The early modern subject of experience
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The early modern subject of experience Christopher Braider: Experimental selves: person and experience in early modern Europe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018, 448 pp, US$69.75 HB Charles T. Wolfe1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Experimental Selves joins a growing number of studies of early modern personhood, some of which are more than strictly ‘studies of’, given the historicist claims they make about the ‘emergence’ of the modern subject, self or person (Taylor 1989; Reiss 2003; Siegel 2005; Wahrman 2006). The early modern self is a loaded object of study, different in that sense from ‘ancient ethics’ or ‘medieval logic’, given that these studies wish to demonstrate that the self or person (perhaps in our understanding thereof) is a modern invention—thus Balibar spoke of ‘the invention of consciousness’ or de Libera of ‘the invention of the modern subject’ (Balibar 2000; de Libera 2015), and the idea is usually traced back to Foucault, although notably his focus was on the ancient ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 1988). However, after some initial sections on the topics, the work becomes, if not more impressionistic, then more collageist, going deep into analyses of theatre and aesthetics that leave this overarching theme behind. As this theme is a worthwhile one and the author makes some intriguing claims, it shall constitute my primary focus, although the work unfortunately does not devote sustained analysis to ‘self’ or ‘person’ after the first chapters. Braider states that ‘the single most salient fact about “self” as experienced by the early moderns was, precisely, that it was “a matter of experience”’ (5). Experience is a key concept here—although notions of experience were being reconfigured in this period (as has been studied notably by Peter Dear, cited also by Braider, e.g. Dear 2006). This is not just a matter of individual experience (e.g. the sensations of the individual, which empiricists will take to be the basis of that individual’s knowledge), for ‘early moderns also knew they had selves because other people assigned them in the course of everyday traffic and encounter’ (9). This is indeed partly what Locke meant when he wrote in the Essay that ‘person’ was a ‘forensick notion’. But Braider does not just mean that selves were also experienced as social; he means, in an odd formulation that is also the book’s title, that early modern selves were * Charles T. Wolfe [email protected] 1
Cá’Foscari University, Venice, Italy
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‘inherently experimental’ (9), and thereby open to manipulation (indeed, an early modern self is part and parcel of a process of manipulation, so to speak—a figure familiar both from Montaigne and from Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau). An interesting side-effect of this point is that it leads Braider to reject ‘alienation’ or ‘disenchantment’ narratives (think of Husserl’s Crisis, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Weber’s image of the ‘iron cage’ of modernity), given that persons are understood experimentally, and ea
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