The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes 9781442696204

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Experience and the Matter of Mind: Dualism, Classicism, and the Myth of the Modern Subject in Seventeenth-Century France
1. Front Matter: Placing Descartes’s Meditations
2. A State of Mind: Embodying the Sovereign in Poussin’s The Judgment of Solomon
3. The Witch from Colchis: Corneille’s Médéé, Chiméne’s Le Cid, and the Invention of Classical Genius
4. Seeing Is Believing: Image and Imaginaire in Molière’s Sganarelle
5. The Ghost in the Machine: Reason, Faith, and Experience in Pascalian Apologetics
6. Des mots sans fin: Meaning and the End(s) of History in Boileau’s Satire XII, ‘Sur l’Equivoque’
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T H E M AT TER OF M IND : REASON AND EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF DESCARTES

This page intentionally left blank

CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER

The Matter of Mind Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4348-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Braider, Christopher, 1950– The matter of mind : reason and experience in the age of Descartes / Christopher Braider. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4348-2 1. French literature – 17th century – History and criticism. 2. France – Intellectual life – 17th century. 3. Experience in literature. 4. Reason in literature. 5. Descartes, Rene´, 1596–1650 – Influence. I. Title. PQ245.B73 2012

840.9´38409032

C2011-905347-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

for the Boys, big and little

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction. Experience and the Matter of Mind: Dualism, Classicism, and the Myth of the Modern Subject in Seventeenth-Century France 3 1 Front Matter: Placing Descartes’s Meditations

34

2 A State of Mind: Embodying the Sovereign in Poussin’s The Judgment of Solomon 66 3 The Witch from Colchis: Corneille’s Me´de´e, Chime`ne’s Le Cid, and the Invention of Classical Genius 122 4 Seeing Is Believing: Image and Imaginaire in Molie`re’s Sganarelle 150 5 The Ghost in the Machine: Reason, Faith, and Experience in Pascalian Apologetics 173 6 Des mots sans fin: Meaning and the End(s) of History in Boileau’s Satire XII, ‘Sur l’Equivoque’ 201 Notes

243

Bibliography Index

305

323

Colour plates follow page

84

This page intentionally left blank

Illustrations

Plate 1 Nicolas Poussin, Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind of Jericho. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 83 and colour section Plate 2 Nicolas Poussin, The Judgment of Solomon. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 89 and colour section Plate 3 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait for Jean Pointel. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. 107 and colour section Plate 4 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait for Paul Fre´art de Chantelou. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 110 and colour section Fig. 1 Nicolas Poussin, Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Wilderness. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 74 Fig. 2 Anger, from Charles le Brun, Confe´rence sur l’expression ge´ne´rale et particulie`re. 75 Fig. 3 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Ordination. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. 77 Fig. 4 Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the Cross. Antwerp, Cathedral of Our Lady. 79 Fig. 5 Nicolas Poussin, The Finding of Moses. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 81 Fig. 6 Colour chart from Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae. 84 Fig. 7 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus. St Petersburg, The Hermitage. 92 Fig. 8 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. 93 Fig. 9 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. London, The National Gallery. 94 Fig. 10 Title page from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 99

x

Illustrations

Fig. 11 Nicolas Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 104 Fig. 12 Nicolas Poussin, Inspiration of the Poet. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 105 Fig. 13 Nicolas Poussin, Apollo and Daphne. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 106 Fig. 14 Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego (Arcadian Shepherds). Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. 119

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks go, first and foremost, to the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC, for a year-long research fellowship (2005–6) that enabled me to complete my research and make substantial progress toward pulling the book together. And equally heartfelt thanks go to the Kayden Book Prize committee at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for the grant that made it possible to include colour reproductions without which the argument of chapter 2 would not be what I hope it has become. Versions of several chapters have appeared as journals articles or edited volumes: chapter 3, ‘The Witch from Colchis: Corneille’s Me´de´e, Chime`ne’s Le Cid, and the Invention of Classical Genius,’ in Modern Language Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2008): 315–45; chapter 4, ‘Seeing Is Believing: Image and Imaginaire in Molie`re’s Sganarelle,’ in PMLA 117, no. 5 (October 2002): 1142–57; and chapter 5, ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Reason, Faith, and Experience in Pascalian Apologetics,’ in Le Savoir au XVII e sie`cle, ed. John D. Lyons and Cara Welch, proceedings of the 34th annual meeting of the North American Society for SeventeenthCentury French Literature (Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr, 2003), 345–55. Thanks are also due to those who, in inviting me to speak on various occasions, helped me clarify what the book was about: Harriet Stone at Washington University of St Louis, who not only organized the NASSCFL panel at Tulane University in New Orleans from which chapter 4 arose but organized the MLA panel in New York that planted the seed for chapter 2; Timothy Hampton, whose invitation to address a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley brought into focus the ideas on Pascal’s doctrine of the will that eventually produced the NASSCFL paper presented at the University of Virginia that John Lyons and Cara Welch

xii

Acknowledgments

published; Timothy Hampton again, this time for hosting the Berkeley conference on Pierre Corneille to which I owe chapter 3; Nicholas Paige, who organized the panel at the NASSCFL conference hosted by New York University for which I wrote the core of chapter 6; and Lisa Freinkel of the University of Oregon and Michael Steinberg, Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, who gave me a chance to submit the project as a whole to spirited and probing public discussion. Nor should I forget the members of the seminar on ‘Places, Citations, Memories’ that Herbert Marks and I organized at the 2004 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association hosted by the University of Michigan, and in particular Harry Berger, Lisa Freinkel, and Daniel Selcer, who managed to see everything wrong about my first attempt to formulate the argument for chapter 1. My deepest thanks, finally, to my wife Helen and my friend Daniel Shine, Johnsonian enemies of pomposity and obscurity who helped humanize my prose – to the extent at least that that is possible.

T H E M AT TER OF M IND

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction. Experience and the Matter of Mind: Dualism, Classicism, and the Myth of the Modern Subject in Seventeenth-Century France

Reason as logic, or reason as motive? Or reason as a way of life? – John Le Carre´, Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The following book sets out to topple a tenacious idol to which most accounts of the early modern West pay homage. It is by way of being an axiom of early modern literary and cultural studies that the crucial turning point in Western modernity was the advent of the so-called modern subject, the sovereign rational mind personified by Rene´ Descartes. Whether applauded as the spring of self-determining freedom Hans Blumenberg, Jonathan Israel, and Desmond Clarke celebrate or lamented as the fount of alienated enslavement Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor indict, the dualist severance of mind and body is said to have inaugurated a new era grounded in reason’s critical and instrumental detachment both from physical nature and from the cultural allegiances inherited from the past.1 Against this view, I argue that we cannot take the dualist self of modern rationality at what we have come to think of as face value. The Cartesian ‘invention of the mind’2 was not just the heroic break with prejudice, fantasy, and error that Blumenberg chronicles. But neither was it simply the hubristic mask for the new rationalist tyranny epitomized by Foucault’s favourite icons of the modern technocratic state – the insane asylum, the panoptical prison, and the barracks-like public school. The rationalist ego was a perplexed response to the historical experience it set out to reduce to order. The self Cartesian reason laboured to emancipate and reform declared its inextricable entanglement in the modes of physical, psychological, and cultural embodiment it purported to overcome.

4

The Matter of Mind

This was already obvious to many of Descartes’s contemporaries, including the authors of the six sets of critical objections published in the first edition of the Cartesian Meditations themselves. The model human being ( Jacob Burckhardt’s civic individual, Norbert Elias’s courtly homo clausus)3 was indeed portrayed as being at least fitfully capable of rational self-control. Whence the mental discipline demanded not only by philosophical method but by the intricate ethical codes set forth in the conduct manuals for which Baldassare Castiglione set the standard or in the Machiavellian literature of political prudence that reached a summit in Baltasar Gracia´n.4 Yet the mind that grants this power was seen less as an autonomous nature or substance than as a predicate of person, a term that, in denoting the concerted roles people played, underscored the contingent socio-physical bodies that anchored those roles in human space.5 Nor should we overlook the constraining settings in which early modern persons played their parts. The Italian Renaissance city state and the absolutist court not only provided a passive backdrop for the self-fashioning individuals who inhabited them; they also called those individuals into existence as a function of the artificial modes of life city and court made possible and policed. Accordingly, where period readers like the objectors Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi did not merely ridicule Descartes’s picture of mind as selfevidently false, they joined later writers like Blaise Pascal and Molie`re in exposing it to critical experiments designed to restore it to the natural order over which it arrogates dominion.6 Far from taking the Cartesian ego as a model to which they rigorously conformed, the monuments of early modern literary, artistic, and intellectual history undermine the traditional dualisms (mind and body, spirit and flesh, male and female, truth and error, reality and appearance) to which, for all his critical modernity, Descartes remained loyal. They thereby challenge the very notion of a pervasive rational subject imagined as escaping the multiple determinations of incarnate historical experience. Insofar as early modernity can be said to have had a single overarching theme, it is precisely that there is no mind but embodied, no spirit but in flesh, no male but feminized, no truth but in error, no reality beyond the endless play of metamorphic appearances. In declaring the dualist subject a standard universally endorsed, we cast the spell we congratulate ourselves for breaking. To test this hypothesis I focus on the time and place to which Descartes most plausibly set his seal, the so-called classical age of seventeenthcentury France. The grand sie`cle is seen as the pre-eminently Cartesian era

Introduction 5

of classical dualism and the order of synoptic representation classicism enjoins. From this standpoint, the period’s central task was a work of critical discrimination aimed at distinguishing the true nature of things, at clarifying their systematic relations, and at giving them proper names. Dualism lays out the metaphysical framework for this project by divorcing the rational mind from the encumbering body and the sources of irrational disorder the body both causes and symbolizes: our deceptive bodily senses; the ‘humours’ and passions for which the senses serve as vehicles and stimulants; and the multiple cultural predispositions with which sensuous experience is complicit – the customs, idioms, and identities we acquire as historical inhabitants of a socially prefabricated world. Scholars have kept the agonistic dimension of the classical enterprise in view by directing attention to the overdetermining political, ideological, and material interests classicism covertly advances. Dualism thus becomes a target for the paradoxes and anamorphic reversals that enable the Foucaldian archaeology of power, Bourdellian sociology, structuralist semiotics, or Lacanian psychoanalysis to upend the putatively common-sense evaluation of the cultural past by showing how, to a sophisticated eye, the truth is invariably the opposite of what conventional wisdom decrees.7 However, the basis for such critiques remains the claim Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and the rest ironically share with conventional wisdom: the grand sie`cle marks the triumph of dualist representation; and what sustains that triumph is the thoroughgoing repression of the social, sexual, and historical modes of embodiment that disturb the rational ‘clarity’ and ‘distinctness’ to which the disembodied mind aspires. One may nonetheless wonder if the Cartesian order of French classicism was ever as triumphant as period proponents and latter-day antagonists have a common stake in urging. Even leaving aside the extent of the period debt to Descartes, it is an open question how far the era was properly ‘classical’ at all. As He´le`ne Merlin-Kajman and Alain Ge´netiot have recently reminded us, the label used less to characterize than to taxidermize the decades from the foundation of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise in 1635 to the death of Jean Racine in 1699 is a late coinage designed to impose retrospective coherence on developments contemporaries experienced in often conflicted as well as conflicting ways.8 The label does afford a certain purchase in that the era’s consistent (if still not uniform) goal was to rescue some sort of working communal order from the chaos of historical events and the clashing passions and prejudices that, in clouding human judgments, threatened peaceful

6

The Matter of Mind

coexistence. A feature of this pursuit was a thirst for consensus and the orthopyschic discipline consensus was felt to require. The Cartesian principle of method is indeed exemplary from this standpoint in that it supposed not merely the need for some kind of method but the existence of a single right one – what the title of Descartes’s book on the matter calls not just ‘method’ but ‘the method’ alone capable of hunting down ‘the truth.’9 For every question it was taken for granted that there had to be one answer, that the key to this answer was to be sought in the nature of the problems or phenomena at issue, and that, to find that key, it sufficed to exercise the faculty of right reason with which human beings were naturally endowed for this very purpose. The ideal of natural and rational self-government invoked against this background was, moreover, regularly associated with the authoritative example of the ‘classical’ past of pagan Greece and Rome. It is largely in recognition of the special emphasis the French gave to putatively ‘ancient’ standards of nature and reason conceived as coordinated principles of social and political as well as mental, emotional, and artistic order that I will, in what follows, conform to traditional usage in this regard. Despite the many deep and abiding differences that divided them, seventeenth-century poets, critics, philosophers, and divines succeeded in debating everything from the nature of reality or the mandates of the cult to the moral springs of beauty and the art of civilized conversation without reverting to the savage violence epitomized by the wars of religion Henri IV had brought to an end. That they did so pays tribute to a shared commitment to the social virtues of urbanity, rationality, and balance for which classicism is as good a name as any. The fact remains that, as witnessed by the debate conducted with undiminished heat ever since Jean Rousset’s hypothesis of a French baroque first challenged the supposed supremacy of the classical norm, even figures as incontestably enlisted in the classical cause as self-styled anciens like Racine, Nicolas Boileau, or Jean de La Bruye`re were liable to deviate from the norm in spectacular ways.10 Nor is it just that, for all their cultivation of the arts of rational self-government, the seventeenthcentury French were as often (if agonistically) drawn to the same disordering affects and ambitions as their more self-evidently baroque contemporaries in Spain, Italy, Germany, or Britain. The classical itself was subject to a wide range of interpretations capable of leading down any number of rival paths. As far back as 1950, E.B.O. Borgerhoff wrote of the ‘freedom’ French classical writers enjoyed in open opposition to the dogmatism announced in the verdict handed down by the

Introduction 7

Acade´mie Franc¸aise on the controversy surrounding Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid. The same era that gave us authoritative classical unities and rules also gave us the je ne sais quoi of an increasingly ‘liberal’ taste whose sources lay in what figures as diverse as Rene´ Rapin, Dominique Bouhours, Boileau, and La Bruye`re called the ‘secrets’ and ‘hidden beauties’ of unmediated aesthetic feeling and the unregulated experiences feeling inspires.11 Similarly, John Lyons explores the ‘kingdom of disorder’ both represented in and engendered by not only classical tragedy, whose fables of pity and fear depend on the breakdown of the moral and political order classicism champions, but the emergence of the institution of dramatic criticism, whose efforts to formulate canons of critical judgment wound up parading the quarrelsome anarchy of private aesthetic response.12 To this we may add the recent renewal of interest in the sublime: a phenomenon, exhibited above all by Corneille before being theorized by Boileau, whose demonstration of poets’ power to produce feelings of quasi-theological awe by breaking the rules of art has fundamentally changed scholarly assessments of the moral, political, and aesthetic bearing of seventeenth-century literature.13 The convenience and even justice of the classical label should not, then, blind us to the degree to which the harmonious rational order the term implies was a reflex of the disorders classicism has been understood to school. Such is, besides, the testimony of the material interests to which modern-day critics of classical culture in a specifically Cartesian register draw attention. More than a settled system, classical dualism was a strategic ideal whose key doctrines raised difficulties that consistently defied it. Whatever classical theory might decree, classical practice and the material conditions that beset it engendered problems theory never managed to solve. It is not just that classicism was resisted in its own day by the younger Pierre Corneille or by the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac, writers whose stridently baroque portrayal of human motives, potentialities, and desires deliberately subvert the rational pieties of the cultural establishment. The disreputable facts classical culture is alleged to have suppressed – the ‘scandal of the talking body’ and the verbal and erotic bases of identity (Shoshana Felman); the idolatrous psycho-political fantasies of Œdipal symbolism (Mitchell Greenberg); the ‘four-letter’ truths of human sexuality and the scandal-mongering press that exploited them for profit ( Joan DeJean)14 – are not the invasive opposites of classical mind. They are the very matters of which classical minds were made.

8

The Matter of Mind

This radical reassessment of the classical canon cashes out in a series of interdisciplinary readings keyed to the material conditions that, in determining the thingly contours of human experience, also determined the surprising variety of forms in which French poets, artists, and philosophers both pictured mind and exposed it to critical experiment. In chapter 1, ‘Front Matter: Placing Descartes’s Meditations,’ rather than read the master text of rationalist thought as the anthology of dualist pronouncements we tend to see in it today, I present it as a telltale product of the socio-economic circumstances surrounding its publication. Thanks to prior circulation in manuscript and uncorrected proofs overseen by the eclectic impresario Marin Mersenne, the text that reached the public first in Latin (1641) and then French (1647) was accompanied by objections and responses in which Descartes duels with a wide range of critics – the Dutch Thomist Caterus, the materialists Hobbes and Gassendi, and the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld as well as Mersenne himself. The effect of these interventions was to turn the metaphysical monologue on which Descartes’s reputation rests into a dramatic dialogue in which he defends himself against attacks levelled not only at his arguments but at his character as a specific, socially located individual. The printed text is moreover preceded by a growing body of front matter (a dedication, a preface, a bookseller’s notice to the reader) that, in trying to frame the book’s reception while assuring the widest possible sales, shows how far it remained in thrall to the alienating processes of commodification, translation, and critical uptake. The result confirms the embodiment Cartesian metaphysics set out to refute. Descartes haughtily insisted that he was no faiseur de livres, a venal hack writing books for prideful publicity’s sake; his only motive in publishing was the disinterested love of truth. This noble aim was nonetheless trumped by the worldly forces shaping both the actual book and a public persona far more protean and vulnerable than the main body’s abstract first-person hero. Chapter 2, ‘A State of Mind: Embodying the Sovereign in Poussin’s The Judgment of Solomon,’ analyses a complex royal icon intended to grant the disembodied ideal of absolutist monarchy a memorable and persuasive visual expression. In choosing the Bible’s Solomon as a type for the reigning monarch, the most Cartesian of artists identifies the source of royal sovereignty with the self-composing mind of which Solomon’s court turns out to be an emblem. However, the resulting image questions both the royal theory it endorses and the Cartesian picture of sovereign reason it incorporates to that end. For the first beneficiary of

Introduction 9

the move by which the picture subordinates political authority to an intellectual authority that as such transcends the historical person of the king is Nicolas Poussin himself, as author of the compositional invention on which the painting turns. Yet the acknowledgment of Poussin’s sovereignty as an artist is itself subject to an act of judgment on the beholder’s part: as witnessed by the extraordinary exegetical lengths to which Poussin’s acolyte Charles Le Brun had to go to explain how his pictures work, it is only when interpreted (and so constructed) by wellinformed spectators that the painting achieves the form and meaning to which it aspires. The picture’s ultimate theme, consciously or not, is thus the ungovernable play of the emphatically plural minds on which painting, meaning, artist, and sovereign all depend. In developing this theme, the painting materializes the solipsistic potential inherent to Descartes’s picture of vision as an exclusively mental rather than a sensory act, the work of an autonomous intellect that, in detaching itself from the world of material bodies it inhabits, gives that world the form of a rational spectacle. In inviting us to look at a mind, Poussin invites us to look into one: Solomon’s first of all, and then his own; but also and most fundamentally ours since it is finally there, in the ‘sensorium’ housed within the human skull, that we forge the image we receive and the understanding needed to grasp its import. In chapter 3, ‘The Witch from Colchis: Corneille’s Me´de´e, Chime`ne’s Le Cid, and the Invention of Classical Genius,’ the experience of painting gives way to that of the ‘sister’ art of theatre. The chapter opens by reminding us of another crucial expression of the notion of sovereignty in seventeenth-century France, that associated with the figure of the great classical Author. One of the signal achievements of the French classical age, making it indeed the grand sie`cle in whose giant shadow later eras of French literature stand, is the creation of the modern French paradigm of transcendent literary greatness. As attested by the monumental The´aˆtre of 1660, committing his collected dramatic works to posterity along with three magisterial treatises on dramatic art and introductory examens providing critical commentary on each play, the first unmistakable exponent and beneficiary of the new mode of greatness is the original grand classique, Corneille. It is important, however, to grasping Corneille’s unprecedented stature and accomplishment that they are not the product of the autonomous act of will and private genius that Corneille liked to imagine and that his subsequent canonical status seems to ratify. They are rather, in the first instance, a correlate of the form he practised: Aristotelian mimesis and the illusion of

10

The Matter of Mind

internal logical necessity prescribed by the Aristotelian norm of selfdetermining action. Corneille’s success in convincing both himself and others of his transcendent genius is in part an artefact of dramatic representation: the fact that, though everywhere present as the offstage arranger whose panoptical mind frames characters’ words and actions from the start, the poet is also characterized by his systematic absence from the scene as the author of words and actions that appear to be the unrehearsed expression of the characters’ immediate responses to the events in which they find themselves embroiled. Further, despite his subsequent identification as the very embodiment of the classical culture he helped inaugurate, Corneille’s uniqueness as a dramatic poet is also linked to his status as the antagonist of the prevailing cultural order. Indeed, throughout his career, and for a start in the infanticidal Me´de´e of his very first tragedy, Corneille foregrounds an unbroken series of operatically powerful women in whom he portrays not only deviants from contemporary taste and morals but creative embodiments of his own poetic art. Far from confirming the fundamentally anti-feminine thrust of an ostensibly dualist notion of authorship, Corneille identifies his gifts with what his more high-minded contemporaries regarded as the very symbol of embodiment as such: the passionate women whose irregular subjectivities threatened the normative rational ego of Cartesian metaphysics. Chapter 4, ‘Seeing Is Believing: Image and Imaginaire in Molie`re’s Sganarelle,’ moves discussion from the realm of high tragedy epitomized by the self-consciously great Corneille to the largely inadvertent mode of greatness achieved in Molie´resque comedy. The initial focus is the miniature portrait the romantic heroine of an early Molie`re farce preserves in token of her absent love. Fainting under the strain of her father’s efforts to marry her to another man, the heroine loses the portrait, which falls into the hands of Sganarelle’s wife. This change of hands occasions jealous suspicions on Sganarelle’s part, whose conscious basis ironically lies in the classical theory of images. According to the Logique de Port-Royal, a primer designed to clear up philosophical debates by subjecting them to expressly Cartesian modes of logical analysis, portraits (like words) derive their meaning from their ‘originals’ in that (like words and the ‘ideas’ or mental images words excite) their essential function is to stand for those originals in the mode of visual representation. To possess a portrait thus declares some sort of attachment to the person it portrays. But as Molie`re’s audience readily understands, the true ground of Sganarelle’s suspicions is jealousy itself: theory

Introduction 11

merely ratifies the selfish conclusion to which emotion blindly leaps. The comic fallout of Sganarelle’s misreading of his wife’s intentions thereby demonstrates that what people see in images (now in the form of portraits, now in that of the ideas words excite) is less what the technologies of visual representation show them than what overmastering passion leads them to believe. In exposing the portrait to the material logic of comic theatre, the miniature’s circulation overturns the system of classical semiotics Descartes’s disciples enlist to dispel the idolatrous errors Molie`re deploys to farcical effect. Molie`re’s materialist critique of classical semiotics sets the stage for the critique of mind itself at work in Pascalian apologetics. In chapter 5, ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Reason, Faith, and Experience in Pascalian Apologetics,’ the Jansenist apologist applies Descartes’s mathematized mechanics to the mind the cogito presents as mechanism’s protagonist. In the second Provincial Letter, Pascal propounds the parable of an emblematic traveller prevented from returning to his celestial home by a mortal wound (original sin) inflicted by robbers on the road. The parable refutes the neo-Pelagian theory of will sustaining the Jesuit doctrine of grace by showing how the traveller’s happy return is only granted once he acknowledges his powerlessness and appeals for divine mercy. The problem is that, to persuade us, Pascal hints that God’s mercy hinges on the freely formulated choice the traveller is led to make by what the parable terms the ‘experiment’ of his helplessness. But this is the view the parable challenges since it implies an autonomy Pascal’s Augustinian doctrine of will precludes. The point, however, is not simply that Pascal’s rhetoric refutes his theology. Seconded by comparable arguments mustered in the Wager section of the fragmentary ‘discours de la machine’ in the Pense´es, the parable portrays mind itself as a machine. In one sense, Pascal’s model here is la pascaline, the mechanical computer he invented to ease the complex mathematical labours incident to his father’s duties as a tax gatherer – a task not unlike the one the Wager’s interlocutor is called on to undertake in calculating the odds of betting for or against God. Yet there is this crucial difference: the mental machine the interlocutor deploys is inhabited by a second machine in the form of amour-propre, the idolatrous love of self that characterizes fallen human nature. In presenting his calculator to the world, Pascal explains that it manages to perform what we take to be the distinctively mental work of mathematical calculation by eliminating the sources of error in human attention, which flags, and in human intention, which wants things as a reflex of the interests

12

The Matter of Mind

that actuate it. The goal indeed is to eliminate mind itself conceived as a limited capacity for concentrated thought overrun by a limitless power of distracting imagination and desire. But this is just how Pascal’s apologetics work. In the dialogue that frames our parable, if the speaker’s interlocutors are convinced it is because, unlike other potential auditors (a Jesuit, say, or a libertine), they already believe what the parable only seems to teach. Similarly, as Bernard Williams shows, the logical basis for belief the Wager supplies stems not only from sacramentalist faith in the powers of conversion inherent to the psycho-physical routines of liturgical observance; it arises above all from an antecedent fear of eternal hellfire.15 The Wager convinces only insofar as craven ‘attrition’ does the work for it, miming the acts of true penitent ‘contrition’ the sacrament of confession requires. We never in fact choose belief; God grants it through an act of unconditioned grace. Our only hope accordingly lies in the willing suspension of our rational faculties, allowing the paradoxes that besiege the mind to shut it down on faith’s behalf. Pascal’s Turing-like antimentalism raises a final curtain on the literally apocalyptic experience of language explored in chapter 6, ‘Des mots sans fin: The End(s) of History in Boileau’s Satire XII, “Sur l’Equivoque.” ’ Composed in 1705–7, when the classical culture of which Boileau was the pre-eminent spokesman yielded to the ‘modern’ age of his literary archenemy Bernard le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, ‘Sur l’Equivoque’ is the twelfth and last of Boileau’s short verse satires. One reason for writing it, recommended by Boileau’s engagement on the classical side of the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, is just to make twelve, the number of completion and closure consecrated by the twelve books of Virgil’s Æneid. But a deeper reason is to bring an end to history itself, blocking the advance of Fontenellian modernity once and for all. The problem is that history has no end; nor does Boileau succeed in making an end even within the confines of his own poem. Driven by a nameless ‘demon’ whose moral character (Socratic daimon, messenger of truth, or minion of Satan, father of lies?) is itself strikingly equivocal, what begins as an attack on the ‘insipid’ figure of off-colour punning in vogue in Boileau’s youth turns into a history of humanity from the primal Fall to the present. And what makes history the irresistible progress of error and change Boileau tries to stop is l’e´quivoque conceived not merely as a figure of speech but as sectarian acts of interpretive equivocation (those Boileau identifies with the Arian heresy, the Reformation, Jesuit casuists) licensed by the irredeemably equivocal nature of language as such.

Introduction 13

All of which is symbolized in the word e´quivoque itself, a term whose equivocal status surfaces in the difficulty period lexicographers had in determining its ‘proper’ gender. Satire XII begins with a conceit in which l’e´quivoque is apostrophized as the ‘bizarre hermaphrodite’ of the French language, thereby linking problems of gender in every sense to the shape-shifting ambiguities to which equivocation subjects the classical ideal of clear and distinct expression. If, as Boileau wittily yet fatefully notes in the poem’s opening lines, the question of the word’s gender proves so difficult, it is because his contemporaries had a hard time telling the difference between l’e´quivoque construed as a deliberate figure of speech and l’e´quivoque conceived as pure semantic accident, a condition over which we exert no real control. But can we in fact tell the difference between what is a figure of speech and what is not? The satire’s own figural reworking of human history as a drama whose ultimate author (or ‘subject’) is the Devil himself demonstrates that we cannot. In the process, Boileau’s final satire not only defeats the ends it sets itself but enacts the inevitable catastrophe of the classical culture it defends. As this rapid survey of the issues engaged in the following book suggests, the dualist picture of mind exerted a far weaker hold on the contemporary imagination than we are accustomed to suppose. The remarkable thing is indeed the variety of lights to which the mind was exposed and the degree to which those lights were coloured by acute awareness of the complex forms of embodiment that define historical persons. In saying this I do not mean that dualism is a myth or that it had no influence on the ways in which French classical culture conceived human identities. The point, simply, is that it exercised nothing like the hegemony Foucault, for one, would lead us to believe. While dualism is no myth, a uniform subscription to the Cartesian picture of self we call the ‘modern subject’ is; nor can we properly grasp the character of seventeenth-century French culture until we acknowledge this fact. The question then is why this has proved so hard to see. What features both of the period itself and of conventional scholarly wisdom encourage us to assign the Cartesian model a centrality it did not in fact possess? A first reason for overrating Descartes’s contribution is simply the degree to which he got things right. As noted earlier, dualism’s philosophical as well as historical significance consists in its status as a strategic or, in the Kantian phrase, regulative ideal rather than as a positive doctrine, something aimed at and hoped for whether literally believed in or not. The doctrine is to this extent the echo of a deed, the change in position and attitude required to think not only about the world we inhabit and

14

The Matter of Mind

what it takes to grasp the forces that shape it but also, as a means to that end, about how thought itself operates and the ways in which we might enhance its grip on reality. What is at stake is the mental distance thinking demands as a condition of possibility: the capacity to suspend both our normal engagement in the world and the beliefs we spontaneously frame about it in order to subject them to critical scrutiny.16 This purely functional detachment from our own perceptions and beliefs, and thus from the natural objects and forces that engender them, explains why, in the seventeenth century itself, even an unstinting monist like Spinoza concedes an innate power of reflection thanks to which our ideas are never wholly reducible to the material conditions they ‘express’ as an effect expresses its cause or a ‘mode’ the substance of which it is the deterministic ‘affection.’17 But it also highlights a paradox underlying the oppositional tradition in which ritual deconstruction of the Cartesian order of thought figures so prominently. The gesture Foucault, Lacan, or the Roland Barthes of Sur Racine perform in subjecting conventional wisdom (the infamous ‘doxa’) to systematic critique is by its very nature dualistic even (if not especially) when it targets dualism itself. To think about dualism and, a fortiori, to think about the role dualist doctrine plays in conditioning both how and what we think is to strike a dualist posture as a natural reflex of critical thought. The phenomenologist Drew Leder makes the point in describing classical dualism less as an error than as a ‘motivated misreading.’18 Descartes’s mistake lies not so much in his analysis of what actually happens when we think as in yielding to the temptation to hypostasize, turning a natural function into a fixed substance. Something like what Descartes describes as mind does in fact exist as a matter of direct experience. It is just that, as Hobbes objected from the first, mind is a property of the thing that thinks rather than a separate kind of thing in its own right, the res cogitans whose nature is somehow coterminous with abstract thought itself (2:600–2; AT 7:171–3). Or again, in Spinoza’s terms, mind is ‘an idea of the body’ in a simultaneously accusative and genitive sense: an idea we form about the body that belongs to, and thus expresses, the body itself; an idea, then, the body forms of its own identity and the internal and external forces that determine its shifting states and modes.19 If it proves so hard to rid ourselves of the Cartesian model of mind, it is in part because it contains just enough truth to make outright dismissal impossible. But there are other, less reputable factors at work. First and foremost among these is the traditional periodization of French culture, an

Introduction 15

entrenched historical scheme even such otherwise sceptical commentators as Foucault, Lacan, or Barthes embrace without question. We have to deal here with a case of the mode of ‘mythic’ discourse Barthes himself describes as ‘tautology,’ the assertion that something is so because it is so.20 As the story is habitually told, the French seventeenth century simply is the ‘classical age,’ defined as such by the self-conscious purity of its language, by the rule-governed rigour of the poetic procedures laid down in Boileau’s theory of genres or in the notorious neoAristotelian doctrine of the unities, and by a pervasive faith in reason’s unqualified power of objective discernment whose canonical authority just is Descartes. As noted earlier, the most enterprising students of the period are perfectly aware of everything in the historical record that refuses to fit. Foucault chronicles the deep-seated fear of anarchic unreason that motivated the ‘grand renfermement,’ the wave of punitive incarcerations by which the new rationalist state set out to eliminate those deviant social elements (mad people, spendthrifts, beggars, prostitutes, vagrants) that threatened the social order – an order, however, that circularly constituted their deviancy as part of its own self-justification.21 In a similar spirit, Lacan analyses the chiastic opposition between the ‘perspective subject’ he takes to be the normative protagonist of classical experience and the indigestible ‘other’ whose resistant ‘gaze’ rises up to meet it as the latent content of the visible world to which the subject gives representational form. The ‘other’ thereby lends its weight to the ‘alienating armor of identity,’ the conscious persona the subject dons in order to defend himself against creeping recognition of his own fundamentally imaginary character.22 Barthes, meanwhile, challenges the hagiographic myth of Racine’s unprecedented insight into the ostensibly universal laws of the human heart by probing the malevolent idiosyncrasy of homo racinianus, the historically because ethnographically unique amalgam of erotic violence and incurable paranoia that characterized the specifically Racinian contribution to classical psychology.23 And then there is what we have schooled ourselves to think of as the paradoxical persistence of the entity Francis Barker melodramatically terms ‘the tremulous private body’ itself, the marginalized appendage whose systematic ‘subjection’ has become an article of faith even though its disordering symptoms are acknowledged to be everywhere – in the gender trouble indexed by literary women like Madeleine de Scude´ry, cross-dressers like the abbe´ de Choisy, or pornographic novels like L’E´cole des filles; in the machinery of disease, desire, and death besetting

16

The Matter of Mind

classical medicine, morality, and etiquette alike; in the demoralizing dissolution to which early modern anatomical science consigns our physical frames; or in the unnerving spectacle of the labouring masses wandering the backstreets of major cities or the lost byways of the countryside.24 The problem is that, far from interpreting such things as grounds for challenging the traditional picture of the classical era, we tend to read them back into it as evidence of an all-powerful period ‘unconscious.’ Rather than reveal the inadequacy of the traditional model, the accumulated counter-evidence reinstates it in the inverted mode of Freudian neurosis, as the ‘repressed’ whose uncanny ‘return’ confirms the authority of the very repressions it calls in doubt. The tenacity of the Cartesian model also owes much of its plausibility to still another, related factor, a pervasive fascination with Ludovican absolutism.25 Ever since the publication of Voltaire’s history of the period in 1751, our conception of the French seventeenth century has been dominated by a seemingly incorrigible teleological illusion: the tendency, shared by intellectual left and right alike, to interpret the era as a whole in the retrospective light of its presumed apogee in the absolutist culture dictated at the court of Louis XIV. As a defence against a return of the horrors of the civil wars of the preceding century and the political chaos attending the Frondes of 1648–52, Louis declared the at once monarchic and monocular paradigm of the state Poussin propounds as both the formal and the ethical idea on which his Judgment of Solomon is based. There was to be henceforth one king, one faith, and one nation symbolized by the body of the sovereign and by the royal exercise of rational justice that preserved the integrity of the monarch’s public character by suppressing the empirical person whose private interests would otherwise have threatened the dissolution of king and kingdom alike.26 The result was not only the absolutist form of the state (‘L’E´tat, c’est moi’) but the model of grandeur that state monolithically embodied: the grandeur indeed of Louis le grand himself, the heroic figure whose ceaseless praise Boileau’s Art poe´tique identifies as the true theme of national verse.27 Louis thus became a mirror for the grands classiques, the canonically great national poets who, in gracing Louis’s reign, determined the pattern of both authorial greatness and the inscrutable (yet still somehow unfailingly rational) genius that animated it. The trouble with this picture is, once again, a failure to deal with the actual evidence. The point here is not merely that the moment of high classicism associated with Louis’s personal reign was remarkably shortlived, extending little further than from the Sun King’s seizure of

Introduction 17

power in 1661 to the period of moral and political as well as intellectual stagnation that set in with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The point is also that high classicism was the conscious product of the socio-cultural forces it sought to contain, invisible as it seemed to have made them during the quarter century of its heyday. In its very triumph it knew itself to be grounded on, and therefore undermined by, the unruly diversity, the acts of resistance and defiance, protest and delay, epitomized in the political sphere by the Frondes and, in the aesthetic, by a century-long series of what DeJean has styled ‘culture wars’ of which her own example, the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns touched off by Charles Perrault’s Sie`cle de Louis le Grand in 1687, was neither the loudest nor the last.28 To be sure, dating from the publication of Jean Chapelain’s Sentiments de L’Acade´mie Franc¸aise in 1637, deciding the controversy surrounding Corneille’s conspicuously neo-feudal and so signally anti-monarchic Le Cid in favour of his right-minded rival, Georges de Scude´ry, the state exerted a degree of censorship and control unparalleled in French history. It is equally true that, despite the recent revival of interest in the libertins or Christian Jouhaud’s remarkable resurrection of the mazarinades of the Fronde era, the French seventeenth century produced nothing like the outpouring of publicly radical speech characterizing the revolutionary decades between the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 and the Stuart Restoration of 1660.29 The French seventeenth century nonetheless remained an era of ceaseless cultural combat, pitting Cartesians against Thomists, pre´cieux against classicists, esprits forts against honneˆtes gens, bons franc¸ais against politiques, clerics against dramatists, Jansenists against Jesuits, anciens against modernes – combat the more acrimonious for displacing the deeper historical conflicts the period failed squarely to face up to or resolve. Even the clearest and most authoritative exemplars of the high classical order were shaped by the conflicts we allege they suppressed. Nor was this the result of the purely unconscious process the model of Freudian repression would suggest. Subversive ideas rarely received direct expression: where they did not take the carefully equivocal forms of irony and parable, as in Pascal’s Pense´es or the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, they were chiefly reserved for denunciations of the criminal designs imputed to one’s enemies – the procedure adopted in Boileau’s feud with the Jesuits or in Molie`re’s six-year running battle with the devout party at court. Yet the live possibility of subversion was on everyone’s mind just the same, defining the overt horizon against which all of the period’s cultural activity must be measured.30

18

The Matter of Mind

Still another factor in scholarly readiness to assign Descartes a leading role is the degree to which, for all his critical detachment, he remains representative of the wider culture he is presumed to have redirected. But if Descartes can in fact serve as a paradigm for his age, he owes this status less to his historical novelty than to his historical embeddedness as a symptomatic product of the culture to which he belonged. Even leaving aside his well-documented philosophical debts to Augustine, Anselm, the neo-Stoics, and scholasticism, many of the most distinctive elements of his thought were as plausibly borrowed from his contemporaries as authoritatively modelled for them. Consider, for instance, an article of Cartesian doctrine Taylor particularly decries as promoting the demoralized estrangement from the world he takes to characterize the modern self: the voluntarist assertion of not merely the freedom but the at once intellectual and ethical supremacy of the will.31 In the fourth meditation, on ‘true and false,’ Descartes attempts to determine the sources of the errors that plague human reasoning even when conducted with method of the sort he recommends. The analysis reaches a crux when he discovers that the most powerful mental faculty, the one endowed with the greatest range and freedom of action, is not a faculty of the understanding – the imagination, say, or memory, or even reason itself – but rather the will. Will indeed so far outweighs all other mental faculties as to be identified as that one in which humanity most clearly recognizes its proximity to the Creator whose active ‘concourse’ is finally seen to preserve us from the errors to which mere humanity otherwise leads. It is the will itself ‘that chiefly teaches me I bear the image and likeness of God’ (2:461; AT 7:57). Will then rather than reason is the spring of the godlike autonomy that enables us to aspire to a condition superior to that of the automata that characterize the purely physical world over and against which our minds stand in conspicuous (if specious) contrast. This fact convinces Descartes that error is caused less by flawed reasoning than by the freely formulated choice we make in assenting to ideas that lack the requisite clarity and distinctness. Error springs from a failure to contain the will within the limits of the understanding, limits to which will is as such ‘indifferent,’ with the result that ‘it easily goes astray, choosing bad for good or falsehood for truth’ (2:463; AT 7:58). In extending will’s domain to cover judgments of true and false as well as the moral or practical choices we make, Descartes lent it surprising scope – a point to which both Hobbes (2:623–5; AT 7:190–2) and Gassendi (2:752–5; AT 7:314–17) drew attention. However, the privilege

Introduction 19

thereby accorded it was hardly unprecedented. On the contrary, Descartes shared the notion not only, as Taylor himself notes in passing, with the heroic portrait of human freedom exhibited on the stage of Cornelian tragedy but with the Molinist doctrine of grace to which Descartes and Corneille were alike exposed as a part of the Jesuit schooling both received.32 And he also shared it with the ‘decisionist’ moment in the theory of royal absolutism: the idea that what both makes and demands a king is the voluntary exercise of the autonomous power of unilateral decision required by the states of emergency to which political life unpredictably succumbs.33 All of this helps explain the otherwise inexplicable historical irony in the fact that, as radical as Cartesian rationalism may initially have seemed, by the end of the century, it had come to serve as a bulwark against the still more radical consequences the monist Spinoza drew from it. Thus, in Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, Nicolas Malebranche, and even the fiercely conservative Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet, what contemporary observers had suspected of amounting to a secularizing assault on revealed religion and the social order religion helped support had become the last line of defence between traditional society and the modern world Descartes is said to have ushered in.34 But perhaps the most intractable reason for ongoing belief in the paradigmatic authority of Descartes’s picture of the sovereign rational ego is philosophical prejudice. The Cartesian ‘invention of the mind’ owes much of its spell-binding prestige to the notion that it solved the great sceptical crisis, the notorious crise pyrrhonienne, whose canonical French exponent is Michel de Montaigne. Seen in this light, the sceptical challenge to traditional knowledge, faith, and ideals Montaigne voiced marked the epoch-making yet finally transitory occasion for the dualist remise en ordre his successor undertook. By subjecting Montaigne’s amiably unsystematic insights to painstaking analysis of the sort demanded of a mathematician engaged in a piece of sustained geometric reasoning, Descartes gave doubt the ‘methodic’ form that converted it into an instrument of the search for truth it appeared to derail. The result was of course the cogito conceived as uncovering the self-certifying autonomy the mind achieves just insofar as it exerts its rational powers of critical discernment. It is true that the Cartesian portrait of reason, and thus of mind, created epistemological dilemmas of its own, in particular those associated with the new ‘veil of ideas’ scepticism generated by its solipsistic insistence on the simultaneously logical and psychological priority of inner acts of rational consciousness.35 After all, if the only objects of immediate knowledge are the thoughts,

20

The Matter of Mind

volitions, images, and sensations that form the raw ideational content of our own minds, on what basis can we draw inferences about the outer world of physical things that content brings to our attention? Descartes is nevertheless seen to have put Pyrrhonism in its place by making it a theme for professional philosophical study. In doing so, he paved the way for the rational certainties the new classical culture championed in large measure at Montaigne’s expense. However, because the conventional picture espouses Descartes’s own estimate of his historical significance, it mistakes the tenor of the difficulties Montaigne posed and so the testimony of the cogito itself. It is taken for granted, for instance, that the issues Montaigne joined, most notably in the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond,’ were essentially epistemological, bearing on the nature, grounds, and scope of human knowledge.36 This in turn yields the standard reading of Montaigne’s famous motto, ‘Que sais-je?’ Philosophers have formed the habit of taking the question literally: Montaigne really wants to know what he knows, and so how he knows and to what extent such knowledge can be defended against sceptical doubts like those Sebond propounds. The answers to the problems Montaigne raised concerning what the ‘Apologie’ portrays as the incorrigible fallibility, mutability, and relativity of human knowledge were thus technical, requiring the rational discipline Descartes set out to supply. The resulting method is accordingly construed less as a specific way of going about the business of philosophy than as a general definition of what that business is, namely, epistemology itself conceived as the kind of foundational enquiry into the origins, character, and limits of human knowledge that constitutes the modern professional norm from Descartes down through Kant to our own day.37 But the problems Montaigne raises are not in fact epistemological; they are ethical. Nor is the question couched in his motto to be taken literally, with an eye to determining what I know and how I might extend it without falling into the errors sceptics highlight. The question is rhetorical, ‘What do I know?’ It is not properly a question at all given that, as the ‘Apologie’ tirelessly demonstrates, in the foundational sense Descartes wants, I do not know anything whatever. The issue is then this: within the limits of what I can ever truly claim to know not only about the world but even about myself since, on closer acquaintance, I turn out to be as great a mystery as the origins and fate of the universe I inhabit, what sort of life should I lead? More specifically, what kind of life is best designed to make me a well-adjusted human being worthy of the existence an inscrutable providence has granted me?

Introduction 21

A first point is that to assign Montaigne an epistemological program is an anachronism: in portraying the mind as a ‘mirror of nature,’ thereby defining at once its characteristic mode of participation in the world and its peculiar instrumentality as a source of cognition, Descartes invented epistemology as well. But this first point underscores a second: Montaigne’s epistemological interests are a means to an end whose basis is not knowledge but wisdom and, if not happiness, at any rate a colloquially rather than professionally philosophical acceptance of the life I find myself called on to live.38 Projected against this background, the questions Descartes asks are not only misplaced but jejune – a point Pascal makes in deriding the founder of modern philosophy as the ‘Don Quixote of nature,’ vainly tilting at windmills while all the real problems lie elsewhere.39 The result, however, is not only the fideism the ‘Apologie’ appears to endorse, a position to which Montaigne seems to have been largely drawn by filial piety, as a debt paid to the beloved father for whom he had translated Sebond to begin with.40 It is also the defiantly Epicurean flavour of Montaigne’s final contribution to the sceptical canon, the last essay in the book, ‘De l’expe´rience.’ The essay opens in a confidently declarative mood: ‘There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.’41 We are initially invited to contemplate a self-congratulatory commonplace: what most essentially defines the human species is that desire than which no other is ‘more natural’ to it, the desire for knowledge. The thought seems to propose an ennobling picture of our kind. If indeed our most natural desire is the desire for knowledge, this grants us a higher nature than the notions of both nature and desire appear to license. While we do have other, lower, and in this sense more obviously natural desires about which, in the continuation, Montaigne writes at length, they are all finally subordinate to our thirst for knowledge itself just insofar as no other is more natural. It is important, however, that the syntax of this opening sentence supports a second reading that complicates the first.42 While no desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge, this does not necessarily mean the others are less so. On the contrary, in saying that no desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge, Montaigne emphasizes just how natural it is, and thus how thoroughly it belongs to the family of more recognizably natural appetites of which it is a member. The pursuit of knowledge turns out indeed to be a natural function modelled on the same pattern as those lower, animal functions the essay goes on to explore in mouth-watering detail: eating, sleeping, copulating, even passing

22

The Matter of Mind

water, this last looming especially large owing to Montaigne’s notorious susceptibility to kidney stones. However inherently noble it may please us to imagine the pursuit of knowledge to be, it too is a natural drive set on the same ontological footing as the desire for food, sleep, sex, or the blessed release of a good piss. And to what end, besides, do we pursue knowledge in the various forms Montaigne examines, as law, medicine, culinary science, or the ars amoris, if not in the service of the desires we ordinarily deem less noble because more natural? The essay’s opening sentence lays a trap calculated to ensnare us in the state of natural embodiment from which it appears to exempt us. It thereby announces the ironic intent with which, having declared our natural commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, Montaigne proceeds to frame the essay’s theme, which is of course not knowledge itself but experience. Given that no desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge, it is only natural that we should try, assay, or test (essayer) ‘every means apt to bring us to it.’ The question then is, which means is best? Though he leaves it unspoken, Montaigne now invokes a second high-minded commonplace: the best and most worthy because least carnal means to truth is the one Descartes elects, namely, reason. That Montaigne should leave the commonplace unspoken is crucial to the argument he mounts. If reason’s superiority to experience and, what is more, if the grounds for that superiority go unsaid, it is because, from the standpoint he initially adopts, they go without saying. Montaigne ventriloquizes here, tacitly voicing the central presumption governing the philosophical analysis of experience from antiquity to his own day.43 In line with the root meaning the Greek empereia shares with the Latin experientia from which Montaigne’s term derives, the tradition Aristotle inaugurates is notably respectful of the kind of empirical trial or test experience makes possible, and thus of the practical expertise or wisdom (phronesis) tests of this sort confer. Plato’s attachment to the transcendent ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’ of which earthly things are mere copies or simulacra prompts invincible mistrust of the lowly ‘appearances’ that define what he regards as the incorrigibly narrow and deceptive content of our ordinary transactions with reality. By contrast, Aristotle acknowledges the positive contribution experience makes at least in those fields (law, medicine, history, poetry, physics) that deal with matters of empirical as well as theoretical fact. This yields a maxim, sometimes attributed to Aristotle himself but more probably coined in medicine or law, that enjoyed a certain vogue when Montaigne sat down to write: experientia rerum magistra, ‘experience is the teacher of [all] things.’44

Introduction 23

However, even Aristotle insists on the limited scope of experience precisely insofar as true knowledge as opposed to mere habit, prejudice, or opinion depends on grasping less things themselves than the reasons behind them, the causes and formal essences of which things are the contingent ‘accidents’ or expressions. The humblest ‘empiric,’ a midwife, say, or quack, will know by experience more about the natural course of the illnesses that afflict the human body and the remedies likely to palliate or cure them than the best trained physician who lacks that experience. Nevertheless, once he acquires the experience he lacks, the latter will necessarily surpass his empirical counterpart just as, in the Nichomachean Ethics, the person who understands the theory of moral conduct will be better and happier than one whose wisdom is of the purely prudential kind that comes from direct acquaintance with practical affairs.45 Whence the need expressed throughout the tradition Montaigne impersonates at this stage in the essay for the return to ‘first principles’ of which, for all their novelty, Descartes’s ‘meditations on first philosophy’ were a late variant. Against all this, Montaigne contrives to suggest that the traditional view mistakes the nature of experience by representing it as an external quantity we simply acquire, something we can therefore hold at arm’s length as being logically separable from the rational powers we bring to bear on it. But experience is not an external acquisition; it is rather the living element in which we move, the condition in which our corporeal natures immerse us as the basis of life itself. One of the characteristic ingredients of this condition is moreover the set of assumptions we make about it and the way in which, by colouring how we see the world, these assumptions determine our experience as well. This relates to what, in a passage we will take up in a moment, Montaigne identifies as properly ‘divine’ in the ‘divine Plato’ of the philosophical dialogues: the consciousness evinced by the form of the dialogues as such, as by that of the myths that consistently mediate the dialogues’ exhibition of truth. For Plato as for Montaigne, insofar as it means anything to us at all, the question of truth is a function of our interest in it, and thus of the embodied concerns, beliefs, and motives that set us talking in the first place. This in turn highlights the prejudicial form in which Montaigne states the problem of means. By indicating that the choice between reason and experience should be put to some sort of empirical test (‘nous essayons tout les moyens qui y peuvent mener’), Montaigne presupposes the principle at issue. The same idea informs the equally circular presumption expressed in the tacit form he gives the commonplace

24

The Matter of Mind

he challenges. By leaving the commonplace unspoken, underscoring how thoroughly it goes without saying, he shows how far the notion of reason’s superiority is already at work, conditioning discussion from the start. And yet, despite the difficulties with which the principle turns out to be fraught, Montaigne seems to take it for granted that, all things being equal, reason is best; and what makes it best is its presumed autonomy as a higher faculty that rises above the contingent sprawl of corporeal experience in order to subject it to its ordering rule. The theme of experience is accordingly introduced as a fallback, a makeshift required if things go wrong: ‘When reason fails us, we turn to experience […], which is a feebler and less worthy means; but truth is so great a thing that we should scorn no instrument capable of leading us to it’ (3:275). But it is just here that Montaigne’s irony becomes unmistakable. For if there is anything we know, and know moreover as a matter of plain experience, it is that reason does fail; and it fails because it shares the same ungovernable multiplicity as experience itself. That this is so is attested in the first place by something else that reason and experience have in common: the fact that, as instruments of knowledge, both seek the sort of ‘resemblances’ by means of which the many of everyday life may be subjected to the rule of the one with which knowledge is customarily identified. In the case of reason, unity is achieved by applying the a priori principle of the law expressed in the universal forms, kinds, and essences in which individuals are presumed to participate and by which they are presumed to be defined. In the case of experience, we deploy the empirical principle of example, looking for precedents and analogies by which what we have learned from the past, stored now in the natural mode of personal memory, now in the artificial memory collected in books, can be used to map the uncharted emergencies of the present with a view to guiding future acts and choices. The fact remains, however, that, as a matter of pure experience, nothing can ever be reduced to unity in either of these ways because nothing is ever the same, least of all reason itself: Reason has so many forms that we do not know which one to lay hold on; experience has no fewer. The consequence we want to draw from the likeness [resemblance] of events is unsound, the more so since events are always unlike [dissemblables]: there is no quality so universal in the image of things this presents as diversity and variety. The most expressive example of similarity the Greeks, the Latins, and we ourselves employ is that of eggs. Men

Introduction 25 have nonetheless been found, and notably one in Delphi, who could perceive marks of difference between eggs, so that they never mistook one for another, and having several hens, could tell to which one the egg belonged. Dissimilarity meddles of its own accord in all of our works; no art can attain to similitude. Neither [the playing-card manufacturer] Perrozet nor anyone else can so carefully bleach and polish the backside of his cards as to prevent some players from telling them apart simply on seeing them dealt by someone else’s hands. Resemblance does not make things so much the same as difference makes them different [autre]. Nature is obliged by its own laws [s’est oblige´e] to make nothing different [autre] that is not first unlike [dissemblable]. (3:275)

In just these first few sentences the ostensibly ‘feebler and less worthy’ mode of experience has been shown not merely to support but to instruct reason in its business. Just as the choice of which mode of knowledge we use depends on an experimental process of trial and error, so too experience teaches reason to use experimental means because it is itself a feature of the experience it claims to dominate. To be sure, experience retains all of the deficiencies with which Cartesian rationalism taxes it. The world as we experience it is an indigestible congeries of infinite protean differences; and these differences prove all the more intractable for being subject not only to the revolutions of ceaseless natural change but to the still more ceaseless mutations of human perception, custom, and experience itself. But what is true of experience is just as true of reason; for like the desire for knowledge it helps to satisfy, reason is a natural faculty coterminous with the natural body that defines its purpose and limits. Far from dominating the natural scene and the animal appetites that attach us to it, reason is the slave of the desires it serves, of the habits, customs, and private idiosyncrasies that engender those desires, and of the infinite play of experimental circumstance that sets the whole machine in motion. The result, however, is not the nightmarish state of insuperable ignorance rationalists fear. Though we may never have knowledge of the absolute sort Descartes demands, the unshakeable possession of necessary and objective truths nothing can change or dislodge, we actually know quite a lot. It is just that this knowledge is inevitably coloured and shaped by the very nature of things, that is, by nature as such. Which is why, by the close of the essay, our true teacher turns out to be neither reason nor experience but, as reason and experience are alike compelled to acknowledge, nature itself as made known to us in the

26

The Matter of Mind

pleasures, pains, and appetites by which, in showing us what kind of creatures we are, our bodies teach us what kind of world we inhabit: Æsop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked along: ‘What,’ said he, ‘must we shit while running?’ Let us make use of such time as we have; as it is, much of it is left idle and ill-used. Our minds doubtless lack hours enough to perform the chores alotted to them without severing themselves from the body in the little span required to see to its needs. [Philosophers] want to get outside themselves and escape the human condition. This is folly: rather than transform themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; rather than raise themselves up, they cast themselves down. These transcendent humours frighten me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is harder for me to digest in the life of Socrates than his ecstasies and his traffic with demons, and there is nothing more human in Plato than that for which they say he is called divine [his character as the inspired ‘poet’ of the philosophical dialogues]. And of all of our forms of knowledge [nos sciences], those seem to me most earthly and base that climb the highest. And I find nothing more humble and mortal in the life of Alexander than his fantasies about achieving immortality. (3:327)

What it comes down to is that, to the extent that Montaigne is a sceptic at all, it is less as an adherent to any of the philosophical schools that go by that name, whether Academic, neo-Stoic, nominalist, or Pyrrhonian. It is rather as a student of the one thing that, for all his scepticism, he never called in doubt, namely, nature. Like the wider epistemological interests he shares with Descartes, scepticism, in Montaigne, is a means to an end: a way of getting back to what he took to be the one sure rule, the one nature gives us in the form of the human body and the experience of which the body is at once the vehicle and terminus. The strictly sceptical Montaigne, the one who takes such energetic delight in cataloguing the self-defeating vagaries of human pride, fantasy, and error, freely confesses his inability to tell the difference between the self-reproducing truth of nature and the self-displacing revolutions of fallen human passion, custom, and prejudice. Yet a reassuringly personified nature remains an essential postulate, a cosmological constant enabling him to gauge the otherwise unimaginable dislocations time and chance produce not only in the fabric of the world but in the contents of our own minds. His sceptical insistence on the limits and imperfections of human knowledge and on the interests, habits, and

Introduction 27

physical dispositions that frame those limits invariably brings him back to the natural machinery of which knowledge is the servant and the dependent: the body of which the mind is the perspectival register and the world of material urges, causes, and events to which the body exposes us. Insofar as Montaigne can be said to have embraced a consistent philosophical creed at all, it is naturalism rather than scepticism if only because scepticism is the natural expression of his naturalist commitments. That this should be so is a central lesson of the history of scepticism itself. As Richard Popkin reminds us, a major impetus for the sixteenthcentury revival of the sceptical arguments inherited from antiquity was the great schism dividing the Christian world in the Reformation.46 It is remarkable, however, that the scepticism at work in the theological polemics of the Reformation era does not at least initially arise as an intellectual consequence of religious differences, in the form of the disquieting doubts to which believers are driven by the collapse of devotional consensus. On the contrary, it emerges as a rhetorical device both sides spontaneously wield as a weapon against their adversaries. Montaigne makes the point in a passage in ‘De l’expe´rience’ describing the vanity of efforts to control the judicial application of the law, a program defeated not only by our inability to frame enough laws to cover all possible contingencies but by the interpretations to which judges are driven in trying to determine both how the laws fit and what they mean. With the example of the emperor Justinian’s historic codification of Roman law in mind, Montaigne voices his disapproval of the views of that man who thought, through the sheer multitude of laws, to curb the authority of judges by cutting up their meat for them [en leur taillant leurs morceaux]. He failed to realize that the interpretation of the laws enjoys as much freedom and scope as their promulgation. And they fool themselves [ils se moquent] who believe they can reduce the scope of our debates, and bring them to a halt, by calling us back to the express word of the Bible. The more so in that our minds find no less ample room for criticizing others’ understanding than for conveying our own; nor do we find any less animosity and bitterness in glossing them than in drawing them up. (3:275–6)

Montaigne alludes here to the standard Catholic response to the Lutheran assertion of the ‘plain’ text of the Bible underwriting the

28

The Matter of Mind

doctrine sola scriptura, by scripture alone. For Luther, God speaks directly to the faithful in scripture not only because scripture is the Word of God but because the language God uses is the ordinary language of everyday life. There is accordingly no need for the commentarial allegories favoured by the Church since scripture is written in plain terms designed to be accessible to all who read it with the open heart of faith. However, as Catholic exegetes insisted in defending the complex allegorical interpretations Luther despised, there is good reason to think the text of scripture is never in fact plain. This is in part because it notoriously resorts to figurative speech that as such demands an interpretive act. But is also due to the fact that, however ordinary the language in which it was originally written, the tongues it uses as its instruments are both foreign and dead, and thus hardly the language of everyday life. To this extent, Luther’s Catholic respondents endorse the lessons of the humanist discovery of the philological specificity of the historical meanings and forms of speech on which even the holiest of writings draw. But they go on to deduce the consequence: if no text is ever plain, no interpretation is either, being subject to the same passionate prepossession as everything else in human life. Except where they are stabilized by the authority of the traditions of the Church and the succession of councils and synods at which, down through the ages, the fathers of the Church have hammered out the readings we are now to take on faith, all interpretations are partial, biased, subjective, reflecting the senses we want from the text as an expression of the personal interests and experience we bring to it. Which is why, in the continuation, Montaigne cites a second Catholic commonplace in noting that Luther ‘has left as many, if not more, divisions and controversies arising from doubt as to his own opinions as he stirred up concerning holy writ itself’ (3:280). Conversely, the pervasive theme of the Lutheran riposte is to denounce the worldly motives behind Catholic denial of the express meaning of God’s word. From this point of view, what prompts Roman prelates to defend the sophistical allegories with which Catholic tradition encrusts the Bible is the desire to monopolize the interpretation of scripture the better to hold the mass of the faithful in thrall to priestly extortion and deceit. The aim imputed to the Church here is the same as the one of which it stands accused in the debate surrounding ‘works.’ By asserting that it is not, as Luther maintained, sola fides (by faith alone) that we are saved since Lutheran faith offers no criterion of truth beyond the private inner conviction of the person who claims to

Introduction 29

feel it, the Roman Church insists on its own objectivity as the timehonoured sacramental intercessor between the faithful and God. Nevertheless, as Protestants see it, its interest in doing so is less to secure salvation than to control the hearts, minds, and, above all, the purses of those on whose behalf it purports to speak. And beyond fattening prelatical bellies, to what end does the Church make free with the hardearned money of its congregants if not to advance worldly ambitions antithetical to the redemptive mission over which Roman Catholics affirm a monopoly? However lofty both sides imagined the stakes to be, bearing as they did on the ‘final’ things of the life to come and the salvation of our eternal souls, the debate involved a great deal of energetic mud-slinging of an unmistakably earthy kind. To doubt is not merely to call some belief into question by raising formal objections to the grounds on which it stands; it is to subject it to the reductive laws of natural experience. This explains why, for all his apparent success in defeating classical Pyrrhonism, Descartes merely replaced one form of scepticism with another. In methodizing the sceptical arguments Montaigne deploys, imposing the specialized rational shape on which the norms of a properly professional philosophy rely, Descartes misses the point. Though classical Pyrrhonism gives way to the modern ‘veil of ideas,’ scepticism remains triumphant; and it does so because scepticism is as such a dependency of the naturalist outlook that is Montaigne’s true theme. The result is not merely the fact that, by the end of the seventeenth century, a self-consciously experimental empiricism will have made Cartesian metaphysics irrelevant, opening the way for the renewed sceptical crisis of which Hume is the cheerful exponent. It creates the illusion that the central philosophical problem is mind rather than what Hume and, following him, Kant will understand it to be: the question of experience and the exclusively natural order of which experience is the register and fruit.47 If then Descartes ‘invents’ the mind in the sense of concocting or fabricating it, it is because he ‘invents’ it in the traditional rhetorical sense of finding it ready to hand the moment he attempts to articulate the strictly natural account of the origins of knowledge the sceptical eviction of divine or Platonic alternatives demands. But as Montaigne would have ironically noted, and as Hobbes and Gassendi observed from the first (2:599–600 and 2:707–8), this means that Descartes merely restates the traditional sceptical problems with which he begins. The sceptical ‘tropes,’ the classical paradoxes and puzzles that Sextus

30

The Matter of Mind

Empiricus bequeaths to his early modern descendants, take aim not only at our beliefs about the world but at the source of those beliefs in the immanent forms of natural experience. The mind’s hold on truth is cast in doubt because it is itself a symptomatic product of the experimental order it attempts to master, an incarnate expression of the physical experiences into which both the world and our beliefs about it ultimately resolve. It is against this background that I propose to revisit the literary, artistic, and intellectual culture of seventeenth-century France, and in particular the matter of mind as a representative sampling of canonical French poets, artists, and philosophers portray it. What distinguishes the work even of figures who, like Poussin, the younger Boileau, or Descartes himself, embrace the dualist picture of mind as unfettered reason is the degree to which the body reasserts its rights. A crucial element in all of this is time.48 A feature of Cartesian ‘intuition,’ that mode of purely ‘mental’ sight that corrects the idolatrous errors into which the physical source of the visual metaphor falls, is its instantaneousness. Physical sight unfolds in the time of the chance encounters that bring visible objects to our notice and of the physiological events that enable the mind to process sensory stimuli in order to determine what they mean.49 Intuition, by contrast, happens all at once, in the pure because exclusively rational form of direct apperception. To this extent, it does not exist in time at all, the less so in that its fundamental objects are timeless verities, the eternal truths that give even the empirical facts of scientific observation their reference and shape. Yet ‘the subject’ of these acts of mental vision, the empirical person who first has them and then sets about communicating them to others, remains an embodied creature that, as such, does exist in time. A first result is the narrative framework Descartes gives the philosophical itinerary the Meditations depicts: the story of the heroic struggle in which, having overcome the dark forces of prejudice, habit, and error, the knight errant of reason scales the luminous heights of knowledge and truth.50 A second result, one that, as we will see in chapter 1, simultaneously places and relativizes the first, is the intersubjective adventure to which the light of truth so won is exposed in the process of publication, reception, and debate of which his book is the product as well as victim. And still a third is the evolution of Descartes’s doctrines themselves, and most notably the way in which his conception of the relation between mind and body changes as he gets older, yielding the more complex and nuanced picture the late treatise on the passions of the soul provides.51

Introduction 31

But perhaps the most telling result are the duplicities that characterize French classical culture as a whole, engendering the nagging second thoughts that put it on both sides of every issue. The providential image of history shaping Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle inhabits the same sphere of courtly discourse as the gossipy historiettes of Ge´de´on Tallemant des Re´aux and Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy. Nor can we fully appreciate the sonorous monarchic platitudes set forth in Pierre Le Moyne’s servile Art de re´gner except when set beside Gabriel Naude´’s unapologetically Machiavellian Conside´rations politiques sur les coups d’E´tat, where the unforgiving weight of historical example compels high-minded moral reason to bow to the demands of heartless reason of state. Similarly, the ostensibly rational rules promulgated in Boileau’s Art poe´tique help generate the exceptions he was led to make not only in the thorny matter of ‘genius,’ an inscrutable gift as such impervious to rationalization, but in the increasing prominence given to matters of ‘taste’ and the je ne sais quoi of inborn aesthetic sensibility. Or again, the hereditary noblesse on the basis of which French nobles claimed an innate social distinction supposed to be merely displayed in rather than defined by courtly modes of conduct is subject to the growing pressure exerted by the ever-more accomplished behavioural imitations of upstart bourgeois. Nevertheless, as the related antinomies of honneˆtete´ attest, the conscious work of polite self-fashioning undertaken by nobles d’e´pe´e and nobles de robe alike unfolds under constant threat of reversion to untutored caracte`re, a brute givenness from which there is all the less escape in that it remains largely invisible to the person on whom it imprints its mark. Notions of nature exhibit a comparable doubleness. On the one hand, in the domain of aesthetics, what the connoisseur Roger de Piles calls ‘ordinary’ nature evinces a defectiveness it is art’s business to remedy by imitating less nature as such than the perfected version of nature (‘la belle nature’) art itself produces in line with nature’s underlying ‘principle’ or ‘intention.’52 But even as the aesthetic sophistries Piles formulates try to restore the sense of permanence and unity to which the actual artistic and scientific observation of nature gives the lie, Pascal insists on nature’s alien mutability. Pascal indeed radicalizes Montaigne’s dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘custom’ by inverting the terms of the familiar notion of custom as ‘second nature’ to produce the picture of nature as ‘first custom’ (Lafuma 126; Sellier 159), the fruit of an experimental history we have chosen to forget. Which brings us at last to reason itself, an entity that, on closer scrutiny of the sort Descartes attempts to methodize, turns out to be, as

32

The Matter of Mind

Montaigne had insisted from the first, as elusive and multiform as the crazy-quilt of experience it sets out to discipline. What all of this suggests is that, far from being the historical embodiment of the crises that, in following Descartes’s example, French classical culture left behind, Montaigne remained a fundamental reference and resource. Marc Fumaroli has made the point with respect to La Fontaine, the French counterpart of the hero of ‘De l’expe´rience,’ ‘that great man,’ the slave Æsop, who, unlike his anal master, knew how to take the time to enjoy the gift of regular bowels a beneficent nature grants.53 As Fumaroli sees it, what Montaigne communicated above all to his seventeenth-century successors, and most notably La Fontaine, was the peculiar experience of freedom associated with life among intimates in the ‘arrie`re boutique,’ the room merchants and artisans reserve at the back of the shop for private gatherings of family and close friends. This certainly works for La Fontaine himself, a great poet who, in contrast to his immediate contemporaries, Racine, Boileau, and Molie`re, but in conformity with the example Montaigne set, withdrew from traffic with the court in order to maintain his independence as a writer and a man. But I want to suggest that Montaigne’s image of the arrie`re boutique had a wider currency. Beyond reflecting the autonomy of private persons, the freedom enjoyed by particuliers precisely insofar as they divest themselves of all public roles and the public identities those roles enforce, it bespoke the deeper and more pervasive sense of mind to which Montaigne’s naturalism gave its characteristic spin. Like the camera obscura and the perspective box, figures of intimate enclosure it closely resembles, the arrie`re boutique represents the mental interior in its anatomical as well as social opposition to the external world from which it stands apart. And yet, even leaving aside the fact that it delineates a private space nonetheless shared with one’s intimates rather than dwelt in alone like the desert island of Robinson Crusoe, the arrie`re boutique exists only as an inner extension of the shop that backs on to it. The demands of the public world are not suspended even though, in retiring to the back room, we temporarily withdraw from it. Nor will we remain there for ever: the shop eventually reopens for business, restoring us to participation in the greater world outside. Indeed, like another of Montaigne’s images of private innerness, the homely stewpot whose contents we are forced to reveal at the moment of death, showing by our public end what kind of people we truly are,54 the arrie`re boutique figures our inner selves just in terms of their engagement with other selves, those fellow inmates of the public world from

Introduction 33

whom we take momentary leave. As is besides so typical of Montaigne, the demotic homeliness of the image speaks to the same purpose. It is not just that there is nothing remotely hermetic or hieratic about the arrie`re boutique. As the space at the back of the shop in which artisans ply their trades, sell their wares, and receive their clients, engaging with them in the humble yet fundamental processes of commerce and exchange, the arrie`re boutique refers us back to the practical transactions of everyday life. It thus defines inner privacy and freedom as a function of the deeper sense of connection by which our intimate lives not only communicate with but are permeated by the multifarious social, economic, and cultural relations to which the shopfront links us. In this sense, more than a figure of mind, the arrie`re boutique images the body of which mind forms as it were the material backing, as obedient to the body’s mobile contours as a suit-lining to those of the costume to which the tailor fits it. It portrays our separateness as an expression of an underlying entanglement in the intricate web of worldly acts, needs, and relationships that, in shaping the experience to which Montaigne gave the emphasis of valedictory utterance by taking it as the final theme of both the book and the life whose form the book espouses, define what it is to be a living human person. The aim of the following book is to show that this sense of material entanglement represented not just a fact or even a pervasive motif but the essential matter of the so-called classical culture of seventeenthcentury France. Whatever Descartes and Poussin, Corneille and Molie`re, Pascal and Boileau imagined they were doing, the form and effect of the works they made exhibit the inescapable embodiment of which mind is the expression rather than an impartial witness or judge. For all its self-conscious intellectualism, the fundamental matter of French classical culture was the body rather than the mind. The body indeed turned out to be the matter of mind itself, granting it the stuff without which it would not have been anything at all.

1 Front Matter: Placing Descartes’s Meditations

Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise. – John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’

As Montaigne’s valedictory account of the matter suggests, the characteristic mark of a distinctively human nature is less the faculty of reason we pride ourselves on than the intricate web of experience reason undertakes to digest. Experience itself, moreover, is not just a way of knowing about the world. As a natural function evolving alongside those other, putatively more natural ones to which we customarily oppose it, it expresses our inescapable embodiment and the needs, routines, and appetites through which the body asserts its rights. Experience does teach many things, including the limits of the faculty of reason to whose ordering rule philosophers try to subject it. But our experimental relation to the world is not primarily epistemological. As the very power of taking reflective thought instructs us by bringing us back to the restless stream of moods, habits, and sensations that determine what we think, believe, and feel, experience is fundamentally ethical. It is at once an instrument and precipitate of the way of life we lead as a reflex of the worldly conditions under which the business of living unfolds. Nor is this insight unique to Montaigne, a sceptical vision French intellectual culture outgrows once Descartes discovers the dualist discipline that, in resolving doubts, sets reason free for more constructive tasks. It marks the naturalist turn that shapes early modern culture as a whole. Experience is the test to which even Cartesian modes of thought submit because experience is the native ground from which all thought springs and to which all thought returns, however lofty its ambitions.

Front Matter 35

Seen in this light, the notion that early moderns were singularly attached to the Cartesian version of self we call ‘the modern subject,’ the uniformly dualistic sense of person as an epistemological agent detached from the world on which it trains a methodic eye, turns out to be a myth. Christopher Pye argues that a signal feature of early modern subjectivity is a tendency to ‘vanish’ beneath the multifarious ‘matters’ to which material experience exposed it.1 I urge a further point. Early modern identities did indeed display a highly complex situatedness or ‘positionality,’ reflecting the densely interlocking social, doctrinal, geographic, and linguistic standpoints at which the fluent world of material experience is perceived. There was nonetheless never any one position, that of the subject or of subjectivity as such, to which all others were subordinate. If then the subject ‘vanishes,’ it is because it never existed to begin with. My aim, however, is not the merely negative one of refuting the conventional view. It is the productive one of showing, on the evidence of the works they have left us, what seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, and poets actually made of self, whatever present-day theory or their own conscious intentions lead us to expect. The often dramatic contrast between work and intent is a phenomenon to which early moderns themselves paid close attention. As we will see more particularly in chapter 2 with reference to Poussin, a guide to the early modern reception of painting was the Florentine proverb, ogni dipintore depingese, all painters paint themselves.2 The proverb had two faces, one of which focused on praise. In saying that paintings are in effect portraits of the artist even in pictures that are not explicit self-portraits, the proverb highlights the skill and power of creative invention or imagination ( fantasia) of which the image is the outward token. To look at a masterpiece by the hand of Raphael is to look at Raphael himself in that the painting materializes the beautiful Idea Raphael alone could conceive and then make visible to us in just this form. But the proverb also had a critical edge. Where a Raphael commands admiration, a lesser painter will prompt derision or contempt. Nor did even Raphael have the power to make himself the artist he turned out to be. Though training, practice, and, above all, the assiduous imitation of the great art of the past refined and perfected his native gifts, they could not supply them in their absence. The very fact that any work of art, in whatever medium, reveals the inborn qualities of mind that produced it accordingly exposes that mind to public criticism in a way it can neither predict nor control. The paradoxical result is the methodological corollary of this process of selfdisclosure: to grasp the mind of which the work was taken to be the

36

The Matter of Mind

mirror demands looking to the work itself independently of its originating mind. To understand not just the early modern conception but the early modern experience of self, what self was as opposed to what it was supposed to be, the best evidence is the form it took in the public forum of material self-representation. As a case in point, consider the text that, more than any other, seems to bear out the misinterpretation of early modern culture I hope to correct, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy.3 The Meditations is indeed the very place, the locus classicus, for all discussions not only of the historical phenomenon we call the ‘modern subject’ but for the underlying metaphysics of which the subject is ‘as such’ the product and the champion. This has made it a kind of proving ground for the deconstructive operations we are accustomed to perform on the documentary record. These operations often take the form of a particular kind of story, forensic reconstructions to which we give a variety of sonorously suggestive names of a generally Nietzschean-cum-Foucaldian cast: ‘genealogies,’ ‘archaeologies,’ ‘aetiologies,’ and the diverse ‘transvaluations’ and ‘revisions’ these make possible. All of these narratives share what Louis Althusser calls the ‘topology’ inherited from nineteenthcentury thought in the Marxian and Freudian vein: the ambition (or pretension) of referring the available record to some putatively more fundamental structure for which the record serves as the kind of epiphenomenal allegory Fredric Jameson derives from the ‘political unconscious’ of buried social motives.4 Jameson’s choice of the term ‘allegory,’ denoting a mode of reading expressly modelled on the medieval method of scriptural interpretation aimed at recovering the divine intention secretly shaping the Bible’s literal, moral, metaphorical, and anagogical layers of meaning, could not be more explicit on this point. The emphasis falls less on the record itself, whose testimony is in any case ambiguous at the best of times, than on the underlying ‘discourse,’ ‘episteme,’ ‘ideology,’ ‘imaginary,’ or ‘mentality’ that, in engendering it, also makes it legible. And behind (or beneath) these stand the determinative energies (social reproduction, economic interest, interpersonal relations of force, the distribution of gender roles) of which the chosen discourse or episteme is itself the more-or-less mystified instrumental telltale. One index of the difficulties with which such methods are fraught is their reductiveness, a feature related to the now conscious, now unconscious scientism inscribed in the metaphors used to describe them. Foucault himself worried about this. In The Archaeology of Knowledge he

Front Matter 37

insists at one point, against the grain of his own procedures, that his aim in shifting attention from particular works of early modern philosophy and science to the rationalist ‘doxology’ that defines their conditions of possibility is not to produce the sort of allegory Jameson prescribes. Far from excavating some ‘other,’ putatively more fundamental discourse of which the surface text is merely the figure, he seeks to engage his specimens in their ‘intrinsic’ or ‘proper volume’ (their volume propre) as the products of autonomous choices and conceptions.5 The propriety he thereby allows his texts is nevertheless limited by a system of quasi-grammatical constraints invisible to their authors themselves. To the precise extent that the doxological discourse Foucault targets exerts the coercive force of a grammar, pre-empting private intent, it looks exactly like the abstract layer of meaning he claims it is not. The ‘proper volume’ of texts construed as historical individuals is ultimately eclipsed by an underlying system of ethical purposes no less peremptory for replacing the medieval mind of God with the at once preconscious and transpersonal structure of a collective ideology. Another symptom of our quandary is the tendency to hypostasize. Despite the warnings we might have gleaned from a more scrupulous reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the fallacies attending the careless use of definite articles,6 there is lots of talk about pseudo-entities like ‘the modern subject’ (as though there were only one) or ‘subjectivity as such,’ as though as-suchness were a real property of existing things rather than a garbled memory of the Scholastic doctrine of substantial forms. Or again, there is the tendency Antoine Compagnon’s The Demon of Theory indicts: our readiness to take the mechanical inversion of the dictates of conventional wisdom at face value. We are thus primed to agree that talk of authors is jejune because ‘the author is dead,’ ‘the real’ is at most a mere ‘reality effect,’ appeal to the ‘patent’ meanings of words is fallacious since meaning is endemically ‘undecidable,’ or what we take for ‘natural kinds’ are in fact social constructions designed to blind us to nature’s ineluctable ‘indeterminacy.’ Compagnon is wrong to suggest that high theoretical suspicion of what Roland Barthes acerbically calls the ‘mythologies’ of the ‘common-sense’ view of literature can be reduced to rote operations of this sort. He is nonetheless right that theory often persuades more by an effect of cynical paradox than by weight of evidence.7 Finally, there is the metonymical procedure Harry Berger felicitously terms ‘snippetotomy.’ To cite Berger’s own example, Francis Barker’s The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection makes a characteristically

38

The Matter of Mind

Foucaldian case for interpreting the advent of ‘the modern subject’ as the disciplinary social construction of the privatized individual. In support, Barker cites an isolated bit of a text, Samuel Pepys’s report of destroying his copy of the pornographic L’E´cole des filles immediately after reading it. The episode is first overinterpreted. It is far from clear that shame-faced repression of his pleasure in the book made Pepys destroy it; a better if less lurid motive is his wife’s natural inquisitiveness about his cheerfully uninhibited extramarital adventures. Having thus blown Pepys’s haste to cover his tracks out of all proportion, Barker then makes the passage stand not only for Pepys’s mammoth diary as a whole but for the entire culture of which, big as it may be, the diary is the merest slice.8 Or to take another example, the more outstanding for the pointed refutation it receives at Jacques Derrida’s hands, there is Foucault’s snippetotomous overreading of the dismissal of the possibility of madness in Descartes’s First Meditation: a brief passage (about half of a shortish paragraph) on the grounds of whose very brevity Foucault lays the entire basis for the history of modern reason.9 Against such habits as these, I propose to try to get behind (topologie oblige) the places and citations we tend to extract from Descartes’s text and the collective memory of Descartes these places and citations frame. This effort resembles the one Derrida undertakes in the essay noted a moment ago. Responding to Foucault’s reading of the First Meditation, Derrida argues that the speaker to whom Foucault assigns the dismissal of madness is not in fact the philosopher himself – ‘the subject,’ if you like, of philosophy ‘as such.’ It is the specifically pre-philosophical reader whose common-sense unreadiness to envisage the possibility of being mad is trumped by the even more unanswerable possibility of dream and by the reader’s apparent assent to the difficulty (if not impossibility) of distinguishing between dream and the waking state.10 Derrida does a number of things in this early text. (The essay is based on a public lecture delivered on 4 March 1963 and first printed in the Revue de Me´taphysique et de Morale in 1964.) Perhaps the most striking is the symbolic murder of the Foucaldian Father announced in his preening preambular talk of the ‘master/disciple’ relation he feels called upon to overcome in order to speak in his own voice.11 The passage also announces the unprecedentedly literary method of deconstructive reading for which Derrida is justly famous – a method characterized by its own exemplary mobilization of small details to farreaching effect. Nevertheless, as evinced in particular by his deployment of the time-honoured humanist technique of parallel passages,12

Front Matter 39

Derrida displays a professional’s care to read the whole and to read it, slowly and patiently, a` la lettre. And what such a reading shows is that the First Meditation aims far less at finding grounds for the kind of certainty Foucault asserts than at overturning the grounds for the unthinking confidence in the natural order of mental faculties, processes, and events Descartes’s common-sense readers find it hard to relinquish. My goal here then is to recover Descartes’s text conceived as what we are given to read before it has been turned into a mere ‘methodological field’13 that serves as a constructive reflex of whatever argument we are intent on mounting at its expense. It goes without saying that my own reading is overdetermined in ways that will be obvious to others even if I myself cannot perceive them. I will inevitably cite, excise, elide, remember, misremember, and distort as much as anyone. But I hope the excesses I commit will be more faithful, or at least less egregious, than those I try to avoid. I write, in other words, in the spirit of Bernard Williams’s analysis of the dialectic of ‘truth’ and ‘truthfulness’ shaping the humanities today. As Williams reminds us, what is undeniably good about the forensic methods currently in force is their truthfulness – the desire, precisely, to get at something that is more honest and fundamental just insofar as it is demystified. What is less good is the widespread presumption that the enterprise demands the sacrifice of truth itself, as the very fount of the mystifications it sets out to dispel.14 Though truth (and, a fortiori, the truth) must ultimately elude us, it remains an essential postulate that makes the whole business both possible and responsible, however problematic the result. To this end and against this background, let us now turn to the Meditations. My focus, however, falls less on the familiar philosophical content Descartes gives the book, the doctrines he espouses and the arguments he assembles, than on its form as a book, the actual volume that found its way into the hands of contemporary readers. More specifically, I propose to consider how the book came to be and how this is enacted in the way it sets about presenting itself. For the work Descartes brought to the public was never just the occasioning metaphysical meditations that gave it its title. It was a great deal else; and for a start it was the surprisingly dramatic record of, precisely, how it came to exist in the form in which it was originally met. What the revolutionary progress of print in early modern Europe and the critical editions print made possible encourage us to think of as the text of Descartes’s Meditations is an unstable composite, a congeries

40

The Matter of Mind

of accidents, large and small, whose turbulent unfolding shaped the material object first offered for sale in August 1641. The first thing we notice in contemplating this object is that the actual meditations that form the volume’s core account for only about seventeen per cent of the book’s total content – 74 of the volume’s 447 pages. The bulk of the book is in fact composed of an elaborate paratextual apparatus and a series of objections and responses prompted by the Meditations’ circulation in advance of publication. There is of course no mystery about the existence of these items. The material they contain is available in Charles Adam and Paul Tannery’s standard edition of Descartes’s complete works (AT) and, albeit in abridged form where Pierre Gassendi’s objections are concerned, in Ferdinand Alquie´’s edition of the Œuvres philosophiques.15 Moreover, commentators have extensively cited the objections and responses from the start. Indeed, a feature of the objections themselves from the second set on is their awareness of both earlier ones and Descartes’s responses to them. Like later commentaries, each successive wave of objections cites earlier objections and responses, now for further evidence of Descartes’s thought on thornier issues to which previous objectors drew attention, now as the primary source on a number of topics (for instance, the doctrine of the ‘objective reality’ of ideas) that first appear in the author’s responses. It is nonetheless striking that these supplementary texts continue to be used as a secondary corpus, leaving readers free to ignore them, as in fact most readers do. And when commentators do turn to them, it is largely with a view to clarifying statements and arguments contained in the meditations themselves even though they not only constitute by far the largest part of the book but amply repay close scrutiny in their own right.16 A second point worthy of notice is that, as Desmond Clarke has observed, owing to the vexing circumstances surrounding its assembly and publication, the book rapidly escaped Descartes’s control.17 Consider, for example, the question of its title. On 11 November 1640 Descartes forwarded the final draft of the occasioning meditations to the abbe´ Marin Mersenne, a one-man clearinghouse for information and erudite correspondence in the intellectual Europe of the 1630s and 1640s to whom he had confided the task of seeing the book into print. Descartes indicates in the accompanying letter that, though he personally prefers the simple ‘Meditations on First Philosophy,’ he leaves the choice of a title up to his friend ‘in order to make you its godfather, and to leave you the power to baptize it’ (2:280). The title Mersenne settled on,

Front Matter 41

Meditations on First Philosophy, in which Are Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul, certainly reflected his own notion of what the book was going to be about, as too his sense of the orthodox positions it would have to defend to escape official censure. It does not, however, accurately describe what Descartes wrote. As the author was forced to point out to a number of readers, including Mersenne himself, though providing proofs both of the existence of God and of the ‘real distinction’ between body and mind, he has nothing to say about the immortality of the soul. Despite these disclaimers, Mersenne’s title stuck until the second Latin edition of 1642. The problem of getting the title right raised the curtain on others. To start with the Latin text of 1641, though there is a tendency to speak of it as a single edition – indeed, as the edition to which all others are tied – there were in fact three, or at least, according to AT, three different printings in which we detect minor yet telltale differences.18 So while both AT and Alquie´ give a single date, 28 August 1641, this should not be taken too literally. The date is a moving target, as is the text whose finalization it is taken to have fixed. For example, an ‘index’ or table of contents was added to the third printing. Beyond making the book’s contents more accessible, the index partially identified the authors of the various objections generated by the book’s circulation in manuscript and uncorrected proofs. Readers of the third printing thereby learned that the First Objections came from the hand of ‘a learned [yet otherwise unnamed] theologian of the Netherlands,’ the Dutch Thomist Johan de Kater, professionally known by the Latinized Caterus, and that the Third Objections had been penned by a nameless ‘philosopher’ identified further still in the French edition of 1647 as ‘a famous’ if still nameless ‘English philosopher,’ Thomas Hobbes. But those overseeing production of the volume – Descartes, his Parisian printer, perhaps proof readers hired by the printer or Mersenne – also detected errors in the first printing. Most surviving copies of the first edition contain corrected pages, but a few do not. There exists, moreover, at least one copy that contains both the corrected and the uncorrected version of several pages.19 The verbatim fixation that print is generally taken to entail did not, then, eliminate a certain manuscriptlike mouvance of the sort Paul Zumthor chronicles in the Middle Ages.20 On the contrary, typesetters’ lapses, the recapture of uncorrected pages by one of the binders, and booksellers’ interest in identifying themselves as sources of copies for future readers to buy shift both the text and the volume about in admittedly modest yet still not negligible ways. What

42

The Matter of Mind

scholarly tradition trains us to regard as the text of Descartes’s Meditations turns out to have been the product of a collaborative undertaking in which we discern the confusing work of many hands. The functionally collaborative character of the book as a manufactured item fit for sale on the contemporary market becomes more emphatically so when we move from the circumstances clouding the production of the physical volume to the collected objections and responses that accompanied the actual meditations. Here, too, we discover layers, archaeological strata not unlike those that contemporary philologists were in the process of unearthing in classical texts and the Bible.21 Shortly after completing the meditations (not, as we have seen, to be conflated with the book soon to circulate under that name), Descartes shared the manuscript with friends in Utrecht, Emilius and the committed Cartesian professor of physics Regius (Henri le Roy). These early readers sent on comments to which Descartes responded in a letter dated 24 May 1640, though without, to our knowledge, changing anything in the text. A copy of the text was also forwarded to the Catholic theologian Caterus by mutual friends (2:507). Caterus responded with a set of objections that were to be the first of those included in the published volume. Caterus’s objections were then followed by a set sent in by Mersenne, ostensibly canvassing the sentiments of philosophers of his immediate acquaintance in Paris but more likely conveying mainly his own views. To what eventually became the Second Objections were rapidly added three more sets, by Hobbes (the Third), the Jansenist theologian Antoine Arnauld (the Fourth) and the Epicurean natural philosopher Gassendi (the Fifth), all of which passed through Mersenne’s busy hands.22 Meanwhile, in a letter on 23 June 1641, Descartes urged Mersenne to prevent Gassendi from seeing his testy responses to his objections before publication. The motive he confided to Mersenne was fear that, alerted by a reading of Descartes’s responses to how foolish his objections looked, Gassendi would want to withdraw them. This in turn would presumably have both altered the book as Descartes and Mersenne then conceived it and spared the objector a public embarrassment the author felt he richly deserved. Mersenne apparently respected Descartes’s wishes to the extent of leaving Gassendi in the dark. He nevertheless sent Descartes’s reply to members of Gassendi’s philosophical circle, thereby provoking a sixth set of objections and responses all the more interesting for incorporating a reading not only of the meditations themselves but of the barely concealed insults Descartes and Gassendi had traded. Nor did

Front Matter 43

the process stop there. Though it arrived too late for inclusion in the first edition, Descartes’s enemy, the sharp-tongued if addle-pated Jesuit Pierre Bourdin, sent in a seventh set of objections. These were added to the second edition of 1642, together with Descartes’s reply in the form of a letter of expostulation to Bourdin’s superior, the Jesuit Provincial, Jacques Dinet, complaining of the slanderous injustice of Bourdin’s comments. The Bourdin-Descartes exchange was then followed by a letter from yet another supporter of Gassendi, the pseudonymous Hyperaspites, accompanied by Descartes’s reply. By the time the book finally reached the public in August 1641, the metaphysical monologue Descartes had originally written, and which forms the strikingly slender main body of the final volume, had become a complex dialogue. The private self-colloquy on which the philosopher’s reputation as author of the ‘modern subject’ chiefly rests had turned into a three-ring circus, largely orchestrated by Mersenne rather than Descartes, in many ways possible only because, unlike the more professional writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, none of the participants expected (or needed) to make money by it. That both Descartes and Mersenne meant the enterprise to be perceived in expressly dialogic terms is confirmed, moreover, by Descartes’s letter of 24 December 1640. In forwarding a copy of his exchange with Caterus, Descartes rejects Mersenne’s proposal that his responses (together, presumably, with the corresponding objections) be incorporated in the main body of the text. Beyond alleging the sheer technical difficulty involved, he argues that, in a book where the order of the topics covered matters less than that of the process of reasoning about them, the interlinear insertion of the attendant debates would impede logical flow, obscuring his argument’s originality and strength. However, Descartes’s rejection of Mersenne’s suggestion underscores the telling fact of his having first seriously entertained it. Protective as he was of the meditations’ novel mode of exposition, Descartes remained committed to the principle of erudite conversation that shaped the volume as a whole. But in addition to putting the core text of Descartes’s Meditations in a new, dialogical light, the assembled Objections and Responses also produce tonal and generic modulations that change the formal as well as vocal character of the Cartesian first person they collectively attack and defend. The main body’s monologuist, familiar to us as the transcendental ego of both modern metaphysics and the scientific enterprise metaphysics sets out to explicate and legitimize, strikes an altogether different set of poses once the process of public comment begins.

44

The Matter of Mind

It is instructive in this wider context to compare the ego of the Meditations with the subject of professional scientific discourse whose institutionalization over the course of the seventeenth century Steven Shapin, Peter Burke, and Mary Campbell analyse.23 It is of course a truism of intellectual history that a key element in the emergent discourse of modern science is experiment and the forms of narrative experiment commands. Scientists formulate hypotheses and, to test them, design and perform empirical experiments whose results they report in scientific papers disseminated in professional journals, and in particular in volumes of ‘acts’ and ‘proceedings’ published by the new learned societies and academies created for the purpose. However, a cornerstone of modern experimental method is not simply the empirical tests it undertakes, checking hypotheses against the observable facts. A more fundamental feature is the principle of replication: the notion that, so long as the relevant laboratory conditions remain unchanged, the same experiment should produce the same results, whoever performs it. In English, the characteristic rhetorical marker of this replicability is the passive voice, a narrative device based squarely on the principle that the identity of the actual agent is indifferent. In French, where the passive voice is generally avoided in favor of active constructions, the equivalent device is the impersonal pronoun on (one) to which Pascal notably resorts in his account of his experiments on the existence of the vacuum.24 It is against this background that we should assess the grammatical subject of the thought experiments the Meditations minute. Though the originality of the endeavour makes it clear that, to begin with anyway, only Descartes himself could have performed them, the ego whose voice the text records is not finally Descartes’s own. It belongs rather to whoever, following Descartes’s example in the effort to replicate his work, conducts them on his or her own behalf. As Michel Butor acutely observes, the first person of the Meditations is in fact a second person since it delineates acts the reader is called on to perform in Descartes’s place.25 These complex discursive arrangements grant the Carestian ego the status of a fictional character. While the fact may not merit the tone of metaphysical pathos Jean-Luc Nancy injects,26 the Meditations’ protagonist remains a discursive persona that cannot be unproblematically identified with its empirical author. On the contrary, as attested by the conditional construction that marks the Meditations’ opening movement (‘such that it was necessary seriously to undertake, once in my life, to rid myself of all of the opinions I have heretofore received

Front Matter 45

among my beliefs […] if I wanted to establish something firm and constant in the sciences’) (2:404; AT 7:17; emphasis added), the subject of the text is essentially hypothetical, and of course rhetorical, too: a way of framing, packaging, and dramatizing arguments that, as arguments, could in principle do without it. This helps us understand Descartes’s notoriously confusing reply to a remark of Mersenne’s. In the Second Objections, Mersenne suggests that it would have been useful to see conventionally ‘geometric’ demonstrations of his major theses as supplements to the somewhat baffling expository method of providing proofs in the ‘analytic’ order of logical discovery rather than in the ‘synthetic’ pattern of question and debate favoured by the Schools (2:549; AT 7:128). Descartes defends the analytic approach on the grounds that it ‘shows the true path by which a thing has been methodically discovered, and lets us see how effects depend on causes.’ The source of confusion here lies in the reference of the terms ‘causes’ and ‘effects.’ Descartes does of course subscribe to the notion that knowledge of effects ultimately proceeds from that of their underlying causes. However, he does not use the terms here in the ordinary way. By ‘effects’ he means, not the natural phenomena that need to be explained, but rather the findings reached in the course of our investigations; and by ‘causes’ he means, not the laws or forces that produce natural phenomena, but the problems, observations, and reasonings that lead us to those findings. The superiority of his chosen procedure thus lies in the fact that, where the synthetic mode of presentation reverses the natural sequence of events by deducing the properties of things from the conclusions we reach about them, the analytic works upward from observed phenomena to the conclusions that make sense of them. The analytic method accordingly captures the concrete process of intellectual discovery as it moves from the phenomena that prompt or ‘cause’ enquiry to the explanatory findings that are its ‘effects.’ In following the natural order of thought itself, Descartes’s mode of exposition trains us to understand not only the content of philosophical discovery but the means by which such discoveries are actually made in the state of initial ignorance or doubt that stimulates the search for knowledge in the first place (2:581–5; AT 7:155–9).27 Still, though preferring the analytic method on both theoretical and pedagogical grounds, he notes that he could have proceeded in the traditional manner had he wanted to – a claim he makes good by presenting his proofs of the existence of God and of the real distinction between mind and body in the prescribed geometric style (2:586–98;

46

The Matter of Mind

AT 7:160–70). Beyond demonstrating that he could indeed have done it this way had he chosen to, Descartes’s shift to the standard method employed in the Schools concedes a larger point. Even though it follows the natural order of discovery the synthetic mode violates, the decision to expound his thoughts in the form of a meditation rather than in that of a mathematical theorem or of a scholastic question or dispute is in the end a purely expository matter. Though called ‘meditations,’ Descartes’s arguments are not in fact real meditations at all. They are not even the record of real meditations but rather an experimental protocol that, in aping the form of the process of active thought, gives thought an intelligible pattern it would otherwise lack. All of this underscores the deconstructive lesson behind Derrida’s critique of Foucault. If we read Descartes’s text carefully a` la lettre, we find that we cannot in fact read it a` la lettre. The ego the text sets out to present is neither Descartes’s own nor even that of an ideal or hypothetical Descartes of Descartes’s imagining. It is a map designed to lead the reader down a road whose character and direction only become thinkable on the assumption that the subject of the text is some deliberately extended and reordered version of ourselves. But the experimental nature of the Cartesian ego reminds us of something else inveterate talk of ‘the subject’ in this connection causes us to forget: the fact that, as the Objections bound together with the Meditations exhaustively document, nobody believed it, or at any rate believed all of it. For example, though lamenting the absence of a proof of the immortality of the soul the book’s title promised, the members of Mersenne’s circle in Paris swallowed the cogito well enough. The problem they raised was how to get from there to the satisfactory proof of the existence of God without which the cogito loses all purchase on the world it purports to put at the disposal of a newly methodized science (2:543–8; AT 7:123–7). Arnauld, too, buys the cogito, and even how the cogito yields an ontological proof of God, in part because he can find precedents in St Augustine’s treatise on free will (or the lack of it). However, in addition to worrying about how Descartes’s account of matter as extended substance can be squared with the doctrine of the transubstantiation (2:655–6; AT 7:217–18), he rejects the Sixth Meditation’s claim to arrive at a clear and distinct knowledge of God on the grounds that such knowledge cannot be had by the ‘natural light’ of reason alone but only directly from God himself as an act of grace (2:654; AT 7:216). Hobbes, for his part, assented to the cogito, but rejected the dualist consequences Descartes drew from it. As he saw it, the dualist thesis of

Front Matter 47

the mind as an entirely incorporeal ‘thing that thinks’ was incoherent: ‘[T]o say: I am thinking, therefore I am thought; or I am intelligent, therefore, I am an understanding,’ amounts to the same thing as saying ‘I am walking, therefore I am a walk’ (2:601; AT 7:172). He argued, then, that all the cogito logically authorizes is the claim that, though a thing, and therefore as material in nature as any other thing of which we are capable of having some sort of experience, I am nonetheless that particular kind of thing that enjoys the faculty of thinking. To insist, as Descartes does, that the fact of thought and the related fact of conscious knowledge of my own existence require the addition of some new, incorporeal substance (that of thought itself ) is the needless and unjustified result of the nominal fallacy: the belief that, because I can give something a different name (‘thought’), it must be a different thing rather than simply a different state, attribute, or modification of the otherwise quite ordinary extended body I already am. Gassendi, meanwhile, did not understand the cogito at all, in part because he shared Montaigne’s Epicurean sense of the material limits imposed on human certainty by the embodied nature of human experience. This prompted him to interject irritating apostrophes mockingly addressing Descartes as pure Mind (O Anima! O Mens!), a gag intended to reveal the absurdity of Descartes’s position by stressing how the very act of verbal address presupposes the embodiment Descartes appears to deny. Nor, in truth, could Descartes resist responding in kind, salting his reply with apostrophes to mere flesh (O Caro!) designed to finger his correspondent’s boorish want of subtlety and tact. In any event, Gassendi’s flat refusal to envisage mind and body as distinct entities in turn made the Cartesian ideal of certainty in general and therefore, a fortiori, the certainty supposed to attach to the cogito itself literally incomprehensible – a fact Descartes put down to Gassendi’s stupidity, leading him not only to treat Gassendi’s objections dismissively but to try to have them left out of the French edition of the book. In the event, the publisher did not leave them out. Descartes’s wishes nonetheless produced yet further turbulence in the shape of the book. In the 1647 translation, the Fourth Objections are followed by a note from Descartes briefly indicating his reasons for dropping Gassendi’s contribution and his reply. This note is in turn followed by the Sixth Objections. There then appears a note from Claude Clerselier, as translator, explaining his own reasons for wanting the Fifth Objections put back in. (He remarks among other things the trouble he went to in translating the hundreds of pages involved.) So Gassendi’s text gets back in after all, even if out of place, and

48

The Matter of Mind

in ironic proximity to Descartes’s note reporting its absence. The net result of all of this pushing and shoving thus reinforced Gassendi’s major point: thought’s presumed material envelope is in the end indiscernible from thought itself. The criticisms Hobbes and Gassendi made open the door for Spinoza’s later monistic radicalization of Cartesian rationalism: the thesis that what can be known is known by strictly rational and therefore natural means. As the Ethics will insist, if the faculty of reason is indeed, as Descartes calls it, a ‘natural light’ inherent to the naturally given selfconscious experience it characterizes, it follows that it is a feature of the natural being to which it belongs, and so of the natural order whose rational laws it sets out to understand. Moreover, as reason itself teaches, the very notion of two substances of whatever kind, whether extended and inextended, mind and body, or nature and God, is self-contradictory. For if a substance is a thing that subsists by and within itself alone, independent of any other thing, its fundamental property is the infinitude this implies. But if substance is infinite, there can by definition be only one of which its apparent competitors are mere ‘affections’ or ‘modifications,’ a variety of distinguishable states each of which expresses some aspect or dimension of the ontological ground they share. The dualist divorce of mind and body accordingly betokens their deeper identity as complementary ‘aspects,’ ‘attributes,’ or ‘expressions’ of a single underlying substance, namely, the body itself, shorn of transcendental reference of any sort. The very fact that we can reason about both nature and ourselves accordingly commits us to the naturalist thesis of mind’s intrinsic embodiment.28 But Hobbes’s criticisms in particular also lend philosophical muscle to the idea that lies behind his sneering opening salvo. Piqued in part by recent memories of the ill-tempered exchange of letters between them concerning the Dioptrics,29 he takes Descartes to task for making points in the First Meditation that were already commonplaces among the ancients. He thus expresses disappointment that the ‘excellent author of novel speculations’ Descartes professes himself to be should waste his time rehashing such stale topics as the difficulty of finding certain and self-evident marks distinguishing the waking state from dream or the impossibility of interpreting mere sensations as providing proof positive of the reality of what we take to be the external objects that cause them (2:599–600; AT 7:171). As the Meditations’ circulation in advance of publication reminds us, the Republic of Letters to which the book was primarily addressed

Front Matter 49

remained a largely manuscript culture whose gentlemanly norms did not require publication to disseminate authors’ opinions or to assure their renown.30 Indeed, publication was in certain respects regarded as unseemly precisely because, in projecting an author’s name and work beyond the circle of erudite readers of which the Republic was composed, it bespoke a worldly ambition that contravened the distinterested love of truth the Republic’s citizens presumed each other to share. This is why, in the Discourse on the Method (1637), Descartes insists with otherwise inexplicable heat that he is not a literary hack (un faiseur de livres) actuated by vulgar motives of personal fame, still less by the sordid thirst for gain by which booksellers were notably moved (1:633). But it also accounts for the personal tone of his response to the first of Hobbes’s objections. Descartes begins by explaining that, if he has indeed gone over welltrodden ground in the way Hobbes criticizes, it is only as a kind of mental calisthenics designed ‘to prepare readers’ minds to consider intellectual matters and to distinguish them from corporeal’ (2:600; AT 7:171). The procedure so described is of course circular: in suggesting that readers need to be prepared to draw the distinction Descartes engages to prove, it presupposes the issue in dispute. But Descartes’s explanation also allows him to impeach his adversary’s mental powers by hinting at Hobbes’s failure to rise above the crudely material plane at which his objections show him to be stuck. This in turn lays the basis for Descartes’s rebuttal of an accusation the ironical Hobbes leaves decorously implicit. In reproaching Descartes for recycling philosophical cliche´s, Hobbes not only hints that he does not realize they are cliche´s, which is bad enough; he insinuates that, motivated by a ridiculous if not contemptible thirst for fame, the ‘excellent author of novel speculations’ lays claim to an originality he lacks. Descartes responds by repudiating not just any claim to originality on this score but the desire to ‘acquire renown’ that lurks behind it. Far from being prompted by the vulgar thirst for fame Hobbes symptomatically imagines, Descartes’s goals are selflessly therapeutic. If he discusses these tired matters at such length, it is because he was ‘no less obliged to lay them out than a doctor to describe the disease for which he undertakes to teach the cure’ (2:600; AT 7:171–2). The point of revisiting the tired tropes of classical scepticism is to remedy the very pathology from which Hobbes’s snide insinuations no less than his philosophical doctrines show him to suffer. The result of all of these features of the book taken as a whole is nonetheless to confirm what, in their complementary ways, both

50

The Matter of Mind

Gassendi and Hobbes insist on: the degree to which the very form of the book refutes the dualist doctrines Descartes defends. The most that can be said for the ‘subject’ of the meditations assembled in the main body is that it is an experimental fiction, an artefact of the analytic mode of presentation Descartes deploys. The hypothesis of a purely mental substance may illuminate certain aspects of the process of rational thought, and in particular the relative, strictly functional detachment from our own embodied identities involved in the act of critical reflection. Still, it cannot be taken to grant the being thus engaged the special ontological status Descartes asserts. On the contrary, as Descartes’s mud-wrestling with his detractors amply testifies, as radically disembodied as the ego of the Meditations may be, the book’s author is unmistakably not. Nor would any of the participants, however Cartesian their outlook, have genuinely been tempted to think otherwise. The care given in later versions, and especially the French translation of 1647, to identify by name at least those objectors a French public could have been expected to recognize (Mersenne, Arnauld, and Gassendi if not Caterus or Hobbes) underscores the fact that everyone involved took part both as a determinate individual acting on his own behalf and as the representative of the specific, highly characteristic viewpoint he espoused as someone of a particular kind – a ‘learned Dutch theologian,’ a ‘famous English philosopher,’ a fatuous Epicurean. This carries over into the discriminating way in which Descartes responds to different objectors. For example, Caterus expresses confusion at one point (2:508–9; AT 7:92) about Descartes’s novel use of the term ‘idea’ to denote, not a notion we form about an external object, but a pure mental entity that, as such, ‘objectively’ exists only and entirely in the mind itself. In reply, Descartes accuses Caterus not merely of failing to understand his words but of feigning not to understand them. True, in alleging pretence on Caterus’s part, he really accuses him of weak-wittedness: he condescendingly pretends that Caterus merely pretends not to understand in order to soften the blow by suggesting that Caterus’s motive is the charitable one of giving him ‘the opportunity to explain [my meaning] more clearly’ (2:520; AT 7:102). But Descartes’s condescension is surely a reflex of his impatience in the face of what, given the utmost ‘clarity’ and ‘distinctness’ he attributes to the notions he presents and the terms he uses to express them, can only seem abject stupidity. The subtle dosage of graciousness and gibe is the result of a precise calculation of what he can permit himself in replying to a ‘learned Dutch theologian’ as opposed, say, to a Parisian

Front Matter 51

doctor of theology like Arnauld, an authority still uncompromised by the controversies surrounding his allegiance to the heretical Jansenius that will engulf him in 1643. The author of the meditations that give the book its name addresses readers all of whom are intimately aware of each other’s interests, foibles, and institutional solidarities as fully formed empirical beings. All of this is magnified by the portion of the book alluded to in the first part of this chapter’s title: the remarkably elaborate paratext formed by the evolving body of front matter that shapes Descartes’s monument from the start. In the Latin edition, the Meditations are preceded by a dedication, a preface, a synopsis, and (dating from the third printing) a table of contents in the guise of an ‘index.’ The mere existence of this complex preliminary apparatus recalls the paradox that opens Hegel’s Phenomenology. The problem Hegel addresses stems from the fact of beginning the book with an introduction. This is a problem because philosophy as philosophy, that is, as the systematic articulation of truth, should need no introduction. If truth is in fact truth, what Descartes himself calls ‘the truth,’ the one and only, then it is by definition timeless and unconditional and should therefore stand entirely on its own. Once it is said, if it is said, it is said once and for all, fixed and invariant. This relates to one of Hegel’s major revisionist theses: the evolution in our understanding of the truth is an evolution in truth itself. As the introduction confesses by its very function, citing the author’s sources, the progress of his thinking, the circumstances attending the book’s composition, the book’s relation to tradition and how it means to change it, truth has a history because truth is itself historical. To be sure, as the Phenomenology sets itself the task of showing, the historical nature of truth reflects that of its locus and instrument: the ‘mind,’ ‘ghost,’ or ‘spirit’ (German’s notoriously polysemous Geist) that at once brings truth into being and transcends it in the form of the dialectical Idea of which both mind and truth are the vehicles and the products. This is why history surfaces only toward the Phenomenology’s close, once the mass of the book has been wheeled into position to show that history is finally the creation of the mind’s own self-governing development. As Hegel writes, ‘The process of carrying forward this form of knowledge of itself is the task spirit accomplishes as actual History.’31 Like the proverbial rabbit plucked from rhetoric’s hat, history emerges only once it can be seen as ‘actual’ history, that is, only once it can be acknowledged as the dependency of a self-disclosing act of conscious self-representation. Hegel accordingly conceals history until he has

52

The Matter of Mind

prepared a form that cancels it out by presenting it as a movement of autonomous self-actualization whose ultimate term (glimpsed if not comprehended and ‘realized’) is Absolute Spirit defined as the ‘end’ of history. Once this point is reached, history stops in fulfillment of the goal or final cause toward which human reason has blindly yet, as the later Philosophy of History puts it, ‘cunningly’ directed its owl-like flight from the first.32 This is of course why Hegelian history will eventually have to be stood on its head, or rather, as Marx famously quips, how it can be shown to march on its head instead of the feet material reality gave it. But the need to set history to rights by putting it on its feet is already exhibited by (because it already operates through) the front matter of Descartes’s book. For whatever Descartes may say or think, it is never enough simply to seek the truth; we must add the supplement of expression involved in telling it.33 But telling in turn demands some sort of framing context. The moment truth is confided to the language authors share with others not prepossessed of the knowledge they mean to impart, it is no longer just itself, but is now as it were doubled by how it is taken. This brings us back to what Descartes says in the passage from the Discourse cited earlier concerning the reason to write at all. As he reports in that place, if he commits his thoughts to public paper, forsaking modest contentment with knowledge as a self-rewarding good in its own right, it is because of an overriding care for truth made personally urgent by a growing awareness of the widespread mischaracterization of his ideas by other people (1:633). Even though he has as yet published nothing, his views already circulate both in manuscript and in the distorted guise of public rumour. Writing and, more pointedly, publication thus respond to a problem of public uptake and reception that antedates publication itself. Indeed, in a wonderful irony, they respond to the specifically Cartesian problem of ‘other minds’ and of what (in the usefully flexible English expression) other minds make of truth as a function of motives and preoccupations quite different from those by which Descartes claims to be inspired. Whence the addition of a synopsis and index supplying a timeline and map, mnemonic devices designed to counteract the argument’s dispersal across the space-time of Descartes’s unfolding discourse by projecting it against the miniaturized spatial image of the book as a whole. Whence too the dedication addressed to the massed ranks of the ‘deans and doctors’ of the Sorbonne: an attempt to propitiate a body of readers Descartes had excellent reason to fear by highlighting

Front Matter 53

themes (the existence of God, the nature of the human soul) they were likely to welcome. In the event, God and the soul turn out to look like instruments in the quest for truth whose hero and beneficiary is the autonomous mind itself portrayed as the seat of a ‘natural light’ about which the Sorbonne was ominously suspicious. As Descartes was at pains to remind Mersenne, he has nothing to say about the properties of the soul of greatest concern to orthodox readers, and in particular the immortality Mersenne persisted in putting in the book’s original title. And as Arnauld points out, the issues theologians would be most interested in are largely omitted where they are not made more difficult than before, as in the case of transubstantiation. Descartes nonetheless makes an effort to flatter and cajole, stressing those elements of the text Catholic right-mindedness will find most reassuring. The problems the synopsis, index, and dedication engage are magnified in the preface. Descartes worries not only about the champions of orthodoxy at the Sorbonne; he also worries about Epicurean esprits forts like Hobbes and Gassendi, radical freethinkers by whom he expects to be attacked even as the orthodox take him for one of them. As the preface stresses, he wants it understood that he is no ‘atheist’ intent on undermining the acknowledged truth of orthodox belief. This prompts him, in a preliminary movement, to second the dedication’s insistence on orthodoxy. He claims, for instance, that, however suspect some of his ‘conclusions’ may at first appear, the ‘reasons’ supporting them are not only entirely consonant with Catholic doctrine but refute atheistic arguments. In a curious move that underscores just how acutely orthodox sensibilities weigh on his mind, he refrains from stating how these arguments are refuted ‘for fear of being obliged thereby to report them.’34 Still, thinking ahead to the premises shoring up the ontological proof of God advanced in the Third Meditation, he notes that ‘everything atheists say, in order to combat the existence of God, always depends either on pretending that God possesses human feelings [humani affectus] or on arrogating to our minds so much strength and wisdom as to instill the presumption of aiming to determine and comprehend for ourselves what God can and must do; with the result that nothing they say will prove difficult to refute, provided only that we remind ourselves that we must view our minds as finite and limited things, and God as an infinite and incomprehensible being’ (2:392; AT 7:9). But if Descartes is no atheist, he also wants it understood that, talk of God and the soul notwithstanding, he is no old fart of a sorbonnard either. So while the dedication sets out to reassure the Sorbonne of his

54

The Matter of Mind

piety, the preface attempts to stake out an elusive middle ground between the hostile extremes of scholastic dogmatism and rationalist unbelief that will both cover his back and preserve his self-esteem. This leads him to try to pre-empt criticism from radical sceptics by disqualifying a wide range of readers from judging the matters in dispute. He allows that he looks for praise neither from le vulgaire, the lazy, illinformed multitude incapable of the abstruse reasoning ‘first philosophy’ demands, nor from assorted materialists, dilettantes, and nit-pickers who, though ostensibly better equipped, prove just as incapable of deliberate application. Far from seeking as wide a public readership as possible, Descartes writes, I would counsel no one to read [my book] except those who are willing to join with me in serious meditation, and who are able to detach their minds from commerce with the senses, and completely rid themselves of all manner of prejudices – persons of whose exceedingly small number I am all too well aware. But as for those who, without taking careful account of the order and interrelation of my arguments, will amuse themselves, as some do, by caviling about individual parts, such readers, I say, will profit little from perusal of this treatise; and though they may perhaps find opportunities to split hairs in various places, it is hardly likely that they will be able to raise pressing objections worthy of reply. (2:393; AT 7:9–10)

As in his response to Hobbes, the circularity of this proceeding is obvious. The only readers fit to take on the task of working through the book are those who, armed with the synopsis and index, can appreciate the argument as a whole. This reflects both the novelty of Descartes’s analytic method and the peculiar difficulties it raises. As we have seen, the argument takes the form of a process of discovery, moving toward its conclusions rather than from them in the way the synthetic method prescribes. This means that readers have to suspend judgment at any given moment of the exposition until the reasons behind the puzzling phenomenal ‘causes’ the process of discovery sifts through finally emerge. This is indeed why Mersenne needed the pony provided by the synthetic exposition of the author’s theses given in the Second Responses, where Descartes begins with the ‘effects,’ that is his findings or conclusions, and then works back to the ‘causes’ whose analysis led to their discovery. But the circularity also reflects the prejudicial assumption that the only readers who will be capable of performing this feat are those who, unlike Hobbes, are ready ‘to detach their minds from

Front Matter 55

commerce with the senses.’ The best readers turn out to be dualists a` leur insu. If they are prepared to grasp the perfect orthodoxy of the reasons behind Descartes’s preprogrammed conclusions, an orthodoxy initially concealed by the unorthodox mode of presentation, it is because they are prepared to assent to the description of mental operations that not only sustains those reasons but presents their analytic grounding in the phenomenon of thought itself. The force of Descartes’s argument will then only be grasped by those who are already convinced by their own prior sense of what thinking is to begin with. As we have observed, Descartes’s attempt to stake out a middle ground failed. Despite his efforts to persuade them of the orthodoxy of his beliefs, the ecclesiastical authorities put the Meditations on the Index in 1663 for encouraging the radicals from whom he was at such pains to distance himself. Descartes was thus held responsible for later outrages like Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), subjecting the three Abrahamic religions of the Book to devastating historical criticism, or Ludewijk Meyers’s Spinozistic Philosophy, Interpreter of Holy Scripture (1666), openly subordinating the theological exegesis of holy writ to the rational and so naturalistic adjudication of philosophy.35 Conversely, rationalist dissatisfaction with dualism and the attendant comfort given proponents of theological tradition were eventually confirmed by the way in which Nicolas Malebranche and, still more pointedly, the conservative archbishop Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet enlisted Cartesian doctrine as a bulwark against naturalist thought.36 But that is just the point. The paratextual apparatus with which Descartes tries to shape the book’s reception bears the traces of the violently contradictory reactions to which he was forced to respond even in advance of formal publication. The text of the Meditations is thus the seat at once of the doctrines Descartes himself bequeaths to his successors and of the deconstructive energies that condition its complex historical fate. To all of this we may now add one final item, the notice from the ‘bookseller to the reader’ that appears in the French translation of 1647. The notice is in its lowercase way perhaps the most telling feature of the book’s front matter because it is the most difficult to know how to read. In the Œuvres philosophiques, Alquie´ indicates in a note that he hesitated to include it because it is not obviously by Descartes’s own hand (2:394). Indeed, if the title is anything to go by, the notice is obviously not by Descartes’s hand but rather that of Pierre Le Petit, partner of the widow of Jean Camusat and publisher of the book. Yet beyond the fact that, in seventeenth-century France, authors often

56

The Matter of Mind

prefaced their works under cover of fictional bookseller notices, as a modesty trope designed to avoid the odium of talking up one’s own productions, the text has appeared in all earlier editions of the book, making it a de facto component of the Cartesian corpus. But this merely deepens the problem Alquie´ wrestles with by broadening its sphere of reference. For what exactly is the Cartesian corpus? This is of course the question a reading of Foucault’s classic essay ‘What Is an Author?’ raises.37 Foucault’s central thesis is that what we call an ‘author’ is far less the empirical person to whom a given document may (or may not) be attributed than a framing device (the ‘author function’) that enables readers to define, organize, and orient the body of writings we read under a given author’s name. And as Foucault goes on to note, even if we limit the corpus solely to those writings whose autographic origins are attested beyond dispute, it remains subject to change depending on what we take ‘authorship’ to mean. To cite one of his own examples, does it make sense to regard Nietzsche as the ‘author’ of a laundry list found among his papers after his death, and undoubtedly written in his own hand? Is a laundry list in fact the kind of thing that can even have an ‘author’ in any but the strictly legal or philological sense in which one could imagine wanting to know who wrote it with a view, say, to using it as a sample to authenticate the hand in which some other document has been written? And if we do decide, in some loose sense of the term, to say that Nietzsche was the list’s ‘author’ rather than simply saying that he wrote it, do we on this account want to include it in an edition of his Complete Writings, let alone of his Complete Works? Assuming, as both Foucault and I do, that the answer would surely be no, the concept of authorship thus implies a kind of purpose, a claim on time, on thought, and on posterity, that the mere contingent fact of writing a laundry list does not. Nevertheless, if the foregoing discussion of the textual history of Descartes’s Meditations has taught us anything, it is that even Foucault’s sceptical probing of notions of authorship falls short. As we have seen, barring the kind of editorial fiat Genevie`ve Rodis-Lewis exercises by excluding them from the Vrin bilingual edition of 1970, the objections Caterus, Mersenne, Hobbes, Arnauld, and the rest sent in are already an integral part of the book we call ‘Descartes’s Meditations.’ And as we have also seen, even the responses, though Descartes’s own, form a part of the work far different in tone and character from the series of thought experiments and supporting arguments that, in prompting the objections, provoked the responses in turn. That we should consider

Front Matter 57

the bookseller’s notice, frankly acknowledged as such, as belonging to the evolving work by the same token as everything else is thus entirely in the logic of the work itself: the kind of thing it is and, more importantly, the kind of event it was – the curious process from which the Cartesian composite issued and that it thereby re-enacts. Having then chosen to keep it in and, what is more, having granted it a status worthy of close reading, what does the notice give us? The first thing is a candid airing of an issue Descartes himself tends to duck: the question of translation. Le Petit is understandably anxious to assure potential readers that the text he offers for sale is the genuine article. To this end he recounts how the author himself (save the name) oversaw the preparation of the duc de Luynes’s translation of the main body. In the process Le Petit flags a problem that should not be one: an instance of the more general problem of linguistic mediation that Descartes consistently discounts. In Descartes’s eyes the problem is less language and language’s habit of saying things we do not mean than our finite powers of attention and will. It is we ourselves, and not language, who shift the focus from the things words name to the words used in naming them, just as it is we who assign meanings to words other than those the author (save the name) had in mind, and then hold him responsible for it. Whence, for instance, the remark in his responses to Hobbes about the absurdity of believing, as Hobbes does, that words rather than wordlessly unconditioned ‘intuition’ form the basis of the objects we hold in thought. Were words more than neutral tags used to docket ideas that remain inherently unchanged, whatever name we give them, how would we ever understand each other? Yet understand each other we indisputably do, for ‘who doubts,’ as experience seems readily to prove, ‘that a Frenchman and a German may have the same thoughts or reasonings concerning the same things even though they conceive entirely different words?’ (2:609; AT 7:178–9). The bookseller is nonetheless concerned about the translation not only on his own behalf but on that of his readers, whom he no doubt rightly guesses need reassurance on this score, whatever Descartes thinks. Nor is it irrelevant, in Le Petit’s defence, that the problem of translation lies near the heart of the debate between Foucault and Derrida concerning the interpretation of the First Meditation’s treatment of madness. The first step in the process of doubt that paves the way to the cogito is the universally acknowledged fact that the senses often mislead us – for example, by making distant objects look smaller than they are, or by making bits of wood plunged into the refractive medium of water

58

The Matter of Mind

look bent when they are in reality straight. However, Descartes’s aim in the First Meditation is to weigh all conceivable grounds for doubt as a preliminary to determining whether we can claim to know anything with the degree of certainty required to count as genuine knowledge. To this end, it is not enough to rehearse the occasions for doubt we meet in everyday life, for it is almost always possible to get around them by saying that we also regularly meet with grounds for belief. Descartes’s immediate problem indeed is less how much reason there is for doubt than how little. In the case of sensory error, for instance, Descartes argues that, since the senses sometimes deceive us, and since ‘it is only prudent never to place implicit faith in those who have once deceived us,’ we should withhold faith in the testimony of the senses as a matter of principle. However, this abstract de jure argument for doubt is directly countered by a de facto appeal to the kinds of things we know as a matter of course. So while it is true that ‘the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things that are hard to perceive and very distant, there may perhaps be many others about which one cannot reasonably doubt even though we know them by [sensory] means: for instance, that I am here, seated by the fire, clothed in a dressing gown, holding this paper in my hands, and other things of this nature’ (2:405; AT 7:18). Our seemingly incorrigible capacity to find grounds for dogged assurance in the face of growing doubt shapes Descartes’s exposition throughout the First Meditation. At least until the hypothesis of the Evil Genius brings doubt to the ‘hyperbolic’ apogee with which the cogito itself finally appears, the goal is less to rescue knowledge from the kinds of dilemma sceptics raise than to provoke dilemmas where we would least expect them. The rhythm of thought in the First Meditation is accordingly defined by successive aggravations of doubt linked by provisional concessions to the counterclaims of common-sense realism. The passage just cited, marking the transition from the first stage of doubt to the hypothesis of madness, offers a critical case in point, which is one reason why Derrida emphasizes it in his critique of Foucault. Derrida makes much of the fact that, in the Latin text, the transitional note of concession is conveyed by the two-word phrase ‘sed forte’ rather than the simple conjunction ‘but’ encountered in Luynes’s translation (AT 7:18).38 As he rightly remarks, a direct rendering in French would give ‘mais peut-eˆtre qu’encore que,’ yielding in English something like ‘but perhaps even though.’ While Foucault seems to miss the point in his reply to Derrida’s critique, Luynes does in fact catch the same idea: though he avoids the rather clumsy direct rendering Derrida proposes, the

Front Matter 59

modalizing combination of ‘peut-eˆtre que’ and ‘encore que’ is there just the same: ‘Mais, encore que les sens nous trompent quelquefois […], il se rencontre peut-eˆtre beaucoup d’autres’ (2:405). But Derrida’s aim in stressing the transition is less the precise form the conjunction takes than the note of concession it sounds. He argues that the true speaker in the approaching dismissal of madness is not the philosopher Descartes but the philosophically naı¨ve man in the street for whom the possibility of madness at first seems unimaginable.39 The original’s pointedly hesitant sed forte thereby becomes a significant interpretive crux. Luynes’s French actually gets closer to the reading Derrida wants than Derrida’s polemical stress on the Latin allows. In the Latin text, the sentence in which the possibility of madness is dismissed reads as follows: ‘[S]ed amentes sunt isti, nec minus ipse demens videre, si quod ab iis exemplum ad me transferrem’ (AT 7:18). In English we might say: ‘But these people are mad [or, more colourfully, out of their minds], and I would have to be as demented as they are to apply their example to myself.’ In Luynes’s translation we get the following, introduced by a Gallic shrug for which the original has no equivalent: ‘Mais quoi? ce sont des fous, et je ne serais pas moins extravagant, si je me re´glais sur leurs exemples’ (2:406). As Derrida might have noted had the matter been drawn to his attention, the whole weight of Foucault’s reading could be said to fall on that introductory shrug, whose air of exasperated common sense conveys just how self-evidently unthinkable the possibility of being mad is, especially in such a time and place as the present, where we are engaged in the actively self-reflexive work of philosophical argument. But it also strikes me that, though expressly focused on the immediately preceding sed forte, Derrida’s own reading may in fact spring more directly from the translation than he suggests Foucault’s does. For if the true subject (in the sense of source or ‘author’) of this sentence is not the Cartesian philosopher but his impatient interlocutor, whom Descartes here personates, Luynes’s rendering of the ‘but’ of ‘sed amentes sunt isti’ works perfectly. After all, l’homme moyen sensuel Derrida posits could readily be imagined to respond with just this shrug and the tone of voice it suggests. Still, the fact that the issue is fought out on the grounds of translation, with Derrida hurling the Latin in Foucault’s teeth, is what matters. Whether or not a faithful translation is possible, a translation intervenes, and the bookseller wants to remove it as a potential impediment to readership and sales. Sales seem at the root of Le Petit’s other concern in the notice. More precisely, sales are at the root of a pair of contrasting concerns that leave

60

The Matter of Mind

him all the more apprehensive for getting entangled with each other to countervailing effect. One problem is that of reception: the very real possibility that the book will encounter a hostile public and bring trouble on the poor bookseller’s head. Given, moreover, the degree to which, as Joan DeJean reminds us, official state censorship had begun to gear up at just this time in France, Le Petit’s anxiety on this score is hardly fanciful.40 The second problem, however, pulling in the opposite direction, is the one noted above, namely, the question of sales itself. The notice can accordingly be divided into three parts, and watching Le Petit move from one to another, dancing on the horns of his dilemma, is a treat. The first part notes that, in the original Latin in which the author’s thoughts were first contained, the book has successfully passed the test of critical scrutiny. Having resolved, as it were against his better judgment, to publish his book ‘as much through fear of stifling the voice of truth as with the design of submitting it to trial by the learned,’ the author’s hopes were fulfilled in that his book was ‘put to the question in all of the tribunals of philosophy’ (2:394). The crucial phrase is of course ‘put to the question’ (mis a` la question), a judicial term of art that not only means that the book was subject to investigation, enquiry, or inquisition but carries the sinister suggestion of having been made to answer subject to at least the threat of torture. The result, Le Petit writes, was that the debates to which the accompanying objections bear quasi-judicial ‘witness’ (te´moignent) proved both the book’s worthiness of the attention that ‘the learned of the age’ paid it and its inoffensiveness from the standpoint of official dogma and public morals. What is more, the lively disputations it prompted proved fruitful in their own right since ‘so many great men could not have come to blows without producing a great deal of light’ (tant de grands hommes n’ont pu se choquer sans produire beaucoup de lumie`re) (2:394–5). Le Petit’s strategy is obvious. On the one hand, he hints at a succe`s de scandale. The Meditations is a controversial book at which curious readers will naturally want to take a look for themselves. Yet, having survived being ‘put to the question’ without yet winding up on the Index, it is not too controversial and should not therefore scare anybody off. On the contrary, as witnessed by all of the great and learned men who have troubled themselves about it without clamouring for its suppression, its orthodoxy is beyond dispute. Le Petit’s aim, then, is simply to stimulate interest in order to sell as many copies as possible. The general public’s potential interest in the book carries over into the beginning and end of the second part of the notice, where the bookseller explains how the book came to be translated. Here he notes

Front Matter 61

that, having passed from the ‘universities’ to the ‘palaces of the great,’ including that of the duke who undertook to render it in French, the book has now assumed a vernacular form from which ‘the tongue and tang of the schools’ (la langue et le gouˆt de l’Ecole) have been expunged (2:395). The point now is that the book is entirely accessible in a way those leery of the universities and repulsed by the hard and rebarbative idiom schoolmen affect might not credit. Even in Latin Descartes has secured a lay audience, and a very distinguished one at that, earning him, if not a royal, at any rate a ducal seal of approval. Given the success the book has already enjoyed among the erudite and those at court, how many more people may not derive both pleasure and profit from it, now that it has been made over into faithful and familiar French? Yet no sooner has the bookseller laid out all of the good things readers can expect than anxieties return. In the third part of the notice, having related how Descartes personally reviewed and corrected Luynes’s version, and having thereby removed all conceivable obstacles to as wide a circulation as he could wish, Le Petit finds himself standing on the brink of an abyss. For the fact is that, easy as the translator may have made the approach, the book remains hard and even shocking to read. He accordingly enters a plea with the public as a prelude to closing the sale: ‘Were it permitted, I would now add that, since this book contains some very daring meditations [des me´ditations fort libres] and that may even seem mad [extravagantes: one of the terms used for the kinds of notion the insane entertain in the First Meditation] to readers who are unaccustomed to the speculations of metaphysics, it will be neither useful nor agreeable to readers who can neither apply their minds with a great deal of attention to what they read nor abstain from judging before having sufficiently weighed the matters discussed’ (2:396). Le Petit is thus clearly afraid that the commercial success he promises himself will come back to haunt him – that the combined ‘extravagance’ and difficulty of Descartes’s speculations may earn both the philosopher and the bookseller a public opprobrium that might not only land him in hot water but be bad for business. At which point, however, moved precisely by thoughts of business, he pulls himself together: ‘But I fear someone will reproach me for exceeding the bounds of my trade, or rather for not knowing my trade, in putting an obstacle in the way of sales of my book [note the form of the possessive] by making so large an exception of persons for whom I do not believe it appropriate. I accordingly fall silent, and refrain from scaring the public off’(2:396–7). Since the goal is sales, what does it matter if some readers take offence, so long as they

62

The Matter of Mind

purchase copies first? And yet people will take offence; nor can Le Petit stop obsessively talking about it, leading him to close the notice with an appeal to equity, seconded by tips on how to read the book: But before doing so [i.e., falling silent], I feel obliged once again to warn readers to bring a great deal of equity and docility to reading this book; for if they come to it with that ill humour and that contrarian frame of mind shown by many persons who read only to dispute and who, though professing to seek the truth, seem afraid of finding it, since the moment they catch sight of the least hint of it, they labor to combat and destroy it – readers such as these will never draw either profit from or a reasonable judgment about the book. The book must be read without prejudice, without haste, and with the aim of self-improvement; one must first hand oneself over to the author in the spirit of a Schoolboy before coming at him in the role of a Censor. This method is so needful to the reading that I may call it the key to the book, without which no one may properly claim to understand it. (2:397)

With the bookseller’s notice as my text, I wish to make two points by way of conclusion. The first concerns the way Le Petit winds up standing in Descartes’s shoes – and indeed, following the choice of possessive pronoun noted a moment ago, once he decides to offer Descartes’s book for sale, it becomes his as much as his author’s. His exhortation to readers, pleading with them to suspend judgment until they have not only read the book in an initial spirit of schoolboyish docility but thought it over with as much patience and candour as they can muster, recalls Descartes’s own misgivings about the process of publication. In particular, it takes us to the passages in the sixth part of the Discourse where Descartes airs his reasons for publishing his work despite detesting ‘the business of making books’ (1:633). The reasons Descartes alleges are threefold. First and foremost is the distinterested love of truth and his desire, by publishing the truth, to advance the state of knowledge and the welfare of humankind (1:638). The second is more personal and consists (as reported earlier) in attempting to counteract mischaracterizations of his ideas already circulating in the mouths and writings of others – in the light of which ‘I am pleased to pray our descendants [nos neveux] never to believe I have said the things people claim I do unless I have divulged them myself’ (1:641). The third reason for publishing, or at any rate for writing ‘with the same care as though I intended to have [my discoveries] published,’ is

Front Matter 63

perhaps the most striking. Precisely because it demands reading one’s own thoughts less in the form in which they occur to us than in the form they will assume in other people’s eyes, writing for publication constitutes a kind of test. For ‘doubtless one always looks more closely at what one believes will be seen by others than at what is only meant for oneself, and often things that have seemed true to me when I first conceived them have appeared false when I set about putting them on paper’ (1:638). And yet the very motives for writing for publication – the desire to broadcast truth, the desire to refute misinterpretations of his ideas, the need to test his thinking by giving it the form in which other people will see it – also urge suppressing his work. For the one thing of which experience makes him certain is the fact that his writings will be wilfully misunderstood the moment they enter the public domain. Which is to say that Descartes already knows how others will see his work, and in particular how the Aristotelian ‘sectaries’ of the schools will see it. Such readers are like ivy, which does not tend to climb higher than the trees that support it, and often even climbs down again once it has reached their crest; for it also seems to me that they climb down, that is, make themselves somehow less learned than had they abstained from study, who, not content to know what has been intelligibily explained in their author [i.e., Aristotle], further want to find in him the solution to a number of problems of which he says nothing and of which perhaps he never even thought. However, their manner of philosophizing is highly profitable to those endowed with very mediocre minds; for the obscurity of the distinctions and principles they use allows them to talk about everything as boldly as if they understood it and to defend what they say against the most subtle and capable men without one’s having any means of convincing them. In which they seem to me comparable to a blindman who, to fight without disadvantage against another who can see, leads him down to the bottom of some very dark cave; and I may say that scholars like these have an interest in my refraining from publishing the principles of the philosophy I use, for being as simple and selfevident as they are, I would, in publishing them, in effect open windows and cause the light of day to enter that cave into which they have descended to fight. (1:642)

The very good Descartes proposes to achieve in publishing reinforces the misgivings he and his publisher share. The light he borrows from

64

The Matter of Mind

other people’s eyes in order to test his work reveals the darkness in which his adversaries see all things. But the second point to be made on the basis of Le Petit’s text is the degree to which the fears he shares with his author underscore his abiding interest – the business of selling books. Just because it ensures that the Meditations will reach the widest possible audience, the translation conveys the book into the hands of those readers both he and his author dread the most: those who, failing to understand, will nonetheless judge, and condemn what they judge, even though it corresponds neither to what the author wrote nor to what he intended. Which is to say in a new and, I hope, more perspicuous way what I have been urging from the first. Descartes does indeed imagine some sort of ideal of rational intelligence, finally and wholly cut loose from the encumbering body and everything the body brings in its wake. But this ideal, which we call ‘the subject,’ has no real place in the public world to which he is in the end obliged to submit his text for judgment. For when all is said and done, it remains, precisely, an ideal, an abstract standard to which no actual human being could conform. This standard has exerted a powerful influence. In particular, it has tempted philosophers down the blind alley of voluntarism: the hyperbolic attachment to the faculty of the will to which the dualist picture of the mind compels its adherents to resort in order to rescue reason from entanglement in the world of social, physical, and cultural embodiment that is our natural home.41 In Descartes himself, this produces the symptomatically Stoic strain that emerges in the ‘provisional morality’ the Discourse promulgates as a kind of prophylactic aside: ‘My third maxim was always to endeavor to overcome myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world; and in general, to train myself to believe that there is nothing so completely in our power as our thoughts’ (1:595–6). The naı¨ve assumption that our thoughts are more or less ‘completely in our power,’ allowing us to organize them in the way we might the books and papers assembled in our cabinets de travail, was refuted both by Montaigne before and, as we will see in chapter 5, by Pascal after him. Moreover, Descartes himself modified the assumption over the years, as growing experience combined with increasingly acute philosophical criticism obliged him to look more closely into the relation between mind and body whose stubborn intricacies the dualist decree of divorce highlights at its own expense. The assumption nonetheless animates the activist psychology propounded in the late Passions of the Soul (1649), whose goal is less a scientific grasp of human psychology

Front Matter 65

for its own sake than the strikingly traditional ethics of moral self-control Descartes expects science to fortify.42 Descartes’s properly philosophical and scientific project is thus doubled by an orthopsychic drama of mental self-fashioning that grows more patent and more poignant as he gets older, bringing him face to face with the inescapable assaults of age, illness, loneliness, loss, and death. This story of inevitable decline and fall, and of the now noble, now ludicrous effort to resist it, has telling literary counterparts. Franc¸ois de La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1665) shines a pitiless light on the cynical wanting that determines all human conduct, however virtuous the mask it wears to camouflage its true motives. At the same time as Pierre Corneille’s rejuvenation of Senecan tragedy engenders the heroic model of desire Le Cid’s (1637) Rodrigue and Chime`ne incarnate, it also unleashes the glamorous powers of angry self-assertion his Medea (1635) or the Cleopatra of Rodogune (1644) epitomize. Above all, in the person of the self-defeating hero of his School for Wives (1662), Molie`re stagemanages the richly ironic spectacle that reduces Descartes’s ideal of philosophical self-determination to the status of a mere ide´e fixe, a private obsession exposed to public ridicule.43 But what is this if not the, in every sense, experimental exploration of the serio-comic vicissitudes whose prototype is the very book in which Descartes transmitted his ideal to the world in the first place? And what in turn is this record of experiment if not the persistent theme of the so-called Cartesian order of the French classical age?

2 A State of Mind: Embodying the Sovereign in Poussin’s The Judgment of Solomon

[T]his focusing, this staying still, this allowing oneself to respond to the picture’s stillness – everything hidden and travestied, in short, by the current word ‘gaze.’ – T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death

To begin to test the widespread presumption that the Cartesian invention of the mind laid down an authoritative paradigm for French classical culture, chapter 1 addressed the complex problem of placing Descartes’s Meditations in its immediate historical context. This turned out to be a matter of determining the text’s location in the contemporary marketplace for commodities as well as ideas. We accordingly explored not only the position the text was seen to occupy on the general map of ideological possibilities but also the form in which Descartes’s contemporaries first encountered it as an article for public sale. We were guided in this, however, by more than a sense of philological responsibility, checking our interpretations against the range of meanings and understandings available at the time as attested by the light in which period readers received the text. If the problem of placing Descartes’s Meditations emerged in such sharp relief, it is because, in re-placing them in the actual volume to which they gave their name, we discovered how far placing them was an issue for the book itself. We noted Descartes’s own efforts, in the dedication, the preface, and his responses to objections, to plant his flag at the midpoint between the rival extremes of Catholic orthodoxy and the free-thinking radicalism his work helped stimulate. As Hobbes observed with ironical malice, Descartes eagerly promoted the eye-popping novelty of his speculations,

A State of Mind 67

a point to which the bookseller Jean Le Petit returned when, in offering the French translation in 1647, he urged readers not to be put off by the apparently lunatic extravagance of his author’s bolder theses. Descartes nonetheless hedged his bets by distancing himself from what he rightly suspected orthodox readers would deem his doctrines’ more ‘atheistical’ implications. Nor did the problem of placing the Meditations prey on Descartes’s mind alone; it worried everyone who had a hand in seeing the book into print, and for a start Marin Mersenne, who, in addition to soliciting objections and supervising the book’s final publication, gave it its misleading original title, highlighting both the proof of the existence of God and a corollary proof of the immortality of the soul that is not actually there. But the problem also loomed large for Descartes’s indigestibly heteroclite readership in the Republic of Letters at large, whether hostile sorbonnards, sober Jansenists, or mocking Epicureans, not to mention curious bystanders wondering what all the fuss was about. And just as all of these other participants in the public event the book became were spontaneously identified in terms of the contrasting places they occupied on the at once doctrinal and sociological map of early modern Europe – in the Sorbonne as jealously orthodox theologians, or in the wider Republic of Letters as putatively non-partisan gentlemen scholars – so they in turn set about placing Descartes: in the guise of Hobbes’s notoriety-seeking ‘author of novel speculations’; as a potential ally in Arnauld’s attempt to square philosophy with theology in the teeth of Protestant heresy and Thomist suspicion of Jansenist doctrine alike; or as a fellow-traveller of the kind of sceptical materialists the Sorbonne feared the most. It was then, finally, as a function of acts of placing in all of these senses that the text became the place, at once the locus or topos and the arena or battleground, of the dualist theory of mind whose presumptive fruit is the so-called modern subject. One point of the foregoing was to underscore how far the conventional notion of Descartes’s paradigmatic status is a myth. Not only did his doctrines inspire intense resistance within the covers of the very book that gave them to the world but this resistance revealed all of the participants to have been concrete historical persons whose selfconscious embeddedness refuted the picture of mind in dispute. Far from constituting an authoritative model, the Cartesian ego arose as one option among many others, exposed to criticisms that expressly played on the telltale social, ideological, and characterological embodiment it denied. This does not mean that the book had no contemporary impact or influence; it is just that the one-way transitivity of these

68

The Matter of Mind

terms turns out to be misguided: Descartes’s legacy was as much a telltale product of the historical moment as the original doctrines themselves.1 Descartes’s contemporaries were influenced only insofar as they felt drawn to his work by motives of their own. Arnauld, for one, was deeply impressed by the power of clear and distinct ideas to clean up conceptual muddle. But his admiration was conditioned by the use to which he put the Cartesian method in the effort to defeat Protestant heresy by showing it to be the fruit of pure errors in reasoning the mere exhibition of which would compel belief to return to proper Catholic channels.2 Spinoza was also deeply indebted to Descartes, and for many of the same reasons as Arnauld: in particular, he shared Arnauld’s embrace of Descartes’s faith in natural reason’s power to compel belief. Nevertheless, where Arnauld enlisted philosophy in the cause of theological rectitude, Spinoza subjected theology to the demystifying rational critique for which the Theological-Political Treatise of 1670 set the standard.3 If the evidence of Descartes’s contemporary afterlife proves anything, it is that even those who endorsed his views reshaped them as an expression of interests and commitments of their own. In its development as in its birth, the Cartesian picture of mind retains the tang of the creaturely cask from which it was extracted.4 We turn now from the rarefied atmosphere of professional philosophy to the more worldly realm of painting. More specifically, we turn to the work of the painter Louis Marin liked to call ‘the Master,’ Nicolas Poussin.5 The title marks affectionate respect, paying tribute to Marin’s love for Poussin’s paintings as much as his notion of their historical and theoretical significance from the standpoint of the social semiotics of art. But he also used it ironically, as an index of the sceptical detachment that enabled him to measure not only Poussin’s mastery as a painter but also his contribution to the early modern ideology of representation that was Marin’s great theme. It is important that Marin borrowed the honorific from Poussin’s early commentators, most notably Andre´ Fe´libien, to whom Poussin was as crucial as to Marin himself. Poussin was the key figure in Fe´libien’s Conversations on the Lives and Works of the Most Excellent Ancient and Modern Painters (1666–88), a self-consciously French reworking of the Lives of Giorgio Vasari (1555; second, enlarged edition in 1568) and Gian Pietro Bellori (1672) that aimed to grant Poussin the status of touchstone of great art formerly assigned the Italians Titian and Raphael – painters Poussin was argued to have superseded in part because he reconciled the latter’s superiority in invention and design with the former’s genius as a

A State of Mind 69

colourist.6 For Fe´libien, then, Poussin was the model of the ‘peintre parfait,’ defining the painterly ideal to which all artists should aspire in order to achieve a true greatness of their own. Poussin played the same role in the first published series of lectures (1668) in which, under the watchful if benevolent eye of the minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the programmatically neoclassical Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture set out to propagate a reliably rational and a distinctively French style of painting of which Poussin was the epitome. Poussin’s work thus found itself at the heart of the Acade´mie’s mission to establish not only the canons of ‘true’ art but, in the process, its own credentials as the school from which painters and connoisseurs alike would learn the essential principles of the discipline. In calling him the Master, Marin registers Poussin’s place as the crucial focus of the at once nationalistic and aesthetic enterprise whose self-aggrandizing fictions Marin was at pains to expose even as he worshipped the idols on which the Acade´mie based its authority. Yet the title of Master also reflects Poussin’s exceptional status as a pedagogue as well as a practitioner and the unique (if historically and ideologically telltale) philosophical importance with which he has been credited from his own time down to this. Already in his lifetime, Poussin was seen not merely as a great painter but as a ‘peintre philosophe.’ It is not just that contemporaries and subsequent commentators alike have portrayed him as a painter who philosophized about his work; they have seen him as a painter for whom painting was a means of philosophical experiment in its own right.7 This reputation is due in part to his unusual literary output. Poussin was the author of a substantial body of letters, including the one on ‘modes’ addressed to his friend and patron Paul Fre´art de Chantelou, in which he draws parallels between painting and the ancient Greek theory of music, and another to Chantelou’s art-theorist brother, Roland Fre´art de Chambray, transmitting a definition of the art of painting to which we will turn shortly. The existence of these letters, which circulated in manuscript copies and in select citation long before printed collections appeared first in Italian (1764) and then French (1824), lent colour to rumours of his having composed a formal treatise, said to have sported the Latin title De lumine et colore, whose testimony to his character as a painter is no less valuable for the fact that nothing of the kind has ever surfaced. But Poussin’s character as a philosopher is sustained not just by a literary stature shared, besides, with Leonardo, a selection from whose notebooks, preserved by Poussin’s

70

The Matter of Mind

Roman patron Cassiano dal Pozzo, Chambray published in a French edition (1651) for which Poussin supplied illustrations.8 It bears witness to what contemporaries saw in the paintings themselves: a body of insights and demonstrations painting alone could articulate. The special philosophical bearing of Poussin’s work is linked to his well-documented Stoicism, a creed whose literary remains he mined for subjects throughout his career, yielding the deaths of Germanicus (1628) and Eudamidas (1643–4) and the two landscapes (both dating from 1648) depicting incidents from the story of Phokion, a Greek sage put to death for trying to dissuade his Athenian compatriots from embarking on the disastrous Peloponnesian war.9 It is also linked, as Fe´libien noticed, to the sober taste for allegory informing The Dance to the Music of Time (1640) and the late Four Seasons (1660–4), the Louvre’s version of The Inspiration of the Poet (1630), the two versions of Et in Arcadia ego (the first painted ca1627–8, the second variously dated anywhere from 1637 to 1647), or the two series of pictures portraying the seven sacraments (the first painted in the late 1630s, the second in 1644–8).10 Yet Poussin’s philosophical reputation is grounded above all in the detailed painterly practice that converted Stoicism, meditation, or sacramentalist theology into concrete works of art. The present chapter aims to explore what we might call the ‘Cartesian’ tone and ambitions of Poussin’s work: the task Marin takes up in arguing not only that the Master is a ‘peintre philosophe’ devoted to reasoning in paint but that the source and circular fruit of this reasoning is the ‘sujet-peintre,’ a disembodied rational ego whose model, programmatically or not, is a sovereign mind of the sort Descartes imagines.11 In doing so, however, I will go on to show, as Marin fails to, how the very fact of reasoning in paint colours the sense of self to which it gives such form as self is capable of sustaining. As we will see, Marin is right to insist that a characteristic deliverance of Poussinian art is a certain play or state less of the sensations to which painting is immediately addressed than of the mind that takes sensation in in order to make something of it. As he also argues, a signal feature of this state of mind is the curious way in which its relation to the words it conjures up in token of itself is experienced as an irreducible difference that at once certifies and preserves its disembodied integrity as mind. But, as we will further see, the ‘subject’ as we meet it here is not just mind in general and in the abstract, that is, in the form in which philosophy has tended to think of it since Descartes, namely, a set of what Kant will eventually describe as transcendental functions and conditions logically prior to

A State of Mind 71

their instantiation in the form of an actual conscious person. Our focus rather is the state of Poussin’s mind. It emerges accordingly not only as an other mind as different from our own as from the paintings that betoken it. It turns out to have been shaped by the medium to which it resorts, the peculiar mode of embodiment that medium appoints, and the worldly vicissitudes to which embodiment exposes it. The result will resemble what we found in the case of Descartes’s Meditations. In, as it were, materializing before our eyes out of the laborious mental space of invention, inspiration, and thought, the sujet-peintre of Poussinian art becomes the determinate thing, the actual painting, that the artist’s thought and labour leave behind. Mind is the creaturely captive as well as the source of the material token by which it gives itself to the world. As such, it embodies the inescapable social and historical operations to which the world compels it to submit. Yet we will find this difference too. In Descartes, the process takes the form of alienation. Composed in the service of timeless philosophical truth, the Meditations ought in principle to overcome the contingencies of reception, interpretive construction, and debate. It should impose the autonomous authority of the sovereign mind of which it is the sovereign expression. Whence not only the paratextual defences erected in the dedication, preface, and synopsis but the pre-emptive incorporation of objections: a strategy designed less to acknowledge the collective character of philosophical debate than to enable Descartes to convince his interlocutors that he is right – or at any rate, in the cases of Hobbes and Gassendi, to convict objectors of being too hopelessly sunk in the world of matter to be capable of proving him wrong.12 In Poussin, by contrast, for all painting’s vaunted ‘truth to nature’ as well as the moral ideals that guide the selection of themes and the mode of treatment those themes enjoy, the ultimate goal is what the definition of art addessed to Chambray calls ‘delectation,’ the bon vouloir of the sovereign pleasure beholders take in it. As we will see in a moment, Poussin is eager to claim sovereign authority both for his art and for himself as a sovereign practitioner of that art: if he became a model for the Acade´mie, it is in large measure because he meant to. Yet this claim is tempered not only by his exemplary consciousness of the mediating materiality of what he does but also by its consequence: his dependence on the autonomous intelligence, good wishes, and taste of those he paints for – and in the first instance his friends and patrons, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Jean Pointel, or Chantelou, who serve as relays to those future ages to which his art is ultimately

72

The Matter of Mind

directed. As Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey argue in a book to which I am deeply indebted, at the heart of Poussin’s practice lies an appeal to friendship and the surprisingly Montaignian turn the relation of friendship takes.13 Precisely because art is embodied, it must be shared if it is to achieve whatever ‘higher’ goals it sets. To the extent then that there is a sujet-peintre of the sort Marin alleges, it is a means to an end whose very essence is social, corporeal, affective – in a word, experimental. We will shortly turn to one picture in particular, whose date, coupled with the identity of its original recipient, at once reinforces and complicates its chosen theme: Poussin’s Judgment of Solomon, painted in 1649 for Pointel. However, to make the most of the opportunity Poussin’s Solomon presents, we begin where Poussin may be said to have ended, with the late definition of the art of painting confided to Chambray: ‘C’est une Imitation faicte auec lignes et couleurs en quelque superficie de tout ce qui se voit dessoubs le Soleil, sa fin est la De´lectation’ [It is an Imitation made with lines and colours on some flat surface of everything that can be seen under the Sun; its end is Delectation].14 There is much to surprise us here, and for a start the prominence Poussin gives colour.15 In view of his status as the epitome of French neoclassical art, the rational austerity as well as rigorous ‘clarity’ and ‘simplicity’ of the high Academic style that dominates French painting all the way down to David, we would expect undisputed pride of place to go to le dessein: a supple French term that emphasizes the simultaneously mental and manual act of designing, that is, of conceiving, planning, and delineating a global composition as a function of the inspiring invention or idea a picture is meant to convey. Le dessein, then, like its cognate homophone, le dessin, a word reserved for the literal act of drawing with which the work of composition notionally begins, covers the range of pictorial features for which the shorthand English term is ‘line,’ denoting the general shape the composition takes and the execution of the detail that shape determines for the picture as a rationally unified whole. Poussin did not of course intervene in the debate surrounding the relative importance of the two principles that raged in Paris from the later 1660s on.16 Even setting aside his self-imposed exile in Rome, a retreat intended in part to shield him from the vicious wranglings characteristic of the Parisian scene, he was safely dead by the time the controversy hit full stride. He was nonetheless regularly cited as an authoritative example of the supremacy of drawing and of the rational work of judgment, selection, and disposition drawing undertakes:

A State of Mind 73

those qualities of ‘perfect’ art exponents of line like Charles Le Brun pitted against what they regarded as the vulgar and often deceitful blandishments of colour. Such is part of the thrust of Le Brun’s famous lecture of 1667 on Poussin’s Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Wilderness (fig. 1), painted for Chantelou in 1639. Le Brun has perceptive things to say about a number of features of the picture whose bearing on overall design is not immediately apparent. In addition to commenting on Poussin’s selection of Greek sculptures available in Rome as models for the graceful as well as unfailingly cogent expressiveness of individual human figures, he discusses the harmonizing effects achieved in the arrangement of colours across the canvas and in the handling of colour tones to facilitate seamless visual transitions from one part of the painting to another.17 The fact remains that his emphasis chiefly falls on the overall composition: the delineation of the various groups of figures, the relations between these groups, the way these relations lead the eye from one group to the next in search of the underlying story, and the artful distribution of groups both across the canvas and in depth that gives the whole its overall moral focus.18 A similar point is also implicit in Le Brun’s later lecture on expression (delivered in 1668, published posthumously in 1698), where he not only analyses the physiological mechanisms that ‘imprint’ the emotions on the human face but tacitly exhibits the primacy of pure drawing in the black-and-white illustrations that accompany the text (fig. 2).19 Accordingly, like shading, whose contribution to drawing was often seen as a first step in the direction of colour rather than as a necessary part of drawing per se, thereby occupying an ambiguous middle-ground period theorists never quite put a finger on,20 colour is taken to play a secondary and even parasitic role. It is useful, for instance, in promoting the general harmony of pattern and tone mentioned a moment ago. Like the ‘accidents’ of the chance play of light on individual bodies and materials, colour has the character of an ornamental extra with which painting could logically dispense and still accomplish its essential task of representation. As representation indeed, what painting needs is what the arts of line provide: the mastery of perspective required to construct a coherent natural space; the distribution of bodies in space in relation to the intervening picture plane and to each other; the delineation of the action or story the bodies act out; and the expression of the emotions that both identify the story and convey the picture’s interpretation of that story by communicating the feelings, thoughts, and interests that set the bodies so portrayed in dramatic motion. Le Brun’s fundamental

Image Not Available

Fig. 1 Nicolas Poussin, Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Wilderness. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

A State of Mind 75

Image Not Available

Fig. 2 Anger, from Charles le Brun, Confe´rence sur l’expression ge´ne´rale et particulie`re. Paris: E. Picart, 1698. Photo courtesy of the Margaret Clapp Library, Wellesley College.

position is still, in short, the one Leon Battista Alberti had articulated in the De pictura of 1435, inaugurating the discursive tradition to which Le Brun’s lectures clearly belong. Like the art of oratorical elocution, sounding out the words assembled by the nobler parts of rhetorical invention and disposition, colour comes last, accenting the expressive structure that determines its limits, function, meaning, and place.21 Nor are commentators like Le Brun wrong to stress Poussin’s commitment to an aesthetic of design. Poussin himself testifies to this effect in the letter to Chantelou announcing the Manna’s imminent arrival in Paris.22 He begins by giving instructions about the frame it will be the recipient’s job to supply. Chantelou learns that he should use a frame of modest width, tinted a matte gold in order to secure a noble neutrality of tone that, combined with the frame’s unassuming dimensions, will mark the picture off from the surrounding wall without drawing too much attention to itself. The aim is to contain the viewer’s attention within the painting as such, explored within its own self-determining

76

The Matter of Mind

limits and on its own self-legislating terms (20–1). Poussin goes on to explain not just what the viewer (to begin with, Chantelou himself ) should look for but how: ‘lise´s l’istoire et le tableau, afin de cognoistre si chasque chose est aproprie´e au subiect’ [read the story and the picture in order to determine if each thing is appropriate to the theme] (21). He enjoins here not simply a passive act of looking but an active intellectual engagement aimed at uncovering an ideal structure whose organizing principle will not be readily obvious. Poussin thereby articulates a distinction framed in a letter to the royal intendant Sublet des Noyers as the contrast between ‘aspect’ and ‘prospect’ (143), that is, between painting as it spontaneously meets the eye, like the natural world it imitates, and painting as the eye recovers or reconstructs it by deliberately exploring both its general form and the intricate arrangement of its interrelated details. As he puts it in another letter to Chantelou, ‘Les choses esquelles il i a de la perfection ne se doiuent pas voir a`lla haste mais avec temp jugement et intelligense. Il faut user des mesme moiens a` les bien juger comme a` les bien faire’ [The things in which there is perfection must not be seen in haste but with time, judgment, and intelligence. One must use the same means to judge them well as to make them well] (122). To see the Manna for what it is, we must decode it not only by setting it beside the passage in Exodus from which its story comes but by bringing to it the same disciplined exploratory attention the story itself commands, and that the painter brought to retelling it. The Manna does not just represent the story from Exodus, giving it a semantically redundant if memorably lively and expressive visual portrayal; it reinterprets it as, for example, a figural type of the sacrament of the eucharist with which Christian exegetes traditionally connect the tale.23 Poussin’s intentions emphasize a properly hermeneutical activity whose object is just those groupings, orderings, and expressions – in a word, just that design – to which Le Brun adverts. What is true of the Manna proves equally so of pretty much any Poussin one thinks of. Take The Sacrament of Ordination or Ordination of the Apostles (1647) from the second series on the seven sacraments (fig. 3). The picture’s theme already privileges the values of design. Ordination is a ritual, one that Poussin is at pains to depict in rich historical and symbolic as well as liturgical detail. Of particular note is the pairing at the centre, where a standing Christ receives the obeisance of a genuflecting Peter, to whom the Saviour presents the keys of his Church, symbolizing the exclusive power of binding and loosing that sets the consecrated clergy apart from the laity. Yet as the consecrated character

Image Not Available

Fig. 3 Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of Ordination. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland (Bridgewater Loan, 1945).

78

The Matter of Mind

of the priesthood reminds us by stressing that body’s separation as a mystical corpus fictum from the ordinary run of human experience, the true subject of the painting is nothing as tangible as, say, the rocklike ground to which Christ’s right hand gestures in counterpoint to the gate of heaven denoted by the keys uplifted in his left. It is the abstract conception for which the sacrament provides ritual expression. The general composition underscores Poussin’s ruling idea. In keeping with his own standard practice, Poussin does not, as his great baroque predecessors Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens would, try to engage the beholder by blurring the boundaries between the space of the representation and the lived space from which we observe it (fig. 4). Instead, he sets the action well back from the picture plane, leaving an empty margin in the foreground that evokes an attitude of detached contemplation by holding us at a distance from the scene. Where baroque art extorts direct and, more to the point, unreflecting emotional identification, the coolly classical Poussin orchestrates an affect carefully controlled and nuanced by rational thought. As Oskar Ba¨tschmann would put it, the aim is less to move us by means of a coercive display of dramatic visual presence than to guide us in every sense through the embodying image to the prior act of rational judgment, disposition, and selection for which the image is the circular vehicle.24 Such is also the effect of the gestural and iconographic terms in which the ritual is performed. We have already noted the symbolic significance of Jesus’ gesturing hands and the sacramental keys he commits to Peter’s keeping. But we should also note Poussin’s choice of the painting’s Gospel locus in Matthew 16.13–19, where Jesus singles Peter out as the rock on which he will build his church. This is a controversial passage. Early modern Protestants read it as testifying to the priesthood of all believers since what earns Peter Jesus’ accolade is the belief that enables him to see, not John the Baptist or Elijah, Jeremiah, or any of the other prophets, but ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ By contrast, Romans read it as establishing the Apostolic Succession from which the papacy and, by extension, the Church itself as the consecrated body of the clergy directly descend. The identification of the Church with the clergy as opposed to the laity determines the story’s fitness for Poussin’s purpose as a specifically Roman Catholic sacramentalist. To the extent that ordination is a sacrament at all, a teaching Protestant minimalists hotly contested, Matthew 16 is the authorizing place not only because that is where Jesus can be said to have uttered the enabling words of institution but because, in doing so, he performed the prototype for the Roman rite.25

A State of Mind 79

Image Not Available

Fig. 4 Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the Cross. Antwerp, Cathedral of Our Lady. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

80

The Matter of Mind

The point, however, is less the authority the passage gives both the sacrament of ordination and Poussin’s representation of it than the fact that understanding these things demands not just knowledge of the supporting text but an act of interpretation. Far from appealing to emotion, the painting demands intellectual engagement with its scriptural source and the exegetical difficulties that attend it. Nor is it surprising to learn that the recipient of this picture, Chantelou, complained that it lacked the circumstancial liveliness and colourist warmth of the version of The Finding of Moses sent to Pointel in 1647 (fig. 5). As Poussin explained to his grumbling patron in the letter conveying his theory of pictorial modes, the decorum of the theme of ordination did not permit the colourful play of incident and sentiment suitable to the story the Pointel painting tells (372). But the fact that, for all the simple pleasure they impart, these more obviously delectable features of Pointel’s picture are themselves the product of artful calculation signals the detached critical attention Poussin expects on the beholder’s part even where he more directly aims to please. Poussin’s stress on decorum in the letter on modes raises another question about the second Ordination. Related to the demand for appropriateness of mode or tone is what French theorists called le costume, the historical and customary fitness of setting, accessories, and dress.26 The problem is that, as David Carrier remarks, the scene acquires an ambiguous location in time and space alike.27 Christ and the Apostles are all suitably clothed for the event; and the keys Christ holds are justified by both iconographic convention and scripture since Jesus promises to give Peter ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ so that ‘whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’(Matthew 16.19). The location in time is nonetheless ambiguous in that, despite its setting in the life of Christ as recounted in Matthew, the point is less the event itself than the sacrament it licenses and the role that sacrament plays in the soteriological mission the present-day church has inherited. The aim is thus to portray the timeless abstract meaning of which the event is as such the symbol more than the enactment. But the scene has an ambiguous location in space as well in that, though the event took place in ancient Palestine, the architecture Poussin deploys looks Greek. Further, if the controversial testimony of the capital E carved on the column to the left of Christ is anything to go by, the setting is specifically Delphi, site of the Oracle of Apollo, a god whose pervasive presence in Poussin’s work poses complex puzzles of its own.28

Image Not Available

Fig. 5 Nicolas Poussin, The Finding of Moses. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

82

The Matter of Mind

Exactly what this strange dual location means has been subject to prolonged and finally undecidable debate. So has the precise reference of the capital E. One obvious interpretation sees it as a shorthand for Ecclesia, the Church Christ proposes to found on his rock-like Peter. But it has also been seen to allude to the discussion of ‘the E at Delphi’ in Plutarch’s Moralia, a text Poussin is known to have used whose author offers a range of readings that includes everything from a sign for Delphi itself, since just such an E appeared on a column there, to the Greek word ‘if’ of which it is the initial, and to ‘thou art,’ thereby referring to the ‘eternal being’ of Delphi’s tutelary god.29 However, such ambiguities bear on the picture’s aim as well as effect, which is to compel us to seek not just its meaning but the truth of the sacrament of ordination itself, which does not exist in time and space at all. Or consider the Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind of Jericho of 1650 (plate 1). Unlike the anecdote for the cerebral Ordination, the story of the miraculous restoration of sight is intrinsically dramatic and moving. However, as in the earlier picture, the event occasions a representation whose fruit is less the traditional visualization of a sacred tale than the ideas the painting proposes for rational exploration. Ba¨tschmann draws this lesson when he notes that the depiction of the story fuses with a meditation on the role the art of painting plays as an instrument of the truth to which it bears witness.30 The key paradoxically lies in Poussin’s handling of colour. If, with symptomatically allegorizing technical texts like Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae of 1646 (fig. 6) in hand, we resist the carnal appeal Poussin’s colour scheme makes as an object of spontaneous ‘aspectual’ gawking and look at it ‘prospectively’ as a theme for reflection, we discover that the arrangement of colours across the canvas mimics a colour chart. Setting aside the mother with a sleeping child looking on from the left middle ground, the first four figures forming the central group around the Redeemer are respectively clothed in white, yellow, red, and blue.31 These are, in order, the first four primary colours, that is, the first of those colours out of which all others are composed – the green of the onlooking mother’s gown, for example, being formed of a blend of yellow and blue, or orange of a blend of yellow and red. The only primary colour missing from the sequence is the last of them, black, a colour generally excluded from the picture except, significantly, in the expression of the shadows cast by various bodies – those of the two blind men kneeling to receive Christ’s healing touch, or that of the building that dominates the left edge of the composition. The scheme becomes less regular as we move further

Image Not Available

Plate 1 Nicolas Poussin, Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind of Jericho. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY.

84

The Matter of Mind

Image Not Available

Fig. 6 Colour chart from Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae. Rome: Scheus, 1646. Photo courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

Image Not Available

Plate 1 Nicolas Poussin, Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind of Jericho. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Image Not Available

Plate 2 Nicolas Poussin, The Judgment of Solomon. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Image Not Available

Plate 3 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait for Jean Pointel. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

Image Not Available

Plate 4 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait for Paul Fre´art de Chantelou. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

A State of Mind 85

to the right. One of the two men leaning in from behind at the exact centre of the group wears a combination of green and yellowish gold, and the other green and a brownish grey; Christ wears an undergarment of yellowish white, with a purple gown over the top. We then return to primary colours in the red, yellow, and blue of the three men to our right, albeit taken out of order now, presumably for the sake of variety. The effect nevertheless emphasizes the subordination of the various composites to the powerful sense of structure the distribution of primary colours suggests. As we have noted, the primary colours fall into a spontaneous natural sequence. The chief function of a colour chart is to map this sequence by identifying the order in which colours occur and the transformations or, to use a term Poussin’s lifelong interest in Ovid recommends, the metamorphoses by which, each giving way to the next, the primary colours generate the interstitial composites. The trigger of this process is the light that enters the clouding and refracting world of matter from our picture’s left. Light makes colour, but only insofar as it also takes it from the obstructing medium through which it passes. What Ba¨tschmann rightly calls the dialectical relation between light and dark from which colours arise bears on one of the main lessons Poussin learned from Leonardo: the effect of ‘natural’ or ‘atmospheric’ perspective achieved by softening colour tones as a function of increasing distance from the picture plane.32 Early modern theorists presumed air to be a translucent white. The accretion of layers of air intervening between the eye and its objects with increasing distance dims the light as it passes through it, muting the colours light activates. This in turn enables painters to express growing distance not only by diminishing the size of figures relative to the picture plane but by softening the colours in like proportion. The natural sequence mapped out in a colour chart enacts a comparable drama. Beginning with yellow as the first colour proper following the pristine white of light itself, it passes by graded stages through red and blue to pure black, extinguishing colour and light alike. Whence the title of the treatise Poussin was rumoured to have written, ‘of light and colour,’ as too the colour chart’s bearing on the art of painting. In enacting the way in which light engenders colour in the natural process of illuminating the physical world, bringing that world to light in all of the colours we see, the picture identifies the Incarnate Word’s ministry to blind humanity with painting’s performance in retelling the story. Exactly as Poussin’s likely sources argue, the colour chart moralizes the metamorphoses by which colour is engendered

86

The Matter of Mind

and the intelligible order exhibited in the process. Colour becomes the theme of the image’s underlying design and of the divine plan that design records. Colour too, then, signifies as a rational expression of providential purpose, but only insofar as it is structured by the compositional idea that guides the painter’s hand. In all of these ways, then, it is a surprise to find Poussin’s definition of the art of painting concede so conspicuous a role to colour as well as design – and to colour moreover conceived in its specifically material aspect, as the physical stuff whose application to the flat surface of a canvas produces the pictorial imitation we prize. It is a still greater surprise to see the quasi-imperial claim the definition makes on this very account to something like world dominion: ‘[Painting] is an Imitation made with lines and colours on some flat surface of everything that can be seen under the Sun.’ A measure of the world-beating mastery Marin’s Master asserts is that when he says everything, he means everything. There is a clear parallel with the comparably hubristic claim Descartes makes for philosophical method when he boasts that, so long as method is properly applied, ‘all things capable of falling under the knowledge of men follow from each other in the same way, and […] providing only that one abstain from taking any for true that are not, and that one keep throughout the order needed to deduce them one from another, there can be none so remote that one cannot at last reach it, nor any so hidden that one cannot find it out.’33 For Descartes, nothing in the physical universe is so remote or so deeply hidden that reason cannot find it. So, in Poussin, there is nothing under the sun, that is, in the whole world as far as the eye can see or imagine it, that painting cannot portray. This is certainly the road down which Marin’s pursuit of the Poussinian sujet-peintre leads. Marc Fumaroli takes this path too, albeit in a more humanistic mode, when he links Poussinian mind to the Apollonian or, as he calls it with a discreet nod to the Nietzschean Will-to-Power, the ‘Apollinian’ might that enables the painter to scale the heights of godlike Parnassian inspiration.34 The ambition Marin and Fumaroli explore from the complementary standpoints of the semiotics of pictorial form and the deep literary learning Poussin acquired is, besides, implicit in the painter’s attachment to Stoicism. As Gordon Braden has shown, what early moderns picked up from Seneca in particular was not just therapeutic constancy in the face of the anarchic convulsions of sublunary life. More important was what Stoic constancy confers: the radical independence thanks to which the Stoic rules the world in self-disciplined thought just as the emperor or

A State of Mind 87

absolutist monarch does in the more practical but, for that very reason, more treacherous dimension of political life.35 These insights already intimate the kinds of thing we will find in Poussin’s Judgment of Solomon, where politics and painting merge to comparable effect. Yet it is crucial that the scope of which Poussin boasts is constrained by the limiting conditions his statement carefully observes. Though painting commands everything under the sun in the widest sense, it nonetheless commands nothing more than that. It commands everything, then, but only on condition that it take the form of a visible thing, and even then only insofar as it falls in the field of natural light required to transmit it to our eyes. Nor is this simply an acknowledgment of the materiality to which Poussin adverts in defining imitation as lines and colours applied to a flat surface and the manual as well as intellectual labour this implies. It is an expression of the process of vision itself and of the conditional acts of understanding vision makes possible. To make a point about Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind Ba¨tschmann misses, the moralization of colour is not simply a function of design in the painting or of the mental detachment required to apprehend that design. It engages a third term: the prospective eye in whose sight the whole process is brought to fruition, and so the natural limits to which, for all its scope and power, sight remains subject. We have to reckon with a central axiom of natural philosophy whose statement forms the first article of Descartes’s The World, a treatise on the physical universe circulating in manuscript before 1637, when portions were appended to the Discourse on the Method as ‘trials’ of the method the Discourse describes, even though the text itself remained unpublished until 1664, more than a decade after the author’s death. The theme of the first chapter of the book, defining as it were the threshold of visibility for everything to follow, is ‘the difference between our sensations and the things that produce them.’36 The issue is the distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of things as we perceive them in the natural world. One of the chief functions of this distinction is to articulate the topological relation between the underlying causes that produce natural phenomena and the tangible effects by which we come at knowledge of them. Of these sets of perceptible qualities, only five are perceived directly as they are in nature: size, shape, number, location, and motion (Spinoza’s ‘motion or rest’). All others are merely secondary in the sense of being epiphenomenal byproducts of the interaction between primary qualities and our sensory apparatus.

88

The Matter of Mind

While secondary qualities do bear witness to the nature of the physical world, they do so only mediately, as tokens, symptoms, or (to use Locke’s metaphors) ‘footsteps’ or ‘vestiges’ of primary processes too vast or minute, too rapid or slow, too weak or powerful to register directly.37 What is more, where primary qualities refer to two senses working in concert, sight and touch, in a way that favours direct measurement of the sort that occurs when we take down the dimensions of an object with a ruler, secondary qualities refer to only one sense, demanding indirect modes of measurement, where measurement is possible at all. To take the case of Descartes’s own favourite example, a measure of temperature does not in fact measure temperature itself but the movement of mercury in a vacuum tube: it trades on a physical correlation that serves as a proxy from which a measurement is then inferred. Among the qualities to whose ambiguous testimony Descartes draws attention we find, in addition to temperature itself, sound, touch, smell, savour, and colour. When a hand approaches a fire, the sensation of heat is not in fact a property of the fire at all; it is merely the sensation in the hand by which the organism registers the chemical processes to which it is exposed. Like heat, the colour whose application to flat surfaces grants painting its power to conquer the visible world has no real existence except as a reflex of the human eye. It is not, then, simply a product of light’s redemptive penetration of the dark medium of the material world; it bears witness to the beholder (painter and viewer alike) in whose sight alone it has such reality as it may be said to possess. What the aesthetic of design encourages us to think of as a work of mind detached from our fallen physical embeddedness in the world is here brought back to the eye, and so to the body to which the eye belongs. Supremely rational as Poussin’s practice of the art of painting may be, as loftily Apollonian as his work appears, the primacy of colour restores us to the experience of sublunary embodiment Poussinian reason seems to surmount. We turn at last to The Judgment of Solomon (plate 2), in which all of these issues are not only put in play but put to work. Let us begin where Poussin himself does, with the obvious. As a handy title card informs us should we fail to make it out for ourselves, the painting portrays the royal court of the biblical King Solomon. The first thing to meet us is in fact less the event the painting depicts than, as an identifying means to that end, the place where the event unfolds. The setting itself, in turn, is circularly determined by the memorable story from 1 Kings 3.16–28. As witnessed by the exclusion of any visible opening on the outside

Image Not Available

Plate 2 Nicolas Poussin, The Judgment of Solomon. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

90

The Matter of Mind

world, as by the unusually parsimonious use of natural light, place in this instance is confined to decor: a closed artificial environment carved out of the wider world for a special human purpose and shaped by the technical as well as social decorum that purpose ordains. This is, precisely, a scene of judgment from which all potential distractions have been scrupulously pared away. The story tells of two women (more specifically, though Poussin downplays it, two ‘harlots’) recently delivered of sons. When one child dies, his mother claims the survivor as her own; and since the people are unable to decide the truth of the matter, they bring the rival claimants before the king, one of whose roles consists of adjudicating disputes like this. To be sure, the king seems no better placed to determine the truth than his subjects. In the absence of independent eyewitnesses or the sort of physical evidence (DNA tests, say) available to us today, the only facts at his disposal are those the people have already deduced for themselves from the counterclaims the mothers make and the demeanour and rhetorical artifice they bring to making them. Nevertheless, unlike his subjects, Solomon possesses the authority and, above all, the wisdom needed to extract the truth from ambiguous circumstance. Indeed, he uses both attributes to perform a Caesarian intervention indexed by the soldier in the left background, who holds the surviving infant upside down by the foot in alarming proximity to the blade he draws with his free hand. Solomon decrees that, since it is impossible to tell which woman speaks the truth, the child shall be divided in half so each may have a share. The mother of the dead boy approves this verdict because it ensures that both women will be left childless. But the true mother relinquishes her claim in order to spare the boy’s life. This in turn reveals that she is in fact his mother since only she would make this sacrifice on her child’s behalf. It is important to the intricate sense of setting Poussin’s painting constructs in defining both the decor and the decorum the event’s participants observe that Solomon’s court has several topical analogues. One is the theatre. Though the characters involved in the action betray no awareness of a beholder, appearing to be engrossed in the immediate situation, the arrangement of figures across the picture plane relative to each other and the principal actor seated on the throne at the centre is designed to keep the sight lines open, ensuring that no relevant detail is screened from view. Another analogue, to which we will return shortly, is the artist’s studio, not only the place where the picture was painted but that in which the painter performs the visual experiments his task demands. The notion of artistic experiment suggests yet other

A State of Mind 91

analogues: anatomy theatres and the new experimental laboratories of empirical science in which, in Francis Bacon’s resonant phrase, philosophers subject natural phenomena to inquisitorial ‘vexations,’ not unlike the act Solomon’s soldier prepares to commit.38 Above all, however, is the fact that what determines the period interest in the story is the setting’s relation to another time and place of which it offers the idealized image: the royal court of the actually reigning French monarch, or at any rate, since at this point he was still a boy, of the notionally reigning monarch for whom Solomon was a model, Louis XIV. As mentioned earlier, the painting came into the possession of Jean Pointel, a silk manufacturer from Lyon who had cashed in his provincial business in order to set up as a private banker in the capital. Since the relevant correspondence has been lost, we do not know how the subject came to be chosen, or whether the picture was commissioned by Pointel or merely offered to him for sale. We do know, however, that Solomon is unlike almost any other picture Poussin painted for him.39 Along with The Finding of Moses, of which Chantelou was so envious, it is the only biblical subject by Poussin’s hand in his collection. Pointel’s taste, moreover, seems to have run to landscapes. Moses itself is set in the open air, and landscape is the dominant feature of the mythological themes Poussin sent him (fig. 7). It was to Pointel, further, that Poussin sold Landscape with a Calm (fig. 8) and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Serpent (fig. 9), in both of which landscape as such is the theme, unconnected with any direct literary, historical, or scriptural source.40 Solomon is in fact one of only two interiors Poussin made for him, the other being the Self-Portrait of the same year, 1649. But Solomon differs from the other Poussins in Pointel’s possession in another respect. As the date of composition indicates, reinforcing the theme of the story from Kings, it is the only explicitly political picture Poussin can be said to have painted for Pointel or anyone else.41 True, there is no direct documentary evidence that he meant the painting to be read in a political light. Yet the moment at which he painted it grants it political salience even if none was expressly intended. The year 1649 is after all not only the one in which the Stuart king Charles I was beheaded by the English Parliament, sending shock waves throughout Europe. It was the second year in the period of the Frondes of 1648–52, revolts in Poussin’s native France that disturbed the artist deeply, and in which he sided with the monarchy despite obvious sympathies for the supporters of the French parlement if not for the unprincipled princely cause. Solomon accordingly participates in the royalist discourse of

Image Not Available

Fig. 7 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus. St Petersburg, The Hermitage. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Image Not Available

Fig. 8 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Image Not Available

Fig. 9 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. London, The National Gallery. ©National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

A State of Mind 95

state, indeed in the royalist discourse of reason of state, to which a crucial text by Poussin’s friend and sometime fellow expatriot in Rome, Gabriel Naude´, belongs, the Political Considerations on Coups d’Etat (1639).42 The presiding theme of the book is the arcane art of asserting royal power by means of the baroque equivalent of Bush-era ‘shock and awe’: the staging of public coups de the´aˆtre whose impact was magnified by the secrecy in which they were planned and the suddenness with which they were sprung on an unsuspecting world. Naude´’s text provides a blueprint for the double coup de the´aˆtre Poussin’s Solomon stagemanages: first in decreeing the death of the innocent child, a perverse act that leaves his subjects speechless with horror, and then in reversing himself in declaring the truth the first coup flushes from covert.43 Poussin’s painting to this extent propounds a lesson both in the theory of monarchy and in the ars regendi that vindicates that theory by results. Seen from this angle, Solomon is a topical reactivation, for the time and place in which it was painted, of still another sort of place: a biblical locus or commonplace in which early modern culture, like medieval culture before it, found a paradigm of monarchy itself. The Bible’s Solomon is not after all just any royal sovereign; he embodies the very idea of sovereignty as such. The painting accordingly participates in a series of icons that celebrate the principle of monarchy in order to educate the monarch’s subjects in the basis of royal authority. By invoking the well-known story from Kings, Poussin claims on Louis’s behalf a scriptural lineage that anchors his right to rule in an exemplary past. In this perspective, by reviving a significant place in the Bible, the image becomes a place in its own right. More precisely, it sets itself up as a memory place of the kind Frances Yates classically describes.44 It revisits the locus in Kings in order to remember it. But it also revisits it in order to make it memorable, recording and transmitting the paradigmatic tale in a way calculated to imprint it on the beholder’s memory. The painting in fact constitutes that memory in both content and form. In defining what we remember, it determines how we remember it; and in determining how we remember it, ensuring that it is in just these terms that the monarchic principle will imprint itself on our minds, the image inscribes us in the social and moral order of which it is the mnemonic talisman. To remember the story is to remember, as both means and end, in what monarchy is based, why it exists, and our place in the political order the story explicates and underwrites. It is worth noting more closely how all of this works. The presiding compositional motif is the triangle formed at the centre by the king

96

The Matter of Mind

perched on his throne and the rival mothers kneeling at his feet. As in a regular court of law, where judge and opposing parties are arranged to similar effect, Solomon’s position at the apex of the triangle is designed to help him see: dominating a spectacle whose sight lines have been carefully cleared out to ensure maximum visibility, Solomon surveys the small corner of the world isolated for judgment. Nor is it indifferent that this same arrangement guarantees his own visibility. As J.L. Austin reminds us, in the kind of setting pictured for us here, justice is not a naturally occurring fact, still less an abstract moral principle; it is a legal fiction grounded in a performance, something that exists for us only insofar as somebody does it.45 Moreover, as English allows us to say, to be done, justice must be seen to be done by the mass of spectators both within and without the image Poussin’s composition creates. In the process, the picture confirms the place Solomon occupies as king. Unlike the gesticulating litigants and the crowd of breathless witnesses, hanging on the still uncertain issue of the affair, Solomon sits alone, high above the turbulent passions that drive his anguished subjects. In looking down upon the women whose dispute he resolves, he is simultaneously uplifted and singled out, identified in an essential difference emphasized by the stillness of his posture, the masklike impassivity of his face, and the balanced gestures of his hands, sketching out the equity with which he renders his verdict. What we have seen so far already suggests the political motive for telling this story in 1649. The episode constitutes what Carl Schmitt would call a ‘state of exception.’46 The normal course of civic life has been derailed by the people’s inability to determine which of the two mothers tells the truth. The result, however, is not merely the state of indecision to which this reduces them but a crisis whose anarchic potential is measured by the horrific character of Solomon’s initial verdict. In the absence of a readily detectible alternative, the truth will be what Solomon says it is even if this means the child must die. But if this is so, it is because, more than justice or truth, what the people need is a decision that, in breaking the impasse they have reached, will enable life to go on again as before. The question the episode asks is accordingly the one Schmitt finds in Hobbes: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur? [Who will decide? Who will interpret?].47 Schmitt’s answer, like Hobbes’s, is that the sovereign will interpret and decide, the sovereign being just ‘he who decides on the exception.’48 The moral of Poussin’s fable is thus a decisionist theory of justice and sovereignty alike. In deciding the issue the people bring before him, Solomon not only determines what

A State of Mind 97

everyone concerned will henceforth accept as just and true; he also establishes his own sovereign right to do so. If ever there was a time when a decision was needed and, as a means to that end, a sovereign empowered to make it, 1649 was the year. The state of exception Solomon faces is a small-scale counterpart of the disorders in which the French state of the Fronde era was embroiled. The great difference of course, apart from the sheer scale of the thing, is that, unlike the faithful Hebrews who, however horrified by Solomon’s first verdict, accept its justice by accepting it as justice, Louis XIV’s minority created a political vacuum intensified by the suspect character of the regent who ruled in his place: his mother, Anne of Austria, whose dependence on the notoriously venal and duplicitous Italian Jules Mazarin undermined the legitimacy of the state, thereby licensing the revolts that rocked the kingdom. Poussin does not comment on the matter directly: he remains a ‘history’ painter whose subjects relate to truth in part by virtue of their remoteness from the muddled emergencies of the present. However, the painting reminds us why monarchy is not only useful but necessary. Unlike what was happening in France, as also, at this time, in Britain, Poland, and Naples, not to mention the living memory of the disasters of the Thirty Years War that had ended with the Peace of Westphalia only the year before, Solomon’s Palestine has a king to whom his subjects loyally and spontaneously turn in their hour of need. Poussin therefore draws the same moral from the political catastrophes of the first half of the century that Hobbes does: the state needs an Arbiter or Leviathan, without whom the tumultuous passions of his people will inevitably lead to violence and ruin. Yet there is also a sense in which Poussin significantly differs from Hobbes, and so too from Hobbes’s later commentator, Schmitt. As the names he gives the absolutist overlord suggest, the Hobbist solution is not only grounded in the pure brute might the Leviathan embodies; it is arbitrary – precisely what Schmitt criticizes Hobbes for in returning to the question in Weimar Germany.49 As Schmitt sees it, voicing an expressly Catholic standpoint that Poussin, the faithfully Catholic author of two series of paintings on the seven sacraments, would have readily grasped, because it embodies pure arbitrary force, Hobbes’s Leviathan is undermined by its dehumanized abstraction. The Leviathan represents the state without personating it, that is, without giving it a human face that enables the people to submit to it in human if nonetheless unquestioning terms. This is why, in the Catholic version of the discourse of reason of state from which Hobbes strikingly and deliberately

98

The Matter of Mind

deviates, the emphasis falls less on the abstract theory of political representation Hobbes develops than, precisely, on the person of the king – on the character of the monarch whose role is not merely to represent but to embody the state, in person. Whence Poussin’s choice of theme. In the frontispiece of Leviathan (fig. 10), the king is rendered by an emblem in which his status as the embodying head of the state is revealed as the legal fiction it is inasmuch as the body he heads is not in fact his own but the aggregate formed by the swarming masses over which he rules. By contrast, Poussin’s Solomon is a distinct person as well as king, one whose authority and success alike are firmly grounded in his personal character and the powers of self-determining mind that enable him to sustain it.50 The political doctrine the painting’s basic construction at once anchors and explicates is further adumbrated by the way it tells the occasioning story. Poussin recounts the episode in accordance with the general narrative scheme Le Brun adduces in his lecture on Poussin’s Manna (fig. 1). As Le Brun notices, a key feature of the Manna is the way it solves the problem of painting’s formal confinement to the space-time of a single synchronic view. In telling the story from Exodus, Poussin eschews the device the picture’s spatial form would seem to recommend: the ‘pregnant moment’ method of visual narration in which the painter chooses a single, strategically significant instant calculated to suggest all of those others, before and after, an image cannot normally encompass. On the contrary, Poussin recounts the story at length by distributing a series of pregnant moments both across the canvas and in the depth perspective allows as successive episodes enacted by the local groups the figures form. This enables him to reproduce the dimension of sequential unfolding in the time it takes to scan the image from side to side and from front to back. So in the left foreground we find the group formed around the woman in yellow, evoking the horrors of the famine the Israelites suffered during their wanderings in the desert. The woman suckles one of her aged parents while consoling the famished child denied her breast: an act of combined sacrifice and charity whose unparalleled extremity is stressed by the man who looks on, registering the mingled shock and admiration her deed inspires. Passing now to the right foreground, we see people gathering the manna itself, including two figures wrestling for food in the mistaken belief that there will not be enough for everyone. Meanwhile, working back toward the middle ground, and scanning now from right to left, we discover people giving thanks, clustered

A State of Mind 99

Image Not Available

Fig. 10 Title page from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. London: Andrew Cooke, 1651. Photo Credit: HIP/Art Resource, NY.

100

The Matter of Mind

around the central figures of Moses and Aaron, the latter gazing upward in wondering gratitude, the former pointing to heaven in token of the source of the Israelites’ miraculous rescue. Our own picture accomplishes a similar feat. Though the setting is Solomon’s court, and therefore that of the last of the story’s episodes, Poussin contrives to incorporate not only all of the events immediately involved in the de´nouement (the women’s rival claims; the decision to cut the baby in two; the true mother’s pleas on her son’s behalf; the false mother’s selfbetraying envious malice) but also tokens of the earlier events leading up to the trial scene, including especially the other boy’s death and the crime it inspires. However, as Le Brun goes on to remark in the lecture on the Manna, overcoming the image’s confinement to a single moment is not the only point of Poussin’s composition; it further asserts the aesthetic of reason by which Le Brun’s hero distinguished himself from French and Italian competitors alike. This is the point Poussin makes about the Manna in enjoining Chantelou to read the painting alongside the instigating passage in Exodus. In his Solomon as in the Manna, the painter goes to considerable lengths to create an impression of passionate diversity and dramatic movement. Certainly, his characters’ highly variegated gestures, attitudes, physiognomies, and expressions signify these things. Yet the passions that move the participants are finally subordinated to a rational scheme that is not itself passionate. The space-time of the image, the sense of orderly place the picture portrays and elaborates, is not that of the chaotic events Poussin rehearses. It is rather that of the act of judgment by which these events are brought to an end in the king’s grasp of the truth. This is so not merely because such is the underlying moral of the story Poussin tells and of the paradigmatic act of royal judgment the story commemorates. It is more deeply so because of the way the composition guides the beholder through a prospective exploration that culminates in an act of judgment comparable to the one the king performs: the act by which, in scanning the pictorial surface and reflecting on the indices we successively discover, we arrive at last at a synthesis that transcends the animated circumstancial variety that meets us at first glance. It is important to remember that, though the picture is now accompanied in the Louvre, where it hangs, by a helpful label specifying its theme, when it hung on the wall in Pointel’s home it had no specifying gloss. It was, then, up to us to identify the subject and the thrust of Poussin’s treatment of it through an act of experimental judgment, allied to memory, exactly like the one Le Brun

A State of Mind

101

performs in his account of the Manna, and exactly like the one Solomon performs in reaching his verdict. What Poussin’s painting proclaims and, as a means to that end, enacts in the space-time of its composition and the activity demanded on the beholder’s part is not just the principle of monarchic government but the form of the monarchic state.51 The key to that state lies less in the abstract machinery of Hobbist or Schmittian theory than in the selfregulating person of the monarch himself. Especially when viewed in relation to the counter-example of events in the France of the Frondes, the place we see here is indeed at once an ideal royal court and the ideal nation that, in ruling over it, such a court creates. Yet what makes that state possible, giving it its form, is the way its model sovereign first creates himself through the act of rational judgment he performs. The properties of a well-ordered kingdom are the same as those of the wellordered psyche of which Solomon’s court is also the emblem since the king’s command over his warring subjects is the exact homologue of reason’s command over the warring passions that dwell in the human heart. Poussin’s historical allegory of political sovereignty thus doubles as an allegory of sovereign mind. What turns the person of the sovereign into an embodiment of sovereignty itself, in person, is the degree to which the sovereign is ruled by the faculty of reason of which his position as judge is the icon. But what does this mean if not what everything in the painting has hinted at from the start? As with the picture, whose true location is less Poussin’s canvas than the synthetic act of reading, memory, and construction the beholder undertakes under its guidance, the world Poussin portrays is less the state than a state of mind – the one with which the painter leaves us as, having gazed our full, we turn away to digest what we have seen. We return to a point we made earlier when we noted that, unlike the vast majority of the Poussins in Pointel’s collection, the Solomon is an interior, a generic status it shares with only one other picture, the selfportrait composed in the same year. The fact that Solomon is an interior is in part a function of decorum and plausibility. Whether in its judicial or its ceremonial office, the court itself is an interior, a space constructed both within and against the outside world with a view to controlling what transpires there. As such, however, it is analogous to another interior, the artist’s studio and the work carried on in it: work that, like that involved in handing justice down, demands isolation from the distractions of the wider environment. This proves true not just of the labour of painting itself but also of the artist’s preparation for it, and in

102

The Matter of Mind

particular the experiments Poussin is known to have carried out with a view to mastering the optical features of his craft. There were the drawings, for instance, in which he analysed the interplay of light and shadow; or the boxlike theatres in which he arranged miniature wax figures to help him work out relations, proportions, and the interaction of light with colour as well as shadow.52 And there were the many readings that informed his purely visual experiments: readings in Ovid, for example, whose Metamorphoses was a source of subjects throughout his career; or in Plutarch’s Moralia and Lives, where he found Stoic as well as more broadly historical themes; above all, in the notebooks of Leonardo and their theoretical amplification in the manuscripts of Matteo Zaccolini, all made available by Cassiano dal Pozzo, who was their custodian.53 Poussin was no studio artist in the manner of Caravaggio or Rembrandt. For one thing, as we have seen, he had an abiding taste for exteriors of which the late landscapes are the logical culmination. His models, moreover, were not, like those of which his great baroque rivals boasted, ordinary people plucked from the street in order to be posed for the kind of claustrophobically intense theatrical effect Caravaggio strove for or to achieve the direct, unrectified fidelity to mere ‘present nature’ for which Rembrandt was as famous as he was reviled.54 Poussin found his models in classical statuary, and especially the Greek style he and his sculptor friend Franc¸ois Duquesnoy learned to distinguish from Roman knock-offs.55 To be sure, his paintings have none (or at least less) of the icy inanimation this might seem to imply. On the contrary, what he saw in Greek sculpture was the live expressive force exhibited by the Belvedere Apollo or the Laocoo¨n group. Cropper and Dempsey bring this out in noting that expression in Poussin is not limited, as in his teacher Domenichino, to affetti imprinted on the face; it conveys an inner moral as well as emotional essence that shapes the body as a whole.56 The Judgment of Solomon illustrates the point with special clarity in the portrayal of the two mothers, one of whom is seen from behind so that the body alone communicates her emotions: a technical problem the point of which, surely, was to show how Poussin could do without the face altogether, relying on the agonized twist of the hips and torso and on the urgent appeal of uplifted arms and open supplicant hands. Even so, Poussin’s natural expressiveness remains subject to a governing idea whose source lies in the imaginative reworking of the data of natural experience his studio experiments amass. This introduces a further layer of complexity focused on Solomon, and for which his

A State of Mind

103

impassive majesty serves as a kind of signature. As we have noted, the sovereignty Solomon embodies reflects both the decorum of the scene and the self-regulating wisdom the king brings to the task of grasping the truth. Solomon thus expresses the sovereignty the scene assigns him, but he does so only and precisely because he so visibly achieves that sovereignty within the confines of his own mind. However, the sovereignty expressed in this way is not his alone; as his position at the apex of the ‘prospective’ Albertian pyramid hints, it belongs to the painter as well. What Solomon brings to the determination of truth within the scene is the exact counterpart of what Poussin brings to portraying the truth of the scene: the mind’s godlike power to shape the scene itself as an expression of a hidden truth that painter and monarch alike discern and thereby bring to light. We observe an at once formal and symbolic scheme found elsewhere in Poussin’s work. The Louvre Rape of the Sabine Women (1637–8; fig. 11) is a notable example. Though the figure of the monarch has moved to the left and been turned at an angle of ninety degrees, the result underscores by different means the same contrast between the economy of expression devoted to the sovereign and the explosive energies he unleashes in the world. In the Louvre Inspiration of the Poet (ca 1629; fig. 12), there is the luminous rationality captured by the dialectic set up between the picture’s epic poet and the personifications of the sources of his gifts. Caught in the strikingly unseeing furore of inspiration, the poet opens his body, arms wide, to receive a divine possession symbolized further by the convulsive upward rolling of his eyes toward a heaven the god has paradoxically abandoned for his sake. By contrast, the god himself, the muse who watches by the god’s side, and the putti hovering in wait to adorn the poet with the laurels he will shortly win are all characterized by a knowing serenity the poet lacks. As attested by Apollo’s concentration on the page on which the poet will eventually write, fingering out the place where the words will go, the spring of divine furore lies in a ceremonious calm that is its dialectical opposite. All of these pictures accordingly exhibit a specifically Apollonian configuration whose ultimate manifestation is Poussin’s last painting, the Apollo and Daphne of 1664 (fig. 13): the representation of a signal emblematic failure, stressed here by the insuperable distance that separates Apollo from the nymph, whose cause is the erotic passion to which even the god succumbs though, to render it in the truth Poussin aims at, the painter does not. It is all the more fitting, then, that the only other interior in Pointel’s collection should be the self-portrait Poussin did for him (plate 3), an

Image Not Available

Fig. 11 Nicolas Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Image Not Available

Fig. 12 Nicolas Poussin, Inspiration of the Poet. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Image Not Available

Fig. 13 Nicolas Poussin, Apollo and Daphne. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

A State of Mind

107

Image Not Available

Plate 3 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait for Jean Pointel. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

intimate picture whose funerary motifs poignantly underscore the curiously domestic mode of immortality the effigy confers. Unlike what we will find in the slightly later self-portrait for Chantelou, a version of himself that Poussin at least claimed to have thought superior to the

108

The Matter of Mind

first,57 the painting is squarely centred on the artist’s face and upper torso, which lean out toward the viewer in a one-to-one meeting of eyes and minds. The directness of the encounter staged here, seconded by the way the artist’s torso fills up the frame, creates an atmosphere of great intimacy in which the painter’s gaze seeks out our own in a gesture of mutual recognition. The sense of direct intimate contact strikes the balance the picture as a whole maintains: between presence and absence, since the self-portrait confirms what it also overcomes, namely, the distance between Poussin in Rome and Pointel in Paris; and between life and death since, standing before a tomb based on one designed by the painter’s dead friend Duquesnoy,58 Poussin already looks as it were over Pointel’s shoulder toward posterity as a spectral survival in a future world in which both painter and patron are long dead, leaving only this image behind in token of their vanished kinship. But the picture’s intimacy strikes the balance, too, between this painting and all of the others Poussin has done. Whatever we see in, say, Solomon or Landscape with Polyphemus or Landscape with a Calm, it is not Poussin. Yet what makes these paintings special, giving them the character that makes us want to see the artist’s face, is that they are inimitably by Poussin. The self-portrait activates a Florentine proverb whose core idea guides the biographical turn art history takes from Vasari on: ogni dipintore depinge se, ‘all painters paint themselves.’ Every painting is a virtual self-portrait in that what painters paint, how they imagine the world and give it form in art, expresses who they are.59 The self-portrait puts a face to the mind that directed the hand to which we owe the other pictures in Pointel’s collection, a face whose gaze reminds us that it has been there from the start, visible to anyone who knows how to look for it. But there is still more to it than that. For the self-portrait suggests, just by showing it, that the chances are that we will not in fact have seen Poussin’s face even here. Looked at from this angle, the self-portrait bristles with leads the very need for which suggests they may be false. The self-portrait’s funerary imagery as an effigy claims the afterlife Poussin’s work as a whole confers; but it also reminds us that the price for immortality is death. The book held in the artist’s right hand, in which contemporaries so ardently wanted to see Poussin’s missing treatise that some later hand added the title De lumine et colore to its spine, may more prosaically contain copies that the painter’s friend Gaspard Dughet had made from Zaccolini’s manuscript of Leonardo’s notebooks, assuming it is not simply a generic mark of the artist’s general erudition or, more simply still, a portfolio of preparatory sketches.60 Or

A State of Mind

109

again, the pencil, an instrumental emblem of drawing and design at odds with the phantom treatise on light and colour, reminds us by its placement in Poussin’s left hand rather than his working right that what we are looking at is less Poussin himself than the mediating image he studied in a mirror, where left and right are reversed. The gaze keeps its secrets even as it hints of them. At one level, the game of hide-and-seek Poussin plays with the beholder establishes another parallel between the artist and Solomon, further adumbrating the theme of sovereignty. As we saw earlier with reference to Naude´’s theory of the self-constituting exercise of political power by means of spectacular coups d’e´tat, what flushes truth from covert in The Judgment of Solomon is the double coup de the´aˆtre made possible by the fact that the king hands down not one but two verdicts. The first, decreeing the baby’s division in half, constitutes a judicial murder whose extremity dramatizes the social divisions that appear to demand it. But this brings on the second verdict once the true mother reveals her identity by renouncing her claim to the child. The inspiration for the device by which Solomon extracts the truth is not, however, foreknowledge of the result but rather the confession of his ignorance. It is in fact just because he does not know the answer and, what is more, knows that he does not know it that he resorts to the horrific expedient of threatening to put the child to death. Just so, in the self-portrait for Pointel, the subtle indication of the inversion the use of a mirror entails enlists an exercise of doubt and, since this is a self-portait, of becomingly modest self-doubt as an indispensable component of the wisdom painter and monarch share. To the precise extent that sovereignty is the fruit of wisdom, it is the fruit of scepticism as well, the selfdisciplined mistrust of one’s own instincts and perceptions by which alone wisdom is earned.61 All of this underscores one further point that the self-portrait for Pointel cannot itself quite make, thereby explaining why there had to be a second, for Chantelou, and why Poussin might genuinely have preferred it quite independently of a desire to soothe Chantelou’s notorious jealousy of the artist’s exertions on Pointel’s behalf (plate 4). Several features of the second self-portrait leap out at us. The funerary decor is replaced by something like a studio: the painter stands before a number of overlapping canvasses leaning against a wall with a door let into it, all but one turned away from us. The new scene is also well lit by natural light from a window concealed to the left. We get a sense too of a better likeness. It is certainly better lit, and gives more for

110

The Matter of Mind

Image Not Available

Plate 4 Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait for Paul Fre´art de Chantelou. Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

A State of Mind

111

us to look at in that the painter strikes a more open pose that makes his figure more available for contemplative inspection than its predecessor. The painter’s attitude has changed as well. Where Pointel’s Poussin leans slightly forward in an intimate exchange of glances that hints at shared confidences, Chantelou’s has been positioned well back from the plane, and the sense of eye contact has been subtly undermined. Most commentators assert that Poussin’s gaze directly meets the beholder’s; and it is true that the painter’s left eye (on our right) does appear to be trained on us. It is, however, already unsettling that, being on the side of the artist’s face turned slightly away from the light coming in from the left, this eye looks out at us from shadow: Poussin watches us from covert, as it were spying on our response from a place that does not entirely coincide with the one the face appears to occupy. Moreover, because the shadowing of this eye contrasts with the full illumination that falls on the other, we are led to compare the two; and as compared with Poussin’s left, the right eye does not meet us quite so directly, creating an intermittent impression of wandering off to the side. The net result is a sense of sightless abstraction reinforced by the peculiar sternness of the painter’s expression. While Poussin stands out more fully than before, dressed, what is more, as Fumaroli has noted, in an academic gown that bespeaks his place in the learned world of the Republic of Letters,62 he does not unambiguously return our look, as if his mind were lost in private reflection. This cannot then be a mirror image since that would demand a fixed intentness on the position we occupy that the painter’s gaze here lacks. Whence, on the one hand, the picture’s strength as a likeness: because he is portrayed as if lost in thought, and so as only dimly aware (if in fact he is aware at all) of the beholder’s presence, we see Poussin as we would were no one there, the private man instead of the public persona. But whence too an oblique reinforcement of the compositional motif of overlapping canvasses. As has often been observed, none of the objects visible in the room is complete.63 The canvasses in particular not only screen each other but reach beyond the frame, outside our field of vision. The result is a sense of both fragmentedness and absence concentrated in the one canvas a portion of which is visible: an allegory of Painting, identified as such by the emblematic third eye on her forehead, stepping forward from a hidden space that, to judge by the proportions of the visible part of the frame, amounts to more than half of the picture’s total surface, being greeted by a male figure of which all we can make out are the arms extended in welcome.

112

The Matter of Mind

The question, then, is what is this absence about, and why the related insistence on incompleteness? Surely in part it emphasizes the physical absence the Pointel self-portrait references by overcoming it. Poussin is here, in the self-portrait, because he is pointedly not here in the flesh but rather back in Rome, from which the picture was sent. He is not here, further, as the Pointel self-portrait stresses by means of its funerary decor, because Poussin is (or will soon be) dead, leaving behind what the inscription on the back of the canvas to our right specifically identifies as a dated effigy in singular token of the whole body of work for which the artist is to be remembered. But as Poussin’s absorption in private thought intimates, the absence also becomes a figure of the artist’s inspiration and the work of painstaking invention it sets in train. What the painter paints is the end point of the mental work of conception, learning, imagination, and artistic experiment that is not, and cannot be, literally there before us on the canvas. Nor can that with which Poussin is seen to busy himself as it were offstage: the idea the painter has of which the painting itself is the necessarily imperfect record and expression. This reading amplifies two lessons confided in the correspondence. The first was addressed to Jean Le Maire, in a letter in which Poussin thanks him for confirming the Manna’s safe arrival in Paris. Conscious that the actual painting may fail to live up to its owner’s expectations, he begs Le Maire ‘de conside´rer que en de si petits espaces il est impossible de faire et observer se [sic] que l’on sait, et que a` la fin ce ne peut eˆtre autre que comme une ide´e de chose plus grande’ [to consider that it is impossible to do and observe what one knows in such small spaces, and that in the end it can be nothing more than as it were the idea of a greater thing] (23). The second confidence we have met before, the injunction to ‘read the story and the picture.’ Both statements say the same thing. We must read the picture in the sense of giving it the active prospective attention required to recover what the picture itself can only hint at. But, by the same token, we must also read it in the sense of relating it to the absent idea of which it is less the icon than a vestige. Like all of Poussin’s paintings, the Chantelou self-portrait is expressive, but only for a beholder who knows how to trace it back to its source in the painter’s mind. This is the thrust of Bellori’s reading of the picture in the light of the allegory a piece of which is legible to our left. According to Bellori, the self-portrait’s theme is ‘the love of painting, and friendship,’ conceived as a dyad without which there would be no painting at all.64 The friendship Poussin immediately has in mind is that

A State of Mind

113

with Chantelou, to whom the self-portrait was explicitly addressed. But as the entire history of Poussin’s reception from his own time down to ours reminds us, by ‘friendship’ he further meant just reception itself, and the Solomonic wisdom it takes on the beholder’s part for painting to find its way home. For all the sovereign authority condensed in the painter’s likeness for Chantelou, he depends on and, to that extent, lies at the mercy of an equally sovereign intervention by those who see his work.65 Such is pre-eminently the lesson of the series of lectures of which Le Brun’s talk on the Manna is a telltale part. Consider in particular the very first lecture in the series, also by Le Brun, specifically designed to set the stage and, more to the point, set an example for the lectures to follow. I quote the start of the lecture at some length because it gives such a clear notion of what the Acade´mie took its mission to be: All of the Academicians and most of their Students having made their way to the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, they found there [l’on y trouva] Raphael’s Saint Michael exposed in a favourable light. This painting is eight feet high by five in width. In the middle of a large landscape that represents an uninhabited place, and which has not yet been peopled, one sees Saint Michael descending from heaven to earth, and holding the Demon laid low beneath him. This Angel is supported in the air by two large wings; he is clothed in a breastplate made of golden scales, to which is attached a sort of tunic of cloth-of-gold in the Roman manner that descends just to the knee. There is another of a blue material underneath that hangs slightly beyond the first, on which, in the form of embroidery, one sees written in capital letters, RAPHAEL URBINAS PINGEBAT M. D. XVII. Over the top of this armour there are as it were two scarves, linen grey in colour, which, being agitated and supported by the force of the air, rise on high. One sees that one of the ends is carried off as if with greater violence between the Angel’s two wings, and that the other is held up by its natural lightness. This Angel has a sword bound to his side; in his two hands he holds a short pike, but since the right arm is raised higher, the left hand appears to draw back a little under the right arm because the upper part of the whole body advances further than the lower. His left leg is bent, and even though the right one seems to lean on the Demon, it nevertheless does not touch it. His hair, lifted by the air, makes a movement similar to that of the drapery. His buskins are linen grey in colour, like the scarves that surround him.

114

The Matter of Mind

The Demon, who is beneath him and as though crushed, bites its tongue and grinds its teeth; and one sees in its red and flaming eyes marks of its rage and fury. It is on the edge of a rocky precipice from which flames emerge. It has ram’s horns, dragon’s wings, and a serpent’s tail. It leans on the earth with its left hand, and holds an iron hook that serves as a sceptre, and which is the grim token of its cruel empire over the other Demons.66

The lecture models what the title of Descartes’s discourse on the subject calls ‘the method,’ not just one way but the right way to approach, inspect, describe, appreciate, and assess a visual work of art.67 Such is the underlying point of the stage management of the event: the fact that only the secretary, Fe´libien, and that day’s lecturer, Le Brun, knew in advance which painting the academicians would be invited to see. To be sure, the choice of a Raphael is heavily overdetermined since Raphael is not just any painter; he is the painter, setting a standard to which all others aspire. Later in the series, led by Le Brun with an able assist from the Acade´mie’s amanuensis Fe´libien, the academicians will dispute Raphael’s primacy by proposing Poussin in his place. If it is true, as Le Brun will go on to argue in this first lecture, that Raphael perfected the art of painting by reconciling Florentine design in Leonardo and Michelangelo with the Venetian colourism of Titian and Corregio, Poussin will be shown (or at any rate said) to have gone him one better, especially in the matter of expression and of the handling of accidents of light, aerial perspective, and harmony of colour. Poussin is presented, however, to begin with as a ‘second’ Raphael, the French one in whom what the Italian set out to achieve is brought to true perfection. The fact remains that, by exhibiting Raphael’s picture without prior notice, the speaker creates what folklorists call an ‘induced natural context’ approximating the conditions under which, in theory, any given painting comes to be seen. The lecture thus attempts to reproduce the situation in which we or, more accurately in view of the text’s exclusive use of the impersonal pronoun on, in which anyone might happen on any given work of art in order to show how we should go about responding to it.68 Whence the importance of the lecture’s first move, pure description. Description here is not, however, traditional ekphrasis, a procedure which, in retelling the story the picture represents, is notoriously apt to become an independent artwork in its own right.69 Though the text does indicate what the action is from the start and, in the course of its analysis, provides a detailed narration of how that action unfolds, it

A State of Mind

115

takes pains to ground the account in the direct visual evidence the picture affords – an effort evinced by the frequency of the framing phrase ‘one sees,’ the careful modalizing verbs ‘appear’ and ‘seem,’ and the modifying adverbial expressions ‘a sort of,’ ‘similar,’ ‘as it were,’ and ‘as though.’ In place, then, of ekphrasis, we get a process of identification squarely focused on the details of the painting itself taken in isolation from both other paintings of its kind and from the text’s description of it. The essential aim is to give a complete account of the pictorial individual with the precision of notation and detail required to enable us not only to identify but to re-identify it as being just this picture as distinct from any other.70 So, in addition to specifying the story told, carefully observed as it were in all of its speaking parts, the text gives the painting’s dimensions, describes the setting in which the action occurs, notes the postures, gestures, and expressions of the figures the picture portrays, moving on from there, in the main body of Le Brun’s lecture, to a scrupulously itemized analysis of the treatment of light, the handling of contour, and the harmonizing of colour and perspective. The aim is to take down and annotate everything we are able to see in the picture that deserves some kind of remark and that thereby distinguishes it from any other. We should stress the historical significance of what is happening here. Prodded by Fe´libien, and with Le Brun as point man, the Acade´mie elaborates the fundamental protocols of modern connoisseurship. In commenting on everything that makes Raphael’s painting a distinct individual thing in its own right, it also characterizes everything that makes it a distinct product of Raphael’s hand. We return to the Florentine proverb whose relevance to Poussin we noted a moment ago: ogni depintore depinge se. At the same time as the painting tells a story, it expresses the artist who alone could have told it in this way. Accordingly, as Le Brun’s analysis unfolds beyond Fe´libien’s introductory overview, we read not just about the setting but about how it is depicted, not just about colour, space, and light but about how they have been handled, not just about expressive line but about its typically Raphaelesque interaction with colour and light. The point of the analysis is to teach not simply what is there to be seen but what only a well-trained eye would see, and among other things that this is a Raphael. To which one further step is added. For what makes a Raphael a Raphael is not just how the artist did it but what he meant by it, not only what he painted but to what end and effect as an expression of its underlying idea. The lecture therefore undertakes a complete account not just of the pictorial thing

116

The Matter of Mind

but of its organizing intention with a view to adducing not just a distinct style but the mind that style betokens. The result is a paradox the academicians appear to have overlooked but to which Poussin adverts in a letter to Noyers where he writes of the essential tacitness of his work (‘mes tacites images’) as a painter – ‘Moy qui fais profession des choses muettes’ [I who profess mute things] (54). In speaking about painting, the Acade´mie speaks for it, and does so in a decidedly epistemological register. This is why appreciative looking of the sort Le Brun’s lecture on Raphael illustrates is conceived, precisely, as connoisseurship, a form of knowing. It also explains why connoisseurship is presented as an eminently methodizable enterprise grounded in the rules and protocols the Acade´mie sets out to codify. Unlike the unmethodized looking of naı¨ve observers, true appreciation is difficult. It nonetheless proceeds on an assumption shared with mere looking: however we look and whatever we see (or fail to), the object remains the same. And on what other assumption could looking be said to be good or bad, true or false, faithful or heedless, something that can be done not only better but correctly? And yet can this be right? Does not the fact that we need a discipline of the kind connoisseurship teaches suggest that the objects involved are not the same just insofar as they do not go without saying? Most people fail in fact to see what is there before their eyes until, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin explaining how the purloined letter could have hidden in plain sight, the connoisseur tells them what to look for. The exemplary connoisseurship of the lecture on Raphael’s St Michael confirms the testimony of Le Brun’s later lecture on the Manna, itself a tour de force of connoisseurship to which Poussinists remain indebted to this day. In demonstrating how the arrangement of groups of figures and the expressive means brought to the portrayal of each group in turn deploy in space at once the successive incidents in the unfolding story and successive levels of insight into what the story means, Le Brun enables subsequent readers to see what they might easily have failed to without his help: Poussin’s design, the plan presiding over the composition as a whole, and the idea thereby put to work in both the painting itself and the art of appreciation the lecture models. Under Le Brun’s guidance, we begin to make out what Poussin has achieved, and it is only then that the picture becomes truly visible. In the process, Le Brun drives home the moral of Poussin’s letter to Chantelou, where the recipient learns that, even to begin to comprehend the author’s intent, he must first frame the painting and then read it in the way the artist

A State of Mind

117

prescribes. However, the very fact of prescription reveals how precarious the painting’s status is. Like the truth Solomon discovers in arbitrating the contention between the two mothers, like the spectacle of Solomon’s paradigmatic act of judgment itself, the sovereign act of painting finally owes its sovereignty to that sovereign other, the beholder, who works out how to see it for what it is. Cropper and Dempsey take up this point in their own analysis of the self-portrait for Chantelou by construing an accurate reading as an act of friendship seen in the light of Montaigne’s writings on the subject.71 The turn to Montaigne is exactly right. Though they cannot document it in the way they do Poussin’s debt to Leonardo and Zaccolini, there is every reason to believe that the painter was a constant and faithful reader of Montaigne, and nowhere more thoroughly than in Montaigne’s thoughts on friendship. I also agree that the ideal of friendship Poussin would have found in Montaigne is the one suggested by Montaigne’s friendship with Etienne de La Boe´tie, a bond whose intimacy and power surface not only in the depth of Montaigne’s mourning for his dead friend but in the Essais’s status as what Montaigne himself describes as a self-portrait whose deepest source was the loss of that friend. I am less sure, however, that Chantelou is the friend for Poussin that La Boe´tie was for Montaigne: to the extent that anyone filled that bill, it was the sculptor Duquesnoy, with whom Poussin made the momentous discovery of Greek sculpture and who designed the tomb Poussin used as a model in the Pointel self-portrait. Poussin’s relationship with Chantelou was, moreover, notoriously strained. In particular, the artist had constantly to contend with Chantelou’s jealousy, most notably in what Marin has called the five-act tragedy (a protracted fan dance might better catch the tone) touched off when Chantelou discovered that the painter planned to make a self-portrait for Pointel.72 This is not to minimize Chantelou’s importance to Poussin as a friend as well as patron: after all, it is in the painter’s letters to Chantelou that we find many of his most telling confidences on the nature of his art. It is just that what prompts these confidences is a need for explanation quite unlike the spontaneous fusion of kindred souls Montaigne evokes. Montaigne asks himself what it was that bound him so closely to his friend. The only answer he can find is the most poignant of tautologies: ‘Par ce que c’estoit luy; par ce que c’estoit moy’ [Because it was him; because it was me].73 It is toward mutual understanding on this scale that the Chantelou self-portrait seems finally to gesture. As we have seen, the claim formulated in terms of the power of the artist’s mind is

118

The Matter of Mind

modulated by an appeal to the beholder’s on the basis of a shared love of painting. The self-portrait to this extent looks toward a meeting of minds for which the picture provides the occasion and terms without, however, being able to achieve it on its own. The reason for this is not just what the self-portrait represents as its own inevitable incompleteness and the related unavoidable interventions of absence, loss, death, and incomprehension. As in Montaigne’s friendship with La Boe´tie, an appeal is made to an affinity for which no reason can be given beyond the simple fact of being who we are. True, neither party would be who he is were he deprived of the powers of reason, imagination, and above all memory that maintain the bond across the distance that separates them in time as well as space. Cropper and Dempsey are thus right to link the Chantelou self-portrait to the figure of the shepherdess in the second version of the Arcadian theme (fig. 14). As they argue, following Marin, at the same time as she embodies the second Et in Arcadia Ego’s bittersweet mood of elegiac reflection and remembrance, the shepherdess personifies painting.74 Like Marin, they place this personification under the sign of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. But, also like Marin, they finally subordinate memory to perspective, itself a figure for Poussinian ‘prospect,’ the mode of active looking whose centrality we have repeatedly met – a character granted the figure of painting in the self-portrait for Chantelou, signalled by the third eye fixed to the band that spans her forehead. Yet what most profoundly links Et in Arcadia Ego to the self-portrait is the air of both sightless and wordless meditation the shepherdess shares with the self-portrait’s image of Poussin. Exactly as Montaigne teaches in the memorial to his friend, the inward turn of mind that separates the shepherdess from her companions, and Poussin from the beholder, is the daughter not just of commemorative thought but of experience and the condition of mortal embodiment that makes experience possible. Nor should we fail to notice the marks experience has left in the folds and creases of Poussin’s face. The stern expression betokens thought and the memories that feed it. But it also betrays the effects of weariness, pain, hard work, and age. This is not just a man who thinks; it is a man who has lived and who, in living, has experienced all of the hurts, lusts, and fears, the joys and loves and disappointments and losses, he laboured so long to paint so well. Painting, we recall, is an art of imitation that, by applying line and colour to a flat surface, has the power to portray ‘everything under the sun.’ Though its ‘end,’ both

Image Not Available

Fig. 14 Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego (Arcadian Shepherds). Paris, Muse´e du Louvre. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

120

The Matter of Mind

what it aims at and where it terminates, is ‘delectation,’ the pleasure thus achieved and imparted works through the world insofar as sensuous as well as intellectual experiment makes it known to us. More expressly than most other painters, Poussin does remake that world in the image of his own nature and of his inimitable mastery of his art. Yet insofar as, even for Poussin, painting remains an art of imitation, the forms it engenders bring us back to the unruly experiences in which all art and thought begin. What is more, as T.J. Clark in The Sight of Death grasps perhaps better than anyone, painting constitutes an experience in its own right, as something seen as well as thought, and felt as well as visualized.75 One of the great pleasures of revisiting Poussin’s paintings in Clark’s company is following him as, writing up day by day the unprogrammed fruits of a six-month teˆte-a`-teˆte with Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Serpent (figs. 8–9), he plunges into their thicketlike detail. The book is full of what we expect to find in art-historical analysis: musings on the nature of art, speculations about Poussin’s motives and sensibility, the careful mining of iconographic clues, excursions into the broader historical context, and soundings of the artist’s readings and of contemporary responses. However, these glances in the direction of normative art history are borne along by Clark’s fascinated and deeply felt entanglement in the material singularity of the paintings themselves. The quizzical cock of the head as a goat casts a curious eye in our direction, the puzzling construction of a lean-to in the corner of a wall, the nervous sketchiness of leaves quivering in a breeze, or the blur of green placing an expanse of meadow in the middle distance; how the tone of yellow light falling on a crenellated parapet suggests both a specific time of day and a particular state of the weather, or the way a daub of black paint makes an open-mouthed cry of terror – all of these things are taken up and minutely observed as tokens of a work of hand, eye, and heart as well as brain that unfolds in the time it takes to see everything Poussin has deposited for us. The time Clark takes to look (some 240 pages for two pictures) amounts, moreover, to a reenactment of the time it took Poussin to paint them: it reproduces not only the pure duration of the painter’s labour but its starts and stops, its backings-up and course-changes, its sudden inspirations and equally sudden breakdowns. The paintings do add up to coherent wholes, and Clark takes exemplary pains to show how. Yet the contingencies of each day’s viewing, moved this way and that as a reflex of his evolving interests, the pressure of an unexpected insight, or the quality of the light

A State of Mind

121

cast on the pictures by that day’s weather in Los Angeles, where the two landscapes happened to hang, make us vividly aware of what a chancy, indigestibly multifarious business looking is, and how indigestibly complex the paintings prove to be in return. It is this fusion of mind and sense, memory and feeling, motion and rest, that Poussin’s shepherdess embodies; and in embodying it, she occasions an exactly similar experience for those who gaze on her in open-minded earnest. Painting is the world made beautiful, and so made pleasure. But, like the world, it engrosses anyone willing to pay it the homage of patient alertness for which it calls; and it does so precisely because it is the kind of place experience in general, of picture and world alike, shows it to be. Jotting down that day’s thoughts on Landscape with a Calm, Clark is led at one point to write about the idea of nature arising from Poussin’s rendering of birch leaves to our right, of a galloping horse to our left, of the sky overhead, and of the reflections in the lake at the painting’s centre: The full contingency of nature, the picture says, can be included in a structure that speaks much more simply, more naively, to nature’s self-stabilizing – its offer of itself as all one thing. And to figure contingency as danger isn’t quite right; or even to figure it as movement (galloping) or ephemerality (storm clouds and smoke). Contingency is what is happening to the birch leaves at top right: something unique and incandescent (separated out from the edge of the frame so as to focus our attention on it) but entirely normal and repeatable. The same goes for the reflection in the lake.76

This is not the world of Scientia, whether in the moral dimension of literary tradition or in the rational reductions of Cartesian science. It is, though, the world as we experience it day by day – or at least as we would do if we took the same time to live it as Poussin does to paint the clarified counterpart his beautiful picture forms.

3 The Witch from Colchis: Corneille’s Me´de´e, Chime`ne’s Le Cid, and the Invention of Classical Genius

I dined one day at the table of a royal minister who has the wit of four men together. Well, he demonstrated to us, as clear as one and one makes two, that there was nothing more useful to the people of a state than lies, and nothing more noxious than truth. I can’t recall his proofs very clearly, but it followed with self-evidence that persons of genius are detestable, and that if an infant bore the mark of this dangerous gift of nature on its forehead, it ought to be smothered at birth, or drowned. – Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau

Thanks to the work of Nicolas Poussin, the Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture discovered a French artist capable of bearing comparison with the acknowledged masters of the Italian Renaissance. Painting in France was no longer relegated to the second-class status of a provincial emulation of the metropolitan art of Venice, Florence, and Rome. It could now lay claim to a pre-eminence of its own as a national tradition – more specifically a national genius – for which Poussin represented the progenitor and pattern. To learn to be a great painter meant henceforth, in France at any rate, to imitate the man Andre´ Fe´libien called ‘le Maıˆtre,’ mining his work for infallible models of the beautiful and true. By the same token, however, the greatness of Poussin’s work was not simply the demonstrable sum of its demonstrably excellent parts. It was an expression of the artist himself, whose correspondence and biography as well as paintings became object lessons in what it is not merely to paint like but to be the ‘perfect painter.’ Painters thus came to recognize that what they had to replicate in Poussin was a quality of mind, a character, and a sensibility that in fact they could not

The Witch from Colchis 123

reproduce. The task Fe´libien, Charles Le Brun, Se´bastien Bourdon, and the rest set French artists was to imitate what connoisseurs and emulators were unanimous in regarding as ‘inimitable,’ the je ne sais quoi that made Poussin ‘Poussin.’ The sea change we witness in the conception and practice of painting finds an exact counterpart in the domain of literature. Indeed, a central feature of the classical age of seventeenth-century France, defining it as the grand sie`cle in whose giant shadow later eras of French literature stand, is the creation of the modern French paradigm of literary greatness. The paradigm’s emergence is indexed by a telltale shift in critical usage. The demotic ouvrage, denoting the work conceived as the empirical product of a private esprit, gives way to the imperious œuvre, the enduring monument erected by the mysterious higher faculty called ge´nie. The rise of the modern paradigm of literary greatness thus coincides with the advent of a fundamentally new historical personage: the selfdetermining Author whose only law is his or her own inspired genius.1 Attuned to this new personage, Nicolas Boileau eventually abandoned the espousal of objective rational rules in L’Art poe´tique (1674) in favour of the aesthetics of ineffable feeling enshrined in his translation of Longinus of the same year.2 The hallmark of modern literary greatness is the je ne sais quoi of quasi-supernatural inspiration Peri hypsous celebrates: that more than merely human sublimity of mind whose growing currency in European letters dates from the publication of the Traite´ du sublime. The present chapter explores the roots of this new model in Pierre Corneille, the poet who first embodied the ideal of towering genius to which subsequent generations aspire. As in the case of Poussin, whose voluminous correspondence taught friends and patrons alike to appreciate his paintings as the masterpieces he himself took them to be, Corneille’s stature as the embodiment of literary genius was in part a persona he deliberately forged for himself. A paradoxical result is that, to grasp what Corneille achieved, we need to dispel a teleological illusion induced by the very success of his enterprise. Our conception of the work is inevitably coloured by the monumental The´aˆtre of 1660, the forerunner of the definitive edition of 1682 that serves as the standard copy text to this day.3 In addition to the plays themselves, carefully ‘revised and corrected by the author’ in response to two generations of evolving taste, the The´aˆtre contains Corneille’s three magisterial discourses on dramatic art. Moreover, it frames each play with a critical analysis, the celebrated examens, explaining and defending the author’s practice with a view to shaping both his

124

The Matter of Mind

legacy and a posterity fit to receive it. With the The´aˆtre, Corneille unveiled the true scope of the ambition that had animated him from the first: to create his own literary memorial. In the process, he laid the basis for the Enlightenment ‘sacre de l’e´crivain,’ the institution of the canon of authors and texts with which French culture identifies the literary Pantheon whose physical manifestation is the Parisian temple of letters that bears that name.4 To this extent Corneille can be said to have invented French literary grandeur, casting himself in the role of its epoch-making creator. Yet this enterprise hinged less on a personal act of will than on the medium in which he wrote. The condition of possibility for the emergence of modern literary genius is the ventriloquistic exclusion of the author from the main body of the work that dramatic mimesis entails. Seventeenthcentury dramatists perfected the overwhelming power of illusion informing the theatrical ideal of dramatic verisimilitude.5 As Christian Biet notes, French talk of illusion is largely hyperbolic: in an age when many public theatres occupied converted tennis courts, when lighting schemes were based on the use of candles, and when, except perhaps at court, even the most elaborate stage machinery and set designs ran up against obvious technological limits, the literal belief on which theorists liked to insist could only go so far.6 Despite the powerful emotional identification theatrical representation extorts, neither readers nor spectators lose sight of the fact that it is all in play. Yet passionately identificatory responses remain, rooted in the living form of autonomous, self-generating onstage action. Unfiltered by the intervening narrative that epic, history, the novella, or romance cannot avoid, the characters’ words and deeds arise as the direct ‘natural’ expression of the overmastering interests and passions that inspire their actions and speech. Nonetheless, illusionistic vraisemblance depends less on how characters act and talk than on how the poet manages the plot. If we succumb to the illusion of autonomous events theatre engenders, it is because characters’ words and deeds display the internal logical necessity period theorists called the Aristotelian ‘unity of action.’7 Though obedient to the conventions governing contemporary notions of ‘natural’ human conduct, necessity here was understood to be a matter of art as well as nature. Genius, and the monumental greatness it confers, is thus a structural property of the topology of dramatic composition. The illusion of the spontaneous unfolding of unscripted events is doubled by intermittent awareness of an uncanny offstage arranger, a calculating panoptical mind like that of the magician Alcandre, who stands in for

The Witch from Colchis 125

the poet in Corneille’s Illusion comique [Theatrical illusion] (1636).8 The paradoxical proof of poetic genius is not merely the formal elimination of an intervening authorial voice but an artful work of erasure by which erasure itself becomes a palpable work of art.9 Granting the inspired transcendence that the conception of genius implies, what constitutes great poets is the self-designating and all-seeing absence on which the scenic illusion turns. Viewed from the perspective of the triumphant secularization of French culture to which classical theatre centrally contributed, the Enlightenment sacrament of authorship converts the great national poet into a substitute for the God of orthodox belief; and as the demiurgic makers of worlds obedient to laws of their own devising, dramatic poets look very like the divinity they replace. We must not, however, lose sight of the novelty of Corneille’s accomplishment or of the infernal hubris the poet’s resemblance to the divine betrays. The domesticated figure of the poet of genius embedded in the modern-day canon conceals the far more disturbing, quasi-demonic character of the project Corneille personifies. In the process, it masks the mingled wonder and alarm the project inspired in the more alert of his contemporaries. My point of departure is the allusion to Corneille’s Me´de´e of 1634 that occurs at the end of Jean Racine’s Phe`dre in 1677.10 As many commentators have observed, when Phe`dre announces that she has taken a lethal dose of ‘[u]n poison que Me´de´e apporta dans Athe`nes’ [a poison Medea brought to Athens] (5.7.1638), Racine performs a mise en abyme that links what Marc Fumaroli calls the suicidal end of French classical tragedy in his own play to the inception of the form in Corneille’s.11 A point less often noted is that this link supposes, and so supplies, a revisionist reading of Corneille’s text. The allusion underscores how uncannily Racinian and so, as we have come to think, anti-Cornelian his great predecessor’s first tragedy is. As Fumaroli argues, the mere fact of composing secular tragedy commits Corneille and Racine alike to the at once convincing and sympathetic portrayal not only of heroic conduct but of the sinful passions of love, rage, and ambition from which such conduct typically arises.12 However, beyond reflecting the inherent amorality of the genre to which Me´de´e belongs, thereby confirming the worst suspicions voiced about theatre by the moralist Pierre Nicole,13 passion resonates in the play with a Racinian ruthlessness and violence. There is, for instance, no obvious hint of the Jesuit picture of human will and the concomitantly optimistic, neo-Pelagian potential for human selfimprovement in terms of which we conventionally contrast Corneille

126

The Matter of Mind

with the Jansenist Racine. On the contrary, as again later in Rodogune (1645), the idealist Corneille turns out to be capable of just the kind of irremissible savagery that is supposed to be Racine’s distinctive preserve. Consider the ferocious marital quarrel that reaches its climax in 5.4–5. Reeling from the horrific deaths of his new bride and father-in-law, Jason plots Me´de´e’s destruction with eye-opening sadistic relish. Ordering his followers to carry off Cre´use and Cre´on’s bodies, ridding the stage of corpses whose onstage torments measure the extremities to which Corneille feels licensed to go, Jason announces that he will take the witch on single-handed: [L]a part que votre aide aurait en ma vengeance Ne m’en permettrait pas une entie`re alle´geance, Pre´parez seulement des geˆnes, des bourreaux, Devenez inventifs en supplices nouveaux, Qui la fassent mourir tant de fois sur leur tombe, Que son coupable sang leur vaille une he´catombe.

(5.4.1545–50)

[The part your help would have in my revenge Would deny me complete satisfaction. It is enough to prepare torments, instruments of torture. Be inventive in devising new agonies Capable of making her die so many times on their tomb That her guilty blood will purchase a fitting sacrifice for them.]

However, having declared his intention not merely to kill Me´de´e but, by taking his own life, to pursue her to hell itself in order to go on torturing her there, it occurs to him that even this will not suffice: the torments suicide would allow him to inflict even in death would be ‘un plaisir et non pas un supplice’ [a pleasure rather than pain] (5.4.1558). Jason’s thoughts accordingly turn from torture, murder, and suicide to killing his own children, the very act for which the tradition singles out Me´de´e herself. What prompts him to infanticide is the role Corneille assigns the children in contriving one of the inventive adresses for which the poet congratulates himself in the play’s examen (1:537): the explanation of how Cre´use could commit the otherwise criminal folly of accepting a wedding gift from the sorceress Jason sets aside for her sake. Where both Euripides and Seneca implausibly allow the poisoned robe to arrive as an unsolicited gift, Corneille motivates it by having Cre´use

The Witch from Colchis 127

demand it as the price for persuading her father to spare Jason’s children the exile decreed for their mother. The children are already tainted by association with Cre´use’s sadistic desire not only to supplant her aging rival in Jason’s affections but as it were to flay her alive by stripping her of the sartorial emblem of her beauty, identity, and rank.14 They now become their mother’s unwitting accomplices in murder. Nor should we overlook (the point cannot have escaped Racine’s malevolent notice) that they also become the confederates of the poet whose aesthetic purposes they serve as signally as their mother’s homicidal ones: Instruments des fureurs d’une me`re insense´e, Indignes rejetons de mon amour passe´e, Quel malheureux destin vous avait re´serve´s ` porter le tre´pas a` qui vous a sauve´s? A C’est vous, petits ingrats, que malgre´ la nature Il me faut immoler dessus leur se´pulture, Que la sorcie`re en vous commence de souffrir, Que son premier tourment soit de vous voir mourir.

(5.4.1561–8)

[Instruments of a crazed mother’s rage, Worthless spawn of past love, What sorry fate reserved it for you To bring death to those who rescued you? It is you, little ingrates, whom, in spite of nature, I must immolate on their sepulchre. May the witch in you begin to suffer; May her first torment be to watch you die.]

To be sure, Jason has second thoughts, voiced in the next line, just before Me´de´e appears at a balcony in preparation for her triumphant departure in a chariot borne aloft by winged dragons: ‘Toutefois qu’ont-ils fait qu’obe´ir a` leur me`re?’ [Yet what have they done except obey their mother?] (5.4.1569). However, quite apart from the fact that this sort of volte-face or revirement is a hallmark of Cornelian soliloquy, a weighing of the motives for an opposing course of action the speaker rejects in resolving on the act initially envisioned, the speech is interrupted by the coup de the´aˆtre of Me´de´e’s entry. Brandishing a quite possibly bloodstained stage property as inimical to classical taste as the tormented bodies of the victims of the dress trick, Me´de´e jeeringly reports that the children are in any case already dead:

128

The Matter of Mind

Laˆche, ton de´sespoir encore en de´libe`re? Le`ve les yeux, perfide, et reconnais ce bras Qui t’a de´ja` venge´ de ces petits ingrats. Ce poignard que tu vois vient de chasser leurs aˆmes Et noyer dans leur sang les restes de nos flammes.

(5.5.1570–4)

[Coward, your despair still deliberates? Lift your eyes, perfidious wretch, and acknowledge this arm That has already avenged you in the lives of these little ingrates. This dagger before your eyes has just now put their souls to flight And drowned the last embers of our shared ardour in their blood.]

Thus Corneille defiantly deviates from the idealistic norm imputed to him ever since Jean de La Bruye`re’s famous comparison with Racine in the Caracte`res (final edition, 1694). He does of course give us many memorably wicked characters in subsequent plays. Some of them, like Rodogune’s Cle´opaˆtre or the eponymous villain of the late Attila (1667), are intrinsically evil, governed by lusts endemic to their natures, whether political, like the libido dominandi that rules Cle´opaˆtre, or grossly carnal, like the tyrannical Attila’s passion for the heroic Honorie. Others, like E´milie (Cinna, 1641) or Corneille’s eponymous problem-hero Horace (1640), seem to be driven to wickedness by overmastering circumstance and emotion.15 But in all such instances Corneille leaves the door open for the saving grace of heroic self-transcendence. As La Bruye`re authoritatively puts it, where Racine portrays human beings ‘tels qu’ils sont’ [as they are], Corneille paints them ‘tels qu’ils devraient eˆtre’ [as they should be], subjecting us to an ideal of character and conduct that is not naturally our own.16 Auguste’s sacrificial act of clemency converts E´milie to the imperial cause that has taken her republican father’s life. The odium that Horace’s noble sister Camille heaps on his head before he murders her redeems his heartless, honour-greedy extermination of the more humane Curiace brothers, as does his wife Sabine’s courageously ironic denunciation of the Roman monarch on whose behalf he has committed his crimes. Similarly, for all that Rodogune acts at times like Cle´opaˆtre, her overriding devotion to duty enables her to identify the heroic twin whose love she was meant to share; and the despotic infatuation that her moral as well as physical beauty inspires in Attila enables Honorie to save both Rome and the Cornelian ideal of love by triggering the self-destructive excesses that bring the Hunnish tyrant to his death. In Me´de´e, by contrast, evil reigns supreme. Not only are Cre´use, Cre´on,

The Witch from Colchis 129

and the children murdered, the father and daughter with the added emphasis of unspeakable (if eloquent) agony right on stage, and not only do these murders go unavenged with Jason’s suicide at the final curtain, but Me´de´e herself escapes to Athens, bearing the poison Racine highlights as the curtain falls on Phe`dre. However much licence Corneille may have felt entitled to in his management of finer plot details, Me´de´e’s escape, like her crimes, represents a constitutive element of the fable antiquity bequeathed him. But this fact merely underscores the salience of choosing this fable to begin with. It is already remarkable that Corneille’s choice of a Greek mythological theme for his first tragedy comes just when Jean Mairet and Georges de Scude´ry inaugurate, with the former’s Sophonisbe (1634) and Cle´opaˆtre (1635) and the latter’s Mort de Ce´sar (1634), a vogue for Roman subjects Corneille did not tackle until the 1640s. The decision to take up a tale of triumphant evil drawn from the remote world of darkly archaic Greece thus directly challenged his rivals’ high-minded political moralizing.17 What is more, the climactic exchange between the two central antagonists amounts to a proleptic parody of the duet of heroic self-sacrifice Rodrigue and Chime`ne perform in Le Cid (1637). The fundamental image of Cornelian love is the astonishing jeu de miroirs in which Le Cid’s lovers prove their mutual worthiness by reflecting to each other the model of authentic nobility each finds in the other: the exchange of symmetrically noble likenesses consummates the Platonic twinning of kindred souls. Confronting the otherwise fallen humanity we share with his heroes and heroines, Cornelian love consistently achieves salvation from the Racinian hell of unscrupulous predatory wanting. Yet this salvation merely confirms how deeply Corneille’s first tragedy should give us pause. For the relationship that shapes the exchange between Jason and Me´de´e in 5.4–5 is structured exactly like the one between Rodrigue and Chime`ne in Le Cid 3.4, even if the first inverts the moral orientation for which the latter becomes the paradigm. But what does this mean if not that Racine saw in Me´de´e Corneille’s preemptive anticipation of the kind of tragedy the younger poet wrote in systematic opposition to him? A central fact of life for Racine is that Corneille was always there first.18 If, in choosing the means by which his last classical heroine takes her own life, Racine picks a poison Corneille’s Me´de´e has concocted, it is because Corneille has programmed her death from the start. This reading of Me´de´e challenges the broadly Foucaldian-cum-Lacanian view propounded by the psychoanalyst Mitchell Greenberg and the

130

The Matter of Mind

cultural historian Miche`le Longino.19 In this view, Me´de´e is the other – more specifically, Luce Irigaray’s ‘l’Autre femme.’20 This defines her as the other woman, the adulterous third whose triangular intervention disrupts the foursquare symbolic, political, and moral order represented by the emergent modern state and the nuclear family that legitimizes it. But it also makes her the other as woman, woman herself and in general constructed as the personification of alterity itself. Me´de´e thus marks woman’s expulsion from the orthodox social ‘body’ toward the cultural margin of the patriarchal order. Indeed, she serves as the triangulated outsider who enables the culture to define the normative inside essential to its function as a self-regulating ‘body.’ Whether in the aesthetic form the literature of classical antiquity hands down or converted into an item of Near Eastern exotica of the sort that intrigued the contemporary French travellers whom Longino discusses, Me´de´e is in the end nothing more than the oriental witch. Seen in this light, she combines in her own poetic and dramatic person everything that classical France excludes as the fascinating yet destructive binary opposite – if also, and by the same token, as the uncanny familiar or ghostly remnant – of the distinctively ‘French’ historical personage we call ‘the Cartesian subject.’ Me´de´e does seem tailor-made for the part. An alien and a sorceress as well as a woman, she would appear to typify the passionate foreigners whose strange, disordering bodies image the irrational urges that official French culture casts out in constructing the self-determining because selfdisciplined and so self-subjugating figure of the disembodied rational ego. Me´de´e thereby becomes the first in a long line of diabolical female characters – including, in Corneille, Cinna’s E´milie, Rodogune’s Cle´opaˆtre, and Nicome`de’s (1651) Arsinoe¨, and ending with Racine’s great female predators, Hermione, Roxane, Phe`dre, and Athalie – who incarnate the dark impulses that the cultural body politic extrudes in self-defence. She personifies the anarchic powers epitomized by the religious wars of the preceding century, the looming menace of the Ottoman Turk, or the inscrutable female ‘subjectivities’ that at every point threaten to engulf the normative masculine ego. Ready parallels link Me´de´e in particular to period anxieties evinced by contemporary witch trials, the scandal surrounding the alleged diabolical possession of the nuns of Loudun, or the notorious ‘affaire des poisons,’ a panic that ended only with the public execution of the marquise de Brinvilliers on 17 July 1676.21 Yet Me´de´e functions less as Corneille’s other than as his muse. Compare, from this standpoint, her first appearance on stage with Phe`dre’s.

The Witch from Colchis 131

In Racine’s play, a tottering heroine collapses into a chair to lament the weight of the clothes and coiffure she is forced to wear: Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pe`sent! Quelle importune main, en formant tous ces nœuds, A pris soin sur mon front, d’assembler mes cheveux?

(1.2.158–60)

[How these vain ornaments, how these veils oppress me! What importunate hand, in forming these knotted tresses, Has taken such pains to gather these hairs on my brow?]

By the end of the play, Phe`dre will scale the heights of now plangent, now raging jealous passion. On first appearing, however, she offers the very image of abject suffering, the plaything of forces far deeper than anything she can muster against them. The personified subject of tragedy is, moreover, an artefact of tragedy itself. The ‘ornaments,’ ‘veils,’ and ‘knots’ of her dress and the braided tresses on her head double as tokens of the dramatic poem that, in shaping the complexly overdetermined role she plays as mother, daughter, adulteress, and queen, determines not only who but what she is: a fiction endowed by some inscrutable intelligence with full consciousness of its inescapable tragic destiny. All of this draws attention to the ‘importunate hand’ whose hidden art and unknown origin Phe`dre herself stresses. Given the mythological labyrinth that the Medusa-like serpentine curls assembled on her head also symbolize, the identity of this hand, and of the intent that moves it, is open to a wide range of interpretations. Candidates cover everything from the workings of fate to the will of Apollo, god of poetry as well as reason and light, or from the persecutions of Venus ‘toute entie`re a` sa proie attache´e’ [wholly fastened on her prey] (1.2.306) to the all-seeing gaze of the heroine’s father Minos, judge of the souls of the dead. But as Phe`dre’s frantic efforts to escape from Apollonian sunlight alert us, poetry has a special place here; and where there is poetry, there is the poet Racine, following in the track of the same classical authors whose work Corneille’s Me´de´e reshapes. It is nonetheless quintessentially Racinian that the protagonist who voices the mastery of her creator’s art should fall victim to it. Wherever Phe`dre turns in the labyrinth not only of the encompassing action but of her own desires, the path she takes conforms from the first to the course the poem plots for her, leading inexorably to her suicide. By contrast, Corneille’s heroine bursts on stage like a rocket; and what she

132

The Matter of Mind

voices is the awe-inspiring power she wields as a fully autonomous being: Souverains protecteurs des lois de l’Hyme´ne´e, Dieux, garants de la foi que Jason m’a donne´e, Vous qu’il prit a` te´moins d’une immortelle ardeur, Quand par un faux serment il vanquit ma pudeur, Voyez de quel me´pris vous traite son parjure, Et m’aidez a` venger cette commune injure; S’il me peut aujourd’hui chasser impune´ment, Vous eˆtes sans pouvoir, ou sans ressentiment. Et vous, troupe savante en mille barbaries, Filles de l’Ache´ron, Pestes, Larves, Furies, Noires Sœurs, si jamais notre commerce e´troit Sur vous et vos serpents me donna quelque droit, Sortez de vos cachots avec les meˆmes flammes Et les meˆmes tourments dont vous geˆnez les aˆmes. Laissez-les quelque temps reposer dans leurs fers, Pour mieux agir pour moi faites treˆve aux Enfers, Et m’apportez du fond des antres de Me´ge`re La mort de ma rivale et celle de son pe`re, Et si vous ne voulez mal servir mon courroux Quelque chose de pis pour mon perfide e´poux.

(1.3.197–216)

[Sovereign guardians of Hymeneal Laws, Ye Gods, guarantors of the faith Jason plighted to me, You whom he called as witnesses to his immortal ardour When, by a false oath, he overcame my modesty: See with what scorn his perjured word treats you, And help me avenge a common injury. If he can expel me today with impunity, You are bereft of power or bereft of resentment. Daughters of the Acheron, Plagues, Larvae, Furies, Black Sisters, if ever our intimate commerce Has earned me any right over you and your serpents, Arise from your dark cells, bearing with you those same flames And those same torments with which you torture the souls of the dead. Let them rest for a time in their chains; Call a truce in Hell to work more for me, And bring me, from the cavernous depths of Megara,

The Witch from Colchis 133 The deaths of my rival and her father, And if you choose to serve my anger better still, Bring something worse for my perfidious spouse.]

In bringing Me´de´e on stage, Corneille finds his own poetic voice. Like Euripides, and like Racine, but unlike Seneca, Corneille is an indisputable master at integrating soliloquy into the surrounding flow of the action, avoiding the baggy scene-clogging monsters his humanist forebears E´tienne Jodelle, Robert Garnier, or Antoine de Montchrestien affect. As Corneille’s pride in the handling of the dress trick suggests, matters of plotting count for a great deal here. Indeed, the teleological pattern that plotting exhibits is as essential to Corneille’s art as to the work of Racine’s ‘importunate hand.’ Whence Georges Forestier’s hyperbolic contention that other features of Cornelian drama, among them the bombastic rodomontades with which contemporaries from Scude´ry to Molie`re taxed Corneille, are in the end mere ‘broderie,’ ornamental embroidery ancillary to the unfolding plot.22 The fact remains that, if only given the role they play in communicating as well as advancing the plot that motivates them, Corneille’s speeches command attention, displaying a humanist (and so Senecan) taste for rhetorical pyrotechnics savoured largely for their own sake. Me´de´e’s first entry is above all the occasion for a brilliant tirade that takes full advantage of what, reassessing the Senecan legacy of early modern drama, Gordon Braden aptly calls ‘anger’s privilege.’ 23 Me´de´e has just cause for resentment given the sacrifices she has made in foresaking home and native country – sacrifices made all the more irretrievable by the crimes she has committed in betraying her father and killing her brother to effect Jason’s escape from Colchis with the Golden Fleece. This accumulated suffering authorizes a perfect torrent of ireful figures issuing in thunderous periods of noble yet tightly controlled demonstrative verse. Beyond the terrifying colour Corneille gives it in evoking the massing legions of hell, the monologue’s abiding characteristic is the taut structure provided by its rigorously alternating apostrophes and imperatives, nailing the heads of the verses at intervals of no more than one or two lines. Everything about the speech expresses the heroine’s fury; yet everything also bespeaks both her own invincible sense of purpose and Corneille’s concomitant mastery of rhetorical patterns and tropes. However angry she may be, it is impossible to doubt the sheer joy Me´de´e feels in disburdening herself of her anger. Like the wicked queen of the final conflict between good and evil in Disney’s

134

The Matter of Mind

Snow White, launching herself to the full awe-inspiring height of the elemental force she incarnates, Me´de´e rides the waves of implacable hate to the very apex of cosmic rage. Yet, again like Disney’s queen, once she reaches that height, she does not explode and fade but takes shape as the immense spiritual power she embodies in her own right. What makes this possible is less Corneille’s own control as poet than the form that control takes in the magnificently autonomous figure of the witch herself. Me´de´e makes this point in the continuation, when she wonders if her faithless husband has forgotten just who she is: Sachant ce que je puis, ayant vu ce que j’ose, Croit-il que m’offenser ce soit si peu de chose? Quoi! Mon pe`re trahi, les e´le´ments force´s, D’un fre`re dans la mer les membres disperse´s, Lui font-ils pre´sumer mon audace e´puise´e? Lui font-ils pre´sumer que ma puissance use´e, Ma rage contre lui n’ait par ou` s’assouvir, Et que tout mon pouvoir se borne a` le servir? Tu t’abuses, Jason, je suis encor moi-meˆme.

(1.3.229–37)

[Knowing what I can do, having seen what I dare, Does he think that offending me is a trifling matter? What! My father betrayed, the elements forced from their natural course, A brother’s members scattered in the sea: Do these things let him presume my audacity is exhausted? Do they let him presume that, my powers consumed, My rage against him has no means of finding satisfaction And that all my power is directed toward serving him? You deceive yourself, Jason: I remain exactly who I am.]

With Me´de´e’s opening soliloquy, then, Corneille deploys the full power of his vocal art. The glamorous exorbitance of the periods the scope of Me´de´e’s resentment authorizes, what rhetorical tradition calls the ‘Asiatic’ as opposed to the terser ‘Attic’ style, is integral to the claim he makes on posterity. However evil we may take her to be (and, like that of the later Cle´opaˆtre, her evil is indissociable from her glamour), Me´de´e voices the characteristic pulsating energy of Cornelian poetry. But what defines that energy, making it distinctively Cornelian, is less his mastery of than his identification with the witch in all her barbarously ‘Asiatic’ grandeur.

The Witch from Colchis 135

The point is underscored by the anti-poetic voice of the characters with whom Me´de´e does battle, in particular the amorous pair who ironically stand in for a second signature component of Cornelian drama, the pastoral ‘couple e´lu’ [elect couple] true love forms.24 It is already noteworthy that Me´de´e’s entry in 1.3 is immediately preceded by Jason’s scuttling retreat, quitting the stage to avoid an unpleasant public outburst. More remarkable still, however, is the shamelessly bourgeois tone of the scenes he shares with Cre´use, at least until her death in the final act gives her the poetic dignity so conspicuously absent in the rest of the play. The tone is set even before Jason and Cre´use meet onstage. Thus, in the play’s opening scene, Jason responds with breezy (and, as his friend Pollux vainly warns him, singularly obtuse) braggadocio to the anxieties Pollux expresses at learning that he has set Me´de´e aside for another woman. Hearing that Jason intends to take a new wife, Pollux assumes her predecessor must be dead: Pollux : Quoi! Me´dee est donc morte a` ce compte? Jason: Elle vit, Mais un objet nouveau la chasse de mon lit. Pollux: Dieux! Et que fera-t-elle? Jason: Et que fit Hypsipyle Que former dans son cœur un regret inutile, Jeter des cris en l’air, me nommer inconstant? Si bon semble a` Me´de´e, elle en peut faire autant. Je la quitte a` regret, mais je n’ai point d’excuse Contre un pouvoir plus fort qui me donne a` Cre´use.

(1.1.7–14)

[Pollux: What! Am I to understand that Me´de´e is dead? Jason: She lives. But a new love object drives her from my bed. Pollux: Ye Gods! And what will she do? Jason: And what did Hypsipyle do But conceive a useless regret in her heart, Launch cries in the air, call me faithless? If Me´de´e wishes, she can do the same. I leave her with regret, but I have no excuse Faced with a stronger power that gives me to Cre´use.]

More remarkable than Jason’s fatuous underestimation of Me´de´e is his equally fatuous failure to grasp his own tawdry conduct. The point is nicely caught by the way the acknowledgment that ‘je n’ai point d’excuse’

136

The Matter of Mind

[I have no excuse] hangs for a split second at the end of line 13 before extenuating circumstances are adduced in line 14. But Jason goes on to boast of the advantage to which he has turned his legendary sexual prowess. Indeed, his skill as a swordsman in the colloquial sense appears to have obviated the hero’s actual sword. Jason’s boorish tone-deafness is telegraphed by the self-accusing incongruity of the opening couplet’s rhyme: Aussi je ne suis pas de ces amants vulgaires, J’accommode ma flamme au bien de mes affaires, Et sous quelque climat que le sort me jetaˆt, Je serais amoureux par maxime d’E´tat. Nous voulant a` Lemnos rafraıˆchir dans la ville, Qu’eussions-nous fait, Pollux, sans l’amour d’Hypsipyle? Et depuis a` Colchos que fit votre Jason Que cajoler Me´de´e et gaigner la Toison? Alors sans mon amour qu’e´tait votre vaillance? Eu ˆ t-elle du Dragon trompe´ la vigilance? Ce peuple que la terre enfantait tout arme´, Qui de nous l’euˆt de´fait, si Jason n’eu ˆ t aime´? Maintenant qu’un exil m’interdit ma patrie Cre´use est le sujet de mon idolaˆtrie, Et que pouvais-je mieux que lui faire la Cour, Et relever mon sort sur les ailes d’Amour?

(1.1.25–40)

[Nor am I one of those vulgar lovers; I adjust love’s flame to the needs of my affairs, And under whatever climate fate has led me, The maxims of State have shaped my love. Hoping, in Lemnos, to find refreshment in the city, What would we have done, Pollux, without Hypsipyle’s love? And what did your Jason do once we reached Colchis But cajole Me´de´e and win the Golden Fleece? What then, without my love, could your valour have achieved? Could it have eluded the Dragon’s vigilance? And that armed throng that sprang from the womb of the earth – Who among us could have defeated it had Jason not been in love? Now that exile forbids me my native home, Cre´use is the theme of my idolatry, And how could I do better than to pay her court And lift up my fortunes on the wings of Love?]

The Witch from Colchis 137

Whatever else this may be, it is emphatically not the language of tragedy. On the contrary, the Jason of the sce`ne d’exposition resembles no one so much as the cynical young arriviste Clindor of L’Illusion comique. Yet even Clindor is spared the odium of articulating the seedy motives behind the opportunistic exploitation of his good looks, which wins him not only Isabelle’s love but, as a means to that end, the favours of Isabelle’s servant Lyse. In fact, Lyse spells those motives out for him in a speech in which the comic maid, plotting revenge both for Clindor’s faithlessness and for the insult to her intelligence in presuming she cannot see through him, strikes the note of heroic ressentiment. Thus, in a moment of weakness in which the ‘holy ardour’ of love prompts her to justify the ‘perfidious one’ who, toying with her affections, dared to esteem her honour ‘an easy conquest’ (3.6.827, 819, 821), Lyse invokes the worldly compulsion of penury: Toutefois qu’as-tu fait qui t’en rende coupable? Pour chercher sa fortune est-on si punissable? Tu m’aimes, mais le bien te fait eˆtre inconstant: Au sie`cle ou` nous vivons qui n’en ferait autant? Oublions les projets de sa flamme maudite, Et laissons-le jouir du bonheur qu’il me´rite.

(3.6.837–42)

[And yet what have you done that makes you guilty? Ought one to be punished for seeking one’s fortune? You love me, but gain makes you faithless: Who, in an age like ours, would not do the same? Let us forget the schemes to which his accursed ardour led him, And let him enjoy the happiness he deserves.]

The real surprise, however, is the way the vulgarity from which Jason deludedly thinks himself exempt carries over into his love scene with Cre´use. The love scene is already compromised by the business Corneille makes it do for the sake of dramatic verisimilitude: this is where he plants the plot invention the examen summarizes, the solution of the problem of transmitting the poisoned robe without sacrifice of psychological plausibility. The fact remains that doing business is a feature of the ethos that Corneille’s characters evince even when they talk of love. The love scene opens with a paltry exchange of couplets in which Jason complains of the ‘sufferings’ he endured while Cre´use was at her ‘devotions’ and Cre´use, in reply, observes that she had no prayers to make

138

The Matter of Mind

since, in granting her his love, the gods have already given her the one thing she wanted (1.2.173–6). The speakers then cut to the chase: Jason: Et moi puis-je espe´rer l’effet d’une prie`re Que ma flamme tiendrait a` faveur singulie`re? Au nom de notre amour sauvez deux jeunes fruits, Que d’un premier Hymen la couche m’a produits, Employez-vous pour eux, faites envers un pe`re Qu’ils ne soient point compris en l’exil de leur me`re. C’est lui seul qui bannit ces petits malheureux, Puisque dans les traite´s il n’est point parle´ d’eux. Cre´use : J’avais de´ja` pitie´ de leur tendre innocence, Et vous y servirai de toute ma puissance, Pourvu qu’a` votre tour vous m’accordiez un point Que jusques a` tantoˆt je ne vous dirai point. Jason: Dites, et quel qu’il soit, que ma Reine en dispose. Cre´use : Si je puis sur mon pe`re obtenir quelque chose Vous le saurez apre`s, je ne veux rien pour rien.

(1.2.177–91)

[ Jason: And may I hope to be granted a prayer, A hope whose fulfilment my loving heart would take for a signal favour? In the name of our love, save two young fruits That the bed of a first Marriage has produced for me. Busy yourself on their behalf; secure from your father Their exemption from the exile decreed for their mother. He alone banishes these unhappy children, Since none of the treaties mention them. Cre´use : I had already taken pity on their tender innocence, And I will serve you in this with all my might, Provided that you in turn grant me a point That I will not name until later. Jason: Speak, and whatever it may be, my Queen shall possess it. Cre´use : If I succeed in obtaining something from my father, You will learn of it hereafter: I want nothing for nothing.]

In keeping with the unseemly marchandage that the lovers transact, not a syllable of the dialogue escapes the taint of self-interest. Even Cre´use’s coquettish gesture of withholding her own request until she has secured Jason’s from her father smacks of shared greed and smug self-

The Witch from Colchis 139

satisfaction (‘je ne veux rien pour rien’). No matter how horrific its fruit, Me´de´e’s heroic sense of self-worth looks pure by comparison; and it is just in this that we discern how nearly she approaches the source of her author’s unique poetic gift. But there are deeper reasons for seeing the witch from Colchis as Corneille’s muse. In its very excessiveness, her single-minded pursuit of revenge anticipates another pattern of Cornelian drama: the frequency with which women not only drive but ‘bind’ (nouer) his plots, giving them their characteristic thrust and design.25 Where the Racine of Phe`dre maps his heroine’s every move in order to advance the action that kills her, the Corneille of Me´de´e surrenders the plot to the heroine herself, who literally acts in his place, giving birth in the process to his distinctive mode of dramatic poetry. Me´de´e’s exercise of poetic power is an uncanny proleptic rehearsal of the equally uncanny gesture by which Chime`ne hijacks the action of Le Cid with her at once masterly and masterful speech to the king in 2.7 (2.8 in the 1660 edition and thereafter). The figural heart of Chime`ne’s speech is the graphic depiction of her father’s corpse that gives rise to the macabre image of the wound in her father’s side speaking in the form of her own mouth: Il ne me parla point mais pour mieux m’e´mouvoir, Son sang sur la poussie`re e´crivait mon devoir, Ou plutoˆt sa valeur, en cet e´tat re´duite, Me parlait par sa plaie et haˆtait ma poursuite; Et, pour se faire entendre au plus juste des Rois, Par cette triste bouche elle empruntait ma voix.

(2.7.685–90)26

[He did not speak to me, but, the better to move me, His blood spelled out my duty in the dust, Or rather his valour, reduced to this state, Spoke to me through his wound and bade me hasten my pursuit: And, to make itself heard by the most just of Kings, Through this sad mouth it borrowed my voice.]

Still, Chime`ne does more than set her rhetorical sights on the king, whom she means to bend to the vengeful purpose she publicly espouses in this scene. She also appropriates the paternal honour she defends, converting the crude egotism behind the insult that led to his duel with her lover into the sublimity of filial self-sacrifice that makes her a true

140

The Matter of Mind

heroine. In the process, she gains ascendancy over her lover as well. The crux of the play is of course the deliciously improbable love scene in which Rodrigue and Chime`ne appear to fuse in the mirror-like exchange of high-minded purposes that pits them against each other as deadly enemies. In explaining his motives for killing her father, Rodrigue concludes with a paradox that contains the logic of the plot as a whole: Re´duit a` te de´plaire ou souffrir un affront, J’ai retenu ma main, j’ai cru mon bras trop prompt; Je me suis accuse´ de trop de violence: Et ta beaute´ sans doute emportait la balance, Si je n’eusse oppose´ contre tous tes appas Qu’un homme sans honneur ne te me´ritait pas; Qu’apre`s m’avoir che´ri quand je vivais sans blaˆme, Qui m’aima ge´ne´reux me haı¨rait infaˆme, Qu’e´couter ton amour, obe´ir a` sa voix, C’e´tait m’en rendre indigne et diffamer ton choix.

(3.4.893–902)

[Reduced to displeasing you or suffering an affront, I stayed my hand, thought my arm too eager; I accused myself of excessive violence: And your beauty would no doubt have tipped the scales Had I not weighed against all of your charms That a man without honour did not deserve you; That, having cherished me while I lived without blame, She who loved my greatness of soul would hate my infamy; That to heed your love, to obey its voice, Would make me unworthy and defame your choice.]

Chime`ne gives it right back to him in a speech whose concluding chiasmus perfectly captures the mirror structure of the entire episode: ‘Tu t’es, en m’offensant, montre´ digne de moi, / Je me dois par ta mort montrer digne de toi’ [You have, in offending me, shown yourself worthy of me. / I must, by your death, show myself worthy of you] (3.4.941–2). It is already striking that the woman gets the last word, trumping Rodrigue’s self-sacrifice with her greater one. Yet deeper dissymmetries hide beneath the supreme symmetry visible at the surface. A first source of imbalance is the fact that, where Chime`ne responds to the example of Rodrigue’s action and the honourable intent that lies behind it, Rodrigue remains fixated on her physical beauty. Though he also looks to her mind

The Witch from Colchis 141

since, if he should be dishonoured, he would no longer merit her love, it is her body he has most directly in view. Moreover, unlike Rodrigue, who has in a sense now completed his task, Chime`ne’s still lies before her. The point comes home a few lines later in the shared hemistich in which an orgasmic shout of triumph from Rodrigue is answered by a cry of woe from Chime`ne: ˆ miracle d’amour! Mais comble de mise`res’ [O miracle of love! But ‘O depth of wretchedness] (3.4.995). The effect is subtly redoubled in all ediˆ ,’ replacing Chime`ne’s ‘Mais,’ protions after 1648, where the interjection ‘O duces a parallelism that heightens the sense of estrangement by snapping the dialogic link the conjunction supplies: rather than respond to Rodrigue’s delighted outcry by drawing his attention to how differently things seem to her, Chime`ne voices a private sentiment as solipsistically impervious to influence as her lover’s. But even in the original text, the instant at which the two come face to face in dialogue for the first time is also the instant at which they turn away from each other, he toward his heroic destiny as ‘Le Cid,’ she toward the mutinous silence of the play’s last scene. A second, more fundamental imbalance is inscribed in the very terms that frame Chime`ne’s decisive chiasmus. The criss-cross symmetry described by the play of reflexive and objective pronouns at the beginnings and ends of the two lines of her couplet intensifies the dissymmetry discernible at the level of the lovers’ motives. Though the ‘Je me dois’ that begins Chime`ne’s second verse seems to mirror the ‘Tu t’es’ of the first, there is this crucial difference. ‘Tu t’es’ is tied directly to the core verbal construction (se montrer digne), with the result that the reflexive form used for Rodrigue speaks unproblematically to the fact that he has already proved his worthiness. In Chime`ne’s case, by contrast, the reflexive form is broken by the intervening auxiliary verb, devoir, which bespeaks the delay (indeed, the proto-Derridean deferral or diffe´rance) that Chime`ne will impose on everyone even beyond the technical end of the play and which subtly redirects the force of her verbal reflexion.27 As seventeenth-century usage demands, the verbal construction is interrupted by the reflexive pronoun’s position before the auxiliary verb, yielding the form ‘Je me dois montrer’ in place of the disambiguating modern syntax, ‘Je dois me montrer.’ This produces an e´quivoque that exploits precisely the ambiguity modern usage eliminates. The worthiness that, in concert with Rodrigue, she owes her lover as a condition of their union can also be read as a self-regarding entitlement that puts Chime`ne in direct opposition to lover and union alike. The equivocal force of her determination becomes more explicit with the revision of a remark she makes to her confidante Elvire in the preceding scene. In the original version, Chime`ne explains her resolve

142

The Matter of Mind

to seek Rodrigue’s death despite her love for him by observing that ‘Je sais que je suis fille, et que mon pe`re est mort’ [I know that I am a daughter and that my father is dead] (3.3.834). This apparently pious sentiment is then changed in 1660 to yield a far more ambiguous claim: ‘Je sais ce que je suis, et que mon pe`re est mort’ [I know what I am and that my father is dead] (3.4.824). Yet even the original can be shown to bear as oppositional a construction as her later ‘Je me dois’ can. The pronoun is dative and accusative in one. What looks like apposition designed to convey the meaning filial piety prescribes – I know what I am, the daughter of my dead father – can be read as saying something quite different: I know what I am, a woman who, as a daughter, owes it to herself to prove her worth by avenging her father’s murder in her lover’s blood. Seen this way, both father and lover become means to an end; and that end is neither more nor less than what Chime`ne deserves by virtue of the autonomous identity she wills for herself independently of both the life her father gave and the beauty her lover craves.28 In her more genteel if no less steely way, Chime`ne is thus every bit the monster of egotism as the expressly exotic and infernal Me´de´e. This explains the charges of sexual licence that Corneille’s adversaries levelled at her during the notorious public quarrel the play provoked.29 But if egotism drives both heroines, it is because both bespeak the deep sisterhood thanks to which Corneille not only identifies his power as a dramatist with his leading ladies but delegates it to them throughout his career. In 1.4, Me´de´e’s suivante Ne´rine tries to reason with her mistress about the best course to follow in the perilous situation in which she stands: Ne´rine: Forcez l’aveuglement dont vous eˆtes se´duite Pour voir en quel e´tat le sort vous a re´duite, Votre pays vous hait, votre e´poux est sans foi. Dans un si grand revers que vous reste-t-il? Me´de´e: Moi. (1.4.313–16) [Ne´rine: Shake off the blindness that misleads you So that you may see to what state destiny has reduced you. Your country hates you; your husband is without faith. Given so great a reversal, what remains to you? Me´de´e: Me.]

Me´de´e’s peremptory monosyllable voices everything that makes her at once frightening and admirable. We nonetheless mistake its force if we fail

The Witch from Colchis 143

to grasp how far she speaks here for all her kind, introducing the long line of tragic divas who follow in her footsteps. The stunning verbal gesture by which she asserts her absolute command over the action of the play foreshadows the role Chime`ne arrogates to herself: a role, moreover, that extends beyond the action of Le Cid into the future. Corneille’s tragicomedy begins with the happy ending of a romantic comedy in which the tyrannical father yields in the de´nouement to his meritorious daughter’s wishes by granting her the hand of the man she wants to marry.30 It now ends with the beginning of the epic that converts her lover into the national hero to whom she gives birth precisely because, holding fast to the ideal she sets herself, she rejects the happiness readily at hand. But this unlooked-for empowerment is just as true of Lyse in L’Illusion comique, of Sabine in Horace, of E´milie in Cinna, of Cle´opaˆtre in Rodogune, of Pauline in Polyeucte (1643), of Corne´lie in La Mort de Pompe´e (1644), or of Honorie in Attila. Lyse seizes direct control of the plot: the fate of Clindor, of Isabelle, and, beyond them, of Clindor’s father Pridamant entirely hangs on the course she alone gives the action in contriving both the duel that leads to Clindor’s imprisonment for murder and his escape. In seeking revenge for her murdered father, E´milie unleashes dark energies that, in convulsing the state of affairs in which the action begins, bring on a redemptive transformation that could not otherwise have been achieved; and Corne´lie’s unremitting demand that just honour be paid her beheaded husband forces Caesar to take a harder line with Ptolome´e’s Egypt than his own political interest requires. Meanwhile, Sabine, Pauline, and Honorie take rhetorical command over the de´nouement to give the action a moral valence no one else could conceive. Whatever the modality, Corneille’s women consistently perform a creative part beyond the reach of the males with whom they share the stage. Far from being Corneille’s other, then, Me´de´e personifies his poetic gift, and more specifically the transcendent principle of creative Cornelian will. If Me´de´e is the Cornelian other, it is because, as the prosopopoeia of the peculiar power and glamour Corneille claims as his own, she images the position he programmatically stakes out for himself as the other of the nascent classical order that conventional wisdom takes him to embody. On first appearing on stage in Rodogune, the operatically grandiose Cle´opaˆtre opens a positive aria of hate with these chilling words: Serments fallacieux, salutaire contrainte, Que m’imposa la force, et qu’accepta ma crainte, Heureux de´guisements d’un immortel courroux, Vains fantoˆmes d’E´tat, e´vanouissez-vous.

144

The Matter of Mind

Si d’un pe´ril pressant la terreur vous fit naıˆtre, Avec ce pe´ril meˆme il vous faut disparaıˆtre, Semblables a` ces vœux dans l’orage forme´s, Qu’efface un prompt oubli, quand les flots sont calme´s. Et vous qu’avec tant d’art cette feinte a voile´e, Recours des impuissants, haine dissimule´e, Digne vertu des Rois, noble secret de Cour, E´clatez, il est temps, et voici notre jour. Montrons-nous toutes deux, non plus comme Sujettes, Mais telle que je suis et telle que vous eˆtes.

(2.1.395–408)

[Fallacious oaths, salutary self-constraint, Imposed on me by force and embraced through fear, Happy disguises donned by deathless anger, Vain phantoms of State, now vanish. If terror of a pressing peril gave you birth, It is time for you to disappear with this same peril, Comparable to vows formed during a storm at sea Erased by a prompt forgetting once the waves have calmed. And you that with such art this feint has veiled, Resort of the impotent, dissimulated hate, Worthy virtue of Kings, noble secret of Court, Break forth, it is time; our day has dawned. Let us both reveal ourselves, no longer as Subjects, But as I truly am, and as you truly are.]

This reprises the speech with which Me´de´e makes her first entry in the play that inaugurates the train of tragic poems both characters typify. But the verbal act with which, like Me´de´e before her, Cle´opaˆtre reminds us who she is by tearing off the politic mask that her public persona demands also reprises the gesture of unmasking Corneille himself performs in the ‘Excuse a` Ariste.’ Drunk with the spectacular success of Le Cid, a play so popular that some of the more distinguished spectators crowding in to see it had to be seated onstage (1:1449–50), Corneille published an epistle in which he declines to compose verses to be set to music on the grounds that to do so would cheapen his properly heroic inspiration: N’y pensez plus, Ariste, une telle injustice Exposerait ma Muse a` son plus grand supplice.

The Witch from Colchis 145 Laissez-la toujours libre agir suivant son choix, Ce´der a` son caprice, et s’en faire des lois.

(101–4)

[Think no more of it, Ariste; such an injustice Would expose my Muse to her greatest torment. Leave her forever free to act as she wills; Let her yield to her caprice and take it for a law.]

Needless to say, the muse of whose self-legislating ‘caprice’ he boasts here is finally his own genius: as he puts it earlier in the poem, ‘Je ne dois qu’a` moi seul toute ma Renomme´e’ [I owe all of my Renown to myself alone] (50). In haughtily declaring his absolute creative autonomy, Corneille declares his independence of the system of influence and patronage centred on the great Cardinal Richelieu to whom lesser rivals remained subservient and to whom he himself owed his own preferment as a leading poet of the realm. He thereby claims a towering originality in whose lonely light no one is remotely like him. If Corneille is himself the other that the emergent official culture of French classicism sets out to extrude through the agency of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise, a brand-new state apparatus largely created for just this sort of task, it is because, in writing speeches for the other, penned at the deliberate fringes of conceivable poetic discourse, he writes as the other, in a voice whose unapproachable authority springs precisely from its imperious deviation from all period norms. This, looping the loop, is just what Racine heard him say, and why he responded as he did. French tragedy begins with Me´de´e only to die with Phe`dre because it proves to have been the monument to limitless pride Corneille made of it from the start. This is not, however, the merely personal matter subsequent developments made it look like. In the ‘quarrel of Le Cid’ the vainglorious ‘Excuse a` Ariste’ helped precipitate, Corneille’s adversaries, Scude´ry, Mairet, Chapelain, and their crafty instigator, Richelieu, move seamlessly from critical analysis of the play itself to assaults on the perceived immorality of its action, and from there to attacks on its author’s character. The whole debate rapidly degenerated into an exchange of insults focused on participants’ schooling, taste, and social background, each side accusing the other of a boorish provinciality that disqualified it from judging the matters in dispute.31 Similarly, in the renewed ‘quarrel of the morality of theatre’ licensed by Tartuffe’s magnificently ill-considered satire of the devout party at court, denunciation of the

146

The Matter of Mind

amorality of the stage goes hand in hand with personal invective portraying Molie`re himself as a ‘devil incarnate,’ the enemy of God as well as of bonnes mœurs.32 Or again, in the ‘affaire des Imaginaires,’ Nicole’s efforts to avoid associating Racine directly with his charge that dramatic poets poison the wells of public morality failed to prevent Racine from taking the accusation personally and replying in kind. By comparing Nicole’s epistles on theatre to Pascal’s Lettres provinciales, Racine suggests not only how poorly they measure up to Pascal’s standard but also the risibly narcissistic motive behind their composition: Nicole’s desire to usurp Pascal’s rightful place as the pre-eminent literary exponent of the Jansenist viewpoint.33 The irresistible temptation to personalize nonetheless distorts the phenomenon that encourages it, the Foucaldian ‘author function’ latent in the structure Corneille discovers as the topological foundation of his art. In trying to put his finger on the key to Corneille’s unprecedented stature in French literary history, Fumaroli describes him as the ‘fils de son œuvre,’ not only the source or cause but the effect of his work.34 In one sense, Fumaroli seconds the sociological case Alain Viala makes concerning the emergence of professional writers as a distinct social category.35 Thanks to the financial opportunities theatre in particular offered as an increasingly popular art addressed to an ever wider literate public, Corneille became a self-made man, at once enriched and socially empowered by his growing fame. But Fumaroli’s target is less Corneille the empirical individual than ‘Corneille,’ monumental hero of the special mode of literary history he helped create. The name functions here as a catachresis, an abuse of words justified by the lack of a proper term for the thing we want to describe. In the classic example of a ‘table leg,’ the false analogy between a piece of furniture and an animate being supplies a word for which we have no ready alternative. With the invention of poetic genius, the author’s name operates as a trope of this kind. As a proper name, ‘Corneille’ denotes the author in person, as also, by metonymic association, the body of works whose empirical agent he is. But ‘Corneille’ above all fingers an elusive, quasi-transcendental entity that resembles the ‘esprit de finesse’ Pascal opposes to worldly realism in the fragments on the ‘raison des effets.’36 Genius proves irreducible to either author or work if only because it inhabits the circular relation by which each sends us back to the other as both ‘reason’ and ‘effect.’ What makes Corneille ‘Corneille’ is the tragic drama that bears his name. Yet what makes that drama the work of genius that demands his name is an inspired

The Witch from Colchis 147

panoptical mind for which no other name will serve. Like the witch from Colchis who gives her own catachrestic name to Corneille’s first tragedy, the poet of genius is a daimonic other, the mediating figure of flight imaged by Me´de´e’s climactic departure for Athens, abandoning the limited world of ordinary feeling, taste, and morals she transgresses. Yet, as Racine reminds us in identifying the Athens to which Me´de´e escapes with the Paris of Phe`dre’s premiere, the elsewhere to which she flies is the here and now of the culture Corneille changed forever. It is important, however, that, though it looks something like a transcendental function of the form in which Corneille found it, the figure of the modern dramatic poet of genius remains embedded in the culture it changes, and so in the world of collective practical experience from which, like the Cartesian ego or the Poussinian sujet-peintre, it appears to stand aloof. As Corneille’s adversaries in the querelle du Cid went out of their way to remind him, the lonely autonomy of which the ‘Excuse a` Ariste’ boasts is strictly relative. Even the most towering genius has to be justified by its fruits, the dramatic poems on which Corneille staked a claim that is only as good as the evidence adduced to support it. Genius must also secure corroborative recognition not only on the part of the posterity to which the monumental The´aˆtre was addressed but among the poet’s immediate contemporaries, who were by no means universally inclined to credit his estimation of his own powers. Above all, genius must submit to an experimental embodiment without which it would amount to nothing at all. This is just what Corneille does in identifying his gifts with women, those who, more than anyone other than the labouring poor, bore the burden of embodiment in the culture he set out to transform. One consequence of this identification is to underscore what looks like an ironic outgrowth of the dualism to which what we can only call Corneille’s feminism seems to have been opposed. As Erica Harth pointed out some time ago, women numbered prominently among Descartes’s most fervent early readers. The reason for this apparent paradox is obvious. In divorcing mind from its physical container, dualism makes gender irrelevant to powers of thought and will in principle common to all human beings, regardless of sex. Thus, long before Franc¸ois Poulain de la Barre’s formal, expressly Cartesian pronouncement on the issue in De l’E´galite´ des deux sexes (1673), carte´siennes like Anne de la Vigne, Descartes’s niece Catherine, or Descartes’s probing correspondent, Elisabeth of Bohemia, were drawn to the philosopher’s work because its key doctrine liberated them from the silence to which their physical

148

The Matter of Mind

envelopes were taken to condemn them.37 Yet, as Harth goes on to note, a pervasive theme of the carte´siennes’s response to Cartesian thought was not only to embrace the intellectual emancipation dualism granted but to interrogate the assumptions on which it was based. Their endorsement of dualism was accordingly tempered by a friendly critique grounded in what direct feminine experience enabled them to grasp far better than Descartes: that the body in fact conditions thought as well as experience, and that the different experiences different bodies make possible teach moral and epistemological as well as physiological lessons that Descartes’s own, as it were pre-critical version of dualism distorts. The result in Descartes himself is the far more subtle depiction of the relation between mind and body explored in the late Passions de l’aˆme (1649), a book deeply shaped by its origins in the author’s correspondence with the Princess Elisabeth.38 It is not just that, under Elisabeth’s patient and courteous yet relentlessly searching cross-questioning, Descartes was induced to refine his theory of the brain events by which the mind translates physical stimuli into the conscious perceptions and voluntary commands that distinguish genuine action from the blind automatisms of physical passion. From this standpoint, the romantic novels of Madeleine de Scude´ry – whose salon counted several carte´siennes among its habitue´s – can be seen as pursuing precisely the line of empowering because unapologetically embodied resistance we meet in Corneille’s female leads. Exactly as in Cornelian tragedy, both carte´siennes and their novelist sisters drew inspiration from the gendered bodies that, in marginalizing them, granted the Archimedean point of leverage needed to shift the world from place. Which is why perhaps the greatest Cornelian heroine is not in fact Cornelian at all, but rather the ‘inimitable’ eponym of Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette’s Princesse de Cle`ves (1678): a character whose triumph over physical passion for the man she desires, body and soul, awards her a moral worth whose measure is the at once self-abnegating and self-inventive obscurity to which she retreats as the novel ends.39 Corneille’s career as a tragic poet begins with Me´de´e precisely because she is the great antagonist of both the tradition and the age: a figure of passion and transgression, of furious anger and revolt, whose prideful ferocity takes the measure of the historical order to which she set her face by setting her face against it. Like Me´de´e herself invoking the legions of hell, Corneille channels powers of destruction as well as creation whose sources lie far beyond the frontiers of demotic

The Witch from Colchis 149

experience. Yet the result is not only genius in general, the ideal to which, in Corneille’s wake, all subsequent writers aspire; it is Corneille’s own private genius, unique and unmistakable. Corneille’s great gift as a poet is, in the end, the gift of defiant ambition he makes to his successors. Yet it is of the essence of that ambition not only to express but to seize upon the empirical person who is its slave as well as possessor. In this sense, the abusive contemporary tendency to personalize matters of authorship is as much a structural function of the topology of dramatic mimesis as the authorial figure on which it fastens. And is this not in fact the lesson of the quarrel of Le Cid ? The structural features of the art that enabled Corneille to define himself as its proprietary genius also targeted him for personal attack – and not least because, in encouraging him to adduce the renown the ‘Excuse a` Ariste’ flaunts to ‘moi seul,’ he guarantees the resentment of the swarms of mini-moi’s he taught to emulate his achievement. Even genius, then, is a way of giving oneself up to the world as the experimental sacrifice our inescapable place in the world demands.

4 Seeing Is Believing: Image and Imaginaire in Molie`re’s Sganarelle

Self-deception […] is a homage fantasy pays to the sense of reality. – Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness

If Pierre Corneille invented the paradigm of French literary grandeur, his younger contemporary Jean-Baptiste Poquelin parodied it by turning the monumental Cornelian author into the modern public celebrity.1 As we have seen, a hallmark of Cornelian tragedy is the way it transformed the poe`te a` gages, the paid hack who earned a living churning out scripts for hungry theatre companies, into the majestic figure of inimitable tragic genius. What defines genius is a sovereign effort of private panoptical mind sensed as a looming offstage presence pulling the strings that make characters act and talk with seemingly autonomous spontaneity. The poet becomes a demiurge, a godlike maker of worlds. Nor is the dramatist’s power limited to what happens onstage. As Jean de La Bruye`re puts it, in creating the illusion of self-engendering dramatic action, Corneille in particular subjects the audience to his overmastering vision of heroic nobility.2 The public is in fact all the more helplessly in thrall to the dramatic illusion the poet creates in that it misidentifies the illusion’s nature and source, attributing to the action itself a suspension of disbelief that is in reality an effect of the poet’s well-concealed yet omnipresent will. In Molie`re, on the other hand, we get a comic poet who never strays far from view. It is not just that, unlike Corneille or his later fre`re ennemi Jean Racine, Molie`re was an actor and director as well as a dramatist. He was also determined to make a public spectacle of himself, engaging his audience directly in his own person by mimicking its members right

Seeing Is Believing

151

on stage as the explicit butt of his satiric art.3 As Molie`re himself argues in a passage from the Critique de l’E´cole des femmes (1663) to which we will return in a moment, this kind of direct personal exchange with the audience was due in part to comedy’s underlying generic mission. The whole business of the art is to paint d’apre`s nature, portraying the world as it is rather than as the expression of heroic fantasies about how it could or ought to be. But another source of Molie`re’s direct personal engagement with the audience was his notorious exhibitionism, a compulsion to put himself squarely in the public eye. Corneille’s adversaries in the quarrel of Le Cid (1637) countered his hubristic ambitions by trying to cut him down to size. The constant theme of their attacks was thus everything wrong with him as a person. The ham-fisted irregularities of his plots, the plagiarizing of other poets, the moral duplicities reflected in the behaviour of his model heroine Chime`ne, the infernal pride evinced by the boastful ‘Excuse a` Ariste’ and ironically deflated by the inexpungeable taint of his provincial origins in Rouen – all of these allegations fingered Corneille’s deficiencies as a man as well as a poet.4 Yet however violent the abuse to which Corneille was exposed, his status as a tragedian enforced a certain decorum trimmed to fit the august nature of the persona he forged. Molie`re’s enemies, by contrast, went beyond general character flaws straight to the details of his seamy private life. Typical in this regard was the suggestion that, if so many of Molie`re’s comedies turned on the follies of jealous husbands, the reason was that he had ample cause for jealousy in his marriage to Armande Be´jart, a woman twenty years his junior rumoured to have been his own daughter, conceived out of wedlock with his theatrical partner, Madeleine Be´jart.5 Molie`re rebutted these charges, giving as good as he got. When the cabale des de´vots at court accused him of diabolical iniquity, he returned the favour in Tartuffe (1664–9) and Dom Juan (1665) by accusing them of hypocrisy; and when Edme´ Boursault, turning the tables on Molie`re in a satire symptomatically entitled Le Portrait du peintre (1663), not only hinted at his rival’s marital misfortunes but alleged that he stole his plots from other poets, Molie`re retaliated by imitating Boursault’s stammer in L’Impromptu de Versailles (1663), a mockery all the more cruel for being performed onstage at court.6 But what made all of the participants fair game for this sort of treatment was not simply comedy’s status as a ‘low’ literary genre but the in-your-face energy of Molie`re’s own appetite for public attention. As we noted in the preceding chapter, this kind of personal invective should not obscure the quasi-transcendental modality of

152

The Matter of Mind

the Foucaldian ‘author function’ Corneille did so much to create. The fact remains that this same function also made this sort of personalization possible. If it was Corneille’s genius to invent the form, taking care the while to exploit its commercial applications even as he voiced superb disdain for his patronage-seeking rivals, Molie`re realized the potential for public notoriety it engendered, converting noble Cornelian fame into a gratifying as well as lucrative place in the limelight. There is, however, another side to this transformation. Molie´resque comedy constitutes a kind of public experiment. One objective of this experiment was to remind us that the sort of transcendence Corneille claims is a reflex of its own concrete conditions in the immanent world of socio-economic embodiment the tragic poet purported to scorn. In putting Cornelian hubris to an empirical test, the reminder underscored the inescapable primacy of embodiment itself. The often tragic potential of comic embodiment is in fact a central thread of all of Molie`re’s plays, making him an, in every sense, experimental author. It has been said that, in creating the come´die de caracte`re, a comedy of manners keyed to the study of comic character types, Molie`re created the modern situation comedy, whose staple is a disruptive ide´e fixe the unfolding plot explodes in order to restore the sane normality of everyday life.7 Less obvious, though no less important, is that, at its root, the Molie´resque ide´e fixe is an Aristotelian virtue run amok, deserting the juste milieu of the golden mean by embracing one or the other of its two complementary modes of excess.8 The miserliness of L’Avare (1668), for example, is common-sense moderation and frugality gone overboard, just as hypocrisy in Tartuffe is the dark underside of the dissimulation enjoined by politic prudence or the misanthropy of Le Misanthrope (1666) sincerity with an axe to grind.9 Nor is there anything intrinsically disreputable in the social or ethical ambitions fuelling the behaviour of the female novel readers or upwardly mobile bourgeois satirized in Les Pre´cieuses ridicules (1659), George Dandin (1668), or Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).10 The true point the comedies make is twofold. In the first place, to take a meaningful place in the dimension of everyday life, the virtues and ambitions that prompt characters’ flaws must be realized, and as the resulting flaws suffice to indicate, the process of realization is fraught with peril. Not only is the world as a rule inhospitable to virtue and ambition alike; our motives in pursuing them are never as clear or pure as we would like to imagine. However, the experimental critique of virtue undertaken in this way leads less to a restoration of normality than to a

Seeing Is Believing

153

deeper critique of normality itself. Whence the scorpionlike sting in Molie`re’s satiric tail: the common-sense realism that the comic catastrophes of his plots appear to extol is almost invariably shown to be the real culprit. If a character’s ide´e fixe inexorably leads to comic discomfiture and defeat, it is because there is something fundamentally amiss with the world at large. The true task of Molie´resque comedy is the experimental dissection of experience itself, revealing what makes it as hurtful as well as funny as his plays show it to be, and what sort of creatures we are to have given the world the shape comedy brings to light. This was seen even at the time to pose a direct challenge to the official order of French classicism. As we have repeatedly found throughout this book, the Cartesian ideal of disembodied rationality that is supposed to have dominated the major representatives of classical French culture was never as uniformly victorious as period proponents or latter-day antagonists have a common stake in asserting. Classicism was in fact widely resisted in its own day, provoking violent controversies that spanned the age. The vicious quarrel surrounding Le Cid is only one example, equalled if not surpassed in intensity by the Jansenist debates highlighted in Blaise Pascal’s ferocious anti-Jesuit Provinciales (1656–7), the virulent anti-theatrical polemics in which both the Molie`re of Tartuffe and the Racine of the ‘affaire des Imaginaires’ (1666–7) were embroiled, or the quarrel of ancients and moderns ignited by Charles Perrault’s Sie`cle de Louis le Grand in 1687. Precisely because classical dualism and the sense of rational self-discipline it enjoined formed an ideal more than a settled system, their key doctrines raised difficulties that consistently defied them. Whatever classical theory might ordain, classical practice engendered dilemmas that were never overcome. And nowhere was this self-defeat more incorrigibly evident than in theatre. In accordance with the Aristotelian axiom of mimesis, demanding that drama be envisaged as the imitation of an action unmediated by epic or historical narration, French classicism defines theatre as ‘representation.’ This idea conditions the major principles of seventeenthcentury dramaturgy, and in particular the doctrine of the unities. When the abbe´ d’Aubignac declares in the Pratique du the´aˆtre (1657) that the dramatic poet’s presiding aim must be to ‘travailler sur l’Action en tant que repre´sente´e’ [elaborate the action as represented],11 he has in mind the ontological equivalence of theatrical performance and the events it portrays. In requiring that the plot unfold within the limits of a single natural day, that it be confined to a single, clearly identified place, and that it possess a single dramatic focus displaying rigorous

154

The Matter of Mind

logical connection in every part, the unities fuse the space-time of events with that of their enactment in the playhouse.12 The principle of representation further explains why theatre is systematically described as a kind of painting. The analogy with painting also reflects the aesthetics of the Sister Arts: the doctrine ut pictura poesis [as in painting, so in poetry] distilled in the Simonidean watchword, poesia tacens, pictura loquens [painting is mute poetry, poetry a talking picture].13 Presenting dramatic actors declaiming verse against painted backdrops modelled on the perspective illusions of pictorial art, theatre is the talking picture par excellence – an identification seconded from painting’s side by the art theorist and connoisseur Roger de Piles’s injunction that painters conceive of their compositions as forming ‘une Scene ou` chaque figure joue¨ son Role’ [a stage on which each figure plays its role].14 But ut pictura merely codifies a pictorial force inherent to theatrical mimesis. In the Critique de l’E´cole des femmes, a one-act play in the form of a salon conversation rebutting charges of impropriety levelled at Molie`re’s earlier come´die de caracte`re, the core of Molie`re’s defence is that what his critics call indecency is in fact fidelity. Through the persuasive medium of dramatic imitation, comedy ‘mirrors’ the vices and foibles of the age, holding them up to public ridicule in order to break their tenacious grip. What offends the poet’s critics is thus the comic portrait, a mode of representation whose natural truth not only excuses its improprieties but also reveals the genre’s superiority to the noble tragic norms it violates: Lorsque vous peignez des he´ros, vous faites ce que vous voulez. Ce sont des portraits a` plaisir, ou` l’on ne cherche point de ressemblance; et vous n’avez qu’a` suivre les traits d’une imagination qui se donne l’essor, et qui souvent laisse le vrai pour attraper le merveilleux. Mais lorsque vous peignez les hommes, il faut peindre d’apre`s nature. On veut que ces portraits ressemblent; et vous n’avez rien fait, si vous n’y faıˆtes reconnaıˆtre les gens de votre sie`cle. (208)15 [When you paint heroes, you do what you like. Such portraits are mere fancies in which one seeks no resemblance, and you have only to follow the promptings of a soaring imagination that often abandons the true to catch the marvellous. But when you paint men, you must paint after nature. One expects such portraits to resemble, and you have done nothing if the audience fails to recognize the people of your age.]

The assimilation of theatre and painting is not perfect, however. As the controversies surrounding Molie´resque comedy attest, though the

Seeing Is Believing

155

theoretical basis for twinning image and verse is mimetic truth to nature, the nature ut pictura targets is decidedly not that of everyday life. As Erica Harth explains, ut pictura espouses the ‘essentially aristocratic’ goal of propagating the heroic ethos with which the traditional noblesse identifies its privileges and interests.16 Even in strictly aesthetic terms, the doctrine aims to portray less nature as such than la belle nature, rectifying what Piles calls ‘la pauvrete´ de la nature ordinaire’ [the poverty of ordinary nature] in order to subsume it in the beautiful ideal that forms nature’s underlying ‘principle’ or ‘intention.’17 Insofar as comedy in particular records the people of the age as a function of demotic resemblance, stripped of the alibis of heroic fantasy, it deforms the natural model it is meant to reproduce. The economy of dramatic representation is further disturbed by a characteristic corporeal excess. Unlike painting, theatre traffics less in the images of things than in things themselves. Actors’ bodies, for instance, are not merely pictured but real and, beyond arousing scandalous sexual urges denounced throughout the classical age,18 are subject to professional indiscipline. Molie`re makes the point in the Impromptu de Versailles when he mocks the Falstaffian girth the rival impresario Montfleury brings to a monarch’s role: Voila` un roi qui soit gros et gras comme quatre; un roi, morbleu! qui soit entripaille´ comme il faut; un roi d’une vaste circonfe´rence, et qui puisse remplir un troˆne de la belle manie`re. La belle chose qu’un roi d’une taille galante! (215) [Now there’s a king as big and fat as four together; a king, by God, who’s stuffed in the proper style; a king with a vast circumference who can fill a throne in the grand manner. What a handsome thing it is to see a gallantly proportioned king!]

Moreover, especially in comedy, theatre teems with low quotidian objects: furniture like the table Orgon hides under in Tartuffe’s second seduction scene, but also swords, pistols, coins, caskets, goblets, books, and letters – the indigestible flotsam of stage properties coughed up by the magasin des accessoires. Whence this chapter’s focus: the miniature portrait that binds the plot of Molie`re’s Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire [Sganarelle, or the imaginary cuckold] of 1660. The peculiar interest of this particular object is that the mere contingent thing is itself a representation. Like other stage properties, the portrait passes from hand to hand to calculated

156

The Matter of Mind

effect. But, as a portrait, it carries something else along with it – the likeness of a certain face. To be sure, from where the audience members sit, they cannot see this face; but as played by the actors, the characters do. And what the characters see and how they see it, a modality that depends on who sees it and under what conditions, determine the action. The image in Le cocu imaginaire thus occasions reflection on the at once comic and critical potential of the relation between things and pictures, and so between bodies and minds. What becomes of things when pictured? What becomes of pictures (miniatures, say) because they are things? And what acts of vision and interpretation do such things as pictures trigger or entail? The pertinacity with which, raising such questions, Molie`re’s play challenges the dualist underpinnings of classical representation leads to still wider issues bearing on the nature of royal imagery, on the image’s ambiguous place in contemporary logic, and on its still more ambiguous role in early modern theology, an intellectual discipline to which, despite the era’s growing secularism, all others remained subordinate.19 It is relevant to the intensity with which these issues were experienced that the vehicle for raising these reflections is the merest trifle. The play’s female romantic lead is the faintly parodic Ce´lie, whose union with her male counterpart, Le´lie, supplies a topical anagram of the romantic novel, Mlle de Scude´ry’s elephantine Cle´lie (1654–61), whose purportedly baleful influence on young girls her tyrannical father decries in the opening scene. When the curtain rises, Ce´lie resists her father’s efforts to compel her to marry one Vale`re, a person who, though never introduced onstage, nonetheless possesses the fortune Le´lie has left Paris to seek. Exhausted by spirited defiance of paternal bullying, Ce´lie faints in the street, dropping a miniature portrait cherished in consoling token of her absent love. Le´lie meanwhile, returned to the city, falls victim to a classic quiproquo, the comic device of taking one thing for another to disastrous effect. He concludes that Ce´lie has foresaken him for the moneyed suitor her father has chosen. Le´lie is encouraged in this error by Mme Sganarelle, who reports what she takes to be Ce´lie’s liaison with her husband, in whom Le´lie mistakenly perceives the rival for Ce´lie’s hand. Mme Sganarelle’s conviction springs from another quiproquo. Chancing to see her husband carry our unconscious heroine off the street, she interprets this charitable deed as a lubricious intimacy. Sganarelle in turn accuses his wife of an adulterous affair with none other than Le´lie. The evidence is her possession of the miniature portrait picked

Seeing Is Believing

157

up where the heroine let it fall, an object toward which Mme Sganarelle exhibits an innocently aesthetic prepossession from which her husband infers an amorous subtext. Sganarelle’s misprision colours the complementary suspicions harboured by his wife and his ostensible rival. Mme Sganarelle interprets her husband’s accusations as an attempt to parry her presumably better-founded charges, and Le´lie takes Sganarelle’s heated defence of conjugal right as confirming his marriage to Ce´lie. The climax arrives when, urged on by an enraged Ce´lie intent on punishing the faithlessness of which Sganarelle’s report of Le´lie’s liaison with his wife persuades her, Sganarelle challenges the younger man to a duel. Sganarelle is pure farce, presenting what Jacques Lacan calls the ‘brave […] petit bonhomme’ Molie`re at his least contentious or threatening.20 A come´die de situation rather than a come´die de caracte`re, the play displays none of the earmarks of the sort of theatre for which Molie`re later makes a name for himself. It offers no complexly nuanced psychological development of a miser or hypocrite, a misanthrope or upwardly mobile bourgeois; nor consequently does it expressly engage the resonant social or moral issues such characters raise. It contents itself, rather, with provoking thoughtless mirth keyed to the skilfully managed yet essentially shopworn quiproquos that knot its fast-paced plot. Secure in their seats in the audience, the spectators look on while the protagonists entangle one another in an escalating spiral of cross-purposes that give every act and word a mistaken sense that deepens the illusions under which they labour with Herculean earnestness. The plot generates a splendidly self-defeating violence from which the principals are rescued at the last possible moment by Ce´lie’s maid – along with Le´lie’s valet, Gros-Rene´ [Fat Rene´],21 whose name indicates his strictly gastronomical concerns, the one character in the play who has no dog in the fight and is thus exempt from the passions that delude everyone else. Yet anodyne as all this seems, like any document to which we pay scrupulous attention, Sganarelle proves symptomatic.22 For one thing, the play marks the return to the Parisian stage of one of Molie`re’s most distinctive comic creations, the title character Sganarelle, played by the poet himself.23 This circumstance weights the first words Sganarelle speaks in the play: ‘Qu’est-ce donc? me voila`’ [What’s to do? Here I am] (3.107). Poised between the success of Les Pre´cieuses ridicules and Sganarelle’s reappearance in L’E´cole des maris (1661), Molie`re’s first stab at a theme that, with the following season’s L’E´cole des femmes, ignites the vicious quarrels to which we owe the author’s masterpieces,

158

The Matter of Mind

this self-dramatizing entre´e hints at the actor-poet’s determination to claim a place in the spotlight.24 Further, according to the bookseller Jean Ribou, writing under the pseudonym of the ‘sieur de Neufvillenaine’ in the pirated first edition, the farce’s chief comic agre´ment was Molie`re’s performance in the title role. In particular, the public rejoiced in Sganarelle’s ceaseless de´montage, convulsive changes of expression whose prime showcase was the tortured soliloquy during which, steeling himself to challenge the play’s romantic hero to a duel, Sganarelle feverishly oscillates between outraged honour, wounded vanity, and common-sense alarm at the prospect of getting killed (17.407–74).25 Key to the play’s success was thus the comic loss of face that culminates in Sganarelle’s ludicrous reification when, described by a stage direction as ‘arme´ de pied en cap’ [armed from head to foot], he enters for his duel in scene 21, a hyperbolic bundle of armour and weapons Ce´lie aptly styles ‘cet objet’ [this thing]. The farce thereby foreshadows the more sophisticated Molie´resque comedy of the modern subject, a satiric deconstruction of authoritative social personae that fully surfaces in Arnolphe’s fate in L’E´cole des femmes.26 More specifically, Sganarelle’s changes in expression and the tormented soliloquy that showcases them forecast the great Arnolphian soliloquies that straddle the interval between L’E´cole’s acts 3 and 4: speeches whose chief business is to engineer the systematic reduction of the authoritative public identity Arnolphe projects under the grotesquely self-administered name of ‘Monsieur de La Souche.’ This reduction is accomplished through successive scenes of tortured irresolution focused first on Arnolphe’s determination to outface the suddenly defiant inge´nue Agne`s and then on his frantic efforts to regain his composure in the wake of his abject failure to do so. Arnolphe’s inner struggle climaxes in one of Molie`re’s most memorable quiproquos: the famous one-way dialogue in 4.2, developing a complex gag on the soliloquistic convention of transmitting private thought in the form of public speech, during which a notary replies to distracted deliberations he interprets (since they are spoken out loud) as addressed to him. Sganarelle’s humble status as a petit bourgeois forecloses the emphasis the later play gives the theme. Nevertheless, staging a signal loss of the self-determined agency that characterizes the successful social persona, Le cocu imaginaire poses fundamental questions of identity. But we also note the means employed: the miniature portrait whose ambiguous testimony precipitates the de´montage Ribou singles out as the play’s chief selling point. A first problem concerns the portrait’s function not only as a likeness but as a keepsake or memento, the

Seeing Is Believing

159

mediating idol Ce´lie preserves as a relic of her distant love. The portrait answers to Pascal’s description in the Pense´es, echoing Leon Battista Alberti’s definition of representation as re-presentation: ‘Un portrait porte absence et pre´sence, plaisir et de´plaisir. La re´alite´ exclut absence et de´plaisir’ [A portrait contains absence and presence, pleasure and displeasure. Reality excludes absence and displeasure].27 This normative function is undergirded, and thereby undermined, by another. Beyond serving as a memento, the miniature is a plot device. It is only there as a consoling token of the longed-for Le´lie so that it can be mislaid and, falling into hands other than those intended, subsequently mistaken. The keepsake’s true as opposed to ‘motivating’ aim, comparable to what period metaphysics termed a ‘final’ as opposed to ‘efficient’ cause, is to convince Sganarelle of his wife’s unfaithfulness.28 Sganarelle’s misreading of the portrait’s meaning in his wife’s hands is of course overdetermined, and in the first place by the fact that this is farce. We note a certain inverse decorum delineating what is appropriate, or biense´ant, for this sort of play. It is too much to claim that the image must be misinterpreted in the way it is. Still, that it is so misinterpreted is the kind of thing an audience expects, the kind of thing a farce is for, whatever it thereafter proves to be about. Sganarelle’s misprision is also overdetermined by the fact that its agent is just Sganarelle. His reading demonstrates the workings of comic projection. While his wife is mistaken in believing him guilty in this instance, she is right in thinking that marital infidelity forms part of the conjugal package. And what Sganarelle is capable of doing he is still more capable of suspecting. His own low moral standards shape his anthropology, the picture that determines what he expects of other human beings, and in particular of a spouse whose virtue he is all the less inclined to credit in defence of his own selfish proclivities. The third source of overdetermination reveals the critical potential by which the farce exceeds its generic brief. Mme Sganarelle’s possession of the portrait is misread at the level of the action because, at another, more philosophical level, Sganarelle’s reading conforms to the semiotics inscribed in the classical theory of images and in the wider theory of signs to which classical doctrine assimilates images. Consider the strictly logical (as opposed to characterological or generic) grounds for Sganarelle’s mistake. He infers his wife’s infidelity from her mere possession of the portrait. That she should have the miniature is, if not probative, at least presumptive of guilt because possession is interpreted in light of the normative function of likenesses recalled a moment ago.

160

The Matter of Mind

In a comparable episode in Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette’s Princesse de Cle`ves (1678), the reine dauphine has miniatures painted ‘de toutes les belles personnes de la cour’ [of all the beautiful persons at court]. The enamoured Nemours steals the heroine’s, who refrains from demanding its return since to do so in public would ‘apprendre a` tout le monde les sentiments que ce prince avait pour elle’ [reveal to everyone the feelings this prince had for her], while to do so in private would ‘l’engager a` lui parler de sa passion’ [oblige her to speak to him of his passion].29 The quandary in which the princess finds herself dramatizes the semantics behind Sganarelle’s mistake. The purpose of a portrait, and more specifically of the special intimate object that is a miniature destined for carriage on one’s person with a view to private contemplation, is to preserve the likeness of the dead or distant original whose commemorative copy it contains. But this function implies an intentional address. Because it is a painting of someone, it must have been painted for someone: the person for whom the face matters as preserving a meaningful resemblance. The wife’s possession thus argues an intimate relation with the miniature’s subject. If she possesses the portrait, it is because it is a portrait and, further and in consequence, because it is a portrait of Le´lie.30 The leap from the portrait to the assumption of infidelity is reinforced by Mme Sganarelle’s response to the image and what this response in turn portends. By convention, Sganarelle cannot hear everything spoken onstage, and in particular what his wife says in contemplating Le´lie’s portrait. But he witnesses the accompanying pantomime; and what that pantomime expresses is her infatuation. Sganarelle is right to think that Mme Sganarelle is smitten. The problem is that she is smitten not by the portrait’s original, a person in fact she has never seen and whom she fails to recognize when the two do at last meet. She is smitten, rather, by the miniature’s intrinsic physical and aesthetic properties as an artefact, that is, as a certain kind of object. Picking up the portrait just before her husband’s re-entry in scene 6, she expresses delighted surprise: Mais quel est ce bijou que le sort me pre´sente? L’e´mail en est fort beau, la gravure charmante. Ouvrons. [But what is this jewel that fate puts my way? The enamel is very handsome, and the engraving charming. Let’s open it.]

(5.141–3)

Seeing Is Believing

161

‘O ciel!’ [Oh, heavens!], she exclaims, believing herself alone even though Sganarelle has returned from carrying the swooning Ce´lie indoors, c’est miniature! Et voila` d’un bel homme une vive peinture! Jamais rien de plus beau ne s’offrit a` ma vue; Le travail plus que l’or s’en doit encore priser. Oh! que cela sent bon!

(6.145–6, 150–2)

[it’s a miniature! And here is the lively painting of a handsome man! I have never seen anything more beautiful; The labour alone is worth more than gold. Oh! how good it smells!]

She admires the portrait because it is a beautiful image. Further, since what leads her to open the miniature is the handsome enamel work and engraving decorating the case enclosing it, she admires it as a beautiful thing (‘ce bijou’) even before she realizes that the case contains an image. Though, as a portrait, the image is presumably someone’s likeness, that of ‘a handsome man’ of whom it presents ‘a lively painting,’ her use of indefinite articles makes it plain that her reaction is quite disinterested inasmuch as she neither knows nor cares whose image it is.31 She stands in the position of the connoisseur for whom a portrait is prized in and for itself, regardless of whose likeness it portrays, and independently indeed of whether it is a likeness at all.32 The liveliness she admires in the painting is a property of the portrait whether or not that portrait also achieves a faithful resemblance. Nor is there often any means of verifying such fidelity. To take an example from the field of royal imagery that serves as a paradigm for period portraiture, how can we test the fidelity of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV in the Louvre? One way is by its family resemblance to other portraits, buttressed by contemporary testimony. But while the lifelikeness of Rigaud’s portrait, comparable to the kind of liveliness Mme Sganarelle appreciates, may make it more convincing, we cannot on that account claim that it is more faithful than others we come across. Nor can contemporary testimony adjudicate the matter if only because the function of a portrait (and, a fortiori, that of a portrait of the king) is less to resemble the empirical person than to represent

162

The Matter of Mind

the social persona. Such a portrait mirrors not merely this king but the king, if necessary at the expense of empirical fidelity. As J.L. Austin might put it, a portrait is never a neutral replica; it is an act and, as an act, it aims, beyond fidelity, at felicity, a goal that may under readily imaginable circumstances entail a sacrifice of fidelity. This defines the peculiar dilemma portrait painters must resolve: reconciling what a portrait calls for as resemblance with social, moral, or devotional ambitions in whose light mere resemblance (like the ‘meer nature’ of Hobbesian political theory) constitutes the worst of solecisms.33 Faithful or not, Le´lie’s portrait appeals to Mme Sganarelle as a painting and so as the product (this too is suggestive) of the added value of a skilled craftsman’s labour. The portrait is, after all, handsomely encased and framed with a wood pleasing not only to behold or touch but to smell, a sense whose intervention occasions a gesture her husband interprets as a kiss. For Sganarelle in the character of the right-minded sign-theorist he plays for the sake of the quiproquo that turns the plot, Mme Sganarelle’s response to the portrait is not merely unexpected or implausible. It is properly unimaginable because, unlike her jealous husband, she responds to the picture as something valuable in its own right quite apart from a normative function that, in the absence of even desire for knowledge of the man whose likeness it presents, means nothing to her. The problem, in short, is this: for the jealous Sganarelle as for classical theory, the portrait is a sign whose meaning stems from its relation to what it signifies or refers to, a point underscored by a formula Louis Marin cites (albeit in a misleadingly abbreviated form) from a passage in Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s La Logique, ou l’art de penser (1683) his commentary has made famous: ‘le portrait de Ce´sar, c’est Ce´sar’ [the portrait of Caesar is Caesar].34 The Logique invokes the example of the portrait in token of a function it shares with names, a class of words proposed as a model for verbal signs in general (147–8). Classical theory of course stresses a crucial difference between portrait and name. Where the portrait calls up the face in the direct form of a representation, a name appeals to the mental image or idea the word triggers in the listener’s mind. Yet as early modern psychologists of all persuasions asserted, sensualists and empiricists as much as Cartesian rationalists like the Jansenist Arnauld and Nicole of Port-Royal, an idea is itself a representation: the picture, replica, simulacrum – in a word, the portrait – the corresponding name evokes in the mind whenever we hear, read, or think it.35 A portrait is in this sense the reified expression of the mental image that answers to

Seeing Is Believing

163

the sitter’s name: the same image in fact with which, in the absence of the face itself, we compare a portrait to test its fidelity or truth. Despite the different media embodying them, portrait and name operate to an identical purpose and effect. Whence the force of Sganarelle’s inference. His wife’s conduct can only mean one thing: if she loves the portrait, she loves the original since the portrait denotes the man it portrays. The theoretically correct interpretation of his wife’s behaviour leads Sganarelle catastrophically astray, to the delight of the audience that, in watching his unfolding error, grasps the logic that betrays him. But here we begin to sense still wider stakes. Viewed in a certain light, Mme Sganarelle’s conduct smacks of idolatry, indexing latent anxieties about the political, intellectual, and above all religious use of images that overshadow seventeenth-century aesthetics and philosophy. By embracing the image on its own terms, unedified by reference to the person it portrays, she bears witness to the deceitful seductiveness with which, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein shows, period philosophers taxed both painting and the equally mendacious art of rhetoric.36 Indeed, as Piles insists in a section of his Cours de peinture par principes (1708) devoted to the consciously oxymoronic notion of truth in painting (du vrai dans la peinture), the whole business of art is to deceive (tromper) and seduce (surprendre, saisir), supplanting the merely real (le vrai simple) and even the idealized models that improve on ordinary nature (le vrai ide´al) with a ravishing beauty (le vrai parfait) entirely immanent to painting. Art thus does more than procure a frankly sensuous pleasure that exceeds external reference of the sort classical theory demands; its distinctive mission is to create ‘ce beau Vraysemblable qui paroist souvent plus vray que la Verite´ mesme’ [that truthlike beauty which often seems more true than truth itself].37 Mme Sganarelle’s response has theological implications as well. By the 1660s, Catholic teaching had resolved the centuries-long debate over the use and status of images officially laid to rest at the Council of Trent (1545–63). When added to the conspicuous role art played in orthodox worship, this resolution explains why painting largely escaped the openly hostile religious commentary of which theatre remained the target in polemics like Nicole’s Traite´ de la come´die (1665) and JacquesBe´nigne Bossuet’s Maximes et re´flexions sur la come´die (1694). Nevertheless, the idolatrous misappropriation Piles commends from a secular standpoint haunts the two texts in which the post-Tridentine doctrine of images found its authoritative loci. The first text is the passage in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica where fear of idolatrous error prompts the question ‘[w]hether an

164

The Matter of Mind

Image of Christ should be adored with the Adoration of Latria’ (pt. 3, question 25, art. 3), that is, whether it should be accorded the supreme form of worship, properly reserved for God alone, that Thomas has just established we owe Christ. The arguments Thomas musters quod non are what we would expect. Adoration of an image with the adoration of latria violates the second commandment: ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of anything.’ It thus springs the trap St Paul warns about when he accuses the Gentiles of changing ‘the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man’ (Romans 1.23). Further, since the adoration of latria is due Christ ‘by reason of His Godhead, not of his humanity,’ and since we must deny it even ‘to the image of His Godhead, which is printed on the rational soul’ rather than our gross carnal senses, still less should we extend it to ‘the material image which represents the humanity of Christ Himself.’ Finally, we should withhold the adoration of latria because, as the Apostle reminds us at 1 Corinthians 11.23, ‘I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you,’ meaning that we should avoid anything for which we have no explicit scriptural warrant, and ‘Scripture does not lay down anything concerning the adoration of images.’ But as we would also expect, the contrary exposition quod sic trades on the Aristotelian distinction between ‘the image itself as a certain thing,’ to which veneration is not due, and ‘the movement towards the thing’ of which it is the image. Aquinas continues: Thus therefore we should say that no reverence is shown to Christ’s image, as a thing, – for instance, carved or painted wood: because reverence is not due save to a rational creature. It follows therefore that reverence should be shown to it, in so far only as it is an image. Consequently the same reverence should be shown to Christ’s image as to Christ Himself. Since, therefore, Christ is adored with the adoration of latria, it follows that His Image should be adored with the adoration of latria.38

The distinction between the image ‘as a certain thing’ and as a sign incorporating a ‘movement towards’ what it signifies is designed to enable Thomas to save the image as a proper object of veneration. To this extent it collapses the distance between image as signifier and image as signified with which his analysis begins. We see this still more clearly, and more topically, in our second text, the decree ‘on the invocation, veneration, and relics of saints, and on sacred images’ promulgated by

Seeing Is Believing

165

the Council of Trent on 4 December 1563 in answer to Protestant iconoclasm: [T]he images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be placed and retained especially in the churches, and […] due honor and veneration is to be given them; not, however, that any divinity or virtue is believed to be in them by reason of which they are to be venerated, or that something is to be asked of them, or that trust is to be placed in images, as was done of old by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which they represent, so that by means of the images which we kiss and before which we uncover the head and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ and venerate the saints whose likeness they bear.39

The careful distinction that opens the decree gives way to precisely those acts – kisses, uncoverings, prostrations – the Council’s Protestant adversaries deride as idolatrous. Still, the key point, common to both sides of the argument, remains the same. Image and thing, sign as signifier and sign as signified, are radically different, and to lose sight of this difference is to fall into the idolatrous practices of the Gentiles of Paul’s epistle to the Romans: an irrational confusion of ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational creatures’ from which Christian worship is to be distinguished in its very idolatry. Inasmuch then as Mme Sganarelle is captivated by the image as a thing independent of its signifying ‘movement towards’ its referent, she acts like an idolatress – just what her jealous husband cannot (or at any rate refuses to) imagine. Yet this is not the only irony at work here. That Sganarelle’s error is theoretically correct reveals not only the limits but the incoherence and even duplicity of the classical theory he tacitly applies. More precisely, it betrays the sneaking idolatry latent in the normative function of portraits on which, like Thomas, classical theory relies, the idolatry theory is in theory supposed to guard against. Consider again the formula derived from Arnauld and Nicole’s Logique: ‘the portrait of Caesar is Caesar.’ The formula is keyed in the first place to the analogy between portrait and name, an analogy heightened by the circular relationship the two entertain. For confronted with a portrait, we might ask who it is, and the reply would be the name ‘Caesar.’ Conversely, presented with a name, we might again ask who it is, and one reply would be to point to a portrait – ‘He is.’ But especially in the form in which Marin cites them, the logicians do not invoke the

166

The Matter of Mind

portrait solely on the strength of its analogy with the name. They do so, rather, because it exhibits a power they want to assign names as well: that of evoking not only a sign, image, or idea but Caesar himself apprehended in the presence his representation promises – the presence on which, as Pascal and, in a more strictly aesthetic context, Piles remind us, the portrait’s role as memento depends.40 As the Pascalian fragment quoted earlier recalls, a portrait entails absence too: absence determines indeed both the pleasure it imparts by recovering its original and the displeasure it causes since the very basis of recovered presence is the absence it overcomes. This paradox defines the portrait’s characteristic ambiguity. For it achieves not (to use a theologically loaded term) some sort of real presence but only a pseudoor quasi-presence.41 It is a figure whose dual nature as a figure confirms how unreal it is. As Pascal insists, reality ‘excludes’ the picture that merely mimics it, by filling the place it occupies with an actual face. Presence is nonetheless the portrait’s hallmark. This is why the Logique grants it the role it does. Though portrait and name turn out in the end to be the same, Arnauld and Nicole draw on the portrait in the first instance owing to the difference between the two. More precisely, the portrait is invoked as an example of what they call ‘natural’ signs as opposed to ‘instituted’ ones, which are linked to their referent by arbitrary convention (2:129–30). As a natural sign, a portrait constitutes the ideal by which all others are measured. In particular, the visible relation created by visual resemblance exempts a portrait from the logical confusions to which its conventional counterparts succumb. These confusions form the burden of the chapter from which Marin’s ‘portrait of Caesar’ tag comes. Using the case of the portrait as a control, the logicians carefully analyse the various ways in which, unlike images, words lead us astray. Knowing what a word means, even knowing what kind of word it is (a name rather than a verb, adjective, pronoun, etc.), demands that we know many other things: the code that defines its immediate sense as a locution; the multiple usages that define the illocutionary forces it can obtain; and especially figural codes such as (to give two examples from the Logique) those relating a ‘laurel’ to the idea of victory or an ‘olive’ to that of peace (149). By emphasizing the lack of a natural bond and thus the remove at which instituted signs stand relative to their objects, these cases point to still other possibilities for confusion, misprision, and error. There are miscommunications due to idiosyncratic uses, as when people assign a word a sense other than the one commonly in force and fail to notify their interlocutors of

Seeing Is Believing

167

doing so (148). To idiosyncrasy we may add a case that (the recent affaire du formulaire notwithstanding) the Jansenist logicians pass over in silence: the possibility of mistaken intent engendered by the acts of dissimulation, equivocation, mental reservation, and the like that contemporary Jesuit treatises on casuistry examine in detail.42 Mistaken intent also defines a case that Arnauld and Nicole do address, the exegetical difficulties surrounding the words of consecration in the Catholic Mass: the problem of Christ’s intent in saying ‘This is my body’ and the force we are to grant the act His utterance performs. This case is all the more complex in that what looks like figurative language must be taken literally, implausible though a literal interpretation seems (151).43 But there are also the kinds of cases Sganarelle invokes, more complex than those the logicians cite because grounded in the deluding passions that condition actual human relationship. Jealous prepossession leads quarrelling couples (the Sganarelles in scene 6; Ce´lie and Le´lie in scenes 20–1) to interpret each other’s heated denials of infidelity as proof of faithlessness, thereby exhibiting an overdetermining sense of injury deepened by the outraged counter-accusations their mutual recriminations prompt. In scene 9, moreover, Le´lie encounters a furious Sganarelle brandishing the miniature snatched from his wife in scene 8. Understandably troubled by Sganarelle’s possession of a portrait intended solely for Ce´lie, Le´lie demands to know how he got it. Accosted by a hostile stranger, Sganarelle is at first puzzled. But unlike Mme Sganarelle, who has lost the portrait by the time she and Le´lie meet in scene 11, Sganarelle compares picture and face directly. Recognition provokes an outburst of spousal indignation. Convinced not only that Le´lie has cuckolded him but that his interlocutor must know that the lady involved is married, he commands his putative rival to break off the liaison without feeling it necessary to name the woman he has in mind: Sganarelle: Nous savons, Dieu merci, le souci qui vous tient; Ce portrait qui vous faˆche est votre ressemblance; Il e´tait en des mains de votre connaissance; Et ce n’est pas un fait qui soit secret pour nous Que les douces ardeurs de la dame et de vous. Je ne sais pas si j’ai, dans sa galanterie, L’honneur d’eˆtre connu de votre seigneurie; Mais faites-moi celui de cesser de´sormais Un amour qu’un mari peut trouver fort mauvais; Et songez que les nœuds du sacre´ mariage …

168

The Matter of Mind

Le´lie: Quoi! celle, dites-vous, dont vous tenez ce gage … Sganarelle: Est ma femme, et je suis son mari.

(11.280–91)

[Sganarelle: We know, thank God, what troubles you; This portrait, that angers you, bears your resemblance; It was in the hands of one of your acquaintance; And the sweet ardours you and the lady share Are no secret to us. I do not know whether, in your gallantry, Your worship does me the honour of knowing who I am; But do me the honour of suspending henceforth An amour that a husband is allowed to take very ill; And consider that the bonds of holy matrimony … Le´lie: What! She, you say, from whom this gage reached your hands … Sganarelle: Is my wife, and I am her husband.]

Larded with pompous first-person plurals (‘we know,’ ‘no secret to us’) and ponderously sarcastic turns of politesse (‘your worship honours me,’ ‘do me the honour’) that underscore the burlesque impropriety with which Sganarelle, of all people, invokes the sacred ‘bonds of holy matrimony,’ the reprimand he addresses mingles pointed exactness with hopeless ambiguity in a masterly way. Almost everything Sganarelle says is accurate. The portrait was in fact ‘in the hands of one of [Le´lie’s] acquaintance’ in token of the ‘sweet ardours’ he and ‘the lady share’; and both men would surely agree that ‘a husband is permitted’ to resent infringements of matrimonial right. The problem is that the omission of a proper name allows each to interpret Sganarelle’s words in the light of his own, quite different conviction concerning the lady’s identity. For Sganarelle she is Mme Sganarelle. For Le´lie she can only be Ce´lie – and here too the wifely title fits, confirming the broken troth he fears. Meaning is not confined to the sense we consciously give our words; it also depends on what Austin calls ‘uptake,’ the understandings and emotions others bring to hearing them.44 Insofar as the effect that our words produce is ultimately a function of how others take them, their most decisive meanings are often those we least notice or intend. By contrast, for Arnauld and Nicole at any rate, a portrait dispels such confusions because, thanks to resemblance, it specifies what its referent is and the force with which it refers to it. Seeing that an image is a portrait of Caesar, we also see that it is a portrait: recognizing whose portrait it is entails

Seeing Is Believing

169

understanding that it is not really Caesar but only an image – ‘Ce´sar,’ as the logicians put it, but only ‘en signification et en figure’ [Caesar by signification and as a figure] (147). This is why (restoring the complete quotation Marin abbreviates) the logicians feel entitled to claim that, when reporting what we see in an image, ‘l’on dira sans preparation et sans fac¸on d’un portrait de Ce´sar, que c’est Caesar; et d’une carte d’Italie, que c’est l’Italie’ [one will say without preparation or difficulty of a portrait of Caesar, that it is Caesar, and of a map of Italy, that it is Italy] (147). The example of the portrait helps us see by an effect of contrast the diverse ways in which verbal or written signs are subject to misassignment and misconstrual. The logicians appeal to the portrait because of the special clarity and distinctness it possesses as a natural sign deemed proper to a degree that even the most proper name cannot be. In the process, a portrait achieves the transitivity, transparency, and univocity that recommend it as a saving paradigm for names, themselves adduced as a model for words and thus for signs at large. But of course the logicians’ faith in the portrait’s special clarity and distinctness is exactly what Sganarelle challenges. Even the image is subject to mistake because it too entails uptake: the problems of sense and force, intention and idiosyncrasy against which the Logique invokes it as a saving paradigm all return, with a vengeance, the moment the miniature begins to circulate. Though initially anchored by its reference to the cherished face Ce´lie literally and figuratively clutches to her bosom, once Le´lie’s portrait reaches hands other than those for which it was meant, it reproduces all of the obscurities and blurred distinctions Arnauld and Nicole try to dispel. Nor is this merely an accretion, an external accident that visits the portrait from without. For just what is this painted face, ‘Le´lie,’ that we meet? The answer depends on who sees it and when and under what conditions. For Ce´lie the image is first her true and then, when Sganarelle communicates his conjugal suspicions, her false love. For Sganarelle it is his wife’s lover. For Mme Sganarelle it is ‘a handsome man’ whose ‘lively painting’ proves felicitous regardless of fidelity. It would be wrong to say that these readings inhabit the portrait as expressions of the intent with which it was painted – though the question of intent is more complicated than at first appears if only because, as Mme Sganarelle’s spontaneously aesthetic response suggests, the motives leading Le´lie to have his picture painted are not the same as those leading the artist to paint it.45 Still, the portrait turns out to be the objective correlative of the autonomous and unpredictable acts of vision and

170

The Matter of Mind

appropriation that overtake it. As the Sganarelle of the opening lines of Dom Juan might put it, ‘[q]uoique puisse dire Aristote et toute la philosophie’ [(w)hatever Aristotle and the whole of philosophy may say] (286), the portrait licenses a practically infinite variety of responses, inferences, and constructions it is powerless to rationalize or control. What is true in theory proves more so when we add what both theory and the play recall: the intermediary role of the idea. As we have seen, portrait and name are taken to mean the same thing insofar as they refer to the same thing. Thanks to the visible relation of resemblance, the portrait seems to refer to the thing immediately while the name takes the indirect route of the mental image. But to the extent that a mental image is itself a representation or picture, there is no real difference. This in turn confirms what the logicians’ analogy was intended to refute on behalf of the clarity and distinctness words all too easily lose. Even a portrait is at the mercy of an idea and thus of everything to which an idea may be in thrall – the desires, presumptions, accidents, and anxieties that shape what people perceive by conditioning how they perceive it. In a famous episode toward the close of Tartuffe, a play whose exploration of the issues raised here Mitchell Greenberg shrewdly analyses,46 a belatedly reformed Orgon tries to convince his obdurate mother of Tartuffe’s treachery. To this end, he appeals to the unanswerable authority of having seen the evidence with his own eyes: ‘Je l’ai vu, dis-je, vu, de mes propres yeux vu, / Ce qu’on appelle vu’ [I have seen it, I tell you, seen it, seen it with my own eyes, / What people call seen] (5.3.1676–7). Let us savour the delicious equivocation embedded in Orgon’s final, desperate turn of phrase, ‘[c]e qu’on appelle vu.’ The phrase’s emphasis subtly qualifies the blinding assurance it underlines. For what does one call seen? What does seen mean? To what moreover does Orgon appeal in adducing what people mean (‘[c]e qu’on appelle’) when they say that they have seen something and, more pointedly, that they have seen it with their own eyes? The ambiguities that undermine Orgon’s self-proclaimed certainty are anticipated by comparable incidents in Sganarelle. We have noted how Mme Sganarelle is persuaded of her husband’s infidelity when she mistakes the action he performs in carrying a swooning Ce´lie off the street. Sganarelle’s reciprocal conviction stems not only from the spectacle of his wife’s infatuation with Le´lie’s portrait but also from witnessing Le´lie’s exit from his house in scene 14, where his wife took the young man to help him recover from the shock administered by Ce´lie’s

Seeing Is Believing

171

apparent breach of faith. The words with which, in an aside, Sganarelle comments on this exit could not be clearer, or more beautifully misguided: ‘Il n’est plus question de portrait a` cette heure; / Voici, ma foi, la chose en propre original!’ [It is no longer a question of a portrait; / Here, faith, is the thing itself in the original!] (14.330–1). The persuasiveness that acts of vision derive from a supposed immediacy denied to words and portraits alike proves as overdetermined and therefore deluded as the conclusions we draw from the verbal and pictorial copies to which vision opposes its originals. All of which is expressed in shifts that occur in the farce’s title as our intelligence matures. The play is to begin with called Sganarelle. But despite its apparent specificity as a proper name, this title is remarkably underdetermined. For who is Sganarelle? Unlike a characterological title (Le Misanthrope, L’Avare, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire [1673]) and thus like other Molie`re titles that take the form of a proper name (Tartuffe, George Dandin), Sganarelle obliges the playwright to add a second part filling in what the first omits. Tartuffe is thus amplified to become ‘l’imposteur’ and George Dandin to become ‘le mari confondu’ [the baffled husband]. So the proper name gives way to an explanatory paraphrase, Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire. By ‘Sganarelle’ we must understand an ‘imaginary cuckold,’ a cuckold of the mind, a cuckold en ide´e. But if Sganarelle imagines himself a cuckold, he is one. Certainly, there is a cuckold stuck in his head, and this ide´e fixe leads him to conduct himself like a cuckold, berating his wife for her infidelity and challenging his rival to a duel. What is more, he makes others believe he is a cuckold, in particular Ce´lie, who, persuaded thereby of Le´lie’s faithlessness, reinforces Sganarelle’s original conviction. And why, we may ask, is Ce´lie so readily convinced? Her anxieties doubtless play a role in it. But so does the plausibility of the thing – the thought (the idea) that the clownish character who reports his marital misfortune is just the sort to invite cuckoldry. Yet if Sganarelle is a cuckold, it is not in the way he imagines. Insofar as Le´lie is someone other than the one he pictures, Le´lie is innocent of the crime of which he stands convicted in the outraged husband’s imagination. But there is the rub. For whoever Le´lie may be in himself, he is also just a picture, the portrait whose circulation brings it into Mme Sganarelle’s idolatrous hands. If in the end Sganarelle is genuinely cuckolded, it is literally by the image with which his infatuated wife persuades him of a state he doubles in his own dramatic person. Sganarelle is thus an imaginary cuckold because the true rather than imaginary

172

The Matter of Mind

rival for his wife’s affections is none other than Le´lie’s image. What makes this most fundamental of the play’s quiproquos possible is the fact that, like the portraits we take for names or the names we take for the things we use names to refer to, identity is itself a quiproquo. To cite a Lacanian verity on which the farce trades from the start, who we are is a reflex of the imaginaire, the shifting mental pictures that determine how we act and thus how we represent ourselves to ourselves and others as a function of what we and they imagine us to be.47 Like all the major characters, Le´lie is an idea. But what is an idea if not, like Le´lie’s portrait, the screen on which we project the despotic fantasies that, taken for real, shape the real by shaping what we make of it?

5 The Ghost in the Machine: Reason, Faith, and Experience in Pascalian Apologetics

Truth is the death of intention. – Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Sganarelle’s experiments with words and ideas, and with the images of which words and ideas are the treacherous lookalikes, plunge us headlong into the chaos of demotic experience. To this end the play mobilizes the experimental properties of theatre itself. Thanks to the perfected mimesis of the French seventeenth century, the scenic illusion contemporary audiences prized fuses the space-time of events with that of the dramatic performances that imitate them. The genius of Molie´resque comedy is to have drawn the consequences. Just as an idea is a mode of the image in which we perceive its content and nature, so theatre is a mode of the experience it portrays. The controversies in which Molie`re found himself embroiled from L’E´cole des femmes of 1662 to the royal licence granted the final rewrite of Tartuffe in 1669 speak to the same purpose. In exploiting theatre as a public mirror in which on- and offstage worlds trade places to unnerving as well as comically infuriating effect, Molie`re blurs the boundaries between theatrical action and the larger society of which that action is no longer just a portrait but a visceral reflex and expression. The experience of theatre joins the depiction of experience in theatre to become an integral part of the wider social scene it represents.1 It would be a mistake to see this as a secularizing update of the medieval and baroque theme of theatrum mundi, an allegorical moralization designed to give theatrical illusion a saving soteriological gloss.2 In plays like La vida es suen˜o [Life is a dream] (1635) and El gran teatro del

174

The Matter of Mind

mundo [The great stage of the world] (ca 1635), the Spanish poet-priest Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca deploys the illusionistic technology of the modern stage in order to break the spell of sensuous pleasure of which orthodox morality took theatre to be the scandalous epitome. In exposing the royal Segismundo to an experiment that leaves him uncertain whether he is awake or asleep, La vida prompts the audience to wonder whether its own experience is any more real than dramatic makebelieve. Similarly, in staging the moment when the divine Stage Manager calls souls home from the fleeting world in which they play their appointed parts, the Teatro invites spectators to imagine their own condition as that of actors destined to shed their assumed identities once the play of life comes to an end. Caldero´n’s aim is accordingly to use the persuasive resources of his art to convince audiences and readers of the incorrigibly deluded nature of the experiences that theatre mimics by showing experience to be as insubstantial as the characters and events in which theatre so readily enlists belief. By contrast, Molie`re turns the baroque conceit on its head. To borrow the deliberately homely simile with which the Sosie of Molie`re’s Amphitryon (1668) describes meeting his own indiscernible twin, if experience and illusion resemble each other like ‘two drops of milk’ (2.1.785), it is less because experience is an illusion than because illusion is a mode of experience. Illusion is indeed an ordinary fact of experience, something we laugh at in part because it is so familiar. And what is true of illusion proves just as true of the metaphysical convictions that motivate Calderonian allegory. The providential order whose reality Caldero´n sets above the worldly evidence of our senses and of the emotions, actions, and beliefs the senses trigger is itself a mirage as vulnerable to the compulsions of everyday life as the ide´es fixes that drive Sganarelle’s personnel. As the materialist Pierre Gassendi objects to the circularity of the Cartesian criterion of clear and distinct ideas, all that we can infer from the certainty of our beliefs is our own subjective certainty: the world as we see it is just and only that, the world as we see it, with no metaphysical remainder.3 Applying a comparable standard to Molie`re, what makes sense of the errors and cross-purposes that entangle Ce´lie, Le´lie, and the Sganarelles, giving their fate the perspicuousness that enables the public to understand how they go so badly wrong, is the implicit recognition of our exactly similar subjection to the natural order that governs their behaviour. If everything is illusion, it is because everything is experience, the mediating expression of the natural embodiment all of us share.

The Ghost in the Machine 175

We turn now to the apologetic enterprise to which the mathematician and physical scientist Blaise Pascal consecrated his energies following what he and those close to him regarded as his miraculous conversion to the one true faith.4 Like Caldero´n, Pascal was determined to moralize experience by showing that true happiness lies in salvation and so in exclusive devotion to God as made known to us in that insistent if singularly elusive part of ourselves he calls ‘the heart.’ Nevertheless, unlike Caldero´n, he does not do so by persuading us that life is a dream; rather, like Molie`re, he forces us to see life as it is, that is, as experience teaches it to be. A hallmark of Pascalian apologetics is its brutal realism. The Pense´es (1670) in particular are full of satiric portraits entirely comparable to those assembled in Jean de La Bruye`re’s Caracte`res (1694) or to those showcased on Molie`re’s stage. The depiction of the ‘grandeur and wretchedness’ of the human condition memorably focuses on ennui, the desperate boredom and the concomitant craving for time-killing diversions that spur otherwise sane human beings to gamble their fortunes away or chase inedible game across the countryside. Pascal’s caustic account of the druglike influence of royal spectacle demystifies majesty by showing how we are tricked into seeing the ‘character of divinity’ imprinted in a monarch’s face by the martial trappings of sovereign power that invariably accompany it. The related Hobbist picture of justice in the series on ‘the reason of effects’ exposes how far what people take for right is a mere sublimated expression of the political might alone capable of compelling us to obey any form of right at all. And his sardonic remark about the size of Cleopatra’s nose satirizes the ease with which a trivial accident of physiognomy can convulse the face of the planet by inspiring the madness of erotic passion in powerful men.5 To be sure, as Michael Moriarty has argued, to do the work Pascal wanted it to, experience had to be subjected to a thoroughgoing critique.6 In one sense, this critique is consonant with what we have seen to be the topology of early modern experimental science. As Descartes points out in the opening statement of his posthumous treatise on the physical universe (1664), the correct construal of the evidence of the senses demands acknowledging the lack of direct resemblance between our sensations and the objects that produce them in us.7 If we are obliged to seek the guidance not simply of experience but of the methodized mode of experience for which English reserves the separate name of ‘experiment,’8 it is because the testimony of the senses is rarely more than inferential. This prompts Bacon, before Descartes, to

176

The Matter of Mind

discriminate between mere observation, confined as such to phenomena as they appear to us in pre-critical perception, and what he calls the concerted ‘interpretation of nature,’ inductions schooled by the theoretical ‘organon’ that was his life’s great work.9 However, as Bacon grasped far more systematically than Descartes, and as Pascal understood along with him, we must also allow for the distorting effects of the interests, prejudices, and personal obsessions we bring to the transaction.10 Even as disciplined by Cartesian method, and exactly as Sganarelle reminds us, experience is not just the world as evidenced in perception; it is the autonomous activity going on inside our own heads. It does not suffice, then, simply to discipline our thoughts and the habits and sensations out of which we frame them. We must also dig below to work out where they come from, how they are configured, and the nature of the influence they exert. This explains why, in the ‘Entretien avec M. de Sacy’ (first published in 1696) as well as the Pense´es, Pascal persisted in honouring Montaigne despite the discomfort this caused his Jansenist interlocutors.11 Pascal was pointedly critical of Montaigne’s quasi-pagan paresse, the pleasureloving spiritual indolence to which he believed the great Gascon’s Pyrrhonian scepticism led. The reason he alleged was Montaigne’s failure to distinguish between nature as we find it in the secular here-and-now and nature as Augustine shows it to have been before the Fall corrupted it (123–4). Yet he still felt that it was Montaigne far more than Descartes who took the true measure of secular things by documenting the debility, depravity, and inconsequence of human reason and the natural world to which reason remains in thrall. For Pascal, Descartes was a monster of the demonic pride exhibited by the other author he discusses in his interview with Sacy, the ancient Stoic Epictetus, whose commitment to the divine was outdistanced by his arrogant faith in the self-determining power of human freedom (97–9, 123–3). But according to a bit of table talk preserved by one of his intimates, Pascal also believed that Descartes was a sort of Don Quixote, a comic fantasist blundering about in the natural world, unable to tell the difference between the phantoms of his own imagination and the natural phenomena he believed he explained (Lafuma 1008). The philosopher’s brain was turned by the deluded notion that scepticism armed him against error – that doubt could be methodized in such a way as to turn error itself into an instrument of positive knowledge by correcting for its natural causes.12 In Montaigne, by contrast, Pascal found a candid confession of the, as it were, negative knowledge doubt

The Ghost in the Machine 177

provides by showing us that what little we can learn by harnessing error to science’s car vanishes in comparison with what we can never learn, which is pretty much everything of importance. As he is reported to have put it to Sacy in the midst of an impassioned summary of the arguments in Montaigne’s ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond,’ Il demande si l’aˆme connaıˆt quelque chose; si elle se connaıˆt elle-meˆme; si elle est substance ou accident, corps ou esprit; ce que c’est que chacune de ces choses, et s’il n’y a rien qui ne soit de l’un de ces ordres; si elle connaıˆt son propre corps; ce que c’est que matie`re, et si elle peut discerner entre l’innombrable varie´te´ d’avis qu’on en a produits; comment elle peut raisonner, si elle est mate´rielle; et comment peut-elle eˆtre unie a` un corps particulier et en ressentir les passions, si elle est spirituelle? Quand elle a commence´ d’eˆtre; avec le corps ou devant; et si elle finit avec lui ou non; si elle ne se trompe jamais; si elle sait quand elle erre, vu que l’essence de la me´prise consiste a` la me´connaıˆtre; si dans ces obscurcissements elle ne croit pas aussi fermement que deux et trois sont six qu’elle fait ensuite que c’est cinq. (104–5) [He asks if the soul knows anything; if it knows itself; if it is a substance or an accident, a body or a mind; what each of these things is, and whether there is anything that isn’t of one or another of these orders; if it knows its own body; what matter is, and if it can distinguish among the innumerable variety of opinions that people have formed about it; how it can reason if it is material; and how it can be united to a particular body and feel its passions, if it is spiritual? When it came into being; with the body or before it; if it ends with the body or not; if it is ever mistaken; whether it knows when it is in error, given that the essence of a mistake consists in failing to realize it; if, in its moments of obscurity, it does not believe as firmly that two and three are six as it does later that it’s five.]

Yet the very terms in which Pascal describes Montaigne’s sceptical insights confirms what, for all its dualism, Cartesian science also suggests: experientia rerum magistra, experience teaches all things, even when what it teaches is the demoralizing depth of our ignorance. The passage takes the form of a series of questions put to the soul, questions made rhetorical by the soul’s inability to answer them. It is nonetheless striking that the dimension in which all of these questions arise remains, precisely, that of our place in the world as we spontaneously experience it.

178

The Matter of Mind

Everything Montaigne asks about, in Pascal’s retelling, forms part of what we run up against as the naı¨ve givens of experience: for instance, that we have souls, bodies, and minds even if we do not know what they are or how they relate to each other; that the soul has some sort of enduring being even if we cannot tell whether it is that of an eternal ‘substance’ or merely that of a contingent qualtitative ‘accident,’ and even if we do not know whether the soul comes into existence before or after the body and whether it will cease to exist when the body does. As in ‘De l’expe´rience,’ Montaigne’s own essay on the subject, which Pascal cites alongside the book-length ‘Apologie’ (101–2), the critique of experience is itself a fact of experience not only because experience is its object but because unfolding doubt is an experience in its own right – one possible, moreover, precisely because it is entirely conducted within the limits of experience as such. The Apology for Christian Religion Pascal set about composing shortly after his induction into the spiritual community of Port-Royal was to have included a number of experiments of a strikingly modern type: the famous pari or wager, of which we will have more to say hereafter, whose contribution to probability and decision theory is well known;13 or the exploration of the twin infinities of the unimaginably large and the unfathomably small made possible by the two great emblematic instruments of the Scientific Revolution, Galileo’s telescope and the microscope of Robert Hooke. But experience descends to a still deeper level, shaping the projected Apology as a whole. The Apology was conceived not as an essay or treatise but rather, like the Lettres provinciales (1656–7) before it, as a dramatic dialogue conducted in the form of an exchange of letters between a Jansenist apologist and an anxious correspondent (the ‘interlocutor’) eager to find a route to salvation. On the evidence of the partial drafts and work notes that are all that survive of it, the Apology was to have not only presented but enacted the unfolding search for God, concocting a fictional experience portrayed as a model for the one its readers were encouraged to undertake. Otherworldly as Pascal’s ultimate objectives unquestionably were, the whole point of the exercise depended on the place it claimed in the experimental order it set out to vanquish. In order to see what all of this has to teach us not only about the Pascalian picture of experience but about the second-order experience of reading Pascal’s literary remains themselves, I will approach the Apology by way of the ‘discours de la machine,’ the long fragment or, following the edition, series of fragments (Lafuma 418–26; Sellier 680)

The Ghost in the Machine 179

that features the famous wager and the related distinction between heart and reason underlying the Pense´es’s definition of faith. More specifically, I want to talk about the machine that gives the discourse its title even though its identity is never explained in the notes that are all that remain of the discourse itself. Our theme here, then, is a notion or idea only available at a metadiscursive level, operating, as Pascal himself would have put it, par derrie`re, as the hidden ‘reason’ behind the rhetorical ‘effect’ it was intended to produce. I will argue that the machine points among other things to la pascaline, the computer Pascal constructed to ease the burdensome calculations incident to his father’s office as a tax-gatherer. By automatizing mathematical operations that normally demand sustained (and fallible) mental labour, the pascaline offers a model of both the mind and that faith by which alone humanity has hope of salvation. However, to see how this might illuminate not only Pascal’s larger apologetic project but his scientific and mathematical insights as well, we will come at it by way of a passage in the Provinciales. Our point of departure is the parable that ‘mon ami Janse´niste,’ the Jansenist friend supposed to have written the letters in response to queries from an acquaintance in the provinces, proposes in the second letter in order to discredit the perfidious pseudo-distinction at the root of the controversy concerning the five heretical articles that Jesuits and their Dominican allies in the Sorbonne imputed to Antoine Arnauld’s defence of Jansenius in De la fre´quente Communion [On frequent Communion] (1643). Analysis of how the parable works, or rather of how it breaks down under closer scrutiny than its rhetoric aims to allow, will highlight the simultaneously ontological and psychological dilemmas the discourse on the machine attempts to solve in the service of the faith the later Apology defends.14 The parable bears on an issue central to the Counter-Reformation effort to roll back Protestant heresy, the part human will plays in the drama of redemption. The Jansenist friend introduces it in a discussion with his Dominican foil, a character called ‘le bon Pe`re jacobin’ in honour of the French Dominican province’s Parisian headquarters in the rue St-Jacques, concerning the distinction between la graˆce efficace or ‘efficacious’ grace by which all parties agreed that God in fact grants salvation and la graˆce suffisante, the so-called sufficient grace that Jesuits and Dominicans claimed Christians possess in the form of free will. The question was whether Christians have the autonomous power to ‘merit’ justification by contributing to their own salvation at least to the extent of freely seeking divine mercy. The distinction between efficacious and

180

The Matter of Mind

sufficient grace was accordingly calculated to uphold the Jesuit (or Molinist) doctrine of justification, nominally espoused by Jacobins, against the charge of neo-Pelagian heresy that Jansenists levelled. According to Jansenists, in assigning a prominent role to self-determined human activity, Jesuits went a long way toward repeating the heretical fallacy of the fifth-century ascetic Pelagius, who held that free will grants humans the capacity to undertake and even effect their own redemption. In challenging this view, Pascal not only seconds the allegations of heresy Arnauld made in La The´ologie morale des Je´suites [The moral theology of the Jesuits] (1643) in reply to Jesuit attacks on his book on holy communion; he also rebuts the accusation that Jansenist insistence on God’s exclusive efficacious power commits the Lutheran and Calvinist heresy of denying free will through a perniciously literal interpretation of Augustine’s doctrines of the Fall and divine predestination.15 The Jansenist friend thus deploys the parable to escape the impasse that theological argument has reached, proposing a simplified ‘peinture de l’E´glise dans ses diffe´rents avis’ [picture of the Church in its different opinions] to clear away the sophistical complications in which Jesuits and Jacobins conspire to entangle the case (OC 680). The story concerns an emblematic traveller left ‘half dead’ by robbers on the road to his symbolic ‘home.’ The traveller calls on three doctors from neighbouring towns. The first, identified by that fact as being closest to the primitive Church and the early Fathers of whom Augustine is the implicit chief, pronounces the traveller’s wounds ‘mortal’ and advises him that ‘il n’y a que Dieu qui lui puisse rendre ses forces perdues’ [God alone can restore his lost strength]. Dismayed by this prognosis, the traveller seeks a second opinion. The new physician, ‘arriving next’ as a deceptive substitute for the first, ‘flatters’ his feelings by reporting that, grievous as his wounds may appear, ‘il avait encore des forces suffisantes pour arriver en sa maison’ [he still had sufficient strength to get back home]. The traveller now consults the third doctor, asking him to adjudicate between the opposing views the first two voice, and the third doctor finds in favour of the second. However, when asked to justify his agreement with the second physician, he quibbles. Since the traveller’s wounds have not deprived him of the use of his ‘legs’ (i.e., free will), he retains possession of ‘les organes qui suffisient naturellement pour marcher’ [the organs that naturally suffice for walking]. Yet when his patient enquires if he also has ‘la force ne´cessaire pour m’en servir’ [the necessary strength to use them] in the mortal weakness to which his wounds have reduced him, the third doctor replies ‘non

The Ghost in the Machine 181

certainement […] et vous ne marcherez jamais effectivement, si Dieu ne vous envoie un secours extraordinaire pour vous soutenir et vous conduire’ [certainly not (…) and you will in fact never walk unless God sends you an extraordinary assistance to sustain and guide you]. At which the traveller denounces the third doctor’s ‘bizarre proceeding’ and the ‘ambiguous terms’ used to defend it; and blaming him for plotting with the second ‘avec lequel il n’avait qu’une conformite´ apparente’ [with whom he was in only apparent agreement], the traveller makes the experiment for himself: Et, apre`s avoir fait essai de ses forces, et reconnu par expe´rience la ve´rite´ de sa faiblesse, il les renvoya tous deux; et, rappelant le premier, se mit entre ses mains, et suivant son conseil, il demanda a` Dieu les forces qu’il confessait n’avoir pas; il en rec¸ut mise´ricorde, et par son secours, arriva heureusement dans sa maison. (OC 680–1; my emphasis) [And, having made a test of his strength, and recognized by experience the truth of his weakness, he sent them both away; and, calling the first back, put himself in his hands, and following his counsel, he asked God for the strength he confessed he lacked; he received God’s mercy, and with his help arrived happily home.] (my emphasis)

In the dramatic context of the letter, the Jansenist friend’s parable has the desired effect: ‘Le bon Pe`re [jacobin], e´tonne´ d’une telle parabole, ne re´pondit rien’ [The good ( Jacobin) Father, stunned by such a parable, made no reply] (OC 681). But despite the parable’s in any case preprogrammed success in silencing opposition, the rhetorical means employed conflict with the theological content to which they extort the Dominican father’s assent. The problem lies in the very point of doctrine in dispute: the radical consequences of the Augustinian theology of the Fall and of the ‘mortal’ wound that original sin inflicts on human will. To win the argument, the Jansenist enlists the hope of salvation by which all of the participants claim to be actuated. He achieves this by suggesting that the first physician holds the key to the longed-for voyage home, a suggestion transmitted by the apparently causal force of the sequence of events that mark the parable’s climax. The story’s at once temporal and teleological end in the traveller’s happy return seems not merely to follow but to follow from his decision to put himself in the Jansenist doctor’s hands. And what creates this impression is the emphatic use of the conjunction ‘and,’ employed no fewer than fives

182

The Matter of Mind

times in the parable’s close. While the connecting ‘and’ is in the first place the mark of neutral temporal succession, it activates the finalism endemic to narrative as such, and especially to symbolic narratives like parable. The whole point of the Jansenist friend’s ‘picture of the Church in its different opinions’ is that it has a point, and the cascade of conjunctions signals our arrival at its fulfilment. The philosophical expression of this finalism is a familiar logical fallacy: post hoc, ergo propter hoc, what comes after must somehow come before.16 If the traveller gets safely home, it is because God mercifully brings him there; and God grants his aid because, obedient to the Jansenist doctor’s advice, the traveller confesses his powerlessness and seeks God’s mercy, a course the traveller adopts because a trial of his own strength compels him to acknowledge his weakness. But though the conjunctions’ causal force may work for the purely natural events in the story – for instance, at the level at which the traveller is led to make an empirical test of his strength – it cannot for the supernatural agency that actually gets him home. The Jansenist opinion that provokes the controversy in which the Provinciales intervene holds that the Molinist notion of sufficient grace communicated to us in the form of free will is a fraud. As, following Augustine and Arnauld, Pascal repeats in every way he can think of right up to the moment when, toward the end of letter 4, he passes to the counter-attack with the assault on Jesuit casuistry of which he takes the doctrine of sufficient grace to be a typical product, if the term ‘efficacious’ means anything, then the grace with which God actually saves the elect must also be ‘sufficient.’ Insofar as God alone effects salvation, the act by which he does so suffices by itself, requiring nothing further on our part. It follows then that, if the Jansenist reading of Augustine is correct, and if Augustine in turn gives us the right answer to the question of grace, the implied causal link that persuades us is impossible. If no personal act of will can merit God’s grace, nothing the traveller does will earn the mise´ricorde that brings him home. The proliferating conjunctions thus encourage us to see a causal mechanism that Jansenist doctrine rules out. The result is that the conjunction disappears exactly at the crucial point when God grants the traveller his mercy and grace comes into play. The missing conjunction marks both a moment of absolute plenitude and a telltale gap. It is a moment of plenitude in that it is the place at which God acts, fulfilling scripture and Patristic commentary alike. Yet it is a gap in that it tears the fabric of the supporting narrative by introducing an element that has no place in the natural scheme the parable represents.

The Ghost in the Machine 183

God confirms his unconditioned absence at the very point at which he intercedes on the traveller’s behalf. The logical dilemma that undoes the Provinciales’s parable resurfaces in the transition to the discourse of the machine in the series of fragments where, placing the discourse in the series of letters of which the Apology was to have been composed, Pascal gives it its name (Lafuma 5–12; Sellier 39–46). More specifically, the dilemma arises as a result of the text that was to have preceded the discourse, the ‘lettre d’exhortation a` un ami pour le porter a` chercher [Dieu]’ [letter of exhortation to a friend to lead him to seek (God)] (Lafuma 5; Sellier 39), a letter whose affective as well as thematic focus is the unendurable ‘mise`re de l’homme sans Dieu’ [wretchedness of man without God] and the accompanying hard-line Augustinian thesis that ‘la nature est corrompue, par la nature meˆme’ [nature is corrupted by nature itself] (Lafuma 6; Sellier 40). The ironic outcome of the exhortation, a direct expression of its impact at the level of natural experience, is that its very force throws ‘obstacles’ in the way of faith. This in turn defines the new letter’s task: ‘[a]pre`s la lettre qu’on doit chercher Dieu, faire la lettre d’oˆter les obstacles, qui est le discours de la machine’ [(a)fter the letter that one must seek God, do the letter to remove obstacles, which is the discourse of the machine] (Lafuma 11; Sellier 45). Having digested the hopelessness of his plight from the merely human point of view that he shares with the Provinciales’s traveller, the apologist’s friend despairs: Et il re´pondra: ‘Mais a` quoi me servira de chercher? Rien ne paraıˆt.’ Et lui re´pondre: ‘Ne de´sespe´rez pas.’ Et il re´pondrait qu’il serait heureux de trouver quelque lumie`re, mais que selon cette religion meˆme, quand il croirait ainsi, cela ne lui servirait de rien et qu’ainsi il aime autant ne point chercher. Et a` cela lui re´pondre: ‘La machine.’ (Lafuma 5; Sellier 39) [And he will reply: ‘But what use is there in seeking? Nothing appears.’ And reply to him: ‘Do not despair.’ And he would reply that he would be happy to find some light, but according to this very religion, even if he were to believe thus, it would be of no use and that, under these conditions, he is just as happy not to seek. And to that reply: ‘The machine.’]

What Pascal means here by ‘the machine’ is in general clear enough. In one sense, consonant with the teachings of Cartesian science, the machine is the human body and the natural world to which the

184

The Matter of Mind

body attaches us. To this extent the term fingers the machinery of selfpreserving appetite and sensation that, in enabling us to make just so much sense of the world as is required to act in the interest of our survival as living organisms, lays the foundation for a coherent body of experience and for its coordinate in a coherent sense of self.17 As the machine’s relation to the sense of self suggests, the term also denotes the rudiments of human psychology in the physically based desires and modes of perception by which bodily experience eclipses spiritual concerns, and especially the pursuit of personal salvation in the afterlife. It is crucial to note that the mechanistic theory of perception invoked at this stage works at two levels. On the one hand, it picks up an idea Montaigne stresses in ‘De l’expe´rience’: Esope, ce grand homme, vid some maistre qui pissoit en se promenant: ‘Quoy donq, fit-il, nous faudra-il chier en courant?’ Mesnageons le temps; encore nous en reste-il beaucoup d’oisif et mal employe´. Nostre esprit n’a volontiers pas assez d’autres heures a` faire ses besongnes, sans se desassocier du corps en ce peu d’espace qu’il luy faut pour sa necessite´. [Les philosophes] veulent se mettre hors d’eux et eschapper a` l’homme. C’est folie; au lieu de se transformer en anges, ils se transforment en bestes; au lieu de se hausser, ils s’abattent.18 [Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked along: ‘What,’ said he, ‘must we shit while running?’ Let us make use of the time we have; as it is, much of it is left idle and ill-used. Our minds doubtless lack hours enough to perform the chores alotted to them without severing themselves from the body in the little span required to see to its needs. (Philosophers) want to get outside themselves and escape the human condition. This is folly: rather than transform themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; rather than raise themselves up, they cast themselves down.]

According to the picture Montaigne draws here, the mind’s primary function is not the lofty pursuit of truth of which philosophers boast; it is the more humble task of ministering to the body’s needs by detecting, in the world as the body experiences it, what does it good and what harms it – a task whose laborious difficulty Montaigne notes in observing how much time it consumes if we mean to do it well. This in turn explains the essentially self-centred and therefore subjective character of the perceptions into which the mind transforms bodily stimuli. What the mind needs to learn from the body and then pass back to it in the

The Ghost in the Machine 185

form of useful directions is less the truth of things in themselves than what the body needs to know about them in order to flourish. It is enough, for instance, that what nourishes the body should taste good and that what might harm it should repel us without worrying about whether these reactions are true or not in the sense of delivering some real property of edible and inedible things. The world as we experience it is thus a rigorous coordinate of the self it simultaneously expresses and nurtures, sharing the self’s limits even as it extends the self’s dominion over that portion of reality it is capable of digesting.19 Above all, however, as Montaigne’s picture of the mind-body relation suggests, the machine fingers ‘le moi,’ the notoriously ‘hateful’ creature (Lafuma 597; Sellier 494) whose automatized drives it is one of the Apology’s central aims to defeat as a condition of conversion. To this extent, the machine is insatiable self-love or amour-propre and the selfpromoting routines that enslave us to the corrupted natural world to which the original sin of selfish willing – the sin of will as such – holds us captive. As Martin Luther puts it in The Bondage of the Will, commenting on the apparently paradoxical spontaneity of acts of will necessitated by divine predestination, and crystallizing in the process an idea central to the Calvinist as well as Lutheran anthropology that Jansenists were not unjustly accused of embracing, a man without the Spirit of God does not do evil against his will, under pressure, as though he were taken by the scruff of the neck and dragged into it, like a thief or footpad being dragged off against his will to punishment; but he does so spontaneously and voluntarily. And this willingness or volition is something which he cannot in his own strength eliminate, restrain or alter. He goes on willing and desiring to do evil; and if external pressure forces him to act otherwise, nevertheless his will within remains averse to so doing and chafes under such constraint and opposition.20

Will is not a faculty by which, as Descartes and his Jesuit teachers were of one mind in asserting, we deliver ourselves from captivity to the fallen natural world to which the body belongs; it is a direct expression of our captivity as such. To will at all is to will evil, or at any rate to will in blind obedience to the mechanical dictates of creaturely concupiscence. However, where other passages in Pascal attack the machine head on, the new letter takes the roundabout route of mobilizing its mechanisms at their own expense. Such is the goal of an argument in the discourse that anticipates Immanuel Kant’s similarly motivated analysis of

186

The Matter of Mind

the ‘mathematical sublime,’ an argument whose force derives from the fact that it is grounded in a mathematical rather than spiritual perspective, as a truth that flows from a purely rational and therefore natural insight inseparable from the mere notion of number itself: Nous connaissons qu’il y a un infini, et ignorons sa nature; comme nous savons qu’il est faux que les nombres soient finis, donc il est vrai qu’il y un infini en nombre, mais nous ne savons pas ce qu’il est: il est faux qu’il soit pair, il est faux qu’il soit impair, car en ajoutant l’unite´ il ne change point de nature; cependant c’est un nombre, et tout nombre et pair ou impair […] Ainsi on peut bien connaıˆtre qu’il y a un Dieu sans savoir ce qu’il est. (Lafuma 418; Sellier 680)21 [We know that there is an infinity, and do not know its nature; as we know that it is false that numbers are finite, thus that it is true that there is an infinity in number, but we do not know what it is: it is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd, for in adding a unit its nature is not changed; yet it is a number, and every number is either even or odd (…) So one can in fact know that there is a God without knowing what he is.]

Such is also the goal of the wager, where sheer animal fright at the prospect of eternal hellfire lends muscle to the otherwise strictly rational argument that we have logically nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by betting on the existence of God. The wager is justified not only by the fact that ‘la raison n’y peut rien de´terminer’ [reason can determine nothing about the matter] (Lafuma 418; Sellier 680) since the absence of rational proofs of God’s existence cannot disprove it either. It is also justified by the corollary: the mere fact that God may exist, bringing the threat of eternal pain along with it, entails that we must place a bet, and have indeed already done so, whether we are conscious of it or not. But the chief way in which the discourse enlists the machine in its own defeat lies in the upshot. The commitment to ‘seek’ that the wager enjoins promotes actions (prayers, vigils, fasts, meditations, acts of confession and communion) that establish a pious routine designed to instil the conviction it mimics.22 The discourse aims in short to defeat the machine by uprooting the set of automatized functions to which unmitigated nature subjects us only to replace it with another set. This underscores a further sense of the term ‘machine,’ what Pascal calls ‘custom’: a complex concept, this too borrowed from Montaigne, that covers everything from custom itself and mundane habit to inherited belief, prejudice, and a culturally or historically determined ethos or

The Ghost in the Machine 187

mentality.23 Pascal thereby reaches an insight that, for all his fierce religiosity, recommends him to later secular thinkers (Louis Marin, for example, or Pierre Bourdieu) he would have loathed.24 For an important novelty in Pascal’s thinking about custom is the way he identifies the term with what, despite his nominalist scepticism, Montaigne continues to regard as its opposite, namely, nature. The fusion of custom and nature is in fact the topic of a devastating chiastic fragment on presumptively ‘unnatural’ children eager to dispose of inconvenient fathers: Les pe`res craignent que l’amour naturel des enfants ne s’efface. Quelle est donc cette nature sujette a` eˆtre efface´e? La coutume est une seconde nature, qui de´truit la premie`re. Mais qu’est-ce que nature? Pourquoi la coutume n’est-elle pas naturelle? J’ai grand peur que cette nature ne soit elle-meˆme qu’une premie`re coutume, comme la coutume est une seconde nature. (Lafuma 126; Sellier 159) [Fathers fear that the natural love of children is eroding. What then is this nature that is subject to erosion? Custom is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why isn’t custom natural? I am very much afraid that nature may be nothing but a first custom, just as custom is a second nature.]

Whence an echo in the discourse of the machine itself, defining both the result the wager is supposed to produce and the mechanism that brings that result about: ‘La coutume est notre nature. Qui s’accoutume a` la foi la croit, et ne peut plus ne pas craindre l’enfer, et ne croit autre chose’ [Custom is our nature. Those who accustom themselves to faith believe it, and can no longer avoid fearing hell, and can believe nothing else] (Lafuma 419; Sellier 680). The despairing selfish fear of eternal pain that the interlocutor voices in the transition to the letter on the machine inspires propitiatory rituals that implant the faith the fearful human animal naturally lacks. The outcome of all of this, however, is that the faith the passage seeks to impart is destabilized by the very ironies the Apology visits on human nature on faith’s behalf. Like the automatized custom that propagates it, faith is opposed to reason, a faculty Pascal generally associates with the natural world over which it legislates precisely because it so seamlessly espouses the mechanical laws that determine nature’s form and

188

The Matter of Mind

content. This yields the famous formula toward which the wager points from the start: ‘C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison: voila` ce que c’est que la foi. Dieu sensible au cœur, non a` la raison’ [It is the heart that senses God, and not reason: this is what faith is. God sensible to the heart, and not reason] (Lafuma 423; Sellier 680). To which he adds a rider worthy of Franc¸ois de La Rochefoucauld, one that, detached from the context the Pense´es give it, could easily be read as a testament to the unconscious calculations that the cynical duke attributes to the blind yet infallibly pinpoint promptings of invincible amourpropre: ‘Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaıˆt point’ [The heart has reasons that reason does not know] (Lafuma 423; Sellier 680). This raises the question of just what Pascal takes ‘the heart’ to be. Given its ties to the indemonstrable ‘sentiments’ elsewhere identified with the founding axioms of logic, mathematics, and physical science (Lafuma 110; Sellier 142), Pascal’s ‘heart’ resembles what Kant calls ‘reason,’ a transcendental faculty, as such excluded from direct natural and moral experience alike, that nonetheless grounds both of them as their indispensable condition of possibility.25 But as Pascal expressly acknowledges in the fragment cited a moment ago, where faith and custom fuse in salutary fright, the heart is also the medium of the sheer animal fear by which the human machine is programmed in the belief the Apology promulgates. In this sense it is the organ of what the orthodox doctrine of the sacrament of confession calls ‘attrition’ in contradistinction to ‘contrition,’ the heartfelt sorrow for one’s sins as detestable evils in and of themselves without which no truly good confession takes place.26 So what exactly does the heart feel when Pascal claims that it feels God: God himself, or merely relief from the fear of which God is at once the object and the calculated beneficiary? The way out of the machine that the Apology offers turns out to be nothing more than an automatized effect whose reason is the natural machinery over which reason presides in faith’s despite. The trap the Apology lays for itself brings us to the darkest implication of the term ‘machine,’ intimately related to Pascal’s unassuageably adversarial sense of nature. And it is also here that we begin to appreciate what science contributes. For while science is at one level the foolish distraction the Apology ridicules in the Quixotic person of Descartes, it also models the kind of irresistible because automatized reflexiveness Pascal wants faith to possess. Consider the pamphlet reporting the ‘expe´riences nouvelles touchant le vide’ [new experiments bearing on the void] (1647) to which

The Ghost in the Machine 189

we owe Pascal’s later treatises on air pressure and fluid mechanics (OC 362–77). The central physical problem addressed is that of compelling assent to an unpalatable and therefore, in contemporary eyes, counterintuitive truth. While the anthropomorphized nature of Aristotelian physics championed in the Schools, and upheld on this point at least by Descartes as well,27 may ‘abhor a vacuum,’ it nevertheless ‘admits,’ ‘suffers,’ or ‘tolerates’ it as a reflex of the physical laws that govern its operations. The pamphlet’s guiding ‘spirit’ or ‘genius’ (Pascal uses both terms) is of course reason; and reason is the faculty of disinterested judgment charged with deciding the matter not only by discriminating between true and false or real and apparent but also by distinguishing what we hope, fear, or imagine from what is in fact the case, regardless of the consequences from the merely human point of view to which we naturally cling.28 And indeed the unusual heat with which Pascal appeals to reason in defence of the existence of the void indexes the powerful cultural and emotional resistance the pamphlet’s central thesis provoked among period readers. This accounts for the ruthless industry driving the series of experiments Pascal minutes. In accordance with the method of experimental ‘variations’ he employs, Pascal sets out to demonstrate that the vacuum exists by countering every conceivable attempt to refute it. As the preface to the ‘Expe´riences’ notes, three obstacles stand in the way: the prejudicial ‘pre´vention’ or prepossession enshrined in ‘la maxime si rec¸ue, que la nature ne souffre point le vide’ [the so widely accepted maxim that nature does not tolerate the void]; imagination, the faithless faculty by which prejudice manipulates the ‘natural’ experience of things Pascal’s experiments are designed to correct; and ‘cette puissance de l’esprit, qu’on nomme Subtilite´ dans les e´coles, et qui, pour solution des difficulte´s ve´ritables, ne donne que de vaines paroles sans fondement’ [that power of the mind called Subtlety in the Schools which invariably solves genuine difficulties with baseless idle words] (OC 363). To meet this triple threat, Pascal first replicates Evangelista Torricelli’s celebrated success in creating a vacuum by plunging a glass tube full of mercury into a fluid medium and then opening the lower end of the tube to let a portion of the mercury escape, leaving an airless void behind engendered by the suction that occurs when the mercury is released. He then systematically modifies the conditions of the original experiment – by using an empty syringe in a vat of water, for example, by substituting a bellows or siphon for a tube or syringe and red wine for water or mercury, or by conducting the experiment in

190

The Matter of Mind

different locations in order to control for changes in altitude, climate, and air pressure. These experimental modifications aim to test for every hypothesis he or his associates, among them for a time Descartes,29 can think of that might explain his findings away. ‘Unnatural’ as Pascal’s results may seem as being inimical not only to Aristotelian orthodoxy but to the faith in the providential order of Creation whose presumed plenitude the existence of the vacuum contravenes, the evidence his experiments amass compels us to confess that the void does exist whether we like it or not. Exactly as in the case of the Dominican father at the conclusion of the Provinciales’ parable of the traveller’s journey home, the experiments are meant to strike us dumb, reducing us to helpless silence before an unanswerable truth. It is in this encounter with the coercive authority that reason and nature conjointly oppose to wishful thinking that Pascal finds the underlying model for the discourse of the machine. First is what the experiments force us to accept: not only that the void exists but that, as a condition and consequence of its existence, nature is fundamentally inhuman. Regardless of what we feel ought to be the case from the standpoint of the hopes and fears that fuel human imagination and the sophistical subtleties with which we habitually mask reality from ourselves as well as others, the rigorously de-anthropomorphized nature of Pascalian science constantly gives the same answer, however we frame the question. And it does so just because it is a machine that has as such no choice and, more to the point, no stake in the outcome. This absence of interest or choice, and so of the determinants of human subjectivity, guarantees nature’s veracity by absolving it of the distorting desires our own self-regarding prepossessions introduce.30 But this in turn defines what mathematical science is, and so how reason works. Exactly as not only Descartes but the rigorously monistic (and so putatively atheistic) Spinoza insist, showing Pascal to have been a thoroughly modern man of science despite the theistic commitments his later conversion merely deepened or confirmed, what grants experimental science its hold on nature is just nature’s inhuman automatism. Nature gives science true answers because, as a soulless machine, it remains invariably the same, repeating itself with the mechanical regularity and precision reason demands. The corollary, however, is that, properly conducted, reason must be as heartlessly machinelike and inhuman as the phenomena it explains. One expression of this inhumanity is the rhetoric of Pascal’s report of his experiments. When not engaged in inevitably (if, as chapter 1 on Descartes’s Meditations alerted

The Ghost in the Machine 191

us, still symptomatically) ad hominem debate with dismayed objectors and detractors like the Jesuit Pe`re Noe¨l,31 Pascal affects an impersonal voice, as on, the neutral ‘one,’ the French equivalent of the passive voice Pascal’s English contemporaries increasingly adopted in reporting their own observations and experiments.32 This impersonal voice is the stylistic counterpart of the depersonalized natural processes Pascal analyses. But it also creates the rhetorically empty space of scientific analysis itself. Following in the wake of Bacon’s prophylactic dissection of the ‘idols’ of the human mind, the fantasies by which we construct the world of spontaneous appearances it is science’s initial task to demolish, the passive or neutral voice is the rhetorical marker of the self-correcting orthopsychism of the subject of modern science.33 The enemy of truth in science is in fact the human psyche, a vehicle of knowledge (in the absence of divine revelation, the only one we have) all the more treacherous in that, like the eye that is one of its most potent models as well as instruments, its proper operation renders it invisible to itself. We have already noted how Gassendi makes this point when he objects in response to Descartes’s claim to unconditional certainty that the world as we see it is just and only that: the world as we see it as an expression of what we are both taught and inclined to see. To have then any chance to obtain genuine knowledge even of nature, let alone of such traditional themes of metaphysical speculation as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, we must first set right the psychic mechanisms that condition our perceptions. Whence a cardinal rule of modern scientific method: to be credited as accurate, experiments must be capable of replication. It will not consequently matter who performs the experiments or with what selfservingly human ends in view: the findings will always be impersonally identical. But this same impersonality also characterizes at least the ideal scientific observer. To the precise extent that the result will always be the same, whoever performs the experiment, no one performs it. The purely rational subject that modern science demands is just as empty of humanity as the natural phenomena his or her experiments exhibit.34 We turn at last to the pascaline, the computer Pascal devised to help his father with the calculations incident to his career as a tax farmer. Two insights underlie Pascal’s arithmetical device (see especially OC 354–5). The first is that, since mathematical operations are by nature purely formal, they can be formalized; and if mathematical operations can be formalized, they can also be automatized, programmed to perform the mechanical solution of rote equations. Though it takes an act

192

The Matter of Mind

of mind to invent and construct the machine that replaces it, no mind is needed to undertake even elaborate computations: a machine can do them just as well, if not better. This explains the note of mingled awe and alarm with which Nicolas Fontaine, the member of the community at Port-Royal who composed the relation of Pascal’s interview with M. de Sacy, speaks of the pascaline in his preambular account of the intellectual gifts that made Pascal a prize catch for his new Jansenist associates: On sait qu’il semblait animer le cuivre et donner de l’esprit a` l’airain. Il faisait que de petites roues sans raison, ou` e´taient sur chacune les dix premiers chiffres, rendaient raison aux personnes les plus raisonnables, et il faisait en quelque sorte parler les machines muettes, pour re´soudre en jouant les difficulte´s des nombres qui arreˆtaient les plus savants: ce qui lui couˆta tant d’application et d’efforts d’esprit que, pour monter cette machine au point ou` tout le monde l’admirait, et que j’ai vu de mes yeux, il en eut lui-meˆme la teˆte presque de´monte´e pendant pre`s de trois ans. (89–90) [Everyone knows that he seemed to animate copper and give a mind to brass. He devised it so that little unreasoning wheels, on each of which the ten first figures had been inscribed, out-reasoned the most rational persons, and he as it were gave a voice to mute machines in order to solve, in sport, numerical problems that defeated the most learned people: which cost him so much application and mental effort that in bringing (pour monter) this machine to the point at which everyone admired it, and as I witnessed it with my own eyes, his own head was almost run down (de´monte´e) for nearly three years.]

What naı¨fs like Fontaine saw as the nearly magical – not to say uncanny – animation of inert matter, giving not only life but mind to copper, brass, and the wheels of the computer’s inner workings, is in fact nothing of the kind. It is just that what we tend to think of as the peculiarly mental business of manipulating numbers is an inherently impersonal process that needs no mind to carry it out. To the extent moreover that, as Pascal’s own experience as a scientist would have led him to take for granted, nature itself is a machine governed by the mathematical laws that determine its functions, what Fontaine reacts to as the unnerving proof of Pascal’s quasi-demonic genius is a trick nature turns all the time in the ordinary course of things. Whence Pascal’s second insight. Given the formal character that enables us to automatize mathematical operations, a bit of ‘natural magic’

The Ghost in the Machine 193

nature accomplishes every day, the chief and in fact sole source of mathematical error is the human subject. In devising his machine, Pascal not simply aims to alleviate his father’s official labours; he means to eliminate error by eliminating its source in human attention, which notoriously flags, and in human intention, which wants things as a reflex of the natural interests that set it in motion. The goal is indeed to eliminate the human itself, conceived as a limited capacity for concentrated rational thought threatened at every moment by a limitless power of distracting imagination and desire. Unlike the human mind, the pascaline does not wonder or want but simply follows, with tirelessly undeviating because mindless exactitude, the chains of numbers fed into it. This is finally how the discourse of the machine is supposed to work. The calculus of probabilities the wager lays out aims less to assist than to obviate conscious decision on the interlocutor’s part: the numbers make the decision for him as a matter of pure mathematical fact, as undeniably true as that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. Just as the apprehension of mathematical truths becomes an automatic reflex of the numerical relationships they express, so the only true means of salvation is the elimination of self effected through the extinction of the mind that is its most distinctive and admirable attribute. But if the extinction of the mind seems necessary, it is because, as admirable as it may be, the mind itself is a machine whose automatized functions are the thoughts on which it prides itself. Like will in our parable from the second provincial letter, the mind turns out to be a mirage Pascal invokes only to make us uncomfortably aware of its powerlessness to will even its own redemption. The result is perhaps the discourse’s most singular feature. Who may be said to speak here? One intended outgrowth of the discourse of the machine was to have been the typological decoding of the words of the Jewish prophets: an exegetical adduction of Christian ‘proofs’ whose ‘utility’ the discourse was meant to establish on the basis of a heartfelt desire for the consoling assurance of Christian truth such ‘proofs’ would convey (Lafuma 17; Sellier 41).35 As in the case of the words of the prophets, whose ‘figural’ character inscribes a meaning unavailable to the prophets themselves, insofar as what Pascal says is true rather than merely plausible or persuasive, God speaks. For only God can encompass a truth that necessarily transcends the incurable human blindness for which prophetic speech in advance of Christ’s revelation offers a metaphor. But, in human terms, God is no one, a ghost in the machine. The truth thus speaks itself, unfolding in the place left open for it by the erasure of mortal agency.

194

The Matter of Mind

And yet can this be right? Can we take the full measure of the selfdeceiving machinery of the human mind, and so of the tragicomedy of the human condition, by leaving Pascal’s demonstration at that? In a thought recorded in one of what his editor Louis Lafuma considers the unclassified papers to which Pascal committed some of his ideas in preparing to write the Apology, we find the following: (Nature diversifie et imite.

Artifice imite et diversifie.

Hasard donne les pense´es, et hasard les oˆte: point d’art pour conserver ni pour acque´rir. Pense´e e´chappe´e, je la voulais e´crire: j’e´cris au lieu qu’elle m’est [e´chappe´e].) (Lafuma 541–2; Sellier 459)36 [(Nature diversifies Artifice imitates and imitates. and diversifies. Chance grants thoughts, and chance takes them away: no art for conserving or getting [them]. Thought that escaped, I wanted to write it down: I write in its place that it [escaped] me.)]

Seconding Lafuma’s hypothesis of the fragment’s unclassified status, the fragment has no obvious home in any of the partial drafts left among Pascal’s papers at his death. This focuses attention on an arresting fact both standard editions underscore. Though Sellier gives the fragment a single number, stressing a unity Lafuma concedes by running his own 541 and 542 together without the separating space he usually sets between different fragments, both editors put the text in italics and cast it in the form of a parenthesis. For, in the original autograph manuscript, Pascal struck a vertical line through the fragment, presumably cancelling it out. But while, in striking it out, he clearly meant to exclude it from the main body of the Apology as he then conceived it, he preserved it all the same as containing an idea that would not go away. This dual gesture of cancellation and retention justifies not only the typographical differentiation the use of italics grants but the editorial parentheses, assigning the fragment the at once interstitial and marginal character of, precisely, a parenthesis or (to use the term supplied as a rubric for the very next fragment in the manuscript)

The Ghost in the Machine 195

digression. The suggestion is that the thought the fragment conveys arose in a sequence of other thoughts without, however, quite belonging to it. As a digression, it finds an occasion outside itself, in whatever it was Pascal was thinking about when this particular thought occurred to him. Yet its application to that occasion has been left entirely tacit since the text stands on its own, unembedded in the writing that triggered it. We get a parenthetical insertion detached from a specific triggering context, giving the fragment the feel of a critical aside addressed to the apologetic enterprise as a whole. The fragment exhibits all of the earmarks of what the sequence on the ‘reason of effects’ calls a pense´e de derrie`re, a nagging afterthought, as if the writer had misgivings about the process of thought itself. And indeed, as the fragment’s second and third parts inform us, whatever Pascal started out to think about, he wound up with a thought about thought as such. The first part of the fragment lays out one of Pascal’s signature chiastic formulations, describing a criss-cross relation of inversion and substitution that creates a mirror-like bond between apparent opposites, nature and artifice. Where nature ‘diversifies and imitates,’ artifice goes quite the other way, setting out as imitation only to turn into diversity. One way to sort this out would be to say that, while what initially distinguishes nature from art is the infinite variety of the particular things it engenders, looked at more closely, this diversity turns out in fact to be a mode of imitation – presumably (but how can we really tell since Pascal does not say so?) an imitation of the Creator, God himself. This would certainly sort well with the exegetical path the Apology was meant to take, recasting the natural world in all its indigestible variety as a text traced by the divine hand in testimony to its watchful presence and providential intent. Yet this pious idea runs up against a complementary twin that points in the opposite direction. Artifice, for early moderns, was in the first instance defined as an imitation of the kind nature turns out to perform. What it imitates, however, is nature itself. The result is that, where the diversity of nature is overcome by the discovery of the hand of God that nature imitates in the very variety of its productions, artifice goes astray. In imitating nature, art diversifies if only numerically, by adding its copies to the original. But it also diversifies in that each copy is the product of an individual hand and eye unlike any others just insofar as they express a differential origin of their own. What we get is accordingly not just different copies but copies of the different versions of the original it is given to artists to perceive as a function of what makes them different from each other. So where nature

196

The Matter of Mind

brings us closer to the Creator, artifice takes us further away, unless and until we learn to see nature aright and understand that what needs to be imitated is less nature as we meet it than nature as imitation, the spontaneous expression of the mind and will of God. But what then of the next two parts, a second and then a third divided in the manuscript both from the first and from each other by separating spaces even though all three form part of the same digression? Following immediately on the first, the second part announces its status as a thought not only about thought but about how dicey thought is: ‘Chance grants thoughts, and chance takes them away’; and to this thought Pascal adds a corollary set off by a colon: ‘no art for conserving or getting [them],’ emphasized by the fact of underscoring the words ‘conserving or getting’ (conserver ni acque´rir) in a gesture Sellier wrongly interprets as a separator setting the first two parts of the fragment off from the third. The idea that ideas come and go as a reflex of chance operations over which no art (point d’art) grants any control hints, first of all, at why artifice’s goal of imitation is self-defeating. Like everything else the mind attempts, imitation feeds on such ideas as happen to occur to it. But the mind is incapable of imposing any real discipline on this process. Thinking as opposed to thought, the mental operation of which thought is a mere vestigial by-product, is a chance affair, subject to the contingencies of fundamentally artless natural forces. Brains think in the same way that apple trees grow fruit or storm clouds condense into rain, a pure mechanical precipitate of physical forces. While I may, after the fact, discern a pattern or reason that seems to entitle me to claim the thought as my own by writing it down and publishing it in a book, the actual occurrence of the thought is not in my power: it comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere, unbidden and unforeseen. That it is in fact a product of chance is emphasized moreover by the additional fact of losing it. It is not just that chance gives thoughts; it takes them away again, often so rapidly that I lack the time even to jot them down before they vanish.37 We come now to the last part of the fragment, separated by a space from the other two, perhaps because it records the mental accident that set the whole parenthetical episode in motion: ‘Thought that escaped, I wanted to write it down: I write in its place that it escaped me.’ Pascal’s fragmentary thought about thought is, then, finally about one particular thought – the thought that got away. We will never know what that thought was because Pascal does not (cannot) tell us. It is of course always possible that he had it again. But there is no way of knowing which of the many thoughts set down in his surviving papers it might have

The Ghost in the Machine 197

been. Nor could we be sure that he knew it for the thought he had lost. Further, even assuming, which is also far from clear, that the lost thought returned once more, was it quite the same thought as the first time? Circumstances alter cases, and our ideas along with them: repetition is in the end just another mode of diversity. And what in any case does all of this prove? Is the point to teach us how and why the artifice of formal thinking defeats its own designs by engendering variety out of sameness and multiplicity out of identity? Or does the fragment serve as a reminder – as also a misgiving – about how irreducibly chancy everything is, including especially the natural order in which we imagine we discern the Creator’s hand? Indeed, seen in this perspective, even the thought of God cannot lay our anxieties to rest since even that thought, as a thought, comes to us as borne on the wings of chance. And yet is it in reality chance that Pascal finds himself confronting here, or is it a mechanical compulsion all the more irresistible for lying somewhere behind or below the screen of conscious ideas it generates? Such is the implication we sensed earlier in the La Rochefoucaldian potential of Pascal’s assertion that ‘the heart has reasons that reason does not know.’ To be sure, though the seat of ‘sentiment’ or feeling, the Pascalian heart is not a sentimental organ: its promptings include the axioms of logic, mathematics, and physical experience itself as well as the raw emotions with which it is conventionally linked. Yet even in its axiomatic function, the heart represents a zone of darkness at the foundation of thought as such. Though the heart guides reason by laying down its conditions of possibility, it remains inaccessible to rational analysis, withholding itself from the natural light that is the only source of knowledge naturally open to us. Given, moreover, its imperviousness to rational scrutiny, who is to say that it is not a deceiver, Pascal’s counterpart of the Cartesian malin ge´nie? Seen in these terms, it may well turn out to be the confederate of the corrupted will and the infinitely devious promptings of amour-propre. As La Rochefoucauld observes in the epigraph to his Maximes, setting the strikingly Jansenist note of suspicion that permeates the book as a whole, ‘Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices de´guise´s’ [Our virtues are more often than not nothing more than vices in disguise].38 From where we stand at the midpoint between the spring of thought and thought itself, between the ideas we consciously entertain and the inscrutable heart of darkness that is the heart itself, nothing can assure us that what we take for chance is not in fact the diabolical leading of a greedy self-regard so labyrinthine that it beggars understanding.

198

The Matter of Mind

Let us return, by way of conclusion, to the passage with which we began, the parable from the second provincial letter. We have already seen how the parable’s rhetoric is at odds with the doctrine it defends. If salvation totally depends on God’s will in perfect isolation from any act on humanity’s part, then the causal links the narrative supplies in the form of its streaming conjunctions are a self-deceiving illusion, and thus as fraudulent as the Jacobin doctor’s quibbles or his Jesuit colleague’s lies. The fragment on the lost thought and the radical contingency that envelops its insights reveal a still deeper dilemma. As we noted, at the level of the polemic the Provinciales engages, the parable’s success is registered by the dumbstruck silence to which it reduces the Dominican priest: the Jansenist friend’s picture of the clashing opinions that disturb the peace of the Church is perceived as being so unanswerably true that there is nothing left to say. But is this because, as the parable’s dramatic logic seems to suggest, the Jansenist persuades his Jacobin adversary, or is it because, as the fable’s interpretation of the debate surrounding the alleged heresies of Jansenius and Arnauld indicates, the Dominican already knows what the parable only appears to teach? The hinge on which the parable turns is, after all, less the dispute between Jansenists and Jesuits than the equivocation to which the Jacobin doctor resorts in order to justify the fact that, though he agrees with the Jansenist on the point of doctrine, he finds in favour of the Jesuit’s prognosis. If then the Dominican Father is reduced to silence, it is less because the parable convinces him of a truth he had failed to see before than because he stands convicted of a truth to which his own heart bears witness. And is this not just what the point of doctrine implies? God justifies those he justifies, and does not those he condemns to hell. We either already embrace the truth in our hearts, or we do not, and nothing we do can change it either way. What is true of the parable is also true of the Apology, and so of the evidence to which the discourse of the machine appeals in insisting that the heart alone knows God. Readers of the Pense´es almost invariably suppose that Pascal intended the Apology for the widest possible readership as an antidote to unbelief. This is Philippe Sellier’s assumption, for example, when he asserts that the introductory letter exhorting the interlocutor to search for God aims ‘to pull the unbeliever from his torpor.’39 However, the Augustinian and so Lutheran and Calvinist as well as Jansenist doctrine of divinely predestined grace that both the parable and the Pense´es espouse reminds us that this cannot be the case. The letter of exhortation is not, after all, the first in the series the Apology was

The Ghost in the Machine 199

to contain; nor are the apologist’s missives to the anxious interlocutor unsolicited. In fact, the apologist only has occasion to write because, in his heart of hearts, the interlocutor already seeks God, leading him to initiate an exchange that would not otherwise have happened. Far from pulling his correspondent from the torpor of unbelief, the apologist exploits the spiritual disturbance that induces the interlocutor to contact him in the first place. For indeed, as the parable in the Provinciales would argue, if, like the traveller, the interlocutor were not already en route to salvation, why would he turn to a Jansenist rather than seek the more comfortable and flattering spiritual direction of a Jesuit or Jacobin? The traveller gets safely home because he is already going home when we first meet him, just as the interlocutor is fated to find God because his anguish already shows him to have turned in that direction. And what leads the one to return home and the other to seek salvation if not the fact that God has set them on this path from the start? The whole thrust of the Apology is thus preconditioned by the doctrine of grace and the related doctrine of divine predestination. Supposing that genuine unbelievers would so much as read Pascal’s text, nothing it could say would ever affect them any more than the parable could change the minds of Arnauld’s Jesuit persecutors. It is not just that the game has been rigged from the start, though of course it has been since the Apology’s success in bringing the interlocutor safely home is foreordained. The objective the Apology sets itself has already been achieved as a reflex of the spiritual movement that provides its rhetorical occasion. Which is to say that, from the strictly human standpoint to which the inscrutably hidden will of God consigns us, the spring of the spiritual certainty that the Apology aims not so much to impart as to confirm for those who already feel it is as contingent as the world of chance from which the lost thought surfaced only to vanish again. At one point in the Pense´es, thinking of Montaigne as well as Montaigne’s ancient models, Pascal writes that ‘le pyrrhonisme est le vrai’ [Pyrrhonism is the truth] (Lafuma 691; Sellier 570). So long as, unenlightened by Christian revelation, we remain at the level of natural experience in which reason finds a footing, reason and experience alike confine us to the specious world of chance where, as the interlocutor puts it, ‘nothing appears’ except appearance itself. Yet if revelation is in fact what its name implies, the at once unsolicited and unmerited gift of God, our consciousness of the supernatural light of faith alone capable of opening our eyes to a reality beyond appearance has no deeper warrant than the

200

The Matter of Mind

brute fact that we happen to feel it. Just as the Epicurean Gassendi insists, all that our claims to certainty prove is that we are certain; they say nothing about whether our certainty is right or not. But what is this if not the ironically candid acknowledgment of the truth to which Pascal is brought by the inner logic of his own fierce argument?

6 Des mots sans fin: Meaning and the End(s) of History in Boileau’s Satire XII, ‘Sur l’Equivoque’

A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day. – Emily Dickinson (poem 1212)

We began with Rene´ Descartes’s Meditations, the slender text around which the far larger volume that bears the same name formed. In picturing a self-disciplined rational ego detaching itself in pure thought from the world made known to it in physical sensation and from the mediating body that gives sensation its distinctive shape, the Meditations are said to have invented the ‘modern subject’ conceived as disembodied mind. However, the upshot of Descartes’s invention of mind was not the general convergence on the Cartesian picture of sovereign self-possession historians of early modern intellectual culture take for granted; it was a series of critiques, debates, and experiments that yielded a wide range of alternatives grounded in the incorrigibly contingent experience of which personal identity is the telltale. As early as the very book in which Descartes bequeathed his version of self to the world, the disembodied mind of Cartesian metaphysics was subjected to relentless contestation. The overarching theme of this contestation was not only the sort of technical difficulties Antoine Arnauld took aim at in pointing out the logical circularity of the Cartesian criterion of clear

202

The Matter of Mind

and distinct ideas. It was also the inescapable embodiment Pierre Gassendi stressed in locating the source of that circularity in the nature of ideas themselves. To have, say, a visual idea of the kind Descartes describes in the First and Second Responses as a packet of sensation rattling around in the mind with an ‘objective’ reality of its own distinct both from the mind and from its external referent or occasion1 is to see something. And to see something means not only perceiving some external object but undergoing an objective modification of the embodied power of vision itself, a power from which we cannot detach ourselves for the simple and sufficient reason that that is what we are. As Gassendi puts it in the Fifth Objections, ‘It is you yourself who sees colours, hears sounds, etc. […] It is in fact you who sees, who hears, and who feels all things.’ And if this is so, it is because you are yourself the body that makes these things possible, coterminous with the eye ‘that, if truth be told, cannot see without you.’2 This accounts for the double thrust of Gassendi’s critique. The only inference we can draw from the certainty of which Descartes makes so much is the subjective fact of certainty itself: ‘things appear as they appear to us,’ without the sort of metaphysical remainder Descartes alleges.3 But whence too the rigorous corollary Gassendi draws. The world as we see it is just and only that: the world as we see it. Nor would we see it at all, let alone perceive it in the way we find we do, were we not the historically as well as physically embodied creatures we are, actuated by the interests, habits, prepossessions, and desires embodiment brings with it. The result is the actual form of Descartes’s book: the argumentative shape of the Meditations themselves, full of the cross-questioning doubts that drive the analytic process of discovery through its successive stages; the complex paratextual apparatus designed to control the book’s reception by the often contrasting readerships the Meditations were destined to reach; and not only the structure of Objections and Responses superadded to the Meditations as such but a multidimensional polemic whose participants knew each other to be exactly what they were, fully embodied empirical persons representing the at once institutional and doctrinal positions they occupied in the world of public discourse. What proves true of the ideas advanced in Descartes’s book proves just as true of the Cartesian model of mind once his multifarious successors set to work on it. The sovereign sujet-peintre of Poussinian art, the self-made genius of Cornelian tragic poetry, the experimental theory of

Des mots sans fin

203

words, ideas, and images enacted on the Molie´resque stage, or the Pascalian portrayal of mind as an impersonal machine whose only hope of salvation is to find a way to switch itself off – all of these avatars of the so-called modern subject demonstrate just how implausible the Cartesian notion of self turned out to be. To the extent that Descartes’s contemporaries looked to ‘the subject’ at all, they did so as a problem, a demonic temptation, a heroic failure, or a farcical self-deception. That this was to be the subject’s fate was, moreover, a matter of the very experience it was meant to reduce to order. Whatever mind may be persuaded to think it is, there remains the experimental evidence of what it is in fact – how it works, what it does, and what happens to it in the world it shares with other minds and bodies alike. The matter of mind in the sense of being the point at issue between Descartes and his contemporaries is finally decided by the matter of mind construed as the contingent corporeal stuff it is shown to be made of. We turn now, in conclusion, to one of the few figures of note who genuinely did espouse the Cartesian ideal, the satiric poet Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux. Insofar as there really was a specifically classical theory of art, Boileau’s verse treatise, L’Art poe´tique of 1674, made him its pre-eminent spokesman. And a feature of classical theory as Boileau there lays it out is the Cartesian demand for clarity and distinctness on which it rested. One of the things that still makes Boileau worth reading is in fact the clarity and distinctness with which he articulates the values of clarity and distinctness themselves. Typical in this regard is his insistence on the rigorous subordination of what contemporary theorists of painting would have termed the ornamental ‘colours’ and ‘accidents’ of figure, cadence, and rhyme to a clearly stated rational purpose.4 Poetry will not of course be perceived to be poetry without the accidents of colourful ornament. L’Art poe´tique nonetheless binds it to the underlying thought to which it is meant to give pleasing and persuasive expression without in any way impinging on thought itself. As Boileau authoritatively puts it in the opening canto, deploying political metaphors whose harshness speaks volumes to the point, Quelque sujet qu’on traite, ou plaisant, ou sublime, Que touˆjours le Bon sens s’accorde avec la Rime. L’un l’autre vainement ils semblent se haı¨r, La Rime est une esclave, et ne doit qu’obe´ir. Lors qu’a` la bien chercher d’abord on s’e´vertue¨, L’esprit a` la trouver aise´ment s’habitue¨,

204

The Matter of Mind

Au joug de la Raison sans peine elle fle´chit, Et, loin de la gesner, la sert et l’enrichit. Mais lors qu’on la ne´glige, elle devient rebelle, Et pour la rattraper, le sens court apre´s elle. Aimez donc la Raison. Que touˆjours vos e´crits Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix.5 [Whatever the subject, now teasing, now sublime, Ensure that the rhyme always agrees with Good Sense. It is in vain that the two seem mutual enemies; Rhyme is a slave, and must obey in everything. When one applies oneself to seeking it aright, The wit readily grows accustomed to finding it: Rhyme painlessly bends its neck to Reason’s yoke And, far from hampering it, serves and enriches it. But if one gives it its head, it becomes rebellious, And to catch it sense must chase after it. Love Reason, then: may your writings Always owe to her alone their lustre and their price.]

It is crucial, however, to grasping Boileau’s testimony that even he had second thoughts. It is striking, for instance, that the year that saw the publication of L’Art poe´tique also saw that of the Traite´ du Sublime, an annotated translation of Longinus’s Peri hypsous that championed a kind of poetry Boileau himself rarely attempted.6 Moreover, L’Art poe´tique voices second thoughts of its own. The treatise’s insistence on rule is accompanied by talk of a ‘secret influence’ whose mysterious promptings prove all the more decisive in that their source is expressly celestial rather than the fruit of rational design: C’est en vain qu’au Parnasse un temeraire Auteur Pense de l’Art des Vers atteindre la hauteur. S’il ne sent point du Ciel l’influence secrete, Si son Astre en naissant ne l’a forme´ Poe¨te, Dans son genie e´troit il est touˆjours captif. Pour lui Phe´bus est sourd, et Pe´gaze est retif. [It is in vain that, on Parnassus, a foolhardy Author Thinks to scale the heights of the Art of Verse. If he does not feel the secret influence of Heaven,

(1.1–6)

Des mots sans fin

205

If his Star at birth has not made him a Poet, He will remain the captive of his narrow genius. For him Phœbus is deaf, and Pegasus restive.]

While poets must discipline their talents, it is le Ciel (with an emphatic capital) that first makes poets of them, dispensing gifts of which they are, in every sense, the fortunate beneficiaries. As one would expect, with the monumental example of Pierre Corneille in the background, the earthly manifestation of these gifts is genius, an inborn talent nothing can replace or teach. Genius, in L’Art poe´tique, never wanders far from the empirical realm in which, as unteachably heaven-sent as their talents may be, even great poets turn out to be satirizable persons of an unmistakably world-bound sort. The inscrutable ‘Heaven’ of line 3 mutates into the lower-case ‘nature’ of observable phenomena introduced in line 13. To know one’s genius in the sense that Boileau prescribes is to know one’s limitations as well as one’s gifts: La nature fertile en Esprits excellens Sc¸ait entre les Auteurs partager les talens. L’un peut tracer en vers une amoureuse flamme: L’autre, d’un trait plaisant aiguiser l’E´pigramme. Malherbe d’un he´ros peut vanter les exploits; Racan chanter Philis, les Bergers et les bois. Mais souvent un Esprit qui se flatte, et qui s’aime, Me´connoist son genie, et s’ignore soy-meˆme. Ainsi Tel [Saint-Amant] autrefois, qu’on vit avec Faret Charbonner de ses vers les murs d’un cabaret, S’en va mal a` propos, d’une voix insolente, Chanter du peuple Hebreu la fuitte triomphante; Et poursuivant Moı¨se au travers des deserts, Court avec Pharaon se noyer dans les mers. [Nature, fertile in excellent wits, Knows how to share talents among authors. One can limn an amorous flame in verse; Another sharpens an epigram with a witty dart. Malherbe can vaunt the exploits of a hero; Racan can sing of Phyllis, shepherds, and woods. But often a self-flattering and self-infatuated wit

(1.13–26)

206

The Matter of Mind

Mistakes its genius, and remains ignorant of itself. Thus he [Saint-Amant] who, of yore, was wont to join Faret In scrawling his verses in charcoal on cabaret walls, Misguidedly takes it in mind to raise his insolent voice To sing of the triumphant flight of the Hebrews And, chasing Moses across the desert, Races with Pharaoh to drown himself in the sea.]

The pastoral Racan, a poet as shallow as he is mellifluous, should stick to pretty madrigals without trying to rival Malherbe’s skill in heroic genres. So too the baroque Saint-Amant, author of ‘Les Goinfres’ (ca 1630), a sonnet celebrating the raffish joys of drinking, whoring, and tobacco-smoking, looks merely foolish when, quitting in pious old age the cabarets of his youth, he sets his hand to biblical epic in Moı¨se sauve´ (1653). Yet if Racan and Saint-Amant stray from their own terrain in this way, poaching on territory for which they are unfit, it is at least in part because the rational self-awareness that would have prevented them is as great a gift as the talent they also lack. To this extent L’Art poe´tique shares the Traite´ ’s faith in what Longinus calls that ‘more than merely human’ inspiration made known to us precisely by the sublimities that unpredictably arise in the great works of the past. The fact that the Traite´ du Sublime should appear in the same year as L’Art poe´tique thus hints at a subliminal evolution that the Boileau who was a critic rather than a practising poet spent much of the rest of his life trying to make sense of. As Ann Delehanty has shown, whatever Boileau’s specifically poetic performance as the author of verse epistles, short satires, and the mock epic Le Lutrin [The lectern] (1666) may suggest, the critical Re´flexions (the first nine published in 1694, the remaining three in the posthumous Œuvres comple`tes of 1713) reveal a man increasingly aware of a poetry of feeling, of direct emotional experience, rather than of disciplined rational rule.7 The result is one of the central ironies of Boileau’s career: to have given us in the Traite´ du Sublime an entirely new, proto-Romantic idea of poetry that would eventually consign his own verse to comparative oblivion. The focus of this final chapter is just this irony as manifested in Boileau’s poetry itself, and in particular in his very last poem, Satire XII, ‘Sur l’Equivoque.’ Satire XII is a fathomless text, quite unlike anything else Boileau ever wrote. A measure of its disquieting depths is the difficulty we encounter in determining what exactly it is about. L’e´quivoque,

Des mots sans fin

207

to be sure; a figure of speech. Yet quite apart from the fact that the essence of the figure itself is its deliberate ambiguity, and quite apart from the further fact that, even as the name for a particular trope, the term ‘e´quivoque’ covers a multitude of sins, including puns and double entendres as well as calculated amphibologies and conceits, a distinctive property of the figure in question is the way it shades off into something more. It becomes indeed, at the limit, indistinguishable from language itself, and so from human consciousness as a whole, of which language is the gift and torment, the mark, achievement, instrument, and curse. We will nonetheless find a key to the poem’s restless inspiration by looking closely at the problem it addresses, or at any rate purports to address, in its long first stanza (1–48) and in the accompanying preface. A feature of Satire XII is that what begins as mockery of a figure of speech identified with a type of poetry Boileau refused to write not only turns that figure into the very matter of Boileau’s thought as well as the poem, making it its ‘subject’ in all senses of the word, but it also swells to the proportions of nothing less than a history of humanity from the creation of the world to the present of Boileau’s writing. Our theme in this chapter is just this turn, how it happens, and something of why. In the preambular ‘author’s discourse’ presented as an ‘apology’ for Satire XII, Boileau tells us that the poem was inspired by ‘le caprice du monde le plus bisarre,’ the strangest caprice imaginable. The idea for the satire came from ‘a sort of irritation and poetical anger’ occasioned by a difficulty the poet ran into in another poem that never in fact got written: a satire against ‘the bad Critics of our age’ rather like Alexander Pope’s English reworking of Boileau’s L’Art poe´tique, the Essay on Criticism of 1711.8 The original, uncompleted poem got off to a promising start – ‘I had even composed a few lines with which I was quite happy’ – when Boileau spotted a problem that stopped him in his tracks: ‘But wishing to continue, I noticed there was a verbal ambiquity [une e´quivoque de langue] in these lines; and taking it as my immediate duty to correct it, I was unable to eliminate it. This irritated me to such an extent that, instead of applying myself further to removing this ambiquity [cette e´quivoque], and to finishing my Poem against false Critics, the mad idea came to me of composing a Satire against Ambiguity [l’Equivoque] itself in order to exact revenge for all the woes it has caused me since I first meddled in writing’ (OC 88). There is already much to chew on in this account – an account, incidentally, that may or may not be true depending on how we weigh all of the other motives for writing the poem that come up once it gets in

208

The Matter of Mind

motion. For a start, we have just the prefatory discourse itself, an apology in which the author not only explains but justifies a text that, in the age of not simply bad but ‘false’ critics of whose malevolent as well as incompetent attentions Boileau is conspicuously aware, may all too readily look more than a little louche. To believe Boileau, Satire XII’s goal is to achieve once and for all the ideal of linguistic clarity that forms the cornerstone of his earlier L’Art poe´tique: the notion that, whatever else a poem aims at, the chief business of poetic as indeed of any kind of utterance is to think rationally, and so clearly, to have, but also to possess, a clear meaning and intention of one’s own, and then to say, expressly and unambiguously, just and only what one means to say. The problem is that, as Boileau’s long, often sad experience as a writer has taught him, while we generally do mean what we say, this does not guarantee that we say what we mean. On the contrary, as Boileau discovers in reading through the opening verses of the satire on critics, there is often a frustrating remainder, unintended senses that wind up saying something more and other than we consciously had in mind. Needless to say, this problem arises for anyone writing anything: ambiguities creep into even the most artlessly straightforward piece of prose. But the risks are still greater when, to the ordinary task of putting words to meanings, we add the elaborate detours of poetic ornament. Unlike prose, the journeyman object-language of everyday life, which is in principle at least entirely consumed in the business of getting ideas across, poetry aims to please. If in the classical view, as Roland Barthes once summarized it, prose is poetry minus and poetry prose plus,9 poets deploy a surplus in the tropic displacements of rhyme, metre, and figure. What language gains thereby in pleasure it loses in transparency. Just writing poetry invites what Boileau runs up against in writing about bad critics: ambiguities in whose parasitic light what is said can be interpreted to mean something other than what was meant – in whose light indeed the poet himself can be accused of deliberately equivocating, playing with words to more or less invidious intent. The poem Boileau failed to write accordingly gives birth to the one he did: the satire on equivocation that takes the place of the one on critics. Yet this is only the start of his difficulties. For the satire he winds up writing proves to be as equivocal as the opening lines of the poem on critics – verses whose meaning was so hopelessly tangled he abandoned them altogether. Why else preface the new poem with an apology? Why in fact write a preface at all if not because the ideal of pure, exact, and

Des mots sans fin

209

above all unequivocal statement the new poem champions turns out to be perilously elusive? A poem ought, in principle, to stand on its own, saying what it means and meaning what it says with unanswerable because unmistakably self-announcing clarity. Yet this poem, at any rate, cannot be trusted to do so, demanding a paratextual apparatus devised to head off the misreadings to which it is inescapably exposed. The potential for misreading sneaks, moreover, into what Boileau identifies as the poem’s instigating conceit, the ‘caprice’ that supplied its ‘bizarre’ inspiration: Du langage Franc¸ois bisarre Hermaphrodite, De quel genre te faire, Equivoque maudite? Ou maudit: car sans peine aux Rimeurs hazardeux, L’usage encor, je croi, laisse le choix des deux.

(1–4)

[Bizarre Hermaphrodite of the French language, What gender should we give you, accursed Equivoque, female? Or male? For, without penalty, I believe, Usage still leaves reckless Rimers the choice of both.]

What makes this conceit not only a ‘caprice’ but ‘bizarre’? In part, it is the uncertain gender: if the official classical order of which the notoriously misogynistic author of Boileau’s Satire X is the exemplary exponent was clear about anything, it was the absolute distinction of sex the conceit trades on by blurring it.10 It is true that, with the exception of Malherbe, whose manly stoic severities leave little room for sex in any form,11 the poets Boileau most admired, and in particular the three great dramatists of the age, fail to draw the bright line Boileau himself insists on. As we saw in chapter 3, Corneille tends to identify his gifts as a tragic poet with his female leads. The heroine of the play L’Art poe´tique (4.195–6) singles out as an unchallengeable masterpiece, the Chime`ne of Le Cid (1637), hijacks the plot by pursuing revenge for her dead father beyond the happy ending that ought to have been achieved with Rodrigue’s victory over her champion, Don Sanche. In responding with mutinous silence to the royal verdict that decrees her paradoxical surrender to the man she loves, she forces the temporizing postponement that, in delaying all thought of marriage until Rodrigue has driven the Moors from the realm, gives birth to the national hero her lover has yet to become. Meanwhile, as Molie`re’s enemies gleefully observed in turning the mirror of satire

210

The Matter of Mind

back on their tormentor, male sexual jealousy amounts to an obsession in Molie´resque comedy.12 The reason for this lies less, however, in the shameful irregularities of Molie`re’s own marital fortunes than in the perceived inversion of ‘natural’ gender roles that are a stock-in-trade of the comic conventions he mobilizes as part of the more general assault on rational notions of identity chapter 4 showed to be at work even in an early one-act farce like Sganarelle.13 All of which is distilled in a signature feature of Racinian tragedy, the representation of gender as a relational rather than biological phenomenon. The acts of violation that constitute the cruel Racinian norm reflect shifting fields of psychic violence that are entirely independent of physical sex.14 Nevertheless, much as Boileau esteemed all three poets, he refuses to follow their lead in this respect: the gender trouble the dramatists exploit as a central resource is roundly condemned in Satire X as a threat to the natural order it angrily defends. The whole thrust of the poem is to put women in their place, eliminating the sexual disorder whose satiric emblems are the emasculated fops, complacent husbands, and oily directors of conscience who give the ladies their heads.15 In this sense, Satire XII’s introductory caprice owes its bizarreness to its transferential heat. The linguistic ambiguity the satire attacks becomes not just a symptom but a symbol of the wider psycho-social chaos the satire on women denounces: a chaos whose baleful influence is mirrored in the bizarre character of the word e´quivoque itself, whose shifting grammatical gender dramatizes the disturbingly shifting senses the poem sets out to pillory. Nor should it escape our notice that the gender trouble the word stirs up licenses a second deviation from classical rule in the enjambment between lines 2 and 3, disguised yet thereby also emphasized by the insecure closure supplied by the question mark at the end of line 2. The target of Boileau’s ire is thus shown from the outset to be doubly uncontainable, this uncontainability being precisely what the satire attacks: the very word e´quivoque has no single gender and escapes secure confinement within the space of a single verse. Rather like sex a` califourchon, the enjambment enacts the figure’s hermaphroditic transgressiveness, itself in turn the figure of its subversion of rational sense. Yet there is a deeper reason for calling the poem’s inaugural conceit a caprice and for insisting on how bizarre it is: the personification announced by still another figure mobilized in these first four lines, apostrophe. By apostrophizing a capitalized Equivoque, as he consistently does throughout the poem, the poet not only personifies his target but ascribes intent to it; and it is just in this that the inspiring caprice proves

Des mots sans fin

211

most bizarre. For of course l’e´quivoque is not a person; it is not even quite a thing. It is, rather, that strange hybrid, at once notion and thing, we call a form of words, a chimera made all the more complex in the present instance in that the form of words is also a figure of speech. From the standpoint of the classical rationality Boileau champions, personifying l’e´quivoque in this way is the very height of ir-rationality. What is more, it foreshadows the category mistakes underlying the idolatrous practices of pre-Christian pagans stigmatized later in the poem. Whence the further joke introduced in verse 5 as a displaced rejoinder to the gender-play of lines 1–4: ‘Tu ne re´ponds rien’ [you make no reply]. If l’e´quivoque fails to answer the poet’s opening taunts, it is because it cannot. For it is, after all, just words on paper, all the more mute for being fixed on the page, remaining just the same words, however we choose to address or interpret them. L’e´quivoque is a text, and nothing we say or do will change it.16 Still, Boileau’s opening figure, or rather the opening avalanche of figures, amounting to a convulsive figuration of figure as such, is not merely a concession to the spirit of caprice and so to everything of which we have already seen caprice to be the symbol, and in particular the unruly women Boileau portrays as caprice, so to speak, in person. It is a concession to a type of writing he has specifically opposed throughout his career. His opposition on this point is in fact one of the chief ways in which he located himself on the literary map of seventeenthcentury Europe. In espousing a poetics of rational clarity and the ethics of clear statement demanded in meaning what you say and saying what you mean, Boileau identifies himself not only as a classical poet but as not being another kind of poet. In the French context, this involves standing apart from baroque pre´cieux like Isaac de Bensserade or Vincent Voiture, to whom he turns later in the first stanza. On the wider European scene, it means distinguishing himself from Spanish Gongorists, ‘metaphysicals’ like the English Donne, or Italians imbued with the sensibility of Emiliano Tesauro, author of one of the century’s most important (and encomiastic) treatises on equivocal discourse construed as art.17 Nothing could be more alien to the ideal of poetry Boileau made it his life’s work to defend than Tesauro’s argutezza, the engan˜os of Gongorist verse, or the intricate conceits of the English Metaphysicals, embodying as they do a conception of poetry for which the gaudy equivocations of baroque verse are not only a legitimate mode of expression but a sign of genuine poetic genius whose hyperbolic scope is measured just by the loss of rational self-possession of which Boileau complains.18

212

The Matter of Mind

It is nonetheless as a Gongorist Spaniard or Tesaurist Italian that Boileau now consents to mount a final defence of his identity as a classical poet. Yet to say even that he consents to do so says too much. Rational self-possession gives way here to something like possession tout court. On the heels of the introductory apostrophe, Boileau briskly paints an initial picture of the havoc l’e´quivoque wreaks for readers and writers alike, reaching a high point in a couplet that features a comic personification of his pen: Sors d’ici, Fourbe insigne, Maˆle aussi dangereux que femelle maligne, Qui crois rendre innocents les discours imposteurs; Tourment des Ecrivains, juste effroi des Lecteurs; Par qui de mots confus sans cesse embarrasse´e Ma plume en e´crivant, cherche en vain ma pense´e.

(5–10)

[Leave here, arrant Cheat, Male as dangerous as malignant female, Who believe you can make deceitful discourses innocent; Torment of Writers, just fright of Readers; By whom, ceaselessly entangled in confused words, My pen, in writing, seeks my thought in vain.]

Then, at verse 17, peremptorily commanding its personified figure to quit the scene once and for all, the poem comes within an ace of bringing itself to a halt, only to be prevented by a supernatural intervention as ambiguous as it is unexpected: Fui donc. Mais non, demeure; un Demon qui m’inspire Veut qu’encore une utile et dernie`re Satire, De ce pas, en mon livre exprimant tes noirceurs, Se vienne en nombre pair, joindre a` ses Onze Sœurs; Et je sens que ta vuˆe¨ e´chauffe mon audace. Viens, approche: Voyons, malgre´ l’aˆge et sa glace, Si ma Muse aujourd’hui, sortant de sa langueur, Pourra trouver encore un reste de vigueur. [So fly. But no, stay. An inspiring Demon Commands that yet one last useful Satire should

(17–24)

Des mots sans fin

213

At once, in describing your foul crimes in my book, Now join, in even number, her Eleven Sisters; And I feel that the sight of you fuels my daring. Come, approach: Let us see whether, despite icy old age, My Muse today, shaking off her languor, Can still find a remainder of her former vigour.]

The strange thing about this Demon, to whose offices we owe the remaining 322 lines of the poem, is how equivocal it is. In one sense, it constitutes yet another personification – this time of the ‘caprice’ Boileau’s preface alleges to have supplied his inspiration, and which Boileau calls ‘bizarre’ just because he cannot offer a rational explanation for it. In a second sense, however, echoing the theme of textual muteness sounded with l’e´quivoque’s failure to respond to Boileau’s taunts, the Demon is something like a Socratic daimon: the messenger of truth that, in Plato’s Phaedrus, notably, obliges Socrates to stop and recant the lying speech about love he makes in imitation of the sophist Lysias.19 The problem is that still a third sense is possible, one moreover that squares with the subsequent force of Boileau’s personification of l’e´quivoque. In this reading, the Demon is an agent of Satan, father of lies, whose spirit turns out in fact to infest the whole of the rest of the poem. Had the poem stopped here, where the logic of its opening stanza allowed it to, we would have been spared the increasingly dismal picture of the human condition to come. Indeed, following a brief interlude in which Boileau returns to the triumphant scenes of his youth with a final drubbing of Bensserade and Voiture, we get the history of humanity noted earlier: one in which, to every attempt on God’s part to rescue us from the equivocations of our own fallen natures, now in the divinely granted light of natural reason, now in the Incarnate Word, now in the CounterReformation’s defence of Catholic orthodoxy in the face of Protestant heresy, the Devil opposes an artful counter that plunges us into chaos again. True, the point of this relentless panorama of horror and dismay is to make us see the depths of confusion and depravity to which l’e´quivoque condemns us. And yet, bearing in mind that, ostensibly at least, Boileau’s target here is a figure of speech, the disproportion is obvious. While it would surely be too much to identify the poet’s Demon with the Devil, its source just as surely lies in something other, and darker, than truth. We will begin to see the answer if we return to the potential for misreading with which we began. As Boileau explains at the very start of

214

The Matter of Mind

the preface, though l’e´quivoque as a figure inspired the poem, what led him to publish it was misprision: Whatever happy success my Works may have enjoyed, I had resolved since their last Edition [that of 1701] to give nothing more to the Public; and though in my idle hours, dating some five years back, I had gone on to write a Satire against l’Equivoque that all those to whom I communicated it judged in no way inferior to my other Writings, far rather than publish it, I kept it carefully hidden; and I did not believe that, so long as I was alive, it would ever see the light of day. Being thus as desirous henceforth to make people forget me as I had once gone to great lengths to make them talk about me, I was enjoying, save for my infirmities, reasonably great tranquillity when, all of a sudden, I learned that someone circulated in the world, under my name, a collection of wretched [me´chants, and so possibly wicked] Writings, and among others a verse piece against the Jesuits as odious as it was insipid, wherein I was made in my own name to level the most atrocious and grossest insults at the entire Society of Jesus. I confess that this pained me greatly. For though sensible people realized without difficulty that the piece was not at all mine, and only persons of very little wit would presume that I could have been the Author, the truth, however, is that I did not regard it as a slight affront to see myself suspected, even by fools, of having written so foolish a work. (OC 87)

Boileau’s goal in publishing ‘Sur l’Equivoque’ is thus to dispel another e´quivoque: though only witless people are capable of believing that he could have written the ambiguously me´chants, that is, both bad and wicked verses against Jesuits circulating under his name, misunderstanding will remain possible until he gives the world the verses he did in fact write. Boileau is, if you like, an early victim of identity theft. Though be cannot, as a matter of pure equity, be held liable for any of the credit charged to his account, he wants his name cleared; and the only way to do it is to drive the counterfeits out by publishing the genuine article. To recap the story so far, maddened by insoluble ambiguities arising in the opening lines of a satire against bad critics – critics part of whose badness presumably consists in overinterpreting verse by alleging equivocal meanings its author did not intend – Boileau abandons that poem to write a satire against equivocation itself. Being chiefly concerned, however, in his professedly tranquil if infirm old age, to foreswear the self-advertising habits of his youth in order to be, or rather

Des mots sans fin

215

(and the point will assume some significance in a moment) in order to cause himself to be, forgotten (me faire oublier), he chooses not to publish it. But then, out of the blue, certain other verses begin to circulate, attacking Jesuits; and these verses, as insipid as they are wicked, are laid to his account. Accordingly, in order to set the record straight, he now publishes Satire XII against his will, in hopes that future readers will be able to tell the difference between the poems he is accused of writing and the one he did in fact write: a poem so tangibly his own that no reader with any sense could possibly imagine he would have written anything else. But this is of course just where fresh difficulties arise. In order to forestall any future impostures and misunderstandings, Boileau complicates matters further by adding to the ideally self-identifying and so selfexplicating poem the question of intent. Nor does it help that the poem whose publication is meant to exonerate him of having composed scurrilous attacks against Jesuits will do just that – attack Jesuits. Much of the remainder of the preface is taken up with an account of the pains Boileau took to ensure that there was nothing in the satire liable to offend orthodox Catholic dogma. As in the case of his twelfth epistle, on the love of God, he submitted the draft of the poem to no less an authority than cardinal de Noailles, a close associate of the archbishop of Meaux, Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet, and to that extent a conservative (not to say reactionary) voice in the French Church.20 Boileau did so, however, not just because the satire moves in the direction of matters of faith and doctrine – though that it does, and how it came to do so, is itself a key part of the story. The chief reason was the identity of the main target of what Boileau portrays as his own staunch defence of orthodox belief. While the preface is careful to avoid mentioning the fact expressly, there is no question as to whom he has in mind when he declares, at the close, that, armed with an imprimatur as ‘authentic,’ ‘sure,’ and ‘glorious’ as the one the cardinal has provided, ‘I can walk with my head held high, and boldly say in reply to the criticisms that anyone may henceforth make about the doctrine of my Work, that they amount to nothing more than the vain subtleties of a heap of miserable Sophists trained in the School of lies, and as devoted friends of l’Equivoque as they are stubborn enemies of God, good sense, and the Truth’ (OC 91). In the context of the long decline of Ludovican culture and the increasingly Jansenist turn committed anciens like Racine or La Bruye`re as well as Boileau himself felt driven to take, to speak, in Pascalian wise, of the ‘vain subtleties’ of ‘miserable Sophists’ trained in the

216

The Matter of Mind

‘School of lies’ can only mean one thing: casuistry, and so the Jesuits who sired it.21 Whatever therefore Boileau claims to have been his intent in starting to write the poem, it wound up doing something rather different – so different in fact as to cast doubt on the whole question of intent. So what was the poem’s intent if not simply, as Boileau begins by insisting, the ‘caprice’ of exacting a poet’s revenge on the technical difficulties bedevilling the effort to say just and only what one means? We can make a start on answering this question by returning to the matter of forgetting noted a moment ago. As we have seen, the preface reports that Boileau had originally intended not to publish the poem at all, being as desirous, in his declining years, ‘to make people forget me as I had once gone to great lengths to make them talk about me.’ It is already paradoxical that Boileau casts the matter of forgetting in the active voice – that it should be less a matter of letting himself be forgotten than one of making sure he is forgotten by bringing that state about on his own initiative. One thing this odd formulation highlights is the degree to which he does not in fact mean to be forgotten: for what indeed, as L’Art poe´tique reminds us, is the aim of any poet worthy of the name if not deathless fame?22 But another suggestion, the reverse side of the coin of the thirst for fame, is the fear that he just will be forgotten: that his short hour of renown has come and gone, leaving nothing more to hope for than the long night of oblivion soon to overtake him. True, despite what he reports to have been his own best efforts to be forgotten, people continue to remember him – whence the calumnious attribution of the scurrilous satires that prompt him to publish Satire XII after all. Yet what gives the whole issue both point and poignancy is the fear of being forgotten of which the prideful claim to bring that condition about is a transparent surrogate. If Boileau publishes the satire, it is in fact to ensure that he will be remembered as the author of this as well as the eleven ‘Sisters’ it now joins. The question thereupon becomes the following: what makes the twelfth in particular memorable? The short answer is that it just makes twelve: the sacred number of completion and closure consecrated, notably, by the twelve books of Virgil’s Æneid and already granted the series of Boileau’s verse epistles, the last of which, on the love of God, appears in 1698.23 The desire to reach the magic number twelve fuels the fear of being forgotten. Composed in the early years of the eighteenth century, at a moment when the friends of his maturity are dying or dead, Satire XII appears just when the classical ethos of which

Des mots sans fin

217

Boileau is the fossilized epitome is being definitively displaced by the ‘modern’ culture championed by his last great literary enemy, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Secretary of the Acade´mie des Sciences as well as member of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise, Fontenelle wrote many books, including the breezy Entretiens sur la pluralite´ des mondes [Conversations on the plurality of worlds] (1686), popularizing the triumphant Copernican system of modern astronomy, and the Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes [Digression on the battle of the books] (1688), promoting the modern way in all things, literary and scientific alike. Personification of everything Boileau found most distasteful in contemporary secular letters, Fontenelle added insult to injury by being exceptionally long-lived: already in his late sixties when Boileau dies of pleuresy in 1711, he survives deep into the Enlightenment, where he felt thoroughly at home. So in bringing the series of short verse satires to a clearly preprogrammed end, the satire’s chief aim is to bring history to an end by monumentalizing this last unequivocal statement of the classical order now visibly in retreat. The problem, however, is that history cannot end; nor does Boileau succeed in making an end even within the confines of his own poem. Consider again the poem’s long first stanza. As Boileau remarks with pardonable pride in the preface, the stanza opens with a pretty conceit keyed to ongoing uncertainty as to the proper gender of the noun e´quivoque: Du langage Franc¸ois bisarre Hermaphrodite, De quel genre te faire, Equivoque maudite? Ou maudit: car sans peine aux Rimeurs hazardeux L’usage encor, je croi, laisse le choix des deux.

(1–4)

[Bizarre Hermaphrodite of the French language, What gender should we give you, accursed Equivoque, female? Or male? For, without penalty, I believe, Usage still leaves reckless Rimers the choice of both.]

As the preface acknowledges, the majority of writers had by this time settled on the feminine, which is in fact the gender Boileau adopts.24 However, Boileau’s initial playful hesitation sets the stage by dramatizing the theme of equivocation itself and by striking the note of offcolour punning with which, in its character as a figure of speech, l’e´quivoque is most freely associated in the French canon. It is worth observing

218

The Matter of Mind

that Boileau’s opening lines thereby participate in the new aesthetic ethos of which the author complains. The disarming hint of sexual ambiguity is redolent of the distinctively French taste for galanterie, the cult of sexualized badinage one of whose most conspicuous public organs was Donneau de Vise´’s Mercure galant, a journal, founded in 1672, that mingled society gossip with the sort of literary and dramatic criticism Boileau had planned to satirize in the poem he abandoned in favour of Satire XII.25 This same air of decorous gallantry is a signal feature of Fontenelle’s Entretiens. In casting the discussion of modern astronomy in the form of nocturnal conversations between a man of the new science and the charming proprietress of the chateau in whose gardens the conversations take place, Fontenelle not only makes astronomy easy by adapting it to an intellectual level even ladies can reach; he grants it the inimitably Gallic flavour of flirtatious double entendre that made Parisian salons the envy of civilized Europe. Instruction in the nature of the physical universe as modern astronomy reveals it goes hand in hand with an act of seduction that enables the Fontenellian man of science to conquer his hostess as well as the stars.26 Boileau’s inaugural conceit works to exactly comparable effect. The titillating uncertainty surrounding the gender of the word e´quivoque enlists the reader in Boileau’s cause by gently fingering the body whose yearnings need as much discipline as the sloppy literary habits that are the poem’s ostensible theme. Nevertheless, cutting across the grain of his own urbane rhetoric, the opening e´quivoque on the gender of the noun e´quivoque enables Boileau to begin not only his last satire but his last poem of any kind by returning to the site of his earliest satirical triumphs as the scourge of the baroque preciosity of his youth: a taste that, in the long perspective of the growing secularization of French culture, turns out to have been the predecessor of the worldly gallantry of which Donneau was the publicist and Fontenelle the learned doyen. Boileau proceeds accordingly to the ritual drubbing administered to Bensserade, Voiture, and their kind in the first stanza’s closing lines, given additional force by the observation that, like indeed Boileau himself, they have all by now fallen out of fashion.27 Speaking of Bensserade in particular, though still apostrophizing l’e´quivoque as the presiding genius of his target’s verse, Boileau writes: Tes bons mots, autrefois de´lices des ruelles, Approuvez chez les Grands, applaudis chez les Belles, Hors de mode aujourd’hui chez nos plus froids badins, Sont des collets montez et des vertugadins!

Des mots sans fin Le Lecteur ne sait plus admirer dans Voiture De ton froid jeu de mots l’insipide figure.

219

(37–42)

[Your bons mots, once the delight of ladies’ salons, Approved by the Great, applauded by Beauties, Today out of fashion even with our most uninspired wags, Are high stiff collars and hooped skirts! Voiture’s Reader no longer knows how to admire The frigid figure of your insipid play on words.]

All of this is perfectly in tune with the urbanely teasing tone of the first stanza as a whole, stressing the seemingly harmless triviality of baroque pre´cieux. Yet even before turning one last time to the by now ritual mockery of the ‘bluettes folles’ and ‘quolibets frivoles’ (33–4), the giddy sparklings and frivolous wordplay, that turn out to be all that Bensserade and Voiture had to recommend them, something genuinely strange, something quite uncanny, starts to happen. For it is just here that the poet receives the visitation of the Demon. I cite the passage again to keep its terms directly before our eyes: Fui donc. Mais non, demeure; un Demon qui m’inspire Veut qu’encore une utile et dernie`re Satire, De ce pas, en mon livre exprimant tes noirceurs, Se vienne en nombre pair, joindre a` ses Onze Sœurs; Et je sens que ta vuˆe¨ e´chauffe mon audace. Viens, approche: Voyons, malgre´ l’aˆge et sa glace, Si ma Muse aujourd’hui, sortant de sa langueur, Pourra trouver encore un reste de vigueur. (17–24) [So fly. But no, stay. An inspiring Demon Commands that yet one last useful Satire should, At once, in describing your foul crimes in my book, Now join, in even number, her Eleven Sisters; And I feel that the sight of you fuels my courage. Come, approach: Let us see whether, despite icy old age, My Muse today, shaking off her languor, Can still find a remainder of her former vigour.]

It is not immediately obvious where Boileau is going with this. The grim noirceurs of line 19 sounds a distinctly troubling, quasi-tragic note.

220

The Matter of Mind

Still, both the demand that l’e´quivoque quit the scene in the name of good sense and good taste alike and the subsequent supernatural intervention that calls it back again can be read as playful jeux d’esprit. Boileau himself makes the point in a brief transition in which he joins his imagined reader in wondering if he does not take the whole matter too seriously: Mais ou` tend, dira-t-on, ce projet fantastique? Ne vaudrait-il pas mieux dans mes vers, moins caustique, Re´pandre de tes jeux le sel re´jouissant Que d’aller contre toi sur ce ton menac¸ant Pousser jusqu’a` l’exce`s ma critique boutade?

(25–9)

[But where, one will ask, is this fantastic project headed? Would I not do better to be less caustic, seasoning my lines With the delightful salt of your wordgames Than to set about, in this menacing tone, Driving my critical sallies against you to the point of excess?]

Since besides, following this transition, the first port of call will be the dated preciosity of his outmoded baroque forebears, playfulness rules for another twenty lines or so. Nevertheless, the moment Boileau has finished taking a parting shot at Bensserade and Voiture, the poem turns, in deadly earnest, to its true theme, announced at the start of stanza 2: Mais laissons-la` le tort qu’a` ces brillans Ouvrages Fit le plat agrement de tes vains badinages. Parlons des maux sans fin que ton sens de travers Source de toute erreur, sema dans l’Univers: Et pour les contempler jusque dans leur naissance, De`s le temps nouveau ne´, quand la Toute-Puissance D’un mot forma le ciel, l’air, la terre et les flots, N’est-ce pas toi, voyant le monde a` peine e´clos, Qui par l’e´clat trompeur d’une funeste pomme, Et tes mots ambigus, fis croire au premier homme, Qu’il alloit en gouˆtant de ce morceau fatal, Comble´ de tout savoir, a` Dieu se rendre e´gal? [But let us leave the harm done these brilliant Works By the stale charms of your idle badinage. Let us speak of the endless evils that your twisted sense,

(49–60)

Des mots sans fin

221

Source of all error, sowed through the Universe: And to contemplate them even in their birth, As early as newborn time, when the Almighty, With a word, formed heaven, the air, the earth, and all its seas, Was it not you who, seeing the world only just wakened to life, Through the deceitful gleam of a mortal fruit, Coupled with your ambiguous words, made the first man believe That, in tasting this fatal morsel, he would Be filled with all knowledge and make himself equal to God?]

As noted earlier, what starts out as a satire on a particular, limited abuse of language, l’e´quivoque defined as a figure of speech, morphs into something weightier: the history of humanity from the primal Fall of Adam and Eve to the present. The engine of that history, the engine indeed that makes history construed as the irresistible march of error and change that Boileau’s tired Muse rouses herself from her senile slumber to stop, is again l’e´quivoque – yet l’e´quivoque conceived this time not as a mere figure of speech but rather as acts of interpretive misconstruction, where not outright equivocation, whose basis lies in the irremissibly equivocal nature of language itself. Boileau’s history of the world is the dark underside of Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle [Discourse on world history], a manual the archbishop and royal tutor composed in 1681 for the young dauphin of Louis XIV. As Bossuet explains in the preface, laying out the benefits the prince can expect to reap from historical learning, the point of the digest or epitome (l’abre´ge´) his tutor has prepared is to serve as a mental map of world-historical events: This sort of global history is, with respect to the histories of each country and of each people, what a general map is with respect to particular maps. In particular maps, you see all of the detail of a kingdom or of a province in itself: in global maps you learn to situate these parts of the world in the whole to which they belong; you see what Paris or the Ile-de-France is in the kingdom, what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe. Thus particular histories represent the sweep of the things that have happened to a people in all of their detail: but, in order to understand the whole, one must know the relation into which each history enters with the others, which is achieved by means of an epitome in which one sees as at a single glance the whole order of times past.

222

The Matter of Mind

Such an epitome, My Lord, offers you a great spectacle. You see all previous ages evolve before your eyes as it were in a few hours: you see how world empires succeed one another, and how religion, in its different states, maintains itself equally from the beginning of the world to our own time. It is the continuity of these two things, I mean that of religion and of empires, that you must imprint in your memory; and, as religion and political government are the two points on which all human things roll, to see what concerns these things contained in an epitome, and to discover by this means the whole of their order and succession, is to comprehend in one’s thought all that is great among men, and to hold, as it were, the thread of all of the business of the universe. As then, in looking at a global map, you leave the country in which you were born and the place that confines you in order to travel across the whole of the inhabitable earth, which you embrace in thought with all its seas and all its lands; so, in looking at the chronological epitome, you leave the narrow limits of your own era and you extend yourself through all ages.28

Bossuet’s goal is to show how the apparently random rise and fall of ‘empires’ and the world orders they successively impose is guided from the outset by the self-replicating truth of ‘religion,’ by which of course he means the true religion of the Roman Church. Bossuet’s history is thus structured by the transcendental perspective required not just to survey the course of historical events but to perceive their ongoing motive, reason, or cause in the will of God, of whom, as king, the prince will be the anointed earthly deputy. While the visible shape of the world may change, God’s providence does not, enjoying a permanence whose image is just the static form of the map into which Bossuet’s discourse converts the otherwise pathless sprawl of historical time. In the perspective of God, all times, past, present, and to come, are captured in a single, simultaneous view for which there is no time as such at all, time being the element of the fallen human experience the digest purports to emend. Just so, the map enables its possessor, in subsuming the past under the synoptic gaze of the present, to adopt a prudential overview that approximates the timeless light of the divine intelligence of human affairs mirrored in the map.29 In Boileau, by contrast, and despite orthodox convictions that cardinal de Noailles has certified to be as dogmatically sound as the royal tutor’s, no such anchoring faith is

Des mots sans fin

223

found. We have already noted the stop-start pattern of the opening stanza where, the moment the poem reaches the point of coming to an end, the Demon steps in to set it going again. This same stop-start rhythm characterizes the poem as a whole. The history of the world according to Boileau will be, not the seamless suite, the self-sustaining continuity, Bossuet celebrates, but an endless train of errors whose correction breeds new errors demanding correction in their turn. What gives Boileau’s history its stuttering gait is the fact that nothing is ever final: however momentous God’s intervention in the course of human events may be, there is always some new way to misread his intent. Thus no sooner has Boileau’s Adam learned, through cruel experience, not only how duplicitous the serpent’s promise of godlike knowledge was but his own true miserable nature as un chetif animal peˆtri d’un peu de terre, A qui la faim, la soif, par tout faisoient la guerre, Et qui courant touˆjours de malheur en malheur, A la mort arrivoit enfin par la douleur

(65–8)

[a feeble animal kneaded out of a bit of earth Whom hunger and thirst assailed everywhere, And who, ever rushing from one misfortune to the next, Arrived at last in death through pain]

than his descendants forget the lesson so painfully won, embarking on ceaseless cycles of ruinous mistake. The ‘insane arrogance’ of the first human generations annihilated by the Flood from which Noah alone escaped, carrying the serpent on board (71–8); the extravagant delusions of idolatrous antiquity, blinded by the ‘captious lies’ of fables and dreams, the ‘false dogmas’ of superstition, false gods of humanity’s own pitiful manufacture, and the ‘false miracles’ of the pagan oracles, deploying a ‘double meaning’ that let them, ‘in lying, tell the truth’ (79–106); the honour-mad pagan ethos of unbridled passion and worldly ambition that taught ‘each virtue to take the name of a vice’ and each vice that of a virtue (107–24); the institution of Roman civil law that, in subjecting even the plainest legal text to the cavilling ambiguities of the judicial gloss, gave ‘every word […] two faces,’ plunging all notions of justice and right in doubt (125–32); the classical art of rhetoric thanks to which, ‘eloquence furnishing the ornament of

224

The Matter of Mind

words,’ the ‘true came to pass for false’ and scepticism for the sum of human wisdom (133–40); the deluded pride of pagan philosophers, all the more helplessly entangled in error for boastfully taking the Godgiven light of natural reason to be their own free attainment (141–56) – all of these pre-Christian avatars of l’e´quivoque betray not simply the bottomless human capacity for self-deception but the satanic ingenuity with which words are used to deflect, and so defeat, each fresh outbreak of truth. To be sure, in the very middle of the poem, as the fulcrum around which its dark masses turn, we get the reprieve introduced by the Incarnation of the Word: Pour tirer l’homme enfin de ce de´sordre extreˆme, Il fallut qu’ici-bas Dieu, fait homme lui-meˆme, Vint du sein lumineux de l’e´ternel se´jour, De tes dogmes trompeurs dissiper le faux jour.

(157–60)

[To rescue man at last from this extreme disorder, It was necessary that God, himself made man here below, Come down from the luminous bosom of his eternal dwelling place To dispel the false light of your deceitful dogmas.]

The immediate result is to topple idols throughout the world, silencing the pagan oracles and their familiar demons. Even the betrayal, trial, passion, and death of Jesus Christ, perpetrated by the swarms of ‘Sectators, / Priests, Pharisees, Kings, Pontifes, Scholars’ stirred up, at l’e´quivoque’s bidding, ‘[c]hez la Nation meˆme a` son culte fidelle’ [in the very Nation faithful to his cult] (166–8), fails to impede God’s redemptive plan. L’e´quivoque’s minions did succeed for a time in distorting the truth at least in Jewish eyes: [L]’on vit la Ve´rite´ supreˆme De mensonge et d’erreur accuse´e elle-meˆme, Au tribunal humain le Dieu du Ciel traıˆne´, Et l’Auteur de la vie a` mourir condamne´. [(O)ne saw the supreme Truth Itself accused of falsehood and error, The God of Heaven dragged before the tribunal of men,30 And the Author of life condemned to die.]

(169–72)

Des mots sans fin

225

In the long run, however, providence turned l’e´quivoque’s apparent success against it, converting the worst of evils into the ironic instrument of the highest good: Ta fureur toutefois, a` ce coup fut dec¸ue, Et pour toi ton audace eut une triste issue. Dans la nuit du tombeau ce Dieu pre´cipite´ Se releva soudain tout brillant de clarte´.

(173–6)

[Your fury was, however, baffled at this blow And, for all your audacity, suffered a sad defeat. This God, hurled into the night of the tomb, Of a sudden raised himself up all shining with light.]

It is nonetheless already striking that the weapons God wields are as equivocal as l’e´quivoque’s own: the birth of the God-Man and the divine irony that turns the Crucifixion into the ransom of human souls bear witness, like the central remedy of the Incarnate Word itself, to the inherently suspect medium in which the divine will operates. Worse still, the reprieve won by Christ’s death and resurrection proves tragically shortlived. Indeed, the propagation of the truth directly creates the conditions for its own overthrow in the articles of the faith Christ came to teach: Sans succomber pourtant, tu souˆtins cet orage, Et, sur l’idolaˆtrie, enfin perdant courage, Pour embarrasser l’homme en des nœuds plus subtils, Tu courus chez Satan brouiller de nouveaux fils. Alors, pour seconder ta triste fre´ne´sie, Arriva de l’enfer ta fille l’He´re´sie. Ce monstre de`s l’enfance a` ton e´cole instruit, De tes lec¸ons bien-toˆt te fit gouˆter le fruit. Par lui l’erreur, touˆjours finement appreˆte´e, Sortant pleine d’attraits de sa bouche empeste´e, De son mortel poison tout courut s’abreuver, Et l’Eglise elle-meˆme eut peine a` s’en sauver. [Without succumbing, however, you withstood the storm, And, finally abandoning hope in idolatry, In order to ensnare man in subtler knots, You fled to Satan to enravel new threads.

(185–96)

226

The Matter of Mind

Then, to further your sad frenzy, Your daughter Heresy arrived from hell. This monster, from infancy instructed in your school, Soon enabled you to taste the fruit of your lessons. Thanks to her, error, as ever subtly prepared, Flowing full of charms from her pestilent mouth, Induced everyone to rush to drink her mortal poison, And the Church itself was saved only with pain.]

With the revelation of God’s truth in the death and resurrection of his only begotten son, the era of pre-Christian blindness is ended, suspending the reign of confusion and error to which Boileau reduces the entire span of ages between Creation and Epiphany. Yet the paradoxical fruit of the abolition of the errors of the pre-Christian past is the advent of a new reign of error, all the more deadly for being grounded in revelation itself as relayed in holy scripture. The demons of the ancient world are now replaced by the great heresiarchs, Arius, Valentinus, and Pelagius, devils endemic to the Christian era as such (209–10). These in turn are followed by Luther, Calvin, and their hideous spawn, ‘mad’ Anabaptists, ‘prideful’ Puritans, ‘execrable’ Deists (233–4), possessed by the crazy conviction that, with Luther’s self-styled ‘reform’ of the visible Church of sacramental works, the sole standard of faith is the inner light of private faith itself: Alors, n’admettant plus d’autorite´ visible, Chacun fut de la foi cense´ juge infaillible, Et sans eˆtre approuve´ par le Clerge´ Romain, Tout Protestant fut Pape une Bible a` la main.

(221–4)

[So, no longer acknowledging visible authority, Everyone was supposed to be the infallible judge of faith, And without receiving the approval of the Roman Clergy, Every Protestant was a Pope, Bible in hand.]

From the breakdown of religious authority it is a short step to the collapse of civil order at large, plunging the whole of Europe into ceaseless religious wars in which all sides, sectaries and Catholics alike, sink to the level of beasts: L’Europe fut un champ de massacre et d’horreur. Et l’Orthodoxe meˆme, aveugle en sa fureur,

Des mots sans fin De tes dogmes trompeurs nourrissant son ide´e, Oublia la douceur aux Chre´tiens commande´e, Et crut, pour venger Dieu de ses fiers ennemis, Tout ce que Dieu de´fend legitime et permis. Au signal tout a` coup donne´ pour le carnage Dans les Villes, par tout, the´aˆtres de leur rage, Cent mille faux zelez le fer en main courants, Allerent attaquer leurs amis, leurs parens; Et, sans distinction, dans tout sein he´retique, Pleins de joye, enfoncer un poignard catholique. Car quel Lion, quel Tigre, e´gale en cruaute´ Une injuste fureur qu’arme la Piete´?

227

(243–56)

[Europe was a scene of massacre and horror. And even the Orthodox, blind in their fury, Nourishing their thoughts on your deceitful dogmas, Forgot the gentleness commanded of Christians, And believed that, to avenge God against his proud enemies, Everything God forbids is permitted. At the signal suddenly given for carnage to begin, In the Cities, everywhere theatres of their rage, A hundred thousand false zealots, sword in hand, Ran to attack their friends, their kin; And without distinction, in every heretic breast, Full of joy, they plunged a Catholic dagger. For what Lion, what Tiger, equals in cruelty An unjust fury armed by Piety?]

Even within the Catholic Church itself, ostensibly restored to purity and unity by the consensus reached at the Council of Trent, the reaffirmation of the truth provokes the further wave of internecine conflict that characterizes the renewed chaos of post-Tridentine times. Boileau returns in this context to the present with the promised attack on Jesuits, seconded by a related defence of their Jansenist adversaries, with whom the aged satirist makes common cause in the poem’s final movements. Though he never cites the Society of Jesus by name, speaking only of ‘the School,’ the Catholic faculties of theology charged with promulgating official Church doctrine, the substance of the attack makes it clear who the poet’s target is. Still haranguing a personified e´quivoque as the mastermind of the evils he chronicles, Boileau makes a

228

The Matter of Mind

transition from the horrors of religious civil war to their aftermath in the deformed moral teachings of his own day: Ces fureurs, jusqu’ici du vain peuple admire´es, Etoient pourtant touˆjours de l’Eglise abhore´es; Et dans ton grand credit pour te bien conserver, Il falloit que le ciel paruˆt les approuver. Ce chef-d’œuvre devait couronner ton adresse. Pour y parvenir donc, ton active souplesse Dans l’Ecole abusant tes grossiers Ecrivains, Fit croire a` leurs esprits ridiculement vains, Qu’un sentiment impie, injuste, abominable, Par deux ou trois d’entr’eux re´pute´ soutenable, Prenoit chez eux un sceau de probabilite´, Qui meˆme contre Dieu lui donnoit surete´; Et qu’un Chre´tien pouvoit rempli de confiance Meˆme en le condamnant le suivre en conscience.

(257–70)

[These furies, till now admired by the ignorant masses, Were however consistently abhorred by the Church; And in order to maintain yourself in the great credit you enjoyed, It was necessary that heaven itself appear to approve them. This masterstroke was to be your guile’s crowning achievement. In order to reach it, deploying your insinuating energies In the School to mislead your venal Writers, You persuaded their absurdly vain wits to believe That, so long as two or three of them alleged it to be defensible, An impious, unjust, abominable belief Could receive from them a seal of probability Sufficient to give it security against God himself; And that a Christian could with complete assurance Follow it in good conscience even when condemning it.]

The crime of which the Jesuits stand accused in the poem is of course casuistry, a science with which the order was misleadingly identified by all of its enemies, Protestant and Catholic alike.31 At its core, casuistry is a method of moral analysis designed to adjust the absolute decrees of the moral law to the complex circumstances that define the contingent ‘cases’ or situations in which actual moral choices have to be made. As we saw in chapter 5, the cornerstone of Jesuit moral teaching was the

Des mots sans fin

229

Molinist doctrine of sufficient grace: the notion that, though in the end God alone effects salvation by deciding who is saved and who damned, each person has the power to contribute to his or her own redemption through right exercise of the gracine gift of free will. One aim of the doctrine was to smooth the way for heretics to return to the mother church by offering an easier route to salvation than the Protestant dogmas of the bondage of the will and divine predestination could afford.32 Because each person can choose to turn to God through prayer and a sincere effort to renounce evil for the sake of good, he or she can merit God’s redeeming love. But this raises the question of intent and, with it, the obstacles encountered in the intractable conditions under which choices have to be made. The sincerity of a moral choice cannot by itself guarantee that people make the right choice, only that they sincerely believe it to be right. The issue is thus no longer whether the choice people hit upon is objectively correct or not, a matter often impossible to determine in merely human terms. It is, rather, the character of the inner state of the will and the degree of objective understanding of which we may fairly hold them to be capable under the circumstances in which they are called to choose. Like Pascal before him, whose cameo appearance below in line 325 shows him to have been much in the poet’s mind, Boileau prejudices the argument by shifting its focus back to the absolute demands of the moral law per se. He does so, moreover, again like Pascal, against the background of Augustinian suspicion of human motives and intentions as such. As the evidence of Boileau’s history of humanity makes overwhelmingly clear, the determining factor in human moral actions is what human beings want; and what they want is invariably just what the moral law forbids: the sins for which Jesuit casuists are accused of concocting sophistical alibis. From this standpoint, what casuistry portrays as the ambiguities that beset real-life moral problems can only be seen as self-serving equivocation, the attempt to vindicate actions that we know as a matter of plainest common sense to be inherently indefensible. Accordingly, in the transition, Boileau’s point of attack is not the moral difficulties that the Molinist doctrines of will, grace, and intention address, difficulties of which Jesuit probabilism is less a solution than an illustration, but the self-evident bad faith with which its perpetrators justified the horrific violence of the wars of religion those doctrines helped fuel. As Boileau rightly notes, echoing the lessons of experience Montaigne draws to the same effect, a feature of contemporary religious

230

The Matter of Mind

violence was the special cruelty with which participants on both sides of the conflict acted precisely because they were ‘armed with Piety’: the apparent justice of the cause as each side saw it excused the horrors committed in its name. What is less obvious is the justice of making this point the theme of Boileau’s transition from the wars of religion to the Society of Jesus. Needless to say, the poet’s aim here is less to give a faithful account of Jesuit doctrine than to find an at once expository and satirical means of introducing it in as prejudicial a light as possible. The context is after all that of polemic rather than that of sober analysis; and as Olivier Jouslin has shown, period rules governing truth claims in polemic were far looser than those applied in formal debate.33 Even so, we detect more than a little bad faith on Boileau’s part here. For the transition creates the impression not only that Jesuit casuistry helped justify murderous violence in the name of religion but that justifications of this sort were its exclusive raison d’eˆtre. Whence the generalizing force of the continuation, coupled with the hyperbolic virulence of the language in which it is couched: C’est sur ce beau principe, admis si follement, Qu’aussi-toˆt tu posas l’e´norme fondement De la plus dangereuse et terrible Morale, Que Lucifer, assis dans la Chaire infernale, Vomissant contre Dieu ses monstrueux sermons, Ait jamais enseigne´e aux Novices Demons. Soudain, au grand honneur de l’e´cole payenne [les e´picure´ens], On entendit preˆcher dans l’Ecole chre´tienne Que sous le joug du vice un pe´cheur abbatu Pouvoit, sans aimer Dieu ni meˆme la vertu, Par la seule frayeur au Sacrement unie, Admis au Ciel jou¨ir de la gloire infinie; Et que les clefs en main, sur ce seul passeport, Saint Pierre a` tous venans devoit ouvrir d’abord. [It is on this handsome principle, so madly admitted, That you immediately laid down the abominable foundation For the most dangerous and terrible Moral Teaching That Lucifer, seated on the infernal Chair, Vomiting his monstrous sermons against God, Had ever taught Novice Demons. Suddenly, to the great honour of the pagan school [Epicureans],

(271–84)

Des mots sans fin

231

Doctors were heard to preach in the Christian School That, bowed to the ground beneath the yoke of vice, a sinner Could, without loving God or even virtue, United to the Sacrament [of confession] by fright alone, Be admitted to Heaven to enjoy infinite glory; And that, keys in hand, on the strength of this passport alone, St Peter was obliged to open the gates at once to all comers.]

The specific issue of the violence of the wars of religion has now been left far behind, to be replaced by a pocket rehearsal of the charges levelled at Jesuits in Pascal’s Provinciales. Once the neo-Pelagian doctrine of sufficient grace has been admitted and, along with it, probabilism and the related rehabilitation of the role mere ‘attrition’ plays in the salvation of souls by substituting creaturely fear of hell for the proper contrition the faithful are supposed to feel, there is no crime, however heinous or base, for which the diabolical spirit of equivocation cannot invent an excuse. Nor does casuistry merely allow self-styled Christians to nourish the hellish illusion of sinning with impunity; it subverts common-sense moral language itself: Ainsi pour e´viter l’e´ternelle misere, Le vrai zele au Chre´tien n’e´tant plus necessaire, Tu suˆs, dirigeant bien en eux l’intention, De tout crime laver la coupable action. Bien toˆt se parjurer cessa d’eˆtre un parjure; L’argent a` tout denier se preˆta sans usure. Sans simonie on put contre un bien temporel Hardiment e´changer un bien spirituel. Du soin d’aider le pauvre on dispensa l’avare; Et meˆme chez les Rois le superflu fut rare. C’est alors qu’on trouva pour sortir d’embarras, L’art de mentir tout haut en disant vrai tout bas. C’est alors qu’on apprit qu’avec un peu d’adresse Sans crime un Pretre peut vendre trois fois sa Messe, Pourvu ˆ que, laissant la` son salut a` l’e´cart, Lui-meˆme en la disant n’y prenne aucune part. C’est alors que l’on sut qu’on peut pour une pomme, Sans blesser la justice, assassiner un homme: Assassiner! Ah non, je parle improprement; Mais que preˆt a` la perdre, on peut innocemment,

232

The Matter of Mind

Sur-tout ne la pouvant sauver d’une autre sorte, Massacrer le voleur qui fuit et qui l’emporte.

(285–306)

[Thus, in order to avoid eternal wretchedness, True Christian zeal being no longer required, You discovered how, in directing people’s intentions well, To cleanse the culpable commission of every crime. Soon to perjure oneself ceased to be perjury; Money could be lent at any rate of interest without usury. One could, without simony, for a temporal good Cheerfully exchange a spiritual good. The miser was dispensed of the care of aiding the poor, And even in the courts of Kings superfluity became rare. It was then that one found, to get out of a tight corner, The art of lying out loud while telling the truth under one’s breath. It was then that one learned that, with a bit of skill, A Priest could, without crime, sell the same Mass three times, Provided that, leaving his own salvation to one side, He said it without taking part in it himself. It was then that you learned how one can, for an apple, Murder a man without injuring justice: Murder! Ah, no, I speak improperly; Rather, on the verge of losing the apple, one can in all innocence, Especially if there is no other way of recovering it, Butcher the thief as he flies and carries it off.]

However, as the subversion of our ordinary moral language suggests, the worst of all of this is less the way Jesuit sophistry teaches the faithful to quibble with moral commandments; it is the way it distorts the very possibility of truth itself. The chief victims of this distortion are the Society’s Jansenist adversaries precisely because, in defiance of Jesuit force and fraud, they hold fast to the truth even at the cost of being made to look as hateful as the heretics all Catholics are nominally united in abhorring. Commenting on both the difficulty and the dangers involved in countering Jesuit lies, Boileau cites the fate his Jansenist allies have suffered: J’entends de´ja d’ici tes Docteurs frenetiques Hautement me compter au rang des heretiques; M’appeler scelerat, traıˆtre, fourbe, imposteur,

Des mots sans fin Froid plaisant, faux boufon, vrai calomniateur, De Pascal, de Wendrock,34 copiste miserable, Et, pour tout dire enfin, janseniste execrable. J’aurai beau condamner, en tout sens expliquez, Les cinq dogmes fameux par ta main fabriquez; Blaˆmer de tes Docteurs la Morale risible, C’est, selon eux, preˆcher un Calvinisme horrible; C’est nier qu’ici bas par l’amour appelle´, Dieu pour tous les humains voulut eˆtre immole´.

233

(321–32)

[I can already hear your frenzied Doctors Loudly consign me to the ranks of heretics; Call me knave, traitor, cheat, impostor, Insipid wag, false clown, genuine calumniator, Of Pascal, of Wendrock, the miserable ape, In sum and in a word, an execrable Jansenist. I will in vain condemn, in all of the meanings assigned them, The five famous dogmas fabricated by your hand; To blame your Doctors’ risible Moral system Amounts, by their account, to preaching a hateful Calvinism; Amounts to denying that, called here below by love, God consented to be sacrificed for all of humanity’s sake.]

The Jesuits’ worst crime is to have left truth defenceless by twisting the very words in our mouths. Both the phenomenon and its impact are neatly caught by the return of the adjective ‘execrable,’ originally used, at line 234, to characterize Deists, but now turned, at line 326, against Jansenists. At its first appearance, the word is used without irony. It means exactly what it says: as Pascal taught in his critique of Descartes, the Deist reduction of God to the status of an at once absent and abstract cause of the physical universe is an abomination against the Almighty and the true nature of his creation. In Boileau’s defence of Jansenism, on the other hand, it is accompanied by virtual scare quotes. Jansenists are ‘execrable’ only from the Jesuit point of view, as a projection of their own execrable teachings. Yet just insofar as the recurrence of the adjective is ironical, it becomes fatally equivocal. The only defence against casuistical wordplay is to play on words at the risk of losing sight of truth altogether. All of which brings us at last to the deepest source of the anguish that has driven the poem from the start – the one Boileau almost confesses

234

The Matter of Mind

in the preface when he suppresses the fear of being forgotten by claiming that the only wish of his advanced old age is to achieve that state on his own initiative. For the prospect of being forgotten not only entails an end to the fame Boileau has enjoyed for forty years or more; it carries the risk of being misremembered. The fear indeed is that posterity will portray him not simply, like Bensserade or Voiture, as being risibly out of date but as being something other than he truly was. Boileau feels precisely in the position of his Jansensist friends, defending true Christian faith in the teeth of the all-conquering lies their self-serving Jesuit enemies purvey. The last living exponent of the classical order the triumphant modernity of Fontenelle now sweeps aside risks becoming a mere historical oddity, as absurd as he is obsolete. Neoclassical culture was not the sum of moral, political, and aesthetic virtues Boileau and the other anciens asserted. It was rather, like the empires of Bossuet’s panoramic history, a contingent arrangement destined to fall away with all the others. Yet where Bossuet counters the apparently meaningless rise and fall of worldly orders with the self-reproducing truth of faith, Boileau sees only historical ruin, formless, pathless, and dark. Wherever we turn, then, the story never stops because, each time something happens that might bring it to an end, l’e´quivoque is there to shift the shape of things exactly like the hermaphrodite of the poem’s opening lines. Put another way, the story never stops because, though constantly changing shape, it is always the same story: one grounded, however, not in self-sustaining truth but in the shifting sands of human thought, human experience, and the treacherous words with which human beings interpret their own motives. In Bossuet, the goal of the world-historical digest is to cancel history out by revealing the providential plan that guides it from the first. In Boileau, by contrast, we get history itself just because it is in the nature of his own linguistic medium to teach him that the dying culture he represents is history, as irrelevant to the modern world to come as the high collars and hooped skirts of his youth. The question nevertheless remains: how and, more to the point, why exactly do things happen this way? And what exactly is l’e´quivoque if it is true that, as the history of the human race seems to testify, a mere figure of speech has the power to lead us on such a dance? This question takes us back to the difficulty period lexicographers experienced in determining what the gender of the word e´quivoque ought to be. By the end of the century, with the dictionaries of Antoine Furetie`re and the Acade´mie, consensus had settled on the feminine. However, the fact that, down to that time, writers were free to choose

Des mots sans fin

235

either gender according to taste seems to suggest that the final determination was purely arbitrary, a matter of convention that had no bearing on the actual nature of the thing. This arbitrariness is the point of Boileau’s joke. Calling l’e´quivoque a hermaphrodite grabs our attention, and makes us smile, just because the question of sex does not properly arise. Yet, granting that assigning the word a gender is a mere convention, once we return to the acts of reference the word itself makes possible, it may be less arbitrary than at first appears. Though the choice of a name (and so a gender) is arbitrary in that, in principle at least, any name of either gender would do, usage is subject to careful discriminations that are as real as labelling is conventional. As we noted earlier, the French term e´quivoque covers a multitude of sins: what seems to have made the choice of gender difficult was indeed the range of phenomena the word picks out. At one end of the spectrum are figures of speech. Off-colour puns of the sort Bensserade and Voiture indulge in, or of the sort Satire XII opens with, are the kind of thing ordinary usage most readily identifies as e´quivoques. But the word was also applied to any figure (pointes, amphibologies, conceits as well as puns in general) that in some way trades on ambiguity. The notion was to this extent firmly lodged in the doctrine of figures of speech, the great family of displaced, substitutive, or metaphorical modes of reference for which the word ‘trope’ serves so well just because they all deviate from the unreflecting directness of ordinary language. E´quivoque can even be said to designate all figures as such insofar as they all operate by blurring the boundaries between the literal and figurative senses of words. This is surely one reason why using the analogy of the hermaphrodite to characterize l’e´quivoque’s shape-shifting power triggers the avalanche of tropes in Satire XII’s opening lines. Almost anything can be made the subject of an e´quivoque, with the result that l’e´quivoque can turn out to be almost anything. This protean excessiveness is besides just what the great practitioners of the art, Tesauro, Marino, Go´ngora, Gracia´n, Donne, or Marvell, prized it for, and not least because it mirrors the figural and typological turns that Christian exegetes claimed God gave the apparently plain text of both holy scripture and the physical universe. It is not for nothing that the Father to whose impact on seventeenth-century French sensibilities Boileau himself bears tribute, the Augustine of the Confessions, the treatise on the Holy Trinity, and the account of the City of God, should have granted the title of ‘Christian doctrine’ to what is in fact a manual of sciptural allegory: a ‘charitable’ method of reading designed to reconcile the contradictions

236

The Matter of Mind

and elucidate the obscurities discovered in holy writ by interpreting them as tropes God himself put there to spur the loving spiritual reflection required to make sense of them.35 Whatever its source then, and whatever its meaning, l’e´quivoque was seen first and last as a figure of speech; and since the French figure takes the feminine, l’e´quivoque eventually came to as well. So why was this so hard to work out? If seventeenth-century French writers had trouble fixing e´quivoque’s gender, it is because they had trouble telling the difference between figurative and non-figurative occurrences of the attendant ambiguity. We recall that Boileau’s satire against bad critics came to grief when he detected an irreparable e´quivoque de langue, an expression that contained an ambiguity he had not intended yet could not eliminate. Though, following French usage, he gives it a feminine name, calling it ‘une e´quivoque,’ it was not a figure. It was rather a disfiguring accident, an inadvertent ambiguity exhibiting the general condition of just being ambiguous or equivocal for which French provides the masculine adjectival noun e´quivoque. The trouble is, where do we draw the line? At what point does ‘une e´quivoque’ (the figure) simple become ‘de l’e´quivoque,’ a case of the merely equivocal in the absence of any positive intention to equivocate? Conversely, at what point does ‘une e´quivoque de langue,’ a bit of unintentionally ambiguous discourse, become the deliberately equivocal figure of which unwary poets risk standing accused in the eyes of bad and even ill-intentioned critics of the sort Boileau’s original satire had been meant to address? The semantic field e´quivoque denotes, and so not only the theme but, as we put it some time ago, the very subject of Boileau’s poem in every sense of the word, is thus fraught with confusions – indeed, with e´quivoques – of every conceivable sort. Consider from this standpoint the definitions supplied in Furetie`re’s Dictionnaire universel of 1690. Furetie`re begins with the word’s use as an adjective: EQUIVOQUE. adj. m. & f. & quelquefois subst. Terme qui a plusieurs significations. Le besoin qu’a noˆtre Langue de relatifs fait faire plusieurs e´quivoques. Les e´quivoques sont souvent la pointe, la beaute´ d’une Epigramme. Il y a de bonnes & de mauvaises e´quivoques. [EQUIVOQUE. m. & f. adj. & sometimes subst. Term that has several meanings. Our language’s need for relative pronouns causes several e´quivoques. E´quivoques often give an epigram its point or beauty. There are good and bad e´quivoques.]

Des mots sans fin

237

It is already striking that the one thing Furetie`re’s definition of the adjective fails to define or illustrate is the adjective itself: both the definition (‘term that has several meanings’) and all three examples concern the noun or its pronomial substitutes. The obscurity surrounding the range of meanings the word supports thus clouds even such basic distinctions as those between parts of speech. To be sure, the case is aggravated by the fact that noun and adjective share the same form. But Furetie`re’s inability to maintain focus bespeaks the chameleonlike character of his topic. We also note that all of the uses he cites require the feminine even though only the second and third cover figures. Furetie`re accordingly omits the case of the nominalized adjective to which ‘sometimes subt.’ alludes. A further important distinction is thereby lost: that between specific instances of ambiguous or equivocal speech and the general condition of being ambiguous. True, Furetie`re’s first example, bearing on ‘our language’s need for relative pronouns,’ points in this direction by noting that one source of equivocal speech in French, as in any language, is the use of ‘shifters’ like demonstrative as well as relative pronouns, or the adverbs ‘here’ and ‘there’ or ‘now’ and ‘then’: words whose reference (and so meaning) depends on the immediate existential context in which they are used. Yet, on the evidence of his own performance, the underdetermination affecting other words proves especially acute in the case in hand. All of which is recapitulated in the ensuing entry: EQUIVOQUE, est quelquefois une beveue¨, une inadvertance qui nous fait prendre une chose pour une autre. Plusieurs intrigues de Romans sont fonde´es sur des e´quivoques de billets rendus a` ceux a` qui ils ne s’adressoient pas. [EQUIVOQUE is sometimes a blunder, an accident that makes us take one thing for another. Several romance plots are based on e´quivoques in which love notes are given to those to whom they were not addressed.]

Given its placement immediately after what was to have been (but failed to be) discussion of the adjective, the new entry would appear to have been originally reserved for the noun. However, not only is there no definition since Furetie`re has already given it in place of the one for the adjective; he does not even bother to indicate the part of speech involved. But of course this is not in fact a separate entry at all; it is a supplement to the preceding entry, adding a further example previously missed. More than anything, the new entry is in fact a be´vue, the

238

The Matter of Mind

misbegotten fruit of Furetie`re’s blundering through the thicket of misprisions, mixed messages, and cross-purposes he has undertaken to pin down. To say that Furetie`re’s remarks are indiscriminate is to say the least of it. The term e´quivoque is itself an e´quivoque, deepening the muddles a discriminating use is meant to sort out. To all of which should be added a still further layer of difficulties. For what happens when we meet not just figural e´quivoques and their accidental lookalikes but non-figurative and yet nonetheless intentional acts of equivocation: the lies, false oaths, mental reservations, and the rest that form the topical theme of the Jesuit system of casuistry with which Boileau’s history comes to an end? As, to be fair, casuists of all stripes argued, Protestant as well as Catholic, and Jansenist signatories of the formulary foreswearing the heresies alleged to have been found in Jansenisus’s Augustinus as much as their Jesuit enemies, a lie is not a lie if it is told to protect the innocent or if one’s persecutors take it to be true owing to their own malevolent intentions. Nor is a false oath strictly false if made under duress or if accompanied, as in the formulary’s case, by a mental proviso that gives it a force other than the one in the mind of the tyrant who imposes it, thereby allowing Jansenists to abjure Jansenius’s heresies, but only on the silent condition that his book contains any, which is precisely what Jansenists publicly denied.36 Like puns, conceits, or simple ambiguities, verbal acts of these sorts mislead by saying something other than what they literally mean; yet they do not explicitly advertise their equivocal status but work instead by being taken for true because they do not obviously seem false. The result, in Boileau, is the paradoxically paranoid faith that, like the one that sustains Freud’s theory of the Witz or the de Manian ‘bliss’ in the face of rhetorical undecidability, makes a virtue of necessity by turning the diabolical indiscernibility Satire XII chronicles into the very truth to be got across.37 Boileau’s solution is given in the personification that shapes his introductory apostrophe. In personifying l’e´quivoque as a ‘fourbe insigne,’ the unspeakable cheat the poet sets out to expel from the sphere of civil discourse, the satire makes no distinction between advertent and inadvertent ambiguities. All of them are condemned en masse because, whatever their circumstantial source, all are just the same. And what makes them the same is the fact that, in personifying them all under a single name, as the feminine e´quivoque reserved for figures of speech, Boileau grants them the agency of intent. Even the most innocently ambiguous meaning is a meaning, and so, to Boileau’s paranoid ear, an intention to mislead, deceive, betray. Yet because, like the

Des mots sans fin

239

apostrophe that ascribes it, intent is itself a figure of speech, the very language he speaks becomes an inscrutable mind from whose Machiavellian toils there is no escape. It is remarkable that, in describing Jesuit casuistry as ‘the most dangerous and terrible Moral Teaching’ Lucifer ‘ever taught Novice Demons,’ the agent responsible for its invention remains l’e´quivoque itself: Satan merely dispenses the poison l’e´quivoque concocts (271–6). Like the equivocal Demon that prods Boileau into going beyond the relative safety of the satire’s first stanza, Satan only makes three brief appearances in the poem: here near the end, as an accomplice in propagating casuistry, as l’e´quivoque’s counsellor in devising the snares of Protestant heresy, and as the serpent in the Garden of Adam and Eve. It is only in this last case that the Devil seems to take a leading role; and even here agency shifts, laying the crime at l’e´quivoque’s feet through the ‘ambiguous words’ (indeed, ‘your ambiguous words’) in which the promise of godlike knowledge is couched (58). Boileau’s Lucifer in fact resembles no one so much as the God of ‘execrable Deists’ like Pascal’s Descartes: he gets the ball rolling by sending the serpent to provoke the Fall and then quits the scene, leaving events to unfold on their own. It is enough that we possess the godlike power of speech, and that we are human beings; the rest, throughout the whole course of recorded history, is what we ourselves have made of it in defiance of reason and God alike. For what indeed are all of the turning points in Boileau’s history of the world if not a rational God’s unflagging yet invariably defeated efforts to rescue us from a ruin of our own devising? In the final scenes of Molie`re’s monumentally ambiguous version of the Don Juan myth we witness the irresistibly comic if at the same time disturbingly dark spectacle of a man stubbornly refusing to take providence at its word. The don’s tragicomic annihilation at the end of the play is telegraphed by a flurry of events warning of the imminent risk of damnation by proffering signs whose meaning is quite unmistakable. The arrival of the ‘stone guest,’ detaching itself from the murdered Commander’s tomb in answer to his killer’s taunting invitation to dinner; the garbled remonstrances of the don’s servant Sganarelle which, hopelessly nonsensical as they may be, nevertheless testify, by the risks Sganarelle takes in openly challenging his master, to the sincerity of a speech whose threat of eternal pain could not be plainer; the descent of a spectre in the form of a beautiful woman metamorphosed in an instant into the terrifying figure of Time itself, scythe in hand; the extended hand of the statue miraculously overcoming its inert materiality

240

The Matter of Mind

to lead Don Juan to perdition – all point the same way and say the same thing with inescapable explicitness. The don’s answer to it all in act 5, scene 4, speaks volumes to Boileau’s purpose: ‘Si le ciel me donne un avis, il faut qu’il parle un peu plus clairement, s’il veut que je l’entende’ [If heaven sends me a warning, it will have to speak a little more clearly if it wants me to understand]. Error proves invincible; nothing can make it stop. In witness we find nothing better than Boileau’s ‘Sur l’Equivoque’ itself. No matter how clear the message, it will never be clear enough not only because, as Boileau’s self-betraying as well as selfdefeating performance shows, our own motives and intentions remain irrecoverably obscure but because language itself, by its very nature, leads us fatally astray. I advert, by way of conclusion, to a surely inadvertent pun that surfaces repeatedly throughout the poem. As a tale of the multiple evils to which l’e´quivoque exposes us, Boileau’s history of humankind has frequent recourse to the plural of the French word for evil, mal. The first occurrence in fact motivates the transition from the satire of baroque preciosity to world history itself: Mais laissons-la` le tort qu’a` ces brillans Ouvrages Fit le plat agrement de tes vains badinages. Parlons des maux sans fin que ton sens de travers Source de toute erreur, sema dans l’Univers. [But let us leave the harm done these brilliant Works By the flat charms of your vain badinage. Let us speak of the endless evils that your twisted sense, Source of all error, sowed through the Universe.]

(49–52; my emphasis)

(my emphasis)

The thing is that, in the plural, the French mal (maux) becomes the exact homophone of mots, the plural form of the common French term for ‘word.’ Given that, in Boileau’s telling, both the cause of and the agent ultimately responsible for the endless self-inflicted evils of the human condition is the incurably equivocal character of even the plainest words, what expression could be more appropriate than the paranomastic twist by which words and evils fuse? Nor should we fail to notice a second, equally adventitious pun riding piggyback on this first. For the evils that double the words we speak are sans fin: endless not only in the sense of being unceasing but, as a consequence of that very fact, in that of having no goal, aim, reason, or ‘final cause’ capable of bringing

Des mots sans fin

241

them to an end by giving them one. The evils we suffer will never end because the words that cause them will never end any more than Boileau was able to stop the poem the ambiguous opening words of the unfinished satire on critics induced him to start. So at least it seems to all those who, like Boileau, convince themselves that history can in fact stop: that there is some final state of things, a single rational truth of the whole, waiting to be grasped in its entirety, once and for all. But to what does Boileau’s effort to apprehend and communicate that whole bear witness if not its own impossibility as a matter of the plain experience of the poem? Nor is Boileau perhaps quite so committed to end-making as he has chosen to suggest for the purposes of the final settling of accounts Satire XII undertakes. If part of the point of this final poem is to rescue his work as a whole from the forgetting that the triumph of Fontenellian modernity portends, what is at stake is the claim to immortality involved in writing verse to begin with. But what makes verse immortal? Is it, as the poem’s explicit argument insists, the power to get things right by expressing them with a clarity and justice that leave no room for answer, equivocation, or doubt? Or is it some more impalpable property of the verse itself, of the words it hits on, of the figures it deploys and of the alternating wit and grandeur that enable it to set itself apart, beyond all possible mistake, as Boileau’s own? As we noted at the start of this chapter, despite his association with a poetics of rules and of a purity of expression grounded in the ostentatiously classical virtues of clarity and distinctness, Boileau devoted a great deal of time and energy to trying to think through the appeal to inchoate yet irresistibly authoritative feeling exhibited in the sublime. One result was the series of twelve Re´flexions whose emergence over the quarter century following the publication of the Traite´ du sublime mimics the process of indeterminably open-ended reflection Kant later defines as the very form of aesthetic experience as such. To this extent, the immortality Boileau craves is a reflex of everything in poetry that escapes rational determination and, along with it, the ideal of lucid selfpossession governing the Boileauvian picture of poetic intent. It is not just that, as the aged satirist and critic of other people’s work was in a position to understand more than anyone now that his own hour had struck, while verse may be immortal, poets are not. It is that what grants verse immortality is the death of the author in every sense of the phrase. Poetry lives because, like Boileau’s puns every bit as much as his more concerted trouvailles and even his moments of grandeur, it acquires a

242

The Matter of Mind

life of its own indistinguishable from the life of language itself. In this sense, the end Boileau tries to bring to history would have brought an end to the poem in which he does so. If, then, in the darkling retrospective light of his very last poem, we find reason to return to all of the others, it is because, precisely by defeating him, it secures the equivocal afterlife we bring to reading them.

Notes

Introduction. Experience and the Matter of Mind: Dualism, Classicism, and the Myth of the Modern Subject in Seventeenth-Century France 1 On the Whiggish side, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). For more saturnine views, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1990); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Michel Foucault, L’Histoire de la folie a` l’aˆge classique (1961; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1972; ‘Tel’ paper ed.), Les mots et les choses: une arche´ologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), and Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 2 The phrase is Richard Rorty’s, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 1. 3 See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, 3rd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1950); and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 4 The literature on conduct manuals, ‘the subject’ of civility, and the related problem of prudential politics is very rich. For especially helpful examples, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Barbara Correll, The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); John Martin, ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,’ American Historical

244

Notes to page 4

Review, 102, no. 5 (1997): 1309–42; Harry Berger Jr, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), and Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 3; Jean-Pierre Cavaille´, Dis/Simulations: Religion, morale et politique au XVII e sie`cle (Paris: Champion, 2002); Jacob Soll, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); and Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 5 On the sense of socio-physical embodiment that defined the early modern ‘person,’ see Rosario Villari, Baroque Personae, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), presenting a representative gallery of embodied sociological types rather in the manner of the early modern ‘character’ books it largely draws on. In a more systematic as well as encyclopedic guise, see Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Reiss’s massively documented account of the essential ‘passibility’ of self prior to (and to a degree even after) Descartes is extremely useful if also at times tendentious. For example, the dubious idea, defended in chapters 6 and 7, that the notion of self that reaches us in the literary remains of the ancient world portrays the persons of women and slaves as being of essentially the same kind as those of the slave-owning men who created that picture seems the idealized product of anti-modern infatuation with the pre-dualist world view of pagan antiquity. Reiss’s picture is also skewed by heavy reliance on philosophical, medical, and theological rather than literary, historical, or artistic portrayals of self – a weighting the more surprising in that one would expect the latter to provide a far more searching sense of self’s ‘passible’ situatedness in the wider circles of cosmic, biological, and social existence. 6 For Hobbes and Gassendi’s objections, together with Descartes’s responses, see Rene´ Descartes, Œuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 14 vols. (Paris: Le´opold Cerf, 1897–1913), 7:171–96 and 7:256–412. I also use Clerselier’s French of 1647, in Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Fernand Alquie´, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1988–92), 2:599–631 and 2:703–838. Subsequent references to the Meditations will cite the location in Alquie´ first, followed by that in the Adam Tannery, denoted as ‘AT.’ In order to underscore the fundamentally collective character of the Meditations, references to objections as well as to Descartes’s own contributions will take the form of parenthetical citations of these editions in the text. On Pascal and Molie`re’s experiments, in addition to chapters 4 and 5 of the present book, see my Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (Chapel Hill: North Carolina

Notes to pages 5–6 245

7

8

9

10

Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002), chap. 4, and Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), chap. 4. I am thinking here of Antoine Compagnon’s critical account of the oppositional consensus concerning not only Descartes but literature and philosophy generally in Le De´mon de la The´orie: Litte´rature et sens commun (Paris: Seuil, 1998). Much as I endorse Compagnon’s analysis of the automatized character of much recent and contemporary theorizing, I hope the sequel makes it obvious how mistrustful I am of his efforts to rehabilitate unedified ‘common sense.’ I have similar concerns about two more books devoted to a certain de-theorization of thought about self, Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and John Farrell’s Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Both books try to demystify the modern demystificatory posture toward persons and identities by showing how abandonment of a more balanced and humane because commonsensical view breeds just the monsters the modern tradition delights in dissecting as constituting our true selves. While I am in sympathy with the impatience Seigel and Farrell evince toward the increasingly reflex presuppositions of much current theory-based thought about self, the presuppositions that usually govern the common-sense view are not generally more helpful or more humane. He´le`ne Merlin-Kajman, ‘Un sie`cle classico-baroque?’ XVII e sie`cle 223, 56, no. 2 (April 2004): 163–72; and Alain Ge´netiot, Le classicisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), pt. 1, chap. 1, whose title terms the age ‘an object constructed by response.’ Both writers see the classical era as being above all an artefact of ‘modern,’ and especially Romantic and post-Romantic, efforts to define the anti-modern tradition of which it undertakes the historic overthrow. On the need to attend to Descartes’s use of definite articles in this connection, see Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 18. See Jean Rousset, La Litte´rature de l’aˆge baroque en France: Circe et le paon (Paris: J. Corti, 1953), and, for a late restatement, Dernier regard sur le baroque (Paris: J. Corti, 1998). Rousset’s chief target is Rene´ Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris: Payot, 1931). For a wide-ranging debate of the issues, see Didier Souiller, ed., Le baroque en question(s), Litte´ratures classiques 36 (Spring 1999). For an earlier discussion of my own, together with further references, see Baroque Self-Invention, 144–8, and the appended notes.

246

Notes to pages 7–14

11 E.B.O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950). 12 John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999). In a similar spirit if on a broader canvas, see Nicholas Hammond, Creative Tensions: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century French Literature (London: Duckworth, 1997); and Ge´netiot, Le classicisme. 13 See, in particular, Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2002); Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (London: Legenda, 2006); and Ge´netiot, Le classicisme, pt. 5, chap. 2. 14 Shoshana Felman, Le scandale du corps parlant: Don Juan avec Austin, ou la se´duction en deux langues (Paris: Seuil, 1980); Mitchell Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering, and Seventeenth-Century Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), and Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 15 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 7. 16 This aspect of Descartes’s thought and influence relates to the challenge to traditional authority and the growing demand for the general right or freedom to philosophize on which philosophical modernity depends. See, e.g., Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 116–17 and 265–70. As a consequence of the new intellectual dominion philosophy arrogates to itself in Descartes’s wake, especially as amplified by Spinoza’s intransigent hyper-Cartesianism in this regard, it also bears on the debate touched off by Lodewijk Meyer’s Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres of 1666. In this debate, to which Israel devotes wonderful pages (chap. 11), philosophers in the new rationalist tradition asserted not only their independence from theology but theology’s subservience to philosophy on the grounds that no theological doctrine can contradict the laws of nature or thought as reason shows them to be. However, given precisely that this last is an idea Descartes himself would have actively (if in part disingenuously) resisted, this is the place to note a vexing ambiguity to which, for all his astuteness, Israel falls victim. Though, like most commentators, Israel writes freely about ‘Cartesianism’ as a general mode or style as well as a doctrine that retains, through all its phases, the unity the

Notes to pages 14–15

17

18 19

20

247

undifferentiated name implies, both Descartes’s thought and his impact are in fact multifarious. Here the term identifies the demand for freedom of thought and the related claim to intellectual supremacy over other disciplines. Elsewhere, however, it tags a particular physical doctrine (mechanism, with or without Descartes’s eccentric ‘vortices’), one of a group of related psychological theories, or a metaphysics. What is more, contemporaries could (and did) adhere to one aspect of Cartesian thought while rejecting others, and still claim to be (and be praised or vilified for being) Cartesians: Israel’s hero Spinoza is a notable case in point. Confusion therefore arises from a failure to distinguish the various, often competing senses in which it was (and remains) possible to be Cartesian. More specifically, it leads to the troublesome assumption that, because a given writer endorses one aspect of Cartesian doctrine, he or she must also endorse all of the rest. The fact remains that, while each aspect of Descartes’s thought may imply the others, it does not necessarily entail them – something of which, again, Spinoza seems probative. See on this score Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), x–xi and xxii–xxiv, correcting his own earlier reductive views on the kind and degree of freedom cognitio reflexiva makes possible for Spinoza’s monistic ‘body-mind.’ Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 132. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), pt. 2, prop. 11, ‘That which constitutes the actual being of the human mind is basically nothing else but the idea of an individual actually existing thing.’ In 2.13, we learn that the ‘individual actually existing thing’ in question is none other than the body: ‘The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body – i.e., a definite mode of extension actually existing, and nothing else.’ Following a development on sensation and perception in which Spinoza explains that all of our ideas can eventually be traced back to the ‘affections’ or modifications produced in our body either by other bodies or by parts of the body itself, 2.23 goes on to claim that ‘The mind does not know itself except in so far as it perceives ideas of affections of the body.’ For a definition, see Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957; ‘Points’ paper ed.), 240–1. The ‘tautology’ is an especially pregnant instance of the chief target of the cultural demystifications Barthes pursues throughout his work: the ‘ideological abuse’ latent in whatever culture presents as ‘what goes without saying’ (9). One of Barthes’s choicest examples, introduced by an epigraph from Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ‘Le gouˆt, c’est le gouˆt,’ is

248

21 22

23 24

Notes to pages 15–16

Racine: ‘J’ai de´ja` signale´ la pre´dilection de la petite bourgeoisie pour les raisonnements tautologiques (Un sou est un sou, etc.). En voici un beau, tre`s fre´quent dans l’ordre des arts: “Athalie est une pie`ce de Racine.” ’ ‘Racine est Racine,’ in Mythologies, 96–8. Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 56–91. See in particular the section entitled ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un tableau?’ in Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Le se´minaire de Jacques Lacan, bk. 11, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973; ‘Points’ paper ed.), 120–35. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963; ‘Points’ paper ed.), esp. chap. 1, sect. 1, on the structural properties of ‘l’homme racinien.’ For Francis Barker’s influential (if misguided) study, see The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984). Problems of gender have generated a vast body of criticism. See in particular Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Re´gime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), for its relevance to Descartes; Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Faith E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), for the strong case made both about the suppression of the feminine in French classical culture (or rather in the formation of our general ideas about French classical culture) and about how central and dynamic the feminine contribution nonetheless proved. On crossdressing and pornography, see Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, chaps. 2 and 3, and DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity, chaps. 1 and 2. Medicine, death, and dying are of course constant themes throughout the period and accordingly figure in much if not most of the relevant critical literature. However, for a usefully encyclopedic (if under-theorized) treatment of the issues as they impinge on the work of one particularly significant seventeenth-century poet, see Patrick Dandrey, La me´decine et la maladie dans le the´aˆtre de Molie`re (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998). On the demoralizing impact of anatomy, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995). By contrast with the foregoing issues, the status and experience of the working poor get relatively short shrift, not least because seventeenth-century French literature shows so little interest in them. (Portraying servants and peasants on stage or in novels is not the same thing as exploring what the world that real ones inhabited felt like.) For intriguing (if brief ) critical exceptions, see the introductory anecdote and the discussion of the place reserved for ‘le peuple’ in the period notion of ‘la nation’ in Jean-Marie Apostolide`s, Le roi-machine: spectacle et

Notes to page 16

249

politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 10 and 20–2. For a striking (and even briefer) literary engagement, see Jean de La Bruye`re, Les Caracte`res, ou Les Mœurs de ce sie`cle, ‘De l’Homme,’ character 128, in Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Julien Benda (Paris: Ple´iade, 1951): ‘L’on voit certains animaux farouches, des maˆles et des femelles, re´pandus par la campagne, noirs, livides et tout bruˆle´s de soleil, attache´s a` la terre qu’ils fouillent et qu’ils remuent avec une opiniaˆtrete´ invincible; ils ont comme une voix articule´e, et quand ils se le`vent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine, et en effet ils sont des hommes; ils se retirent la nuit dans des tanie`res ou` ils vivent de pain noir, d’eau et de racine; ils e´pargnent aux autres hommes la peine de semer, de labourer et de recueillir pour vivre, et me´ritent ainsi de ne pas manquer de ce pain qu’ils ont seme´’[One sees certain fierce animals, males and females, scattered through the countryside, black, livid, and thoroughly burnt by the sun, tied to the land they dig and move about with invincible stubbornness. They have something like articulate voices, and when they stand on their feet, they show human faces, and are in fact human beings. They retreat at night into lairs where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other humans the effort of sowing, cultivating, and harvesting the necessities of life, and deserve not to lack the bread they produce]. 25 I closely follow here a comparable discussion in Indiscernible Counterparts, 43–5. 26 Major left-leaning studies are Jean-Marie Apostolide`s, Le roi-machine, and its companion, Le prince sacrifie´: the´aˆtre et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1985); Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981); and Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation, Canonical States, and Baroque Bodies. One of the many ironies here is that, though dramatically different in ideological commitment and tone, the way it is simply taken for granted that ‘the age of Louis XIV’ forms a monolithic unit is pretty much the view adopted in Paul Be´nichou’s Morales du grand sie`cle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) or Antoine Adam’s L’Age classique (Paris: Arthaud, 1968–71). This also seems the place to mention the strange introduction to Greenberg’s Baroque Bodies, which appears to acknowledge that his own ongoing investment in the culture of absolutism may reflect the narcissism of contemporary critical theory as much as the one he himself imputes to classical France. Whence the following confession: ‘That Absolutism was not absolute will not surprise students of the period. What is perhaps less fathomable is the continued seduction of the concept defining an outmoded political structure that itself was a fantasy and that nevertheless endures and informs our desire for the Grand Sie`cle. Are we not seduced by our own fantasies, and do we not

250

27 28 29

30

Notes to pages 16–17

therefore have to explore the fascinations of this seduction? Do we not dream, when we fantasize life at Versailles at the apogee of the Sun King’s reign, of being in his presence, of being honored by a glance, or of being signaled [sic] out to perform one of those many small tasks that were the reward of selected courtiers who were allowed to approach this “divine” body, to touch it and thereby to share in its sacred essence? Did they not wish to display to the world that they too were exceptional, that they too shared in the hallowed aura of the absolute? And is not part of our fascination with this image of the absolute that we too can participate in it, we too can transcend our quotidian existence and, for a moment, partake of the divine?’ (5–6). Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux, L’Art poe´tique, canto 4, ll. 193–210, in Satires, Epıˆtres, Art poe´tique, ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 257. Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Sie`cle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). On seventeenth-century English pamphlet literature, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972). On the contrasting situation in France, see Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985). One of Jouhaud’s most telling theses, developed in the introduction and in his brilliant analysis of the Cardinal de Retz’s mastery of the genre in chap. 4, is that the last thing to look for in mazarinades is a coherent political philosophy. In a similar vein, see Erica Harth, Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 51–2, on the heavy revisions the libertine Cyrano’s Autre monde underwent before even posthumous publication seemed possible. It is immensely revealing to set the case of France beside the account of Britain in Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). In showing the degree to which the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 was driven by ideological resistance to the Ludovican model of monarchic absolutism James II attempted to impose, Pincus not only demonstrates that the English revolution was every bit as divisive, violent, and, in a word, revolutionary as the French one of 1789; he helps us appreciate, by contrast, how much the French model of political modernization owed to ideological hostility toward the Anglo-Dutch model. In doing so, moreover, he performs in-depth analysis of the antecedent revolution in social, economic, technological, and political infrastructure without which neither model of political modernization would have been possible. This in turn helps grasp more fully the state of things in absolutist France in terms of both its rejection of the Anglo-Dutch version of modernity and its

Notes to pages 18–19

251

concomitant awareness of the possibilities it rejected. Insofar, then, as revolutionary events in England were ignited by opposition to French absolutism in such a way as to produce the first modern revolution, French absolutism can be seen as the first modern counter-revolution, albeit avant la lettre. In this sense, revolution is already afoot in absolutist France even if political circumstances made it impossible to say so explicitly. 31 Taylor, Sources of the Self, chap. 8. 32 On Descartes’s education at the Jesuit Colle`ge de la Fle`che, see Genevie`ve Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), chap. 2; Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 2; and Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 1. In addition to attempting a year-by-year survey of what Descartes could have expected to learn at La Fle`che, Gaukroger avoids the mistake Rodis-Lewis makes in trying to map Descartes’s educational experience directly onto the account of his schooling in the Discours de la me´thode. Yet it is striking that none of these biographers makes much of an effort to determine what, beyond a thorough grounding in letters, philosophy, and mathematics, Descartes might have taken away from school as an expression of the underlying ethos of the Jesuit ratio studiorum. As professional philosophers, albeit mostly working in the historical mode, and despite Clarke’s gifts as a storyteller and judge of character, all three prove largely deaf to the program’s cultural rather than strictly curricular content. For all three, moreover, Descartes’s real education as a philosopher does not properly begin until what Gaukroger calls his years of ‘apprenticeship’ with the Dutch mathematician Beeckman in 1618–19, after leaving La Fle`che. By contrast, as a student of literature whose cultural antennae are much more acute, Marc Fumaroli’s parallel interest in Corneille’s education with the Jesuits of Rouen is much richer and much more revealing as regards both what Jesuit schooling was like and how it might have shaped its more sensitive and intelligent recipients. See his He´ros et orateurs: Rhe´torique et dramaturgie corne´liennes (Geneva: Droz, 1990), part 2. Also useful is Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, chap. 17. Note, however, that Reiss’s readings in both this chapter and the next are distorted by a Quixotic effort to rescue Descartes by showing how he somehow said (or meant to say) what Reiss thinks he would have said had he known how badly subsequent commentators would get him wrong. 33 On the voluntarist doctrine of royal exceptionalism both in the period and as problematically revived by the reactionary German Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt, see Victoria Kahn, ‘Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,’ Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 67–96.

252

Notes to pages 19–21

34 The metamorphosis whereby the dualist (rather than mechanist or more broadly rationalist) Descartes, initially reviled as dangerously radical, came to look reassuringly middle-of-the-road is a leitmotiv of Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, reflected chiefly in what he takes to be the growing rift between the ‘radical’ Enlightenment whose fountainhead is Spinoza and the more moderate, ‘mainstream’ version that eventually came to encompass Descartes. Oddly, the same result occurs in Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), where Descartes’s critique of experience in the interest of scientific rationality is interpreted, without irony, as fuelling the critical piety of Pascal and Malebranche. We will return to this question in chapter 5. 35 On how Descartes’s solution of sceptical dilemmas paradoxically deepened them, see the final update (extending now from Savonarola to Bayle) of Richard Popkin’s classic History of Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 10. The ‘veil of ideas’ problem is already raised by Mersenne (re. the thesis of God’s necessary veracity), Arnauld (re. the circularity of Descartes’s proof of the existence of God), and Gassendi (re. the fact that the only warrant for claims to certainty is subjective certainty itself ) in the 2nd, 4th, and 5th objections. 36 Gaukroger and Rodis-Lewis are typical in this regard. For both, Montaigne personifies the scepticism the young Descartes set out to eradicate. Neither is thus much interested in what Montaigne actually wrote as opposed to what mainline history of philosophy takes him to represent. Gaukroger, 314–9, and Rodis-Lewis, 17–20. 37 I follow Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, chap. 3, esp. 131–9. 38 Rorty reminds us that, before the invention of epistemology consequent on the Cartesian invention of the mind, philosophy had always been what the rebellious twentieth-century moderns, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, tried to make it, ‘therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic’ (5). It aimed at ethical ends of the kind Montaigne proposed rather than the professional goals Descartes set for it. While Rorty misses how far a number of classically ‘modern’ philosophers like Spinoza, Hume, and Kant remain true to philosophy’s ethical traditions, the humbling reminder that philosophy was once the handmaiden of wisdom rather than the queen of the sciences matters. The distinction between the ‘epistemological’ and ‘ethical’ functions of judgment is echoed in Andrea Frisch’s analysis of ‘epistemic’ and ‘ethical’ notions of testimony in mediaeval and early modern law. See The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2004), chap. 1, where, in addition to drawing

Notes to pages 21–2

39

40

41

42 43

44

253

the basic distinction between the two notions of witnessing, Frisch comments on the relation between the modern insistence on the authority of direct personal experience (or at least of the rhetoric of direct personal experience) and the Cartesian conflation of legal roles mediaeval and early modern law carefully separated: that of the witness and that of the judge. Blaise Pascal, Pense´es, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962), fragment 1008. As an item of Pascalian table talk rather than a note for the unfinished Apologie de la religion chre´tienne, this fragment does not appear in the other authoritative edition of the Pense´es, that of Philippe Sellier (Paris: Garnier, 1991). See also Pascal’s famous characterization of Cartesian science as ‘incertain et inutile,’ fragment 887 (Lafuma) and 445 (Sellier). In keeping with current scholarly practice, I will henceforth cite the Pense´es by fragment number using both of these editions, giving Lafuma’s number first and Sellier’s second. On Montaigne’s translation of Sebond’s Natural Theology and the role the translation played in his relations with his father, see Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (1965; repr. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 103–13. Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’expe´rience,’ in Essais, 3 vols., ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 3:275. Subsequent references will appear in the text. The translations are my own. I am indebted to Tom Conley for pointing the duplicity of this opening sentence out to me. For a concise and lucid account of the fortunes of notions of experience from antiquity to Descartes, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 1. Together with that of its variants (experientia est rerum magistra, experientia est optima rerum magistra), the tag’s source proves elusive. I have been able to locate three occurrences in the general period: the decrees issued by the tenth session of the Lateran Council of 1512–17, the prefatory letter to the account of Jacques Cartier’s second voyage to North America in Relation originale du voyage de Jacques Cartier (1598), and Molie`re’s Le Me´decin volant, composed sometime around 1647 for performances in the provinces and first staged at court in 1659, when the Illustre The´aˆtre finally established itself in the capital. Cartier’s Relation gives Aristotle as the source, but without providing an exact reference; nor have I been able to identify anything like it in Aristotle’s own writings. The records of the Lateran Council give no source at all. Meanwhile, the editor of the Seuil edition of Molie`re’s Œuvres comple`tes (Paris, 1962) cites Erasmus, again without an exact reference. It is

254

45 46 47

48

Notes to pages 23–30

striking, however, that Molie`re, who briefly trained for the law and, as Dandrey’s La me´decine et la maladie documents, read widely in the available medical literature, assigns the maxim to a lawyer who thinks or at any rate pretends to think that he is conversing with a doctor. In scene 8 of Molie`re’s farce, Sganarelle, disguised as a physician, tries to uphold his role in response to the lawyer’s Latin citation of Hippocrates’ first aphorism by spouting nonsense Latin of his own. The lawyer replies (how ironically is impossible to say, though the excellence of his own Latin would argue very) by congratulating him for being an empiric rather than a ‘rational’ or ‘dogmatic’ exponent of a Hippocratic or Galenic stripe: ‘Vous n’eˆtes pas de ces me´decins qui ne vous appliquez qu’a` la me´decine qu’on appelle rationale ou dogmatique, et je crois que vous l’exercez tous les jours avec beaucoup de succe`s: experientia magistra rerum.’ (43) The context suggests that, whatever the maxim’s origins, it had by Molie`re’s day taken firm root in medicolegal milieus. My thanks to Andrea Frisch and Robert Pasnau for their help in trying to track the tag down. On the relative contributions of theory and experience in Aristotle, see Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 296–8. Popkin, History of Scepticism, chap. 1. While readers will have no trouble accepting Hume’s attachment to experimental nature, applying the notion to the idealist Kant may seem perverse. However, it is vital to understanding his philosophy from the critical turn on that Kant retains throughout a fundamentally reductive and deterministic conception both of the nature of experience and (as defined by the conditions of possibility of experience) of nature itself. The autonomy of moral reason, e.g., does not abrogate but rather defines itself in strict relation to the purely natural laws of empirical psychology. Or again, the mitigated teleological perspective hammered out in the second part of the 3rd Critique holds fast to the limits of ‘regulative ideas’ and ‘moral’ modes of argument that acknowledge that nature, as nature, remains deterministic and therefore non-providential, however much our own conduct may exhibit a different law. Nor, finally, does such knowledge as Kant defines, in contrast to Hume, as unassailably objective either violate or suspend the laws of empirical experience. In asserting the role mind plays in constituting experience, Kant leaves experience itself just as it was – as fallible, mutable, and incomplete as Hume claimed. Still the best general account of time in Descartes, conceived both as a theme and as a phenomenological dimension of the experimental activity of thinking itself, is that of Georges Poulet in Etudes sur le temps humain I (Paris: Plon, 1952), chap. 2.

Notes to pages 30–2

255

49 See Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind, chaps. 2–4, the best account I know of the strength of the bond between mind and body in Descartes, one consequence of which is the temporalization of perception (as opposed to intuition) at issue here. True, one outgrowth of the depth and seriousness with which Clarke credits Descartes’s insistence on the indissoluble union of mind and body is to downplay his even greater insistence that, in the end, mind and body remain (and ought to remain) distinct. Whence the case Erec Koch makes, first in ‘Cartesian Corporeality and (Aesth)Ethics,’ PMLA, 121, no. 2 (March 2006): 405–20 and then, in expanded form, in The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), chap. 1, about Descartes’s ethical as well as scientific interest in the mind-body problem. As Descartes makes clear in the Passions de l’aˆme, the point of learning how mind and body interact is to understand and so master one’s passions in order to prevent them from usurping the rational self-control the distinction of mind and body makes desirable and attainable. For a similar account, Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 5–6. 50 For a valuable if at times overwrought analysis of the narrative (indeed, novelistic) character of the Meditations and the way this puts both the text and the Cartesian ego at odds with the content of Descartes’s metaphysics, see Jacques Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 2. 51 On the Passions, see Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, chap. 17, esp. 486–7. Rebecca M. Wilkin, ‘Figuring the Dead Descartes: Claude Clerselier’s Homme de Rene´ Descartes (1644),’ Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 38–66, explores both Descartes’s own evolution and its prolongation in Clerselier’s work as translator, publicist, and posthumous editor; and Koch, The Aesthetic Body, chap. 1, offers a detailed commentary on the way objections Descartes initially found irritating when voiced by Gassendi helped shape the views set forth in the Passions under the midwifely influence of Elisabeth of Bohemia. Clarke comments on this virtual partnership in Descartes, chap. 9, as does Brown in Descartes and the Passionate Mind, 12–23. 52 Roger de Piles, Abre´ge´ de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs Ouvrages, et un Traite´ du Peintre parfait, de la connoissance des Desseins, & de l’utilite´ des Estampes (Paris: Franc¸ois Muguet, Paris), 17, 21–2, and 222. 53 Marc Fumaroli, Le Poe`te et le Roi: Jean de La Fontaine en son sie`cle (Paris: Fallois, 1997), esp. the ‘preamble’ and chap. 1. 54 The image of the stew pot appears in ‘Qu’il ne faut juger de nostre heur qu’apre`s la mort.’ Noting that, whatever high-minded things he may say

256

Notes to pages 35–6

before his end is upon him, we cannot truly judge the firmness and tranquillity of a man’s soul so long as ‘on ne luy aye veu jou¨er le dernier acte de sa come´die,’ Montaigne writes: ‘En tout le reste il y peut avoir du masque: ou ces beaux discours de la Philosophie ne sont en nous que par contenance; ou les accidens, ne nous essayant pas jusques au vif, nous donnent loysir de maintenir tousjours nostre visage rassis. Mais a` ce dernier rolle de la mort et de nous, il n’y a plus que faindre, il faut parler Franc¸ois, il faut montrer ce qu’il y a de bon et de net dans le fond du pot’ [In all the rest there may be a mask: either we resort to the handsome discourses of Philosophy only to strike a pose; or circumstances haven’t touched us to the quick, leaving us the leisure to keep our faces as composed as before. But in this final role, played out between death and us, there’s no more room for feigning. We have to speak French, and show if there’s anything good and proper at the bottom of the pot] (1: 124). Note what Montaigne’s image implies without having to state it: that death, as early moderns knew it, was itself a public event rather than the quintessentially private one we tend to see in it today. 1. Front Matter: Placing Descartes’s Meditations 1 Christopher Pye, The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). See esp. chap. 5, where ‘the subject’ turns out to be (in Hamlet’s resonant phrase) ‘a thing of nothing’ whose substance derives from ‘the unspoken, enabling human and economic detritus’ that fills it up (151). The problem is not only that this ‘detritus’ is far from ‘unspoken’; the ‘thing of nothing’ was not anything to begin with. 2 See David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 111, where (with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as his touchstone) Summers uses the proverb as a lever with which to prise open the otherwise reductive naturalism of Renaissance painting in order to reveal its power to ‘make us see more than we are shown,’ namely, the aesthetic Idea he rightly identifies with the idealist impulse that lies behind the eventual rise of aesthetics as such. For a still richer (because more naturalistically sceptical) commentary, see Harry Berger Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 79–94, where (with Rembrandt’s selfportraits in view) the proverb is made to operate to entirely opposite effect. 3 As befits what we will shortly see to be the socio-economic complexity of the book (as opposed to text) that goes by the name of Descartes’s Meditations, citation and nomenclature are intricate matters. Where the text of

Notes to pages 36–8

4 5 6

7

8

9

257

Descartes’s actual meditations are concerned, together with the book’s paratextual front matter and the series of objections and responses the meditations prompted, I use both Fernand Alquie´’s French version in Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Fernand Alquie´, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988–92) and the original Latin as found in the still standard edition of Descartes’s complete works, Œuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 14 vols. (Paris: Le´opold Cerf, 1897–1913), referenced by the acronym AT. Citations of the meditations, objections, and responses will appear in parentheses, the source in Alquie´ coming first and that in AT second. For other texts, e.g., the Discours de la me´thode and Descartes’s correspondence, where translation is either not an issue or an unimportant one, I cite Alquie´ alone for the sake of simplicity. As to nomenclature, in order to tease out the various, often conflicting components of the published volume that first appeared in August 1641, I will reserve the italicized Meditations for the book itself as a whole. The meditations that form the core of the book will be cited in Roman type, with a titular capital. Objections and responses will be extended the same typographic courtesy in order to emphasize their integral rather than merely contingent and supplementary contribution to the book as a whole. Louis Althusser, ‘Freud et Lacan,’ in Positions (1964–1975) (Paris: Editions sociales, 1976), 9–34. Michel Foucault, L’arche´ologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 182. See, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1968), remarks 39–43, on the confusion of words and names and the way this in turn leads us to imagine that, if a word has ‘a meaning,’ that meaning must correspond to the individual thing it ‘names.’ One result is an addiction to using common nouns as proper nouns, signaled by the definite article (the subject, the truth). Antoine Compagnon, Le De´mon de la the´orie: Litte´rature et sens commun (Paris: Seuil, 1998), intro. For his theoretically pregnant account of ‘mythologies,’ see Roland Barthes, ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui,’ in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957; ‘Points’ paper ed.), 191–247. See Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 50–60. For his critique of Barker’s reading, see Harry Berger Jr, ‘The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary,’ English Literary History 65 (1998): 557–91; for ‘snippetotmy,’ 563. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a` l’aˆge classique (1961; 2nd ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1972), chap. 2. For his critique of Foucault, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ in L’e´criture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 1967; ‘Points’ paper ed.), 51–97. For the relevant passage in Descartes, 2:405–6; AT 7:18–19.

258

Notes to pages 38–40

10 Derrida, ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ 71–80. 11 Ibid., 51–2. 12 For a concise discussion, see Compagnon, Le De´mon de la the´orie, 71–4, who notes, among other things, the method’s occurrence in Aquinas even before the humanists. 13 The phrase is Roland Barthes’s. See ‘De l’œuvre au texte,’ in Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984; ‘Points’ paper ed.), 73. 14 See Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 1. Note from this viewpoint Derrida’s dilemma in ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie.’ On the one hand, he sets out to correct Foucault’s reading of Descartes. On the other, he also articulates his attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ to which he sees both Descartes and Foucault as subscribing. See, e.g., 93. 15 Alquie´’s abridgement of Gassendi’s objections reflects not only their diffuseness but the editor’s pointedly Cartesian embrace of Descartes’s evaluation of Gassendi’s arguments. Alquie´ feels free to abridge Gassendi’s objections because he agrees with Descartes in regarding them as being as uncomprehending as they are repetitive and diffuse. The same bias in Descartes’s favour colours the account of Gassendi in Erec Koch, The Aesthetic Body: Passions, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 22–5. Koch is right to think that, as an Epicurean, Gassendi approaches the mind/body relation from the angle of a Galenic ‘organistic’ rather than a mechanistic view of the body. It is, however, misleading to think that it is his traditionalism in this respect that leads him to argue that Descartes’s own metaphysics ‘may in fact be compromised by the corruption of the thinking subject, of mind, by corporeality’ (23). First, mechanists are just as capable of doubting dualism as Galenists. Second, Gassendi does not in fact entertain the notion that the body may corrupt the mind. For one thing, this is Descartes’s idea far rather than the objector’s. Second, Gassendi’s own point is the natural identity of mind and body, a fusion that leaves no room for the former’s ‘corruption’ by the latter. I would add, finally, that Gassendi’s debt to the Galenic tradition does not preclude his philosophical modernity. After all, as Stuart Hampshire argues in Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xli–xlix, in grounding his account of entities of all kinds in a self-expressive and self-actualizing conatus, Spinoza too can be seen to embrace a biological rather than mechanistic picture even of putatively inanimate beings, and no one would accuse him of dragging his feet. 16 An exception is Jean-Marie Beyssade and Jean-Luc Marion, eds., Descartes: objecter et re´pondre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994). Of special

Notes to pages 40–1

259

note are Marion’s ‘Le statut originairement responsorial des Meditationes,’ 4–19, which argues not only that the objections and responses are integral to the book as Descartes conceived it but that the Meditations themselves should be seen as Descartes’s responses to objections to the metaphysical fourth part of the Discours de la me´thode of 1637, and Beyssade’s ‘Me´diter, objecter, re´pondre,’ 21–38, which briefly examines the process of ‘correction, emendation, and addition’ the book’s tripartite structure makes possible, yet without obliging the principal author to change anything in the main text itself. It is nonetheless striking that none of the other contributions, including a second by Marion himself, ‘Entre analogie et raison: la causa sui,’ 305–34, take up the challenge the two inaugural essays pose, confining themselves rather to commentaries on such arguments as happen to occur in objections and responses. 17 Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 202. 18 For an account of the printing history, see Clarke, Descartes, 199–205, and Alquie´’s introduction to the Latin text, 2:171–5. I note in passing that the vagaries of the first edition lead Alquie´ to correct his text against what he takes to be the superior version of 1642 even though it is a point of his textualcritical method to arrange Descartes’s texts in the chronological order of composition. Le Monde, for instance, appears in vol. 1 of his edition, covering the years 1618–37, even though it was published only posthumously, through the efforts of Claude Clerselier, in 1664 – by which time it sports the delightfully ambiguous title of ‘Le Monde de M. Descartes,’ suggesting a Walter Mitty–like solipsism that would have amused Pascal. 19 I have consulted one such copy, stored in the Duke Humfrey collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford (BOD Byw. M 1.28). On the making of books generally and related matters bearing on the material conditions of the publishing trade in early modern France, see Roger Chartier and HenriJean Martin, eds., Histoire de l’e´dition franc¸aise, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1983–6), vol. 1, ‘Le livre conque´rant,’ which takes the story from the invention of moveable type to the mid-seventeenth century, just before the personal reign of Louis XIV. On the material history of the book in general, see Roger Chartier, L’Ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothe`ques en Europe entre le XIV e et le XVIII e sie`cle (Aix-en-Provence: Aline´a, 1992). On the impact of printing more broadly on thought as well as on its dissemination, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Intellectual Transformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

260

Notes to pages 41–8

20 On ‘mouvance’ and related issues, see Paul Zumthor, La Lettre et la voix: de la ‘litte´rature’ me´die´vale (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 21 On Renaissance philology in general, see Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 22 On the generation and assembling of the Objections and Responses, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 354–5, and Clarke, Descartes, 199–205. 23 See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Mary B. Campbell, Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 62–3 on scientific prose; and Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), chap. 3, esp. 38–44, on the new academies and journals. 24 We will take up the question of Pascal’s experiments in chap. 5. 25 Michel Butor, ‘L’usage des pronoms personnels dans le roman,’ in Re´pertoire II (Paris: Minuit, 1964), 70. 26 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); and, more recently, Jacques Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 2. Hyperbolic rhetoric also invades Derrida’s ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ which lays heavy metaphysical stress on discursive functions and relations. See, e.g., the discussion of what he takes (not entirely without reason) to be the inherent hubristic ‘extravagance’ and ‘excess’ of philosophical reason ‘as such’ and ‘in general,’ 87–95. 27 The clearest account of this feature of the Meditations is Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations (1970; rpt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 5. 28 For the argument against dualism based on the logical analysis of the notion of ‘substance,’ see Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), part 1, propositions 1–8. This leads to the identification of God and Nature inscribed in the equation, ‘Deus sive Natura,’ and so to the reduction of God as Nature to rationally intelligible natural law underlying proposition 18, ‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things.’ The result is the rigorously monistic account of mind in part 2, propositions 11–13. This is perhaps the place to note two powerful recent arguments in favour of a more mitigated dualism in Descartes: Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); and Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 3, esp.

Notes to pages 48–55

29

30

31 32 33 34

35

36

261

85–6, on the intransparency of embodied mind. Still, we should not forget that even though, as Moriarty puts it, Cartesian epistemic transparency is a ‘capacity, not a given,’ the presumption remains that this very capacity tells us something essential about the nature of mind that no account of the body (incuding the brain) could suggest, however exhaustive and acute it may be. Frankfurt makes a similar point in his account of the underlying (and inescapably necessary because uniquely enabling) presumption of the ‘legitimacy of reason’ without which Descartes’s counter-arguments against scepticism would be powerless: see Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, 39–42. See Descartes’s letter to Mersenne of 18 February 1641, where he remarks that things have reached such a pass that ‘I don’t think I should ever again reply to anything you may send me from that man’ for fear that they would inevitably ‘become enemies.’ On the Republic of Letters, its gentlemanly ethic, and its status as a manuscript culture, see Shapin, A Social History of Truth; and Peter N. Miller, Pereisc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (rev. ed., 1931; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 801. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, § 36. Derrida, ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ 17–19. Note, however, that citing heterodox opinions with an ostensible view to refuting them was a widespread covert means of disseminating them. See, e.g., Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952; new ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 24–5. Perhaps the greatest (and certainly the most prolific) exponent of this art was Pierre Bayle. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. chaps. 11 and 16. On Malebranche, ibid., chap. 25. See, too, Richard Popkin, History of Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chaps. 11 and 16. For a defence of Malebranche’s project on the grounds that the persistence of scepticism of the sort Descartes’s account of mind, knowledge, and God invited actually strengthens the lesson of Descartes’s invocation of the divine as a necessary condition of natural knowledge, see Moriarty, The Age of Suspicion, chap. 5. I find the case Moriarty makes worryingly sophistical in that it winds up reproducing (rather than analysing) the Post-Tridentine co-optation of Descartes’s most critical insights. In particular, both the aim and the achievement of the Cartesian critique of experience, on which Moriarty’s argument hinges, is to open the way for modern empirical science by drawing attention to the deep

262

37

38 39

40

41 42

43

Notes to pages 56–68

distinction between how the world appears in untutored observation and the underlying law-bound physical processes of which appearances are the empirical telltales. It is thus emphatically not aimed at stimulating, as both Malebranche and the Bossuet of De la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-meˆme (published posthumously in 1722) try to make it do, the kind of anguished self-doubt capable of leading us not merely to God but to the God of orthodox Catholic faith. Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ in Dits et e´crits, 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Franc¸oise Ewald, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:789– 821. On sed forte and translation, see Derrida, ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ 71–2. But see, too, Frankfurt’s more relaxed view, stressing a philosophical as well as a humble man-in-the-street version of common sense, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, chap. 5. Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Like all of us, DeJean is deeply indebted to Robert Darnton’s pioneering work, focused mainly on the situation in eighteenth-century France, yet of great relevance to the preceding, ‘classical’ era, in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and The Forbidden BestSellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995). Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 8. I agree here with both Moriarty, The Age of Suspicion, 76–87, and Koch, The Aesthetic Body, 64–85. See, too, Clarke’s account of Elisabeth of Bohemia’s contribution to Descartes’s late revised view of the passions in Descartes, chap. 9. We will return to these questions and writers in the chapters that follow. However, also see my Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002), chap. 4, on L’E´cole des femmes.

2. A State of Mind: Embodying the Sovereign in Poussin’s The Judgment of Solomon 1 See the ‘excursus against influence’ in Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 50–62. 2 See Louis Marin, La critique du discours: sur la ‘Logique de Port-Royal’ et les ‘Pense´es’ de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975), and ‘La parole mange´e ou le corps divin

Notes to pages 68–70

3 4

5

6

7

8

263

saisi par les signes,’ in La parole mange´e et autres essais the´ologico-politiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), 11–35. See Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, in Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), chap. 5. The phrase ‘tang of the cask’ is John Locke’s, and appears in his antiCartesian account of ideas and their origin in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894; repr. New York: Dover, 1959), 1:136. See Louis Marin, De´truire la peinture (Paris: Galile´e, 1977; repr. Paris: Flammarion, 1997), which plants itself under the banner of Poussin’s mastery from its opening words: ‘Tout d’abord ce mot du Maıˆtre’ (11). See Andre´ Fe´libien, Entretiens sur les Vies et sur les Ouvrages des plus excellens Peintres anciens et modernes, avec la Vie des Architectes (Paris: Pierre Le Petit, 1666–88), 8th entretien. I have used the facsimile of the Tre´voux edition of 1725 presented by Claire Pace in Fe´libien’s Life of Poussin (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1981). For Poussin’s synthesis of Venetian colour and Raphaelesque design, see 137 (facsimile, 114) and 147 (facsimile, 153). On how Poussin outdid Raphael by doing consciously and so by force of rational genius what Raphael did on sheer instinct, see 147 (facsimile, 154). See too Pace’s commentary in her introduction, 78–81, where she links Fe´libien’s analysis of Poussin’s synthesis of Venice and Florence to Fe´libien’s own defence of le coloris in the face of Academic dogma. For a classic art-historical discussion, see Walter Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (New York: Abrams, 1966), chap. 4. This is a staple of Poussin criticism, as endemic to conventional art historians like Anthony Blunt or Jacques Thuillier as to theory-driven outsiders like Louis Marin. However, the best expression of the sense of Poussin’s philosophical character and seriousness is in T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 150: ‘Poussin’s achievement is of roughly the same order of intensity and complexity as Descartes’s or Hobbes’s, and […] therefore what is of interest is how Poussin (like them) managed to break and reconstellate his world of assumptions.’ Fe´libien already notes Poussin’s debt to Leonardo and Zaccolini in Fe´libien’s Life, 113 (facsimile, 15–6) and 114 (facsimile, 22). For recent chronicles of the debt, see Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Art of Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 154–7; Pauline Maguire Robison, ‘Leonardo’s Tratto della Pittura, Nicolas Poussin, and the Pursuit of Eloquence in Seventeenth-Century France,’ in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, ed. Claire Farago

264

9 10 11

12

13 14

15

Notes to pages 70–2

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 189–235 and ‘Leonardo’s Theory of Aerial Perspective in the Writings of Andre´ Fe´libien and the Painting’s of Nicolas Poussin,’ in Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550–1900, ed. Claire Farago (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 267–98; and Juliana Barone, ‘Poussin as Engineer of the Human Figure: The Illustrations for Leonardo’s Tratto,’ ibid., 197–236. For the basics on Poussin’s Stoicism, see Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (New York: Bollingen, 1967; repr. London: Pallas Athene, 1995), chap. 4. See Fe´libien, Fe´libien’s Life, 130–1 (facsimile, 86–9). Louis Marin, ‘Variations sur un portrait absent: les autoportraits de Poussin 1649–1650,’ in Sublime Poussin (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 189. While he does not use the term there, the sujet-peintre is an abiding preoccupation. See the section entitled ‘De´(ne´gation)’ in De´truire la peinture, 57–80, where the same basic figure takes the form of an occluded ‘sujet d’e´nonciation-repre´sentation.’ See too the ‘introduction me´thodologique-critique’ to part 2 of the same book, 129–48, which analyses the ‘sui-re´fe´rentialite´ caracte´ristique du syste`me repre´sentatif.’ Or see ‘Panofsky et Poussin en Arcadie,’ in Sublime Poussin, 106–25, critiquing Panofsky’s seminal contrastive readings of Poussin’s two versions of Et in Arcadia Ego, first in ‘Et in Arcadia ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau,’ in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and P.J. Patton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 223–53 and then in ‘Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,’ in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 295–320. Marin reinterprets the pronoun ego carved on the tomb, which Panofsky aligns now with Death (the first Et in Arcadia Ego) and now a vanished shepherd (the second), as properly belonging to Poussin himself as the otherwise speechless and undetectible author of both paintings. Jean-Marie Beyssade makes this point in ‘Me´diter, objecter, re´pondre,’ in Jean-Marie Beyssade and Jean-Luc Marion, eds., Descartes: objecter et re´pondre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), 21–38. See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, esp. chaps. 5 and 6. La Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, ed. Charles Jouanny (Paris: J. Schmit, 1911; repr. F. de Nobele, 1968), 462. I cite Poussin in French as well as translation in order to savour the beguiling thingliness of his prose. Subsequent references appear in the main text. All translations from French are my own. See Marin, De´truire la peinture, 12–15. Obsessed with representation (here styled ‘imitation’) and the exaggerated role he assigns perspective in making it possible, Marin skips over the place colour occupies in order to establish a secret paradoxical link between Poussin and Caravaggio, the painter

Notes to pages 72–8

16

17

18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25

265

Poussin himself singled out as his great antagonist when remarking that Caravaggio ‘came into the world to destroy painting.’ For a concise overview, see Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 274–84. See too Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur e´loquente: rhe´torique et peinture a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), which, in linking the quarrel between colour and design to rhetoric, also brings out its bearing on ethical questions. See Charles Le Brun, 6th Lecture, in Andre´ Fe´libien, Confe´rences de l’Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris: Franc¸ois Le´onard, 1668; repr. London: David Mortier, 1705), 65–6 and 77. Ibid., 61–5 and especially, in response to prodding from Le Brun’s audience, 79–80. See Charles Le Brun, L’Expression des passions et autres confe´rences, ed. Julien Philipe (Maisonneuve et Larose: E´ditions De´dale, 1994), 51–109. See Oskar Ba¨tschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, trans. Marko Daniel (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), chap. 1. See Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, ed. with parallel trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972). Following part 1’s discussion of the basics of pictorial construction (perspective and the manufacture of the colours applied to a flat surface), part 2 takes up the three ‘parts’ of painting, circumscription, composition, and ‘reception of light’ (the application of expressive colour), all three subsumed under the story (historia) told and the terms of its telling. As Baxandall shows, this scheme clones the classical analysis of the parts of rhetoric, invention (Alberti’s historia), disposition (circumscription and composition), and elocution (colour and light). Colour thus literally comes last, completing a work of creation whose essentials are already in place. See Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). See too Marin’s use of this letter, ‘Lire un tableau en 1639 d’apre`s une lettre de Poussin,’ in Sublime Poussin, 11–34. For this typological reading of the picture, see Marin, ibid., 31. The interpretation traces back to St Ambrose’s treatise on the sacraments, De mysteriis (ca. 370 CE). See Ba¨tschmann, Nicolas Poussin, chap. 2. On readings of Matthew 16, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), paper ed., 115– 16 and 270–3.

266

Notes to pages 80–7

26 For a usefully concise account, see Pace, Fe´libien’s Life, 55–7. 27 See David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), chap. 9, esp. 184–7. 28 See Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 326–38 and chap. 12, where Poussin’s interest in Apollo is put in context with what the author sees as the pantheism infusing the late landscapes; and Marc Fumaroli, L’Inspiration du poe`te de Poussin: Essai sur l’alle´gorie du Parnasse (Paris: Muse´e du Louvre, 1989), where Apollo is presented as part of the specifically Christian humanist project sponsored by the papal Barberini family. 29 See Carrier, Principles, 185–6. I note in passing that the ‘eternal Being’ to which the E alludes may also characterize the painting. 30 See Ba¨tschmann, Nicolas Poussin, 30–9. 31 We should note with Ba¨tschmann (ibid., 32) that the original colours became muddier with the years. The reading thus depends on reconstructing the original state of the colour scheme in light of Se´bastien Bourdon’s lecture on Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind, the seventh of the Academic lectures published in Fe´libien’s collection. However, since Ba¨tschmann’s book came out, the painting’s colours have been restored, as a glance at plate 1 will confirm. I note in passing that Bourdon departs from the Acade´mie’s standard protocol in opening with a discussion of light rather than with a general overview of the painting. His reason for doing so speaks directly to the picture’s symbolism: ‘since it is light that discovers all objects, and that gives us the means of studying them, it is through it that he judges it appropriate to begin.’ Fe´libien, Confe´rences, 86. 32 See note 8 above. 33 Rene´ Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, in Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquie´, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1988–92), 1:587. 34 See Fumaroli, L’inspiration du poe`te, 69–79. 35 See Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), chap. 1. 36 Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, 1:315. For recent commentaries, see Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115–8; and Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 92–3. Moriarty does not discuss Le Monde but rather the general scepticism with regard to the deliverances of spontaneous experience that is Le Monde’s point of departure. It is perhaps in part for this reason that Moriarty’s reading trends toward Malebranche’s apologetic interpretation of Cartesian doubt. However, as Clarke stresses, especially where Descartes’s physics is concerned, the structure of Descartes’s experimental scepticism points toward the

Notes to pages 88–96

37 38

39

40

41

42 43

44 45

267

reductive function of naturalistic explanation characteristic of modern science rather than toward Pascalian or Malebranchian piety. For the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, see Locke, Essay, 1:168–82; for the foosteps metaphor, 1:195 and 1:208. See Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, in Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (London: Macmillan, 1965), 320. For a shrewd commentary, see Mary B. Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 71–6. For the contents of Pointel’s collection, including the inventory taken at the time of his death, see Jacques Thuillier and Claude Mignot, ‘Collectionneur et peintre au XVII e: Pointel et Poussin,’ Revue de l’art 39 (1978): 46–58. These two paintings, read in intense dialogue, are the subject of Clark’s The Sight of Death. In part because, trained as a student of Impressionist, postImpressionist, and modern art, the author has a Greenbergian sense of the primacy of painterly form, but also because, almost uniquely in Poussin’s work, these two pictures have no direct literary, mythological, or scriptural theme or source, Clark analyses the two landscapes at stunningly detailed, breathtakingly mobile, refreshingly open-minded, and, above all, unfailingly patient length. For commentaries on Poussin’s politics, in addition to Clark, ibid., 181–6, see Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 169 and 209; Ba¨tschmann, Nicolas Poussin, 109–10; David Carrier, Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), chap. 5; and Todd Olson, Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 5. Though Blunt, Ba¨tchsmann, and Clark see Poussin as largely non-partisan, Olson has him siding with the parlement and Carrier with the crown. As we will see in a moment, my money is on Mazarin, or at least on the idea of rational justice Mazarin ought to have represented on his youthful monarch’s behalf. See Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 208–11. Ba¨tschmann, too, has noticed the two-part character of Solomon’s verdict: see Nicolas Poussin, 81. However, he falls into the trap of reading the two verdicts as separate judgments, leading to needless puzzlement. The point rather is that the first verdict is an experimental device designed to extract fresh evidence of the truth in the form of the mothers’ telltale reactions. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). On the class of performative utterances he calls ‘verdictives,’ see J.L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa` (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 150–62.

268

Notes to pages 96–8

46 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 1 for the analysis of the state of exception in its relation to sovereignty and chap. 2 for the ‘decisionist’ theory of sovereignty that flows therefrom. 47 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 51. 48 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 49 For Schmitt’s critique of Hobbes, see Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G.L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), which attacks Hobbes’s depersonalized representationalist (and so, in Schmitt’s view, ultimately ‘liberal’ because technical and scientistic) theory of sovereignty from the standpoint of the personalist theory Schmitt sees embedded in the Catholic interpretation of the incarnate Word and the doctrine of original sin, and The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), where Hobbes’s theory is said to be defeated by the rationalist abstraction internal to its presiding myth of the state as a great man (the Leviathan as the King in his status as head of the body politic), a great beast (symbolizing its raw power), and a great machine (its contrived character as a human institution). 50 It is at the very point where Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty applies most exactly to the case Poussin makes that we see what Schmitt has omitted: the degree to which the personalist model of the decisionist prince hinges on the self-mastery that makes him not only technically capable but morally worthy of sovereign decision, capacity and worthiness being construed as essentially consubstantial. As the artist’s sympathy for the cause of the Fronde du Parlement suggests, this aligns Poussin more with the early modern English rather than Continental conception of monarchy enshrined in the specifically English legal fiction of the King’s ‘politic’ as well as ‘natural,’ ‘private,’ or ‘personal’ body as described, in conscious opposition to Schmitt, in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957; copyright renewed in 1981; 7th paperback ed. with preface by William Chester Jordan, 1997). As Kantorowicz observes, the acquisition of their legal identity as sovereign not only distinguishes monarchs from their private subjects by lifting them above the law in the way Schmitt grasps; it subjects them to the higher law inherent to their sovereign identity and office. In the matter of property, for instance, in stating that the possessions of the Crown are inalienable, English jurists meant not only that they cannot be taken away but that the

Notes to page 101

269

monarch becomes responsible to the kingdom itself for preserving them intact for his or her people and successors alike. (See chap. 7, section 2, on ‘the Crown as fiction,’ and esp. the discussion of the inalienability of the ‘fiscal Crown,’ 342–58.) This paradoxical picture of the king as falling under the law just by reason of his rising above it explains, among other things, how the revolutionary English Parliament of the Civil War era was able to depose and behead ‘the king’ as a private person in the name of ‘the King’ as a legal person. It also explains why, in overlooking (or suppressing) the moral as well as legal obligations that bind princes as a direct expression of their political identity, Schmitt was led to grant the right of sovereign decision to Adolf Hitler. And it further illuminates the grounds of Walter Benjamin’s implicit critique of Schmitt in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), namely, his insistence on the sovereign indecision to which royal tyrants (there are no other monarchs in Benjamin) are brought by their inescapable creatureliness (70–2). For helpful commentaries on the Schmitt-Benjamin-Kantorowicz triad, see Richard Halpern, ‘The King’s Two Buckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II, and Fiscal Trauerspiel,’ Representations 106 (Spring 2009): 67–76; and Victoria Kahn, ‘Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies,’ ibid., 77–101. For discussions of the doctrine’s fortunes in a specifically French context, see Alain Boureau, Le simple corps du roi: l’impossible sacralite´ des souverains franc¸ais, XV e– XVIII e sie`cle (Paris: E´ditions de Paris, 1988); and He´le`ne Merlin-Kajman, L’absolutisme dans les lettres et la the´orie des deux corps: passions et politique (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2000). In the latter, the author is chiefly interested in the way the doctrine authorizes the private subject’s oppositional ‘disidentification’ from the king. The emphasis accordingly falls less on the work of self-fashioning to which the sovereign is called as a duty his higher symbolic identity enjoins than on the emergent political psychology of private persons from which the eighteenth-century public sphere will eventually arise. 51 This internalization of the form of the state speaks to the underlying thrust of Yates’s The Art of Memory. As she argues, memory theatres like the one Poussin’s Solomon creates are meant not only to imprint things on memory but, as a means to that end, to give private memory itself the shape and orientation its content ordains. In constructing a memory place to house the ideal of royal sovereignty as the principle of, among other things, the beholder’s place in the kingdom the sovereign embodies, the act of memory Solomon implants is intended to shape the mind of the loyal subject who, in performing that act, becomes the person loyalty demands. To be sure, the arts of memory with which Yates is especially interested – those, e.g., of Giulio Camillo and above all Giordano Bruno – have a far more expressly cosmic

270

52 53

54

55 56 57

58 59

60 61

62 63 64 65

Notes to pages 102–13

reach and ambition than what Poussin undertakes here. But given what we have already seen of Poussin’s world-dominating conception of painting’s power, the parallel is worth exploring. See Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin, chap. 6; Ba¨tschmann, Nicolas Poussin, chaps. 2 and 3; and Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, chap. 4. See Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin, chaps. 3, 7–8; Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, chaps. 5–7; Fumaroli, L’Inspiration du poe`te, 53–96; and Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, esp. chaps. 3–4. See my earlier discussion of Rembrandt and Caravaggio in Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), chap. 2. The best discussion is Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, chap. 1; but also see Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin, chap. 7. See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 46–8. See Poussin, Correspondance, 402. The claim cannot quite be taken at face value since the point of the letter in which Poussin makes it is in part to assuage Chantelou’s hard feelings at learning about the self-portrait for Pointel. See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 188. See David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110–2; and Harry Berger Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 80–4. For the story of the painting-in of the title De lumine et colore, see Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 145–8. The link between prudence (and so wisdom) and scepticism, especially in relation to the sort of political reflection Poussin engages in here, is the theme of Victoria Kahn’s Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1985). Fumaroli, L’Inspiration du poe`te, 94–5. For a memorable discussion of this incompleteness, see Carrier, Poussin’s Paintings, 3–7. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de’ pittori, sculturi et architetti moderni, ed. Evelina Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 455. Note the parallel with Merlin-Kajman’s argument about the generalization of the royal model of ‘two bodies’ to the monarch’s subjects in L’absolutisme dans les lettres. Merlin-Kajman’s chief focus is of course drama, and more specifically Cornelian drama; and her emphasis mainly falls on characters rather than on either the poet or the poet’s public, readers and audience alike. Nevertheless, especially when set beside John D. Lyons’s Kingdom of

Notes to pages 114–15

66 67

68

69

70

271

Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), which shows how the at once political and aesthetic claims tragedy made in the grand sie`cle opened the way to their own relativization in the form of private as well as public readerly response, her analyses move in a direction similar to the one pursued here. Fe´libien, Confe´rences, 1–2; emphasis added. The importance of the definite article, ‘the method,’ has been stressed by Bernard Williams in Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin, 1978), 18. The use of the impersonal on is the French equivalent of the passive voice English contemporaries increasingly adopt in reporting scientific observations and experiments. This impersonal voice is itself the stylistic counterpart of the autonomous phenomena scientists and, like them, Academicians study. In the process, it creates the rhetorically empty space of methodical scientific analysis itself. In line with what Gaston Bachelard has described as the self-correcting orthopsychism of the subject of modern science, if descriptions of the sort the Acade´mie offers are accurate, it is because, like experiments, they are replicable. It will not consequently matter who performs them or with what merely human ends in view; the results will remain impersonally identical. On the impersonal (or, more properly, depersonalized) rhetoric of early modern science, see Campbell, Wonder and Science, esp. 62–3. For Bachelard, see La formation de l’esprit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1938), esp. chap. 12. For valuable updates, see Joan Copjec, ‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,’ October 49 (Summer 1989): 53–71; and Berger, Fictions of the Pose, chap. 7. On ekphrasis (as opposed to the quasi-scientific description the Acade´mie aims at), see Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 1–5; and Carrier, Principles, chap. 5. Unlike Carrier, who is at particular pains to distinguish it from the interpretive procedures of modern art-historical analysis, Baxandall cites ekphrasis as sharing with art-historical description and interpretation alike a substitutive relation to the artworks it fastens on: ‘We do not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures – or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them under some verbal description or specification.’ Ibid., 1. On the importance of identification (and subsequent re-identification), see Joseph Margolis, Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 45–55. Note, though, that what makes identification interesting for Margolis is not, as for the Acade´mie, the hope of gaining access to the artwork in its putatively objective autonomy; it is the way it allows us to talk coherently about the same

272

71

72 73 74 75

76

Notes to pages 117–23

thing even when we give up the idea that that thing is securely fixed and bounded so as to permit right and wrong readings of the sort the Acade´mie has in mind. See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 185–96. For their chief source in Montaigne, see ‘De l’amitie´,’ in Essais, ed. Alexandre Micha, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 1:231–42. See Marin, Sublime Poussin, 186–8. Montaigne, Essais, 1:236. See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 196–205. For Marin, see De´truire la peinture, 87–92. The following is an impoverished because schematic attempt to recreate something of the flavour of Clark’s The Sight of Death. Irritating as some of its features may be (Clark might have spared us the intermittent outbursts of verse, and the descriptions can be repetitious), the book casts a compellingly new light on a painter whose work is all too easily intellecualized out of its essential pictorial thingliness. For a telling contrast, see Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen, eds., Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), the catalogue for the exhibition of Poussin landscapes held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 8 October 2007 to 13 January 2008. The essays collected in this volume cover respectively the landscapes’ ‘critical fortunes,’ Poussin’s search for ‘the Absolute’ in the Roman Campagna, the deployment of linear and atmospheric perspective in the ‘conquest of space,’ the theme of the pastoral retreat, the allegorical shift from storm to flood, and only a single attempt to close with the landscapes themselves, albeit via reflection on their ‘meaning’ (103–17). This last essay, by Willibald Sauerla¨nder, is the most telling. The author begins by citing Hazlitt’s wonderfully graphic (and notably pre-iconographical) rhapsody on Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun. This promises an equally sensitive response to the landscapes’ sensuously pictorial values. The result, however, is a quick survey rather than a close analysis, and the emphasis falls on theme, Ovidian sources, and generic categorization. Such topics are revealing and important. But as Clark remarks of Marin’s discussion of Landscape with a Calm, there aren’t enough goats, enough bends in the road (85). Ibid., 146.

3. The Witch from Colchis: Corneille’s Me´de´e, Chime`ne’s Le Cid, and the Invention of Classical Genius 1 The link between a genius-based notion of authorship and the transition from the term ouvrage (as in Jean de La Bruye`re’s ‘Des ouvrages de l’esprit’)

Notes to page 123

273

to the monumentalizing œuvre identifies the true target of Roland Barthes’s ‘La mort de l’auteur’ and ‘De l’œuvre au texte,’ in Le bruissement de la langue, vol. 4 of his Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 63–9, 71–80. In decreeing the ‘death of the author,’ Barthes does not dismiss the relevance of the empirical source of a given ouvrage; he dismantles the inhibiting pieties associated with the supervenient notion of the monumental œuvre and the concomitant image of authorship as self-determining genius. Antoine Compagnon, in Le de´mon de la the´orie: litte´rature et sens commun (Paris: Seuil, 1998), thus exaggerates the scope of Barthes’s high-theoretical suspicion of the ‘mythologies’ of the ‘common-sense’ view of literature. Compagnon is right to say that theory often trades on a mechanical inversion of the dictates of common sense, convincing us more by an effect of cynical paradox than by weight of evidence. But by no means all theoretical suspicion amounts to rote operations of this sort. 2 Even L’Art poe´tique edges beyond the rule of reason toward the more disorderly ‘influence secre`te’ (canto 1, line 3) an inscrutable providence dispenses. See Ann T. Delehanty, ‘From Judgment to Sentiment: Changing Theories of the Sublime, 1674–1710,’ Modern Language Quarterly 66.2 (2005): 151–72. As further testimony to Boileau’s ambivalence, the note of personal satire informing canto 1’s contrast between the austerely classical Malherbe and the effete Racan limits ge´nie’s range to the poet’s native and so empirical endowments: ‘La nature, fertile en esprits excellents, / Sait entre les auteurs partager les talents: / L’un peut tracer en vers une amoureuse flamme; / L’autre d’un trait plaisant aiguiser l’e´pigramme; / Malherbe d’un he´ros peut vanter les exploits; / Racan, chanter Philis, les bergers et les bois; / Mais souvent un esprit qui se flatte et qui s’aime / Me´connaıˆt son ge´nie, et s’ignore soi-meˆme’ (1.13–20) [Fertile in excellent wits, nature / knows how to share talents among authors. / One can limn an amorous flame in verse; / another uses a humorous touch to sharpen an epigram. / Malherbe can extol a hero’s exploits; / Racan can sing of Phyllis, shepherds, and woods. / Yet a wit that, infatuated with its own powers, flatters itself often / mistakes its own genius and remains ignorant of itself]. See Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux, L’Art poe´tique, in Satires, E´pıˆtres, Art poe´tique, ed. JeanPierre Collinet (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 227. 3 To correct for the distortions that this conception entails, I use the original versions of Corneille’s plays presented in the Ple´iade Œuvres comple`tes, 3 vols., ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–7). Occasional quotations from later editions will demonstrate that, far from muting the tenor of the original on matters of interest here, Corneille’s later revisions generally strengthen it. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

274

Notes to pages 124–5

4 Paul Be´nichou, Le Sacre de l’e´crivain, 1750–1830: l’ave`nement d’un pouvoir spirituel laı¨que dans la France moderne (Paris: Jose´ Corti, 1973). 5 See, e.g., Franc¸ois-He´delin, abbe´ d’Aubignac’s Pratique du the´aˆtre, facsimile ed. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971). For an overview, see Jacques Sche´rer, La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1986), pt. 3, chap. 1. 6 Christian Biet, ‘L’avenir des illusions, ou le the´aˆtre de l’illusion perdue,’ Litte´ratures classiques 44 (2002): 175–214. 7 See Georges Forestier, Essai de ge´ne´tique the´aˆtrale: Corneille a` l’œuvre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996). Where Corneille studies traditionally focus on the moral, psychological, and above all political themes Corneille’s characters voice, Forestier foregrounds the labour of forging a plot, relegating thematic concerns to a secondary, quasi-epiphenomenal status. Among other achievements, Forestier recognizes the fidelity to Aristotle that the voluntarist principle of Cornelian heroism encourages scholars to minimize. As Forestier puts it, precisely because it concentrates so centrally on the logical unity of action required for mastery of the plot, ‘the creative procedure we believe we have discovered in the process by which Corneille works up his tragedies is strictly Aristotelian’ (26). 8 Another troublesome lookalike is the calculating minister whose offstage hand directs the state. This resemblance helped embitter le grand Corneille’s notoriously vexed relations with le grand cardinal, Richelieu. See, notably, Katherine Ibbett, The Style of the State in French Theatre, 1630–1660: Neoclassicism and Government (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), for an exploration of the way in which Corneille’s handling of character and plot mimics (and so critiques) the ruler’s management of people and events so closely that, in return, the management of the state mimics the handling of character and plot. See too my Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002), 89–99, for a similar argument concerning the political implications of Corneille’s formal procedure in Le Cid. 9 For parallels in courtly sprezzatura, see Harry Berger Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 3. The acme of sprezzatura lies less in concealing artful conduct than in letting its artfulness peek through its own graceful concealment. See too Berger, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 1. Both works argue that the autonomous inwardness assigned courtly individuals is an effect rather than a cause of its artful outward tokens. I urge a similar point for dramatic authorship.

Notes to pages 125–9

275

10 For Racine, I use Œuvres comple`tes (Paris: Seuil, 1962), cited henceforth in the text. All translations are my own. 11 Marc Fumaroli, ‘De Me´de´e a` Phe`dre: naissance et mise a` mort de la trage´die corne´lienne,’ in He´ros et orateurs: Rhe´torique et dramaturgie corne´liennes (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 493–518. For an overview, including a critique of Fumaroli’s reading, see Amy Wygant, ‘Medea, Poison and the Epistemology of Error in Phe`dre,’ Modern Language Review 95, no. 1 ( January 2000): 62–71. See too Muriel Gutleben on the paradoxical sublimity of monstrousness in both plays, ‘Faste et pompe, monstres et sublime dans Me´de´e de Corneille et Phe`dre de Racine,’ Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 27 (2000): 153–61. 12 Fumaroli, ‘De Me´de´e a` Phe`dre,’ 499–513. 13 See Pierre Nicole, Traite´ de la come´die, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961), 41–2 and 47. 14 Fumaroli makes the point in ‘De Me´de´e a` Phe`dre,’ 503. Eglal Henein shows how the dress’s proximity to Me´de´e’s skin leads the Jason of all editions from 1644 on to use the verb de´pouiller to describe its transferral to Cre´use in ‘Les Charmes de Me´de´e,’ Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 12 (1979–80): 33. Miche`le Longino reads the dress as an exotic object of protocapitalist and so proto-imperial covetousness in Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71–5. 15 I note French critics’ stubborn insistence on seeing Horace as a hero and so as somehow exonerated of his sister’s murder. Even Forestier, otherwise quick to overturn ide´es rec¸ues, holds fast to the heroic view. For a counterview, see my Indiscernible Counterparts, 110–12. 16 Jean de La Bruye`re, Les Caracte`res ou les Mœurs de ce sie`cle, ed. Robert Garapon (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1962), 88. The idea that we are not only presented with but ‘subjected’ to Cornelian virtue is La Bruye`re’s. 17 See Georges Forestier, Corneille: Le sens d’une dramaturgie (Paris: SEDES, 1998), 15–16. However, Forestier’s point concerns less the singularity of Corneille’s first tragic subject than his conformity to the historical as opposed to the mythological model once, following the ‘querelle du Cid,’ he sets ‘ve´ritablement’ about the business of writing tragedy, a genre Forestier takes to be constitutively linked to historical themes. My argument (Indiscernible Counterparts, 108–27) is that his belated turn to historical subjects in Horace and Cinna reflects not only his acknowledgment of generic propriety but the aim of beating his rivals on their own ground. The point is less that to write tragedy at all is to ‘rewrite history’ than Corneille’s desire to rewrite the rewriting of history in whose light Richelieu’s circle condemned Le Cid. 18 The notion of a Bloomian anxiety infusing Racine’s work by way of his quasi-Œdipal relation to Corneille has a venerable pedigree, dating back to

276

19

20 21

22 23

Notes to pages 130–3

Raymond Picard’s La Carrie`re de Jean Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) and Charles Mauron’s L’Inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine (Gap: Ophrys, 1957). See too Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 327–33, which reads Racine’s first tragedy, La The´baı¨de, symptomatically on twins, as intended to differentiate him from his great predecessor; and Richard E. Goodkin, Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), which, beyond adding the theme of fratricidal conflict to the traditional Œdipal mix, extends the issue from Racine to Corneille’s younger brother Thomas. The rivalry between Corneille and Racine reaches an explicit crisis with the premieres of the former’s Tite et Be´re´nice and the latter’s Be´re´nice, both in 1670. Racine met the same challenge from Jacques Pradon’s Phe`dre et Hippolyte in 1677. Greenberg lays the foundations for this view in Corneille, Classicism, and the Ruses of Symmetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For Longino’s more circumstantial approach, see Orientalism, chap. 1. Holly Tucker, in ‘Corneille’s Me´de´e: Gifts of Vengeance,’ French Review 69, no. 1 (October 1995): 1–12, resituates Greenberg’s view in the anthropology of gift-giving as described by Marcel Mauss and then re-described by Jacques Derrida; Tucker portrays Me´de´e’s murders as the alienated product of woman’s exclusion from the symbolic economy of the gift. Along with Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), Greenberg’s thesis also underwrites Dalia Judovitz’s analysis of what she takes to be the absolutist politics of the ‘Cartesian body’ in Corneille in The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), chap. 5. Luce Irigaray, Speculum, de l’Autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974). See Virginia Krause, ‘Le sort de la sorcie`re: Me´de´e de Corneille,’ Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 30 (2003): 41–56; and Stephanie O’Hara, ‘ “Savante en poison”: Me´de´e and Madame de Brinvilliers,’ in Le Savoir au XVIIe sie`cle,ed. John D. Lyons and Cara Welch (Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr, 2003), 195–204. Forestier, Essai, 22–6. Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Chapter 1 argues that, especially in its Senecan version, Stoicism pursues, in the mode of wisdom, the project of world domination the emperor (and later the absolutist monarch) forecloses in the political sphere. Accordingly, the sage constitutes a

Notes to pages 135–9

277

rival to, and so double for, his egomaniacal overlord – whence the decompensating anger that drives Senecan tragedy, expressing the universal willto-power thwarted by the imperial status quo. This leads, in chapter 5, to a reading of both Me´de´e and the Cornelian hero generally as le moi, an autonomous first-person individual demanding the right of absolute selfdetermination in a moral and political universe that denies that right. Braden’s sense of the centrality of le moi in the dramaturgical project that Me´de´e inaugurates parallels my own, but with this difference. For Braden, the dramatic poem exists for the sake of its self-determining heroes. Here, the heroes exist for the sake of the poet, who frames them in his own image. The true focus of Cornelian heroism is less what heroic individuals do in the world than the act of dramatic composition that makes heroic action possible. The world-dominating Senecan sage is reconfigured as and eclipsed by the world-dominating Senecan poet. For a comparable view, see He´le`ne Merlin-Kajman, L’absolutisme dans les lettres et la the´orie des deux corps: Passions et politiques (Paris: Honore´ Champion. 2000), which approaches the same general idea via analysis of the privatization of the juridico-theological fiction of the ‘king’s two bodies’ especially in Corneille. Crucial to her approach to the problem is chap. 3, ‘Nicome`de-Come´die: L’ironie corne´lienne,’ which equates the eponymous hero’s spontaneous grasp of the act of virtuous will required to rule with Corneille’s ironic exercise of his own will as a poet. However, like Braden but unlike Ibbett, say, or myself, she does not quite hold on to the fact that Corneille acts above all as a poet rather than as some version of his superbly self-determined heroes. We see this in her inspired yet off-centre reading of the anagram in the title of her proof text, where ‘Nicome`de’ is said to yield ‘come´die.’ Quite apart from the fact that this buries Corneille’s will in his play rather than allowing it to stand at the remove the theme of the king’s two bodies mandates, it somewhat inexplicably overlooks the nonetheless capital n that forms the initial of the anagrammatic hero’s name. The link thus lies less between Nicome`de and come´die than between Nicome`de and the come´dien, the actor (in both senses of the word) to whom Corneille grants the gift of self-determining will as an embodied mirror-image of his own as the poet who pulls the strings. 24 Marc Fumaroli, ‘Pierre Corneille, fils de son œuvre,’ in He´ros et orateurs, 36–61. For Fumaroli, both Me´de´e and the comic Place Royale enact the ‘autodestruction’ of the pastoral ideal (40–3). See too John D. Lyons’s deliciously mordant ‘Tragedy Comes to Arcadia: Corneille’s Me´de´e,’ in Theatrum Mundi, ed. Claire L. Carlin and Kathleen Wine (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood, 2003), 198–205. 25 A measure of the significance of this fact is the challenge to the masculinist view of Cornelian heroism propounded by Serge Doubvrosky, Corneille et la

278

26

27 28 29

30

31

32

33

Notes to pages 139–46

dialectique du he´ros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). For Doubrovsky, as an agent in the world, the hero is essentially male – whence his avoidance of mention of Me´de´e except as a vehicle of unnatural evil. Contrast this, however, with Merlin-Kajman’s remarks about Cornelian women, and especially about women pursuing vengeance for the letting of kindred blood, in L’absolutisme dans les lettres, 127–41. True, Merlin-Kajman’s identification of women with blood and the lineal house of which blood is the vitalizing symbol confines not only characters like Me´de´e or Rodogune’s Cle´opaˆtre, or indeed Rodogune herself, but even Le Cid’s Chime`ne to the subordinate role I challenge. The crucial thing remains the autonomy she grants them, albeit subject to the corporate identity (and so authority) they possess as representatives of their families and loved ones. The image of the ventriloquized wound is reinforced in 1660 when the first of these lines is revised to ‘Son flanc e´tait ouvert, et pour mieux m’e´mouvoir,’ telegraphing the talking wound that appears three lines later. I develop this Derridean reading of Le Cid in Indiscernible Counterparts, chap. 1. We see here the full scope of the disagreement with Merlin-Kajman outlined above in n. 25. See Georges de Scude´ry, Observations sur ‘Le Cid,’ and Jean Chapelain, Sentiments de l’Acade´mie Franc¸aise sur la tragi-come´die du ‘Cid,’ in La Querelle du Cid: Pie`ces et pamphlets, ed. Armand Gaste´ (Paris: H. Welter, 1899), 79–83, 90–5, 372–5. The generic conceit is explicit in the original version, which opens with a scene in which Don Gome`s pronounces the happy decision in person. From 1660 on, this scene is elegantly suppressed in favour of having Elvire report the count’s words in the former scene 2. See Christian Jouhaud, ‘Power and Literature: The Terms of an Exchange 1624–42,’ in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 34–82; and He´le`ne Merlin, Public et litte´rature en France au XVII e sie`cle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), chaps. 5–6. See, e.g., the Sieur de Rochemont’s Observations sur une come´die de Molie`re intitule´e Le Festin de Pierre, in Come´dies et pamphlets sur Molie`re, ed. Georges Mongre´dien (Paris: Nizet, 1986), 89–90. Wygant argues that Racine disputes Nicole’s claim to Pascal’s place by defending theatrical ‘error’ on the paradoxical grounds, shared with Pascalian ‘persuasion,’ that such error gets at truth more directly than Nicole’s antitheatrical moralism can (68–9). I argue in addition that Racine insultingly projects his own Œdipal struggle with Corneille onto Nicole’s relation to Pascal. My reading dovetails with Louis Marin’s analysis of Arnauld’s and

Notes to pages 146–50

34 35 36 37

38

39

279

Nicole’s anxious sense of the ironic spirit hovering over the Logique de PortRoyal’s doomed efforts to subordinate Pascalian rhetoric to Cartesian logic. See La Critique du discours: sur la ‘Logique de Port-Royal’ et les ‘Pense´es’ de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975), chap. 12. Fumaroli, He´ros et orateurs, 17–61. Alain Viala, Naissance de l’e´crivain: sociologie de la litte´rature a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Minuit, 1985), chap. 3. Blaise Pascal, Pense´es, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1991), fragments 115–36 (80–104 in the Lafuma edition). See Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Re´gime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 2. On Poulain de la Barre, see Michael A. Seidel, ‘Poulain de la Barre’s The Woman as Good as the Man,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 35.3 ( July-September 1974): 499–508; and Siep Suurman, Franc¸ois Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), chap. 3. On Elisabeth of Bohemia’s contribution to Descartes’s late revised view of the passions, see Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 9; and Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 5–6. See Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), which foregrounds both Scude´ry and La Fayette. For two especially stimulating analyses of the Corneille/La Fayette link, see Ge´rard Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation,’ in Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 71–99; and John D. Lyons, ‘Au seuil du panoptisme ge´ne´ral,’ XVII e sie`cle 223, 56, no. 2 (April 2004): 277–87, both of which focus on the parallels between La Princesse de Cle`ves and Le Cid. Genette discusses what Corneille would have called the ‘vraisemblance extraordinaire’ common to both works while Lyons addresses their respective heroines’ shared (and distinctly noble) resistance to the ‘generalized panopticism’ Foucault’s Surveiller et punir argues to have been endemic to the new rational state Ludovican absolutism helped establish.

4. Seeing Is Believing: Image and Imaginaire in Molie`re’s Sganarelle 1 On Molie`re’s celebrity, see Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chap. 3. 2 Jean de La Bruye`re, Les Caracte`res, ou les mœurs de ce sie`cle (final ed., 1694), in Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Julien Benda (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 88.

280

Notes to pages 151–2

3 On Molie`re’s unusually immediate and intense interactions with his public, see Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molie`re and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For a related discussion of the themes of sociability and public exchange, see Pierre Force, Molie`re, ou le Prix des choses: morale, e´conomie, come´die (Paris: Nathan, 1994). 4 See Christian Jouhaud, ‘Power and Literature: The Terms of an Exchange 1624–42,’ in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 34–82; and He´le`ne Merlin, Public et litte´rature en France au XVII e sie`cle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), chaps. 5–6. 5 For a careful sifting of the evidence concerning Armande’s paternity, see Virginia Scott, Molie`re: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44–5. On the cause Armande may have given her husband for jealousy, 211–13. 6 Molie`re, L’Impromptu de Versailles, in Œuvres comple`tes (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 220. Subsequent references will appear in the text, citing prose works by page number, five-act verse plays by act, scene, and line, and one-act verse plays by scene and line. 7 The idea is a staple of Molie`re criticism in English. See, e.g., W.D. Howarth, Molie`re: A Playwright and His Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 141. For a more scholarly (if equally sympathetic) Frenchlanguage version of the same general picture, see Ge´rard Defaux, Molie`re, ou les me´tamorphoses du comique: de la come´die morale au triomphe de la folie (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980). 8 For Aristotle’s model, see the Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985), 41–5 (1106a–1107a). 9 For a recent discussion of these issues, see Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), esp. chaps. 1–3 for personal conduct. 10 On the entirely admirable social and intellectual ambitions Molie`re’s pre´cieuses travesty, including a detailed and sympathetic discussion of the romantic novels in which Madelon and Cathos find the desired pattern for real life, see Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). For a study of the wider impact mockery of the sort Molie`re permits himself has had not only on our sense of feminine expression and ambition in classical France but on our conception of the grand sie`cle as a whole, see Faith E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). As both DeJean and Beasley show, feminine desire was entirely consistent with the more readily credited social ambitions of upwardly

Notes to pages 153–5

11

12

13

14

15 16

17

281

mobile bourgeois like Molie`re himself. The ridicule aimed at pre´cieuses was thus the direct parallel of the ridicule aimed at self-made men like Molie`re’s M. Jourdain and George Dandin, but with this difference: the critical tradition has always found it easier to acknowledge the positive face of a bourgeois gentilhomme or paysan parvenu than that of a salonnie`re or female author. Franc¸ois-He´delin, abbe´ d’Aubignac, La Pratique du the´aˆtre (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1657; facsimile of 1715 ed., Munich: Fink, 1971), 33. All translations from French are my own. See Jacques Sche´rer, La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1986); He´le`ne Baby and Alain Viala, ‘Le XVII e sie`cle ou l’institution du the´aˆtre,’ in Le The´aˆtre en France des origines a` nos jours, ed. Alain Viala (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 153–230; and Georges Forestier, Essai de ge´ne´tique the´aˆtrale: Corneille a` l’œuvre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996). See Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (1940; repr. New York: Norton, 1967); Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and my ‘The Paradoxical Sisterhood: “Ut Pictura Poesis”,’ in The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168–75, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Roger de Piles, Abre´ge´ de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs Ouvrages, et un Traite´ du Peintre parfait, de la connoissance des Desseins, & de l’utilite´ des Estampes (Paris: Franc¸ois Muguet, 1699), 43. On staging conditions in seventeenth-century France, see Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre, 5th ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1966), chap. 6; Sche´rer, Dramaturgie classique, pt. 2, chap. 1; T.E. Lawrenson, French Stage and Playhouse in the Seventeenth Century (New York: AMS, 1986), chaps. 5–7; and Baby and Viala, ‘Le XVIIe sie`cle,’ 155–66. On the complex problem of Molie´resque comedy’s ambitions as a ‘public mirror,’ see Norman, Public Mirror. Erica Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 24. Ut pictura’s ‘aristocratic’ force is a major theme of the whole book. For a preliminary formulation, see 23–9. Piles, Abre´ge´, 17, 21–2, 222. On the tension between ‘truth to nature’ conceived now as the recovery of nature’s underlying ideal, now as unedified naturalism, see David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and my Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), chap. 2. See too Piles’s characteristic critique of Rembrandt (Abre´ge´, 433–5) and the allegorical origin myth in Charles

282

Notes to pages 155–7

Perrault’s ode to Charles Le Brun, ‘La Peinture’ (1668), in Contes, ed. JeanPierre Collinet (Paris: Folio, 1981), where the erotic springs of painterly representation (236–8) are prefaced by the reminder of the priority of Apollonian judgment (221–8). 18 On the ‘querelle de la moralite´ du the´aˆtre,’ particularly as focused on Molie`re following the revival of the debate provoked by L’E´cole des femmes and Tartuffe, see Marc Fumaroli, ‘Sacerdos sive rhetor, orator sive histrio: The´ologie et moralite´ du the´aˆtre de Corneille a` Molie`re,’ in He´ros et orateurs: Rhe´torique et dramaturgie corne´liennes (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 449–91. For key contemporary statements, including comment on the sexual availability of actors and actresses, see Georges Mongre´dien, La Vie quotidienne des come´diens (Paris: Hachette, 1966), pt. 1, chaps.1–2. For period testimony, see La Bruye`re, ‘Des femmes,’ Caracte`res, car. 33; Paul Scarron, Le Romant comique (1651), ed. Henri Be´nac (Paris: Socie´te´ des Belles-Lettres, 1951), where the temptations of actorly flesh and loose thespian morals form a leitmotiv; Pierre Nicole, Traite´ de la come´die (1665), ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961); and Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet, Maximes et Re´flexions sur la come´die (1694), ed. Guy Soury (Paris: Hatier, 1925). Both of these last argue the same point in terms of the sexual passions in which drama trades. 19 Arnauld and Nicole constantly emphasize the application of logical to theological problems, as does Bossuet’s Logique du Dauphin (1677; published posthumously), ed. Fre´de´ric Laupies (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). Conceived as a manual for the crown prince, Bossuet’s Logique also stresses logic’s subordination to monarchic absolutism via the latter’s subordination to the theological bases of good morals. More generally, though Bossuet begins by distinguishing logic as the ‘science of reasoning’ from morals as the ‘science of virtue’ (11), the theological inflection given his notion of truth finally abolishes the distinction. Whence his major philosophical work, De la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-meˆme (1677; published in 1722), ed. Christiane Fre´mont (Paris: Fayard, 1990), an introduction to philosophy that presents logic, psychology, natural science, and theology as a synoptic system. For commentaries on logic’s subservience to theology, see Louis Marin, La critique du discours: sur la ‘Logique de Port-Royal’ et les ‘Pense´s’ de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975) and ‘La parole mange´e, ou le corps divin saisi par les signes,’ in La parole mange´e et autres essais the´ologico-politiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), 11–35. 20 Jacques Lacan’s ‘Sosie,’ in Le moi dans la the´orie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (1954–55), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 301–16, turns on the hypothesis that Amphitryon’s Sosie, played as well as adapted by Molie`re from Plautus’s original ‘myth,’ is the Ego – ‘Sosie, c’est le moi.’ True,

Notes to pages 157–8

21

22

23 24

283

the formula is applied to Sosie rather than Molie`re; but since Sosie is ‘le moi’ in general, it amounts to the same thing. Restoring the formula to its full glory: ‘Sosie, c’est le moi. Et le mythe vous montre comment se comporte ce brave petit de moi de petit bonhomme comme vous et moi dans la vie de tous les jours’ [Sosie is me, the ego. And the myth shows you how this brave little me of a nice little guy like you and me comports himself in everyday life] (306). The formula is both ironic and not. It is ironic in that it expresses the ineffable combination of courage, self-pity, and bad faith with which Sosie (Molie`re, moi) responds to the world’s adamant refusal to take him at his word. But it is not ironic inasmuch as this essentially comic situation mirrors the inescapable predicament of self as such, and thus the curious lowercase heroism with which all human beings resist the pertinacious authority with which the world exposes self-image as the ‘mirage’ it is. Note, finally, in passing that a major theme in this seminar, as in Molie`re’s play, is the problem of marital infidelity and so of the nature of the faith infidelity betrays. The enlistment of the popular farceur Gros-Rene´ registers a kind of comedy Molie`re is in the process of liquidating. On the transition Gros-Rene´ indexes, see Baby and Viala, ‘Le XVIIe sie`cle,’ 169–75. On the symptomatic documentary status of literary monuments and the problems and opportunities this affords, see my Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), intro. and 76–81. Sganarelle’s first attested appearance is in Le Me´decin volant, performed in Paris in 1647. Though we cannot explore the matter here, Sganarelle’s character as a stand-in for Molie`re relates to the questions Merlin’s Public et litte´rature and Norman’s Public Mirror explore. Moreover, the shifting relations between ‘public’ and ‘private’ that Merlin examines have a peculiar relevance to portraits inasmuch as the face presented in a likeness functions as a formal interface between the public domain in which it appears and the private individual it represents. Meanwhile, on the continuity of Molie`re’s production from the ‘querelle de L’E´cole des femmes’ on, see Jacques Guicharnaud, Molie`re, une aventure the´aˆtrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); Defaux, Molie`re; and Norman, Public Mirror, chap. 11. Because of their medium’s narrative demands, biographers tend to chronicle the continuity without expounding it: see, e.g., Pierre Gaxotte, Molie`re (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), chaps. 8–13; Francine Mallet, Molie`re (Paris: Grasset, 1986), pt. 1, chaps. 6–7; and Scott, Molie`re, chaps. 6 and 8. Mallet’s organization is particularly telling since the chronology driving the properly biographical part 1 yields in parts 2–4 to a thematically ordered analysis that precludes continuity.

284

Notes to pages 158–60

25 For Ribou’s account of the play’s performance and reception, see Molie`re, Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire (Paris: Jean Ribou, 1660; repr. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1872). 26 On the comedy of the modern subject in L’E´cole des femmes, see my Indiscernible Counterparts, chap. 4. 27 Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 60–1 (2.25); and Blaise Pascal, Pense´es, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962), fragment 260; fragment 291 in Philippe Sellier’s ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1991). 28 See Ge´rard Genette’s classic ‘Vraisemblance et motivation,’ in Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 71–99, focusing on problems of plausibility and motivation in La Fayette’s Princesse de Cle`ves, with glances at Corneille’s Le Cid. The analogy between dramatic or narrative motivation and period speculations about ‘final’ vs ‘efficient’ (or ‘primary’ vs ‘secondary,’ or ‘divine’ vs ‘natural’) causes suggests a broader cultural horizon than Genette’s narratological emphasis accommodates 29 Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, La Princesse de Cle`ves et autres romans (Paris: Folio, 1972), 202–4. 30 See the stimulating discussion of miniature portraits in Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 125–8. However, approaching miniatures from the perspective of the compensatory fantasies their possession serves, she neglects the risks to which they are endemically exposed. She thus concludes an earlier analysis of miniature objects in general (portraits or not) by characterizing the underlying defensive wish they fulfil: ‘The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination’ (69). If the portraits in Molie`re and La Fayette teach anything, it is that this goal is readily defeated by the very means it employs. For another, similarly intriguing and similarly flawed account of miniature objects, see the discussion of toys in Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Playland: Reflections on History and Play,’ in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 65–87. Where Stewart sees miniaturization as selfprotective fantasy, Agamben sees it as ‘the cipher of history’ (72), an idea whose potential application to miniature portraits is obvious if hard to work out in detail. While Agamben provides a complicated theoretical apparatus for his own application of the idea to toys, wedding Benvenistian sign theory and Le´vi-Strauss’s theory of myth and mythical thinking to a broadly materialist sense of objects borrowed from Benjamin, what is lacking (as always in

Notes to pages 161–2

285

his writing) is both fidelity to experimental detail (and this in a book that purports to be about experience) and a sense of historical contingency. As evidence of the latter fault, note how, having cited Heraclitus’s remark that the perfect figure of time in its character as aion or pure ‘vital force’ as opposed to rationalized chronological continuity is a ‘child playing with dice,’ Agamben drops the dice altogether, preserving only the idea of play (72–3). The element of pure chance Heraclitus incorporates in his image is accordingly suppressed in favour of a theory that, in defining play as the complementary opposite of ritual, and both as functions of the constraining structure of mythic signifiers, leaves no room for chance, and thus no real room for play either. 31 The fact that Mme Sganarelle’s ‘disinterestedness’ with respect to the portrait’s reference occasions a purely ‘aesthetic’ response tantalizingly points to Kant’s ‘explication of the beautiful’ as ‘inferred from the first moment’ of judgments of taste: ‘Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautiful.’ Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 53. Kant’s emphasis. 32 Piles’s Dialogue sur le coloris (1677), Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (1681), Abre´ge´ de la vie des peintres, and Cours de peinture par principes (1708) serve as both guides for painters and manuals for connoisseurs. Though the doctrine of natural imitation plays a major role, the development of Piles’s thinking leaves mere resemblance behind owing to his exemplary appreciation of painting as, precisely, an art whose aesthetic impact (the ‘tout-ensemble’ and the quasi-musical ‘harmony’ of colour, composition, and line; the demand for ‘elegance’ and ‘invention’ beyond mere natural ‘truthfulness’) is finally independent of the natural forms it mimics and transcends. Also note Piles’s comments on how the remarkable ‘presence’ Rembrandt portraits owe the ‘surprising force, suavity, and truth’ they bring to human faces overcomes Rembrandt’s otherwise distressing enslavement to ‘mere present things’ reproduced in their native state (Abre´ge´ 433–5). For a helpful introduction, see Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 33 For the ‘doctrine of Infelicities’ as applied to speech acts in contrast to the doctrines of error, falsehood, imprecision, inaccuracy, or (in the case of pictures or descriptions) infidelity that traditionally dominate the philosophy of language, see J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa` (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 14–45. On the tension between portrait as (empirical) resemblance and portrait as (social) representation, see Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris:

286

34

35

36

37

38 39 40 41

42

Notes to pages 162–7

Minuit, 1981), especially the introduction, citing a passage from the Logique de Port-Royal to which we turn later. On the same theme, also see Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), chap. 2; and Harry Berger Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 2. For Hobbes, see Leviathan (1651; London: Everyman, 1965), 66. The equivocation behind Hobbes’s talk of ‘meer nature’ relates to Piles’s neoclassical insistence on art’s duty not merely to imitate but to ‘rectify’ nature. For an analysis of the wider philosophical grounds and consequences of this equivocation, see my Baroque Self-Invention, chap. 2. Marin, Portrait, 14–18. For the source, see Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou l’art de penser, ed. Charles Jourdain (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 147. Subsequent references to the Logique appear in parentheses in the text. For an important commentary on this issue, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chaps. 1 and 5, and especially the discussion of Locke (121–5). Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La couleur e´loquente: rhe´torique et peinture a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). See too the comparable analysis of the contest between the ‘rhetorical’ manipulation of sensual passion and the ‘dialectical’ stimulation of critical judgment underlying the ‘aesthetic of the good physician’ in Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), introduction. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: J. Estienne, 1708), 27. See Lichtenstein’s discussion in a section entitled ‘Du Vrai en peinture ou les divers usages de la cosme´tique’ [On the true in painting, or the diverse uses of the cosmetic], La couleur e´loquente, 183–211. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Nemziger Brothers, 1947), 2:2155. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. and trans. H.J. Schroeder (St Louis: Herber, 1941), 215–16. Piles, Abre´ge´, 433–5. The loaded term ‘real presence’ is justified given that the Logique’s entire analysis heads toward justifying their orthodox Catholic interpretation of the eucharistic words of consecration in the Mass. On the historical context, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). On the Jesuit contribution, see chap. 8. Arnauld did devote a work to casuistry, the The´ologie morale des Je´suites (1643); but taken

Notes to pages 167–73

43 44

45

46

47

287

with Pascal’s Lettres provinciales and Nicole’s casuistical reply to Pascal’s ‘E´crit sur la signature,’ in which Pascal challenges Port-Royal’s decision to sign the notorious formulary of 1661 formally abjuring the five heretical propositions attributed to Jansenius’s Augustinus (1640), the Logique’s omission of dissimulation and equivocation is striking. Marin devotes important pages to the logicians’ interpretation of the words of consecration in La critique (290–9) and ‘La parole mange´e.’ ‘Uptake’ bears on Austin’s doctrine of ‘perlocutionary acts,’ introduced in How to Do Things, lecture 8. The question of what a speaker does not only in saying something (an ‘il-locution’) but by saying it (a ‘per-locution’) rarely receives its due. This is the more regrettable in that, unlike illocutions, which are generally intentional acts, perlocutions include acts a speaker performs both unintentionally and unawares. An utterance’s perlocutionary force depends thus far more on what others make of it as a function of how they understand or react to it, regardless of what the speaker means. To gauge the difference a closer reading of this theory makes, note how it removes most of the sting of Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin in ‘Signature e´ve´nement contexte,’ in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 365–93. See Berger, Fictions of the Pose, chaps. 2–6, for a wonderful account of these issues, together with a helpful introduction to the secondary literature. Also see Harth, Ideology and Culture, chap. 3, for the broader social implications of portraiture in seventeenth-century France. See Mitchell Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 5. The imaginaire is a perennial theme in Lacan. See, in addition to the charming seminar on Amphitryon cited above, the sequence of seminars on ‘la topique de l’imaginaire’ in Les Ecrits techniques de Freud (1953–54), ed. JacquesAlain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 87–182.

5. The Ghost in the Machine: Reason, Faith, and Experience in Pascalian Apologetics 1 This is the view variously promoted by Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molie`re and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sexs, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chap. 3. 2 This is a venerable trope, dating back to antiquity. For overviews, see Hans Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R.

288

3

4

5

6

Notes to pages 174–5

Trask (1953; new ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 138– 44; and Frances Yates, Theater of the World (1969; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). For recent updates in the context of seventeenth-century France, see Claire L. Carlin and Kathleen Wine, eds., Theatrum Mundi (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood, 2003). For Caldero´n and the Spanish context, see Anthony J. Cascardi, The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Caldero´n (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Jose´ Maravall, The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), chaps. 6–7. Pierre Gassendi, Fifth Objections to the Meditations, in Rene´ Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquie´, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1988–92), 2:721–6. See the accounts in the biographies left by Pascal’s sister and niece, in Blaise Pascal, Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 10–11 and 37–8 respectively. Subsequent references to all works by Pascal except the Entretien avec M. de Sacy and the Pense´es will be to this edition, cited in the text by the initials OC followed by page numbers. I use both of the leading editions of the Pense´es, that of Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962) and that of Philippe Sellier (Paris: Garnier, 1991). For the coordinate themes of grandeur and mise`re, see Lafuma 53–76 and 105–18 (Sellier 86–111 and 137–50); for divertissement in general, Lafuma 132–9 (Sellier 165–71); for ennui in particular, Lafuma 77–9 (Sellier 112–14); for the monarch’s face, Lafuma 25 (Sellier 59); for the paradox of right and might, Lafuma 81 (Sellier 116); for Cleopatra’s nose, Lafuma 413 (Sellier 32). Subsequent references to the Pense´es will appear in the text by editor’s name and the corresponding fragment numbers. See Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 4. See too Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 1, which shows among other things the ancient roots of the suspicion Moriarty chronicles. For the wider sceptical context, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Sylvia Giocanti, Penser l’irre´solution: Montaigne, Pacal, La Mothe Le Vayer (Paris: Champion, 2001). For the history of imagination from Aristotle down to Kant, as that faculty responsible for experience as such in its instructive as well as deceptive functions, see Ge´rard Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde: l’imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris: Champion, 1995), pt. 2; and John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 3.

Notes to pages 175–6

289

7 Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, 1:315. On the wider historical significance of this idea, see Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 114–17. 8 According to the OED, though the notion of experience as a form of knowledge ‘resulting from actual observation or from what has been undergone’ does not crystallize until the sixteenth century, the word applies to tests or trials, to ‘the actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge,’ or to ‘the fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event’ from the later fourteenth century on. The term ‘experiment’ begins to be used in place of ‘experience’ just when the latter takes on the meaning not just of a source but of a form of knowledge. In French, meanwhile, the one term, expe´rience, does double duty as what English distinguishes as ‘experience’ and ‘experiment.’ 9 See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 67–91. 10 I refer here to Bacon’s historic analysis of the ‘idols of the mind,’ ibid., 47–62. Descartes does of course often speak of the distorting effects of prejudice, usually as an all-purpose explanation for his adversaries’ failure to agree with him. However, he undertakes no rigorous analysis of the sort Bacon and Pascal supply. 11 I use Blaise Pascal, Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur E´picte`te et Montaigne: Original ine´dit, eds. Pascale Mengotti-Thouvenin and Jean Mesnard (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1994). Note the caution, amounting to alarm, with which Sacy reacts to Pascal’s enthusiastically detailed account of his two preferred authors, Epictetus and Montaigne. Clearly disturbed by what he has just heard, Sacy innoculates himself with a timely quote from St Augustine before permitting himself to pity what he pictures as his guest’s self-lacerating sufferings. According to Nicolas Fontaine, to whom we owe the entretien, ‘M. de Sacy, comme il me le redit apre`s, e´coutait paisiblement M. Pascal, se croyant vivre dans un nouveau pays et entendre une nouvelle langue. Il se disait en lui-meˆme ces paroles de saint Augustin: “O Dieu de ve´rite´! ceux qui savent ces subtilite´s de raisonnement vous sont-ils pour cela plus agre´ables?” […] Il plaignait ce philosophe qui se piquait et se de´chirait luimeˆme de toutes parts des e´pines qu’il se formait […], Ipsi se compungunt aculeis suis, et, comme saint Augustin dit de lui-meˆme lorsqu’il e´tait en cet e´tat, Quasi acutele movebar. Jusseras enim et ita fiebat in me, ut terra spinas et tribulos parerat mihi’ [As he told me afterwards, M. de Sacy listened tranquilly to M. Pascal, feeling like he lived in some new country and heard some new language. He said to himself the words of St Augustine: ‘Oh, God of truth!

290

Notes to pages 176–9

they who know these subtleties of reasoning, are they more agreeable to you for that?’ (…). He pitied this philosopher, who stabbed and tore himself on all sides with thorns of his own making (…), and, just as St Augustine said of himself when he was in that state, I was driven like a herd animal. Indeed, you commanded it and it came to pass that I felt as one compelled to obey by thorns and spiky darts] (110–11). Subsequent references appear in the text. 12 Though it will not take formal shape as the ‘law of errors’ until the fusion of probability theory and statistics in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notion that careful analysis of the origins of mistakes and the patterns they form will enable us to correct by allowing for the distortions they produce is central to Bacon and Descartes alike. Pascal himself, moreover, plays a central role in the process not only by virtue of his contributions to probability theory but also thanks to the sense of psychic automatism to which we will turn presently. On the general history of probability, statistics, and the science of taming error and chance by analysing them in tandem, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) and The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 13 Pascal’s contribution to probability and decision theory understandably dominates readings of the wager. The result is a pervasive misunderstanding. Rather than ask (as especially philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition do) whether the wager’s calculus of probabilities works in strictly logical terms (it doesn’t), one should note, as we will later in Bernard Williams’s company, how it trades on prior moral and theological assumptions concerning, e.g., the possible existence of hell as well as God or the psychological efficacy of the Catholic sacraments. As we will see presently, developing a paradox that applies to the Apology as a whole, the wager only helps you decide to the precise extent that you have in fact already decided without it. Whence the interest of Van Kelly, Pascalian Fictions: Antagonism and Absent Agency in the Wager and Other Pense´es (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1992), which emphasizes the wager’s theological significance and its related literary (in Kelly’s terms, ‘fictional’) character. Kelly’s careful (and useful) rehearsal of what he terms the ‘wager improper,’ i.e., the various probability matrices the wager deploys (chap. 3), is framed on one side by the ‘ontological prolegomena’ introduced as a polemical (and systematically anti-Cartesian) preamble to it (chap. 2) and what he calls the ‘wager proper’ (chap. 4), i.e., the payoff in the form of conversion by means of a readiness to act on the hypothesis (‘as if’) of belief. 14 Pascal’s rhetoric, and more specifically the tension between the deceitful persuasiveness with which rhetoric is classically associated and the claims to

Notes to pages 180–5

15

16

17

18

19

291

transcendent truth Christian belief involves, has generated a rich critical literature. See, e.g., Louis Marin, La critique du discours: sur la ‘Logique de PortRoyal’ et les ‘Pense´es’ de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975); Paul de Man, ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,’ in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 1–25; Nicholas Hammond, Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s Pense´es (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Richard Lockwood, The Reader’s Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine, and Pascal (Geneva: Droz, 1996), chap. 5; and Erec Koch, Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the Scientific Treatises, the Provinciales, and the Pense´es (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 1997). On the general theological background to this dispute, see Philippe Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970); Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), paper ed., 217–32; Sara Melzer, Discourse of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s Pense´es (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Koch, Pascal and Rhetoric. For classic accounts of the endemic finalism of narrative discourse, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); and Ge´rard Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation,’ Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 71–99. This is a point to which Desmond M. Clarke has drawn renewed attention. For one thing, as Clarke notes, the role self-preservation plays in seventeenth-century theories of perception (including Descartes’s) invites us to revisit the whole question of the links between body and mind, a question made all the more pointed in the great dualist’s case by Clarke’s convincing insistence on the part brain states play in Descartes’s own theories. See, e.g., Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), chap. 2, on sensation, and Descartes, 210–11. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Alexandre Micha, 3 vols. (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1969), 3:327. For a fuller analysis of the entire passage, see our introduction. The pertinence of the metaphor of digestion informs Montaigne’s remark about the consequences of the discovery of the New World in ‘Des cannibales’: ‘J’ay peur que nous avons les yeux plus grands que le ventre, et plus de curiosite´ que nous avons de capacite´. Nous embrassons tout, mais nous n’e´treignons que du vent’ [I’m afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we grasp nothing but wind] (Essais, 1:251). Compare this with Stuart Hampshire’s claim that, despite the mechanistic picture of self endemic to

292

20

21

22

23 24

Notes to pages 185–7

seventeenth-century natural philosophy, Spinoza anticipated the biological model the success of Darwinism put in its place from the mid-nineteenth century on. See Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xli–xlix. Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston (Grand Rapids, MI: Fleming H. Revell, 1957), 102. For the comparable view in Luther’s Genevan fre`re ennemi, see Jean Calvin, Institution de la religion chre´tienne, ed. Olivier Millet (Geneva: Droz, 2008), bk. 2, chaps. 2–3. Luther’s analogy of a thief caught up in the toils of the criminal justice system puts us in mind again of Pascal’s chiastic paradox on justice, sticking a Hobbist thumb in the eye of Grotius’s theory of natural right: ‘Ne pouvant faire qu’il soit force d’obe´ir a` la justice, on a fait qu’il soit juste d’obe´ir a` la force’ [Lacking the might to enforce obedience to right, one made it right to enforce obedience to might] (Lafuma 81; Sellier 116). See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 103–17. As in the case of Kant’s immediately following analytic of the ‘dynamically sublime in nature,’ the point is to show how the empirical (and therefore natural) experience of the sublime enfolds as part of its logical (a priori) content a reference to (though of course no direct experience of) a ‘supersensible’ sphere that, as such, exceeds mere nature. Pascal’s text functions to an exactly similar purpose and effect. Bernard Williams notes how sacramentalist faith in the efficacy of the routines of Catholic piety forms one of the implicit premises sustaining the wager. See Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 98. To this extent, it contributes to Williams’s general argument about the role that unanalysably ‘thick’ concepts play in shaping moral judgments. But there is no comfort for Pascal in this argument since he finds himself subject to the same critique as the secular John Rawls, with whom Williams mischievously pairs him. See too Kelly, Pascalian Fictions, 216–21; and Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde, 99–117. For a thorough account of custom in Pascal, see Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde, pt. 1. Pascal’s adaptation to the radical socio-semiological critique of classical logic is central to Marin’s Critique du discours. But see too Pierre Bourdieu, Me´ditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997), where Pascal’s thought is harnessed to Bourdellian sociology. It is true that, unlike Marin, who works closely with the Pascalian text engaged in its historical singularity, Bourdieu mainly confines himself to citing Pascalian thoughts out of context, as epigraphs for meditations of his own. Still, Pascal’s writings have always lent themselves to this sort of use.

Notes to pages 188–91

293

25 This reminds us of Lucien Goldmann’s analysis of the links as well as differences between Pascal and Kant in Le Dieu cache´: e´tude sur la vision tragique dans les Pense´es de Pascal et dans le the´aˆtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), chap. 15. 26 Note however that the Fifth Canon of the Council of Trent anathematized the claim that attrition amounts to mere ‘hypocrisy.’ Though it does not make ‘perfect contrition,’ it does play a legitimate part by pushing us in the right direction. 27 See Clarke, Descartes, 357. 28 Though Pascal turns it to what Hans Blumenberg, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), would call ‘gnostic’ effect, the commitment to reason exhibited in the debate about the void relates to the Pyrrhonian iconoclasm Pascal shares with Montaigne, Bacon, and Descartes – reminding us, among other things, that Pyrrhonism is not simply Academic scepticism but a stalking horse for the materialist outlook championed by French libertins e´rudits like Gassendi, La Mothe le Vayer, or Naude´. 29 See Clarke, Descartes, 353–60. 30 We meet yet another parallel with Kant. The de-anthropomorphized automatism that validates nature from an epistemological standpoint guarantees the authenticity of nature’s testimony from an aesthetic point of view. In particular, what justifies Kant’s claim both that beauty is the ‘symbol of morality’ and that it provides a bridge to teleology that avoids the pitfalls of anthropomorphism is that, in its truest sense, beauty is naturally occurring and so, by definition, devoid of the sort of interests or intentions that vitiate the testimony of art. See, e.g., Critique of Judgment, 173–6, where Kant spins the otherwise entirely conventional notion of fine art as imitation of nature into a theory of genius as that ‘innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art’ (Kant’s emphasis). 31 For the debate with Pe`re Noe¨l as reflected in Pascal’s crushing response, see OC 370–7. 32 On the impersonal (or, more properly, depersonalized) rhetoric of early modern science, see Mary B. Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 62–3. 33 We meet again with Gaston Bachelard’s picture of the progress of modern science. As he argues in La formation de l’esprit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1938), the conditions for modern scientific thinking are not merely intellectual and methodological; they are deeply psychological as well, demanding a profound change in our whole conception of human and physical truth alike. As Thomas Kuhn famously suggests in both The Structure of Scientific

294

Notes to page 191

Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) and his earlier preparatory case study, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), moving from one form of scientific understanding to another demands a general ‘paradigm shift’ that may in certain cases (like that indeed of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century) involve reimagining reality itself from the ground up. Pascal’s proof of the existence of the vacuum depends on just this sort of shift. However, as Bachelard also argues, and as the example of Pascal confirms, as applied to the specific case of the Scientific Revolution, this shift demands not just a general change in understanding but the expressly depersonalized stance demanded by methodic experimentation. Whence precisely the self-administered mental discipline Bachelard describes, creating a ‘subject’ whose most signal attribute is its lack of personal coordinates. 34 This points to the hyperbolic nonsense commentators like Bruno Latour sometimes speak. Contrary to the thesis advanced in Nous n’avons jamais e´te´ modernes: essai d’anthropologie syme´trique (Paris: E´ditions de La De´couverte, 1991), we are all irrevocably modern as a function of the reductiveness enshrined in the modern scientific discipline guiding his own attempt to practise the ‘symmetrical’ consequences anthropology shares with physics, biology, or any other ‘physical’ because critically de-anthropomorphized mode of analysis. By contrast, Steven Shapin’s recognition of this fact gives his A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) a thrust rather different from the one the book’s title would suggest. The truths modern science claims to secure do indeed have a social history because, like everything else, truth is an expression of the society that pursues and uses it. Nevertheless, it cannot simply be reduced to the ordering social networks that make it possible even if attention to them explains many things – e.g., in seventeenth-century England, the role notions of civility played in determining who would be believed and so get to participate in the business of science, and who would not. As Shapin observes, a feature of seventeenth-century science is that it rapidly got very much bigger than any one natural scientist could manage. As a result, scientists had increasingly to depend on what, in Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), Bernard Williams calls the ‘virtues of truth,’ the accuracy and sincerity of their colleagues’ work. That seventeenth-century English scientists were inclined to associate trustworthiness with gentility is a natural reflex of the society to which they belonged. But this in no way altered the underlying grasp of the practical conditions that demanded this sort of trust any more

Notes to pages 193–6

295

than it altered the associated sense of nature that presided over the observations and experiments, the report of which increasingly needed to be taken on faith. Whence the fact that, as time goes by, the initial tendency to read social standing as an index of trustworthiness gave way to standards focused less on social standing than on professional training, the quality of the results obtained and the venues in which they were published, and the experimental or observational protocols employed. 35 On the exegetical fulfilment of the projected Apology, see, among other important studies, some of them cited above, David Wetsel, L’E´criture et le reste: The Pense´es of Pascal in the Exegetical Tradition of Port-Royal (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1981); and Pierre Force, Le proble`me herme´neutique chez Pascal (Paris: J. Vrin, 1989). See too Pierre Magnard, Pascal: La cle´ du chiffre (Paris: Socie´te´ les Belles-Lettres, 1975), which is however interested less in Pascalian typology than in Pascal’s anticipation of a generalized hermeneutic applicable to humanity and nature as well as the texts of the prophets. Note that, because, like many other commentators, Magnard reads Pascal from the standpoint of a faithful Catholic, he not only avoids the sort of problem highlighted here but tries to remove much of the sting from Pascal’s anthropology and cosmology alike. In this sense, he continues the work Pascal’s sister and niece began in their early biographies of their brother and uncle, softening Pascal’s intransigent edges in order to make his theological views more palatable. 36 I combine elements of both standard editions, following Sellier in stressing the unit the fragment’s three parts form while following Lafuma in preserving the mirror structure the ms. gives the first. But I also correct both editions. Thus I retain the understroke Lafuma omits; but where Sellier treats it as a separator dividing the first two parts of the fragment from the third, I reattach it to the words it clearly underlines (conserver ni pour acque´rir). And unlike both Lafuma and Sellier, who silently supply the participle (e´chappe´e) elided at the end of the fragment, I use square brackets to indicate its omission. For a facsimile of the original, see Le manuscrit des Pense´es de Pascal, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Libraires Associe´s, 1962), 214. 37 On the role of chance in Pascal’s thought in general as well as throughout the Pense´es, see Laurent Thirouin, Le Hasard et les re´gles: le mode`le du jeu dans la pense´e de Pascal (Paris: J. Vrin, 1991). While I greatly admire Thirouin’s book, I differ from his reading of Pascal’s thoughts about chance in two respects. First, as the name given to the inescapable contingency of sublunary human experience, chance does not, as Thirouin suggests (20–7), dislodge despotic natural determinisms like those exhibited in Pascal’s experiments on the vacuum. It is true that, from a metaphysical standpoint, we cannot

296

Notes to pages 197–204

explain why the laws of physical (or indeed social, historical, or psychological) nature work the way they do; nor (anticipating Hume) can we affirm that the laws in force today will remain so tomorrow. Nevertheless, until such time as nature itself abrogates them, they remain the laws in force. As laws, moreover, they are no less coercive for being contingent; nor would the thought of their contingency produce the dismay Pascal wants it to were it otherwise. Second, for all his subtlety as well as originality, Thirouin falls into the familiar trap of aligning Pascal’s thought with its underlying apologetic intention. There is no doubt that, writing as an apologist, Pascal wants the role chance plays in human affairs to compel acknowledgment of the demoralizing contingency of everything we experience. But the Pascal who writes as an apologist is not Pascal, leaving room for afterthoughts (pense´es de derrie`re) as liable to undermine the faith the Apology defends as to force interlocutors to embrace it. Such is indeed the testimony of the fragment discussed here. 38 Franc¸ois de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, ed. Pierre Kuentz (Paris: Bordas, 1966), 49. 39 Philippe Sellier, introduction to the text of the Pense´es in Jean Lafond, ed., Moralistes du XVII e sie`cle de Pibrac a` Dufresny (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), 291. 6. Des mots sans fin: Meaning and the End(s) of History in Boileau’s Satire XII, ‘Sur l’Equivoque’ 1 See Rene´ Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquie´, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1988–92), 2:520–1 and 2:557. 2 Ibid., 2:717. 3 Ibid., 2:724. 4 For a detailed survey of the crossovers between the ‘colours’ of poetry and rhetoric and those of painting, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur e´loquente: rhe´torique et peinture a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). 5 Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux, L’Art poe´tique, in the Ple´iade Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Franc¸oise Escal (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 157–8. I cite the Ple´iade because it reproduces Boileau’s original spelling and puncuation. However, the Ple´iade omits line numbers, making location hard, so I cite the Ple´iade by page number (signalled by OC) and then add line and, where appropriate, canto numbers from Satires, Epıˆtres, Art Poe´tique, ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). For the present quote from L’Art poe´tique, 1.27–38. All subsequent references to Boileau appear parenthetically in the text. Though I cite Boileau’s prose only in translation, I cite verse in the original

Notes to pages 204–9

6

7

8

9 10

297

as well. All translations are my own, and respect Boileau’s choice of capital letters for the sake of conveying as much of the original feel as possible. Boileau jokes about his avoidance of the nobler genres in the introductory conceit of Epistle 8, to the King: ‘Grand Roy, cesse de vaincre, ou je cesse d’e´crire’ (OC 130; 1). The point is that, as a satirist, he is unable to keep pace with his sovereign’s epic triumphs. Ann T. Delehanty, ‘From Judgment to Sentiment: Changing Theories of the Sublime, 1674–1710,’ Modern Language Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2005): 151–72. Though their emphasis falls more on the je ne sais quoi of inscrutable inspiration than on feeling, Delehanty’s counter- if not anti-classical analysis of Boileau on the sublime was anticipated by E.B.O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950; repr. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 200–12; and Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2003), chaps. 4–5. Like Borgerhoff and Cronk, Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), chaps. 8–9, focuses on the je ne sais quoi. However, she also rightly dwells on what Boileau saw as the sublime’s moral grounds and the concomitantly moral impact it has on readers. This emerges especially in his incoporation of the theory of the sublime in his contributions to the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns. For what, in Boileau’s view, most fundamentally distinguished the latter from the former was their inability to grasp the true nature of the sublime experiences great (ancient) writing imparts, an inability adduced to their want of a genuine moral sense, and so of the kinds of moral feeling integral to the sublime. The shift from a poetics based on rules of composition to one grounded in readerly response is crucial to both Pope’s undertaking in the Essay on Criticism and Boileau’s evolution as a critic and poet. As we will see, it is possible to define the whole issue in Satire XII as a problem of reception. On the growing centrality of response in seventeenth-century French tragic writing of the sort Boileau’s last satire curiously approaches, see John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999). Roland Barthes, Le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture (1953), in Le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture, suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 33–4. On Boileau’s misogyny, see Jeffrey N. Peters, ‘Boileau’s Nerve, or the Poetics of Masculinity,’ Esprit cre´ateur 43, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 26–36. Though his chief target is Re´gnier Mathurin, see too Pascal Debailly, ‘Satire et peur du fe´minin,’ in Cite´ des hommes, cite´ de Dieu, ed. Alain Meyer (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 321–30. It is curious to note that, though overlooked, Boileau conforms in

298

11

12

13

14 15

16

17

Notes to pages 209–11

his attitude toward women almost exactly to the model elaborated for the grand sie`cle as a whole in Mitchell Greenberg, Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Indeed, Greenberg’s model fits Boileau far better than it does most of the writers he looks at, especially the dramatists. But see Michel Jeanneret, ‘ “Envelopper des ordures”? Erotisme et libertinage au XVIIe sie`cle,’ Litte´ratures classiques 55 (Summer 2005): 157–68, for a discussion of Malherbe’s contribution to the erotic in his minor, semiprivate poetic writings. See too the same author’s E´ros rebelle: litte´rature et dissidence a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Seuil, 2003), which explores eroticism’s wider politically as well as morally oppositional function during the grand sie`cle. Molie`re’s personal jealousy and the reasons for it given his wife Armande’s youth and (as an actress) presumed lewdness were a theme of Edme Boursault’s Le Portrait du peintre (1662), as of much of the gossip retailed by Donneau de Vise´. As the title of Boursault’s contribution indicates, payback was a major feature of the various querelles in which Molie`re found himself embroiled from L’E´cole des femmes (1662) on. See Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molie`re and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Molie`re’s most systematic critique of classical notions of identity is L’E´cole des femmes, where Arnolphe’s ultimately self-defeating efforts to marry without risk of cuckoldry are explicitly aligned with the instrumental detachment Cartesian method requires and ensures. See my Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002), chap. 4. This idea was first adduced by Roland Barthes in Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 18. See especially the diatribes against opera’s stimulation of sexual promiscuity (130–40; OC 66), the taste for gambling (215–48; OC 68–9), female learning (438–60; OC 73–4), and the fashion for taking ( Jesuit) directors of conscience (555–624; OC 76–8). I note in passing the echoes of the critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, and so the door opened to a Derridean reading of Satire XII. A ready term for the phenomenon Boileau will shortly associate with language at large is in fact Derrida’s ‘dissemination’ as described in particular in ‘La pharmacie de Platon,’ in La disse´mination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 69–198. For a survey of early modern thought about l’e´quivoque as about e´quivocite´ more generally, see Jean-Pierre Cavaille´, ‘Histoires d’e´quivoques,’ Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 33 (April 2004): 155–73. For comments on

Notes to pages 211–18

18

19 20

21

22

23

24

25

299

Satire XII and its role as an exemplar of the general project of ‘disambiguation’ associated with seventeenth-century European rationalism at large, see 167–73. For the two great contemporary apologies for concerted ambiguity of the sort historians associate with the baroque, see Baltasar Gracia´n, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642; 2nd ed. 1648; Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autono´ma de Me´xico, 1996); and Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannochiale aristotelico, o sia Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione che serve a` tutta l’arte (1654; Savigliano: Artistica piemontese, 2000). See Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Early Modern Literature and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 2010), esp. chap. 3. Plato, Phaedrus, 242b–c. I have used the translation by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 24. On the occasion and composition of Satire XII, see OC 944–8. On Noailles himself, see the article by Antoine De´gert in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1911), available online at www.newadvent .org/cathen/11085b.htm. Boileau chose his authority carefully. Despite his association with Bossuet, Noailles was known both for his hostility to the Society of Jesus and for his sympathy for the Society’s Jansenist adversaries. As Satire XII’s later references to Pascal and his fellow Jansenist Pierre Nicole make clear, the chief source for Boileau’s account of casuistry, here and throughout, is Pascal’s Lettres provinciales. We will return to this point shortly. The thirst for fame underwrites L’Art poe´tique’s introductory allusions to Parnassus, the mythical site of poetic inspiration and achievement and the eternal abode of great poets. See too, however, the poem’s closing movement (OC 185–5; 4.193–236), where poets’ fame fuses with that of the sovereign whose praises French poets will immortalize themselves by singing. The slavish hyperbole of this passage reminds us how worldly Boileau’s ambitions were. We also note that there were twelve Re´flexions and that the longer poems are divided into factors of twelve – the four cantos of L’Art poe´tique and the six of Le Lutrin. In his Remarques sur la Langue Franc¸oise, new ed. (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1664), the lexicographer and Academician Claude-Favre de Vaugelas gives the word’s gender as optional: ‘L’E´quivoque est fe´minin […] quelques-uns encore le font masculin’ (21). On galanterie, see Alain Viala, La France galante: essai historique sur une cate´gorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’a` la Re´volution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). See too Noe´mi Hepp, ‘La galanterie,’ in Les Lieux de me´moire,

300

Notes to page 218

ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 3, Les Frances (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 745–83; and the incidental discussions in the literature on the art of conversation, of which galanterie was a conspicuous amenity, in Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Marc Fumaroli’s preface to L’art de la conversation, ed. Jacqueline Hellegourac’h (Paris: Garnier, 1998); and Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2005). 26 The heady mixture of intellect and sex emerges in the opening words of the preface, where the author commends the book to a curious friend who had expected something different: ‘You wish, Monsieur, that I give you an exact account of the manner in which I passed the time in the country at the home of Madame the Marquise de G***. Did you realize that this exact account would make a book and, what is worse, a book of philosophy? You expected to get feˆtes and card or hunting parties, and you have planets, worlds, and vortices. It was a question of almost nothing but such matters. Happily, you are a philosopher and will not mock these things as much as another would. Perhaps you will even be glad that I lured Madame la Marquise into joining the party of philosophy. We could not have made a more considerable acquisition, for I take it that beauty and youth are things of great price. Do you not feel that, were Wisdom itself to seek to represent itself to men in a favourable light, it could not do better than to appear with a face approaching that of the Marquise?’ See Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralite´ des mondes, 9th ed. (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1724), 11–12. Of particular note are the various registers through which the terms ‘philosopher,’ ‘philosophy,’ and ‘philosophical’ move even in these few lines, encompassing at one end science and wisdom and then passing through colloquially philosophical resignation in the face of disappointment toward something approaching the erotic (not to say pornographic) connotation these words acquire in the Enlightenment. On this latter development, see Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995), esp. chap. 3. Fontenelle’s performance here conspicuously trades on e´quivoques in the specifically French style. 27 Boileau echoes the chapter on fashion (‘De la Mode’) in La Bruye`re’s Caracte`res. What goes in and out of fashion with such giddy speed is by definition trivial. It thus sets off by contrast the fundamental properties of truth, which is not only essential but eternal and unvarying. Yet the very alacrity with which critics of fashion turn into enemies of fashion, decrying its baleful influence on taste and morals, indicates that it triggers fears out of all proportion to their ostensible cause. Fashion is not just a trivial surface phenomenon; it raises ontological issues bearing on the very nature of

Notes to page 222

301

humanity, and in the first place whether humanity has a stable nature at all. Whence the place the chapter on fashion holds in the Caracte`res. Beginning with the products of the mind (chap. 1) and the question of personal merit such products raise (chap. 2), La Bruye`re works his way through permanent features of social existence as exhibited in his own age (women, love, sociability, and conversation, fortune, the city, the court, the great, politics) until he reaches the human essence in successive chapters on humanity (‘De l’homme’) and on the powers of judgment that separate humans from animals, and greater humans from lesser (‘Des jugements’). The chapter on fashion then opens a quasi-anthropological perspective, directly followed up by the caracte`res devoted to ‘quelques usages,’ undermining the impression of self-replicating stability maintained to that point. This in turn leads to a chapter on homiletics (‘De la chaire’), much of it criticizing the influence of fashion in preaching and moral instruction, and then to the concluding, dark, Jansenist-inspired defence of the truths of faith against modern materialism, scepticism, and atheism, symptomatically entitled ‘Des esprits forts,’ in negative honour of those whose captious yet somehow invincible Pyrrhonian ‘reasons’ compel La Bruye`re to take up the weighty theological and cosmological themes with which his book ends. For a similar case in seventeenth-century England, see Mary B. Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 7, on what the Puritan physican and moralist John Bulwer calls ‘anthropometamorphosis’ in a ferociously encyclopedic diatribe of the same name decrying fashions of all sorts (especially those like cosmetics and tatoo art that work directly on the body as well as its accoutrements) as acting in depth to change the very essence of the creatures whose external carnal envelope they adorn, disguise, and, in consequence, deform and denature. 28 Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 40–1. 29 See William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). The general conception of time here, grounded in the contrast between divine and human perspectives on events, is deeply Augustinian. However, as the Discours’s function as a primer for the crown prince suggests, it is also Machiavellian, combining theology with reason of state. The crux is the notion of prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues Christian theology takes over from pagan antiquity as regulating the conjunction of transcendent and immanent outlooks on temporal experience. What therefore, in Bossuet, looks unequivocally God-centred proves on closer scrutiny disquietingly secularized, and not least because, in preaching historical

302

30 31

32

33

Notes to pages 224–30

learning as a prudential guide against error and hubris, the royal tutor enlists his fledgling monarch in the cause of the specifically Catholic and, what is more, Gallican mode of devotion Bossuet represents. The Discours purveys what the German Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt will later call a ‘political theology,’ focused on a notion of the sovereign as both ‘he who decides on the state of exception’ and he who, as the sovereign, personates the divine perspective in human affairs. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G.L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). Seen from this angle, the rise and fall of empires is the story of the eternal return of the state of exception through which God impresses his seal on history in the form of the sovereign decision Bossuet prepares the future king to make. But note the e´quivoque de langue; for this line could also be translated as reading ‘God dragged from Heaven before the tribunal of man.’ On casuistry both in its Jesuit avatar and as a rational response to real dilemmas that preoccupied everyone, Protestants and Catholic, Jesuits and antiJesuits alike, see Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). For a similar analysis of the problem of lies, dissimulation, mental reservations, etc., see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). This last is especially valuable for emphasizing the relation between dissimulation and the instrumental detachment required for successful social and political action. For a brief summary of the role free will played in the fight against Protestant heresy, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (London: Penguin, 2003), 150–2 and 480–1. For fuller accounts, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), paper ed., 217–32; Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge; William Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (New York: Brill, 1991); and Thomas Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Olivier Jouslin, ‘L’e´thique pole´mique de Pascal,’ Litte´ratures classiques 59 (Summer 2006): 117–39. The curious thing here is the way the reminder that the goal in polemic is victory rather than truth excuses Pascal’s distortions of the truth. The essay amounts, then, to a casuistical defence of Pascal’s less than scrupulous account of casuistry.

Notes to pages 233–8

303

34 Wendrock is the pen name the Jansenist Pierre Nicole adopted in his Latin translation of Pascal’s Provinciales. 35 See Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson Jr (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 36 The crisis surrounding the formulary pitted Pascal against Arnauld and Nicole, who counselled the kind of mental reservation Pascal abhorred. For Pascal’s anguished as well as rigorist resistance to signing, see the ‘E´crit sur la signature’ in Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1075–7. 37 See Sigmund Freud, The Joke in Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (London: Penguin, 2003); and Paul de Man, ‘Semiology and Rhetoric,’ in Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 19.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Adam, Antoine. L’Age classique. Paris: Arthaud, 1968–71. Agamben, Giorgio. ‘In Playland: Reflections on History and Play.’ In Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, translated by Liz Heron, 65–87. London: Verso, 1993. – State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura. Edited with parallel translation by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972. Althusser, Louis. ‘Freud et Lacan.’ In Positions (1964–1975), 9–34. Paris: Editions sociales, 1976. Apostolide`s, Jean-Marie. Le roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Minuit, 1981. – Le prince sacrifie´: the´aˆtre et politique au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 3 vols. New York: Nemziger Brothers, 1947. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985. Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. La Logique ou l’art de penser. Edited by Charles Jourdain. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Aubignac, Franc¸ois-He´delin, abbe´ de. Pratique du the´aˆtre. Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1657. Facsimile of 1715 ed., Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971. Augustine of Hippo. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D.W. Robertson Jr. New York: Macmillan, 1958. Austin, J.L. How To Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa`. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

306

Bibliography

Baby, He´le`ne, and Alain Viala, ‘Le XVIIe sie`cle ou l’institution du the´aˆtre.’ In Le The´aˆtre en France des origines a` nos jours, edited by Alain Viala, 153–230. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Bachelard, Gaston. La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Paris: J. Vrin, 1938. Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Fulton H. Anderson. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960. – Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works. Edited by Sidney Warhaft. London: Macmillan, 1965. Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. London: Methuen, 1984. Barone, Juliana. ‘Poussin as Engineer of the Human Figure: The Illustrations for Leonardo’s Tratto.’ In Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550–1900, edited by Claire Farago, 197–236. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957; ‘Points’ paper ed. – Sur Racine. Paris: Seuil, 1963; ‘Points’ paper ed. – Le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture, suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques. Paris: Seuil, 1972. – ‘La mort de l’auteur.’ In Le bruissement de la langue, 63–9. Paris: Seuil, 1984; ‘Points’ paper ed. – ‘De l’œuvre au texte.’ In Le bruissement de la langue, 71–80. Paris: Seuil, 1984; ‘Points’ paper ed. Ba¨tschmann, Oskar. Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting.Translated by Marko Daniel. London: Reaktion Books, 1990. Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. – Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Beasley, Faith E. Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le Vite de’ pittori, sculturi et architetti moderni. Edited by Evelina Borea. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Be´nichou, Paul. Morales du grand sie`cle. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. – Le Sacre de l’e´crivain, 1750–1830: l’ave`nement d’un pouvoir spirituel laı¨que dans la France moderne. Paris: Jose´ Corti, 1973. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1977. Berger, Harry, Jr. ‘The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary.’ English Literary History 65 (1998): 557–91. – The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Bibliography

307

– Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Beyssade, Jean-Marie. ‘Me´diter, objecter, re´pondre.’ In Descartes: objecter et re´pondre, edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade and Jean-Luc Marion, 21–38. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994. Beyssade, Jean-Marie, and Jean-Luc Marion, eds. Descartes: objecter et re´pondre. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994. Biet, Christian. ‘L’avenir des illusions, ou le the´aˆtre de l’illusion perdue.’ Litte´ratures classiques 44 (2002): 175–214. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Blunt, Anthony. Nicolas Poussin. New York: Bollingen, 1967; repr. London: Pallas Athene, 1995. Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas. Œuvres comple`tes. Edited by Franc¸oise Escal. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. – Satires, E´pıˆtres, Art poe´tique. Edited by Jean-Pierre Collinet. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Borgerhoff, E.B.O. The Freedom of French Classicism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950; repr. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968. Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne. Maximes et Re´flexions sur la come´die. Edited by Guy Soury. Paris: Hatier, 1925. – Discours sur l’histoire universelle. Edited by Jacques Truchet. Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1966. – Logique du Dauphin. Edited by Fre´de´ric Laupies. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. – De la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-meˆme. Edited by Christiane Fre´mont. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Bourdieu, Pierre. Me´ditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Boureau, Alain. Le simple corps du roi: l’impossible sacralite´ des souverains franc¸ais, XV e-XVIII e sie`cle. Paris: E´ditions de Paris, 1988. Braden, Gordon. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Braider, Christopher. ‘The Paradoxical Sisterhood: “Ut Pictura Poesis.” ’ In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 3, The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton, 168–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. – Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002. – Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.

308

Bibliography

Bray, Rene´. La Formation de la doctrine classique en France. Paris: Payot, 1931. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Brown, Deborah J. Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Translated by S.G.C. Middlemore. 3rd ed. London: Phaidon, 1950. Burke, Peter. The Art of Conversation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. – A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Butor, Michel. ‘L’usage des pronoms personnels dans le roman.’ In Re´pertoire II, 61–72. Paris: Minuit, 1964. Calvin, Jean. Institution de la religion chre´tienne. Edited by Olivier Millet. Geneva: Droz, 2008. Campbell, Mary B. Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Edited and translated by H.J. Schroeder. St Louis: Herber, 1941. Carlin, Claire L., and Kathleen Wine, eds. Theatrum Mundi. Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood, 2003. Carrier, David. Principles of Art History Writing. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. – Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Cascardi, Anthony J. The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Caldero´n. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Cavaille´, Jean-Pierre. Dis/Simulations: Religion, morale et politique au XVII e sie`cle. Paris: Champion, 2002. – ‘Histoires d’e´quivoques.’ Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 33 (April 2004): 155–73. Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Chapelain, Jean. Sentiments de l’Acade´mie Franc¸aise sur la tragi-come´die du ‘Cid.’ In La Querelle du Cid: Pie`ces et pamphlets, edited by Armand Gaste´, 355–417. Paris: H. Welter, 1899. Chartier, Roger. L’Ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothe`ques en Europe entre le XIV e et le XVIII e sie`cle. Aix-en-Provence: Aline´a, 1992. Chartier, Roger, and Henri-Jean Martin, eds. Histoire de l’e´dition franc¸aise. Vol. 1, Le livre conque´rant. Paris: Promodis, 1983. Clark, T.J. The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Clarke, Desmond M. Descartes’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003.

Bibliography

309

– Desmond M. Descartes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Compagnon, Antoine. Le De´mon de la The´orie: Litte´rature et sens commun. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Copjec, Joan. ‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.’ October 49 (Summer 1989): 53–71. Corneille, Pierre. Œuvres comple`tes. 3 vols. Edited by Georges Couton. Paris: Gallimard, 1980–7. Correll, Barbara. The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Craig, William. Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom. New York: Brill, 1991. Craveri, Benedetta. The Age of Conversation. Translated by Teresa Waugh. New York: New York Review Books, 2005. Cronk, Nicholas. The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature. Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2002. Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey. Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Art of Painting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Curtius, Hans Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. 1953; new ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Dandrey, Patrick. La me´decine et la maladie dans le the´aˆtre de Molie`re. Paris: Klincksieck, 1998. Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. – The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: Norton, 1995. Debailly, Pascal. ‘Satire et peur du fe´minin.’ In Cite´ des hommes, cite´ de Dieu, edited by Alain Meyer, ed., 321–30. Geneva: Droz, 2003. Defaux, Ge´rard. Molie`re, ou les me´tamorphoses du comique: de la come´die morale au triomphe de la folie. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980. De´gert, Antoine. ‘Cardinal de Noailles.’ In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1911, consulted online at www.newadvent .org/cathen/11085b.htm. DeJean, Joan. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. – Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Sie`cle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. – The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Delehanty, Ann T. ‘From Judgment to Sentiment: Changing Theories of the Sublime, 1674–1710.’ Modern Language Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2005): 151–72.

310

Bibliography

de Man, Paul. ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.’ In Allegory and Representation, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 1–25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. – ‘Semiology and Rhetoric.’ In Allegories of Reading, 3–19. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie.’ In L’e´criture et la diffe´rence, 51–97. Paris: Seuil, 1967; ‘Points’ paper ed. – ‘Signature e´ve´nement contexte.’ In Marges de la philosophie, 365–93. Paris: Minuit, 1972. – ‘La pharmacie de Platon.’ In La disse´mination, 69–198. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Descartes, Rene´. Meditationes de prima philosophia. Paris: Michel Soly, 1641. Copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University (BOD Byw. M 1.28). – Œuvres. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 14 vols. Paris: Le´opold Cerf, 1897–1913. – Meditationes de prima philosophia/Me´ditations me´taphysiques. Edited by Genevie`ve Rodis-Lewis. Paris: J. Vrin, 1970. – Œuvres philosophiques. Edited by Fernand Alquie´. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1988–92. Diderot, Denis. Le Neveu de Rameau. Edited by Jean-Claude Bonnet. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1983. Doubvrosky, Serge. Corneille et la dialectique du he´ros. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Intellectual Transformation in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. – The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Farrell, John. Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Fe´libien, Andre´. Entretiens sur les Vies et sur les Ouvrages des plus excellens Peintres anciens et modernes, avec la Vie des Architectes. Paris: Pierre Le Petit, 1666–88. – Fe´libien’s Life of Poussin. Edited by Claire Pace. London: A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1981. – Confe´rences de l’Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Paris: Franc¸ois Le´onard, 1668; repr. London: David Mortier, 1705. Felman, Shoshana. Le scandale du corps parlant: Don Juan avec Austin, ou la se´duction en deux langues. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Ferreyrolles, Ge´rard. Les Reines du monde: l’imagination et la coutume chez Pascal. Paris: Champion, 1995.

Bibliography

311

Fish, Stanley. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Flint, Thomas. Divine Providence: The Molinist Account. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de. Entretiens sur la pluralite´ des mondes. 9th ed. Paris: Michel Brunet, 1724. Force, Pierre. Le proble`me herme´neutique chez Pascal. Paris: J. Vrin, 1989. – Molie`re, ou le Prix des choses: morale, e´conomie, come´die. Paris: Nathan, 1994. Forestier, Georges. Essai de ge´ne´tique the´aˆtrale: Corneille a` l’œuvre. Paris: Klincksieck, 1996. – Corneille: Le sens d’une dramaturgie. Paris: SEDES, 1998. Foucault, Michel. L’Histoire de la folie a` l’aˆge classique. 1961; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1972; ‘Tel’ paper ed. – Les mots et les choses: une arche´ologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. – L’arche´ologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. – Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. – ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ In Dits et e´crits, 1954–1988, edited by Daniel Defert and Franc¸oise Ewald, 1:789–821. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Frame, Donald M. Montaigne: A Biography. 1965; repr. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. Frankfurt, Harry G. Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations. 1970; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. The Joke in Its Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by Joyce Crick. London: Penguin, 2003. Friedlaender, Walter. Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach. New York: Abrams, 1966. Frisch, Andrea. The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2004. Fumaroli, Marc. L’Inspiration du poe`te de Poussin: Essai sur l’alle´gorie du Parnasse. Paris: Muse´e du Louvre, 1989. – He´ros et orateurs: Rhe´torique et dramaturgie corne´liennes. Geneva: Droz, 1990. – Le Poe`te et le Roi: Jean de La Fontaine en son sie`cle. Paris: Fallois, 1997. Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gaxotte, Pierre. Molie`re. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Ge´netiot, Alain. Le classicisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005. Genette, Ge´rard. ‘Vraisemblance et motivation.’ In Figures II, 71–99. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

312

Bibliography

Gilby, Emma. Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature. Oxford: Legenda, 2006. Giocanti, Sylvia. Penser l’irre´solution: Montaigne, Pacal, La Mothe Le Vayer. Paris: Champion, 2001. Goldmann, Lucien. Le Dieu cache´: e´tude sur la vision tragique dans les Pense´es de Pascal et dans le the´aˆtre de Racine. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Goodkin, Richard E. Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Gracia´n, Baltasar. Agudeza y arte de ingenio. 1642; 2nd ed. 1648; repr. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autono´ma de Me´xico, 1996. Grafton, Anthony. Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Greenberg, Mitchell. Corneille, Classicism, and the Ruses of Symmetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. – Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. – Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering, and Seventeenth-Century Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. – Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Guicharnaud, Jacques. Molie`re, une aventure the´aˆtrale. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Gutleben, Muriel. ‘Faste et pompe, monstres et sublime dans Me´de´e de Corneille et Phe`dre de Racine.’ Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 27 (2000): 153–61. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. – The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Halpern, Richard. ‘The King’s Two Buckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II, and Fiscal Trauerspiel.’ Representations 106 (Spring 2009): 67–76. Hammond, Nicholas. Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s Pense´es. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. – Creative Tensions: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century French Literature. London: Duckworth, 1997. Hampshire, Stuart. Spinoza and Spinozism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Harth, Erica. Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Bibliography

313

– Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. – Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Re´gime. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Hasker, William. God, Time, and Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J.B. Baillie. Rev. ed. 1931; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. – Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Hellegourac’h, Jacqueline, ed. L’art de la conversation. Paris: Garnier, 1998. Henein, Eglal. ‘Les Charmes de Me´de´e.’ Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 12 (1979–80): 29–38. Hepp, Noe´mi. ‘La galanterie.’ In Les Lieux de me´moire, vol. 3, Les Frances, edited by Pierre Nora, 745–83. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Everyman, 1965. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1990. Howarth, W.D. Molie`re: A Playwright and His Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Ibbett, Katherine. The Style of the State in French Theatre, 1630–1660: Neoclassicism and Government. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum, de l’Autre femme. Paris: Minuit, 1974. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Jeanneret, Michel. E´ros rebelle: litte´rature et dissidence a` l’aˆge classique. Paris: Seuil, 2003. – ‘ “Envelopper des ordures”? Erotisme et libertinage au XVIIe sie`cle.’ Litte´ratures classiques 55 (Summer 2005): 157–68. Johnson, Christopher D. Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Early Modern Literature and Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 2010. Jouhaud, Christian. Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots. Paris: Aubier, 1985. – ‘Power and Literature: The Terms of an Exchange 1624–42.’ In The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, edited by Richard Burt, 34–82. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

314

Bibliography

Jouslin, Olivier. ‘L’e´thique pole´mique de Pascal.’ Litte´ratures classiques 59 (Summer 2006): 117–39. Judovitz, Dalia. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Kahn, Victoria. Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. – ‘Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision.’ Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 67–96. – ‘Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies.’ Representations 106 (Spring 2009): 77–101. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957; copyright renewed in 1981; 7th paperback ed. with preface by William Chester Jordan, 1997. Kelly, Van. Pascalian Fictions: Antagonism and Absent Agency in the Wager and Other Pense´es. Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1992. Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Koch, Erec. Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the Scientific Treatises, the Provinciales, and the Pense´es. Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 1997. – ‘Cartesian Corporeality and (Aesth)Ethics.’ PMLA, 121, no. 2 (March 2006): 405–20. – The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Krause, Virginia. ‘Le sort de la sorcie`re: Me´de´e de Corneille.’ Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 30 (2003): 41–56. Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. La Bruye`re, Jean de. Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Julien Benda. Paris: Ple´iade, 1951. – Les Caracte`res ou les Mœurs de ce sie`cle. Edited by Robert Garapon. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1962. Lacan, Jacques. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1973; ‘Points’ paper ed.

Bibliography

315

– ‘Sosie.’ In Le moi dans la the´orie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (1954–55), edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, 301–16. Paris: Seuil, 1975. – Les Ecrits techniques de Freud (1953–54). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de. La Princesse de Cle`ves et autres romans. Paris: Folio, 1972. Lafond, Jean, ed. Moralistes du XVII e sie`cle de Pibrac a` Dufresny. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992. La Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois de. Maximes. Edited by Pierre Kuentz. Paris: Bordas, 1966. Latour, Bruno. Nous n’avons jamais e´te´ modernes: essai d’anthropologie syme´trique. Paris: E´ditions de La De´couverte, 1991. Lawrenson, T.E. French Stage and Playhouse in the Seventeenth Century. New York: AMS, 1986. Le Brun, Charles. L’Expression des passions et autres confe´rences. Edited by Julien Philipe. Maisonneuve et Larose: E´ditions De´dale, 1994. Le Carre´, John. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. New York: Knopf, 1974. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. 1940; repr. New York: Norton, 1967. Lezra, Jacques. Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. La Couleur e´loquente: rhe´torique et peinture a` l’aˆge classique. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894; repr. New York: Dover, 1959. Lockwood, Richard. The Reader’s Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine, and Pascal. Geneva: Droz, 1996. Longino, Miche`le. Orientalism in French Classical Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will. Translated by J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston. Grand Rapids, MI: Fleming H. Revell, 1957. Lyons, John D. Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999. – ‘Tragedy Comes to Arcadia: Corneille’s Me´de´e.’ In Theatrum Mundi, edited by Claire L. Carlin and Kathleen Wine, 198–205. Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood, 2003. – ‘Au seuil du panoptisme general.’ XVII e sie`cle 56, no. 2 (April 2004): 277–87.

316

Bibliography

– Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. London: Penguin, 2003. Magnard, Pierre. Pascal: La cle´ du chiffre. Paris: Socie´te´ des Belles-Lettres, 1975. Mallet, Francine. Molie`re. Paris: Grasset, 1986. Maravall, Jose´. The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Translated by Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Margolis, Joseph. Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Marin, Louis. La critique du discours: sur la ‘Logique de Port-Royal’ et les ‘Pense´es’ de Pascal. Paris: Minuit, 1975. – De´truire la peinture. Paris: Galile´e, 1977; repr. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. – Le portrait du roi. Paris: Minuit, 1981. – ‘La parole mange´e ou le corps divin saisi par les signes.’ In La parole mange´e et autres essais the´ologico-politiques, 11–35. Paris: Klincksieck, 1986. – Sublime Poussin. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Marion, Jean-Luc. ‘Le statut originairement responsorial des Meditationes.’ In Descartes: objecter et re´pondre, edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade and Jean-Luc Marion, 4–19. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994. – ‘Entre analogie et raison: la causa sui.’ In Descartes: objecter et re´pondre, edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade and Jean-Luc Marion, 305–34. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994. Martin, John. ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe.’ American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1309–42. Mauron, Charles. L’Inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine. Gap: Ophrys, 1957. Melzer, Sara. Discourse of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s Pense´es. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Merlin, He´le`ne. Public et litte´rature en France au XVII e sie`cle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994. Merlin-Kajman, He´le`ne. L’absolutisme dans les lettres et la the´orie des deux corps: passions et politique. Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2000. – ‘Un sie`cle classico-baroque?’ XVII e sie`cle, 56, no. 2 (April 2004): 163–72. Miller, Peter N. Pereisc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Molie`re. Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire. Paris: Jean Ribou, 1660; repr. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1872. – Œuvres comple`tes. Paris: Seuil, 1962.

Bibliography

317

Mongre´dien, Georges, La Vie quotidienne des come´diens. Paris: Hachette, 1966. Mongre´dien, Georges, ed. Come´dies et pamphlets sur Molie`re. Paris: Nizet, 1986. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Edited by Alexandre Micha. 3 vols. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969. Moriarty, Michael. Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Ego sum. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. Nicole, Pierre. Traite´ de la come´die. Edited by Georges Couton. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961. Nicoll, Allardyce. The Development of the Theatre. 5th ed. New York: Harcourt, 1966. Norman, Larry F. The Public Mirror: Molie`re and the Social Commerce of Depiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. O’Hara, Stephanie. ‘ “Savante en poison”: Me´de´e and Madame de Brinvilliers.’ In Le Savoir au XVII e sie`cle, edited by John D. Lyons and Cara Welch, 195–204. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr, 2003. Olson, Todd. Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Et in Arcadia ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau.’ In Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, edited by R. Klibansky and P.J. Patton, 223–53. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. – ‘Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition.’ In Meaning in the Visual Arts, 295–320. New York: Doubleday, 1955. Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres comple`tes. Edited by Jacques Chevalier. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. – Le manuscrit des Pense´es de Pascal. Edited by Louis Lafuma. Paris: Libraires Associe´s, 1962. – Pense´es. Edited by Louis Lafuma. Paris: Seuil, 1962. – Pense´es. Edited by Philippe Sellier. Paris: Garnier, 1991. – Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur E´picte`te et Montaigne: Original ine´dit. Edited by Pascale Mengotti-Thouvenin and Jean Mesnard. Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1994. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Perrault, Charles. ‘La Peinture’ In Contes, edited by Jean-Pierre Collinet, 219–38. Paris: Folio, 1981. Peters, Jeffrey N. ‘Boileau’s Nerve, or the Poetics of Masculinity.’ Esprit cre´ateur 43, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 26–36.

318

Bibliography

Picard, Raymond. La Carrie`re de Jean Racine. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Piles, Roger de. Abre´ge´ de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs Ouvrages, et un Traite´ du Peintre parfait, de la connoissance des Desseins, & de l’utilite´ des Estampes. Paris: Franc¸ois Muguet, 1699. – Cours de peinture par principes. Paris: J. Estienne, 1708. Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Plato. Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995. Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Poulet, Georges. Etudes sur le temps humain I. Paris: Plon, 1952. Poussin, Nicolas. La Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin. Edited by Charles Jouanny. Paris: J. Schmit, 1911; repr. F. de Nobele, 1968. Puttfarken, Thomas. Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Pye, Christopher. The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Racine, Jean. Œuvres comple`tes. Paris: Seuil, 1962. Reiss, Timothy J. Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Robison, Pauline Maguire. ‘Leonardo’s Tratto della Pittura, Nicolas Poussin, and the Pursuit of Eloquence in Seventeenth-Century France.’ In Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, edited by Claire Farago, 189–235. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. – ‘Leonardo’s Theory of Aerial Perspective in the Writings of Andre´ Fe´libien and the Painting’s of Nicolas Poussin.’ In Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550–1900, edited by Claire Farago, 267–98. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Rodis-Lewis, Genevie`ve. Descartes: His Life and Thought. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rosenberg, Pierre, and Keith Christiansen, eds. Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Rousset, Jean. La Litte´rature de l’aˆge baroque en France: Circe et le paon. Paris: J. Corti, 1953. – Dernier regard sur le baroque. Paris: J. Corti, 1998. Sauerla¨nder, Willibald. ‘ “Nature through the Glass of Time”: A Reflection on the Meaning of Poussin’s Landscapes.’ In Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions,

Bibliography

319

edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen, 102–17. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Scarron, Paul. Le Romant comique. Edited by Henri Be´nac. Paris: Socie´te´ des Belles-Lettres, 1951. Sche´rer, Jacques. La Dramaturgie classique en France. Paris: Nizet, 1986. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. – The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. – Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by G.L. Ulmen. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. – Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology. Translated by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Scott, Virginia. Molie`re: A Theatrical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Scude´ry, Georges de. Observations sur ‘Le Cid.’ In La Querelle du Cid: Pie`ces et pamphlets, edited by Armand Gaste´, 71–111. Paris: H. Welter, 1899. Seidel, Michael A. ‘Poulain de la Barre’s The Woman as Good as the Man.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 3 ( July-September 1974): 499–508. Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sellier, Philippe. Pascal et Saint Augustin. Paris: Armand Colin, 1970. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Snyder, Jon R. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Soll, Jacob. Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and Political Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Souiller, Didier, ed. Le baroque en question(s), Litte´ratures classiques 36 (Spring 1999). Spinoza, Baruch. Complete Works. Edited by Michael L. Morgan, translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. 1952; new ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

320

Bibliography

Summers, David. The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Suurman, Siep. Franc¸ois Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannochiale aristotelico, o sia Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione che serve a` tutta l’art. 1654; repr. Savigliano: Artistica piemontese, 2000. Thirouin, Laurent. Le Hasard et les re´gles: le mode`le du jeu dans la pense´e de Pascal. Paris: J. Vrin, 1991. Thuillier, Jacques, and Claude Mignot. ‘Collectionneur et peintre au XVIIe: Pointel et Poussin.’ Revue de l’art 39 (1978): 46–58. Toulmin, Stephen. The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Tucker, Holly. ‘Corneille’s Me´de´e: Gifts of Vengeance.’ French Review 69, no. 1 (October 1995): 1–12. Vaugelas, Claude-Favre de. Remarques sur la Langue Franc¸oise. New ed. Paris: Louis Billaine, 1664. Viala, Alain. Naissance de l’e´crivain: sociologie de la litte´rature a` l’aˆge classique. Paris: Minuit, 1985. – La France galante: essai historique sur une cate´gorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’a` la Re´volution. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008. Villari, Rosario. Baroque Personae. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Wetsel, David. L’E´criture et le reste: The Pense´es of Pascal in the Exegetical Tradition of Port-Royal. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1981. Wilkin, Rebecca M. ‘Figuring the Dead Descartes: Claude Clerselier’s Homme de Rene´ Descartes (1644).’ Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 38–66. Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. London: Penguin, 1978. – Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. – Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester, ‘A Satyr against Reason and Mankind.’ In The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by David M. Vieth, 94–101. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Wygant, Amy. ‘Medea, Poison and the Epistemology of Error in Phe`dre.’ Modern Language Review 95, no. 1 ( January 2000): 62–71.

Bibliography

321

Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. – Theater of the World. 1969; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Zagorin, Perez. Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Zumthor, Paul. La Lettre et la voix: de la ‘litte´rature’ me´die´vale. Paris: Seuil, 1987.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Acade´mie Franc¸aise, 7, 17, 145, 217, 234, 278n29 Acade´mie Royale de Peinture, 69, 113 – 17, 122 – 3, 271nn68, 70 Adorno, Theodor, 3, 243n1 Agamben, Giorgio, 284n30 Alberti, Leon Battista, 75, 103, 159, 265n21, 284n27 Alquie´, Ferdinand, 40 – 1, 55 – 6, 258n15, 259n18 Althusser, Louis, 36, 257n4 Anabaptism, 226 Anselm, 18 Apostolide`s, Jean-Marie, 248n24, 249n26 Aquinas, Thomas, 163 – 4, 258n12 Arian heresy, 12 Aristotle, 22 – 3, 63, 170, 253n44, 254n45, 274n7, 280n8, 288n6 Arius, 226 Arnauld, Antoine, 8, 19, 42, 46, 50 – 1, 53, 56, 67 – 8, 162, 165 – 9, 179 – 80, 182, 198 – 9, 201, 252n35, 278n33, 282n19, 286nn34, 42, 303n17 art, 115 – 17; and classicism, 66, 69, 72, 203, 286n33; of memory, 24,

95, 100 – 1, 269n51; and naturalism, 256n2; and nature, 71, 102, 121, 124, 151, 154 – 5, 162 – 3, 194 – 6, 293n30. See also nature Aubignac, Franc¸ois-He´delin, abbe´ de, 153, 274n5 Augustine of Hippo, 11, 18, 46, 176, 180 – 3, 198, 229, 235, 289n11, 301n29, 303n35 Austin, J.L., 96, 162, 168, 267n45, 285n33, 287n44 authority, 16; of Acade´mie Royale de Peinture, 69; of art, 71, 113; biblical, 80; of Church, 28, 226; and Corneille, 145, 278n25; of Descartes, 15, 19, 246n16; intellectual, 9; of law, 27, 253n38; of mind, 71; of nature, 190; political, 9; of reason, 190; of senses, 170, 253n39 authorship, 27, 116, 272n1; and Boileau, 123, 204 – 6, 214 – 16, 241; and Descartes, 43 – 4, 48 – 57, 59 – 60, 62 – 4, 67; and greatness, 9 – 10, 16; and subject, 10, 13, 43, 59

324

Index

Baby, He´le`ne, 281nn12, 14, 283n21 Bachelard, Gaston, 271n68, 293n33 Bacon, Francis, 91, 175 – 6, 191, 267n38, 289nn9 – 10, 290n12, 293n28 Barker, Francis, 15, 37 – 8, 248n24, 257n8, 276n19 Barone, Juliana, 264n8 baroque: and Boileau, 206, 211, 218 – 20, 240; French, 6 – 7, 245n8, 245n10; and painting, 78; politics in, 95, 102; person in, 244n5; and theatrum mundi, 174 Barthes, Roland, 14 – 15, 37, 208, 247n20, 248n23, 257n7, 258n13, 273n1, 297n9, 298n14 Ba¨tschmann, Oskar, 78, 82, 85, 87, 265nn20, 24, 266nn30 – 1, 267nn41, 43, 270n52 Baxandall, Michael, 262n1, 265n21, 271n69 Beasley, Faith E., 248n24, 280n10 Be´jart, Armande, 151 Be´jart, Madeleine, 151 Bellori, Gian Pietro, 68, 112, 270n64 Be´nichou, Paul, 249n26, 274n4 Benjamin, Walter, 173, 269n50, 284n30 Bensserade, Isaac de, 211, 213, 218 – 20, 234 – 5 Benveniste, Emile, 284n30 Berger, Harry, Jr, 37, 244n4, 254n2, 257n8, 270n59, 271n68, 274n9, 286n33, 287n45 Beyssade, Jean-Marie, 258n16, 264n12 Biet, Christian, 124, 274n6 Blumenberg, Hans, 3, 243n1, 293n28

Blunt, Anthony, 263n7, 264n9, 266n28, 267nn41 – 2, 270n53 body, 23, 78, 222n27; in Corneille, 10, 130, 147 – 9, 277n23; in eucharist, 167; and gender, 10, 130, 141, 147 – 8; and language, 7, 218, 247nn17, 19, 255n49, 258n15, 261n28, 291n17; and mind, 3 – 5, 14 – 15, 30 – 3, 41, 45 – 8, 64, 130, 148, 177 – 8, 183 – 5, 201 – 2; in Montaigne, 25 – 7, 32 – 33, 34, 177 – 8, 183 – 5; and painting, 78, 88, 102 – 3, 121, 163; in Pascal, 177 – 8, 183 – 5; social, 130; of sovereign, 16, 98, 250n26, 268nn49, 50. See also dualism; gender; mind Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas, 32, 297n6; and ancients, 215, 234; L’Art poe´tique, 16, 31, 123, 203 – 9, 216, 299n22; and Augustine, 229, 235 – 6; and baroque, 211; and Bensserade, 211, 218, 234 – 5; and body, 30, 33; and Bossuet, 221 – 3, 234, 299n20; and casuistry, 228 – 33, 238 – 9, 299n21; and clarity, 208 – 9; and classicism, 6 – 7, 203, 216 – 17; and criticism, 207 – 8, 214, 218, 297n8; and deism, 226, 233, 239; and demon, 12, 213, 219; and Descartes, 203; and Donne, 211, 235; and dualism, 30; and English metaphysicals, 211; and error, 221, 223 – 6; and equivocation, 12 – 13, 211, 214, 225, 233; and l’e´quivoque, 12 – 13, 206 – 42, 298n17, 299n24, 300n26, 302n30; and experience, 208, 222 – 3, 241; and Faret, 205 – 6; and figure, 203, 207 – 8, 210 – 14, 219, 221, 234 – 9, 241; and Fonte-

Index nelle, 12, 217 – 18, 234; and Furetie`re, 234, 236 – 8; and galanterie, 218 – 20; and gender, 13, 29, 209 – 10, 217, 234 – 8, 297n10; and genius, 31, 204 – 6, 273n2; and Gongorism, 211 – 12, 235; and grace, 231; and Gracia´n, 235; and heresy, 225 – 6; and history, 12, 207, 213, 217, 221 – 42; and Incarnate Word, 224 – 5; and intent, 208, 210, 215 – 16, 223, 229, 231 – 2, 236, 239 – 41; and Jansenism, 227, 232 – 3, 238, 299n20; and Jesuits, 12, 17, 214 – 16, 227 – 33, 238 – 9, 299n20; and language, 12 – 13, 221, 224, 231 – 2, 236 – 7, 240 – 2, 298n16; Le Lutrin, 206; and Marino, 235; and Marvell, 235; and mind, 30, 33; and meaning, 238 – 40; and modern, 217, 234, 241; and Molie`re, 239 – 40; and monarch, 16; and Montaigne, 229 – 30; and nature, 205, 300n27; Œuvres comple`tes, 206; and Pascal, 229, 231, 233, 239, 299n21; and poetics, 15, 203, 273n2; and poetry, 203 – 6, 208 – 9; and Pope, 207, 297n8; and pre´ciocite´, 211, 219 – 20; and quarrel of ancients and moderns, 12, 217, 297n17; and Racan, 205 – 6; and reason, 20, 203 – 4, 206, 208, 210 – 11; Re´flexions sur le sublime, 206, 241; and rules, 31, 123; and SaintAmant, 205 – 6; Satire X, 210; Satire XII, 12 – 13, 206 – 42, 297n8, 298n17; and subject, 12, 207, 236; and sublime, 7, 123, 203 – 4, 297n7; and Tesauro, 211, 235; and textuality, 211; Traite´ du sublime,

325

204, 206, 241; and trope, 207 – 8, 235 – 6; and truth, 215, 223 – 4, 233; and Virgil, 12, 216; and Voiture, 211, 218, 234 – 5; and wars of religion, 226 – 31 Borgerhoff, E.B.O., 6, 246n11, 297n7 Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne, 19, 31, 163, 215, 221 – 3, 234, 262n36, 282nn18 – 19, 299n20, 301nn28 – 9 Bouhours, Dominique, 7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 187, 292n24 Bourdin, Pierre, 43 Bourdon, Se´bastien, 123, 266n31 Boureau, Alain, 269n50 Boursault, Edme, 151, 298n12 Braden, Gordon, 86, 133, 266n35, 276n23 Bray, Rene´, 245n10 Brilliant, Richard, 286n33 Brinvilliers, Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, marquise de, 130 Brown, Deborah J., 255nn49, 51, 279n38 Bruno, Giordano, 269n51 Bulwer, John, 301n27 Burckhardt, Jacob, 4, 243n3 Burke, Peter, 44, 260n23, 299n25 Butor, Michel, 44, 260n25 Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro, 173 – 5, 288n2 Calvin, Jean, 226, 292n20 Calvinism, 180, 185, 198, 233 Camillo, Giulio, 269n51 Campbell, Mary B., 44, 260n23, 267n38, 271n68, 293n32, 301n27 Caravaggio, 78, 102, 264n15, 270n54 Carlin, Claire L., 288n2 Carrier, David, 80, 266nn27, 29, 267n41, 270n63, 271n69

326

Index

Cartesian subject. See subject Cartier, Jacques, 253n44 Cascardi, Anthony J., 288n2 Castiglione, Baldessare, 4 casuistry, 12, 167, 182, 216, 228 – 33, 238 – 9, 286 – 7n42, 299n21, 302nn31, 33 Caterus (Johan de Kater), 8, 41 – 3, 50, 56 Catholicism, 27 – 9, 53, 66, 68, 78, 97, 163, 167, 213, 215, 222, 226 – 8, 262n36, 268n49, 286n41, 290n13, 292n22, 295n35, 301n29, 302n31 Cavaille´, Jean-Pierre, 244n4, 298n17 Cave, Terence, 276n18 Chambray, Roland Fre´art de, 69 – 72 Chantelou, Paul Fre´art de, 69, 71, 73, 75 – 6, 80, 91, 100, 107, 109, 111 – 13, 116 – 18, 270n57 Chapelain, Jean, 17, 145, 278n29 Charles I, 91 Chartier, Roger, 259n19 Choisy, Franc¸ois-Timole´on de, 15 Clark, T.J., 66, 120 – 1, 263n7, 267nn40 – 1, 272n75 Clarke, Desmond M., 3, 40, 243n1, 251n32, 255n51, 259nn17 – 18, 260nn22, 28, 262n42, 267n36, 279n38, 289n7, 291n17, 293nn27, 29 classical culture. See classicism classicism: and art, 66, 69, 72, 203, 286n33; and Boileau, 210 – 12, 216 – 17, 234, 241, 273n2, 297n7; and Corneille, 7; and dualism, 5, 7, 14, 153, 298n13; and French culture, 7 – 17, 20, 31 – 3, 65, 123, 143, 145, 153, 209, 245n8, 249n26, 262n40; and gender, 129 – 31, 248n81, 276n19, 280n10; and

poetry, 208, 210 – 11; and Poussin, 78; and representation, 10, 156; and taste, 127; and theatre, 125, 153, 155; and theory of ideas, 162 – 3; and theory of images, 159, 162 – 3, 165; and theory of portraits, 162 – 3; and theory of signs, 159, 162 – 3, 292n24 Clerselier, Claude, 47, 244n6, 255n51, 259n18 cogito, 11, 19 – 20, 46 – 7, 57 – 8 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 69 colour: chart, 82, 83 – 6; and design, 86 – 7, 265n16; and drawing, 73, 75; Kircher on, 83 – 4; moralization of, 8, 85 – 6; in painting, 72 – 3, 85 – 7, 118, 265n21; and poetry, 203, 296n4; in Poussin, 72 – 3, 82, 86 – 7, 102, 109, 114 – 15, 118, 264n15, 266n31 colourism, 69, 80, 114 – 15, 263n6, 285n32 Compagnon, Antoine, 37, 245n7, 257n7, 258n12, 273n1 Conley, Tom, 253n42 connoisseurship, 115 – 17 Copjec, Joan, 271n68 Corneille, Pierre: Attila, 128, 143; and authorship, 9 – 10, 123 – 5, 139, 145 – 9, 150, 152, 277n24; and body, 10, 130, 147 – 9, 277n23; Le Cid, 7, 17, 65, 129, 139 – 46, 149, 151, 209, 284n28; Cinna, 128, 130, 143; and classical culture, 79, 145, 149; and dualism, 10, 47; and Euripides, 65, 126, 133; ‘L’Excuse a` Ariste,’ 144 – 5, 147, 149; and gender, 10, 130 – 4, 139 – 49, 209, 276n19, 277n25, 279n39; and genius, 9 – 10, 123 – 5, 145 – 9, 152,

Index 205; and grace, 19, 128; and heroism, 135 – 9, 150, 277n25; Horace, 128, 143; and idealism, 126, 138; L’Illusion comique, 127, 137, 143; and Jesuits, 19, 125, 251n32; and literary greatness, 9, 124 – 5, 150, 274n8; and mind, 33, 147; Me´de´e, 9 – 10, 65, 125 – 39, 142 – 6, 148, 278n25; and monarchy, 17, 277n23; La Mort de Pompe´e, 143; Nicome`de, 130, 227n23; Polyeucte, 143; and Racine, 125 – 9, 131, 133, 145; 150, 275n18, 278n33; Rodogune, 65, 128, 130, 134, 143 – 4; and Seneca, 65, 126, 133; and subject, 130, 147, 276n19; and theatre, 9 – 10, 125 – 8, 133 – 4, 139 – 46, 151, 274nn7 – 8; The´aˆtre, 9, 123 – 4; and tragedy, 65, 125 – 6, 129, 137, 146 – 8, 275n17 Corneille, Thomas, 276n18 Corregio, 114 Correll, Barbara, 243n4 Counter-Reformation, 179, 213 Craig, William, 302n32 Craveri, Benedetta, 299n25 Cronk, Nicholas, 246n13, 297n7 Cropper, Elizabeth, 72, 102, 117 – 18, 263n8, 264n13, 270nn52 – 3, 270nn55 – 6, 58, 60, 272n71, 272n74 Curtius, Hans Robert, 287 – 8n2 Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien, 7, 250n29 dal Pozzo, Cassiano, 70 – 1, 102 Dandrey, Patrick, 248n24, 254n44 Darnton, Robert, 262n40, 300n26 Debailly, Pascal, 297n10 Defaux, Ge´rard, 280n7, 283n24

327

De´gert, Antoine, 299n20 deism, 226, 233, 239 DeJean, Joan, 7, 17, 60, 246n14, 248n24, 250n28, 262n40, 279n39, 279n1, 280n10, 287n1 Delehanty, Ann, 206, 273n2, 297n7 de Man, Paul, 291n14, 303n37 Dempsey, Charles, 72, 102, 117 – 18, 263n8, 264n13, 270nn52 – 3, 270nn55 – 6, 58, 60, 272nn71, 74 Derrida, Jacques, 38 – 9, 46, 57 – 9, 257n9, 258nn10, 14, 260n26, 261n33, 262n38, 276n19, 287n44, 298n16 Descartes, Catherine, 147 Descartes, Rene´: and analytic exposition, 45 – 6, 54; and Cartesianism, 246n16; and classical culture, 4 – 6, 11, 13 – 15, 18 – 20, 33, 65, 66 – 8, 201 – 3, 252n34; and cogito, 46 – 8; La Dioptrique, 48; Discours de la me´thode, 6, 49, 52, 62 – 4, 86 – 7, 114; and doubt, 58; and dualism, 3, 13 – 14, 30, 46 – 50, 54 – 5, 253n49, 260n28, 291n17; early critiques of, 4, 244n6; education of, 251n32; and epistemology, 20 – 1, 252n38; and experience, 261n36, 266n36; Foucault and Derrida on, 38 – 9, 57 – 9; and gender, 147 – 8; and grace, 19; and hyperbolic doubt, 58; and ideas, 50, 202; and intuition, 30; and ‘invention of the mind,’ 3, 19 – 21, 29, 201; and Jesuits, 19, and language, 57; and madness, 57 – 9; and matter, 46; Me´ditations de premie`re philosophie, 8, 23, 30, 34, 38 – 64, 66 – 8, 71, 190 – 1, 201 – 2;

328

Index

and method, 6, 19, 86 – 7, 114, 176; Le Monde, 87, 175 – 6; and Montaigne, 18 – 23, 25 – 7, 29 – 32, 134, 252n36; and Pascal, 176, 188 – 90, 233, 239; Les Passions de l’aˆme, 148, 255n49; and Poussin, 86, 88; and professionalization of philosophy, 20 – 1, 252n38; and publication, 62 – 4; publication history of, 39 – 43, 48 – 50, 202, 258n15; and rationalism, 48; readers in, 58 – 64, 66 – 7, 258n16; and readership, 49 – 57, 59; and reason, 3, 31 – 2, 46, 48, 68; and scepticism, 19 – 20, 26 – 7, 29 – 30, 34, 252n35 – 6; and self, 3; and sensation, 88, 175 – 6; and subject, 3, 10, 34 – 5, 43 – 8, 50, 59, 64, 67, 70 – 1, 86, 130, 201 – 3, 258n15; and time, 30, 254n48; and translation, 57 – 9, 61, 67; and truth, 6, 7, 18 – 19, 25, 30, 49, 51 – 3, 60, 62 – 3, 71; and vacuum, 189 – 90; and will, 18 – 19, 185 design, 72 – 3, 265n16; in poetry, 204; in Poussin, 68 – 9, 75 – 6, 86 – 7, 109, 114, 116, 263n6 des Noyers, Sublet, 76 Dickinson, Emily, 201 Dinet, Jacques, 43 Domenichino, 102 Dominicans. See Order of St Dominic Donne, John, 211, 235 Donneau de Vise´. See Vise´, Jean Donneau de Doubrovsky, Serge, 277n25 drawing, 73, 75, 109 dualism: in Boileau, 201 – 2; and classical culture, 5 – 7, 13 – 14, 30, 34 – 5, 153, 156; and Corneille, 10,

147; in Descartes, 3 – 4, 8, 13 – 14, 19, 34 – 5, 45 – 48, 50, 55, 64 – 5, 177, 291n17; early critiques of, 46 – 8, 258n15, 260n28; and gender, 130, 147 – 8; and history of philosophy, 3 – 4, 13 – 14, 19, 55, 64 – 5, 67, 252n34; and mind, 3 – 7, 11, 13 – 14, 18 – 20, 29 – 30, 41, 45 – 54, 64 – 5, 66 – 8, 147 – 8, 201 – 3, 255n49, 260n28; and Molie`re, 156; and Poussin, 70 – 1 Dughet, Gaspard, 108 Duquesnoy, Franc¸ois, 102, 108, 117 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 259n19 ekphrasis, 114 – 15, 271n69 Elias, Norbert, 4, 243n3 Elisabeth of Bohemia, 147 – 8, 255n51, 262n42, 279n38 Emilius, 42 Epictetus, 176, 289n11 Epicureanism, 21, 42, 47, 50, 53, 67, 200, 230, 258n15 e´quivoque, l’, 12 – 13, 141, 206 – 42, 298n17, 299n24, 300n26, 302n30 Erasmus, Desiderius, 253n44 error, 3 – 4, 30, 221, 240, 275n11, 285n33; and change, 12; and heresy, 226; and history, 301n29; and humanity, 18; and idolatry, 11, 30, 163 – 4; law of, 290n12; and philosophy, 224; in reasoning, 68; and scepticism, 20, 26, 176 – 7; sensory, 58; sources of, 11, 18, 166, 193, 221, 223, 240; and theatre, 278n33; and trial, 25; and truth, 224 Euripides, 126, 133 experience, 8, 47, 78, 147, 153, 252n34, 253nn38, 43, 284n30,

Index 288n6, 301n29; and aesthetic, 7, 9, 70, 206, 241, 297n7; in Boileau, 206, 208, 229, 234, 241, 297n7; in classical culture, 5; in Descartes, 63 – 4, 177, 261n36; historical, 3 – 4, 222 – 3; in Hume and Kant, 254n47, 292n21; and knowledge, 15, 22 – 33, 34, 148 – 9, 189, 241, 261n36, 289n8; and language, 12, 57, 202 – 3, 234; and mind, 14, 35, 203; in Montaigne, 22 – 31, 32 – 3, 34, 177 – 8, 184 – 5; in Pascal, 31, 175 – 8, 181, 183 – 5, 189, 192, 197, 199 – 200, 295n37; and painting, 9, 72, 88, 102, 118, 120 – 1; and reason, 24 – 6, 34, 188; and self, 36, 48, 185, 201, 203; sensory, 5; and theatre, 9, 147, 149, 173 – 4. See also experiment experiment, 4, 8, 44, 65, 175, 201, 271n68, 281n8, 293n33, 294n34; in Descartes, 46, 50, 56, 266n36; in Montaigne, 25, 29; in Molie`re, 65, 152 – 3, 173 – 4; and painting, 69, 90 – 1, 112, 120; in Pascal, 11, 178, 181, 188 – 91, 295n37; in philosophy, 19 – 20; in Poussin, 90 – 1, 100 – 2, 112, 120, 267n43; and theatre, 152, 173 – 4. See also experience experimental. See experience; experiment farce, 157, 159 Farrel, John, 245n7 Fe´libien, Andre´, 68 – 70, 114 – 15, 122 – 3, 263nn6, 8, 264n10, 265n17, 266nn26, 31, 271n66 Felman, Shoshana, 7, 246n14

329

Ferreyrolles, Ge´rard, 288n6, 292nn22 – 3 Fish, Stanley, 286n36 Flint, Thomas, 302n32 Fontaine, Nicolas, 192, 289n11 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 12, 217 – 18, 234, 300n26 Force, Pierre, 280n3, 295n35 Forestier, Georges, 133, 274n7, 275nn15, 17, 281n12 Foucault, Michel, 3, 5, 13 – 15, 36 – 9, 46, 56 – 9, 243n1, 248n21, 257nn5, 9, 258n14, 262n37, 279n39 Frame, Donald, 253n40 Frankfurt, Harry G., 260n27, 261n28, 262n39 Freud, Sigmund, 238, 303n37 Friedlaender, Walter, 263n6, 270nn52 – 3, 55 Frisch, Andrea, 252n38 Frondes, 16 – 17, 91, 97, 101, 268n50 Fumaroli, Marc, 32, 86, 111, 125, 146, 251n32, 255n53, 266nn28, 34, 270nn53, 62, 275nn11 – 12, 14, 277n24, 279n34, 282n18, 299n25 Furetie`re, Antoine, 234, 236 – 8 Galileo Galilei, 178 Garnier, Robert, 133 Gassendi, Pierre, 4, 8, 18, 29, 40, 42 – 3, 47 – 8, 50, 53, 71, 174, 191, 200, 202, 244n6, 252n35, 255n51, 258n15, 288n3, 293n28 Gaukroger, Stephen, 251n32, 252n36, 260n22 Gaxotte, Pierre, 283n24 gender, 129 – 34, 139 – 49, 209, 248 – 9n81, 276n19, 277 – 8n25, 279n39, 280 – 1n10, 282n18. See also body

330

Index

Ge´netiot, Alain, 5, 245n8, 246nn12 – 13 Genette, Ge´rard, 279n39, 284n28, 291n16 genius, 9 – 10, 16, 31, 68, 122 – 5, 145 – 9, 150, 152, 173, 189, 192, 202, 205 – 6, 211, 263n6, 272n1, 273n2, 293n30 Gilby, Emma, 246n13, 297n7 Goldmann, Lucien, 293n25 Go´ngora, Luis de, 235 Gongorism, 211 – 12 Goodkin, Richard E., 276n18 grace (theological), 11 – 12, 19, 28, 46, 179, 182, 198 – 9, 229 Gracia´n, Baltasar, 4, 235, 299n17 Grafton, Anthony, 260n21 Greenberg, Mitchell, 7, 129, 170, 246n14, 248n24, 249n26, 267n40, 276n19, 287n46, 290n10 Gros-Rene´, 157, 283n21 Grotius, Hugo, 292n20 Guicharnaud, Jacques, 283n24 Gutleben, Muriel, 275n11 Hacking, Ian, 290n12 Hagstrum, Jean, 281n13 Halpern, Richard, 269n50 Hammond, Nicholas, 246n12, 291n14 Hampshire, Stuart, 247n17, 258n15, 291n19 Harth, Erica, 147 – 8, 155, 248n24, 250n29, 279n37, 281n16, 287n45 Hasker, William, 301 – 2n29, 302n32 Hazlitt, William, 272n75 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51 – 2, 261n32 Henein, Eglal, 275n14

Henri IV, 6 Hepp, Noe´mi, 299n25 Heraclitus, 285n30 Hill, Christopher, 250n29 history, 12 – 13, 22, 31, 207; in Boileau, 12 – 13, 207, 213, 217, 221 – 23, 229, 234, 238 – 9, 240 – 2; in Bossuet, 221 – 2, 234; and philosophy, 51 – 2 Hitler, Adolf, 269n50 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 8, 14, 18, 29, 41 – 2, 46, 48 – 50, 53 – 4, 56 – 7, 66 – 7, 71, 86, 97 – 9, 162, 244n6, 263n7, 268n49, 286n33 Hooke, Robert, 178 Horkheimer, Max, 243n1 Howarth, W.D., 280n7 Ibbett, Katherine, 274n8, 277n33 iconoclasm, 165, 293n28 idea: in Descartes, 18 – 20, 30, 40, 57, 68, 174, 201 – 2, 252n35; in Hegel, 51; as mental image, 10 – 11, 162, 166, 170 – 3, 202 – 3; in painting, 35, 72, 78, 82, 86, 102, 108, 112, 115 – 16, 256n2; in Pascal, 194 – 7; in Plato, 22; in poetry, 208; in Spinoza, 14, 247n19 idolatry, 7, 11, 163, 165, 171, 211, 223, 225 illusion, 9 – 10, 124 – 5, 151, 154, 157, 173 – 4, 198, 231 imagination, 12, 18, 35, 112, 118, 154, 171, 189 – 90, 193, 288n6 Irigaray, Luce, 130 Israel, Jonathan, 3, 243n1, 246n16, 252n34, 261n35 Jacobins. See Order of St Dominic Jameson, Fredric, 36 – 7

Index Jansenism, 8, 11, 17, 42, 67, 126, 146, 153, 162, 167, 176, 178 – 82, 185, 192, 197 – 9, 215, 227, 232 – 3, 238, 299nn20 – 1, 301n27, 303n34 Jansenists. See Jansenism Jansenius (Cornelius, Jansen), 51, 179, 198, 238, 287n42 Jay, Martin, 253n43, 288n6 Jeanneret, Michel, 298n11 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jodelle, E´tienne, 133 Johnson, Christopher D., 299n18 Jouhaud, Christian, 17, 250n29, 278n31, 280n4 Jouslin, Olivier, 230, 302n33 Judovitz, Dahlia, 276n19 Justinian, 27 Kahn, Victoria, 243n4, 251n33, 269n50, 270n61 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 20, 29, 70, 185 – 6, 188, 254n47, 285n31, 288n6, 292n21, 293nn25, 30 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 268n50 Kelly, Van, 290n13, 292n22 Kemp, Martin, 265n16 Kermode, Frank, 291n16 Kircher, Athanasius, 82 knowledge: in Aristotle, 22 – 3; in Boileau, 223, 239; in Descartes, 19, 29 – 30, 45 – 7, 58, 62, 86; in Hegel, 51 – 2; in Kant, 254n47; in Malebranche, 261n36; in Montaigne, 19 – 27, 291n19; in Pascal, 176, 191, 197; in Poussin, 86 – 7, 109 Koch, Erec, 255nn49, 51, 258n15, 262n42, 291nn14 – 15 Krause, Virginia, 276n21 Kuhn, Thomas, 293n33

331

La Boe´tie, Etienne de, 117 – 18 La Bruye`re, Jean de, 6 – 7, 128, 150, 175, 215, 249n24, 272n1, 275n16, 279n2, 282n18, 300n27 Lacan, Jacques, 5, 14 – 15, 129, 157, 172, 248n22, 257n4, 282n20, 287n47 La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de, 148, 160, 279n39, 284nn28, 30 La Fontaine, Jean de, 17, 32, 255n53 Lafuma, Louis, 194, 295n36 La Mothe le Vayer, Franc¸ois de, 293n28 La Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois de, 65, 188, 197, 296n38 Lateran Council (1512 – 17), 253n44 Latour, Bruno, 294n34 La Vigne, Anne de, 147 Lawrenson, T.E., 281n14 Le Brun, Charles, 9, 73 – 6, 98, 100, 113 – 16, 123, 265nn17 – 19, 282n17 Le Carre´, John, 3 Leder, Drew, 14, 247n18 Lee, Rensselaer W., 281n13 Le Maire, Jean, 112 Le Maıˆtre de Sacy, Louis-Isaac, 176 – 7, 192, 289n11 Le Moyne, Pierre, 31 Leonardo da Vinci, 69, 85, 102, 108, 114, 117, 256n2, 263n8 Le Petit, Pierre, 55, 57, 59 – 62, 64, 67 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 284n30 Lezra, Jacques, 255n50, 260n26 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 163, 265n16, 286nn36 – 7, 296n4 Locke, John, 88, 263n4, 267n37, 286n35 Lockwood, Richard, 291n14 Longino, Miche`le, 130, 275n14, 276n19

332

Index

Longinus, 123, 204, 206 Loudun, possessed of, 130, 276n21 Louis XIV, 16 – 17, 91, 95, 97, 161, 221, 249n26, 259n19 Luther, Martin, 28 – 9, 185, 226, 292n20 Lutheranism, 27 – 9, 180, 185, 198 Luynes, L.C. d’Albert, duc de, 57 – 9, 61 Lyons, John D., 7, 246n12, 270n64, 276n24, 279n39, 288n6, 297n8 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 302n32 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 4, 31, 239, 301n29 Magnard, Pierre, 295n35 Mairet, Jean, 129, 145 Malebranche, Nicolas, 19, 55, 252n34, 261n36, 266n36 Malherbe, Franc¸ois de, 205 – 6, 209, 273n2, 298n11 Mallet, Francine, 283n24 Maravall, Jose´, 288n2 Margolis, Joseph, 271n70 Marin, Louis, 68 – 70, 72, 86, 117 – 18, 162, 165 – 6, 169, 187, 249n26, 262n2, 263nn5, 7, 264nn11, 15, 265nn22 – 3, 272nn72, 74 – 5, 278n33, 282n19, 285n33, 286n34, 287n43, 291n14, 292n24 Marino, Giovanni Battista, 235 Marion, Jean-Luc, 258n16 Martin, Henri-Jean, 259n19 Martin, John, 243n4 Marvell, Andrew, 235 materialism, 8, 11, 54, 67, 174, 284n30, 293n28, 301n27 Mathurin, Re´gnier, 297n10 Mauron, Charles, 276n18

Mazarin, Jules, 97, 267n41 Melzer, Sara, 291n15 memory, 18, 24, 95, 100 – 1, 118, 121, 222, 269n51 Merlin-Kajman, He´le`ne, 5, 245n8, 269n50, 270n65, 277n23, 278nn25, 28, 31, 280n4, 283n24 Mersenne, Marin, 8, 40 – 3, 45 – 6, 50, 53 – 4, 56, 67, 252n35, 261n29 Meyer, Ludewijk, 55, 246n16 Mignot, Claude, 267n39 mind, 3, 8 – 12, 156, 291n17; dualist conception of, 3 – 7, 11, 13 – 14, 18 – 20, 29 – 30, 41, 45 – 54, 64 – 5, 66 – 8, 147 – 8, 201 – 3, 255n49, 260n28; in Gassendi, 258n15; of God, 37, 196; in Hume, 29; idols of, 191, 289n10; and imaginary, 171; ‘invention’ of, 3, 19, 29, 66, 201, 252n38; and intention, 208, 238, 239; in Kant, 29, 254n47; and machine, 179, 191 – 3; in Malebranche, 261n36; and memory, 269n51; in Molie`re, 4, 156; in Montaigne, 26 – 9, 32 – 3, 184 – 5; and painting, 35 – 6, 70 – 1, 87, 122 – 3; in Pascal, 11 – 12, 177 – 9, 184, 191 – 6, 203, 289n10; and perspective, 27, 32; in Poussin, 71 – 2, 86 – 8, 98, 100 – 3, 108 – 9, 112 – 13, 116 – 18, 121, 184 – 5; and representation, 162; in Spinoza, 247nn17, 19, 258n15; and sublime, 123; and theatre, 125, 147, 151. See also body; dualism Mitchell, W.J.T., 286n35 modern subject. See subject Molie`re, 32 – 3, 150; Amphitryon, 174; and authorship, 151 – 2; L’Avare, 152; and body, 152, 156; Le

Index Bourgeois gentilhomme, 152; and classical theory of images, 159 – 70, 203; and classical theory of signs, 11, 159 – 70; and comedy, 10, 151 – 5, 173; and Corneille, 133, 152; La Critique de l’Ecole des femme, 151, 154; and Descartes, 4, 10 – 11, 65, 203, 244n6, 298n13; and devout, 17, 151; Dom Juan, 151, 170, 239 – 40; L’Ecole des femmes, 65, 157, 173, 283n24, 298n12; L’Ecole des maris, 157 – 8; and experience, 153, 173 – 5, 253n44; George Dandin, 152; and idea, 10 – 11, 170 – 2, 173; L’Impromptu de Versailles, 151, 155; and materialism, 11; and mind, 4, 156; Le Misanthrope, 152; and ‘moi,’ 282n20; and moral status of theatre, 146, 163, 282n18; and portraiture, 10 – 11, 155 – 6, 158 – 72, 284n30; Les Pre´cieuses ridicules, 152, 157, 280n10; and public, 151 – 2, 157 – 8, 209 – 10, 279n1, 280n3, 281n15, 283n24, 298n12; and representation, 152 – 6, 159 – 70; Sganarelle, 10 – 11, 155 – 63, 165, 167 – 74, 284n25; Tartuffe, 151 – 3, 170, 173; and theatre, 152 – 5, 158, 173 – 4, 203, 283n21; and vision, 156, 170 – 2 monarch. See monarchy monarchy, 8, 16 – 17, 31, 87, 91, 97 – 8, 101, 103, 109, 128, 155, 175, 250n30, 267n41, 268n50, 270n64, 276n23. See also sovereign Mongre´dien, Georges, 282n18 Montaigne, Michel de: and body, 25 – 7, 32 – 3, 34, 177 – 8, 183 – 5; and Boileau, 229; and Descartes, 18 – 23, 25 – 7, 29 – 32, 134, 252n36;

333

and experience, 22 – 31, 32 – 3, 34, 177 – 8, 184 – 5; and experiment, 25, 29; and knowledge, 19 – 27, 291n28; and mind, 26 – 9, 32 – 3, 184 – 5; and naturalism, 27, 29, 32; and nature, 21 – 6, 32; and Pascal, 176 – 8, 184 – 7, 199, 289n11, 291n19, 293n28; and philosophy, 26 – 7, 184 – 5, 252n38, 255n54; and Poussin, 72, 117 – 18; and reason, 22 – 7, 34, 293n28; and scepticism, 19 – 21, 26 – 7, 176 – 7, 187; and self, 20 – 1, 117; and truth, 22 – 6, 184 – 5 Montchrestien, Antoine de, 133 Montfleury, 155 Moriarty, Michael, 175, 252n34, 260n28, 261n36, 262n42, 266n36, 288n6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 44, 260n26 naturalism: in art, 256n2; and mind, 48; and modern culture, 34; in Montaigne, 27, 29, 32; and philosophy, 55; and scepticism, 27; and science, 266n36. See also nature nature: and art, 71, 102, 121, 124, 151, 154 – 5, 162 – 3, 194 – 6, 293n30; and custom, 31, 186 – 8; in Descartes, 21; doubleness of, 31; and the Fall, 176, 183, 213, 223; and God, 48, 260n28; higher, 21; in Hobbes, 162; human, 11, 187 – 8, 221n27; knowledge of, 21, 48, 87, 176, 246n16, 254n47, 293n30; indeterminacy of, 37; in Montaigne, 21 – 6, 32; in Pascal, 176, 183, 196, 295nn35, 37; physical, 3, 23, 35, 88; and science,

334

Index

188 – 93, 218, 294n34; truth to, 154 – 5. See also art; naturalism Naude´, Gabriel, 31, 95, 109, 293n28 neo-stoicism. See stoicism Nicole, Pierre, 19, 125, 146, 162 – 3, 165 – 9, 275n13, 278n33, 282nn18 – 19, 286n34, 287n42, 299n21, 303nn34, 36 Nicoll, Allardyce, 281n14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 56, 86 Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, 215, 222, 299n20 Noe¨l, Etienne, 191 Norman, Larry F., 280n3, 281n15, 283n24, 287n1, 298n12 O’Hara, Stephanie, 276n21 Olson, Todd, 267n41 Order of St Dominic, 179 – 81, 190, 198 – 9 Ovid, 85, 102 Pace, Claire, 263n6, 266n26 painting, 68, 114; academic theory of, 113 – 16; allegory of, 111, 118; and colour, 72 – 3, 85 – 7, 118, 265n21; craft of, 101 – 2; and design, 68 – 9, 72 – 3, 75 – 6, 86 – 7, 109, 114, 116; experience of, 9, 120 – 1; French, 69, 72; and idea, 35, 72, 78, 82, 86, 102, 108, 112, 115 – 16, 256n2; love of, 68, 112; and mind, 35 – 6, 70 – 1, 87, 122 – 3; perspective in 73, 98, 115, 154, 265n21; and philosophy, 69 – 70; Poussin’s theory of, 69, 72, 86 – 7, 112 – 13, 116 – 20; reception of, 35, 76, 88, 112 – 13, 116 – 17; as selfportraiture, 35, 108, 118; and subject, 71; and truth, 71, 82, 85,

97, 163, 285n32. See also portraiture; representation; selfportraiture Panofsky, Erwin, 264n11 Pascal, Blaise, 33, 278n33, 292n24, 293n25, 295n35, 302n33; and apologetics, 11 – 12, 175, 178 – 9, 183, 185, 187 – 8, 194 – 5, 198 – 9, 253n39, 290n13, 295n35, 296n37; and art, 194 – 6; and Augustine, 176, 180 – 3, 198, 289n11; biographies of, 288n4, 295n35; and body, 177 – 8, 184 – 5; and Boileau, 215, 229, 233, 239, 299n21; and chance, 194 – 7, 295n37; and Creation, 190; and Creator, 195 – 7; and custom, 186 – 7, 292n23; and Descartes, 4, 21, 64, 176 – 7, 185, 188 – 91, 197, 233, 239, 244n6, 253n39, 259n18, 289n10, 289 – 90nn11 – 12, 293n28; and desire, 184, 190, 193; and Dominicans, 179 – 82, 190, 198 – 9; ‘Ecrit sur la signature,’ 287n42, 303n36; ‘Entretien avec M. de Sacy,’ 176 – 8, 192, 289n11; and error, 11 – 12, 193, 290n12; and esprit de finesse, 146; and experience, 175 – 8, 184 – 5, 188, 192, 199, 252n34; and experiment, 11, 44, 175 – 6, 178, 188 – 91, 293n31, 294n33, 295n37; and faith, 183, 187 – 8; and genius, 146; and God, 175, 178 – 83, 185 – 6, 188, 191, 193, 198 – 9, 203; and grace, 11 – 12, 179 – 82, 291n15; and heart, 188, 197; and imagination, 176, 189 – 90, 193; and Jesuits, 11, 17, 153, 179 – 82, 185, 198 – 9; Les Lettres provinciales, 11 – 12, 146, 153,

Index 179 – 83, 190, 198 – 9, 231, 287n42, 299n21; and love of self, 11, 185, 188, 197; and Luther, 185; and machine, 178, 183 – 8, 190, 193; and mathematics, 11 – 12, 179, 186, 188, 191 – 3; and mind, 11 – 12, 177 – 9, 184, 191 – 6, 203, 289n10; and monarchy, 175; and Montaigne, 31, 176 – 8, 184 – 7, 199, 289n11, 293n28; and nature, 31, 187 – 92, 194 – 6, 292n21; and pascaline, 179, 191 – 3; Nouvelles expe´riences touchant le vide, 188 – 91, 294n33; Pense´es, 159, 175, 178, 183 – 8, 193 – 200; and persuasion, 175, 182, 193, 198, 203, 290n14; and portraiture, 159, 166, 175; and probability, 290nn12 – 13; and realism, 175; and reason, 186, 188 – 90, 197, 199; and revelation, 191, 193, 199; and sacramentalism, 12; and salvation, 175, 178 – 9, 181 – 2, 184, 193, 198 – 9, 203; and scepticism, 176 – 8, 199, 293n28; and science, 175 – 7, 188, 190 – 2, 267n36; and self, 184, 193; and subject, 193, 203; and thought, 64, 176, 193 – 7, 295nn36 – 7; and truth, 189 – 91, 193, 198 – 200, 278n33; and wager, 179, 186 – 8, 292n22; and will, 180 – 3, 185 Paul of Tarsus, 164 – 5 Pelagius, 226 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 265n25, 291n15, 302n32 Pepys, Samuel, 38 Perrault, Charles, 17, 153, 282n17 person: and character, 31; empirical, 16, 30; in epistemology, 35, 71; and experience, 28, 33, 49; historical, 9,

335

13, 67, 244n5; and memory, 24, 269n51; and portraiture, 10; private, 32; of sovereign, 98, 101, 268n50; and subject, 4 perspective: aerial or atmospheric, 85, 114, 272n75; and mind, 27, 32; in painting, 73, 98, 115, 154, 265n21; in Poussin, 118, 264n15; and subject, 15 Peters, Jeffrey N., 297n10 philosophy: debate in, 10, 71; in Descartes, 38; discovery in, 45; and dualism, 13 – 14; and epistemology, 19 – 20, 34, 252n38, 285n33; on experience, 22 – 3; and history, 51 – 2; and madness, 59, 260n26; meaning of the word, 300n26; method in, 4, 20, 86; on mind, 8, 29, 252 – 3n38; in Montaigne, 26 – 7, 184 – 5, 252 – 3n38, 255n54; and painting, 69 – 70; and Poussin, 69 – 71, 263n7; prejudices of, 19, 252n36; professionalization of, 20 – 1, 68; and self-determination, 65; subject of, 38; and theology, 51, 67 – 8, 246n16, 289n11; tribunal of, 60; and truth, 51, 71; and will, 64 – 5 Picard, Raymond, 276n18 Piles, Roger de, 31, 154 – 5, 163, 166, 255n52, 281n14, 281n17, 285nn32 – 3, 286nn37, 40 Pincus, Steve, 250n30 Plato, 22 – 3, 26, 213, 298n16, 299n19 platonism, 29, 129 Plutarch, 82, 102 Poe, Edgar Allan, 116 Pointel, Jean, 71 – 2, 80, 91, 100 – 1, 103, 108 – 9, 111 – 12, 117, 267n39, 270n57

336

Index

Pope, Alexander, 207, 297n8 Popkin, Richard H., 27, 252n35, 254n46, 261n36, 288n6 portraiture, 151; comic, 154; and fidelity, 161 – 2; function of, 158 – 9, 161 – 2, 166, 169 – 73, 283n24, 285n33, 287n45; and ideas, 10 – 11, 162 – 3, 165 – 72; and meaning, 159 – 63, 169 – 72; miniature, 10, 155 – 6, 158, 160, 284n30; and names, 163, 165 – 72; reception of, 160 – 2, 285n31; satiric, 175; and words, 10 – 11, 162 – 3, 165 – 72. See also painting; representation; selfportraiture Poulain de la Barre, Franc¸ois, 147, 279n37 Poulet, Georges, 254n48 Poussin, Nicolas: Apollo and Daphne, 103; and baroque, 78, 264n15; and beholder, 9, 71, 78, 112 – 21, 272n75; Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, 272n75; Christ Restoring Sight to the Blind of Jericho, 82 – 7; and colour, 72 – 3, 75, 82 – 8, 109, 114, 263n6; Dance to the Music of Time, 70; The Death of Eudamidas, 70; The Death of Germanicus, 70; The Death of Phokion, 70; and decision, 96 – 7; De lumine et colore, 69, 108, 270n60; and Descartes, 70 – 1, 86 – 8, 147; and design, 72 – 86, 109, 114, 116; and drawing, 72 – 3, 109; and dualism, 30; Et in Arcadia Ego (Arcadian Shepherds), 118 – 20, 264n11; and experience, 78, 102, 118 – 20; and experiment, 90 – 1, 101 – 2, 112; and expression, 102 – 3; Fe´libien on, 68 – 9, 122 – 3, 263n8; The Finding of Moses, 91; The

Four Seasons, 70; and French painting, 69, 122 – 3; and friendship, 69, 71 – 2, 102, 108, 112 – 13, 117 – 18; and Greek sculpture, 102, 117; and idea, 78, 112; The Inspiration of the Poet, 70, 103, 266n28; and interpretation, 9, 76, 100, 112; The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Wilderness, 73, 98, 100 – 1, 112 – 13, 116 – 17; and judgment, 90, 96 – 7; The Judgment of Solomon, 8 – 9, 16, 72, 87 – 103, 108, 267n43, 269n51; and justice, 96 – 7; Landscape with a Calm, 91, 108, 120 – 1; Landscape with Polyphemus, 108; Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 91, 120 – 1; Le Brun on, 9, 73 – 6, 116 – 17; and Leonardo, 69, 85, 102, 108, 114, 117; as ‘Master,’ 68 – 9, 122; and Michelangelo, 114; and memory, 95, 118, 269n51; and mind, 9, 30, 33, 70 – 1, 98, 103, 116; as model, 69; and monarchy, 16, 86 – 7, 91, 95 – 103, 109, 267n41; and Montaigne, 72, 117 – 18; and painting, 35, 72 – 5, 86 – 7, 108, 112 – 13, 116, 118 – 21; and patrons, 69 – 71; and perspective, 85; and philosophy, 69 – 71, 86, 263n7, 264n9; and prospect, 76, 82, 87, 100, 103, 112, 118; The Rape of the Sabine Women, 103; and Raphael, 68 – 9, 114, 263n6; and rationality, 72, 78, 100; The Sacrament of Ordination, 76 – 82; and sacraments, 76 – 8, 80; and self-portraiture, 108, 112; The Self-Portrait for Chantelou, 109 – 13, 11 – 20; The Self-Portrait for Pointel, 91, 103, 107 – 11, 117; and

Index sovereign, 8 – 9, 95 – 8, 101 – 3, 113, 202, 268n50; and studio, 90, 101 – 2; and subject, 70 – 2, 86 – 7, 147, 202, 264n11; and theatre, 90, 95, 109; and Titian, 68 – 9, 114 Pradon, Jacques, 276n18 Protestantism, 29, 67 – 8, 78, 165, 179, 213, 226, 228 – 9, 238 – 9, 302nn31 – 2 Puritanism, 226 Puttfarken, Thomas, 285n32 Pye, Christopher, 35, 256n1 pyrhonnism, 20, 29, 199, 293n28. See also scepticism Rabutin, Roger de, comte de Bussy, 31 Racan, Honorart de Bueil, 205 – 6, 273n2 Racine, Jean, 5, 14, 32, 278n33, 298n14; and authorship, 131, 133, 139, 146 – 7, 248n20; and classicism, 6, 215; and Corneille, 125 – 9, 133, 139, 145, 159, 275n18; heroines of, 130; and Jansenism, 126; and moral status of theatre, 129, 131, 153; and tragedy, 129, 131 Raphael, 35, 68, 113 – 16, 263n6 Rapin, Rene´, 7 rationalism, 3, 8, 15, 19, 25, 37, 48, 54 – 5, 162, 246n16, 252n34, 268n49. See also reason reason: in Boileau, 204, 213, 224, 239, 273n2; in classical culture, 30 – 1; in Descartes, 3, 22, 34, 38, 46 – 7, 86, 246n16, 261n28; in Derrida, 260n26; and experience, 23 – 7, 34; faculty of, 3, 6, 8, 15, 18 – 19, 64, 68; in Hegel, 52; in Kant, 254n47; in Montaigne, 22 – 7, 34,

337

293n28; in Pascal, 176, 179, 186 – 92, 197, 289n11, 293n28; in Poussin, 88, 100 – 1, 118; and reasoning, 18 – 19, 43, 45, 53 – 5, 57, 68, 70; in Spinoza, 48; of state, 31, 95, 97 – 8; and unreason, 15. See also rationalism Reformation, 12, 27 Regius (Henri le Roy), 42 Reiss, Timothy J., 244n5, 251n32, 255n51 Rembrandt van Rijn, 102, 270n54, 281n17, 285n32 Renaissance, 4, 123, 256n2, 260n21 representation: classical, 5, 15, 68; dramatic, 10; dualist, 5; and ideas, 162, 166, 170; and painting, 73, 155 – 6, 159; political, 98; theatrical, 124, 152 – 6, 173 – 4; of self, 36, 51 – 2; and signs, 159 – 70; visual, 10 – 11. See also painting; portraiture; self-portraiture Republic of Letters, 48 – 9, 67, 111, 261n30 Retz, Paul de Gondi, cardinal de, 250n29 Ribou, Jean, 158, 284n25 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, cardinal de, 145, 274n8, 275n17 Rigaud, Hyacinthe, 161 Robison, Pauline Maguire, 263n8 Rochemont, Sieur de, 278n32 Rodis-Lewis, Genevie`ve, 56, 251n32, 252n36 Rorty, Richard, 243n2, 252nn37 – 8 Rousset, Jean, 6, 245n10 Rubens, Peter Paul, 78 sacramentalism, 12, 70, 78, 292n22. See also sacraments

338

Index

sacraments, 12, 29, 70, 76 – 80, 82, 188, 226, 230 – 1, 290n13. See also sacramentalism Sacy. See Le Maıˆtre de Sacy Saint-Amant, Marc-Antoine de Ge´rard de, 205 – 6 Sauerla¨nder, Willibald, 272n75 Sawday, Jonathan, 248n24 Scarron, Paul, 282n18 scepticism: crisis of, 19, 29; in Descartes, 19, 29, 34, 49, 54, 58, 67 – 8, 252n35, 260n28, 266n36; history of, 27 – 9, 252n36, 288n6; in La Bruye`re, 301n27; and language, 224; in Malebranche, 261n36, 266n36; in Montaigne, 19 – 21, 26 – 7, 176 – 7, 187; in Pascal, 176 – 7, 187, 293n28; in Poussin, 109, 270n61. See also pyrrhonism Sche´rer, Jacques, 281nn12, 14 Schmitt, Carl, 96 – 7, 101, 251n33, 268nn46 – 9, 50, 301n29 scholasticism, 18, 37, 46, 54 science, 218; in Bossuet, 282n19; culinary, 22; in Descartes, 44 – 6, 65, 261n36, 266n36; and experiment, 44, 91, 175; in Pascal, 177, 183, 188 – 91, 253n39, 271n68; and philosophy, 252n38; and probability, 290n12; and rationalism, 37, 121; and Scientific Revolution, 293 – 4nn33 – 4 Scott, Virginia, 280n5, 283n24 Scude´ry, Georges de, 17, 129, 133, 145, 278n29 Scude´ry, Madeleine de, 15, 148, 156, 280n39 sculpture, 73, 102 Sebond, Raimond, 20 – 1, 253n40

Seidel, Michael A., 279n37 Seigel, Jerrold, 245n7 self: coherence of, 184 – 5; in classical culture, 3 – 6, 35; in Descartes, 3, 35, 201, 203; and dualism, 3; elimination of, 193; hatefulness of, 185; love of, 12, 185; as machine, 184, 291n19; modern, 18; and modern subject, 13, 35; in Molie`re, 283n20; in Montaigne, 20 – 1, 117; passibility of, 244n5; in Poussin, 70, 91, 98, 100, 103 – 12, 117 – 18; and reason, 4; and self-fashioning, 4, 31, 65, 269n50; in self-portraiture, 35 – 6, 91, 100, 103 – 12, 117 – 18; and theory, 245n7. See also person; subject self-portraiture, 35 – 6, 91, 100, 103 – 12, 117 – 18. See also painting; portraiture; representation Sellier, Philippe, 194, 196, 198, 295n36 Seneca, 65, 86, 126, 133, 276n23 Sextus Empiricus, 29 – 30 Shapin, Steven, 44, 260n23, 261n30, 294n34 Simonides of Chios, 154 Snyder, Jon R., 244n4, 280n9, 302n31 Society of Jesus, 11 – 12, 17, 19, 43, 125, 153, 167, 179 – 80, 182, 185, 191, 198 – 9, 214 – 16, 227 – 34, 238 – 9, 251n32, 286n42, 298n15, 302n31 Soll, Jacob, 244n4 Sorbonne, 52 – 3, 67, 179 sovereign, 8 – 9, 16, 71, 95 – 7, 101, 103, 109, 175, 268nn46, 49, 50, 269n51, 297n6, 299n22, 301n29; and artist, 9, 71, 113, 117, 202; and mind, 3, 70 – 1, 101, 103,

Index 150, 201; and reason, 8, 19, 101. See also monarchy sovereignty. See monarchy; sovereign Spinoza, Baruch, 14, 19, 48, 55, 68, 87, 190, 246n16, 247nn17, 19, 252nn34, 38, 258n15, 260n28, 263n3, 291n19 statuary. See sculpture statue. See sculpture Stewart, Susan, 284n30 stoicism, 18, 26, 64, 70, 86, 102, 176, 209, 264n9, 276n23 Strauss, Leo, 261n34 subject, 3 – 33, 34 – 8, 201 – 3, 256n1, 257n6; in Boileau, 207, 236; in Descartes, 3, 10, 34 – 5, 43 – 8, 50, 59, 64, 67, 70 – 1, 86, 130, 201 – 3, 258n15; early critiques of, 4, 201 – 3; and intersubjectivity, 30; modern critiques of, 5, 15 – 16; and modern science, 190 – 1, 271n68, 293n33; in Molie`re, 158; and painting, 71; in Pascal, 193; and person, 4, 30; and perspective, 15; in Poussin, 70 – 2, 86 – 7, 202 – 3; and time, 30. See also dualism; mind; person; reason; self Summers, David, 256n2, 270n59, 281n17 Suurman, Siep, 279n37 Tallemant des Re´aux, Ge´de´on, 31 Taylor, Charles, 3, 18 – 19, 243n1, 251n31, 262n41 Tesauro, Emiliano, 211, 235, 299n17 theatre, 9; and anatomy, 91; classical, 125; comic, 11, 155, 157; and Corneille, 9 – 10, 125 – 8, 133 – 4, 139 – 46, 151, 274nn7 – 8; and experience, 9, 147, 149, 173 – 4;

339

and experiment, 152, 173 – 4; financial opportunities in, 146; and illusion, 124 – 5; and mimesis, 153 – 4; moral status of, 124, 145 – 6, 153, 163, 174, 278n33; and painting, 9, 154 – 5; in Poussin, 90 – 1, 102 Thirouin, Laurent, 295n37 Thirty Years War, 97 Thomism, 8, 17, 41, 67 Thuillier, Jacques, 263n7, 267n39 Titian, 68, 114 Torricelli, Evangelista, 189 Toulmin, Stephen, 302n31 Trent, Council of, 163, 165, 227, 293n26 truth: in Boileau, 12, 213, 215, 223 – 7, 232 – 4, 238, 300n27; in Bossuet, 282n19; and conventional wisdom, 5; in Descartes, 6, 7, 18 – 19, 25, 30, 49, 51 – 3, 60, 62 – 3, 71; and error, 4; in Hegel, 51 – 2; and history, 51 – 2, 222, 294n34; and judgment, 90, 95 – 6, 100, 103, 109, 117, 267n43; and Luther, 28 – 9; in Montaigne, 22 – 6, 184 – 5; to nature, 154 – 5, 281n17; in painting, 71, 82, 85, 97, 163, 285n32; in Pascal, 189 – 91, 193, 198 – 200, 278n33; in philosophy, 51, 71; and polemic, 230, 302n33; in portraiture, 163; and scepticism, 30; and truthfulness, 39; and whole, 241. See also error Tucker, Holly, 276n19 Turing, Alan, 12 ut pictura, 154 – 5, 281n13 Valentinus, 226

340

Index

Vasari, Giorgio, 68, 108 Vaugelas, Antoine, 299n24 Viala, Alain, 146, 279n35, 281nn12, 14, 283n21, 299n25 Villari, Rosario, 244n5 Virgil, 12, 216 Vise´, Jean Donneau de, 218, 298n12 Voiture, Vincent, 211, 213, 218 – 20, 234 – 5 Voltaire, 16

Williams, Bernard, 12, 39, 150, 245n9, 246n15, 258n14, 271n67, 290n13, 292n22, 294n34 Wilmot, John, 34 Wine, Kathleen, 288n2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 37, 252n38, 257n6 Wygant, Amy, 275n11, 278n33

Welch, Cara, 276n21 Westphalia, Peace of, 97 Wetsel, David, 295n35 Wilkin, Rebecca M., 255n51

Zaccolini, Matteo, 102, 108, 117, 263n8 Zagorin, Perez, 286n42, 302n31 Zumthor, Paul, 41, 260n20

Yates, Frances, 95, 267n44, 269n51, 288n2