Repetition in Andreas’s Text

Abstract

In this chapter, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the dialogues, I show that the repetition in Andreas’s text, far from being a flaw or mere convention, is a method Andreas uses to draw the reader’s attention to the problematics of acculturated conformity and its transgression. This chapter is divided into two specific areas of focus: “How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Social Hierarchies” and “How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Religion.” I read the various types of repetition in Andreas’s text as significant for three reasons.

Sed ideo me sciatis in hac parte vos admonere curasse, quia saepius repetita placebunt, maiori soliditate firmantur et attention memoria servantur, ac, quum fuerit opportunum, exercentur.

(1.6.408)

But therefore you must know that I have taken care to advise you in this part, since things most often repeated are eventually approved, become more firmly established and become preserved in the memory more attentively; and, when the opportunity arises, they will be put into practice.

Andreas Capellanus, The Man, Dialogue 8, 408

As a process, signification harbors within itself what the epistemological discourse refers to as “agency.” The rules that govern intelligible identity, i.e., that enable and restrict the intelligible assertion of an “I,” rules that are partially structured along matrices of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, operate through repetition. Indeed, when the subject is said to be constituted, that means simply that the subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity. The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; “agency,” then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition.

J. Butler, 145

Et nonne maius ac laudabilius homini reputatur, si aliquam ex se ipso peroptime artem retineat, quam si earn ex artificio sumpserit alieno? Certe utique est, verum si fateri volueris.

(1.6.175)

Is it not considered a greater thing and more praiseworthy for a man if he possesses an excellent skill from within himself than if he gets it from the craft of another? Certainly it is so, if you want to acknowledge the truth.

Andreas Capellanus, The Man, Dialogue 4, 175