Abstract
If the stoic tradition valorized self-killing as the ultimate example of the rational control of the passions, Christian thought regarded self-killing as a sin and a crime. Yet there is a third level at which medieval and early modern persons understood such actions as neither a moral quandary nor a philosophical exemplum but a medical problem for the emerging Renaissance sciences of life, vitality, and matter. What role might “affect” have in the understanding of self-killing as both an object of thought and a completed action when the explanatory force of humoral theory began to wane? This chapter examines two exemplary early modern texts that reveal the categorical problems and conceptual challenges posed by self-killing to emergent materialist accounts of the passions.
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Daniel, D. (2017). Self-Killing and the Matter of Affect in Bacon and Spinoza. In: Bailey, A., DiGangi, M. (eds) Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56126-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56126-8_5
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