ABSTRACT
This essay focuses upon a single dramatic scene in order to address a general problem: what is the relationship between theoretical abstraction and emotional display? William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s collaborative play Timon of Athens seemingly insists upon the isometric correlation between affective service and the capacity to pay. Against this backdrop, there stands the ethical counterexample of Flavius, the “one good man” who, with tears in his eyes, remains loyal to his destitute master. Flavius’ affect prompts Timon to deploy a peculiar and symptomatic form: the logical syllogism. In what sense do Timon’s syllogisms constitute a response to Flavius’ tears? In pursuit of answers to this question, this essay contextualizes the ambient tension between rhetoric and logic within early modern England, and considers the intersection of this dramatic scene with Hegel’s account of the dynamic interdependence of lord and bondsman, and with Hegel’s account of the relationship between logic and sexual difference. If weeping is shown to be a gendered act that sunders the capacity of logic to denote a singular human “all”, what does that suggest about the limited purchase of philosophical generality?
Anticipating both Hegel’s account of the dialectical reciprocity of lord and bondsman and Hardt’s concept of affective labour, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s collaborative play Timon of Athens depicts Athens as an economically precarious society in which servants and masters mutually define and determine each other through bonds which are at once financially determined and emotionally expressive.1
This essay focuses upon a single dramatic scene in order to address a general problem: what is the relationship between theoretical abstraction and emotional display? William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s collaborative play Timon of Athens seemingly insists upon the isometric correlation between affective service and the capacity to pay. Against this backdrop, there stands the ethical counterexample of Flavius, the “one good man” who, with tears in his eyes, remains loyal to his destitute master. Flavius’ affect prompts Timon to deploy a peculiar and symptomatic form: the logical syllogism. In what sense do Timon’s syllogisms constitute a response to Flavius’ tears? In pursuit of answers to this question, this essay contextualizes the ambient tension between rhetoric and logic within early modern England, and considers the intersection of this dramatic scene with Hegel’s account of the dynamic interdependence of lord and bondsman, and with Hegel’s account of the relationship between logic and sexual difference. If weeping is shown to be a gendered act that sunders the capacity of logic to denote a singular human “all”, what does that suggest about the limited purchase of philosophical generality?
Anticipating both Hegel’s account of the dialectical reciprocity of lord and bondsman and Hardt’s concept of affective labour, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s collaborative play Timon of Athens depicts Athens as an economically precarious society in which servants and masters mutually define and determine each other through bonds which are at once financially determined and emotionally expressive.1
Pressurizing the Greek past with a proximity to the stratified reality of early modern London in which they lived and worked, Shakespeare and Middleton subtract slavery from the classical world, re-imagining the polis as a curiously modern sort of service economy in which “tendance” and payment go together from the play’s first scene:
