Reading T. S. Eliot Reading Spinoza

Abstract

"[The ordinary man] falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other" - a good reader of T. S. Eliot's criticism probably knows this famous passage; a good researcher on Eliot's apprenticeship in philosophy perhaps knows that he did actually read Spinoza; and yet, in the current Eliot studies, reading Eliot and reading Spinoza seem to have nothing to do with each other. In this dissertation, I attempt to reconstruct Eliot's reading of Spinoza as faithfully and comprehensively as possible, by closely analyzing the marginalia in Eliot's copy of Spinoza's Opera, housed in the Archive Centre of King's College, Cambridge. At the same time, the Spinozist context for Eliot's apprenticeship at Harvard and Oxford (with the intermission of "a romantic year" in Paris) is also to be presented, which is, in fact, a glaring absence in the philosophical branch of Eliot studies. In addition to these positivistic contributions, I also take a theoretical approach so as to demonstrate how illuminative Eliot's reading of Spinoza can be for understanding the characteristic style (or "ethology") of Eliot's reading in general (i.e., Theory), by way of extensively analyzing the unpublished as well as published materials of Eliot's "academic philosophizing" that culminated in his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley. Furthermore, theories of reading are to be provided mainly by the (New) Spinozist tradition, e.g., Deleuzean "double reading" and Althusserian "symptomatic reading". With these theoretical weapons in hand, I examine the ways in which Eliot's repression, or symptomatic oversights, of the Ontological question in his "systematic reading" of Spinoza (hence his Theory in general) is dogged by the return of the repressed "affective reading", while his evasion of the Ontological question leads to an epistemological deadlock over the issue of solipsism, which is only to be resolved, rather violently, by a "leap" at an imagined commonality based on "essential kinship" that Eliot has contrived for himself - in sharp contrast to the idea of an "inessential commonality" that Agamben derives from Spinozian "common notions". Finally, the political afterlives of Eliot's Theory are problematized through the analysis of several uncanny mis/readings, or appropriations, of Eliot's celebrated essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Those politicized mis/readings by Nishida Kitarō (arguably the greatest philosopher of Imperial Japan) and Ch'oe Chaesŏ (a most prominent "pro-Japanese" intellectual in Colonial Korea) as well as that by the later Eliot himself will, in turn, illuminate the idea of Empire and its logic that are latent in Eliot's ostensibly "purely literary" theory of "Tradition".