The linguistic turn of the english renaissance: a lacanian perspective 1st edition zisser 2024 scrib
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The English Language A Linguistic History 3rd Edition
The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance: A Lacanian Perspective examines a selection of cultural phenomena of the English Renaissance, all of which include a focus on language, from a Lacanian perspective.
The book examines four inter-related cultural symptoms of the English Renaissance: the paucity of painting, the interest in rhetoric, the emergence of a literary style focusing on form and a fascination with the myth of Orpheus. The book argues that the English Renaissance, an apex of rhetorical theory, can offer psychoanalysis further knowledge concerning the intrication of language and flesh, especially where feminine jouissance is at stake. These languagecentred phenomena emerge against the backdrop of a peculiar configuration of the visual field, which in contrast to other cultures of the European Renaissance is largely barren of painting other than portraiture.
The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, scholars of Renaissance culture and those interested in the psychoanalytic study of culture.
Shirley Zisser practices Lacanian psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is a Full Professor and former Chair of English at Tel Aviv University. Her publications include Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint: Suffering Ecstasy, Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis(with Efrat Biberman), and Writing,SpeechandFlesh
in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology (both Routledge).
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The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance: A Lacanian Perspective
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The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance
A Lacanian Perspective
Shirley Zisser
First published 2024 by Routledge
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ISBN: 9781032490625 (hbk)
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ISBN: 9781003392040 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003392040
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Acknowledgements
Introduction
Overture: The Other Side of the Renaissance Image
1 Rhetoric
2 Euphues
3 Orpheus
Glossary
Index
Acknowledgements
This is a project whose roots extend back many years. It tracks a personal trajectory from the study of English Renaissance rhetoric and poetics through a formation in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I would like to thank the individuals who were present for me along the circuitous path this book traces. Dr. Zafra Dan read the chapters as I wrote them and offered erudite and wise commentary as well as support. Dr. Tamar Gerstenhaber was always there with brilliant comments. Prof. Efrat Biberman has been my constant and faithful companion in the study of the texts of Freud and Lacan for many years. Thanks are due to my analysts for different ways of holding me accountable for my words and my analysands, for teaching me about the intrications of language and jouissance. My most heartfelt thanks as always are due to my husband, Eyal Zisser, for making my work, and so much else, possible.
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003392040-1
The Arte of English Poesie, a rhetorical treatise of the English Renaissance, offers a definition of poetry starting not from its formal properties but from its relation to jouissance. “Speech by meeter,” its author, George Puttenham, asserts is a kind of vtterance … more delicate to the eare then prose is, because it is more currant and slipper vpon the tongue, and withal tunable and melodious, as a kind of Musicke, and therfore may be tearmed a musicall speech or vtterance, which cannot but please the hearer very well.1
“Where it speaks, it enjoys (Làoùça parle,çajouit),” Lacan would say centuries later, in Encore.2 The utterance of poetic speech slips upon the tongue smoothly, “currant” as a running (French courant) current of words, sweet to the palate as currants. An object of oral jouissance to the speaker, poetic speech proffers aural jouissance to the recipient, whom it “please[s] very well” by virtue of its quality of being “delicate to the eare.”
In celebrating the jouissance value of poetic speech, Puttenham exploits the polysemic resources of English lalangue,a conglomerate where multiple languages – Anglo-Saxon, French, Celtic and others –coalesce to generate equivoques (for instance, “courant” and “current”) that are a hallmark of unconscious discourse. The irregularity of spelling in sixteenth-century England, where orthography colludes with homophony, enabling the signifier “currant,” for instance, to be read at once as the French for
“running” [courant], as the flowing of a current and as the name of a dried fruit, Corinthian raisin, exponentially increases the English language’s polysemic potential, its status as lalangue profferring satisfaction to both tongue and ear, granting literal resonance to Lacan’s insistence, in his late teaching, on the collocation of speech and enjoyment.
And yet in his 22nd seminar, R.S.I., Lacan, freshly back from a trip to London, declares the English lalangue poses an obstacle and is resistant to the unconscious.3 While this statement has been read as gesturing towards the unanalysability of the English,4 one would do well to recall not only Lacan’s incessant recourse to English-language sources, literary and philosophical, from Edgar Allan Poe to Jeremy Bentham,5 but the function Freud accorded resistance in the operation of the unconscious. Resistance, for Freud, is a resource for the transference. “Only when the resistance is at its height,” he writes in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” “can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance.”6 This is because for Freud, from early on in his work, resistance is a condition for writing. In the Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895, Freud postulates the existence of portions of the speaking organism he calls “ψ neurons” which “afford the possibility of representing memory” precisely because they are “impermeable,” that is, “loaded with resistance and holding back Qή.”7 As a consequence of this resistance, the quantum of psychic energy passing through those portions of the organism does not leave them unaltered, as is the case with the permeable, “ϕ neurons,” but frays them, leaving a trace behind that would become the memory trace or representation [Vorstellung], what Lacan, following Saussure, would come to call the unconscious signifier.8 Resistance as a precondition for writing operates in the transference as well, for it is there that instinctual impulses as precipitates of psychic quantum which would otherwise be opaque become legible as transference phenomena, for instance, the typically hysteric falling in love with the analyst.9 The hindrance to psychoanalytic work that resistance
provokes is thus not a blockage but a productive obstacle which functions as a condition of legibility. Thus if the English lalangue is resistant to the unconscious, what this means is that in the friction between this lalangue and unconscious mechanisms there is much that might give itself to be read.
The possibility of texts written in English to serve as productive obstacles for the generation of knowledge for psychoanalysis is confirmed at several points of Lacan’s work. It is works of literature written in English through which Lacan stages his metapsychology at two landmarks of his teaching: the Écrits, whose opening note is a seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” demonstrating the vicissitudes of the signifier in the unconscious,10 and the 23rd seminar, The Sinthome, where the works of James Joyce make possible the development of a radically new metapsychology wherein a fourth register, made of the debris of the other three, provides the source material for a singular invention that knots the otherwise disparate registers together.11 English literature, then, serves Lacan simultaneously as a source from which metapsychology may be deduced and a scene on which metapsychology upon its consequences for clinical practice may be staged. Interspersed in Lacan’s teaching between the early reference to Poe and the late reference to Joyce are references to the golden standard of English literature – the works of William Shakespeare, in particular, in the sixth seminar, where Hamlet becomes for Lacan a turning plate displaying the different facets of neurosis.12 The obstacle that English lalangue poses to psychoanalysis, then, was a productive one for Lacan, one that led as far as the formulation of a new metapsychology and a new clinical technique, focused on the sinthome. What I would like to suggest in this book is that English culture of Shakespeare’s time, which included a marked engagement with the question of the subject’s relation with the signifier which is a crucial and perennial concern of psychoanalysis, is a nexus where this obstacle may be made no less productive.
The cultural products of the English Renaissance bear witness to a historical moment which similarly to the apotheosis of courtly love
poetry Lacan dwells on in the Ethicsseminar13 touches upon crucial problems of psychoanalysis. For the English Renaissance evinces an interest in language unparalleled in English culture before and since. This interest is especially focused on language’s capacity to morph into multiple forms of the binding and unbinding of signifiers, provide aural pleasure, create effects of beauty, trigger affect. It is as such that the English Renaissance constitutes a resource for psychoanalytic knowledge. It is as such that this book enlists cultural productions of this epoch, in order to try and return to psychoanalysis with knowledge concerning enigmas that always remain on its side.
What makes the linguistic turn of the English Renaissance a productive resource for psychoanalysis – a treasury or storehouse, to use a term Renaissance humanists favoured for compendia of rhetorical examples and which Lacan resonated via Saussure – is the richness of its texture where the question of man’s relation to the signifier is concerned. Far from being manifest only in linguistic theory, which in this case takes the form of treatises on rhetoric, the linguistic turn of the English Renaissance includes three other salient features from which psychoanalysis might turn a profit of knowledge. One of these is a curious absence in the sphere of visual art, which accentuates the period’s focus on the pleasures of language. Another is the emergence of several strikingly selfreflexive literary texts combining a euphonic style termed “Euphuism” effected by antitheses, alliterations, isocolons and erotemas, so foregrounded as to eclipse sense and thus manifesting what Viktor Shklovsky would theorize centuries later as the hallmark of the literary,14 with a title including a reference to Euphues,15 a character introduced by John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and EuphuesandhisEngland (1580) but conspicuous by its absence from their storylines. The final cultural phenomenon that makes the Elizabethan age of interest to psychoanalysis is a productive screening of the Oedipus myth. In the English Renaissance, a culture retroactively named for its return to classical sources, the myth of Oedipus is almost completely absent from
manifest cultural production. Instead, the period is incessantly preoccupied by the myth of a protagonist renown neither for his hysteroformic curiosity, nor for his anagnorisic insistence on truth, what psychoanalyst André Green calls his having “one eye too many,”16 nor for the passionate excesses of which he at first knows nothing, but for his skill with melody and words: Orpheus, whose near homophony with Euphues may not have escaped the savoirlire of early modern English humanists. It is to the sketching of these phenomena and the outlining of their productivity for psychoanalysis that the chapters of this book are dedicated.
Each chapter of the book considers a cultural symptom of the English Renaissance from the vantage point of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The overture considers the peculiar configuration of the visual field in the English Renaissance, rife with portraits of the queen and her courtiers but otherwise largely barren of painting. Turning to poetic engagements with the visual field which evince an uneasy relation to the scopic, the overture shows how in the English Renaissance the visual image was rendered almost redundant by an investment in the aural contours of words as major sites of organizing repressions. Thus eclipsing the seen, English Renaissance culture created conditions strikingly similar to those of the psychoanalytic treatment of the neuroses, in which the couch serves to neutralize the visual register, turning the clinic into a resonance chamber where the unconscious may be auditivated and read. To use the words of Stephen Whitworth, English Renaissance culture beckons us to “close our eyes so that we might awaken to the sound of a somniloquy,”17 one of the forms wherein the unconscious speaks and jouissance asserts itself as a wish fulfilled.
The following three chapters consider linguistic phenomena of the English Renaissance accentuated by the darkening of its visual scene: the abundance of linguistic theory, manifest in the publication of rhetorical treatises celebrating the pleasures of the ear, the emergence of a literary genre – Euphuism – whose true protagonist is its style, where auricular figures eclipsing sense set the tone and the repression of the Oedipus myth by a myth Lacan was to
designate as profiling the figure of the psychoanalyst – that of Orpheus.18 The first of these chapters considers the psychoanalytical stakes of Renaissance rhetoric, where a nomothetic impulse evincing a phallic logic is offset by a foregrounding of auricular figures beyond sense, beyond the phallus, yielding a structure subtended by two incompatible economies, coeval with the structure of the feminine unconscious as theorized by psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay. The second chapter too considers a linguistic phenomenon whose valence is double. It focuses on the literary phenomenon of Euphuism as the English Renaissance equivalent of the Sophism of the ancient world. It reveals Euphuism as a linguistic economy whose gorgianesque, schematic quality generates a jouissance outside sense Lacan would term feminine yet one that is not without an attenuating phallic limit, the limit of the ear, the organ parexcellenceof the analytic cure. The third and final chapter considers the Orpheus myth so ubiquitous in the English Renaissance as repressing substitute and index to the Oedipus myth, almost completely absent from cultural production in early modern England. At work in the Orphic myth as reiterated in the English Renaissance, it finds a totemic logic wherein Orpheus, master of artful combinatories of word and note, paragon of the symbolic, is cannibalized by the Maenads who thus acquire a phallic limit to their feminine fury. In all three cases, the salient features of English Renaissance culture, blossoming against a darkened backdrop wherein eyes are wide shut and sound predominates, reveal a double logic that speaks in the feminine, shuttling between a beyond sense trumping representation and a phallic limit transporting jouissance to the field of the signifier.
Notes
1. Puttenham, G. (1589). The Arte of English Poesie, London: Richard Field, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16420/pg16420.txt, n.p.
2. Lacan, J. (1972–1973). TheSeminarofJacquesLacanBook20: Encore, trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton, 1998, p. 115.
3. Lacan, J. (1974–1975). TheSeminarofJacquesLacanBook22: R.S.I., trans. C. Gallagher from unedited typescripts, lesson of 11.2.1975, www.lacaninireland.com/web/wpcontent/uploads/2010/06/RSI-Complete-With-Diagrams.pdf
4. Cléro, J.-P. (2020). Lacan and the English Language, trans. J. Houis, New York: Agincourt Press, pp. 15–16.
5. Ibid, pp. 20–23.
6. Freud, S. (1914). “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001, 24 Vols., Vol. 12, p. 156.
7. Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud, trans. J. Strachey etal., London: Vintage, 2001, 24 Vols., Vol. 1, p. 300.
8. For a more detailed account of Freud’s theory of unconscious representation see Zisser, S. (2022) Writing,Speech, and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology, London: Routledge.
9. Freud, S. (1915). “Observations on Transference Love,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud, trans. J. Strachey etal., London: Vintage, 2001, 24 Vols., Vol. 12, p. 163.
10. Lacan, J. (1955). “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Écrits, trans. B. Fink etal., New York: Norton, 2006, pp. 6–48.
11. Lacan, J. (1975–1976). TheSeminarofJacquesLacanBook23: TheSinthome,trans. A. Price, Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2016.
12. Lacan, J. (1958–1959). The Seminar ofJacques Lacan Book 6: Desire and its Interpretation, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2019, p. 324.
13. Lacan, J. (1959–1960). The Seminar ofJacques Lacan Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, New York: Norton, 1997, pp. 139–154.
14. Shklovsky, V. (1917). “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism:FourEssays, eds. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reiss, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 3–24.
15. The Greek meaning of the name is “gracefiul” or “witty.”
16. Green, A. (1969). The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. A. Sheridan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
17. Whitworth, S. (1999). “Far from Being: Rhetoric and DreamWork in Dickenson’s ‘Arisbas,’” Exemplaria, 11.1, p. 168.
18. Lacan, J. (1964). The Seminar ofJacques Lacan Book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 25.
References
Cléro, J.-P. (2020). Lacan and the English Language. Trans. J. Houis. New York: Agincourt Press.
Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London: Vintage, 2001. 24 Vols. Vol. 1, pp. 281–391.
———. (1914). “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London: Vintage, 2001. 24 Vols. Vol. 12, pp. 145–156.
———. (1915). “Observations on Transference Love.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London: Vintage, 2001. 24 Vols. Vol. 12, pp. 157–171.
Green, A. (1969). The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy. Trans. A. Sheridan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Lacan, J. (1955). “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Écrits:The FirstCompleteEditioninEnglish. Trans. B. Fink etal. New York: Norton, 2006. pp. 6–48.
———. (1958–1959). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 6: Desire and its Interpretation. Trans. B. Fink. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
———. (1959–1960). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Porter. New York: Norton, 1997.
———. (1964). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998.
———. (1972–1973). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 20: Encore. Trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.
———. (1974–1975). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 22: R.S.I. Trans. C. Gallagher from unedited typescripts. www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/RSIComplete-With-Diagrams.pdf
———. (1975–1976). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 23: TheSinthome.Trans. A. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
Lyly, J. (1578). Euphues:TheAnatomy ofWitandEuphuesand His England. Ed. M. W. Croll and H. Clemons. London: Routledge, 1916.
Puttenham, G. (1589). The Arte of English Poesie. London: Richard Field. www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16420/pg16420.txt Shklovsky, V. (1917). “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism:FourEssays. Eds. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reiss. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 3–24. Whitworth, S. (1999). “Far from Being: Rhetoric and DreamWork in Dickenson’s ‘Arisbas.’” Exemplaria11.1, pp. 167–194. Zisser, S. (2022). Writing, Speech, and Flesh in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology. London: Routledge.
Overture
The Other Side of the Renaissance Image
DOI: 10.4324/9781003392040-2
The culture of the English Renaissance1 was a culture focused on sound, on the pleasure of the ear – in itself enough to commend it as point of interest for psychoanalysis, whose orientation is always already oto-bio-graphical, as it transfers the savoir lire of what is heard, initially on the side of the analyst, to the side of the analysand2 who learns to read the unconsciously inscribed destiny his bios does not cease to write in symptoms and in the speech he emits, thus transforming jouissante iteration into a subjective graphism with which destiny might be written differently. Another cultural symptom of the English Renaissance lends its aural accent even more emphasis. Coming at the heels of the Italian quattrocento whose aesthetic forms (for instance, Petrarchism in poetry, the madrigal in music) it reworks, the English Renaissance is curiously lacking in one of the arts that have made Renaissance Italy famous: painting. Renaissance Italy could boast Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, Botticelli, Correggio and many other painters. It was also the site of the cultural production of an entirely new theory of sight and visual representation, geometrical perspective, by theorists such as Leon Battista Alberti. By contrast, in the idiosyncratic visual style that became distinctive of the Elizabethan aesthetic, “perspective had no place.”3 The cultural production of Renaissance England includes objects d’art appealing to the sight such as miniatures, engravings, frontispieces, woodcuts, emblems and portraits of dignitaries. But other than in portraiture – in
particular of Queen Elizabeth I and her courtiers4 – the age is relatively sparse in what Alberti referred to as “the flower of all the arts”: painting.5 It is perhaps not incidental that the most wellknown painters of the English Renaissance, Anthony Van Dyke, court painter of Charles I, and Hans Holbein the Younger, whose anamorphotic skull in The Ambassadors (1533) plays a major role in Lacan’s theorization of pictorial art in Seminar 116 are not Englishmen. The first was born in the Low Countries and the second was a German who lived two significant portions of his life in England.
Impoverished on the level of painting other than portraiture, English Renaissance culture proffers ekphrases and allusions to painting betraying an uneasy relation to the visual field.7 Shakespeare’s Sonnet24is a case in point
Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled, Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart; My body is the frame wherein ‘tis held, And perspective that is best painter’s art. For through the painter must you see his skill, To find where your true image pictured lies, Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still, That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes. Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done: Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee; Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art, They draw but what they see, know not the heart.8
“And perspective that is best painter’s art” – the line is grammatically awkward; its rhythm jars, iambs smashing into an anapest that has left commentators perplexed. Why does the poem trip itself up when speaking of perspective? Shakespeare’s anapestic declaration alludes to the new geometry-based technique for transposing three-
dimensional objects to two-dimensional representations, and evokes not only Leon Battista Alberti’s specification of the laws of geometrical perspective, but also his celebration of the art of painting as the flower of all the arts. Yet Shakespeare’s speaker proceeds to denigrate this art as wanting in “cunning,” for the eyes on which it depends “draw but what they see, know not the heart” (ll. 4, 14), or perhaps better, (he)art.9 Painting’s “true image pictured lies” not only because, as Lacan frequently notes, truth has the structure of fiction, for no matter what the subject articulates at a given moment of syncopation, of the unconscious folding inside out, something of the unconscious etched onto the subject’s flesh quintessentially escapes the image which constitutively includes something of the specular, hence of captation. In so denigrating perspective, Shakespeare was echoing the ambivalence of contemporary English painters with regard to this new technique, perhaps best summed up in the words of Nicholas Hilliard, one of the age’s prominent miniature portrait painters, who wrote that perspective is a visual optical device that can be deployed “according to the rule of the eye, by falsehood to expresse truth.”10
For Hilliard as for Shakespeare in Sonnet24, perspective lies; it is a deceiving falsehood. This is a view that differs not only from that of the Italian theorists and the painters who turned their theory into pictorial masterpieces, but also from that of Lacan. For Lacan, geometrical perspective, while not exhausting the “original subjectifying relation,”11 does index it by means of its vanishing point which is nothing if not the graphic registration of the particularity of his angle of vision12 and by means of its anamorphotic distortion wherein, as in Holbein’s Ambassadors, the subject may encounter his own castration.13 But for Shakespeare in this sonnet perspective is a (s)kill that kills, damaging subjectivity by stultifying it in the immobile world of the image. Painting for Shakespeare is tanathographic – a qualification resonating the collocation of painting and death in the myth of the invention of painting as told by Pliny the Elder in NaturalHistory.14 The sonnet’s prosodic structure trips on the signifier “perspective” because even
this most advanced technique of painting does not save the visual field from being a site of the death drive, where objects are inanimate, “hang … still” (l. 7).
Another poetic meditation on the deviousness of images can be found in a poem by Richard Crashaw, English Baroque poet of suffering ecstasy and occasional portrait painter, “The Flaming Heart Upon The Book And Picture Of Saint Teresa (As she is usually expressed with a Seraphim beside her)” (1652). The poem begins with an appeal to a modified mode of reading the conventional hagiographic image:
Well meaning readers! you that come as friends And catch the precious name this piece pretends; Make not too much haste to admire That fair-cheeked fallacy of fire. That is a Seraphim, they say And this the great Teresia. Readers, be rul’d by me; and make Here a well-plac’d and wise mistake You must transpose the picture quite, And spell it wrong to read it right; Read him for her, and her for him; And call the saint the Seraphim.15
“You must transpose the picture quite /and spell it wrong to read it right” (ll. 9–10), Crashaw writes of conventional pictorial representations of St. Theresa, whose rapt expression in Bernini’s sculpted portrayal famously served Lacan to exemplify a feminine jouissance defying speech.16 What speech fails to contain the image cannot divulge, Crashaw implies, unless subjected to a “well-plac’d and wise mistake” (l. 8). What the mistake in question pertains to is the common depiction of St. Theresa covered by a veil, and of the angel facing her as holding a dart. “Give him the veil; that he may cover / The red cheeks of a rivall’d lover,” Crashaw asks of his reader; “Give her the dart for it is she” who “sends … a Seraphim at every shot” (ll. 42–44, 47, 54).
The mistake in conventional hagiographic representation, the exchange of dart and wound between St. Theresa and the Seraphim is an exchange on the level of the grammar of the drive. One of the vicissitudes of the drive, Freud writes in “Drives and their Vicissitudes,” is a reversal into the opposite, for instance from activity into passivity: “the active aim (to torture, to look at), is replaced by the passive aim (to be tortured, to be looked at).”17 Freud emphasizes that the primary aim of the drive is active, a thesis that has deep roots in Freudian metapsychology. In the Projectfora ScientificPsychology Freud speaks of the subject’s archaic state of helplessness [hilflosigkeit] which necessitates the turning to an extraneous experienced person so that they might perform a “specific action” that would relieve the subject’s urgency, his needs of life [NotdasLebens].18 Exiting helplessness, a catastrophic state in which the quantum of psychic energy is invested in the psychic apparatus itself, and that is therefore coeval with the intolerable state Freud would later call primary narcissism, depends on diverting psychic energy from the apparatus to an Other who might respond. The most archaic configuration of the drive is thus active, sadistic, while “a primary masochism … seems not to be met with.”19 In “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud reverses or rather refines his view, asserting that “primal sadism is identical with masochism”20 – a phrase to which Crashaw’s poem grants resonance.
“Loves passives are its activ’st part,” Crashaw writes, “the wounded is the wounding heart” (ll. 74–75). In her only seemingly masochistic suffering ecstasy, Theresa wounds the observer affected by her injury. The “mistake” Crashaw asks his readers to make, then, involves the isolation of the grammar of the drive the image portrays and its inversion from passive to active, an operation of reading whose quotient is a wounding wound. That this reading is necessitated in the first place is an effect of a pictorial commonplace, a “fallacy of fire” (l. 4) whose constituting propositions are the contours of an image. As in Shakespeare’s sonnet, visuality is a deceptive locus, where subjective logic is
blurred, recuperable, if at all, only via the inverted logic of the mistake.
John Lyly’s Euphues and Euphues in his England, proto-novels whose ornate style had a marked influence on the literature of sixteenth-century England, include repeated allusions to painting, most of them invoking references, at times spurious, to stories regarding celebrated painters of ancient times from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Lyly’s texts, whose enargaeic, image-evoking dimension is drastically limited to the profit of the foregrounding of a heavily ornate style largely eclipsing image and sense, nevertheless include epistles dedicatory pursuing an extended conceit in which their artistry is compared to that of legendary and mythic imagemakers.21 In the first instance of this conceit, the author invokes a principle of pictorial art attributed to Parrhasius and Apelles, according to which painting is to include a “fault” or “blemish.”22 In the second instance, an expression of modesty attributed to the first painter, Phidias, is invoked in order to assert the ability of an illustrious addressee to transform not the image but its very substrate for the better: “the face of Alexander stamped in copper doth make it current, that the name of Caesar wrought in canvas is esteemed as cambric.”23 But Alexander is precisely the scarred protagonist of the anecdote attributed to Apelles who painted Alexander’s attempt to hide his scar with his finger24 – the purveyor of the blemish onto the substrate of representation upgraded not despite but because of it. The blemish or wound, corporeal mark of jouissance, is endemic to the pain-t(h)ing that does not cover it; index, perhaps, of what is exposed on its reverse side.
In a myth of no known classical source, which is the last instance of the painting conceit in the dedicatory epistles to Lyly’s Euphues texts,25 mythical weaver Arachne responds to criticism regarding colours missing from her tapestry by suggesting that her critic seek them “on the other side of the cloth,” correlative to “the backside of the book”26 and to matters of love which cannot be seen on Venus’s painted face as they are to be found “hanging “at Venus’s back in a budget [purse].”27 What a woman cannot represent but pertains to a
psychic site whose description as a “budget” or container inflects it, in Freud’s terms in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” as a “symbol … of what is essential in woman”28 – is it not what relates to what Freud would qualify as the dark continent of feminine sexuality, beyond the bar? That the unexplorable of feminine sexuality is not given to pictorial representation, to captation in the image, Lyly implies, does not mean that it cannot be discerned in signs that become visible at the point where the image dissolves into its material substrate and scaffolding.
But perhaps the most precise poetic formulation of the duplicitous status of the image in English Renaissance culture occurs in John Donne’s “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.”29 Like Crashaw, Donne enjoins his addressee to read differently
Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
It is the relative darkness of “the year’s midnight” (l. 1), its shortest day, that enables the speaker, though “ruined,” to be paradoxically “rebegot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not” (ll. 17–18). It is in darkness and the blindness paradoxically ascribed to St. Lucy, patron saint of sight, that the speaker experiences a “new alchemy,” a “quintessence even from nothingness” (ll. 13, 15). The relative darkness, then, is one in which the productivity of negativity is underwritten, for its radical reductiveness forces the extraction of an “elixir” (ll. 15, 29) operative only in an obscurity that obliterates the very possibility of the image.
The relative absence of painting other than portraiture from the sphere of art, matched by a scepticism regarding the reliability,
veracity and even possibility of images such as evinced by the literary examples cited above renders the culture of the English Renaissance a site of obscurity in the visual field. How might we read this obscurity psychoanalytically? In his disquisition on the gaze as objetpetitain TheFourFundamentalConceptsofPsychoanalysis Lacan theorizes the gaze as an elusive object that “slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always in some degree eluded.”30 This object that the neurotic subject cannot seize is nevertheless what in the visual field is of the subject and looks back at, sees the subject, as Lacan demonstrates by means of an anecdote of a sardine can floating in the ocean, its surface glittering in the sunlight. Lacan’s fisherman companion amusedly remarks that while Lacan can see the can, the can cannot see him; but Lacan, failing to share his friend’s amusement, remarks that “that which is light looks at me” as a “point of gaze” unsettling iridescence.31 And yet the gaze that unsettles iridescence, mars every jewel, can even, in the field of the psychoses, become persecutory, may nevertheless be pacified. Indeed, its pacification is what is effected in the field of painting. In giving “something for the eye to feed on,” painting invites the person to whom it is presented “to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons.”32 If not pacified nor veiled, the gaze rises, always at least unsettling an iridescence that might be, possibly menacing. But what if it encounters something other than an image that can pacify it?
The possibility of painting without image is suggested by another reference to ancient painters in Lyly’s Euphues texts. In Euphuesand hisEngland, Lyly recounts a scene where Fidus, an old Englishmen, tries to dissuade Euphues from enquiring too much into the workings of the monarchy by telling an anecdote of Alexander and Apelles which does not have a source in Pliny. When Alexander came into Apelles’s shop, Lyly writes, “Apelles placed him at his back; who going to his own work, did not so much as cast an eye back to see Alexander’s devices.” In response to Alexander’s question as to how he could paint his portrait without seeing him, Apelles replies: “‘For Apelles’ shadows are to be seen of Alexander, but not Alexander’s of
Apelles.’”33 If in the myth of the invention of painting as told by Pliny what is painted is not a person but his shadow, trace of his being (always) already lost, in the pseudo-Plinian anecdote fomented by Lyly what is painted is not even the shadow. The painter paints what he does not see, what is veiled from his eye. In another pseudoPlinian anecdote, Parrhasius, vying for Alexander’s patronage is said to have presented him with a canvas whose borders he “trimmed with fresh colours and limned with fine gold, leaving all the other room without knot or line”34 that is, with an empty frame, “a table … not coloured.” It is as empty, not coloured, Lyly adds, that Parrhasius’s canvas invoked “desire.”35 In yet another anecdote, this time one that does have a source in Pliny and is repeated by other authors, including Cicero and, in the Renaissance, Erasmus, Zeuxis is said to have painted Venus from her back so realistically that the painting affected Apelles himself as a trompe l’oeil, as seeing this work, “he wished that Venus would turn her face.”36 In all three cases, what is painted is not what is seen but what isn’t.
What the poets of the Elizabethan age attest to in their ekphrases and allusions to painting, then, is a veiling of the seen which is not the unaestheticizing trap of painting Lacan would speak of but a productive screening wherein what remains operative beyond the image is its psychic and material origin, an imprint. The archaic root of the image, Françoise Dolto writes, is not visual but tactile. Before unifying specularity intervenes, retroactively giving sense to marks on a page or canvas, there is the first drawing—tactile imprint of umbilical cord on palm, a “signifier made flesh,” or “language of the hand,” which remains tacitly operative in any drawn representation.37 The hagiographic tale of Veronica in which the flesh and blood of Christ is imprinted on her cloth38 gives mythic form to drawing as Dolto theorizes it, as in both cases, drawing is an imprint of a body part on a receiving substrate.
In English Renaissance culture, where the paucity of painting makes near blindness prevail, a consequently enhanced gaze encounters not a screening image but, as Donne implies, its quintessence or elixir. This elixir is a fleshly imprint, letter, encounter
of flesh and jouissance, pictogram (visible gramma, letter) which Piera Aulagnier, in a concept broader than Dolto’s because it touches upon an archaic that is less primal, would precise as psychically registered damage of an encounter of erogenous zone and object not entirely cut off from it where both are cut off from word presentation.39 It is such a pictogram, elixir of the letter inscribed on the reverse side of the image that pulsates in and invigorates40 the darkened pictorial space of English Renaissance culture that beckons us to read with the precision such as Freud has taught us to discern in our errors.
The historical conditions that made the English Renaissance downplay the visual register may be various, and certainly include the iconoclasm which was so integral to the Protestantism that swept the age.41 The end result, however, was a largely invocational culture in which the near-blindness indexed by the paucity of painting functioned as a condition for speech and for listening, for auditivation and auscultation. In foregrounding a near blindness in the cultural sphere, the English Renaissance underscores not only the operativity of primal material traces within the image, but, inseparably, the operativity of the near absence of the image in the ascendance of the vocable, which becomes the preferred mode of form-making repressing an unbearable real. The ear, psychoanalyst Michele Montrelay writes, “stops at the fixed forms of words … as though they were contours.”42 It is the ear that is championed in the literature and literary theory of the Elizabethan age, while the eye is invited to repress mainly by means of the perennial phallophany of the Queen. Only in her Rainbow portrait do eyes and ears appear in equal measure as jewels decorating her sumptuous attire. Before the Baroque aesthetic of the Restoration with its visual excesses, the Elizabethan age hovered at the aural contours of words to an extent that rendered the image almost redundant. This repressing hovering on the aural, more than anything else explains the relative absence of painting from Elizabethan England, darkened culture in which repressing form subsisted for the most part in the ear.43
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Onze deugden zijn meestal niets
dan verkapte ondeugden.
I.
Hetgeen wij voor deugd aanzien is dikwijls niets dan een samenloop van verschillende handelingen en van verschillende belangen, die de fortuin of onze ijver weten te regelen; en het is niet altijd uit dapperheid en uit kuischheid dat mannen dapper en vrouwen kuisch zijn.
II.
De eigenliefde is de grootste van alle vleiers.
III.
Welke ontdekkingen men in het land der eigenliefde ook heeft gemaakt, er blijven nog heel wat onbekende landstreken over.
IV.
Eigenliefde is handiger dan de handigste mensch ter wereld.
V.
De duur onzer hartstochten hangt evenmin van ons af als de duur van ons leven.
VI.
Hartstocht maakt dikwijls een zot van den verstandigsten mensch en de zotsten verstandig.
VII.
Groote en schitterende daden, die het oog verblinden, worden door politici voorgesteld als de uitkomsten van groote plannen, terwijl zij gewoonlijk de uitwerking zijn van humeur en hartstochten. Zoo was de oorlog tusschen Augustus en Antonius, dien men toeschrijft aan de eerzucht om zich meesters van de wereld te maken, misschien louter een uitwerking van jaloezie.
VIII.
Hartstochten zijn de eenige redenaars, die altijd overtuigen. Zij zijn als het ware een kracht der natuur, waarvan de regels onfeilbaar zijn, en de eenvoudigste man met hartstocht overtuigt beter dan de welsprekendste, die er van ontbloot is.
IX.
Hartstochten hebben een kant van onrechtvaardigheid en eigenbelang, die het gevaarlijk maakt ze te volgen en waarvoor men zich moet hoeden, zelfs wanneer zij zoo redelijk mogelijk schijnen.
X.
Er is in het menschelijk hart een voortdurende aanwas van hartstochten, dusdanig dat de ondergang van den eenen bijkans altijd de opkomst van een anderen te weeg brengt.
XI.
Hartstochten brengen vaak andere voort, die aan hen tegenovergesteld zijn: gierigheid verwekt soms verkwisting en verkwisting gierigheid; dikwijls is men standvastig uit zwakte en onverschrokken uit bedeesdheid.
XII.
Hoe veel moeite men zich ook geve om zijn hartstochten met den schijn van vroomheid en eer te bedekken, zij blijven altijd achter die sluiers zichtbaar.
XIII.
Onze eigenliefde duldt bezwaarlijker de veroordeeling van onzen smaak dan van onze meeningen.
XIV.
De menschen zijn niet alleen geneigd de herinnering te verliezen aan weldaden en onrecht: zij haten zelfs degenen, die hen verplicht hebben en houden op te haten wie hen beleedigd hebben. De inspanning om het goede te beloonen en zich te wreken wegens het kwade schijnt hun een last, waaraan zij moeite hebben zich te onderwerpen.
XV.
De genade van vorsten is vaak niets dan politiek om de genegenheid der volken te winnen.
XVI.
Die genadigheid, die men voor een deugd laat gelden, bewijst men nu eens uit ijdelheid, soms uit gemakzucht, dikwijls uit vrees, en
bijna altijd uit alle drie te zamen.
XVII.
De gematigdheid der gelukkige menschen komt voort uit de kalmte, die de goede fortuin aan hun gemoedsstemming geeft.
XVIII.
Gematigdheid is een vrees te worden benijd en veracht, zoo als zij verdienen, die verblind worden door hun geluk; zij is een ijdele pronkerij van onze geestkracht, en ten slotte is gematigdheid der hoogstgeplaatste menschen een verlangen grooter te schijnen dan hun goed gesternte.
XIX.
Wij zijn allen sterk genoeg om andermans rampen te dragen.
XX.
De onaandoenlijkheid der wijzen is niet anders dan de kunst van de stormen in hun hart op te sluiten.
XXI.
Ter dood veroordeelden vertoonen somtijds een onaandoenlijkheid en verachting van den dood, die slechts vrees is om hem in het aangezicht te zien; zoodat men kan zeggen dat die onaandoenlijkheid en doodsverachting voor hun geest zijn wat de blinddoek voor hunne oogen is.
XXII.
De philosophie overwint gemakkelijk verleden en toekomstige rampen, maar de tegenwoordige blijven haar de baas.
XXIII.
Weinigen kennen den dood: men aanvaardt hem gewoonlijk niet uit vastberadenheid maar uit domheid en uit gewoonte, en de meeste menschen sterven omdat er niets tegen te doen is.
XXIV.
Wanneer groote mannen zich laten nederdrukken door den langen duur hunner tegenspoeden, toonen zij dat zij die slechts droegen door de kracht hunner eerzucht en niet door die hunner ziel, en dat, op een groote ijdelheid na, helden gelijk zijn aan andere menschen.
XXV.
Men moet grooter deugden bezitten om voorspoed dan om tegenspoed te verdragen.
XXVI.
De zon en den dood kan men niet strak aanzien.
XXVII.
Men pocht soms op hartstochten, zelfs de misdadigste, maar de afgunst, een bedeesde en schuwe hartstocht, wil men nimmer toegeven te bezitten.
XXVIII.
Jaloezie is in zeker opzicht rechtmatig en verstandig, daar zij er slechts naar streeft iets te bewaren, dat ons werkelijk of naar onze meening toebehoort; afgunst daarentegen is een razernij, die het geluk van anderen niet dulden kan.
XXIX.
Het kwade, dat wij doen, bezorgt ons niet zoo veel vervolging en haat als onze goede hoedanigheden. XXX.
Wij hebben meer kracht dan goeden wil; en het is vaak alleen om ons tegenover ons zelf vrij te pleiten, dat wij dingen onmogelijk achten. XXXI.
Indien wij zelf geen gebreken hadden, zouden wij er niet zooveel behagen in scheppen die bij anderen op te merken.
XXXII.
Jaloezie groeit door twijfel en klimt tot razernij of eindigt zoodra twijfel in zekerheid verandert. XXXIII.
De hoogmoed weet altijd zijn schade in te halen en verliest niets, zelfs wanneer hij van de ijdelheid afstand doet. XXXIV.
Indien wij zelf geen trots bezaten zouden wij ons over dien van anderen niet beklagen.
XXXV.
De trots is bij alle menschen gelijk; er is slechts verschil in de middelen en manieren hem te uiten.
XXXVI.
Het schijnt dat de natuur, die zoo kunstig de organen van ons lichaam heeft samengesteld om ons gelukkig te maken, ons ook den hoogmoed heeft geschonken om ons de smart te besparen onze onvolmaaktheden te leeren kennen.
XXXVII.
Meer dan de goedheid heeft de hoogmoed aandeel in de vermaningen, die wij richten tot hen die fouten maken, en wij berispen hen niet zoo zeer om hen te verbeteren als om hen te overtuigen, dat wij er vrij van zijn.
XXXVIII.
Wij beloven naar mate van onze hoop, en wij houden onze beloften naar mate van onze vrees.
XXXIX.
Het eigenbelang spreekt alle soorten van talen en speelt elke rol, zelfs die van belangeloosheid.
XL.
Het eigenbelang, dat den een verblindt, maakt den ander helderziend.
XLI.
Wie zich te veel met kleinigheden inlaat wordt gewoonlijk ongeschikt voor groote dingen.
XLII.
Wij hebben geen voldoende kracht om ons verstand geheel te volgen.
XLIII.
De mensch gelooft dikwijls te leiden terwijl hij zelf geleid wordt, en terwijl hij met zijn verstand naar zeker doel streeft, sleept zijn hart hem ongemerkt naar een ander.
XLIV.
Men behoort niet te spreken van kracht of zwakheid van den geest; zij zijn in werkelijkheid goede of slechte aanleg onzer lichamelijke organen.
XLV.
De grillen van ons humeur zijn nog grilliger dan die van de fortuin.
XLVI.
De gehechtheid aan of de onverschilligheid tegenover het leven, door de philosophen betoond, was niets dan eene neiging hunner
eigenliefde, waarover men evenmin kan twisten als over den smaak der tong of de keuze der kleuren.
XLVII.
Ons humeur bepaalt de waarde van alles wat de fortuin ons schenkt.
XLVIII.
Het geluk hangt af van den smaak, niet van de dingen; en gelukkig maakt het bezit van wat men gaarne heeft, niet van hetgeen anderen begeeren.
XLIX.
Men is nooit zoo gelukkig of zoo ongelukkig als men zich inbeeldt.
L.
Zij, die zich verdienstelijk achten, stellen er een eer in ongelukkig te zijn, ten einde anderen en zich zelf te overtuigen, dat zij met het noodlot kampen.
LI.
Niets moet de ingenomenheid met ons zelf zoo zeer verminderen als te zien dat wij heden afkeuren wat wij voorheen goedkeurden.
LII.
Hoe verschillend het lot der menschen ook moge schijnen, er is niettemin een zekere vereffening van goed en kwaad, die het verschil wegvaagt.
LIII.
Hoe groote voordeelen de natuur ook schenken moge, het is niet alleen zij, die helden maakt; het geluk moet medewerken.
LIV.
De verachting der rijkdommen was bij de philosophen een verborgen verlangen om hun verdienste te wreken op de onrechtvaardigheid van het lot, door datgene te verachten wat het hun onthield; het was een geheim om zich te beschermen tegen de vernedering van de armoede. Het was een omweg om tot het aanzien te geraken, dat zij door rijkdommen niet konden bereiken.
LV.
De haat tegen gunstelingen is niets anders dan verzotheid op gunst. De ontstemming deze niet te bezitten wordt vertroost en verzacht door de minachting, die men betoont voor hen die haar bezitten en wij weigeren hun onzen eerbied, niet bij machte zijnde hun datgene te ontnemen, wat hun dien van iedereen verschaft.
LVI.
Ten einde in de hooge wereld te komen, geeft men zich alle mogelijke moeite het te doen voorkomen alsof men er reeds thuis behoort.
LVII.
Ofschoon de menschen zich laten voorstaan op hun groote daden zijn deze dikwijls niet de uitwerking van groote plannen, maar van het toeval.
LVIII.
Het schijnt dat onze daden gelukkige of ongelukkige gesternten hebben, waaraan zij een groot deel van den lof en de blaam, die men haar geeft, te danken hebben.
LIX.
Geen gebeurtenis zoo ongelukkig of verstandige menschen trekken er eenig voordeel uit. Geen is er zoo gelukkig of onverstandigen weten haar nog op hun eigen nadeel te laten uitloopen.
LX.
De fortuin stiert alles ten voordeele van hen, die zij begunstigt.
LXI.
Het geluk en het ongeluk der menschen hangt niet minder van hun humeur dan van de fortuin af.
LXII.
Oprechtheid is openhartigheid. Men vindt haar bij zeer enkelen, en die, welke men gewoonlijk ziet, is slechts een verfijnde geveinsdheid, om het vertrouwen van anderen te winnen.
LXIII.
De afkeer van liegen is dikwijls slechts een onmerkbare eerzucht, om aan onze beweringen gewicht bij te zetten en aan onze woorden een heiligen eerbied te verschaffen.
LXIV.
De waarheid doet in de wereld niet zoo veel goed, als haar schijn kwaad sticht.
LXV.
De voorzichtigheid overstelpt men met lof; toch vrijwaart zij ons niet voor het geringste nadeel.
LXVI.
Een verstandig man moet zijne belangen regelen en hen leiden, elk in de juiste volgorde; deze wordt dikwijls door onze begeerlijkheid verstoord, omdat zij ons zoo veel tegelijker tijd doet naloopen, dat wij, de minst belangrijke te zeer begeerende, de belangrijkere misloopen.
LXVII.
Bevalligheid is voor het lichaam wat gezond verstand voor den geest is.
LXVIII.
Het is moeilijk de liefde te omschrijven: wat men er van kan zeggen is, dat zij zich, in de ziel, openbaart als een hartstocht tot heerschen; in den geest als sympathie; en in het lichaam als een verholen, teedere begeerte na vele heimelijkheden te bezitten wat men bemint.
LXIX.
Indien er eene liefde bestaat, rein en vrij van inmenging onzer andere hartstochten, dan is het die, welke binnen ons hart verborgen is en die wij zelf niet kennen.
LXX.
Er bestaat geen vermomming, die langen tijd de liefde kan verbergen die er is, of haar kan voorwenden, waar zij niet is.
LXXI.
Er zijn bijna geen menschen, die zich niet schamen elkander bemind te hebben, wanneer zij elkander niet meer beminnen.
LXXII.
Indien men de liefde beoordeelt naar het meerendeel harer uitwerkingen, vindt men meer gelijkenis op haat dan op vriendschap.
LXXIII.
Men kan vrouwen vinden, die nimmer een liefdes-avontuur hadden, maar het is moeilijk er een aantetreffen, die er slechts één heeft doorleefd.
LXXIV.
Er is slechts één soort liefde, maar er bestaan duizend verschillende namaaksels.
LXXV.
De liefde kan, evenmin als het vuur, voortbestaan zonder onafgebroken aangewakkerd te worden en zij houdt op zoodra er niets meer te hopen of te vreezen overblijft.
LXXVI.
Met de ware liefde is het gesteld als met de geestverschijningen: een ieder spreekt er van, maar weinigen hebben haar gezien.
LXXVII.
De liefde leent haar naam aan een onmetelijk aantal verhoudingen, die men haar toeschrijft en waaraan zij even min deel heeft als de Doge aan hetgeen te Venetië gebeurt.
LXXVIII.
De liefde tot de gerechtigheid is bij de meeste menschen niets dan vrees om onrechtvaardigheden te ondergaan.
LXXIX.
Zwijgen is de beste partij voor hem, die niet zeker van zich zelf is.
Wat ons in onze vriendschappen zoo veranderlijk maakt is de omstandigheid, dat het moeilijk valt de hoedanigheden der ziel, en gemakkelijk die van het verstand te leeren kennen.
LXXXI.
Wij kunnen niets beminnen dan met betrekking tot ons zelf en wij doen niets dan onzen zin en onzen smaak volgen, wanneer wij onze vrienden boven ons zelf verkiezen. Niettemin is het alleen door die voorkeur dat vriendschap waar en volkomen kan zijn.
LXXXII.
De verzoening met onze vijanden is niets dan een verlangen onzen toestand te verbeteren, een oorlogsmoeheid, en een vrees voor tegenslag.
LXXXIII.
Wat de menschen vriendschap hebben genoemd is niets dan een overeenkomst, een wederkeerig ontzien van belangen, en een uitwisseling van goede diensten; het is ten slotte niets dan een handel, waarbij het eigenbelang altijd iets denkt te winnen.
LXXXIV.
Het is smadelijker zijn vrienden te wantrouwen dan door hen te worden bedrogen.
LXXXV.
Wij maken ons vaak wijs lieden te beminnen, machtiger dan wij, en toch is het bloot eigenbelang, dat onze vriendschap doet ontstaan. Wij geven ons niet aan hen om het goede, dat wij hun willen bewijzen, maar om hetgeen wij verwachten te ontvangen.
LXXXVI.
Ons wantrouwen rechtvaardigt het bedrog van anderen.
LXXXVII.
De menschen zouden niet lang in gemeenschap blijven leven, wanneer zij niet elkanders slachtoffers waren.
LXXXVIII.
De eigenliefde verkleint of vergroot in ons oog de goede hoedanigheden onzer vrienden naar mate van de voldoening, die wij van hen smaken; en wij beoordeelen hun verdienste naar de wijze, waarop zij zich tegenover ons gedragen.
LXXXIX.
Ieder klaagt over zijn geheugen, niemand over zijn verstand.
XC.
In het maatschappelijk verkeer behagen wij vaker door onze gebreken, dan door onze goede eigenschappen.
XCI.
De grootste eerzucht vermijdt zorgvuldig zich als zoodanig kenbaar te maken, wanneer zij op de volstrekte onmogelijkheid stuit om tot haar doel te geraken.
XCII.
Door iemand, vervuld van zijn eigen verdienste, de oogen te openen bewijst men hem een even slechten dienst als men aan dien gek te Athene bewees, die geloofde, dat alle binnenkomende schepen hem toebehoorden.
XCIII.
Grijsaards geven gaarne wijze lessen als troost dat zij niet meer in staat zijn slechte voorbeelden te geven.
XCIV.
Een groote naam, in stede van te verheffen, drukt hem ter neder, die niet sterk genoeg is hem hoog te houden.
XCV.
Het bewijs van buitengewone verdienste is te zien, dat de hevigste benijders haar moeten prijzen.
XCVI.
Een ondankbare is soms minder schuld aan die ondankbaarheid, dan hij, die de weldaad bewees.
XCVII.
Men vergist zich door te meenen dat verstand en oordeel twee verschillende zaken zijn: het oordeel is niets dan de grootheid van het licht in het verstand; dat licht dringt tot op den bodem der dingen door, merkt op al wat het moet opmerken en neemt ook waar wat schijnbaar niet zichtbaar is. Dus moet men toegeven dat het de sterkte van het licht in het verstand is, die alle aan het oordeel toegeschreven werkingen te weeg brengt.
XCVIII.
Ieder spreekt in goeden zin van zijn hart, en niemand durft dit van zijn verstand te doen.
De fijnheid van den geest bestaat in het denken aan smaakvolle en kiesche dingen.
C.
De hoffelijkheid van den geest bestaat in het op aangename wijze zeggen van vriendelijke dingen.
CI.
Het gebeurt dikwijls dat dingen zich volkomener voor onzen geest opdoen, dan deze met veel kunst zou kunnen tot stand brengen.
CII.
Het verstand is altijd het slachtoffer van het hart.
CIII.
Allen, die hun verstand kennen, kennen niet hun hart.
CIV.
Menschen en zaken hebben hun gezichtspunt: er zijn er, die men van nabij moet bezien, om er goed over te kunnen oordeelen, en anderen, die men nooit beter beoordeelt dan op een afstand.
CV.
Niet hij is verstandig, die het verstandige toevallig vindt, maar hij, die het kent, onderscheidt en er smaak in vindt.
CVI.
Om iets goed te kennen moet men er de kleinste onderdeelen van kennen en, daar deze bijna oneindig zijn, blijft onze kennis altijd oppervlakkig en onvolkomen.
CVII.
Het is een soort coquetterie te laten merken, dat men er vrij van is.
CVIII.
Het verstand vermag niet lang de rol van het hart te spelen.
De jeugd verandert van smaak door de vurigheid van het bloed, en de ouderdom behoudt den zijnen door de macht der gewoonte. CX.
Men is met niets zoo vrijgevig als met raad. CXI.
Hoe vuriger men bemint, hoe lichter de liefde in haat omslaat.
CIX.
CXII.
De gebreken van het verstand vermeerderen bij het ouder worden even als die van het gelaat.
CXIII.
Er zijn goede huwelijken maar geen kostelijke.
CXIV.
Men is ontroostbaar over het bedrog van vijanden en het verraad van vrienden en is vaak voldaan door zich zelf bedrogen te hebben.
CXV.
Het is even gemakkelijk zich zelf te bedriegen zonder het te bemerken, als moeilijk anderen te bedriegen, zonder dat zij het gewaar worden.
CXVI.
Niets is minder oprecht dan de wijze, waarop men raad vraagt en geeft: wie er om vraagt schijnt een eerbiedige vereering te hebben voor de gevoelens van zijn vriend, ofschoon hij er slechts aan denkt de zijne door hem te laten goedkeuren en hem aansprakelijk te maken voor zijn gedrag; en wie den raad geeft, beloont het in hem gestelde vertrouwen door vurigen en belangeloozen ijver, ofschoon hij meestal in den door hem gegeven raad slechts zijn eigen belang of roem zoekt.
CXVII.
De meest verfijnde slimheid is goed te kunnen voorwenden in den val te zijn geloopen, die voor ons was opgesteld; en men wordt
