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Ross Hamilton. Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 344.
The past two decades have seen a number of books devoted to the role of chance in literature and culture. These include Thomas M. Kavanagh's studies of the culture of gambling in Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance (1993) and Dice, Cards, Wheels (2005), David F. Bell's Circumstances: Chance and the Literary Text (1993), which deals with the French realist novel, and Michael Witmore's The Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (2001). In the wake of Ian Hacking's pioneering work on the emergence of probability, these books draw on thinkers from Aristotle to the contemporary French philosopher Clément Rosset in order to conceptualize chance as a challenge to rational explanation, scientific determinism, and ideological certainty. More or less broad in their focus, they have in common a concern with the role of chance as a significant component in the narrative configuration of events.
The title and subtitle of Ross Hamilton's book lead us to expect a work that mines the same rich vein of cultural history. The original twist that Hamilton brings to this theme is to extend the meaning of "accident" beyond the notion of chance event. The opening pages of the book draw our attention to the double meaning of "accident" in Aristotle's philosophy: the term sumbebekos refers to unexpected events, but also distinguishes mutable or inessential qualities of a thing from its defining essence or substance. Setting out to study the historical mutations of this double concept of accident, Hamilton develops three main lines of argument: first, he insists on the "symbiotic relationship" that exists between accidental qualities and accidental events; second, he relates both categories to the notion of identity (8); third, he makes the case that "the value of substance relative to the value of accident serves as a marker in the cultural identification of what it means to be 'modern'" (9).
Hamilton's introduction identifies modern reformulations of this Aristotelian heritage in the work of three theorists. Paul Virilio's analysis of technology emphasizes the "radical mindlessness" induced by today's mass-production of accidental events (3), Michel Foucault offers archeological and genealogical models for understanding the history of the subject (4), while...