ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins with the claim that wanderers often don’t plan on wandering. Wandering is planless, which contributes to its appeal or terror, and sometimes it happens entirely by accident. Odysseus, an archetypal wanderer, wanders for ten years after leaving Troy. The crucial point: accidental wandering, as unchosen, is profoundly unstable, even if the wander seeks an end to wandering. In effect, accidental wandering encodes a principle of entropy and seeks its own undoing. Ithaca represents real or imagined harbors, shelters, asylums, or promised lands where wandering will conclude. In contrast to Odysseus, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida offer different versions of endless accidental wandering. Accidental wandering in a realm of happenstance identifies a consistent strain in modern philosophy, when philosophers—rather than focusing on logic or analytical thought—gravitate toward open-ended forms of writing, from essays and fragments to paradoxes and postcards. Stanley Cavell turns to film criticism; Arthur Danto writes about modern art; and Pierre Badiou translates and updates Plato’s Republic. Such sideways endeavors allow the writers to assume the role of impromptu, intellectual, accidental wanderers.
