Abstract
In the history of Western metaphysics, the dualistic split between mind and body has underwritten numerous claims to superior rationality and political power. The theory of this split has a particularly French history, one that ultimately enabled French colonial discourses of racial superiority.1 In various ways, the historical narration of the mind/body split in aesthetic discourses, such as rhetorical theory, lent considerable force to colonizers’ discriminatory tales. Colonizers described their own bodies as more evolved because they could narrate the progressive detachment of their minds from their material substance. Locating colonized bodies in history consolidated, in turn, the reliance of Western epistemologies on concepts of disembodied reason and emancipatory teleologies. My purpose here, then, is to examine how this bind between narration and metaphysical dualism emerged in the seventeenth century to constitute, literally, a French body politic.2
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Notes
On the constitution of the colonizer’s body by Western discourse, see Londa L. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon, 1993).
On the French resistance to such theorization, see Emily Apter, “French Colonial Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” SubStance, 76–7 (1995): 169–80.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 17.
Marc Fumaroli, Le Genre des genres littéraires français: la conversation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); also published in Trois Institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 111–210.
Hélène Merlin, “L’Esprit de la langue,” in L’Esprit en France au XVIIe siècle, ed. François Lagarde (Paris and Seattle: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1997), 29–51, at 51. This and subsequent translations are mine, unless noted otherwise.
Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don fuan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 94.
J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Benjamin Stora, Le Transfert de mémoire: De l’Algérie française au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: Découverte, 1999).
See Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London: Routledge, 1997).
On Descartes as a cultural icon, see François Azouvi, “Descartes,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, dir. P. Nora, ed. L. D. Kritzman, trans. A. Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3: 483–522.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Transformation of a Bourgeois Category, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
Hélène Merlin, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994).
William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972);
Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
La Raison d’État: Politique et rationalité, ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992);
Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Raison et déraison d’État, ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994);
Michel Senellart, Les Arts de Gouverner: Du Régimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
Torquato Accetto, Della Dissimulazione Onesta (Naples: E. Longo, 1641), in Politici e moralisti del Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1930);
Pedro de Rivadeneira, Tratado de la religion y virtudes que debe tener el principe cristiano para gobernar sus estados, in Obras escogidas (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), 2:4. Modern studies include:
Louis Van Delft and Florence Lotterie, “La Notion de ‘dissimulation honnête’ dans la culture classique,” in L’Honnête homme et le dandy, ed. A. Montandon (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), 35–57;
Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “Simulation/dissimulation: Notes sur feinte et occultation, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles,” in Il Vocabolario della République des Lettres, ed. M. Fattori (Firenze: Olschki, 1997), 73–102; “De la Construction des apparences au culte de la transparence: Simulation et dissimulation entre le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle,” Littératures classiques, 34 (1998): 73–102.
Puget de la Serre, Les Maximes politiques de Tacite, ou La Conduite des gens de la cour (1664); on Tacitus in France, see Jacob Soll, “Amelot de la Houssaie and the Tacitean Tradition in France,” Translation and Literature, 6 (1997): 186–202;
J. Rohou, “De la générosité à l’intérêt: une révolution des motivations,” in Caractères et passions au XVIIe siècle, ed. D. Souiller (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires, 1998), 129–48.
Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratifications in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976);
Emanuel Bury “Les Salons à l’époque classique,” in Les Espaces de la civilité, ed. A. Montandon (Mont-de-Marsan: Éditions InterUniversitaires, 1995), 27–39.
Maurice Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté, en France, au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660 (Paris: F.Alcan, 1925);
Jean-Pierre Dens, L’Honnête homme et la critique du goût: esthétique et société au XVIIe siècle (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1981);
Emmanuel Bury, “Civiliser la personne ou instituer le personnage? Les deux versants de la politesse selon les théoriciens français du XVIIe siècle,” in Étiquette et politesse, ed. A. Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines, 1992), 125–38; Littérature et politesse: l’invention de l’honnête homme (1580–1750) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996);
Claude Chantalat, À la Recherche du goût classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992);
Orest Ranum, “Courtesy, Absolutism and the Rise of the French State, 1630–60,” Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980): 426–51.
Antoine Gombauld, Chevalier de Méré, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: F. Roches, 1930), 2: 20.
“Car c’est quelques fois un faible dans la politique d’avoir trop de pénétration et trop de lumière: tant de biais et tant de jours différents dissipent l’esprit et nuisent souvent à l’exécution: le temps d’agir se passe à délibérer,” in Dominique Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène [1671] (Paris: Bossard, 1920), 171–2.
Madeleine de Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Les Conversations [1680] (Amsterdam: 1686); Bouhours, Entretiens, 173–4. Modern references include: Christoph Strosetzki, Rhétorique de la conversation: sa dimension littéraire et linguistique dans la société française du XVIIe siècle, trans. S. Seubert (Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 1984);
Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Fumaroli, Le Genre; “L’Art de la conversation, ou le forum du royaume,” in La Diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 283–320; preface to
L’Art de la conversation, ed. J. Hellegouarc’h (Paris: Dunod, 1997).
Merlin, L’Esprit, 45. On usage: Gilles Declercq, “Usage et bel usage: l’usage de la langue dans Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène du père Bouhours,” Littératures classiques, 28 (1996): 113–36.
Françoise Berlan, “Le Père Bouhours, ou L’Air de la cour dans la langue et le style,” in De la mort de Colbert à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes: Un Monde nouveau, ed. Louise Godard de Donville (Marseille: CMR, 1984), 97–109;
Gilles Declercq, “Bouhours lecteur de Balzac, ou Du Naturel,” Littératures classiques, 33 (1998): 93–113.
Michel Tremblay, Hosanna, suivi de La Duchesse de Langeais (Montréal: Leméac, 1984), 75.
Jean Racine, Athalie, in Théâtre complet, ed. J. Morel and A. Viala (Paris: Gamier, 1980), 713.
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© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
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Blanchard, JV. (2003). Postcolonial Courtiers: Performing French Classicism from Versailles to Nouvelle-France. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_11
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