Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture

Freya Sierhuis, Brian Cummings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472413642
• eBook ISBN: 9781317083467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relationship between mind and body and between experience and the senses. Some chapters discuss literature, in studies of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; other essays concentrate on philosophical arguments, both Aristotelian and Galenic models from antiquity, and new mechanistic formations in Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. A powerful sense of paradox emerges in treatments of the passions in the early modern period, also reflected in new literary and philosophical forms in which inwardness was displayed, analysed and studied"the autobiography, the essay, the soliloquy"genres which rewrite the formation of subjectivity. At the same time, the frame of reference moves outwards, from the world of interior states to encounter the passions on a public stage, thus reconnecting literary study with the history of political thought. In between the abstract theory of political ideas and the inward selves of literary history, lies a field of intersections waiting to be explored. The passions, like human nature itself, are infinitely variable, and provoke both literary experimentation and philosophical imagination. Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture thus makes new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the emotions in order to suggest both new models of the self and new models for interdisciplinary history.

PART I
Intersubjectivity, Ethics, Agency

Chapter 1
Passion and Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Literature

Christopher Tilmouth

In recent times, it has become a critical truism that, whatever we understand by the word self now, ‘the self’ did not exist before the late 1600s. Philological, political and semiotic claims all underpin this argument. Philologically, Terence Cave has demonstrated for French, and Nancy Selleck (amongst others) for English, that neither the word self nor its cognates, individual, identity and character, functioned hypostatically (referring to a distinct reified entity) until the late seventeenth century.1 The second, political – that is, Foucauldian cum Althusserian – claim contends that early modern subjectivity2 is imposed from without, interpellated by ideological structures. The consciousness thus formed (however strong its impulse to struggle free) is locked into subjection and so wants genuine autonomy; it wants, too, an inalienable sense of personal identity. In lacking these qualities, such a consciousness falls short of the modern dream of selfhood.3 Catherine Belsey offers a representative instance of the third, semiotic argument. She notes, rightly I think, that the first-person I of a Shakespearean soliloquy can never ‘be fully present in what it says of itself’, and demonstrates, too, that Faustus, Hieronimo and their like adopt a series of fractured, discontinuous voices in striving to signify themselves.4 Consequently, these creations lack that ‘unified’ subjectivity which modern selves allegedly testify to. One might question how many children of Hume and Woolf really envisage their selves as unified, but still the historical claim is broadly true: early modern dramatic agents are fractured beings. However, Belsey elides this observation with the further assertion that Renaissance literature offers scant evidence of individuals imagining their identities as ‘inalienable’, or conceiving of ‘continuous … inviolable interiority’ as essential to their persons.5 ‘Discoveries’ of Renaissance inwardness possessed of these qualities are (we should understand) merely modern impositions upon the text, a response to the semiotic mirage, the reality-effect, of selfhood generated by soliloquies’ first-person idioms.

There is no disputing the first, philological argument here, but its significance is diminished even by Cave when he notes that the progressive replacement of je by moi as a disjunctive pronoun in sixteenth-century French clearly prefigured Pascal’s later, substantive use of moi.6 Cave himself concedes the emergence of a vocabulary for exploring selfhood long before the word itself became reified, and well he might, given that his study centres around Montaigne whose own pronounced use of first-person pronouns Cave discusses. By the same token, Montaigne’s Essais confound my third argument, Belsey’s thesis that continuous interiority is not essential to early modern subjectivity. Montaigne’s whole project is precisely to record the perpetual ‘vient en estre’ of his mind’s inwardness, ‘de penetrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes: de choisir et arrester tant de menus airs de ses agitations’.7 He has a graded sense of what this involves: partly, it is a matter of capturing the fluctuations of moment-by-moment passions and appetites, which together generate a surface inconstancy (witness ‘De l’inconstance de nos actions’); partly, of tracing qualities, once alien, to which one has become habituated (‘Par long usage, cette forme m’est passée en substance, et fortune en nature’8); and partly, of articulating one’s dominant ‘complexion’ or ‘forme maistresse’, which subtends these other phenomena (and indeed ‘lucte contre l’institution et contre la tempeste des passions’) and which Montaigne identifies in his own case as ignorance, a certain intractability, or liberty and laziness.9 These things do not make for a unified subjectivity, but they do comprise a continuously changing interiority which, to Montaigne, is no mere linguistic mirage. He sees in the record of his mind’s ambling movements – even in such trivially emotional actions as playing chess – the means both to discover something of his soul’s nature and, by so delineating it, to make that nature more ‘formé’.10 The Essais’s publication of his manners serves as a rule, ‘un patron au dedans,’ which ‘m’oblige de me tenir en ma route; et à ne desmentir l’image de mes conditions’.11 So in ‘Du repentir’, he sketches the limits of the moral achievement he has found himself capable of in the past, given the particular complexion that nature has given him, and he then takes that – his sense of what is ordinate ‘selon moy’12 – as his moral standard for the future. Here then, in contrast to Belsey, interiority proves both essential to and generative of some sense of self.

As to the middle of the three arguments, the Foucauldian cum Althusserian position, new historicists and cultural materialists have debated, on ideological grounds, how far interpellation actually excluded Renaissance subjects from exercising autonomous agency (and thus discovering an independent sense of identity). However, there are, besides, empirical reasons for questioning Greenblatt’s argument that early modern selves were ‘brought into being by institutional processes’ and so lacked the conviction of ‘inalienable self-possession’ now thought intrinsic to selfhood.13 Greenblatt formulates these claims starkly in discussing the trial of Arnauld du Tilh who, during the 1550s, passed himself off as another peasant, one Martin Guerre (long presumed dead). Du Tilh lived with Guerre’s wife and amongst Guerre’s neighbours for three years before being detected. Greenblatt thinks it notable that, when finally tried, his identity was established by appealing less to the man’s own psychic experience than to opinions amongst the wider community for whom Guerre was an ‘object’, not a subject, ‘placeholder in a complex system of possessions, kinship bonds [and] contractual relationships’.14 In fact, it is surely unsurprising that a public court would resort to just such external measures in its effort to verify identity; what is surprising is how little Greenblatt says here about Renaissance reworkings of Plautus’ Amphitryon. The Comedy of Errors and the interlude, Jacke Jugeler, both stage identity-substitutions similar to du Tilh’s. The comedy in each arises from the fact that the characters do require recognition from those around them in order to maintain their identities; but, paceGreenblatt, they also have a strong sense of unique, inalienable self-possession. As long as these two forces cohere, all is well; when they diverge, it is the inner conviction of identity to which Jenkin Careawaye and Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse hold. Confronted by Jacke Jugler posing as Careawaye, the real Careawaye (like a good Lockian, 120 years avant la lettre) invokes the continuity of his own consciousness – his continuous memories of the day thus far (Jacke Jugeler ll. 499–50715) – to sustain his conviction, ‘The same man that I have ever byne methinkith I am now. | … | For I am sure of this in my mynde, | That I dyd in no place leve myself byhynde’ (ll. 583, 604–5). It is because Jugeler also testifies to these memories and seems to know Careawaye’s otherwise secret wrong-doings, thus appearing to have access to the latter’s private interiority, that Careawaye is spooked into thinking this impostor a devil (l. 553), and then into doubting that he has indeed left himself behind somewhere (ll. 602–3). Antipholus and Dromio, likewise, have a strong enough sense of self-possession that they suppose the Ephesians must all be witches, spirits who, in Antipholus’s phrase, ‘Hath almost made me traitor to myself’ (Comedy of Errors, III. ii. 162).16 These characters seem not to have read their Greenblatt.

Evidently, then, all three arguments insisting upon the difference between modern and early modern selfhood have their shortcomings. Above all, one should doubt any claim that sharply differentiates a fluid, diffuse, somehow incomplete sense of self of the past from a modern subjectivity which is supposedly complete, autarkic and peculiarly adept at fortifying its interiority against incursions from without. No modern actually possesses this unified, reified self, hard and homogeneous like a lump of cheap cheese. Rather, we commonly bear witness to a mixture of Hume’s constantly changing theatre of consciousness and such partial, stabilized self-descriptions as we occasionally muster and cling to. In this, we are not so far from Montaigne. The concentration, therefore, on some alleged condition of lack, some unnatural deficiency, in the Renaissance self is misguided. The real peculiarity that requires explanation is the modern presumption of full self-presence which, though typically taken for granted as an achieved reality, is more often a fantasy, an object of anxious, unfulfilled pursuit. We might best understand this dream of complete, completely independent identity as a corollary of liberal individualism’s atomizing tendency, and as an extension, too, of negative liberty’s ideal of a self absolutely insulated from others. It is an image of selfhood elicited, then, by modern contingencies, not the inevitable last stage in some Whiggish narrative of subjecthood, a supposed perfection which early modern selves regrettably fall short of.

Having contested three, well-established claims about subjectivity, I now turn to a newly emergent thesis which (like Greenblatt’s) locates identity partly outside the individual, but does so in a more persuasive way; indeed, in a way that both reflects contemporary trends in communitarian ethics and challenges the Pocockian assumption that spectatorial consciousness developed only in the eighteenth century. Since 1990 several critics have developed the paradoxical claim that Renaissance selfhood was in some degree vested outside the individual, imagined as located in others’ minds. Inwardness has been reconceived as an experience situated at the boundary between the person and those to whom he relates, within the dialogic domain of intersubjectivity. Edward Burns broached this idea by showing how the ‘interiority’ of Shakespeare’s royals develops in agonistic tension with such fi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I Intersubjectivity, Ethics, Agency
• Part II Embodiment, Cognition, Identity
• Part III Politics, Affects, Friendship
• Part IV Religion, Devotion, Theology
• Part V Philosophy and the Early Modern Passions
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index