Theoria

Now that my proposal has been accepted, I need to begin working on the dissertation proper. My biggest fear heading into this project – the evidence being derived from my comprehensives and the proposal itself – is that the final product will become overwrought; that I’ll refuse to let it go. Last night I was working on the final edit of the proposal – fixing poorly constructed or unclear sentences, making sure accents were facing the right direction, double-checking original publication dates and translation dates, searching out missing words, etc – and I found myself significantly editing the style (but, fortunately, not the content – for obvious reasons) in nearly every paragraph and certainly on every page. If I can spend nearly a week working over a twenty-five page document, how much time will I waste on a three-hundred page document?

So, let me resolve at this point to avoid fine-tuning and excessively editing future work.

Prior to getting to editing, of course, I need to actually write something. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading surveys and interpretations of Renaissance, Reformation and Counter Reformation political theory – essentially Machiavelli to Bodin. Once I finish that, I will move into reading primary sources from seventeenth century political theory, especially Hobbes and Locke, but also Spinoza. This pattern of reading inclines me to begin with the second chapter, which is on the social contract and ends with Spinoza’s anti-Hobbesianism as a way into the actual subject matter of the dissertation: i.e., Boulainvilliers, Dubos, Montesquieu, Buat-Nancay, Mably, etc.

The problem, of course, that in order to write the second and subsequent chapters, I have to, technically, assume the existence of the first chapter, which is largely a “theory of reading” for lack of a better term. How am I going to read these texts in the first place? How do I recognize the presence or absence of the figure (relation? – which? what?) of the barbarian? How do I distinguish barbarians from savages? I think it is quite clear that my approach is somewhere between Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s genealogy (or, is it his ‘problematization as a way mode of writing history’?) – something like what David Couzens Hoy calls “deconstructive genealogy” or “post-critique.” The easiest – and cheapest – way to approach this is to write the first chapter at the end, but that seems a bit dishonest, even if I’m the only one who is aware of the dishonesty.