From ancient philosophy to Tristram Shandy and Buster Keaton movies, this book tells the engaging history of accident as an idea.

An accidental glance at a newspaper notice causes Rousseau to collapse under the force of a vision. A car accidentally hits Giacometti, and he experiences an epiphany. Darwin introduces accident to the basic process of life, and Freud looks to accident as the expression of unconscious desire. Accident, Ross Hamilton claims, is the force that makes us modern. Tracing the story of accident from Aristotle to Buster Keaton and beyond, Hamilton’s daring book revives the tradition of the grand history of ideas.

Accident tells an original history of Western thought from the perspective of Aristotle’s remarkably durable categories of accident and substance. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s distinction underwrote an insistence on order and subordination of the inessential. In a groundbreaking innovation, Hamilton argues that after the Reformation, the concept of accident began to change places with that of substance: accident became a life-transforming event and effectively a person’s essence.  For moderns, it is the accidental, seemingly trivial moments of consciousness that, like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” create constellations of meaning in our lives. Touching on a broad array of images and texts—Augustine, Dante, the frescoes of Raphael, Descartes, Jane Austen, the work of the surrealists, and twentieth-century cinema—Hamilton provides a new way to map the mutations of personal identity and subjectivity.   

Ross Hamilton is associate professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University. 

“Beautifully and lucidly written, Accident balances a series of elegant and convincing close readings—­always supported by an impressive command of the critical terms—­of texts from Oedipus Rex through Musil’s Man without Qualities with a compelling and closely reasoned narrative arc. This is one of the most exciting, imaginative, and original books I’ve read in years, as well as one of the most accomplished and learned: it is truly innovative literary criticism grounded in solid literary scholarship.”­—Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles

"Readers will get the impression that an excellent teacher . . . . is guiding them across millennia. . . . Specialists in English and comparative literature and those teaching undergraduate humanities courses will be well served by this book." .

"That [Hamilton] has alighted on a strikingly original vein of inquiry, to which he brings remarkable intellectual resources, is not in doubt. One wonders whether the idea of the book just idly struck him, or whether it loomed up with a certain implacable necessity."

“Ross Hamilton's Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History is a highly erudite comparative study….Displaying not only great literary-historical, comparative, and philosophical breadth but also rich interpretive depth, this study demonstrates something that could be called prismatic ingenuity, illuminating multiple aspects of ‘accident,’ many of which are far from obvious.”

“Accident is a considerable achievement. An informative, fascinating and thought-provoking book, it results from a bold and original undertaking and is the fruit of an impressive amount of research and reflection. In tracing a history of Western thought, it grapples with the difficulty of perceiving and conceptualizing historical change itself. It successfully relates particular configurations of thought to broad cultural developments and to the mutations of subjectivity. In opening up new perspectives on the power of accident, Hamilton addresses nothing less than the question of what it means to be human.”

"Hamilton presta atención a lo accidental [. . .] lo cual da lugar a este muy sugerente recorrido por el concepto, sus transformaciones, y el subrayado de la total dependencia de su génesis aristotélica."