Name: Dori Aspuru-Takata

Title: “Incorporate Conclusion”: Deception and Embodied Passions in Othello

Abstract: Iago's sneering reference to sexual consummation as “th'incorporate conclusion” (II.i.260) foregrounds the imagined and narrated trajectories of bodies in Shakespeare's Othello. The play-text performs a theatrical experiment through an embodiment of various discourses in order to critique and unsettle foregone conclusions that are prompted by prescriptive types—abstractions that divert our attention from complex particularities. In this paper, I focus on one constitutive thread of these intertwined discourses: the passions. I suggest that the resonances of Thomas Wright's influential text The Passions of the Mind in General (1601), when read in conjunction with Othello, reveal how Iago works to produce himself as what Bruno Latour calls a “centre of calculation." By gathering information, imperfect though that information may be, Iago attempts to control outcomes through masterful deception and the manipulation of contingencies to his advantage. An imaginatively wrought national “complexion” may thus depend on an informed humoral discipline that works by the selective inclusion or exclusion of gendered and raced bodies through politic narration.

 

Dori Aspuru-Takata is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an exchange scholar at Harvard while working on a dissertation on race in early modern English literature. Her interests include Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Renaissance drama, race, ethnicity, and identity.