Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship

From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France

Marc D. Schachter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351874182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing primarily on three early modern French authors, this book explores the erotics and politics of "voluntary servitude" in classical antiquity and the early modern period. These authors-Étienne de La Boétie, Michel de Montaigne, and Marie de Gournay-pursue related inquiries into voluntary servitude and self-control in marriage, friendship, pederasty and politics. Marc Schachter shows how Montaigne's intimate textual relationship with La Boétie provides him the opportunity to honor his beloved friend while transforming many of his ideas. Similarly, Marie de Gournay's editorial voluntary servitude to Montaigne provides her the occasion to authorize her own practice as a woman author and to engage critically with Montaigne's ideas even as she celebrates her friendship with him. Schachter's analyses are pursued particularly through the lens of Michel Foucualt's concept of governmentality which, like voluntary servitude, operates on three interrelated scales: self-control, control in interpersonal relationships, and political control. Schachter argues that thinking about the function of voluntary servitude through the lens of governmentality leads to a more nuanced understanding both of Foucault's late work and of the transformational possibilities offered by friendship and voluntary servitude in early modern France.

Chapter One

Voluntary Servitude and the Politics of Pederasty in Plato's Symposium

And so it was that those benefactors of the state, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, men preeminent for their virtues, were so nurtured by that chaste and lawful love—or call it by some other name than love if you like—and so disciplined, that when we hear men praising what they did, we feel that words are inadequate to the eulogy of their deeds.

(Aeschines, Against Timarchus)¹

Another fallacy is that of the sign, for this argument also is illogical. For instance, if one were to say that those who love one another are useful to States, since the love of Harmodius and Aristogiton overthrew the tyrant Hipparchus.

(Aristotle, Rhetoric)²

In his delightfuly erudite 1923 L’Humanisme et la politique dans le Discours de la Servitude volontaire, Joseph Barrère proposed that the word “έθελοodoυleα” in PPlato’s Symposium was the source for the title of la Boétie’s treatise on voluntary servitude.³ A compound noun composed of the verb ethelô, “to will” or “to wish, and the noun douleia, “slavery,” ethelodouleia was indeed usually translated a “voluntary servitude” during the Renaissance. As Barrère observed, Louis le Roy rendered the Greek word as “servitude volontaire” in his 1558 translation of Plato’s Symposium, and it is translated as “voluntaria servitus” in Henri Estienne’s 1578 edition of Plato’s complete works.⁴ While the first of these was published after the supposed date of composition of the Servitude volontaire and the second after La Boétie’s death, the similarities are suggestive. Indeed, a review of translations of Plato’s Symposium from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century shows that ethelodouleia was consistently translated by cognates of “voluntary servitude.” The first Latin translation of Plato’s complete works, Marsilio Ficino’s extremely influential 1484 Opera Platonis, renders ethelodouleia as “uoluntaria seruitus.”⁵ Whether by influence or fortune, and a perusal of the texts suggests influence, subsequent Latin translations are similar. Italian and French versions also follow the latin precedent. Hercole Barbarasa’s 1544 italian translation of Ficino’s Latin renders “uoluntaria seruitus” as “voluntaria servitu,” as does Dardi Bembo’s 1601 translation of the Greek.⁶ Moreover, period dictionaries translate ethelodouleia with cognates of voluntary servitude and give the Symposium as the witness for the term when they offer one. Both Jean Crespin’s 1566 Lexicon Græcolatinum and the 1572 edition of Guillaume Budé’s Greek–Latin dictionary define “Εθελοδουλία" [sic] as “voluntaria seruitus” and note that the word is found in Plato’s Symposium.⁷ The sixteenth-century Thesaurus Græcæ linguæ, a work of prodigious scholarship directed by Henri Estienne and also published in 1572, does not have an entry for ethelodouleia. It does, however, contain a long discussion of related words under the heading “Ε'θελόδουλος," which is defined as “Voluntarius seruus, qui sponte sua se alii mancipat” (“A willing slave, who of his own volition enslaves himself to another”).⁸

Given this philological evidence, Barrère’s suggestion that there is a connection between La Boétie’s Servitude volontaire and the Symposium’s ethelodouleia would seem plausible. At least as framed by him, however, it also poses problems, for there is a striking incongruity between the attitudes towards voluntary servitude in the two texts. As François Rigolot has noted, “the expression ‘voluntary servitude’ is twice found” in Louis le Roy’s translation of Plato’s Symposium “with a positive meaning completely opposite to that of La Boétie.”⁹ I propose that this incongruity merits sustained attention less because it mitigates against the possibility of such a connection than because it can help us better understand how the two texts exploit abiding instabilities in the discursive relationship among friendship, pederasty and liberty. I begin to explore these instabilities below, considering the Symposium and the Servitude volontaire as well as three other texts that help clarify the stakes of my exploration: Plutarch’s Erotikos, Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship and Richard Mohr’s Gay Ideas. First, however, I briefly address some other possible classical antecedents for La Boétie’s concept of voluntary servitude to give a fuller sense of the wide circulation and semantic range of the expression.

While there is a demonstrable association in the Renaissance between Latin and romance language cognates of “voluntary servitude” and the Greek word of ethelodouleia, particularly in its Platonic attestation, it would be imprudent to insist that La Boétie’s use of the expression “servitude volontaire” was necessarily inspired by a specific classical referent. The word ethelodouleia appears in numerous contexts, and Barrère is not the only scholar to propose classical antecedents for the expression. Henri Weber suggested a philosophical work by Lucian, the Nigrinus, as La Boétie’s source. In the Nigrinus, ethelodouleia describes how the poor enable the tyranny of the rich by fawning over them.¹⁰ In his edition of the Servitude volontaire, Malcolm Smith proposes Seneca’s On the Brevity of Life, in which men’s voluntary servitude to their lords is listed among other distractions that keep them from appropriately using and appreciating life.¹¹ As noted in the introduction, the word also appears in Philo of Alexandria’s On Drunkenness, where it describes men’s willing submission to their own base desires.¹² During a critique of democracy in Plato’s Republic, Socrates uses the word ethelodoulos, or voluntary slave, while ventriloquizing the opinions of those partisans of “liberty” who wrongly condemn rightful obedience to a city’s leaders.¹³ In “De l’institution des enfants,” Montaigne himself suggests that a Plutarch text might have inspired La Boétie:

(b)Comme se sien mot [=de Plutarque], que les habitans d’Asie seruoient à un seul, pour ne sçavoir prononcer une seule sillabe, qui est Non, donna peut estre la matiere et l’occasion à la Boitie de sa Servitude Volontaire. (I: xxvi, 156)

(b)Just as that remark of his [=Plutarch’s], that the inhabitants of Asia served one single man because they could not pronounce one single syllable, which is no, may have given the matter and the impulsion to La Boétie for his Voluntary Servitude. (115, translation slightly modified)

The Plutarch text alluded to by Montaigne here is περὶ δυσωπίας, sometimes known by its Latin title De vitiosa verecundia and usually translated into English as On Compliancy.¹⁴ I will return to this suggestion in the Conclusion.

Two additional, heretofore unidentified, potential sources also merit mention here: Dio Cassius’ History of Rome and Cicero’s Philippicæ. Dio Cassius uses forms of “ἐθελοδουλεία" four times, the most relevant appearing in a passage from the forty-fifth chapter of the History recounting “L’oraison de Cicero contre Anthoine” (“Cicero’s speech against Anthony”). In this passage, Cicero laments Anthony’s ability to seduce the senate into compliance with his imperial plans:

Et n’est ce vng vitupere que noz antecesseurs lesquelz estoyent nez en seruitude desirerent de se faire liberes, mais nous qui sommes nourris en equalite de loy, maintenant voluntairement vueillions seruir [ἐθελοδυλήσαί]? & que moult voluntiers soyons deliurez de la monarchie de Cesar? combien que de luy eussions receu maintz benefices, & vueillons de nostre libere volunté eslire Anthoine pour seigneur, lequel est de tant pire que Cesar de quant bien qu’il fust tousiours vainqueur es batailles neantmoins pardonna à plusieurs: mais cestuy cy auant qu’il eust aucun pouoir occist trois cens hommes d’armes, & entre eulx aucuns Centurions qui n’auoyent aucunement failly: & ce feist en la propre maison & en la presence de sa femme comme qu’il la desirast encores rassasier de sang humain. Et depuis qu’il à esté si cruel contre ceulx ausquelz pour lors se deuoit monstrer beniuole, pensez de quelle cruaulté il vsera en nostre endroict si d’aduenture il obtient la victoire.¹⁵

And is it not a disgrace that our ancestors who were born in servitude desired to free themselves, whereas we who are nourished under the equality of the law now voluntarily desire to serve? We who were so deliberately delivered from the monarchy of Caesar? And this despite the fact that we often received numerous benefits from him, whereas now we wish with our own free will to elect Antony for lord, who is worse than Caesar insofar as Caesar, who was always victorious in war, nonetheless pardoned many; but this one, before he had any power, killed three hundred men at arms, among them some centurions who had in no way failed, and this in his own house and in the presence of his wife, as if he desired to further satiate her with human blood. And since he was so cruel against those towards whom he should have shown himself benevolent, imagine what cruelty he would use here with us if perchance he should obtain victory.

The invocation of ancestors born in slavery who nevertheless desired to liberate themselves serves to emphasize the cowardice of Cicero’s contemporaries, born in liberty but choosing servitude. This use of ethelodouleia, here in a verbal form, is close to the sense of the word found in La Boétie’s Servitude volontaire, particularly given the accent placed on its shameful nature.

Dio Cassius’ account of “Cicero’s speech against Anthony,” composed around 200 C .E ., reprises the first in a series of speeches by Cicero known as the Philippicæ. Cicero wrote the speeches and, with the exception of the second, presented them to the Roman senate in his unsuccessful attempt to reestablish republican rule in Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar. As a consequence, he was assassinated by partisans of Marc Antony. In the first Philippic, the phrase “voluntary servitude” is used with striking effect: “quæ, malum, est ista voluntaria servitus” (“What, o woe! is this voluntary slavery”)?¹⁶ Cicero bemoans the senate’s refusal to support a motion by his old enemy, L. Calpurnius Piso Cæsoninus, aimed at resisting Marc Antony’s bid for power. The derisive, astonished tone of Cicero’s rhetoric here is strikingly similar to that of La Boétie in the Servitude volontaire. Consonant with the contention that La Boétie’s Servitude volontaire indicts the participation of the French aristocracy in its own disfranchisement as the monarchy consolidated its powers and privileges during the middle of the sixteenth century (an argument briefly taken up in the next chapter), the presence of “voluntaria servitus” in a speech protesting the complicity of the senate in its own disfranchisement is the most obviously relevant potential source for La Boétie’s “servitude volontaire.”

These various attestations of “voluntary servitude” show how the concept could be used across different scales of power, ranging from the question of self-control evoked by Philo of Alexandria and the class dynamics explored by Lucian to Cicero’s condemnation of the cowardly submission of the senate and Plutarch’s evocation of the timidity of a people. That said, given that sixteenth-century Greek dictionaries present the Symposium as the witness for ethelodouleia when they offer one, it does seem a privileged source for “voluntary servitude,” one that would have been likely to inflect Renaissance understandings of the concept even if it did not determine them. These other possible sources do not therefore necessarily void Barrère’s assertion that La Boétie’s concept of “servitude volontaire” refers to the concept of ethelodouleia as it is developed in Plato’s Symposium. Nevertheless, it remains problematic, for reasons I will now discuss.

Problematic, but productively so, for a consideration of why the attestation of ethelodouleia in the Symposium does not in fact offer a fitting antecedent for “servitude volontaire” proves revealing of La Boétie’s strategies for condemning voluntary servitude. According to Barrère,

Plato teaches that servitude and friendship are two inseparable ideas. In the Symposium, the illustrious philosopher declares that while there are friendships that are degrading because they end in a veritable state of subjection, there is one, founded on the cult of virtue and the desire to be better. This friendship, this voluntary submission, this Εθελοδουεία, is not in the least reprehensible, quite to the contrary.¹⁷

This evocation of a salutary voluntary servitude is drawn from the following passage in Plato’s Symposium:

μία δὴ λείπεται τῷ ἡμετέρῳ νόμῳ ὁδός, εἰ μέλλει καλῶς χ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Texts and Translations
• Introduction: Voluntary Servitude, Governmentality and the Care of the Self
• 1 Voluntary Servitude and the Politics of Pederasty in Plato's Symposium
• 2 Critique and Governmentality in La Boétie's Mesnagerie de Xenophon and Servitude volontaire
• 3 Montaigne's "Voluntary Liberty" and the Politics of Friendship
• 4 Friendly Usurpations: Gournay and Montaigne
• 5 The Erotics of Friendship and the Politics of Love
• A Conclusion in Three Parts: The Art of Voluntary Inservitude
• Bibliography
• Index