1 Diderot and DâAlembert, EncyclopĂ©die, 5:910. Translations are mine, based on the English translation of the identical passages appearing in Condillac, Essay on the Origin, 196â99. All translations in this book are mine unless indicated otherwise.
2 See, for example, Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, s.v. âerrĆ,â and Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. âerr.â
3 This example is discussed in Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations, 21. For information about the history of the French erreur, Bates cites the Grand Larousse de la langue française and the TrĂ©sor de la langue française. The German word history can be found in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch. Batesâs examples of the knight-errant and the Wandering Jew serve as useful reminders of the rich material on error offered by medieval and Renaissance writers. The wealth of scholarship available on such earlier explorations of error underscores the difficulty of extracting them from Christian narratives about sin and expiation, and I therefore bracket them out in order to focus my attention on the epistemological stakes of error in the eighteenth century. For some examples of how earlier treatments of error could be integrated into a more general discussion, see Brown, ââErrours Endlesse Traine,â in Turning Points, 3â30; and Teskey, âFrom Allegory to Dialectic.â
4 This would be, one could say, the approach of an intellectual historian like Bates: after a survey of the different metaphorical models that make up the Enlightenmentâs âtopography of knowledgeâ in his second chapter, he is able to then declare his intention to âleave the metaphorical depiction of this epistemological problemâ (40) in order to study error more closely.
5 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.3.3. Quintilian does not provide a name for this common genus to which both tropes and figures belong. Since the discussion about figure cited here deals with the general issue of âdeparture from the simple and straightforwardâ (9.1.3), I employ the term figure for expediency when discussing Quintilian.
6 A parallel case could be made for Greek rhetoric (which Quintilian occasionally cites using the Greek terms). There, the operative terms would be schÄma instead of figura, and either soloikismos or barbarismos in the place of Quintilianâs âvices.â For an excellent overview of the various classical systems of rhetoric, see Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. Solecism will be taken up in more detail in Chapter 5.
7 De Man, âSemiology and Rhetoric,â 7. This essay opens the volume entitled Allegories of Reading, and it could be argued that in the course of his chapters, the suspending potential of what he calls ârhetoricâ is eventually assumed by the metatrope of âallegory.â De Manâs concept of allegory is based on ânarratives to the second (or the third) degreeâ (205) that are engendered by an undecidability between truth and error in a primary narrative, and it could certainly also have been adopted here as a key critical term. My only reason for preferring rhetoric over allegory is historical: while both terms are used by de Man to indicate roughly the same vertiginous undecidability between truth and error, the former experienced a general circulation and co-implication with the discourse of knowledge in the eighteenth century that the latter did not. For more on the relationship between de Manâs treatment of allegory and error, see J. Hillis Miller, ââReadingâ Part of a Paragraph.â See also Corngold, âError in Paul de Man,â for a general discussion of errorâs importance in the writings of de Man.
8 Another suspension that is entailed by this approach to error is the one between reader and writer. The undecidabilities surrounding error apply, in other words, also to reading, criticism, and interpretation as acts of mastery through interpretation, but so too does the possibility of being in error about error. This will be an important consideration here, especially in my discussions of modern critics who read eighteenth-century texts, as well as Enlightenment authors reading classical texts. For a more explicit discussion of error and practices of reading or commentary, see Lerer, Error and the Academic Self.