Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination

Julián Jiménez Heffernan,

doi:10.1515/pol-2012-0018

Article

Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination

Julián Jiménez Heffernan is Full Professor of English Literature at the Universidad de Córdoba, Spain. Ph.D in Philology at the University of Bologna in 1994 with a doctoral dissertation on philosophy and rhetoric in the work of Giordano Bruno. Visiting researcher at the Universities of Yale, Nottingham, Cambridge, Toronto and Munich; has written articles and essays on English Renaissance verse and drama, deconstructive rhetoric, romantic theory and contemporary fiction, and is the author of translations and critical editions of works by Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, Christopher Marlowe, Joseph Conrad, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Mark Strand and Jorie Graham. His articles have appeared in Lingua e Stile, Intersezioni, Research in African Literatures, English in Africa, Contemporary Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture and are forthcoming in Novel Arizona Quarterly and Textual Practice. He is the co-editor of Communities in Twentieth-Century Fiction, forthcoming in Palgrave Macmillan.

Published/Copyright: September 11, 2012

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From the journal Pólemos Volume 6 Issue 2

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes's philosophical system rests on the priority and centrality of the body. Not only is this centrality apparent in his texts devoted to physical and metaphysical issues, but also in those parts of his books dedicated to legal and political matters. My contention in this article is that Hobbes's entire writings are haunted by a de facto argument which, short of “demonstrating”, sought at least to “monstrate” a scene of destitution where bodies are produced. His compulsive resort to this argument was not fuelled only by his scientific and metaphysical interests in the collisional tendency of the human body; it was also an inducement of his largely overlooked literary education. In my view, Hobbes political imagination was not only informed by strictly philosophical argument, but also shaped by readings of Greek authors like Thucydides and Homer, and by the Renaissance spectacle of resilient, soulless and agonistic corporality furnished by Kyd, Nashe, Shakespeare and Jacobean playwrights.

Keywords: production; body; Hobbes; scene; destitution; war; Homer; Thucydides; Shakespeare

About the author

Full Professor Julián Jiménez Heffernan,

Julián Jiménez Heffernan is Full Professor of English Literature at the Universidad de Córdoba, Spain. Ph.D in Philology at the University of Bologna in 1994 with a doctoral dissertation on philosophy and rhetoric in the work of Giordano Bruno. Visiting researcher at the Universities of Yale, Nottingham, Cambridge, Toronto and Munich; has written articles and essays on English Renaissance verse and drama, deconstructive rhetoric, romantic theory and contemporary fiction, and is the author of translations and critical editions of works by Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, Christopher Marlowe, Joseph Conrad, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Mark Strand and Jorie Graham. His articles have appeared in Lingua e Stile, Intersezioni, Research in African Literatures, English in Africa, Contemporary Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture and are forthcoming in Novel Arizona Quarterly and Textual Practice. He is the co-editor of Communities in Twentieth-Century Fiction, forthcoming in Palgrave Macmillan.

Published Online: 2012-09-11

Published in Print: 2012-09-20

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2012-0018

Keywords for this article

production; body; Hobbes; scene; destitution; war; Homer; Thucydides; Shakespeare