active and passive revolution

The ideological hypothesis could be posed in the following terms: "The ideological hypothesis could be presented in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that -- through legislative intervention by the State and by means of the corporative organization -- relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country's economic structure in order to accentuate the 'plan of production' element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased, without however touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation of profit." –Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

There are few references or essays about Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco in English. He is known, by a small minority, for having originated the distinction between passive and active revolution that Gramsci took up in the twentieth century and used in a sense that, to an extent, seems to call out to Karl Polanyi’s hypothesis of the double movement – first the movement towards the free market, then the movement towards state intervention to preserve the private sphere from the stresses the profit taking activity had caused - within the Great Transformation to capitalism.

Cuoco (1770-1823) was the sort of figure who could easily have been cast by Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme. He was also the sort of figure that was easy to lose sight of, since the nuances he stood for were, in a sense, drowned in the blood of his epoch. In this sense, there is something of Benjamin Constant’s sense of the need to reintroduce Nemesis into politics, in the form of limits that would work against ‘usurpation’ and conquest. Constant’s pamphlets didn’t stop Napoleon, and Cuoco ended up, by all accounts, on the side of legitimacy after the great fading of collective energy in 1815.

He was not from Naples, but from the Molise region. By training he was another lawyer – or rather, his training as a lawyer was just part of a vaster training in the vaguer career of a philosophe, that career that is not, like that of law, institutionally recognized, and seems like no career at all to people who have short views of the amplitudes of the human soul.

He was, like all Italian philosophes, keenly aware of what was going on in Paris in the 1790s, and had, to frame his observations of these distant events, a fund of sources that included Vico. When the revolution came to Naples, his friends, like Pagano, participated in it and even tried to lead it. Cuoco took a discreter role, but even so fled the collapse and subsequent repression that put Pagano’s neck in a rope. In Milan, he published his essay on the rise and fall of the brief Parthenopeen Republic, under the guise of a philosophical history:

“In history, the custom of reporting names does more to flatter the vanity of those so named than it serves to instruct the reader. Few men know how to master events; the greatest number is its slave; he is what the time, the ideas, the moeurs and the events want him to be; when one has painted the first, what is the point of naming the others? I am firmly persuaded that if in the greatest part of history, one substituted for the proper names the letters of the alphabet, the instruction one would draw from it would be the same.”

In the event, the philosophic dislike for the personal was quickly disgarded in a history that was filled with personalities. And yet, in a sense, those personalities are as unreal in their reality as the characters of La Bruyere. Or they are real, rather, as calculators the combinations they are made of – which is to say, of that time, those moeurs, those events to which they reacted as though they had the choice to be outside of them.

The vital center and the sage

The longing for the center has been a desire in the collective political consciousness at least since the age of the Atlantic revolutions. It is a desire that, at last, we discover the missing ‘no’ in the political unconscious. Although the desire for revolution has been tracked and interpreted and over-interpreted in political philosophy, the desire for the center, for ‘moderation’, has not been considered in itself. Rather, it is, mostly, considered parasitic on other forces – reactionary or revolutionary forces, in which the face of desire is not masked, even if the face itself, we discover sooner or later, is indeed a mask – there is no face behind it. Moderation, on this reading, is simply the desire that we not go so far, so quick, and above all that we avoid pain, instead of welcoming it – admittedly, usually the welcoming has to do with imposing it on others. And as the hastiest reading of history will show, the center almost always ends up finding its own targets to impose pain upon, often, o so often, on a large scale. But the thing is to normalize that imposition of pain as quickly as possible so that we can “get on with it.” It is, of course, that long digestion called life. This, for the moderate, is the best political use of speed – to entrench our social relations so that they can work by themselves, surround us with their workings, provide that artificial paradise, that womb, that isle of Synthetica which is our true and only utopia.

This desire for the center – the vital center, as Arthur Schlesinger called it back in 1950, rallying liberalism against the communist threat – has a philosophical correlate in the desire for the golden mean, the juste milieu. In Un sage est sans idée, Francois Jullien discusses the juste milieu in terms of two histories – one of the philosopher, one of the sage. Except that the latter, he claims, has no real history. In that sense, the sage could be seen as just another escapee, like the quicksilver cogito.

However, I will bracket my criticism of that claim – what interests me is Jullien’s contrast between the juste milieu and the demi-mesure. The half and half notion of the center – which, in this second year of the great Recession, has become the desire of so many, and seems to be the structural principle to which that demi-sage in the White House, Obama, has given all his heart.

Jullien, in this chapter as well as the book as a whole, shuttles between two registers – Ancient China and Ancient Greece. He begins with a history of the reputation of the sage, through the lens of philosophy: “For philosophy matured [after Plato], it could well vaunt itself for having a history, while the other didn’t. In consequence, wisdom was treated to an inversion, no longer above, as super- but as sub-philosophy: it would thenceforward be a thought that dared not risk itself (to attain the absolute, the truth), or rather which had renounced it – a soft thought, boneless, dulled, tempered. Flat thought, to put it bluntly, and purely residual (the commonplace), stagnating far from the fascinating flight of ideas: it will be the thought of the aging of desire – but does it even think any more? – at best resigned thought.”

At the center of this image is the notion of the just mean, the golden mean – something like Schlesinger’s vital center. Here we will measure our actions like good shopkeepers, matching advantage to the trade offs. Here the passions are purified until only one is left – the passion for being in the middle. In the middle, we are not too high (with all the risks and the vast energy that it takes to get too high) nor on the level of the slave – abject.

Jullien traces the notion of the juste milieu from Aristotle to that common place in a brief passage:
But more is necessary for establishing virtue, it is necessary to have a definition. To which Aristotle applies himself in distinguishing the medium (moyen) in the thing and that relative to us: the virtue will be the ‘equal’, understood as the just milieu between excess and default (thus, at the half way point between fear and temerity is courage, of prodigality and parcimony is liberality, etc.) With Aristotle, this medium still possesses a theoretical status, tied as it is to the nature of the continuum, and by consequence divisible, and communicating structurally with the totality of his thought, the knots of reasoning in logic as well as the mixtures in physics. But, successively, with the vulgarization of aristotelianism, the notion looses its vigor and wilts, it flattens into a counsel of prudence rejoining the ‘not too much’ of common opinion. The juste milieu becomes the demi-measure. Witness the Horace of the Satires, est modus in rebus (there’s a middle in things), etc. Still, the subtle Horace did not reduce it to this timorous juste milieu, he had too much of an Epicurean in him. But the tradition that referenced him approvingly has never stopped praising that wisdom of the middle – the aurea mediocritas (the Latins having that concrete mindset…) fleeing the extreme, fearing excess. A medium fearful enough to nauseate – “wisdom” to throw off.”

This may well be the story of the liberalism of the vital center. The alliance with the working class, welded in the New Deal; the alliance with civil rights movements, welded in the sixties and seventies; and the alliance with the new class of academics and symbol workers, welded in the eighties, has entered the age of extremes with the desire to find half measures not because these half measures work – who thinks, for instance, that Obama’s preservation of the complex system of medical insurance company rents would work better than raw socialized medicine? But because the solutions are “politically real.” Politics, for the once vital center, is now a fearful domain, populated by extremist lunatics, and it is best to tranquilize them by demi-measures. We no longer end wars – for to end a war is to operate fully and decisively, it is extreme – but we let them sink softly under the headlines. In the same way, huge bankrupt banks don’t go bankrupt, nor do shadow financial sectors, chock full of bad bets, go to the window and expose their losing tickets.

Jullien opposes this notion of golden mediocracy with what he takes to be the original Confucian impulse of the sage in China.

“1. while, on the greek side, the medium proper to virtue is envisioned under the aegis of action (ergon), which is conceived in a technical manner and according to a model posed as an end (of the mathematical type: by divisibility, equality, proportion – it is one, error is multiple – in the background is the cosmos, as already in the Gorgias 504a), the Chinese conception is inscribed in a logic of unfolding (deroulement), the real being conceived according to the category of process: this medium is the medium because, being able to vary from one extreme to another, regulation is continuous; 2. Aristotle has very much the idea of a variable medium, which is not only arithmetic (like 6 between 2 and 10) but relative to each (for instance, the amount of food is a lot for one and not very much for another), and proceeds by circumstantial adaptation (at the moment it is necessary in the case and in regard to what is necessary, etc.), but he does not have the idea of a medium by variation from one extreme to another, equally possible, as in the Chinese idea of two mediums; [Jullien is referring here to the idea that there is a “milieu” relative to each pole, the ying and the yang] 3. the Aristotelian just milieu concerns only the ethical virtue (and still there is no just milieu of moderation), while the juste milieu in the Chinese case corresponds to the logic of every process(which, in as much as it is continuous, must be regulated). There is not, in the Chinese case, on one side the real, and on the other side the good. But that from whence proceeds the real, and which is the condition of its emergence, as the just milieu of regulation, is also the norm of the good. Or, rather, it is not a norm, but only a way, by which the real is liveable – the tao.”
Notice how this applies to the current political atmosphere, in which solutions are not related to the real, but to the ‘good’ – that is, to the norms of the opinion-makers. The looseness at the heart of the decaying American empire is all in this suspended animation, this reign of postponement. It is the exhaustion of a centrism that is sure that the real can be dickered with, smoothed over, or, if nothing works, postponed for another couple of years.

But in reality, America is like a man who has leaped from the top of a tower- it has run out of postponements.

the myth of the creator

According to Francois Jullian, the system of classical Chinese thought, in contrast to the Greeks and the Hebrews, did not concern itself with the creation of the world – did not answer the question, why does the world exist, with a story of divine making. “…it is rather the question of the “separation’ of the heaven and the earth: a putting in place that is a putting in order.”

‘The question posed in China would thus be a different kind. As the notion of Tao (dao) expresses it, it is that of the “Way”, which is to say, of the viability of things. In posing the question of how – how does reality ‘march’ [work] – Chinese thought hardly encounters the question of an original why. What I mean is, it didn’t need to regroup or put into form mythical elements that it found here and there, since at the bottom the question which carried it was not this one. Chinese thought sought to give an account of the march of the world, and it did so starting with the idea that the world always functions by polarity – yin and yang…

To sum up, from the moment where it is a question of the march of things that predominates, and that one accounts for starting with a polarity (and not one, but two instances), one no longer meets with the question of a first moment – nor of a last one besides.” (Francois Jullien, interview, Communication, 1997)

Vico, that opponent of the secularizing and mechanizing l’esprit geometrique as a distorter of the human portion (which is fated to exist, as a thing in its essence created, among probabilities, and never among certainties), shared with the moderns a certain conception of making – of the made – that is so embedded in modern culture – and perhaps that of the premodern era in what became the “West” – that the thought of some original polarity – a polarity that always defers the question of origin – is almost impossible to absorb. Zero points, ground zeros, the seed and the target, these are the symbols that swim in the dreamlife of the White Mythology. That the maker does not know the made from the inside – the terrifying discovery of Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Freud – is a side thought, a nightmare.

Our escapee, the cogito

Trip like I do...

Vico’s New Science seeks the route to universal history – path of needles, path of pins - through reconstituting the trajectory of thought from the era when men ‘thought humanly’ for the first time to the moment when there comes a time to man and nation that thought dims, declines. Vico’s famous corsi and recorsi, that fatal consort of the society of the limited good, cyclical time, ruled over by nemesis. To be replaced, of course, by happy time, the time of Jack’s beanstalk, always growing, growing up to the sky, and troubled only intermittently by business cycles – the general equilibrium being the last faint gasp of an older temporal framework.

Vico does not suppose – heady thought of his contemporary, George Berkeley - that thought was disembodied, a free range agent. On the contrary, in keeping with his dictum that the true is the made, he clings to the fact that “that this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.” But Vico is far from accepting that the world itself is made by men – not for him Descartes’ heroic cogito, the persevering captive of the genie malin, whose escape into the world out of the dark night of the logical soul proves that the world exists – for the whole logic of escape is escaping from something, n’est-ce pas? Vico, who in his previous discourses had pointed to the erroneous goal of certainty as the ruling purpose by which Cartesians and materialists thought they could grasp and advance philosophy and physics, is not averse to geometry himself – after all, like Spinoza, Vico seeds the New Science with axioms. Axiom enigmas. But these are not to serve us a models of deduction. Rather, in Vico’s eyes, the geometric method, properly applied, lends itself to the New Science as a model of construction. “Thus our Science proceeds exactly as docs geometry, which, while it constructs out of its elements or contemplates the world of quantity, itself creates it; but with a reality greater in proportion to that of the orders having to do with human affairs, in which there are neither points, lines, surfaces, nor figures. And this very fact is an argument, O reader, that these proofs are of a kind divine, and should give thee a divine pleasure, since in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.”

Here we strike upon a pleasure we are inclined to ignore – for in the culture of happiness, science is neither gay nor sad, but our neutral eye. Thus, we greet our proofs with the satisfaction felt by the escaping cogito – the satisfaction that attends opening and closing a door. But the divine pleasure of the New Science is, indeed, a cognitive pleasure of a different kind – it is Daedelian, the pleasure of an artisan or artist.

And in this, it too is rapt up with the ingenuity that Fontenelle, as well, astutely remarked as a hallmark of the modern. Subordinate to the escapee’s preference for the exterior – ever more exterior - that set the stage for the love affair between the positivist and the machine is the idea that the maker has a knowledge, a power over the made.

on belief and practice

In the History of Oracles, Fontenelle – with his native deadpan delivery, a style that had more in common with Defoe than with the salon - describes Cicero’s criticism of the theory of sacrifice propounded by some of the stoic philosophers: that in the moment of sacrifice, the oracular portion – the heart, the liver, etc. – was changed by the god, depending on the sanctity of the sacrificer, or the favor a particular priest had with the gods. Of course, this passage contains a muffled echo of Fontenelle’s own times – it is the choked laugh that makes for the deadest of deadpan styles. Fontenelle indirectly acknowledges the obvious parallel between the stoic theory and the theory of the transmutation of the host only by making a point about Cicero’s ability to get away with criticizing the terms of sacrifice without being regarded ‘with horror’ by the people. “There is reason to believe that, among the pagans, religion was only a practice, to which speculation was indifferent. Act like the others, and believe what you wish. This is a very extravagant principle, but the people, who did not recognize its impertinence, were happy with it, and the gens d’esprit submitted to it easily, because it barely restrained them.”

Oh the deadpan regard that marks the witticism. Fontenelle, France’s most ardent propagandist of the new science, was aware – was more aware than perhaps he wanted to be, as Nietzsche later astutely understood – that the spirit of enterprise and science for which he stood was slowly but surely diverging from the croyance in the tenets of religion. The instant of their separation had suddenly become a speck, a distinct speck, a very distant point, on the horizon.

Yet, more than a polemical irony can be extracted from under the impenetrable mask. Fontenelle is making a real historical point, in line with his ambition to read history as the philosopher would read the results of an experiment. When a social fact presents itself that does not elicit the social reaction that the presence of such a social fact would cause in the historian’s own society, one can trace a certain lack – as Sherlock Holmes would put it, the significant fact is that the dog did not bark. And that lack of an expected fact must, itself, be subject to the same causal inquisition – the non-lieu is an effect in its own right.

Of course, the presupposition here – the White Mythology – is that the historian’s own society is, as it were, full – it is the most ‘advanced’ society. It would be easy, though, to turn around the historian’s assumption and ask about the lacks in that advanced society.

The lack of a certain collective passion, then, one that led, in Christian Europe, to the burning of Bruno, allows us to retrospectively suppose a certain tolerance. The indifference of the people that he condemns might, actually, be something he works towards.

But such is the dead weight of the masked language that this has to remain speculation.

Still, it is easy to assimilate Fontenelle’s remark to the coming program of the Enlightenment without really looking at its paradoxical nature. Surely, the idea that a collective practice does not reflect a collective belief is a startling anthropological speculation. It might have been devised precisely to counter, or at least question, the passage about divination in Vico’s New Science.

From Fontenelle again: “Thus we can see that the entire pagan religion only asked for ceremonies, and no sentiments of the heart. The gods are irritated, all of their lightning bolts are about to fall: how will we appease them? Do we need to repent of the crimes that we have committed? Is it necessary to return to the paths of natural justice, which ought to be among all men? Not at all: we need only to take a calf of such and such a color, born in such a such a season, cut its throat with a knife, and this will disarm the gods. And still you are permitted to mock the sacrifice inside yourself, if you wish. It won’t make anything worse. Apparently, it was the same with the oracles; let he who wished to believe do so; but one does not give up consulting them. The custom had such force on people that it had no need to be supported by reason.” [Chapter 7, my translations]

superstition and its trace

“D.C. who, in his village in Romania, wrote his reminiscences of his childhood, having told his neighbor, a peasant named Coman, that he would not be forgotten in his book, the latter came to see him early the next day and said: “I know that I am not worth much, but even so I don’t think I have sunk so low as to be talked about in a book!”

The oral world, how superior it was to our own! Beings (I mean, the people) only lived in the true as long as they had a horror of writing. As soon as they caught the prejudice, they entered into the false, they lost their ancient superstitions in order to acquire a new one, worse than all the other ones combined.” - Cioran

LI has been madly pursuing a small point in Vico, from which we would like to grow a larger point about the belief system of the culture of the limited good. But we don’t ourselves quite understand our point, since it concerns a separation between the significance of ‘creation’ and that of ‘nature’ that may seem too thread subtle to make a real difference, or too idealistic to describe the real change in the routines of work and passion that lead us ever onward towards the Eldorado of all the young dudes, Synthetica.

Changes in the weave, changes in the sewing. We pick up our pins and needles from their allotted paths in the forest, we set to work.

In a 1971 article about the tense of popular belief by Nicole Belmont, The Function of Belief, Belmont remarks about a persistent connection in stories about popular belief between belief, practice, and the authority of the past. Often, when asked about the truth of this or that belief, the anthropologist is given a story about the past – either embodied in old people (the old people know about such and such a belief and its expression in practice) or in a story about some founding hero or god. It is in relation to this theme that Belmont cites a passage in Emile Beneveniste concerning superstition that I want to translate here, and comment upon in another post:

Beliefs are often given the pejorative name of superstitions which, curiously, leads etymologically to this question of projection (rejet) into the past. It has been studied by E. Benveniste, who sees in superstitio the abstract correspondent to superstes, “survivor”, and which thus signifies survival: “Superstitio indicated thus a ‘remnant’ of an old belief which, in the age in which is it envisioned, appears superfluous.” Benveniste sees there a historical countersense: we loan to the ancients an attitude taken from the modern mindset and the capacity to discern in religion the survivals of a distant epoch. But this is not a very credible objection: the ancient Romans could very well distinguish, in their religion, diverse strata of belief and ritual. The proof is in the existence of the terms religio and superstitio.

“Super” – Beneviste notes – “signifies not only above, but also beyond: superstare is to keep oneself beyond, subsist above… he who has gone through a danger, a test, a difficult period, who has survived it, is superstes. Another sense thus branches out: he who has subsisted beyond an event and become the witness of it.”

One thus sees clearly the double character attributed to popular beliefs: they are present, but in the guise of witnesses of a past. Why this ambivalence?”

a small displacement...

And so LI moved to Paris…

Lucretius might have been a hard taskmaster when it came to superstition, calling upon man to surpass the “flaming limits of the world” and not to piss himself before the vain phantom of the angry gods – but he did have a fearful appreciation of the power of love, with its invisible, hounding movement. “Hence into the heart distilled the drop/Of Venus’ sweetness, and numbing heartache followed./For if what you love is absent, none the less/ Its images are there, and the sweet name/Sounds in your ears.”

Amen to that! Lucretius, drawing an ascetic’s conclusion from the naturalist stance, taught us to resist the drop of Venus’ sweetness – or so some claim. LI, however, drew the opposite conclusion – we have had more than enough of numbing heartache in our life, and so we didn’t hesitate to follow A. to Paris, merrily throwing away clothes and books, giving away our paltry possessions, and in general reducing the hurly burly of our, shall we say, middle aged existence to the order of two packed suitcases, plus a laptop in a knapsack purchased from Target for thirty nine dollars.

And so the city I have imagined, the exemplum of the artificial paradise, Baudelaire’s cite des reves en plein jour, is a place I casually get ripped off in, purchasing meatballs from the Italian deli down the street.

It is here, I hope, that I will get much more done on the Human Limit, as well as making a superhuman effort to edit many many more papers and books – for the prices of Paris truly are beyond the flaming limits of the world.

On the other hand, what price could possibly be attached to biking, on a lovely autumn afternoon, with my love through the streets up to Paris-Bercy and the BN – observing the absurd names that are attached to things (Simone de Beauvoir’s passerelle, Josephine Baker’s piscine – heartbreakingly, some restaurant that calls itself Jules et Jim (o the exploitation!) in a complex of cinemas, MK2.

And so I have arrived...

Our logical leaps: monkey shines in the artificial paradise

The Lynn White thesis, advanced in his 1967 article, The Historical roots of our Ecological Crisis, is that Christianity provided a paradigm that allowed the “West” to develop the kind of mechanical technologies that subordinated the whole of nature to man. This isn’t an original thesis, nor does White claim it as such. The young Hegelians present a similar picture of the historical meaning of Christianity. What was original with White is the thesis that this subordination is at the root of our present ecological crisis.

LI has already put his fork and knife into this article, as it doesn’t accord with our sense of before and after. We locate the shift of the human limit in the early modern era. And we maintain that the ‘subordination’ of creation to man and is different in kind from the subordination of nature to man.

Here is Lynn White:

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.

At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible
to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their
ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook,
it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation,
and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it
possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural
objects.”

LI’s discussion of Vico’s doctrine that verum est factum gives us a hold on what is missing in Lynn White’s rather romantic historiography. For Vico’s modern anti-modernism is precisely concerned with the conflation between mechanical and real understanding. Now, this may seem like almost nothing, but it has roots in a much greater thing, the main thing, the thing so casually overlooked in White’s hedging phrase that man shares “in great measure’ God’s transcendence of nature. In fact, the word "nature" avoids the word, the non-scholarly word, ‘creation” – which is the historically interesting word, here. It is part of the creation of the non-Western other that the West is the home of the nature/culture divide, and the other is the home of a groovier monism. Philippe Descola, for instance, has made much of the idea that there is no divide between society and nature for the Jivaro among whom he did his fieldwork. That, instead, the Jivaro “consider the plants and the animals like persons with whom one can communicate in certain circumstances.” And this simple insight has led to further insights about the lack of a certain structure – totemism – in the Western world.

This is, on one level, true. On another level, however, it fails to penetrate the sheath of the modern, the womb of the artificial paradise in which our ethnographic fieldworkers have their breathe and bodies. LI would contend that the famed modern ideology critic – that God is made by man in his image, in some unconscious moment of ilynx that occurs throughout the premodern era in universal history – imports into that era an idea of the made, the mechanically made, that significantly distorts the idea of creation. It might seem that Vico’s idea that there is a special, interior understanding in making is part of the White mythology – that man takes, once again, a transcendental distance from nature in a symmetry that can never really be sustained, and produces, infinitely, its supplements. But I think this ignores the way in which Vico’s critique of the geometric method and the appeal to God the maker go together. Vico is not urging their synthesis – not leading us to the world of models and bullet pointed instruction sheets. Rather, he is pointing to the transcendental blind spot that makes man’s participation in making essentially different from God’s, not quantitatively – we just need better science and tools – but qualitatively. Dominion is not and can never be making, and the creatures made by man – fire, wheel, telescope and automaton – are not made in the same way, with the same gesture, as is inherent in divine making.

verum and factum

LI lept, in our last post, upon Vico’s passage concerning the material transmission of the masterpieces. As I pointed out, it is an odder passage than it might at first appear. Consider – it sounds themes – notably, the warning that mechanization works against authenticity – which are distinctly post-revolutionary. Furthermore, the man writing this is the son of a bookstore owner, who – one can say, literally – owes his bodily being to the printing press. Furthermore, the chance to study came to him from a chance conversation in a bookstore with a Bishop, carefully recorded and placed in the autobiography.

The ancients versus the moderns was a battle of the books, as Swift puts it (at about the same time as Vico), but it is the making of books as well as their content that concern our man. While it may seem that the analysis of mechanization is far removed from Vico’s protest against the geometric method, in fact, it is part of the same problem of exteriority. Just as the deductive method, in philosophy and physics, is nothing more than a baroque ornament, expressing no intrinsic truth about philosophy or physics, the printing press is the extrinsic mechanism that gives us no information about the quality of the rhetoric and themes of the books it produces, as it deviates from the track of the word – the special art of Hermes. To put oneself, by copying, in the track of the writer is a form of ‘magical’ materialism, one that is hard – and perhaps impossible? – to entirely give up. LI, ever your man for tracks and paths, backwards and forwards, would link Vico’s words about copying with a more famous Viconian theme that is given to us a year later in his essay, “The wisdom of the ancient Italians. This is a passage translated from Michelet’s French translation:


The words verum and facturm, the true and the fact, are put in a relation one for the other by the Latins as inter-convertible, as the schoolmen say. For the latins, intelligere, understand, is the same thing as to read clearly and to know with evidence. They call cogitare what, in Italian, is called pensare et andar raccogliendo (ratio reason) designating among them a collection of numeric elements, and this gift proper to the human, distinguishing him from the beasts and constituting his superiority, which is why they call man an animal who participates in reason - rationis particeps – and who, consequently, doesn’t possess it entirely. Just as words are the signs of ideas, ideas are the signs and representations of things. Thus, as to read, legere, is to gather together the elements of writing out of which words are formed, intelligence, intelligere, consists in assembling all the elements of a thing from out of which emerges the perfect idea.

One is able thus to conjecture that the ancient Italians admitted the following doctrine on the true: the true is the fact (the made) itself, and by consequence God is the first truth because he is the first maker (factor), the infinite truth because he made all things and the absolute truth because he represents all the elements of things, external as well as internal, for he contains them. To know is to assemble the elements of things, from which it follows that the thought cogitatio is proper to the human spirit and intelligence to the divine spirit, for God unites all the elements of things, external as well as internal, since he contains them, and he disposes of them, while the human spirit is limited as it is, and outside of all of what is not of it can relate to the external points, but can never unite everything in such a way that it can think about things, but not understand them – this is why he participates in reason, but does not possess it.”

In the background, outside of the window of a bookstore in Naples, on the branch of a figtree, two birds have settled from the Rg Veda, “one of the twain eats the sweet Figtree’s fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only.”

the gay science

Thanks to printing, books are published everywhere; this is why, with the moderns, those are so numerous who, not content to know one or two authors, have an erudition which depends upon abundant, varied, and almost infinite reading. And finally we have universities, which are institutions organized in view of the study of all kinds of sciences and arts, thanks to which intelligence, esprit and language are carried to their perfection. And in almost all these studies a single end is aimed at today: the truth. To the point that if I undertook to make a speech in praise of the truth, I would deserve the fact that one would respond to me, with stupor: But who has ever thought to dispraise it? - Vico.

Foucault revivied Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural causes and consequences of the Will to Truth in the sixties; the diagnosis has rapidly penetrated to every sphere of the discourses devoted to the social sciences, and to the humanities. One hundred fifty years before Nietzsche, Vico was expressing his own discomfort with truth as the ‘single end’ of study, for reasons that reappear in Nietzsche’s account. It is a protest, on Vico’s part, that is almost wholly prophetic – for though, as Fontenelle wrote, the new mechanical ingenuity was appearing under the very noses of the poets and philosophers, in trades and shops, without the poets and the philosophers being aware of it, certainly the great European metropoles – London, Paris, Naples – had not yet been wholly caught up in the great transformation that instituted monetized commodity markets and industry on a mass scale, the concomitants of the artificial paradise. Fontenelle, Nietzsche justly wrote in a passage in The gay science (a Viconian book), ‘grew after death” – ‘Those small, bold words over moral things, that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal eloges, seemed to his time to be paradoxes and games of a not inoffensive wit; even the highest judges of taste and reason didn’t see anything else in them – yes, including Fontenelle himself, perhaps. Now something unbelievable has happened: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read these dialogues with another feeling than that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and lift their progenitor into another and highter rank of intellects, as these did – justly? Unjustly?”

Vico’s examination of the “method” of the ancients versus the moderns is, on its face, an examination of the most modern of methods, that of science- as we find it in Descartes – with the ancients. But there is another face of his essay. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to look at what Vico says about printing. Remember that Vico, in the smallest of parentheses in his autobiography, tells us that his father owned a bookshop. Remember that the great encounter in Vico’s life – with the Bishop of Ischia – occurred in another bookshop (Michelet mistranslates this as a ‘library”), where Vico seemed to charm the Bishop with his knowledge of canon law, and his latin. Vico’s autobiography mentions several incidences concerning finding books, which was of course the bookseller’s trade. LI could, if you like, find something a bit Oedipal, then, in Vico’s remarks about printing, and the preference for the quill – for copying.
At the same time, it is important to note the conjunction of the intellectual and the material here. Vico sees that matter is a matter of routine.
A long citation, and then to bed.

In fact, when books were written by hand, the copyists, in order to make their labors worth the pain, only transcribed authors who had a well established reputation, and, as they sold their copies dearly, the amateurs were sometimes constrained to copy them with their own hand. What admirable profit one takes from this kind of exercise! We better meditate a text that we write, and chiefly that we write in calmness, without precipitation, peacefully, and in always following the order. Thus is established between us and the authors not a tie of superficial acquaintance, but a long habit by which we finish purely and simply by identifying with them. It is for this reason that the bad authors, when one copied them by hand, knew disfavor, and the goood saw their works diffused for the great benefit of all. Bacon made proof of more cleverness than good sense when he remarked that, in the influx of barbarians, the authors with the most weight sank to the bottom, while the light ones swam on the surface. In all genres, the most important, the best authors have come down to us, thanks to writing, and if this or that author has disappeared, one must attribute it to chance. When I question my memory (I wrote this when I was still not an old man) I perceive that I have seen writers who enjoyed while alive such glory that their works had been printed twelve times or more, and who are now disdained and even held in contempt. Others, remaining too long in obscurity and indifference, now see their name celebrated by a change in circumstance by the greatest experts.”

Vico and the failure of the revolution of 1799

The Gnostic historian, like the universal historian, has a strong sense of epochs – which, as Bossuet pointed out in his essay on universal history, are stopping points, still moments that frame a sequence. They are in history and not in history. They are signaled by royal deaths, falls of empires, the rising of the son of god from the clutches of death, etc. Instead of the grand events that punctuate the march of universal history, however, the gnostic’s epochs happen in corner conversations, or in a glance at a sign in a window, or in the lyrics of a popular song. Herzen had a nose for these things – in his writing, one finds moments in which suddenly, the forces at dialectical play, usually disguised in a thousand blind intentions, suddenly become naked and twofold, under a harsh and unforgiving stage light. In his beautiful essay on Owen, the proto-socialist English radical, Herzen reports on a conversation Owen had with Gentz, in Herzen’s words, “the literary sycophant of Metternich”, who said to him, about his scheme for a socialist utopia at New Lanark:

“Suppose you had been successful, what would have been the outcome of it?”
“It’s very simple,’ Owen answered. ‘The outcome would have been that every man would have had enough to eat, would have been properly clothed, and would have been given a sensible education.”
“But that’s just what we don’t want,’ observed the Cicero of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz was frank, if nothing else.”

In one sense, this has a satisfying Voltarian sound – in the struggle of the ancients and the moderns, the ancients – representing the ancien regime – want to impose poverty and ignorance on the masses to uphold their hierarchy, and the moderns want to burst through these tired integuments, made of superstition and irrationality, to produce dignity and culture for every man – plus dinner.

In another sense, though, dinner and high culture are not really correlates. Herzen, in his letters to Turgenev, emphasized this point. Raymond Williams, in contrasting Burke and Cobbett in Culture and Society, makes the point that judging our usual political dualities (left or right, ancien regime or modernity) under the Enlightenment program is a more difficult game than it seems when we approach the matter simply by letting certain books talk. The books talk and talk, a cartoon bubble forms, and it fills with theory. Meanwhile, cartoon bubbles were everywhere coming out of the mouths of speculators in drained Fenland and alehouse keepers, lazzaroni and dairy maids. The moderns were of course busy imposing the benefits of a beneficient system on the people, and tearing up the texture of popular belief, for good and ill. This is really a post about Vico and his consideration of the competition between the ancients and the moderns, or rather, as is the way of LI, a flirtation with a topic that always seems to recede from out of the clumsy grasp of my paragraphs, but I want to get to him via these nineteenth century anecdotes – and, for instance, via his radical/conservative reader, Vincenzo Cuoco, who, in exile from the collapse of the revolutionary Parthenopean Republic of Naples, looked back at the mistakes of the Jacobins of 1799 and stressed their disconnect from the people. Cuoco’s history – about which I will have more to say later – has often been linked to the reaction in Europe – to Burke, or to Gentz. About the leader of the Jacobins, the Neapolitan radical Pagano, for instance, Cucio writes:

You wouldn’t say that the families of the Serras, the Colonnes, and of the Pignatellis were obscure, or that Pagano, Cirillo, Conforti were men without a name, but they had a name among the wise who do not make revolutions, and they were unknown to the people, without whom they are not made, because they were too superior. Paggio, the head of the Lazzaroni of the market, was without doubt a contemptible man in all respects, yet however it was Paggio and not Pagano who was loved by the people – the people who always insult those who are above their intelligence.”

But what looks like a standard, Gentzian account of the mob is, in fact, a more subtle critique of the men of theory who do not come out of the crowd – and who, out of an ignorance deriving from that part of knowledge that William James named acquaintance, are all the more ready to reduce all knowledge to what is demonstrable and can be driven to the sole standard of the true or the false. A standard that requires the atomization of culture to a vast mass of independent decision pairs.

But I’ll leave Cuoco and start with Vico – in the next post.

Vico and l'esprit geometrique

In the preface to his translation of Vico’s Le Méthode des études de notre temps, Alain Pons notices that Vico, in contrast to his opponent Descartes, recognizes the distinct cognitive and cultural and philosophical status of childhood and youth.

“. It is doubtlessly in their respective attitude to childhood that best reveals the depths that separate Vico from Descartes. Descartes could not console himself from the fact that “we have all been children before being men, from which it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they could have been, if we had had the entire use of our reason from the instant of our birth and had never been led but by it. The Research of the Truth is even more explicit: “One of the principle causes why we have so much pain in knowing” is that, with the child, “the best comes last, which is understanding”, and that before this, for years, we remain given to the senses, “which see nothing beyond the most vulgar and common of things,” to our natural inclination, which is “completely corrupted”, and to “impertinent nurses”. Vico, on the contrary, could be defined as the philosopher of childhood, of the world of the child as the childhood of the world. From his first inaugural discourse, he declares to the students, “Quivis vestrum puer maximo praelusit philosopho” – every child is the prelude to a great philosopher, because in him is spontaneously amassed a treasury of theoretical and practical wisdom that the speculative knowledge would have to “explain”, to deploy rationally. The child is not infans, he speaks, one must know how to listen to him. Vico reports, in the De Constantia philologiae, the phrase of one of his sons: My heart is always talking to me, and what a lot of things it tells me!” “

Pons is right to elevate the child – that evidence that maturity is, itself, but a phase – to the emblem of what Vico saw as the cultural decadence spread by the geometric spirit. He wrote his small tract on method at almost the same time Fontenelle was writing his on the utility of mathematics. It is a good contrast, since Fontenelle was resolutely on the side of the moderns, and Vico wanted to have his say about this quarrel. LI sees him as one of the primogenitive advocates of the imagination – leading the power of ingenium against a fundamental shift in the human limit. A shift that leads us, in the 19th century, into the building of the artificial paradise.

Pons quotes a letter Vico wrote to a friend concerning the education of the young man of his time: “It [Cartesianism] has filled their heads, Vico will say in a letter of 1729, “with such great words as ‘demonstrations’, ‘evidences’, ‘demonstrated truths’, thus preparing them to enter in a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs.”

That is our world now, of course, and we are ruled by those men.

Seeing the forest

I’m sorry for not blogging for a week, but I am overwhelmed with work and love at the moment.

However, I want to make a post continuing my forest thematic – or obsession.
In Language and Sensibility in the seventeenth century (1975), Pierre Dumonceaux points out that even as the French government rationalized its operations under Louis XIV, the texts of that rationalization were shot through with irrationality. Take, for instance, Colbert’s radical reconstruction of the system of forest maintenance. His order of 1669 not only contains prescriptions concerning the cutting and use of trees, according to a new categorization that recognized different kinds of timber trees and their biological life cycle, but it also contained this sentence: Défendons à toutes personnes de charmer our brûler les arbres, ni d’en enlever l’écorce, sous peine de punition corporelle.” Dumonceaux remarks: “In this phrase, the three terms charmer, brûler, enlever are situated on the same semantic level; each time, it is a purely natural action, punished in the same fashion, the crime being of the same nature. Besides, a commentary for water and forest masters of the 18th century makes not the least allusion to sorcery or to the memory of sorcery, it declares, simply, that it is a grave crime committed with the intent to make the tree perish, and to be able, subsequently, to appropriate it as dead wood. Basically, that use of “charmer” rejoins those which will be studied further on under the general name of invisible metaphors.”

That the invisible and the charm are linked here with the utmost rational blindness to their subliminal provinence is, well, charming – as though the Derridean demon were unloosed, here, quietly, and all unawares, to wreck the careful linearity that so confidently beckons us to what we will study ‘further on’ – plus loin. As if the charm, or witchcraft, had no economic effect or motive at all. But what if what is happening here is not just the instance of an invisible metaphor, but an instance of invisible metaphorization, a retrospective projection of rationality upon a document that carries a rather damning and to-be-explained term for an offense that, as Dumonceaux himself concedes, might have once occurred in a more superstitious era. A rationality shored up by a lacuna in a commentary from the 18th century, a charm – the charm of bureaucratic rationality – against the charm.

In a footnote, Dumonceaux refers to a certain maitre des eaux et forets, Lafontaine – but in his capacity as a poet. In Le gageur de trois commeres, a story taken from Bocaccio, a valet, who wishes to inspire in the husband the belief that a pear tree in their yard is ‘charmed’ – that is, that certain visions occur under it – in order to make love to the wife under the pear tree at his ease, with the husband looking on, thinking that he is not seeing what he is seeing.

Under the auspices of cuckoldry, the tree is disenchanted. Or, rather, there is a thematic of deceit – as though charms were the tools of scoundrels or, in the Enlightenment critique, of priests to deceive the populace – that shows its face here. With the promise that we do see what we see, every tree and branch, in the forest.

The woods

If I wereeeee kinggg of the foreeeesssst

A post that I will expand later:

The Europeans were amazed that Indians seemed to have no rules to limit the persons who could hunt. They believed that there was no order among the savage nations, and that a sing of this was that all males could hunt regardless of station. In Europe, of course, hunting had long been a militarized zone between the notables and the obscure – the rustic could not, legally, hunt. But such laws were as good as their enforcement, which was often ad hoc, and always corruptible.

My sense of the numerous small, seemingly discrete shifts in attitude and use that made the world, or nature, an object of use for “man” is not backgrounded by a nostalgic attitude attached to medieval common lands or the like. It is backgrounded, mostly, by the dream of Carpenter Shih, and similar moments in which the tears and breaks in the historical picture – in the canvas we think we know – let in unexepected lights, a steady small time dazzle. The knowledge that the intellectual history of the pre-modern is found as much in the thick underbrush of superstition, story and custom, protests to authority, letters, drawings, songs, as in philosophy or the writings of the Great Tradition.

When Marx saw that the forest laws around Koln were changing due to the pressure generated not within the state, but of powerful economic actors, he had the insight that this was a clue – a clue in a forest, a very Maerchen clue – to the changes wrought by the system of capitalism.

A similar change in forest customs swept through France in 1669, when Colbert reformed the laws on Eaux et Forets.

La Fontaine’s father had made his fortune, such as it was, as the superintendent of Eaux et Forets in Château-Thierry. Between the time of Francis I and King Louis XIV, the system of the masters of the forest – which rewarded the masters with a portion of the chopped down timber, as well as other lucrative rights – and regulations that had allowed for clearcutting regardless of the nature of the forest – had brought the forests of France into a sad state. Colbert, Louis’s minister, wanted oaks for the navy and reorganized the system. In this reorganization, communities and peasants lost out – as did the old, Falstaffian core of masters of the waters and woods. La Fontaine was one of them. By this time he was in his father’s post as Master of the waters and woods. In this position, he received a severe letter from Colbert on August 7, 1666, asking for an account of the wood being taken out of the wood for fuel and the ‘infinity of malversations’ happening in the forest. The tone was peremptory, and showed no sense at all that La Fontaine was anything more than a lazy, stupid, wayward servant of the King. And on all accounts, La Fontaine sold wood and took his share without much regard for the forest. Plus, like a good poet, he was perpetually on the run from creditors.
TBC

Travelling through the republic of wolves: Dom Juan and Little Red Riding Hood

Contra Deleuze, I am more interested in the tree than the rhizome, the tree that my ape ancestors climbed, and that my hominid ancestors, in Europe, worshipped, chopped down, feared when there was a mass of them stretching for hundreds of miles across the country, and went across the globe to encounter, Paul Bunyan axe in hand, on the shores of the New World. I myself, as a boy, was an ardent climber of trees. The bark that would come away, the ants you would find, the life of the thing, hiding in the top branches. I like to think that the way I misread the story of Fontenelle in the forested park at Mésangère is a deeper sign of the times: that Fontenelle, in explaining to Madame de la Mésangère the orbits of the planets, carved their figures into her beech trees. Not rhetorical figures.

Of course, the tenuous connection of friendship and family, the linking of one Rouennais to another, doesn’t quite explain or justify my sense that l’esprit geometrique and the Perrault’s tales, or the tale of Beauty and the Beast, form a dialectically joined complex.

And what are those tales? I want to go deeper in the woods with this question. Those who pursue literature, or intellectual history, seem to be going down a different track from those who pursue folklore, or ethnography. I like it when those tracks merge, or when you can’t tell if they have or not.

Jean Perrot makes a case, in his essay, L’appropriation et le jeu avec le conte, ou pourquoi
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge? that Perrault’s tale was overdetermined not only in being a mixture of the servant or peasant’s old tale and the courtly overlay, but, Perrot claims, also as a sort of suggestion that arose from Perrault’s rivalry with, and admiration for, La Fontaine. The latter was Boileau’s friend and thus would have been Perrault’s enemy, theoretically, in the battle between the ancients and the moders. Perrot’s case rests on a reading of the extraordinary travel letters that La Fontaine sent his wife in 1663, when he accompanied her uncle, Jacques Jennart, into internal exile in Limoge.

Perrot points to a parallel – a possible appropriation – between certain features of those letters and Perrault’s tale, which was published in 1697. The letters are Perrot’s third “tableaux”, pictures of situations that are not proofs, but suggestions. For Perrot, like Perrault’s heroine, does go down a trail of suggestions:

“Accompanying the uncle of his wife, exiled in Limousin, La Fontaine exhibits his impressions of the journey to his spouse in letters dated from 25 August to 19 September 1663. Significantly, he is going to cross the landscapes of Nivernais, the same in which Paul Delarue has gathered the popular version of Little Red Riding Hood. His confidences, which are far from being confessions and which participate more in the exchanges between Valmont and Merteuil, allow us to see a pronounced taste for the observation of pretty women. In the first letter he writes: “The tell us, among other marvels, that many of the first rank bourgeois women in Limousin wear capes of a dried rose color with hoods of black velour. If I find someone of those capes which cover a pretty head, I could amuse myself in passing, and solely for the sake of curiosity.”

Before I go further into Perrot’s comparison, let me present my own parti pris: I think the letters Perrot cites are much more likely connected to Moliere’s Dom Juan, which was first put on in 1665. As Perrot makes clear, the letters were written to be circulated among La Fontaine’s friends, which would certainly include Moliere and people in his circle. Perrot’s claim I think is a bit tenuous, hanging on that hood. And yet I like the idea that at the source of both Dom Juan and at least part of Little Red Riding Hood stands perhaps the finest, and surely the slyest, French poet of the 17th century.

To go forward, then, a bit with Perrot’s citation of the letters. The letters are written in a prose that often breaks into rhyme. In the first one, La Fontaine praises the woods of a property near Clamart where they stopped to rest, “with the darkness of a ten centuries old forest”. This wood, though, seems to have been very cultivated, and formed part of a landscape with a garden. Going through the alley in the woods, La Fontaine is filled with rococo visions of fauns, and of Pan – a domesticated savagery. The next letter, however, gives us a contrast – for here La Fontaine describes going through the valley of Tréfou. In the coach was a countess, La Fontaine, Jacques Jennart, another woman, and presumably some servants:

I can’t think about that valley of Trefou without trembling,
It is a dangerous passage too,
A site for thieves, for ambushes and to hide
On the left a woods, a mountain on the right side
Between the two
A path very narrow
The mountain is covered
with boulders like those
of our little Domaine.

Even though we were all humans in the coach, we climbed out, in order to relieve the horses. As long as we were on the road, I only talked about the usefulness of war: in effect, if it produces robbers, it occupies them too, which is of great benefit to the entire world – and particularly for me, who naturally feared to meet them. They say that they swarm in the woods we were passing through – this isn’t good. Really, they should burn it down.

Republic of wolves, asylum of brigands
Do you really have to exist in this world?
You favor the evil
By your thick, deep shadows
They cut the throats of he who Themis, or gain,
Or the sightseeing impulse, makes journey from his soil!”

Later, La Fontaine’s party passes into Estampes, which has been sacked in the wars of the Fronde and is still burnt out, although they find lodging. The next day they go through Beauce, and this happens:

“boring countryside, and which, outside of the inclination that I had to sleep, furnished us with a very pretty subject. In order not to go to sleep, we put an argument on the carpet: our countess was the cause, for she is of the Religion, and showed us a book of du Moulin; M. de Chateauneuf (this was the name of the footman) took it up, and told her that her religion was worthless for several reasons. First, Luther had I don’t know how many bastards, the Hugeuenots never go to mass: at last he advised her to convert, if she didn’t want to go to hell: for purgatory was not made for gentlefolk like her. The woman from Poitiers then began on the scripture, and asked for the passage in which Purgatory is mentioned. While all this was going on, the Notary was singing and Mr. Jannart and I were drowsing.”

Finally, there is this passage, which Perrot cites to find a parallel with the wolf in Perrault, and which I will cite for my own purposes – a passage much further on, in the letter written when they were approaching Limoges. Perrault tells his wife about the inn they enjoyed at Bellac:

‘Nothing pleased me as much as the daughter of the innkeeper, a pretty enough young person. I teased her about her coiffure: it was some kind of hood with ear flaps, the cutest thing with a border of gold ribbon about three inches wide. The poor girl, thinking that she was showing off, when to find immediately her ceremonial hood to show me. Once you pass Cavigny, they speak only quasi-French; however, that girl understood me without trying too hard. … As mean as was our niche, I allowed myself a very sweet night. My sleep was not interrupted by dreams as it usually is: however, if Morpheus had brought me the daughter of the innkeeper, I don’t think that I would have sent her back; but he didn’t do it, and so I passed.”

In my hasty researches, I have found nobody who has remarked upon the many elements here that find themselves in Moliere’s Dom Juan. There is, first, the marvelous girl who speaks quasi-French, much like the peasant speech in the play; there is the entrance into a dark forest, a republic of wolves; there is the dispute between the servant and the master – or in this case mistress – about religion. And there is the curious twist in the play, where Dom Juan and Sganarellle are violating a code even more sacred then marriage by fleeing a duel - this is the motivation for the trip through the woods. And yet, in the woods, when they come upon some robbers, Dom Juan shows extraordinary courage. Similarly, the trembling La Fontaine is, after all, accompanying a man in disgrace and writing letters about it that he knows will be read in the highest circles.

I have the highest regard for that play of Moliere’s – higher than most people. La Fontaine and Moliere both frequented circles in which libertine notions – Gassendi’s philosophy, and Epicurus’ – circulated. It is easy for me to believe that Moliere hid some jokes in this play, jokes that La Fontaine would discern. That, twenty years later, Perrault would recall those red hoods – that is, I think, a little harder to swallow. But it does make sense that the Red Riding Hood, La Fontaine, and Dom Juan would be joined together in traversing the wood of the Republic of Wolves. Which gets me, at last, to the woods.

natural kinds and the seven ages of man

In Jacques’ speech in As you like it, he delivers this well known commentary on the seven ages of man:

Jaq All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players
140 They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms
Then the whining school boy with his satchel
And shining morning face creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eye brow. Then a soldier
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard
150 Jealous in honour sudden and quick in quarrel
Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly with good capon lined
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon.
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide 160 For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice
Turning again toward childish treble pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth sans eyes sans taste sans every thing.

The speech has, of course, long ago passed into cliché – and yet if one reads it closely again, it revives in the mind, because it really is brilliantly constructed and creates, in amazingly few words, a panorama reflecting the deep beliefs of the early modern bourgeoisie. It does all this by taking a then common age typology, although not the only one: the ‘seven ages of man.’ One notices that the criteria by which each age is individuated is taken from both nature and the social. In a sense, it is exactly in this form that we classify the negative and positive emotions. The seven ages are not what philosophers would call natural kinds – in that the classificatory scheme that separates and defines one age from another is not generated by ‘natural’ characteristics within the age taxon, but is defined – except in the very beginning and at the end - by characteristics external to the taxon. That externality is what gives the speech its striking and busy visuality – it is as if Jacques were pointing to various tableau vivant. But this externality also insinuates itself into the tableau, reminding us always that it is a tableau of “players”, who are minimally defined by their entrance and exit. This is even true of the infant “Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms”. It is, of course, easier to understand the other theatrical dimension of the other players, because one has the sense that age is represented by the player with an appropriately theatrical consciousness. And that player’s consciousness – which begins at the low level of mewling – ascends, as the tableau succeed one another, to become more and more prominent and frozen, until it returns to the infant’s state of pure play – when the player, an old man, is almost consumed entirely in the thing he plays entirely. It is in this way that the history is strange, or estranging, and eventful without being particularly full of events. The events, too, have their entrances and exits.

The seven ages conception was in competition with other divisions of the life cycle – such as the Three ages – but all responded to the logic of allegory. If there were seven ages, they had to correspond to the seven planets. If there were four, they had to correspond to the four humors. And so on. A conceptual motive articulated itself in this world of allegory: that the world was a unity. It was, every bit of it, created by God.

Yet how much did this unity, this allegorical system, penetrate into the pragmatic age classifications of everyday life? Jacques ‘schoolboy’ was not, of course, recognizable in every household in the Europe of the seventeenth century. The rustic clown, the serf, the lowskilled urban artisan didn’t necessarily go to school at all. To reconfigure the types to represent the clowns would not have been very hard – but did the clowns think in terms of these ages? Shakespeare’s contemporary, Henry Cuffe, in The Differences of The Ages of Mans Life (1607) noted that Aristotle setteth down three ages, each of which is characterized by an endogenous, natural property having to do with our human ‘juices’ – for we are indeed, in this view, trees full of sap, or withered. There’s the green age, man-age, and old-age, in this schema. “For such is the nature and disposition of our body, that by the continual combat and interchangeable dominon of the ever-jarring elements it often changeth its primary constitution.” [Quoted in Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and masculinity, 74) Cuffe was of Bacon’s school, in looking to nature as the root of all things, but nature did include the planets and their evident effects. Thus, he did not finally accept Aristotle’s schema, but came up with one of his own.

I’d contend that the natural kinds of ages do not determine, except at the margins, social age classification – which is indisputable as regards such elements of our natural constitution as, for instance, sex, which is ringed about legally by a tangle of age premises that have little to do with the humors, or planets, or hormones, and much to do with something called consent. It is for this reason that ages have a certain poetry, one which reaches through the entire strange and eventful history of the course of life and shapes such seemingly non-poetic practices as housebuilding and medicine.

Here’s a recommendation from Ficino, writing in the 15th century, in his De Vita:

“Immediately after the age of seventy and sometimes after sixty- three, since the moisture has gradually dried up, the tree of the human body often decays. Then for the first time this human tree must be moistened by a human, youthful liquid in order that it may revive. Therefore choose a young girl who is healthy, beautiful, cheerful, and temperate, and when you are hungry and the Moon is waxing, suck her milk; immediately eat a little powder of sweet fennel properly mixed with sugar. … Careful physicians strive to cure those whom a long bout of hectic fever has consumed, with the liquid of human blood which has distilled at the fire in the practice of sublimation. What then prevents us from sometimes also refreshing by this drink those who have already been in a way consumed by old age? There is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic old women who are popularly called "screech-owls" suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again.1 Why shouldn't our old people, Why shouldn't our old people, namely those who have no [other] recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth? a youth, I say, who is willing, healthy, happy, and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely-opened vein of the left arm…”

This kind of recipe opens a vein of speculation in the puzzled reader. What is being restored, here? As the relation between youth and age is one of the great polarities of the happiness culture within whose mad triumph we stumble on the roads from the artificial paradise today, the social fact of age classifications and relations has to be a great part of the story of modernity.

Kant and Hamann

There’s a story related in Manfred Kuehn’s Kant. When Hamann finally moved back to his native town from Riga – breaking off his engagement with the daughter of the man he was working for, the merchant Behrens – he began to express opinions much different from the enlightened ones that he had left Konigsberg with in 1752. At that time, as he wrote in a letter to his father that he was being driven from the narrow society of Konigsberg because it stymied his ‘freedom to think and to act, our highest privilege.” He was, he said, forced into a “kind of life in which I can grow neither morally nor intellectually,” whereas in the wide world, with cities like Berlin, he could prove himself to his father’s satisfaction.

But he came back to take care of his father’s house with a different sense of what growing in morals and insights meant. This disturbed his friend Kant. When Johann Christoph Berens visited Konigsberg in 1759, Kant and he got together and decided to pay a visit – to make a sort of enlightened intervention – on their friend Hamann. On July 12, Hamann wrote his brother that he and his two friends broke peasant bread at a tavern in a suburb of Konigsberg, “Between us,” Hamann wrote, “our commerce doesn’t have its former familiarity, and we impose upon ourselves the compulsion to avoid all allusion to the same.”

I wonder, given Hamann’s new and ferocious interest in the bible, and in particular, in Job, if he mentally classified these enlightened souls as Job’s comforters.

What had happened to Hamann was simple and complex. He’d gone to London on a mysterious mission for the Berens House in 1757-1758, and not only failed in his mission, but had fallen into an old habit of lounging – Mussigang – and had made friends with a man who, he discovered, to his shock, was being kept as the lover of another, more powerful man. The rumors that reached Hamann had tempted him to open a letter that he’d been entrusted with by his friend – for obscure reasons – and Hamann had read for himself a somewhat obscene love letter. Alone, tormented by – as we know from his memoir of his early life – sexual desires (like Rousseau, Hamann makes a special note, in his memoir, of the boy who taught him how to masturbate), and broke, Hamann sank into one of the funks that seemed to overcome him periodically. Like the protagonist in Hunger, he subsisted on barely a meal a day, plus coffee. Then one night - the 31st of March, 1758 – Hamann opened the book of Genesis and read the story of Cain and Abel. He fell into a revery over the words, “The earth has opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother”

“I felt my heart begin knocking, I heard a voice in the depths sigh and moan, as the voice of blood, as the voice of a slain brother, who wanted vengeance for his blood, when I commenced to stop up my ears against myself and soon did not hear – even as Cain did unsteadily and fleetingly. I felt all at once my heart swell, it poured itself out in tears, and I could no longer – I could no longer conceal from my God that I was the fratricide, the fraticide of his only begotten son. God’s spirit continued to work in spite of my great weakness, in spite of my long resistence, which I had employed up to now against his testimony and contact, revealing more and more to me the secret of divine love and the beneficence of belief in our blessed and only savior.”

That voice from the subterranean depths of London shattered his belief in pre-established harmony, or the advancement of knowledge, and turned him into a resistor, what we would call a reactionary if, in fact, such a call made sense in 1759, with absolutism heralded by enlightenment. Hamann felt himself called to Job’s side – and it is a great historical symbol that he happened to be friends with Kant, and communicated with him even after that failed intervention. He was never going to convince Kant that the world had ever opened up its mouth to him. On the other hand, he was never going to return to any kind of orthodoxy – any church. Hamann, like many disparate figures convinced that they were called to prophecy, fully accepted the consequence of the Enlightenment critique of institutions.

Like a prophet, too, Hamann had a disability – he had some kind of speech impediment. A stammer of some sort. He went to a quack in London to have it healed, but the quack was too ludicrous and too expensive for Hamann’s taste and pocketbook. Instead, Hamann threw that speech disability into his writing, and began a campaign of deliberate obscurity against the lightfilled flow of 18th century writing. In order to redeem prophecy in his time, he thought, he needed to reawaken the prophet’s old weapon of a rhetoric that shook with private, apocalyptic meanings – as though the blood of Abel were being gargled in the mouth of the earth.

Travelers

Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gesture, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
…
‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end the World.’ But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world.” – Pessoa

It is well know that Kant couldn’t be budged. He never saw a city bigger than his Königsberg. His friend, Johann Hamann, did – as did Herder, and Lichtenberg. The philosophe was, usually, a traveler. But in a sense, Kant was one of the great clerks. I admit that it would distort the metaphysics of the Critique of Pure Reason to make it the equivalent of Bartleby’s, I prefer not to – an almost perfect definition of the noumenon! – but there is something definitely going on, here, in the cultural underbrush.

Königsberg was an important city, historically and symbolically, for Prussia. Kant, who like Kafka, later on, loved his travel books, was able, without budging, to experience Russia when the city was occupied for five years during the Seven Years war – a time when Cossacks camped in the countryside and a low intensity struggle broke out in the East Prussian marshes. It was Kurt Stavenhagen who pointed out, in the 40s, the liberation that accompanied Czarin Elizabeth’s troops – in ironic contrast to Friedrich’s enlightened tyranny. Although Kant did not get his wish during this time to be promoted to professor, he apparently enjoyed the company of the Russian officers, along with other townsfolk – Königsberg had a very nice occupation. When it was re-taken, Friedrich refused to step foot in the town.

I don’t have time, today, for more than a quotation. One is Kant’s description of Königsberg from a footnote in the preface to the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. The preface concerns worldly knowledge. Kant could be accused of not having any, never having gotten out into the world. This is his reply.

“A great city, the middle point of a kingdom, in which the landscollegia [offices] of the Government itself are found, which has a university (for the cultivation of sciences) and is as well a port for maritime trade, which flourishes on a river that rises out of the interior of the country as well as with bordering various countries of different languages and custom – such a city, as for example Königsberg on the Pregel, may well be taken as a proper place for the expansion of the knowledge of men as even that of the world; where this, even without traveling, can be gained.”

a Begriffsroman

Begriffsgeschichte begins in genius and ends in banality. Although there are times, sweet, rare times, when that order is reversed.

I’ve been pondering two things, lately. One is Kosellek’s Future’s past, which is a history of how the future was conceived in the past – how the horizon of expectation is construed - as well as a meditation on the whole enterprise of a "history of ideas". I’ve been thinking of how it is possible to elaborate a history of the third life, and how to avoid the mistake into which all fall of conceiving history as a series of heads reading a series of books. This, of course, misconceives both head and book. We are talking about the inspired sensorium, and we end up talking about 'influence'. Improvements on this improbable picture often consist of rather vague references to class, by Marxists - who will happily go back to the heads reading books picture when talking about Hegel's 'influence' on Marx, etc.

And by these stages, by this blindness, the angel of Detail is driven from the City of the Mind.

I want the Angel back.

But this is a desire easier to express than to realize. Which brings me to my other topic: a nest of gentlefolk in Rouen: Pierre Corneille, who lived on Rue de la Pie; the family of his sister, the Fontenelles, headed by a solid bourgeois lawyer, who lived nearby, on Rue de Cordier; the Pascals, who lived on Rue des Murs-Saint-Ouen. The Pascals evacuate for Paris in 1639 – why? Because, apparently, Etienne has been frightened by the violence in the countryside. For one must remember the countryside – and Rouen’s dependence on it, and its fear of it. And one must remember the weather. According to the Histoire Sommaire et Chronologique de la Ville de Rouen, there were some extraordinarily cold seasons from 1630 to 1650 in France. Repeatedly, in the spring, icebergs would be spotted, floating down the Seine. Sometimes they were big enough to break bridges. The crops, of course, suffered under the excessive cold, the flooding, and the wars – the continual wars of the Court, for which money had to be pressed out of somebody’s hide.

However, this is a tale for later. Let us leave it that the Pascals fled a Jacquerie led by a mythological Jean Nuds-Pieds, whose name appeared on a poster that appeared on April 11, 1639, in the town of Saint Lo, proclaiming a new order – or, actually, in peasant style, a return to the old order.

But this nest of gentlefolks extends over time. Taking Fontenelle as my central figure, I can also trace other connections all the way up to Leprince Beaumont, in the 1730s. For instance, the brothers Jacques and Guillaume Scott, who at some point arrive in Rouen (from Scotland? They are, at least, protestant) and start some kind of business. Exactly what that business is remains a mystery – M. Bouquet, who wrote about them in the Journal de Rouen in the 1860s, at first described them as makers and sellers of vinegar. Vinegar was sold by peddlers on foot, in Paris, and presumably in Rouen. The descendents of the family must have found that description not to their taste, so M. Bouquet retracted his statement in a later article. For us, the important thing is that Guillaume grew wealthy enough to buy himself into the nobility. His son married a woman with a famous name: Rambouillet. Marguerite was the daughter of Mme de la Sabliere, whose Hotel Rambouillet hosted a famous literary set in Paris that included, most famously, La Fontaine. She was also interested in philosophy, and a friend made her a book to guide her through the philosophy of Gassendi. We are, we are in the heart of the heart of it all. But the heart is distributed, the heart is here, and then it is here. To the confusion of literary historians since, Mme de la Sabliere was also named Marguerite, which has led to many errors – the Lamartines of history – in accounts about La Fontaine and about Fontenelle. Guillaume, by that time, had bought a property in a small village outside of Rouen, Mésangère, and Marguerite Scott went by the more grandiloquent name of Madame de la Mésangère. Guillaume had the discretion to die when his widow was still young, twenty four, in 1682.

And this happened – we know from a future biography of Fontenelle by Thomas Le Cat, a Rouen doctor who happened to write for a magazine edited by another Rouennaise, Marie LePrince de Beaumont, in the eighteenth century.

Apparently Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle returned to Rouen in the 1680s, after having spent some time trying to make it as a writer in Paris, and lived in his father’s house at the Rue de Cordier – although he could have spent time, as well, in his father’s two houses in the country, in the forest of La Feuillie.

While contemplating his options, the Fontenelle apparently made himself at home in Marguerite de la Mésangère’s house on Rue de Gros-Horloge, which was quite famous in its day. And it is here that he read her the book he was working on – a dialogue concerning astronomy entitled Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes. Her servant happened to be in the room, and at the description of the woman in this dialogue, she smiled. Which disconcerted Marguerite de la Mésangère – she was a widow with a reputation, and did not want to be gossiped about because of Fontenelle’s book. So he changed certain cues in the text – for instance, the color of the female character’s hair. As well as making certain changes to disguise the garden in which the discussion takes place, which was the Parc at Mésangère.

So – in what Begriffsgeschichte is the smile of that chamber maid captured?

There’s more to the story for me. Fontenelle was not a huge fan of the country, and in his essay on the eclogue, he made cutting remarks about the baseness of peasant life. Yet he wrote a few – for Marguerite de la Mésangère – and carved them in her beech trees in the great Parc.

I’ve been thinking of how this must go into my book, and how the only way to include a discourse on astronomy and the smile of a chamber maid and the verses carved into the beech trees of a Normandy estate and the posters of the mysterious Jean Nuds-Pieds and the horrible winters, which were not so horrible, perhaps, to a boy in Rouen, imagine his hand helf firmly in the gloved hand of his father as they both watch repairs being made on the bridge, and the ice skaters on the river, and the warning issued by the Jesuits that school boys were appearing with mysterious sorcery tracts and the rumors of discontent and Fontenelle’s father’s stories of the violence of the Fronde (his brother in law, Pierre Corneille, had taken the King’s side, and been rewarded) is to give myself up to the capacious embrace of a fiction that truly enters the banal and the heavenly, that forges for itself keys, that becomes a Begriffsroman, that feels the looming presence of the forest at the birth of l’esprit geometrique and the long retreat of the woods – not the retreat of the gods, so much as their revolution – during Fontenelle’s long, long life.

La Belle et La Bête

As Sophie Allera points out in her excellent casebook on La Belle et La Bête, editorial scrupulousness has never been a priority among those who publish fairy tales or other matter intended for children. And thus small changes percolate, coming up from under the surface like bubbles in a child’s fizzy drink, evolving new words from misprints, upsetting the rattletrap apparatus of punctuation, and of course suffering from the heavy hand of what is tellable to children and what is not, a set of norms that has changed even in my time. Thus, the story that appeared in La Magasin des enfants in 1756, an apparent transformation, itself, of the beast of the 300 some page baroque novel by Madame de Villeneuve, is not only about metamophosis (and it is in shapeshifting that one encounters at least one of the gods, as I pointed out in my last post), but is its product. What would Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont (who has so disappeared to history, until recently, that you can read accounts in which she is airily described as an aristocrat) have thought about all this? There was an older view of LePrince de Beaumont in which she figured as nearly protestant – after all, Rouen, where she was born, was a stronghold of Jansenism, and she did move to England after annulling her marriage to her husband, a supposedly notorious libertine. She was known in her time for her indefatigable pen – and though, as Restif de la Bretonne pointed out, Voltaire borrowed from La Belle for the ‘denouement d’un de ses plus agreeable ouvrages’ (Le Taureau Blanc), his remarks about her are typically dismissive – he wrote of “one Madame de Beaumont-le-prince who makes a type of catechism for you ladies”.

My last post presented a case for Hermes as the god that Calasso neglects in his mention of the forgetting of the gods in 18th century France, and for dilating a bit on the paradox of the introduction, at the same time, of the modern and the fairy tale, a theme I return to from time to time. Allera writes: “This book proposes simply to show that, as obscurely distant as are the sources of La Belle et la Bête, it was a tale of the Enlightenment, of which the properly literary fortune begin in France under Louis XV, when it knew many printed versions that placed it at the center of aesthetic debates.”

In her comments to my last post, Amie pretty much said what I am going to say here. However, this is Sunday morning, when “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” are allowed – as well as, I suppose, complacencies in the reading of la Belle et la Bête. Take not away my redundancies! For surely, in an easy entretien, they are no crime.

I’ve read somewhere – was it in Barthes? That the eighteenth century was the last time that a writer could put pen to paper and placidly expect to write well. This may be more nostalgic than true – it is certain that the eighteenth century produced enough dull sermons that if you plunged into them, the splendor of the dying l’age classique might seem a bit rusty. However, it is certainly true that Leprince de Beaumont’s story is so beautifully written, in a sort of sweep, that one is hardly aware of it at all. I’ve thought about this even more since watching Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête – which also has a mythic sweep, even though, at every moment, one is aware of Cocteau. In a sense, though - to give Calasso credit – there is a higher awareness of myth as myth in the high modernism of the twentieth century. The ethnography of the last hundred years has been absorbed by the artist. There is a moment of pure plot in the Beaumont version after the merchant has been condemned to death by the beast for stealing a rose (with that marvelous piece of dialogue, that Cocteau retains, in which the beast, responding to the merchant’s plea of monseigneur, pardon me, cries, I am not monseigneur, I am the Beast; I don’t like compliments. Cocteau has the beast repeat this as the merchant forgets himself and calls him monseigneur again – and this, against the background of the beasts of the twentieth century, and so much vain pleading in the prisons of the GPU and the Gestapo, makes absolute sense) – yes, anyway, after that terrific scene, Beaumont backtracks:

“The good man did not plan to sacrifice one of his daughters to this vile beast, but he thought, at least, I will have the pleasure of embracing them one more time. He thus swore to return, and the beast told him he could leave when he wished: but he added, I don’t want you to return home emptyhanded. Return to the room in which you slept, you will find a great empty strongbox, you can put as much as you want into it, I’ll have it brought to you.”

This is an essential plot point – for that strongbox contains the fortune that redeems the merchant and his bad daughters. But Cocteau – as I say, more mythic in this instance - annuls this moment. Rather, the merchant is ordered to depart immediately. And not having any wealth, his daughters do not marry a beautiful man and a man full of esprit – the negative complements of the Beast.

Beaumont’s narrative, here, reaches out to the novel and conte – it is indeed a fairy tale of Enlightenment. Belle, for instance, is a reader – and unlike the prudish Furies of respectability who will later seed fairy tales with sad encouragements to female piety and stupidity by warning girls away from reading, Belle is given to us as a girl who is all the better for her reading. This attaches our story, by that most Marchen-like of bonds, the invisible thread, to Beaumont. According to her biographer, Genevieve Artigas-Menant, in the first issue of the journal that Beaumont edited from London, she commented on herself:

In 1750, at 39, having lived in London for two years, this French woman of Rouen published a monthly journal of forty pages from the printing house of François Changuion, Juvenal’s head, near Fountain Court in the Strand. The announcement that opened the first number in January exhibited a humorous portrait of the “author female” who confesses that she would rather “write a book, including the preface, and even, if it comes to that, a dedicatory epistle, than place a ribbon”, adding: It is my decided incapacity for that sublime science which forced me to go out and find less elevated occupations.”

Already the humorous inflection, which betrays the negative impress of respectability and all its demonic voices, voices more powerful than the beast. Surely Beaumont is in the lineage that extends to Jane Austin and beyond.

But one last remark about the Cocteau version of Beaumont’s story. While in Beaumont, the beast’s animal nature is reflected by the sigh, the rending sigh he gives each time he asks for Belle’s hand, and is refused, the two hundred years that had passed had brought about an understanding of the genius of details. Cocteau takes the animal and gives him animal traits – and it is here that, I must admit, the movie is superior. When the Beast laps up water, and goes on all fours loping across the field – here myth and detail, myth and rationality, are joined. Not for Cocteau a beast who can hoist a glass of wine.

But both versions join together in the end. When the Beast is transformed into a prince, in Beaumont’s tale – as Cocteau notes in his diary of the movie – Belle, for a second, looks around for the beast. It is the beast she has learned to ‘estime’, not this prince. Belle, to the end, is a woman of the soundest instincts.