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José Rodolfo da SilvaProfessor Eliana ÁvilaCultural and Literary Theory and Criticism:“
The Tempest 
as Contact Zone”13 November 2009“A Brave Form, But a Spirit”:The Production of Early Modern Humanism in
The Tempest 
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “animal” only emerged in theEnglish language by the end of the sixteenth century (Shannon 474). Before that, reference towhat today are called “animals” was done by the means of different lexical strategies, usuallya sort of list, as the biblical account of Creation suggests: “Let the waters bring foorth inabundance euery creeping thing that hath life: and let the foule flie vpon the earth in the openfirmament of the heauen. . . . Let the earth bring foorth the liuing thing according to hiskinde, cattell, and that which creepeth, and the beast of the earth, according to his kinde. andit was so” (Geneva Bible, Gen. 1.20,24). A similar predilection towards a wide range of  phenomena (rather than specific and all-encompassing concepts) could also be found in pre-modern science, wherein the Aristotelian notion of “experience” of the world ruled over themodern scientific concept of the experiment as a path to knowledge (Spiller 24-25). This alsoentailed the distinction among
 scientia
and
ars
which would only find its way back intoWestern thought in the 19
th
century (Spiller, 24).Against this background, Shakespeare’s play
The Tempest 
, having been probablywritten in 1611, stands in a crucial node in the transition from Renaissance to Modernism andenacts many of its main themes, especially the interrelated changing attitudes towardsSilva 1
 
“animality”, science, and art. How does the play portray the production of Early Modernhumanism, in its foundations on science and art, as being strictly related to a newunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and animality? This paper explores thisquestion in a post-structuralist framework which will try to show how the dichotomiesconstructed for the benefit of humanism are arbitrary and deconstructable. The deconstructivecritique will also focus on art as an instrumental discourse to the setting-up of the EarlyModern humanism, and on how it is organized in relation to science and to the concept of animality in order to produce the human.In Aristotelian scholasticism, knowledge of the world could only be glimpsed if it paid respect to an essential teleology of what “happens always or most of the time” (Spiller 28) in the world and, as such, that could only be capture by the means of experience. Becausean emphasis was put on teleology — “how and why [things] were what they were” — certaininstances of nature, which seemed to deviate from nature’s “design”, were discarded asoffering no insight into the truth of the world (Spiller 25). Thus, accidents, anomalies, andmonsters had no relevance to scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Renaissance.This disregard for accidents that did not seem to correspond to teleology alsoimplicated in the notion that creative knowledge, as present in art and in crafts, did not yieldtruth about nature. Artistic knowledge, as well as the ones associated with architecture, painting, and medicine, was seen as product of “human intention rather than the expression of an essential teleology” (Spiller 25). That meant a division among
 scientia
on one side, ascontemplative and rational knowledge about the world, and
 praxis
(decision-making),
 poesis
(crafts), and
ars
(art) on the other, as human derivates (Spiller 27).In
The Tempest 
, Prospero, when he was Duke of Milan, used to be a man of letters,“neglecting wordly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.89-90) and such isolation led to his exile from Italy. Therefore, in his Italian days, Prospero livedSilva 2
 
under an Aristotelian regime of strict separation between world and art. For him and for hiscourtiers, art could bear no relation to reality, and he is banished from Milan to an island.Stranded on this island, Prospero sets out to reorganize the relations between his artand the world. The insularity of the island standing exactly for the kind of accident, of deviated instance from the norm, that scholasticism discredited, it is there that Prospero willset up his artful play in which he will articulate art, knowledge, power and humanism. Thestorm that opens the play is, at the same time, an “accident” and an artifice, upon whichProspero intends to create knowledge and truth. As such, the storm — and the others illusionsProspero creates by the means of his “art” — come close to the modern notion of theexperiment, in which a specific instance of reality is controlled and manipulated to produce afact, a word whose etymology betrays its status of “fabrication” (Spiller 28).The island, and the “accidents” Prospero creates in it, becomes the stage for areconfiguration of the notions of the universal and the singular. The latter was discarded byscholasticism as irrelevant, but little by little it is constructed by Prospero (as in the modernexperiment) as bringing a useful insight into the whole of nature. Beginning with the islandsetting, singularity is stressed repeatedly as relevant to knowledge. The storm can also beseen as an accident, a deviation from proper climatic properties, but one which givesknowledge, such as to Miranda, since it is from the shipwreck that she gets to hear her lifestory. Also, the story is set in a state of exception from the Law, since the rightful Duke isexiled and the King, Alonso, is said to be drowned, suffering a “sea-change”. As authors suchas Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben have pointed out, the state of exception, or emergency,is the outside of the law which ends up defining the inside (Lupton 6).But the importance of singularity over universality is best glimpsed if we see it under the light of what seems to be Prospero’s objective: the pedagogy of the new generation(Miranda and Ferdinand) in the Early Modern values of scientific experiment, of the power of Silva 3
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11 / 14 / 2009

uploaded a new revision for this document (#1)

11 / 14 / 2009
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