The Intimacy of Wounds: Care of the Other in Seneca's Consolatio Ad Helviam

Abstract:In this close reading of Seneca's consolation to his mother, I propose new ways of understanding the text as a whole, building critically on responses to Fantham's thesis of "displacement" (Fantham 2007), and mapping how the notoriously violent opening relates to the central body of the text, and to its concluding chapters. The paper focuses on Seneca's metaphors of the wound and wounding, and on what kinds of ethical relation might be imagined and sustained by the counter-intuitive process of irritating, revisiting and sharing in psychophysical wounds rather than closing them. In considering the disruption to invulnerable male identity that the wounded mother may be seen to represent in this text, I reassess the significance of the ad Heluiam in the development of Stoic ethics and explore what is missing in Foucault's tendentious account of imperial Stoicism as a quasi-medical regimen and social practice in which "all is lost if you begin with care for others" (Foucault 2005, 198).