36 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY maiden's organ-an absence of other visible male appendages-is precisely the somatic and professional privilege of the evirato singer. Orsino's punning infatuation with Viola's small pipe recalls, or perhaps anticipates, the many sexual legends that grew up around the castrati as much sought-after heterosexual and, still more, homosexual fetish ob- jects.'06 The fact that Olivia is equally captivated by Cesario's corporeal and vocal charms ("Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs. . ." [1.5.296]) doubles the stakes of the game and confirms the spectacular triumph of Viola's "musi- cal" seduction. The very scenes in which Viola puts into effect her abnega- tion and self-mortification-concealing her desire for Orsino or acting as go-between for Orsino's desire towards Olivia-are the scenes in which she achieves erotic dominion over both as captivating castrato. Her eviration is simultane

Castration therefore takes on in Twelfth Night some of the broader significance that marks its dramatic career and that establishes it as a point of contact and attrition between opposing social forces. But the comedy also bears traces of that other, more strictly theatrical or metatheatrical history of the eunuchus as triumphant self-transcending performer, as shameless seducer of audiences, as ambiguous object of the desiring gaze

Thus the financial milking and fall from illusory social grace of Sir Andrew Aguecheek-a specular image of Viola's movement from self-relegation to social promotion-is figured in a series of insinuations regarding his impotence and effeminiza- tion, from Maria's "dry jest" and "now I let go your hand, I am barren" (1.3.75, 78) to Sir Toby's ambiguous description of Sir Andrew's lank hair (1.3.99-10 1), which seems to evoke an erotic encounter but in fact equates the flaccid Aguecheek with the distaff, symbol of the female. Sir Andrew confirms these innuendoes in his "thrasonical" reluctance to use his mas- culine weapon in the duel with Viola-Sebastian

n a play dominated by the compulsive drive towards upward social mobility (the efforts of Malvolio, Sir Andrew, Maria), Viola knowingly, if necessarily, steps down on the social scale at the very moment in which she approaches its apex, the court of Illyria. It is this act of social self-disguising that most immediately realizes her "as an eunuch" plan, the eunuch being by tradition a (usually low) servant within a (usually high) household. It is also Viola's closest "political" link with Terence's Chaerea, who makes the same temporary move down the social scale. The implications of Viola's downward m

Twelfth Night may therefore be said to effect the definitive Lacanian passage from the "natural" law of coupling to the law of symbolic inter- change. And yet this may not be the whole story of Viola and her eunuch, whose impressively Castiglionian credentials may themselves disguise more public, less polite aspects of her role and its cultural history. First

Ralph Roister Doister rewrites Eunuchus as a moral allegory on the vanity of male desire and the Elyotian value of female "custance," or chastity. But not all sixteenth-century English readings of Terence's play were so benevolent. The Oxford moralist and antitheatrical polemicist John Rainolds, in one of the most incisive critical commentaries ever written on the play, takes the opposite view, namely that The Eunuch represents the dangerous sexual potency or potentiality of transvestism; and that, far from encouraging private virtue, it is an exhibition of, and incitement to, public vice:

unuchhood constitutes the play's "controlling metaphor,"38 whereby the condition of sexual mutilation comes to stand for quite different forms of social and psychological dispos- session. Castration thus becomes a kind of internal epidemic or contaminatio, spreading out from the play's neutered center. As th

Why this doubling of eunuchs, this redundancy of castration in Terence's play? Eunuchus, as Terence admits in the prologue, is itself a "double," being largely derived from a lost play of the same title by Menander, who in turn inherited the castration topos from the Old Comedy. Indeed, castration might be said to be a founding trope of comedy as dramatic genre. This is probably due historically and anthropologically to the derivation of comic drama from the phallophoria, the fertility-invoking phallic procession, for which castration represented a negative, fertility-threatening force.30 Terence's Eunuchus revives this tradition, rendering the topic fully explicit and doubly central, and greatly elaborating its social and theatrical impli- cations. The immediate reason for the play's redundant emphasis on castration lies in the occasion of its first performance.

Viola's "eunuch" lends itself to both a historical and a psychoanalytical reading in terms of the privatizing and discursivizing of intercourse, within the bounds of Elias's "civilization" and Lacan's "kingdom of culture."

They are substituted for by discursive relationships. Love is exclusively an effect of language, a cultural event. This process involves a loss both physical-that is, the necessary diminution of natural libido-and personal-the loss of what Lacan terms "an essential part of [the woman's] femininity."27 Loss is the price paid for cultur

This is as close a description as one can find of Viola's eunuch role with regard to its effects on Olivia and Orsino: rejecting "an essential part of her femininity" through "masquerade," Viola achieves precisely the paradoxical result of becoming the signifier of the Other's desire. She is loved for-or through-what she is not, as she hints in her teasing revelation/hiding of her "real" gender both to Olivia ("I swear I am not that I play" [1.5.185]; "I am not what I am" [3.1.143]) and to Orsino ("My father had a daughter loved a man.... I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too

Freud's notion of castration anxiety as the founding moment of adult subjectivity and sociality becomes for Lacan the causative principle not only for gender differentiation but for the very possibility of intersubjective desire and interpersonal exchange.

6 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Viola's celebrated "blank" suggests her emptied or castrated subjectivity through the cutting asunder of her desire for Orsino; it also suggests the virtual nature of her history, which remains to be written or performed, and in which her "concealment" might or might not end tragically, like Gonza- ga's narrative. Moreover, the context of Viola's tale of female self-"castra- tion" is analogous to that of Cesare Gonzaga's narrative: both stories are told in response to misogynistic affirmations of women's biological inferiority and incapacity for self-restraint. Gonzaga responds to Gaspare Pallavicino's argument that women are mistakes of nature, mere males manques: "Na- ture . . . would, if possible, constantly bring forth men; and when a woman is born this is a mistake or defect, and contrary to Nature's wishes." Such biological imperfection can be remedied, claims Pallavicino, only through sexual intercourse, whereby the woman receives what, thanks to nature's bungling, she lacks (the phallus): "because in the sexual act the woman is perfected by the man, whereas the man is made imperfect." At the same time, the desperate search for the perfection that only intercourse can provide leads women to destructive promiscuity: "don't believe that men are more incontinent than women . .. countless evils arise from the inconti- nence of women which do not so from the incontinence of men."'17 Viola similarly responds to Orsino's contention that women are biologi- cally and morally inferior because "they lack retention"-in the two senses that they lack the capacity for real love and that they lack self-restraint (with a possible third allusion to women's incontinence or uncontrollable men- strual flows'8)-and are at the same time dominated by mere animal "appetite" (2.4.97, 98). The irony in Viola's situation, of course, is that in order to exercise the very capacity for love and restraint she attributes to women, she must dress as a man, albeit an imperfect or "castrated" man; her male disguise itself represents the self-punishing bridling of her sexuality. She is in danger of unwittingly confirming Pallavicino's contention that women aspire to be males in order to attain the perfection (or phallus) denied to them at birth: "every woman wants to be a man, by reason of a certain instinct that teaches her to desire her own perfection.'9 Viola's disguised entry into Orsino's court and her behavior once there seem, then, to embody, or perhaps disembody, the Renaissance codification of the feminine in her renunciation of exterior sexuality, or in her renunciation of self in favor of her lost male alter ego, her "dead" twin, Sebastian. But the

am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too: and yet I know not

Viola intends to hide ("conceal me what I am" [1.2.53]) not only her innate sexuality but also her assumed masculinity, thereby ensuring a double barrier of chastity against potential sexual dangers in the world of Orsino's court and a doubled privatisation (through the self-privation of her "private" parts) in her personal dealings with the courtiers. "What I am, and what I would," she tells Olivia, "are as secret as maidenhead"

I don’t want the human to be in Nature, as if Nature isa container

In my further elaboration of Bohr’s insights, appara-tuses are not mere static arrangementsinthe world, but ratherappa-ratuses are dynamic(re)configurings ofthe world, specific agentialpractices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionaryboundaries are enacted.

Thisaccount refuses the representationalist fixation on “words” and “things”and the problematic of their relationality, advocating insteadacausalrelationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific ma-terial configurations of the world(i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurationsrather than “words”)and specific material phenomena(i.e., relations ratherthan “things”). This causal relationship between the apparatuses of bodilyproduction and the phenomena produced is one of “agential intra-action.”The details follow

Crucial to understanding the workings of power is an understandingof the nature of power in the fullness of its materiality. To restrict power’sproductivity to the limited domain of the “social,” for example, or tofigure matter as merely an end product rather than an active factor infurther materializations, is to cheat matter out of the fullness of its capacity.

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histrionic gesture

made her the bull of satire from misogynists of the day, hoth on the stage and in print;

hierarchical social order in which all relationships were infused with a spirit of Christian love.

since the convents where some had been educated had been disbamlcd long ago by Henry Vlll,

colour is allowed to be merely a phantasm of the senses.

Plots before Wit,

Complex ideas are not universal, as .. we can see by the difficulties of translating from one language to another.

Thirdly, When the signification of the word is referred to a standard, which standard is not easy to be known.

pleased to comply with my motion; and upon ex-amination found that the signification of that word was not so settled or certain as they had all imagined; but that each of them made it a sign of a different complex idea.

Knowledge itself is independent of language.

'>yllogism

social constructivism

Besides, the Anthropocene has already become another‘Anthropomeme’ (Macfarlane, 2016), spawning an array of derivativeterms, such as ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2015), ‘Anthrop-obscene’(Parikka, 2015b), but also: ‘Plasticene’, ‘Plantationocene’ (Tsing, 2015),‘Mis-anthropocene’ and ‘Chthulucene’ (Haraway, 2015).

eohumanis

contemporary university

ive “Laws”

ra in which moneymight be dubbed the foremost rhetorical proof. In

op tools that can respond in a differentfashion