1. The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist by Zachary Sng (review)
Aakash M. Suchak
MLN, Volume 128, Number 5, December 2013 (Comparative Literature
Issue), pp. 1211-1214 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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through” vs. “acting out” with a provisional reckoning, invested not in trauma’s
endless repetition but its surviving, shifting legacy.
University of Hartford SARAH SENK
Zachary Sng. The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. 202 pp.
The Rhetoric of Error is a precisely articulated, insightful look into the figure of
error, defined as the slippage between language and thought, in eighteenth
century literary and philosophical texts from Britain and Germany. This
potentially vast inquiry makes for an ample text that tackles canonical works
with a rare rhetorical verve. Sng’s attentive readings of Locke, Leibniz, Kant,
Goethe, and Kleist comprise a rigorous exposition of error’s many forms,
while also brimming with comparisons to classical accounts (as in Herodo-
tus, Quintilian, and Aristotle) and contemporary modes of reading (of the
likes of Derrida and de Man). Even if the scope is illimitable, Sng’s work is
no less precise: dubbing as errance the potentially productive wandering and,
conversely, defeating movement that error’s etymology entails, the author
aims to account for the rhetorical strategies that develop the idea of “error”
as well as the ways in which they are undercut by it. It may be needless to
emphasize that Sng’s text often confronts the possibility of a near-constant
doubling and self-criticism, yet preempts this threat by arguing that the work
aspires “to trace the irresolvable contradictions that constitute these texts”
(5) rather than offering a systematic account. Sng’s modest “tracing” shies
away from absolutes in favor of nuanced articulations of textual ambivalence
in these works.
The first chapter of the book examines John Locke’s Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, describes the philosopher’s view of the complex inter-
relationship between thought, words, and objects, and notes the ambiguity
of Locke’s position with respect to language. Locke is fearful of the possibil-
ity of corruption contained within language’s circulation and exchange; as
such, Sng argues that the Essay offers a rhetorical performance that narrates
the work’s own composition in order to give an impression of origination,
which putatively secures the epistemological integrity of the Essay according
to its own standard. By identifying Locke’s figurative associations between
the origination and circulation of language and fountains and pipes, as well
as gold and coinage, Sng represents the epistemological structure of Locke’s
notion of language’s relationship to truth: namely, that the source cannot be
corrupted and circulation is to blame for error. Unfortunately for Locke, this
system cannot hold. Sng draws on Locke’s economic pamphlets to substantiate
the figurative connection between language and coinage, signaling Locke’s

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concern with the British state’s intervention in the denominated value of a
coin, communally accepted, like the meanings of words. Yet, Sng concludes,
the ambivalence of Locke’s need for gold to be both self-identical but also
figurative in exchange undercuts the systematicity of the model of origination
and dissemination that the Essay lays out.
The issue of language’s relative reliability or unreliability continues in the
second chapter, in which Sng examines G. W. Leibniz and John Horne Tooke’s
attempts to affirm language’s stability by offering rigorous etymologies by
which one might successfully account for the origin and use of a word. While
their efforts are noble, these quickly give way to variances that proceed in an
unpredictable, “incalculable” way (46). Sng picks certain stunning examples
from Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Knowledge to demonstrate the ways in
which the method is sound (as in the Latin fatum as the source for “fate”) and
those in which it takes errant transformations and turns (as with the German
term quaken and its spinoffs). Whereas the source of error for Locke was, Sng
argues, language’s relationship to the external world, for Leibniz, the source
becomes the tropological changes that defy predictability. Tooke adds a third
possibility: that of “dispatch” or abbreviation, the tendency to prefer swiftness
in conveying thought. The chapter concludes with an elegant reading of S.
T. Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and its exemplification of the divergence
among thought and word.
The impressive third chapter begins with a playful reference to the sitcom
Seinfeld as a transition into a discussion of gift-giving and language as it pertains
to the reading of Kant’s critical philosophy in Pheng Cheah’s Spectral National-
ity (2003). Sng explores Cheah’s study, which defends the Kantian metaphor
of the political body as organism against “the charge of irrationalism and
ideological mystification,” aiming instead to situate it in a genealogy of the
German Enlightenment and rationality (77). Kant argues that the structure of
nature’s causality as it appears to us can be reversed in order to understand
something about relationships among people, such as the nation-form and
body politic. Sng is skeptical of this view, maintaining that the metaphor seems
to involve an overly convenient correspondence between autonomous reason
and a particular type of causality in nature, which must not be free, but deter-
mined by understanding. Analogy—the “as-if” formulation that Kant states is
necessarily involved in judgment—always comes close to slipping into error,
in particular, that of “subreption,” its negative “counterpart”: purporting to
derive knowledge or understanding from empirical-qua-sensory experience.
In other words, subreption is that fallacy of claiming to know something of
the noumena from the phenomena, which expands to denote the error of sup-
posedly understanding something of the objective from the subjective, or of
the “ontological” from the “epistemic” (79). Sng finds that Cheah’s defense
both “leaves intact the opposition between rationality and irrationality” and
“tends to generate a series of ghost-figures that are invested with a certain
ontological import, and, in doing so, repeats precisely the error of subreption
against which Kant continually warns” (78). He concludes by linking the organ-

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ismic metaphor with the self-giving and self-erasure of analogy, arguing that
the knowledge tentatively obtained through the as-if rests on the distinction
between analogy and subreption. This nearly impossible distinction exists only
through reason’s own capacity for the production and annulment of error.
The latter two chapters attend to German literary texts—Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship and Kleist’s Penthesilea—as they address error as a pos-
sibility confronting self-knowledge. Sng appropriately situates his fourth chap-
ter, “The Madness of the Middle,” in the midst of his book. It considers how
theories proffered by Aristotle and Adam Smith problematize the reliability
and efficacy of the middle as a means to an end. Contrasting the account of
error in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with that of Goethe’s Bildungsroman,
Sng argues that the latter promises that error can only be negated by further
error, thereby begetting Bildung. Yet this account, as soon as it is established
in Goethe, is undermined, that is, threatens to be itself in error. The medium
that transmits either knowledge or error, metaphorically represented in
Wilhelm Meister by drinking, undercuts or “troubles” this knowledge of how
Bildung is brought about. Two senses of “middle” arise in this consideration:
moderation and mediation. Moderation, coming from Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics, refers to the notion that in order to identify a virtue, one must seek
the middle of two extremes through a process of calculation or trial. Sng sees
a variety of similarities between the Aristotelian notion of moderation and
Bildung, arguing that Goethe’s depiction of “sober subject-formation” can be
seen as “a reimagination of Aristotelian moderation” (111). The discussion of
mediation turns to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment, which emphasizes
the two types of error in moral judgments—utility (fitness) and fashion (cus-
tom)—which both rely on the means or middle, which is unstable and merely
average. This discussion in turn articulates how Wilhelm Meister escapes the
generic categorization of Bildundgsroman that it supposedly exemplifies. Sng
also emphasizes the importance of the middle of the narrative to Wilhelm’s
ascent to knowledge. Turning to the novel itself, the chapter concludes with
an examination of the familial structure of the text (and the potential fourth
term, outside father, mother, and child, of physician, whose vantage point
allows him to observe, read, recognize, and measure the Oedipal triangle)
and the persistent recurrence of ribbons and fabric (which metonymically
evoke desire without ever culminating in it).
Sng’s most colorful chapter turns to Kleist’s play Penthesilea to consider how
the logic of threes disrupts binaries and doubles as they are invoked in the
text. The traditional triads of dramatic structure, the gender dichotomy, the
rhetorical figure of the zeugma: Kleist takes up and problematizes (another
zeugma) each of these systematic distinctions, rendering them with the
troubling possibility of corruption and filth, a key theme to the play. As such,
these are either neatly recuperated into a positive meaning or negatively func-
tion as errors that undermine thematic configurations. Looking to Kleist’s

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source, Herodotus, for the source of the tale, Sng finds the use of “solecism”
to describe a new language corrupted by a previous one, as occurred when
Amazonian women picked up the Scythian language when forming the nation
Sauromate. Sng tastefully notes the way in which Herodotus’s word choice in
the passages describing the narrative of nation formation duplicate the union
they describe; yet such a union is potentially dangerous, Sng argues, as the
same term that denotes “joining” and “intercourse”—summignumi in ancient
Greek—also names violent engagement as well as comprehension and under-
standing. Through an adept etymological navigation, Sng is able to show that
the possibility of violence continually threatens peaceful union just as solecism
threatens native speech. Transferring this renewed conception to the Kleist
text, Sng names the Amazonian queen Penthesilea the disconcerting third
that interferes with the happy union of two groups and the binary of love
and war. Concluding with a nod toward his analysis of Leibniz, Sng restates
the errant movement of etymology and the impossible task of reclaiming an
origin with respect to the name Tanaïs, as both the river that the Amazoni-
ans and Scythians crossed and Kleist’s name for the first Amazonian Queen.
The conclusion uses Mary Douglas’s structuralist anthropological study Purity
and Danger (1966) to raise the analogy between error and dirt as residue of a
systematic order. This section cleverly performs its premise by accumulating
details pertaining to the previous chapters that were not recuperated into
the larger whole, turning potential waste matter into meaningful contribu-
tions. In this brief portion, as in the entire work, Sng’s analytic flair shines.
His formidable, if slippery, analyses endorse a return to close-reading and
rhetorical analysis, though this endorsement is accessible only to the spe-
cialist. Further attention to the material circumstances of this philosophical
and literary activity, as briefly achieved in the chapter on Locke, might have
made this text more convincing. Nevertheless, the work is exemplary of liter-
ary argumentation, robust with clever turns and erudite with its linguistic,
chronological, and philological range. There is a converse to this strength
or value, like error itself: the book lacks the restraint to limit certain connec-
tions in order to foreground a certain few. What his style lacks in pedagogical
exposition it makes up for in an almost solemn argumentative dignity. Indeed,
each sentence of Sng’s hardened syntax is wrought as though of steel. The
Rhetoric of Error takes up the conceptual history project of Bates’ Enlightenment
Aberrations (2002) in Germany and England, operating at the intersection of
literary analysis and the history of ideas. To overlook such a keen contribution
to Enlightenment scholarship would only be in error.
University of California, Berkeley Aakash M. Suchak