Queer/Early/Modern (review)
and Hobbes, may suggest the strengths and weaknesses of the whole. In Bacon’s desire to free natural philosophy from scholastic confusions and common faults of perception and understanding, Farrell says of Bacon “suspicion becomes . . . his crucial resource” (94). He argues further that the reformation of religion (considered in an earlier chapter on Luther), provided Bacon with a model for grandiose rethinking of entrenched traditions of authority and knowledge. Here, then, are two defining traits of the paranoiac worldview converging in a definitive project of early modernity. Yet is the application of the term to Bacon just? The ambition and renovation of Bacon are undeniable (though, of course, there are other tendencies, intellectual, psychological, and political, at work), but even if we allow, as Farrell does, that it is the project, not its author, to which the term must be applied — he names it Bacon’s “science of suspicion” — the terms strike one still as overwrought, even misleading. Baconian “suspicion” only seems to add a level of depth and disturbance to a program that, for all its grandiosity and determined rejection of tradition, is more practical than pathological. Baconian suspicion — so darkly hinting — might more justly be called Baconian skepticism. Put another way, terms like paranoia or suspicion seem to demand some kind of application, not only to the writings but to the writer, to require for their full force a more telling continuity between author and text. And it is just this kind of continuity we see everywhere in Hobbes. In an analysis that stands, with the readings of Luther and Rousseau, among the strongest in the book, Farrell examines Leviathan as the masterwork of a philosopher who described himself, nicely enough for Farrell’s purpose, as born into the world, in the wake of the Armada, as a twin with fear. For Hobbes, fear, and the suspicion it bred, were not only aspects of his nature but woven into the fabric of his political philosophy, and Farrell does a marvelous job teasing out the implications of this quality (or, one is tempted to say, psychosis) of his work. In Hobbes, Farrell finds an ideal subject who allows him to follow the paths of paranoia, in writing and writer, in a richly nuanced way. If, at times, readers find themselves unconvinced by a particular analysis, in his readings of figures like Hobbes, where notions of paranoia, clinical and metaphorical, are persuasively applied, Farrell helps us to see again, in sharper focus, works we think we know. SAMUEL GLEN WONG University of Victoria