Jennifer Devereaux (Bryn Mawr College)
This paper reveals the systematic dissolution of personae and embodied emotional experiences into the natural world in Senecan texts. Such dissolution represents an authorial technique that serves to organize the memory of emotional experiences in accordance with Stoic principles. In this paper I engage primarily with Margaret Graver’s (2007) tome on Stoic emotion and Thomas Habinek’s 2007 and 2011 works on Stoicism and the nature of physical reality. In terms of theoretical engagement, see (e.g.) Nalbantian 2003; Colombetti 2014; Armstrong 2015; Meyer, Streeck & Jordan 2017, Fuchs 2017, and Devereaux 2018 for various relevant strands of theory related to intercorporeality and interaffectivity.
Seneca’s invocation of the term persona in the context of emotion’s cause and effect (e.g., Ep. 18.15; Ira 2.11, 3.6, 3.40) intimates that it is the dynamic relationship between self and other that generates, facilitates, and ultimately defines emotional experience. At the same time, Seneca understood texts to communicate emotional states to which readers were expected to have some sort of emotional response (Ira 2.2). This expectation suggests that the notion of the self, in the absence of a discreet other, is also generated, facilitated, and defined by “the text”. Who one “is” is to some extent a product of the texts consumed, a fact highlighted by Quintilian in his complaint about Senecan philosophy changing the fabric of intellectual life at Rome (IO 10.1.123-131), where the ability to assume characters (personae) and emotions (adfectus) was traditionally valued (IO 6.2).
Seneca’s aversion to the embodiment of passionate emotions (see e.g., Ira 2.3-4) led to a particular approach to the “problem” of emotional expression that centers on the Stoic notion of sumpatheia -- the view that the whole of physical reality is an ordinary organism, with different parts connected such that an affection in one place leads to an affection in another (see e.g., SVF 2, 773–89). Such interaffectivity meant that the effects of emotion were never wholly local, which was what made it so dangerous (cf. Sen. Ep. 7). This danger was neutralized through the contemplation of natural phenomena, the elements of which are common to human bodies (QNat. 3.10.4). We thus find in Senecan texts that the dissolution of self and other into the natural environment reflects a process through which the text mediates emotional feeling and creates a space for the reader to exist in a state that is free from emotional perturbances (cf. QNat. 3.18).
The core of the paper reveals the dissolution process through an examination of the interplay of Stoic physics with intertextual practice, the latter of which represents the ultimate means of existing beyond the biological. Examining hitherto unexplored intertextual references to (e.g.) Pacuvius (as quoted in Cic. Div. 1.24), Ovid (Tr. 1.2), and perhaps even Manilius in Senecan works, this paper demonstrates that words prompt the assembling of memory traces that exist within and yet beyond the biological body, such that personae, including author and reader, become indistinct and essentially without biological – and therefore gendered, spatial, or temporal -- boundaries.