumaroli’s L’Etat culturel. Essai sur une religion moderne (Paris: Fallois, 1991), where the bad cultural policy of the Fifth Republic (namely, of Malraux) is associated with Vichy and opposed to the virtuous (read “secular”) cultural policy of the Third Republic. 63. Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Band I: Der Produzionsprozeß des Kapitals (1867; Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1969), 50. Mutatis mutandis, this is not very different from the theological status (and the problems arising therefrom) of double-natured objects discussed in Chapter 2 above. 4

PERSONS

1. Clement of Alexandria, Protreptikos pros helle¯ nas; G. W. Butterworth, trans., The Exhortation to the Greeks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 4.51. 2. Clement, The Exhortation to the Greeks, 4.45, translation slightly altered. 3. Clement, The Exhortation to the Greeks, 4.50. 4. Aristotle, De Anima, 420b: “Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul [apsuchon] utters voice, it being only by a metaphor that we speak of the voice of the flute or the lyre.”Aristotle then goes on to distinguish between psophos, the mere noise made, for example, by insects, from phone¯ , defined as se¯ mantikos psophos, or “meaningful noise.” 5. MacPherson v.Buick Motor Co. 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916). I owe this example to Richard Weisberg. 6. Clement, The Exhortation to the Greeks, 4.52: “under the masks of demons [proso¯ peiois daimonio¯ n] you have made a comedy of that which is holy.” N O T E S

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7. W. W. Hyde, “The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 64:7 (1916), 701.A classic discussion of the special case of statues in this respect can be found in E. R. Dodds, “Theurgy,” in The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 292–295 8. E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals:The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials, Foreword by Nicholas Humphrey (London: Faber, 1987), 174. 9. Polydeukes, Onomastikon, 8.120, quoted in D. M. MacDowell, Athenian Homicide Law in the Age of the Orators (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 86. A good involuntary characterization of this procedure, made in reference to Tacitus, can be found in Roland Barthes, “Tacite et le baroque funèbre,” in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 110: “the act is always absorbed in an object.” Barthes’s point, however, as M. Riffaterre has shown, is that in Tacitus this formula has to do with the theme of the “innocent instruments of evil” and thus that “there is no animism” there. Michael Riffaterre, “Le Formalisme français,” in Essais de stylistique structurale, transl. D. Delas (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 281–282. 10. See Plato, Laws, 873e–874a, especially 874a3. 11. Pausanias,VI, ii, 6–8. 12. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law: The Collected Works of Justice Holmes, Sheldon Novick, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3:132. 13. Holmes, The Common Law, 120. 14. Clement, The Exhortation to the Greeks, 4.41. 15. Holmes, The Common Law, 120. 16. Holmes, The Common Law, 116: “the early forms of legal procedure were grounded in vengeance.” N O T E S

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17. Holmes, The Common Law, 120. 18. Holmes, The Common Law, 119. 19. For example, Just., Institutiones 4.9, pr., S. P. Scott, trans., The Civil Law (Cincinnati: Central Trust Company, 1932), 2:161: “if the ferocity [of animals] is born in them there is no cause of action; hence where a bear escapes from his owner and causes damage, the latter is not liable, because he ceased to be the owner when the beast escaped. Damage of this kind is such as is committed without malicious intent by whatever causes it.” 20. For the full argument see Justice Cardozo’s already mentioned classic 1916 opinion in McPherson v. Buick Motor Co., concerning this time not a bear but the Runabout: “if the nature of a thing is such that it is reasonably certain to place life and limb in peril when negligently made, it is then a thing of danger. Its nature gives warning of the consequences to be expected. If to the element of danger there is added knowledge that the thing will be used by persons other than the purchaser, and used without new tests, then, irrespective of contract, the manufacturer of this thing of danger is under a duty to make it carefully.” 21. Holmes, The Common Law, 130. 22. Holmes, The Common Law, 128. 23. Chief Justice Marshall, quoted by Justice Story in Malek Adhel, 2 How., 210, 234; quoted by Holmes, The Common Law, 129. Marshall’s opinion refers to U.S. vs. The Schooner Little Charles, now in 26 Fed.Cas., 979, 982 (no. 15,612). The case was presented to the circuit court,Virginia, in May 1818. 24. Justice Story in Malek Adhel, 2 How., 210, 234, quoted by Holmes, The Common Law, 129. Malek Adhel (the case of a ship accused of piracy against her owner’s will) was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1844. Story was at this point quoting N O T E S

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himself (albeit anonymously) in Palmyra, 12 Wheat., 1,14. This latter case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1827. 25. Holmes, The Common Law, 128. 26. Holmes, The Common Law, 129. 27. Holmes, The Common Law, 129. 28. Holmes, The Common Law, 130. 29. Holmes, The Common Law, 130. 5

RIGHTS

1. There is an abundant (if only sporadically fascinating) literature on the interests and the rights of nonhuman objects, especially animals (or nonhuman animals, as the current usage has it). R. G. Frey, in Interests and Rights:The Case against Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 78, distinguishes between two senses of “having an interest”: “X is in N’s best interest” and “N has an interest in X.” In the first case, anything can be denoted by N. In the second case, only human beings can be denoted by N. In the first sense of “having an interest,” tractors can have interests (80). For similar reasons, Frey opposes the very notion of rights, understood as the possibility of making claims on one’s behalf, as it is always possible to make claims on anyone or anything’s behalf (8). A critique of Frey’s position can be found in Lawrence E. Johnson, A Morally Deep World:An Essay on Moral Significance and Environmental Ethics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 75–96. For Johnson, species can have interests in Frey’s second sense of “having an interest,” as they are organic wholes, a process with past, present, and future (157). Moreover, recognizing the interests of something means, for Johnson, valuing it for its own sake, and is the natural consequence of holding certain values (284). H. J. McCloskey, in “Rights,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 15:59 (1965), 115–127, N O T E S

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meanwhile argues that things cannot have legal rights because they do not have interests (126), and things do not have interests because things cannot have anything. This last point is disputed by James Rachels in “Do Animals Have a Right to Liberty?”, in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976). For Rachels, interpreting Locke, animals have an interest in what they make for themselves (220). (Rachels’s argument is criticized by Donald Vandeveer, “Defending Animals by Appeals to Rights,” in Regan and Singer, eds., Animal Rights, 224ff.) Joel Feinberg, in “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations,” now in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), suggests that “having a right” is not coextensive with “having an interest,” so that, for example, animals have rights but not interests (172), even if plants do not have the former because they cannot have the latter (168). For Feinberg, having an interest implies having a cognitive apparatus (168). Hence, dead people have neither rights nor interests, although they can be granted the latter (at least) through a useful legal fiction (175). Peter Carruthers, in The Animals Issue:Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), suggests a distinction between “not having rights and interests” and “not mattering to us.” In his opinion, the former (but not the latter) expression applies meaningfully to inanimate objects, as it is possible to want to preserve inanimate objects without granting them interests or rights. This position is perhaps the bright side of what Robert Nozick approvingly, albeit tongue-in-cheek, termed “Kantianism for people, utilitarianism for animals.” See Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 45–47. For Peter Singer, the N O T E

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foremost representative of a whole Benthamite tradition, interests are acquired with the ability to suffer, and so, ipso facto, all suffering objects have interests. See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Random House, 1975), esp. chap. 1. A critical review of Singer can be found in Jan Narveson, “Animal Rights,” Canadian Journal of Phlosophy, 7:1 (March 1977), 161–178. Narveson suggests that major animal interests are not so much nonexistent as less important than minor human interests. Most varieties of contractualism, from Kant to Rawls, seem to be hostile to the notion of nonhuman rights. Perhaps this hostility can be retraced to Hobbes and his observation in Leviathan, I, xiv: “To make any covenants with bruit Beasts, is impossible, because, not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of, any translation of Right, nor can translate any Right to one another; and without mutual acceptation, there is no Covenant.” Mary Midgley, in “Duties Concerning Islands,” in Robert Elliot, ed., Environmental Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), applies the notion of duty without a contract to the cases of inanimate objects. Such cases involve what Holmes Ralston III calls “duties to the vulnerable mute,” “Duties to Endangered Species,” in Elliott, ed., Environmental Ethics, 66. Almost alone in his use of contractual metaphors in relation to inanimate objects is Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel; E. MacArthur and W. Paulson, trans., The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Serres’s point that the social contract wasn’t written in any language (39) is primarily a license to extend the metaphor of the contract to the physical world and grant what he calls “natural contracts” the ability to provide us with the world’s point of view (46). For panoramic discussions of some of these issues see Luc Ferry, Le N O T E

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Nouvel ordre écologique; C. Volk, trans., The New Ecological Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Tom Regan’s Introduction to Regan and Singer, eds., Animal Rights. The best philosophical history of the problem can be found in Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals:The Origins of the Western Debate (London: Duckworth,1993). 2. Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1974), 34, n98. 3. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 9. 4. Stone, for instance, argues that “it is quite misleading to say that “A has a right to . . .” can be fully explicated in terms of a certain set of specific legal rules, and the manner in which conclusions are drawn from them in a legal system . . . Introducing the notion of something having a right (simply speaking that way), brings into the legal system a flexibility and openendedness that no series of specifically stated legal rules . . . can capture” (Should Trees Have Standing?, 41). 5. Stone points out that “if ‘rights’ are to be granted to the environment, then for many of the same reasons it might bear ‘liabilities’ as well,” making thus conceivable the scenario of, say, the trial of an ocean (34). 6. D. M. MacDowell, Athenian Homicide Law in the Age of the Orators (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 88. The contradicting testimonies as to the nonexistence of ephetai in the prutaneion (Harpokration and Polydeukes) MacDowell attributes to a mistake. See also D. M. MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 117. For the characterization of ephetai (not exactly analogous to modern jurors) and the juror system in Athens, see respectively MacDowell, Law in Classical Athens, 117, 35ff. The modalities N O T E S

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and the meaning of ephesis (usually translated as “appeal”) have more recently been described in MacDowell, Law in Classical Athens, 30–31, as well as in Richard Bauman, Political Trials in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1990), 4–5. 7. E. R. Dodds remarks in this respect that “early Greek justice cared nothing for intent—it was the act that mattered.” See Dodds, “Theurgy,” in The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 3. 8. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 11. 9. As opposed to the ethical problem identified by people like Roderick Nash, who in principle agrees with Stone but then goes on to state that “if . . . people succeed in formulating moral rules respecting non-human entities, it may be contended that these entities have rights. From this standpoint the meaning of the rights of rocks is that we should be ethical, not merely economical, in our treatment of rocks.” “Do Rocks Have Rights?,” The Center Magazine, 10:6 (1977), 10. For Nash, a moral act (as opposed to specific jural forms of procedure) is what affords rights. In this sense, the certainty of the attribution can never be challenged, and, because such an attribution is unilateral, the causes for it are not taken to be external. Lawrence Tribe’s claims in this respect, although again he quotes Stone approvingly, seem to me to involve neither epistemological questions proper (as Stone’s do), nor ethical questions (as Nash’s do).Tribe contends that “affording legal rights to endangered species and threatened wilderness areas might . . . be regarded as a convenient technique for concentrating congeries of otherwise diffuse aesthetic and ecological concerns ultimately reducible to human interest—in other words, as a useful but quite transparent legal fiction.” “Ways Not to Think about

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Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law,” Yale Law Journal, 83:7 (1974), 1343. 10. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 24. 11. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 5. 12. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 47, n125. 13. Donald Davidson, “Rational Animals,” Dialectica, 36:4 (1982), 323. 14. Daniel Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (New York: Bradford, 1978), 267–285, quote p. 275. 15. Davidson, “Rational Animals,” 324–325. For Davidson, “a belief about a belief . . . requires the concept of belief,” “the subjective-objective contrast [is] required by belief,” and language “commands” the subjective-objective contrast. 16. One recognizes here a widespread (albeit vulnerable) expedient of contemporary thought. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir; A. Sheridan, trans., Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison (New York:Vintage, 1977). 17. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 17. A comparison with older instances of this topos (“they will speak if we find the right translator”) can be instructive. See, for example, Porphyry, De abst., III, 3.4–5. 18. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 17. 19. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?, 17. 20. Nash, “Do Rocks Have Rights?,” 10. 21. Ralston, “Duties to Endangered Species,” 66. 22. And yet the case of “ordinary citizens” is not significantly different from the other cases. Indeed, the problem of what counts as a meaningful sentence by someone can be a very real one (“Did N mean P?”), as is, in certain circumstances, the

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problem of knowing what counts as a meaningful sentence by myself (“Did I mean P?”). Both problems are problems of representation, in the sense that the word is used here. In either case I can make certain events count as evidence (that is, turn them into symptoms), even if I cannot be deceived by the evidence I take for truth (in a change of opinion one is also not allowing oneself to be deceived by other events, rather than just mistrusting certain evidence hitherto taken for granted). There seem to be, therefore, rules of representation in the case of “ordinary citizens,” just as there are indeed full-fledged theories on ways to know what one means. Perhaps Freud’s Super Ego is in this sense a “friend of the ordinary citizen.” 6

BODIES

1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1885). 2. Justice Black (dissenting), Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77, 87 (1938). Both this case and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad are mentioned in Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?: Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1974), 18, n51. 3. I. Th. Eschmann, O. P., remarks that the word universitas was used as a synonym for several dozen words, among them “respublica, regnum, gens, populus, civitas . . . ; villa, vicus, burgum, castrum, castellum; familia . . . ; societas professionis, negotiationis . . . ; collegium decurionum . . . ; Ecclesia universalis seu generalis . . . singula ecclesia, capitulum . . . ecclesiae collegiatae, monasterium . . . ; xenodochium . . . orphanotrophium, hospitium.” “St. Thomas and the Decretal of Innocent IV, Romana Ecclesia: Ceterum,” Mediaeval Studies, 8 (1946), 9. N O T E S

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E. R. Kantorowicz, in his monumental book The King’s Two Bodies, suggests that universitas was used by jurists in the late Middle Ages very much like “the Universals” was used by scholastic philosophy (without, for that matter, believing that the latter term was in the origin of the former): “[a]ccording to language and content . . . the jurists[,] ‘fictitious’ or ‘intellectual’ persons[,] [i.e., universitates] are hardly distinguishable from the Universals which the nominalists liked to call fictiones intellectuales.” The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 302. This, however, as Eschmann (33–34) indicates, could only have happened as a fourteenth-century revision of Innocent IV’s doctrine. 4. Innocent IV, Apparatus Innocentii IV PP. in Quinque Libros Decretalium (written circa 1245),Venice ed., 1481.The passages relevant to this issue are transcribed by Eschmann, The King’s Two Bodies, 29–32.The three quotes above are respectively from the so-called glosses Consiliarios (5.39.53), Culpabiles (5.39.64), and Abbatibus (5.3.30.) On res incorporalis in this context, see P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas. Expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le Moyen-Age latin (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 209–210. Eschmann’s study as a whole is indeed directed against the very notion of körperschaftliches Verschulden [corporate delict] and the “radical mistake” of supposing “a community to be, simpliciter et per se, one subject of action,” which he finds in the “Platonic ground” of both the Realism of Gierke and Maitland, and in the Fictionalism of Savigny (The King’s Two Bodies, 41). 5. Alberto Melloni, Innocenzo IV. La concezione e l’esperienza della cristianità come regimen unius personae (Genova: Marietti, 1990), 120–121. But see Innocent IV, 5.3.30: “universitas non potest accusari vel puniri.” As to the civil suit as a metaphorical replacement for a criminal suit, see 5.39.52: “Item poena N O T E S

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capitali vel mortis vel relegationis punietur universitas, si contra eam agatur criminatliter, sed poena capitis mutabitur in pecuniariam” (emphasis mine). This passage is transcribed and commented on in Walter Ullmann, “The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations,” Scholarship and Politics in the Middle Ages: Collected Studies (London:Variorum, 1978), xii, 82–83. 6. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 310. 7. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (308), relates this particular theory to Aquinas’s doctrine of the corpus mysticum, of which “membra . . . non sunt omnia simul” (Summa Theologica, IIIa, 8.3).The relationship between the notion of corpus mysticum and political and juridical thought can already be found in Otto von Gierke (1881), “Die publicistischen Lehren des Mittelalters,” Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, III; F. W. Maitland, trans., Political Theories of the Middle Age (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 23, albeit in connection to Nicholas of Cues. 8. This is the standard translation, used, for example, by Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. See, however, Eschmann, “St.Thomas and the Decretal of Innocent IV,” 35, for an alternative, incompatible translation. According to Eschmann, nomen juris should be translated as “the name of a right or privilege.” 9. The attribution to Innocent IV of the paternity of a theory of fiction as well as of the expression persona ficta can be found, for example, in Gierke’s Genossenschaftsrecht (Berlin: Weidmann, 1868–1913), 3:279 (for a summary of Gierke’s arguments see F.W. Maitland’s superb Introduction to his translation of part of the third volume of the Genossenschaftsrecht, xix). Eschmann points out that great historians of the law such as Gierke were in fact misled by fourteenth-century nominalist interpretations of Innocent’s doctrine on the incorporeality, and N O T E S

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thus of the fictional nature, of corporations, while being “unable to show a single text in which Innocent employs the word fiction in connection to this doctrine” (34). The one exception seems to be 2.20.57, in which one reads that “collegium in causa universitatis fingatur una persona.” Eschmann remarks nevertheless that the 1481 edition of the text (as opposed to the Frankfurt edition of 1570, which Gierke quotes) “reads fungatur instead of fingatur” (34, n151). Innocent, however, uses “fingo” in not wholly unrelated contexts, for example, in 1.31.13, when he observes that a bishop, as a member of a chapter, must “pretend to manage [or to represent] two persons [fingere gerere duas personas].” This last passage is quoted and discussed in Melloni, Innocenzo IV, 123. 10. Saint Isidore, in Etymologies, already distinguishes between two meanings of fingere: “One says that a vase is fictional [fictile] for the fictional [fictum] refers not [in this case] to a lie, but [to the fact] that it was formed [formatur] (by someone).” Etymologies 20.4.2., quoted in Michaud-Quantin, Universitas, 207, n23. 11. Gierke describes the failed attempts of John of Salisbury to establish a correspondence between the parts of the State and parts of the human body (24–25). Kantorowicz characterizes John as not having yet “consciously integrated the factor of unlimited Time, which was absorbed only when the state organism became a ‘body’ in the juridical sense: a universitas which ‘never dies’” (Political Theories of the Middle Ages, 311). 12. The brilliant analogy of Kantorowicz (The King’s Two Bodies, 302–303) between medieval doctrines on universitates and on angels also applies here, for angels, while potentially eternal, are created products as well, and thus figments of God’s power. Therefore, both corporations and angels (but not God) N O T E S

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have a history. The connection between the production of juridical fictions and power is very clearly expounded by Maitland in his Introduction to the Genossenschaftsrecht: quoting from Lucas de Penna’s fifty-ninth prerogative of the Emperor (“only the prince can pretend [fingit] what is not in the truth of things [quod in rei veritate non est]”), Maitland concludes that “the corporation is, and must be, the creature of the State” (xxx). It is in this precise sense that the angels are creatures of God. 13. See Ullmann, “The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations,” 80–81, on Johannes Bassianus’s twelfth-century definition of “corporate action.” This notion is of course crucial to the notion of corporate liability. Bassianus’s main argument was that a corporate action is recognizable by specific signs. I am indebted to Ullmann’s masterly essay for my historical exposition and perception of this matter. 14. Ullmann, “The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations,” 85. 15. By contrast, the argument against corporate responsibility was often built as an argument against the effectiveness of corporate sanctions. The juridical argument can be read in the words of Innocent III, which Innocent IV glosses approvingly (Apparatus Innocentii, 5.3.30), “when a multitude of offenders is in question, severity is prejudicial [quia multitudo reperitur in causa, severitati (est) aliquid detrahendum].” There is, however, an additional politico-moral general principle that one finds, for example, in St.Thomas Aquinas, which has to do with the counterproductive effects of punishing corporations. “In the infliction of punishment,” Aquinas writes, “it is not the punishment itself that is the end in view, but its medicinal properties” (Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, 43.7). Punishing certain crimes (and prosecuting certain corporate bodies, such as a crowd or a N O T E S

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prince) can therefore be wrong if, for instance, “the infliction of punishment will result in more numerous and more grievous sins being committed” (Summa Theologica, IIa–IIae, 43.7), for example, in a schism. The coupling of crowd and prince, which Aquinas uses in several places, can be found in the Glossa ordinaria (PL, 114:132) as a short paraphrase of St. Augustine Ep. 250, PL, 33:1066: “multitudo non est excommunicanda nec princeps populi.” All quotes in this note can be found in Eschmann, “St.Thomas and the Decretal of Innocent IV,” 32, 14, 16. 16. Bartolus, fol. 200, no. 4, quoted in Ullmann, “The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations,” 87, n.3. 17. Bartolus, quoted in Ullmann, “The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations,” 87, n.4. 18. Ullmann, “The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations,” 87. 19. Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Das Recht des Besitzes. Eine civilistische Abhandlung, 7th ed., A. F. Rudorff, ed. (Vienna: Gerold, 1865), 206. Original spelling maintained. 20. Savigny, Besitz, 206–207. 21. Savigny, Besitz, 206. 22. Savigny, Besitz, 207. 23. I translate “juristisch” as “juridical,” although in some relevant literature in English the forms “juristic” and “juristical” also occur. 24. Savigny, Besitz, 207. 25. Savigny’s use of “juridical fiction,” as discussed below, should not be confused with the much more empirical use of analogous expressions by, for example, Jeremy Bentham. For Bentham, although fictions in general are “one of those sorts of objects which in every language must . . . be spoken of as existing,” legal fictions present the “danger as that of producing . . . N O T E S

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persuasion, as that of their possessing . . . any real existence” and so partake of a “mischievous immorality.” C. K. Ogden, ed., Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, 1932), 16, 18. In his Theory of Legislation, indeed, legal fictions are merely false facts treated as if they were true. Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Legislation, Richard Hildreth, trans., C. K. Ogden, ed. (London: Routledge, 1950), 71. A classic case of the opposite tendency concerning juridical fictions, whereby fiction is promoted to the role of a transcendental principle prior to any moral evaluation and therefore independent from any distinction between “good” and “bad” fictions, can be found in Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen, und religiösen Fiktionem der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus. Mit einem Anhang über Kant und Nietzsche; C. K. Ogden, trans., The Philosophy of “As if ”:A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), 33ff. 26. Savigny, Besitz, 246. 27. Savigny, Besitz, 246. 28. Savigny, Besitz, 246. 29. Savigny, Besitz, 247. 30. Savigny, Besitz, 248. 31. Savigny, Besitz, 247. 32. Savigny, Besitz, 247, 248. 33. Savigny, Besitz, 247 n.1. 34. Friedrich Karl von Savigny, System des heutigen Römischen Rechts. II. Die Personen als Träger der Rechtsverhältnisse (Berlin:Veit, 1840), 282–283. Original spelling maintained. 35. Savigny, System, 283. 36. Savigny, System, 2. 37. Savigny, System, 236. N O T E S

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38. Savigny, System, 241. 39. Savigny, System, 241, note h. The expression quoted is from L.22, Dig., 46,1: “hereditas personae vice fungitur, sicuti municipium et decuria et societas.” 40. Savigny, System, 261–262. 7

HOSTILITY

TO

INTERPRETATION

1. This minimal definition is sufficient only for the purposes of the following discussion. See, however, Donald Davidson’s characterization of the topic in “Radical Interpretation,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 125–139.Analogously, throughout this book (and so in the definition above) I am using “objects” in a very loose and informal way (perhaps only as a dignified equivalent for “things” or “stuff ”), and in no way does my definition depend crucially on the notion of what Hilary Putnam calls “neutral, discourseindependent objects.” For a relation between this problem and the problem of interpretation, see Putnam’s essay “The Craving for Objectivity,” in Realism with a Human Face, J. Conant, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 120–131, esp. 121–122. 2. Putnam, “The Craving for Objectivity,” 130. I have developed this discussion somewhat in Manners of Interpretation: The Ends of Argument in Literary Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), esp. 151–153. 3. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik; J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, trans., 2nd rev. ed., Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1989), esp. 312–324. The phrase “hermeneutic claim to universality” was coined not by Gadamer but by Jürgen Habermas. N O T E S

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8

DEFERENCE

1. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 18–22. 2. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 18. 3. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 19. Chapter 7’s strict Iconoclast’s version of what Iconophiles do to icons (or Innocent IV’s remark that universitates are res incorporales, mentioned in Chapter 6) would echo meanwhile in Nozick’s comment of what he calls the opposite of invisible-hand explanations, namely, “hidden-hand explanations”: “A hidden-hand explanation explains what looks to be merely a disconnected set of facts that (certainly) is not the product of intentional design, as the product of an individual’s or group’s intentional design(s)” (19). The problem, however, is that the attribution of language and intentions is logically independent from the at most purely honorific acknowledgment that something (say, the behavior of Finland) is “(certainly) . . . not the product of intentional design.” In Nozick’s terms, perhaps, I have been providing in this chapter invisible-hand explanations for hidden-hand beliefs. 4. Kant, KrV, A839/B867. 5. J. G. Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogennanten Philosophie, als Einladungsschrift zu seinen Vorlesungen über diese Wissenschaft. Gesamtausgabe, I, 2: Werke 1793–1795, R. Lauth and H. Jacob, eds. (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1965), 91–172: “Wir sind nicht Gesetzgeber des menschlichen Geistes, sondern seine Historiographen; freilich nicht Zeitungsschreiber, sondern pragmatische Geschichtschreiber” (147).

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INDEX

Action(s), acts, agents, 80, 82, 108, 115–116, 117, 180n13 Adorno,Theodor, 63, 65–67, 165nn40–45 Ad Theophilum, 40, 44, 153n34, 154n39, 155nn60–61 Aesthetic discussions, aesthetics, 42, 46, 48, 67, 157n71, 164n33 Aisthe¯sis, 20–21, 25, 46, 47, 156n71, 157n72 Alternatives to interpretation, 91, 118–124, 128 Anderson, David, 154n43 Angels, 179–180n12 Anger, hatred, 74, 81 Angiviller, Charles Claude de la Billarderie, Comte d’, 163n31 Animus (intention, desire), 108–109 Answering back vs. sort of answering back, 1–2, 4

Anti-Iconoclasm, anti-Iconoclasts, 20, 21, 40 Antimuseum, 64 Antiskepticism, 67 Apprenticeship, 46 Aristotle, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 22, 78, 147nn4,5, 148nn5–8, 149nn16–18, 167n4 Art, 28, 31–33, 38, 39, 46, 47, 51–55, 59, 63, 65, 67, 70, 71, 74, 78, 157n74; art history, art historians, 30–31; bad art, 42, 67, 155n55; doctrines about art, 28, 40; religious art, 153n32, 163n33 Artemios, 26, 28 Art objects, artworks, works of art, 4, 30, 32, 46, 50, 65, 66, 76, 164n33 Attitude, 128 Augustine, 14, 15, 181n15 Autobiography, 86

Cardozo, Benjamin, 78, 82, 167n5, 169n20 Carrier, David, 162n24 Carruthers, Peter, 171n1 Certification, 93 Children, infants, minors, 7, 110, 111 Chomsky, Noam, 19 Circumscription (perigraphe¯), circumscribable (perigraptos), 20, 36–38, 152nn22,23 Civilization, 70 Clement of Alexandria, 77–81, 132, 167nn1–3,6, 168n14 Cohen, Stanley, 159n2 Collection(s), 58–59, 61, 63 Commission, corporate, 105 Communication, 91, 98 Conspiratorial intentions, conspiracies, 55 Constantine V, 20, 34–39, 74, 153nn27, 29, 30, 31 Contemplation. See Theo¯ria) Context, 122, 127 Contracts, 172n1 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), 166n59, 167n61 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property (1954), 70, 166n59

Bacon, Roger, 9, 10, 11 Barasch, Moshe, 153n29 Barbarity, 55 Barthes, Roland, 168n9 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 103, 104, 105, 181nn16,17 Basil, 41 Bassianus. See Johannes Bassianus Baudelaire, Charles, 19 Bauman, Richard, 174n6 Beliefs, 134, 175n15 Bell, Quentin, 155n55 Belting, Hans, 157n74 Benjamin,Walter, 63 Bentham, Jeremy, 181–182n25 Berlin Museum, 164n36 Bevan, Edwyn, 151n13, 156nn68, 69, 157n72 Black, Hugo L., 99, 176n2 Body, bodies, 7, 43, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 99–116, 178n7, 179n11. See also Corporations; Universitates Bonaventure, 10, 12, 13–16, 19, 25, 26, 28, 32, 148n11 Bouwsma, O. K., 3, 147n2 Brains, 19 Bréhier, Louis, 45, 154n35, 156n67, 157n73 Brilliant, Richard, 160n6 British Museum, 161–162n22, 162n24

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Duties, obligations, 52, 72, 73, 96, 172n1. See also Friends, friendship

Corporations, 4, 7, 99, 103, 106, 110, 111, 115, 124, 179–180n12, 180n15 Correspondence, 138, 139 Crime, kinds of, 102, 104 Crimp, Douglas, 60, 162n23, 164n36 Cults of art and nature, 58, 65 Culture, 52, 66–75 Cynic, 135

Ecology, 26, 27 Economics, 26, 27 Economy (oikonomia), 6, 24–28, 33, 42, 43, 45, 48, 58, 74, 155n56, 156n71 Eidos, 24, 149n18 Elective affinities, 140 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 82 Environment, 173n5 Ephesis (appeal), 174n6 Ephetai (jurors), 89, 173n6 Epicurus, 8, 11 Episte¯me¯, 10 Epistemology, 68 Erostratus, 56 Eschmann, I.Th., 176–177nn3,4, 178n8, 178–179n9, 181n15 Estates, inherited, 110 Eucharist, 24, 37, 38 Eusebius, 151n12 Evans, E. P., 79, 168n8 Evidence, 89, 123 Example, 63, 67, 69, 73 Exile, to cast beyond (exorizein), 80, 84–85 Experience, 46, 134 Explanations, kinds of, 142, 184n3

Dante Alighieri, 69, 70 Davidson, Donald, 92–93, 175nn13,15, 183n1 Deference, 130–143 Delation, civic, 55 Deleuze, Gilles, 26 Deliberation, 128 Democracy, 140 Dennett, Daniel C., 92, 175n14 Déotte, Jean-Louis, 164n36 Depiction, 36, 152n23 Descartes, René, 19, 148n2 Destruction, 30, 53, 54–57, 74, 76, 137 Dickens, Charles, 134 Dilthey,Wilhelm, 125 Diogenes Laertius, 8, 148n3 Dismemberment, 63 Dispositions, 1 Dodds, E. R., 168n7, 174n7 Duchesne, Louis, 153n34 Duhem, Pierre, 10–12, 148n9

I N D E X

187

Giakalis,Ambrosios, 153nn29,31, 155n62, 156n66 Gierke, Otto von, 177n4, 178n7, 178–179n9, 179n11 Gilson, Étienne, 12 Goldblatt, David, 160n6 Great-expectationese, 135 Grégoire, Henri,Abbé, 54–56, 66, 67, 69, 158n1, 160nn7–12, 165nn47, 50, 166n55 Gregory I, 45–46, 156n68 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 19 Grosse-Teste, Robert, 9 Guilt, 79, 89, 102, 177n4

Facts, 131 Feinberg, Joel, 171n1 Ferry, Luc, 172n1 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 143, 184n5 Fiction, fictions, 102, 113–115, 179n10, 181–182n25; juridical, legal, 105, 108, 110, 112, 171n1, 174n7, 177n4, 178–179n9, 180n12, 181–182n25 Finnic, 135, 137 Florence, 69 Form, 26, 153n29 Form-ness (morpho¯sis), 38 Foucault, Michel, 175n16 Fragments, 68, 164n36 Freedberg, David, 159n1, 161nn16,19 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 176n22 Frey, R. G., 170n1 Friends, friendship, 1–5, 95–96, 97, 137, 176n22 Fumaroli, Marc, 167n62

Habermas, Jürgen, 183n3 Harpokration, 173n6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 106, 164n36 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 136, 148n4 Held, Julius S., 161n17 Heritage, 70–71, 166n59 Hobbes,Thomas, 172n1 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 80–84, 168nn12–16, 169nn17,18,21–24, 170nn25–29 Honorary terms, 77 Horos of Council of Hiereia, 34–37 Hostility, 53, 74, 76. See also Art; Icon(s); Image Hyde,W.W., 168n7

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 128, 183n3 Gamboni, Dario, 158n1 Gero, Stephen, 40, 151n10, 152nn18,20,25,26, 154n38 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 29, 31, 149n1, 150nn1–3,5

I N D E X

188

Institutiones (Justinian), 169n19 Instruction, 55 Intention, 1, 4, 7, 32, 79, 90–93, 97, 115, 117, 118, 121–123, 129, 132, 137, 184n3 Interests, 70–73, 87, 89–91, 170–173n1 Interpretability, 3, 138, 142–143. See also Objects and things Interpretation, 4–5, 7, 59, 91, 94, 118–129, 130–143 Intuition, 134 Isidore of Seville, 179n10 Italy, 65–66, 69, 166n56

Icon(s), 20, 23, 25, 34–45, 51, 121, 153n26, 156nn62,66, 184n3 Iconoclasm, 5, 7, 19, 20, 28–49, 50–52, 54, 58, 62, 74, 75, 120, 124, 150n7, 153n32, 158n1, 159n3, 161n15, 184n3 Iconoclasts, 20–21, 34, 122, 153n29 Iconophilia, 124, 184n3 Ideas, 43 Idolatry, 31, 32, 56, 58 Idzerda, Stanley, 62, 159n4, 161n15, 163nn30,32–33, 165n46 Ignorance, 51, 55 Image (eiko¯n) 7, 21–25, 32, 38, 42, 43–46, 59, 76, 78, 121, 153n31, 161n16, 164n33 Imagination, 68 Imbeciles, 4, 124 Incarnation (sarko¯sis), 17–18, 25–26, 37 Incircumscribable, 20 Incomprehensible exercises, 132 Incorporation, 101–102 Indemnity, 82 Innocent III, 180n15 Innocent IV, 100–103, 176–177nn3–5, 178–179n9, 180n15, 184n3 Inscription (graphe¯), inscriptions, 20, 36

Johannes Bassianus, 180n13 Johnson, Lawrence E., 170n1 John of Damascus, 20, 26, 28, 36, 41, 42, 149nn13, 20, 152n22, 154nn40,41,43, 155nn44–53, 156n63 John of Salisbury, 179n11 Jokes, 142 Justin, 151n13 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 46, 143, 156n70, 172n1, 184n4 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 100–101, 176n3, 178nn6–8, 179nn11,12 Kenny,Anthony, 11, 148n10 Kitzinger, Ernst, 150n9

I N D E X

189

Marshall, John, 83, 86, 169n23 Marx, Karl, 74, 167n63 Masks, 79, 81, 85, 93, 167n6 Matter, 35, 38–39, 78, 82, 121, 132 Mattering to, 136 McClellan,Andrew, 61, 162nn26–28, 163nn29–33 McCloskey, H. J., 170–173n1 Meaning, 6, 24, 59, 64, 65, 68, 69, 90, 121, 123, 129, 141, 164n33, 175–176n22 Mediation, 108, 113, 115–116 Melloni,Alberto, 177n5, 179n9 Mental states, 135 Metonymy (vs. synechdoche), 25, 43 Meyendorff, John, 150n8 Michaud-Quantin, Pierre, 177n4, 179n10 Midgley, Mary, 172n1 Miller, Edward, 162n22 Mimesis, imitation, 39, 40, 42, 43, 58, 64, 153n29, 156n71 Mondzain-Baudinet, Marie-José, 24, 149n19, 151n11, 152nn18,19, 153n28, 155nn56, 57 Moore, G. E., 8, 18, 148n2 Movement, 84, 85 Museums, 4, 5, 7, 52, 57–66, 68, 74–75, 76, 163n33, 164–165n36

Knowledge, 12, 14, 134 Koyré,Alexandre, 12 Laceration, lacerate (lacerare, zerfleischen), 30–32, 49 Landscapes, 7 Language, 1, 4, 7, 79, 85, 93, 117, 118, 122–123, 133–135, 137, 167n4, 184n3 Leo III, 38, 153n33 Liability, 5, 79, 80, 82, 85–89, 102, 103 Lights (Bonaventure), 12–14 Lisini,Alessandro, 150n4 Locke, John, 171n1 Lorenzetti,Ambruogio, 149n1 Louvre, Museum and Palace of the, 61–62, 66, 68, 162n25 Lucas de Penna, 180n12 Lunatics, 109–110 Lysippus, 29 MacDowell, D. M., 168n9, 173–174n6 Maitland, F.W., 177n4, 178nn7,9, 180n12 Malraux,André, 67, 68, 164–165n36, 165nn49–52, 166n54 Mango, Cyril, 150n8, 151n12, 153n33, 154n36, 156n63 Mansi, Giovan Domenico, 151n10 Maritime law, 82–84

I N D E X

190

pretable, 3, 130, 142; made by no one/manufactured (cheiropoie¯ta), 39, 141; talking/ voiceless, 78, 98 Ockham,William of, 9, 10, 11, 12 Ostrogorsky, Georg, 152n19 Ouspensky, Léonide, 44, 156nn64,66 Owner, 82

Narveson, Jan, 172n1 Nash, Roderick, 95, 174n9, 175n20 Nationalization, 69 Needs, 90, 97–98 Nerves, nervous system, neurological theories, 16–19 Nicephorus, 20, 25, 35, 36, 149nn14,19, 151nn11,14,15, 152nn18,21,23,24, 153n31, 155n43 Nicholas of Cues, 178n7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79 Nomina juris, 101, 178n8 Not-interpretation, noninterpretive realm, 122–123, 125, 128 Nozick, Robert, 142, 171n1, 184nn1–3

Participation (methe¯xis), 38–40, 43–44, 58, 127, 153n29 Pausanias, 80, 168n11 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 151n9, 153n32, 156n71 Person(s), 7, 69, 76–77, 85, 99–102, 107–116, 178n9. See also Universitates Personae vice fungitur, 114 Personality, 82, 93 Personification (Proso¯popoiia), 80–86 Perspective, 44 Phillips, John, 159n3 Philosophy, 13, 143 Phulobasileis, 79 Plato, 11, 15, 23, 168n10 Polydeukes, 79, 168n9, 173n6 Pommier, Edouard, 162n28, 163n31 Porphyry, 175n17 Position, 68, 114, 115

Objects and things, 1, 69, 82, 183n1; aniconic, 39, 154n35; as sum of properties, “neutral, discourse-independent” (Putnam), 64, 183n1; bodiless, lifeless, inanimate, soulless, 4, 78, 80–82, 84, 87, 100, 167n4, 171–172n1, 177n4, 184n3; dangerous/destructible, 51, 78, 169n20; double-natured, 37, 74–75, 167n63; guilty, liable, rights-endowed, 82, 89, 102, 107; intentional, inter-

I N D E X

191

Possession, 71, 107–108, 111, 113 Pound, Ezra, 55 Pratique du bon français, 51–52, 159n4, 160n5 Presence, 68 Presentation, 37, 38 Preservation, 7, 30, 33, 48, 50–75, 76, 81, 161n15 Pre-Socratic philosophers, 34 Promises, 59, 65, 77, 88 Properties, features, 7, 41, 42, 63, 74, 76, 95, 98, 128, 130, 131, 138, 140, 141 Property, 69–73, 113 Propositional attitudes, 92, 135 Prosternation (proskune¯sis), 41–48, 58, 59, 121, 154nn42,43, 157n72 Protection, 32, 51, 53, 56, 68 Prototype, 21–23, 42, 43, 153n31, 161n16 Proust, Marcel, 65 Prutaneion, 80, 89, 173n6 Putnam, Hilary, 123, 183nn1,2

Rachels, James, 171n1 Ralston III, Holmes, 172n1, 175n21 Rawls, John, 172n1 Realism, 17, 128 Reality, 138 Réau, Louis, 56, 160nn7,13, 161n16 Recommendations, 127–128 Reduction, 6, 12, 14–19, 21, 24, 25, 28, 32, 33, 59, 66–67 Regan,Tom, 173n1 Relation, 21–23, 25, 43 Rembrandt van Rijn, 137 Representation(s), 38, 43, 45, 93–98, 111–116, 138, 139, 140, 141, 165n36, 176n22 Representatives, 93, 110, 139 Resemblance, 17, 138 Responsibility, 79, 102, 180n15 Retaliation. See Revenge Revenge, 56, 80–82 Richards, I.A., 19 Riffaterre, Michael, 168n9 Rights, 7, 32, 52, 76–77, 87–98, 115–116, 141, 170–173n1, 173n4, 174–175n9 Ripa, Cesare, 161n20 Rome, 64, 69, 166n56 Rosenberg,Alfred, 165n48 Rubens, Pieter Paul, 62

Quatremère de Quincy,AntoineChrysostome, 63–66, 69, 70, 164nn34,35, 165nn38,39, 166nn56,57 Quine,W.V., 3, 10, 147n3 Quintilian, 81

I N D E X

192

Statues, sculptures, 4, 29–33, 49, 76, 77–80, 87, 89 Stephen, 39, 154nn35, 37 Stone, Christopher, 87–93, 97, 120, 137, 173nn2–5, 174n8, 174–175n9, 175nn10–12,17–19, 176n2 Story, Justice, 82, 84, 169nn23,24 Style, 165n36 Super Ego (Freud), 175–176n22 Synechdoche, 24–25, 43 System, legal, 93

Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 107–115, 119, 177n4, 181nn19–22, 181n24, 181–182n25, 182nn26–37, 183nn38–40 Schlosser, Julius von, 29–30, 59–63, 149–150n1, 150n6, 161n21 Science, 5, 8–10, 11, 13, 26, 68 Sculptor, 78, 80 Searle, John, 19 Senses, 5, 6, 9–15, 17, 18–21, 24–46, 157n72 Sensible vs. intelligible, 43, 66 Serres, Michel, 172n1 Sherman, Daniel J., 164n34, 165n37 Singer, Peter, 171–172n1 Sites, 57–58 Skepticism, 68, 120, 127 Smith,Adam, 142 Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, 56, 160n14 Society of friends. See Friends Sorabji, Richard, 173n1 Soul, 78–79, 85 Speechless nature (aphono¯n eidos), 38 Sprigath, Gabrièle, 56, 160n15 State, 52, 58, 62, 66–75, 179n11, 180n12

Tacitus, 168n9 Theagenes, 80 Theodore of Studion, 19–25, 42, 44, 148n12, 149n15, 152n22, 153n33, 155nn54–56,58,59, 155–156n62 Theologies, theology, 11–13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 25, 26, 33, 42, 47–48 Theophanes, 35, 151nn16,17 Theo¯ria, 21, 25, 43, 45 Theory, 6, 40, 92 Things. See Objects and things Thomas Aquinas, 10, 11, 178n7, 180–181n15 Time, 101–102, 179n11 Token (vs. type), 56, 158n1 Tormey,Alan, 160n6 Totality, nostalgia of, 63

I N D E X

193

Transference, 41, 43 Transmission, 16 Trials, 89 Tribe, Lawrence, 174n9 Tropology, 43 Type (tupon), types, 43, 56, 153n30, 158n1

Vandeveer, Donald, 171n1 Vasari, Giorgio, 29, 164n33 Veneration, venerable, 36, 39–40, 42–43, 45, 58, 73, 75. See also Prosternation Wait, Morrison Remick, 99, 176n1 Wards, 109 Warnke, Martin, 150n7, 159n2 Weever, John, 57, 161n18 Weisberg, Richard, 167n5 Williams, Sharon, 70, 166nn58–60 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 100, 127, 147n1 Wohl, Hellmut, 150n1 Wunderkammern, Kunstkammern, 60, 61, 68

Ullmann,Walter, 103–104, 178n5, 180nn13, 14, 181nn17,18 Uncircumscribable (aperigraptos), 36–39, 43 Understanding. See Interpretation Universals, 176n3 Universitates, 100–107, 115, 176–177n3, 179n12, 184n3 Vaihinger, Hans, 182n25 Vandalism,Vandals, neo-Vandals, 51–57, 158–159n1, 160nn7,13

I N D E X

194