Unspeakable Subjects The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe [Hardcover]

In groundbreaking readings linking works of Descartes, Shakespeare, and Cervantes with contemporary revisions of Freud and Nietzsche,Unspeakable Subjectsargues that the concepts and discourses that have come to define European modernitythe subject's extension and responsibility, genealogies of intention and of freedom, the literary, legal, and medical construction of the body, among othersarise as strategies for evading a profound redefinition of the nature ofeventsin early modern Europe.Negotiating the often competing claims of rhetorical reading and cultural analysis, Lezra reassesses the grounds of literary and philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful reading. His original accounts ofDon Quixote, Descartes'sSecond MeditationandRegulae, andMeasure for Measuretack between linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural materialist approaches to define and discuss the double aspect of the event in early modern literature and philosophy, and in Freudian and Heideggerian critical discourse: the event is at once an accident, the unpredictable, deontic intrusion of the empirical in idealizing schemes,andthe disclosing and recollecting of a subject's relation to discursive and cultural morphologies in which empirical events are said properly to take place.The advent of modernity, Unspeakable Subjectsargues, arises as the novel account of the permanently interrupted negotiation between the event's deontic and its morphological aspects. IfUnspeakable Subjectsconsiders on this level the singularities of textual events, it also seeks to show their complex relation to the singularities of the forms given material history.Drawing upon such varied sources as the proclamations of James I, the law of entail, Renaissance treatises on typography, and documents on Jacobean and Elizabethan privateering, as well as accounts of the events of May 1968 and of Lacan's treatment of thefort-dagame, alƒo