BAROQUE BODIES: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CULTURE OF FRENCH ABSOLUTISM

Comparative Literature, Spring 2004 by Conley, Tom

BAROQUE BODIES: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CULTURE OF FRENCH ABSOLUTISM. By Mitchell Greenberg. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. xii, 278 p.

In the middle of Le Pli, a study of the force and impact of Baroque philosophy on modern times, Gilles Deleuze is led to wonder what a body may be. Is it a product of biogenesis, the result of an organic surface, something akin to a paper-like sheet of protoplasm, that turns on itself and eventually develops inner, median, and outer layers? In other words, is it the result of an action exerted on matter that eventually develops into the plants and animals that comprise our world? Is it an abstraction that causes the philosopher to affirm dubiously, "I must have a body, it's a moral necessity, a 'requirement.' And first of all, I must have a body because there's something obscure inside of me. . . ."? (Le Pli 113). Does the body become the very object of thinking? Or, beyond Le Pli and in other of Deleuze's writings, can it be said that the body is a site of force and of virtue or virtuality, in the words of Spinoza, whose very countenance prompts us to ask, "No one knows a body can do" [nous ne savons m me pas ce que peut un corps]? Is it a form where zones of intensity-buccal, anal, and genital for adepts of Freud-define its geography? Does it ever become an entity "without organs," a surface where no single site would have erotic privilege over another?

Deleuze's copious and sensuous writings on the body serve as an epigraph to Mitchell Greenberg's rich study of its baroque and classical counterpart in seventeenth-century France. They include an illustrated study of Francis Bacon, with one of its chapters, on his portraits, titled "The Body, Flesh and the Mind, Becoming-Animal." The chapter begins with the axiom that "[t]he body is the Figure or, rather, the raw material of the Figure. . . . The Body is a Figure, not a structure. Inversely, the Figure, being embodied, is not a face and lacks a face" simply because the portraitist is composing a head of an erotic form that a face would tend to mollify or even conceal.1 No less powerful are the reflections in Mille plateaux, in a chapter that responds to the question of its title, "How Can a Body without Organs be Made?," where Deleuze and co-author Félix Guattari posit that in its ideal state the body would be lacking "a scene, a place, or even a stage on which something would take place. . . . [The body] is neither a space nor within a space, it is matter that occupies space" in direct relation to the intensities it produces. "It is intense and unformed, non-stratified matter" (189). And in cinema, a medium that he takes to be Baroque par excellence, Deleuze argues that thinking-insofar as film inspires and animates cogitation-plunges into the body "to attain the unthought, in other words, life itself."2 As in his other studies, Deleuze thinks the body in ways that are cause for adventure and pleasure. Returning to Spinoza's dictum in reflecting on how the body is not an obstacle to reflection, in L 'Imagetemps he speculates that "to think [penser] is to learn what a non-thinking body can do, its capacity, its attitudes, or postures. It is by the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema knots its nuptials with the mind, with thought" (246).

The body is omnipresent in Deleuze's work in the areas he calls Baroque. For Greenberg, on the other hand, the body is not instrumental for the possibility of becoming or for multifarious reflections on the relations of form to sensation. Rather, the body is what disappears from the classical world. In the France described in Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism the body is a site of anxiety, fear, and even nightmare. Far from being sensuous or of untold virtue, as it might be in Spinoza's Ethics, here it is forever exorcised and chastised. Like the language of the mannerist poet Philippe Desportes that Malherbe scorned for its suave and fluid character, the body eventually becomes suppressed under the orthogonal rule of grammar and divine right.

Greenberg sums up the history of the repression of the body in classical France in a concluding chapter that turns on Racine's tour de force, the "récit de Théramène," in which Hippolyte's confidant reports the young warrior's death to his listeners at the end of Phèdre. A monstrous bull, its skin of jaundiced scales dripping with the foam and froth of salty waters, is vomited from the sea and tears its victim to shreds. Hippolyte's dead body amounts to nothing more than "a wound" (uneplaie). Here, "in its bloodied disruption," the baroque body "acts as a pivot careening the Racinian text out of the political equipoise to which oedipal Absolutism tends and plunges it back into a scenario of fanatasmatic [sic] chaos" (p. 255). The parabola of Greenberg's history of the classical body becomes clear.

At the beginning of the classical age, roughly synchronous with the impact of a politics of centralization envisaged by Henri IV that Cardinal Richelieu engineered and put in place under the reign of Louis XIII, the body was taken to be excessive, ugly, and repulsive. When theater became an official art in the reign of Louis XIV, the body could be said to have disappeared from theatrical representation. In its perfection, at the apogee of the age, it was nothing more than a voice. In Phèdre voice becomes the place where nocturnal phantasies commingling sexuality, death, and violence are embodied in verbal images. In Théramène's tale or in the eponymous heroine's vision in Andromaque "the textual voice paints visionary tableaux into which the protagonists gaze at their own projection as a vision, but an unfocusable vision." As if they were observing images of themselves in a film, the protagonists speak in ways that the "voice and the vision become indistinguishable, the one relaying the other, instantaneously transcoding voice into vision, and vision into voice" (p. 256).