Victoria Rimell, University of Warwick

This paper takes as its stimulus Adriana Cavarero’s critical investigation of rectitude in the Western philosophical tradition (Inclinazioni, 2014) and the notable absence of Seneca (who extensively develops ‘rectitude as a general principle’ Veyne 2012) in her account. My aim here is twofold: to uncover what might be lost in this elision, and to develop understanding – via close readings that are attuned to the challenge of Senecan philosophy as literary performance - of how the gendered ontology of rectitude is increasingly put under pressure and transformed in Seneca’s later philosophical texts. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between form and content in the Letters, and to the question – taken as a serious one, rather than as a response to a ‘contradiction’ which invalidates Senecan thinking and marks it as ‘crooked’ – of how to square Seneca as a thinker of being as a process or un unfolding in time through the medium of the epistle, with the writer who posits a spatialising metaphysic of static impermeability. I argue that the current critical status quo which envisages an unproblematic sacrifice in Seneca of the bodily integrity and verticality constitutive of the Roman male subject in exchange for the consolation of psychic fortitude suppresses the struggle out of which a context-specific praxis of psychic resilience emerges in the Letters, and underestimates both the provocations of this praxis and its philosophical impact. Seneca’s ‘low’ or ‘stooped’ voice (submissiore lingua, Ep.13.4) lures us down from the Platonic-Lucretian citadel of sapientia to a horizontal plain on which the subject must wrestle with, accept, and redefine dangerous leaning as a condition of an ethical life-in-time. The result is a distinctively different geometry, which does not intersect comfortably with normative Roman masculinity or with the ‘straight’ Seneca of our philosophical tradition.