The indictment

The surrounding world is all lies and treachery. Dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of this century.. . .1 [Deceit] maintains and feeds most of men’s occupations.”’2 People massacre one another under cover of noble pretexts which, in reality, merely mask base interests.

By accumulating such scattered observations, Montaigne develops an ancient theme, older than Plato, who first cast it in mythical form. Exploited by Stoics and Skeptics; developed by Boethius; given wide currency by various medieval authors, most notably John of Salisbury, and repeatedly invoked by moralists and preachers, this is the theme of the world as theater, in which men do no more than play out their roles, speaking their lines and gesticulating like actors on a stage—until death decrees their final exit. This theme was at times employed to exalt the omnipotence of God, simultaneously author, director, and spectator of this vast production; on other occasions it was used to denounce the idle fictions in which gullible mer allow themselves to believe. Montaigne does not fail to cite the words at- tributed to Petronius, ‘Mundus universus exercet histrioniam,’’4 later echoed within the walls of the Globe Theatre by melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: ‘’All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’’.

What Montaigne, in common with many of his contemporaries, uses this image to emphasize is the idea that the world, like a theater, creates illusions. It is a play of shadows that holds us in its grip. The grandeur of princes is pure theater: clever imitators are able to mimic majesty and win the respect of the populace. No less illusory are the wisdom extolled by the champions of prudence and the doctrines propounded by learned scholars. Everywhere there is trumpery, knavery, affectation, and artifice. ‘Yes, even the mask of greatness put on in our plays affects us and deludes us somewhat.’’ Everything is borrowed “for mask and show” in a cruel and futile display.” More from weakness than from malevolence, ordinary men are susceptible to this sort of deception. Prisoners of their imaginations, forgetful of themselves, they let themselves be gulled. They mistake the appearance for the essence. Both monarchs, for their bellicose purposes, and religious factions, through their propaganda, are perfectly capable of taking advantage of this human blindness. Both need credulous men, men easily swayed by opinion and ready to shed their own blood and the blood of others for the sake of the cause. “Any opinion is strong enough to make people espouse it at the price of life.’’8 Wherever one looks, triumphant impostors and satisfied dupes are to be found. “I have in my time seen wonders in the undiscerning and prodigious ease with which people let their belief and hope be led and manipulated in whatever way has pleased and served their leaders, passing over a hundred mistakes one on top of the other, passing over phantasms and dreams.’’?

In denouncing the viciousness of false appearance, Montaigne is at one with the spirit of his age. Flattering the prevailing taste, he exploits a commonplace idea, which he varies and amplifies and embellishes with abundant citations and conceits. Yet through this commonplace he is in fact aiming at an aspect of contemporary reality on which the traditional antithesis of being and appearance bears more directly than at any other time in history. The wars through which the princes of Europe are seeking to augment their power (with the formation of the major European states still in the offing); the religious conflicts that threaten to undermine the very principle of authority (with the elevation of man’s “inner conscience” to the position of supreme authority still looming on the horizon); and the ubiquitous violence, the constant danger that besets all men—all of these circumstances provide pressing reasons for dissimulation and deception; as a result, these have become generally accepted forms of behavior and are frequently taken as themes of literature. In this age of excess, the teachings associated with the ethical and religious tradition of contemptus mundi have been exaggerated: the temptations of this world are traps, the true goods lie elsewhere. Before long, the baroque theater would depict disillusionment (desengaño) as a moment of bitter grace, in which characters too long sunken in blindness would suddenly regain their sight.10

The world against which Montaigne levels a finger of accusation is a labyrinth in which the counterfeit passes for legal tender. Hypocrisy, far from being regarded as a mask that one must penetrate, is everywhere praised as “this new-fangled virtue of hypocrisy and dissimulation, which is so highly honored at present." !11 The juggling of offices and ranks is a scandal for all to behold. Anybody involved in public affairs is aware of what goes on and must, since everybody is doing it, take steps at once to protect himself and remain on his guard. “Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of.”’12 Duplicity and cunning are not discoveries that men make in time, but handles to the world available to anyone bold enough to grasp them. Men learn to dissimulate as they learn to talk, by listening to what is going on all around and mimicking what succeeds. Education is quickly acquired. Politics is defined, in principle, as ostentation, trickery, and ruse—wholly legitimate defenses against an enemy’s ambush and the hazards of fortune. “Innocence itself could neither negotiate among us without dissimulation nor bargain without lying.”13 So little trouble is taken to hide a lie that lying has become the universally accepted convention. Concealment and duplicity are the common “form,” the normal way of doing business—lying, at first tacitly tolerated, is now the general rule.

On the other hand, it is not uncommon in this verbose age to find false appearances being denounced. There were accepted formulas for decrying the universality of lying and for protesting one’s own sincerity, one’s willingness to engage in flattery, one’s eagerness to tell the truth, however imprudent it might be. ‘“Parrhesia’” and protestations of sincerity or candor were devices commonly used by smooth talkers.14 The rhetorical contrast between being and appearance, the topos according to which this world is the world of fraud and deception, were among the common tricks of the duplicitous. Hypocrites could deliver admirable speeches condemning hypocrisy. Anyone who saw profit in so doing could rail against deception, buttressed by innumerable citations, yet remain a character wearing a false mask, an actor in the ultimate role of disillusioned sage. The rules of dissimulation would have been incomplete had they not included among their recommended strategems the refusal to dissimulate. The enemy of concealment is often just an other stage device: the play becomes (or appears to become) believable because it includes a character who ostensibly refuses to believe in the appearances he encounters. In the baroque era this ultimate illusion was expressed symbolically by the play within a play. The actor defending himself against illusion takes on the status of a real being, thanks to the interplay of relative oppositions. The spectator believes that the actor is not on the stage because he denounces yet another stage. (And so it goes today with ideology, one of whose most effective diversionary tactics is the denunciation of ideology.’ Montaigne is obviously making use of this kind of rhetoric.

Indeed, he goes it one better, drawing from the humanist tradition methapors of disloyalty and indictments of lying. But he does what he does with a new seriousness and irony. 

He is to be believed when he insists on his veracity, when he declares that it “is painful for me to dissemble,’”16 or that "I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do,"17 or when he tells how his “face” and “frankness’’18 have on several occasions saved his life. The traditional precepts find in him a ready welcome: for him, to live with an open heart is no mere turn of phrase but an injunction that he has no difficulty putting into practice. By the same token, the gate of his castle remains open to all comers.

Montaigne casts the net of his skepticism quite widely. Looking at the history of mankind, he determines that the consequences of sincerity and deception are quite unpredictable. “By diverse means we arrive at the same end,” says the title of the very first essay in book. Unpredictability means that deception can never be certain of achieving its goals even in the world of facts; hence Montaigne decides in favor of that which the moral tradition has established, in law, as being of higher moral value: sincerity. Whatever the outcome of our actions (which outcome depends on God alone), Montaigne is in no doubt as to the correct moral choice: insistence on veracity remains his unvarying standard of judgment, his permanent criterion for criticizing morals and for governing his own behavior. This standard is, admittedly, a commonplace, but Montaigne’s desire for originality is not so great that he rejects it. Such is his concern for honesty that it is untouched even by his recognition of the mutability of all things.

Montaigne shaped his response to the world-theater by drawing on the humanist tradition. If it is true that “most of our occupations are low comedy," 19 should we laugh or cry? To the sorrowful compassion of Heraclitus Montaigne preferred its fabled opposite, the laughter of Democritus. This comparison heightens the contrast between the two positions and renders compromise less likely. Once again, we have every reason to believe that Montaigne wholeheartedly subscribes to the lesson that he draws from the traditional cultural stereotype:

(A) Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. . . . I prefer the first humor, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. . . . We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are worthless.20

Here, Montaigne is temporarily adapting to his own purposes an attitude that dates from the beginnings of philosophy: Democritus laughs at the world’s folly, but it grieves him just the same, and in fact he exacerbates his melancholy by his relentless efforts to get at the causes of the folly he mocks.21 (Later, in 1621, Robert Burton would publish his Anatomy of Melancholy under the pseudonym Democritus Minor, invoking the name of Montaigne among his precursors.) Hamlet repeats a line remarkably similar to one in the passage of Montaigne cited above: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?’’22 And Freud mentions this verse from Hamlet more than once, most notably in “Mourning and Melancholia,”” where it is adduced as evidence for the clear-sightedness of self-accusation on the part of the melancholic.23 By what special privilege do such judgments of melancholy, more than other words, pass down through the ages, linking the author who pronounces with the reader who reads and pronounces in his turn? Should we conclude that the propensity to quote (about which we shall have more to say later on) is a consequence of the self-denigration of the melancholic? Montaigne’s excuse for the borrowings that serve him as embellishment is that he prefers to speak through the stronger voice of a Seneca or a Plutarch. Citation, an avowal of weakness, shows a marked predilection for the discourse of melancholy.

But Montaigne does not merely take seriously the lessons of the masters of antiquity and try to live in accordance with precepts consecrated by tradition. He goes even further. When he casts his eyes about him, he thinks he sees the end of the world: ‘“Now let us turn our eyes in all directions: everything is crumbling about us... . It seems as if the very stars have ordained that we have lasted long enough beyond the ordinary term. And this also weighs me down, that the evil that most nearly threatens us is not an alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and disintegration, the worst of our fears.’’24 When everything seems to be in collapse, is it not time time to remedy our dissatisfaction, to press our questioning with ever-greater urgency, to arm ourselves with higher standards, to shun every vanity (including even learned discourse on vanity), and to bring to our defense every available resource of sophistication and irony? Desire for independence becomes the main source of energy, though this need not interfere with listening to the past or reading the exemplary texts it provides.

Votive space

To have discerned so clearly the “banishment of truth,’’25 Montaigne must have formulated within himself a standard of candor and veracity which the world constantly disappointed. Would he have spoken so often of inconstancy and fraud had he not imagined a possibility of constancy and honesty, however vague his hope of living up to this standard may have been? To charge that the world is false presupposes belief in an opposite value: a truth situated elsewhere (whether in this world or out of it) which would authorize us to intervene in its name, to act as the prosecutors of falsehood. In denouncing the “prestige of appearance” Montaigne implicitly declares himself in favor of the unequivocal plenitude of true being.26 But he knows this plenitude only through the force of his refusal to accept falsehood and deceit. At the moment he declares his opposition to the world, Montaigne cannot claim to possess any truth: he merely proclaims his hatred of “sham.” The truth is the still-undiscovered positive implicit in the negation of proliferating evil; the truth has no fixed visage but is merely the unappeased energy that animates and arms the act of refusal.

The opposition between truth and falsehood initially has no way of manifesting itself other than through spatial figures. Skeptical refusal is expressed metaphorically in the act of standing aloof, abstaining.

Montaigne feels the need to create a private place for himself at a distance from the world—a place where he can make himself a spectator of human life and feel protected from all its pitfalls. If the world is a deceptive theater, one must not remain on the stage; instead, one must find a way to establish oneself elsewhere. To exile oneself from a world where truth has been banished is not really to go into exile.

(And Montaigne expresses his astonishment that Socrates, who saw the “horribly corrupt laws” of Athens for what they were, did not choose to accept a “sentence of exile.’’27) The secession from the world thus figures as an inaugural act. It determines the site where Montaigne withdraws from the trade in deception; it establishes a frontier, consecrates a boundary line. The site in question is no abstract height: in Montaigne everything has substance. His separate place will be his tower library—a belvedere in the family manor which offers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. It is no secret that Montaigne did not make this his permanent residence: he continued to devote much of his time to public affairs, to conciliatory negotiations. He did not shirk what he saw as his duty to the common weal. 

What mattered in his eyes was to have secured the possibility of occupying his own private territory, the possibility of withdrawing at any moment into absolute solitude, of quitting the game: the important thing was to establish a concrete as well as symbolic embodiment of the imagined distance between himself and the world, a place always ready to receive him whenever he felt the need; but he felt under no obligation to reside there permanently. Thus a hiatus was opened up between the gaze of the spectator and the agitation of mankind, a pure interval, which enabled Montaigne to perceive how the mass of men voluntarily choose bondage while he, each time he withdrew to his library, assured himself of a new liberty. He saw the shackles in which other men remained bound but felt his own fall away. For the first conquest is not knowledge but self-presence (présence à soi).

Now, this occupation of a place, this creation of a space inaccessible to the world’s falsehood, also marks a caesura in time. To see this we have only to pay attention to the wording of the inscriptions that Montaigne had painted in 1571. A precise date is attached to the break in his life. A new era had begun, and it was important to situate it precisely in relation to both the collective time of Christendom (Anno Christi 1571 . . . pridie cal. mart.28) and his own biographical time (aet. 38 . . . die suo natali). Mention of his birthdate reinforces the idea of a voluntary birth. Time takes on a new origin and at the same moment acquires a new meaning: it is the limited lifespan that remains (quantillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii), the few days that will be added to the life already elapsed.

A new law or rule comes into effect. Renewed attachments compensate for the detachment that is at once voluntary and involuntary. The new order is no longer that of servitium but that of libertas. Liberation goes hand in hand with constriction. A strict opposition emerges between the expressions of disgust and of desire to make a break (servitii aulici et munerum publicorum pertaesus) and the votive act which both consecrates and narrowly circumscribes the place of retreat (libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit). This place is metaphorically the “bosom of the learned Muses” (doctarum virginum sinus): the allusion, of course, is to the round shape of the library, to the walls that “in curving round”29 hold the collection of works of poetry, philosophy, and history with which Montaigne wishes to surround himself.

The images of withdrawal (recessit) and the hidden place (dulces latebras) coupled with the feminine figure of the Muses (Montaigne will later declare that he might well have preferred to have produced a child “by intercourse with the Muses [rather] than by intercourse with [his] wife’’30) evoke for the modern reader the psychoanalytic concept of “regression” and all the ideas associated with it. When Montaigne refers to tranquillity (quietus and later tranquillitas), security (securus), and repose (otium), it may seem that he is merely confirming the regressive nature of his desire. The house containing his library is, to be sure, the ancestral seat (avitas sedes) handed down through the male line, but this masculinity (associated with domanial property since 1477) is counterbalanced (so far as the psychoanalytic argument is concerned) by the feminine gender of the word sedes and by the predominance of feminine nouns in the list of terms consecrated by the inscription (libertas and tranquillitas; only otium is not feminine, but neuter!). But in all of this it is important to recognize, as Hugo Friedrich has shown, the traditional formulas of otium cum litteris, a “contemplative” variant of the humanist life, which was recommended after the more active path of civic humanism turned out to be impracticable or fraught with peril! (Montaigne, who diligently discharged his political duties, is proof that the two attitudes could alternate.) The inaugural inscription of 1571 should not be read primarily as a psychological document: it conforms to a cultural paradigm— impersonal and generalizable. One might, however, argue that in the present case the humanist tradition, by its exaltation of antiquity as a wellspring and source of nourishment and its justification of withdrawal into solitude (sibi vivere), placed at the disposal of Montaigne’s desire ready-made formulas in which to pour his dissatisfaction, nostalgia, sublimations, and need for security: a full “instinctual” use of a coded language can be guessed at...

The inscription with which Montaigne dedicated his “library” to his liberty and personal tranquillity stood alongside another inscription (which for some time has been harder to decipher) dedicating the premises also to the memory of Montaigne’s lost friend, Etienne de La Boétie.32 The dedication to his departed ‘brother’ is coupled with the dedication to himself: the library that Montaigne hoped to enjoy also held the books bequeathed to him by La Boétie. The tranquillity he hoped to relish in the second half of his life (that which links up with death) was to prolong and perpetuate his dialogue with his best friend. The time spent in the library is thus framed on either side by death: the death that awaits Montaigne himself, and the death that he survives. The role of identity is important in both perspectives. On behalf of La Boétie, Montaigne felt responsible for an image, a resemblance: he took care in editing his friend’s works (1570-71) and took it upon himself to preserve, to transmit, whole and intact, his admired companion’s likeness as he was in life.33 The rule of identity is this: to lose nothing, to alter nothing, to wrest from death and time images that would otherwise be lost in oblivion and obscurity. (We shall have to consider this point several more times in what follows.) On his own behalf, Montaigne hoped above all that by securing for himself repose, freedom, leisure, tranquillity, and security, he might escape the “mutation” and vain ceremony to which public life condemns those whom it subjugates: his purpose will be to live in dialogue with himself, faithful to his nature and to Nature in the larger sense, and thus to cease to go astray.

From Jean Starobinski
Montaigne in Motion

The theoretical life and the function of the example

 

The relation to the world that Montaigne initiated from his refuge of reading and repose was what the ancients called theoria, or the theoretical life, i.e., comprehension of the world as it offers itself to the contemplative gaze. In a passage added to the manuscript by Montaigne’s own hand (subsequent to 1588) we find one of many classical topoi justifying theoria: ‘Our life, Pythagoras used to say, is like the great and populous assembly at the Olympic games. Some exercise their bodies to win glory in the games, others bring merchandise to sell for gain. There are some, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to see how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the life of other men in order to judge and regulate their own.’’48 This is not merely a “chrie,” or rehearsal of an authorized opinion, an opinion worthy of approval, but even more a statement of the attitude that Montaigne himself intends to adopt in the face of contemporary reality: ‘’As I seldom read in histories of such commotions in other states without regretting that I could not be present to consider them better, so my curiosity makes me feel some satisfaction at seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its symptoms and its form. And since I cannot retard it, I am glad to be destined to watch it and learn from it. Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theaters, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune.’”49

Gazing upon the agitation of men absorbed by battles and interests of their own, the stationary spectator looks to the causes of things: his concern is to discover the how and the why, in order to satisfy his curiosity. This does not mean that he is disinterested, however; he can, if he wishes (and Montaigne seems to have so wished, at least when he began his work), strive to ensure that the truth revealed in the spectacle of the world is applied in his inner life. To succeed in this he must enlist the aid of his judgment (i.e., the intellectual act in which an individual looks at himself and compares himself with others) and his will (i.e., the formative or transformative act by which an individual governs his life).

The aim of the investigation, acutely pursued through the varied spectacle of human action, is to discover regular sequences, which will possess, in addition to explanatory value, direct or indirect regulative value. The fortune or misfortune of illustrious men may serve as models or warnings: even the errors of great men disclose principles of conduct and in so doing help to unify our moral lives. A moral truth perceived externally in its universal validity should be capable of being reexperienced internally in the same way; its efficacy should be apparent in the identity of its inner and outer forms, i.e., in the consistency and cohesiveness of the soul. The hope that animates this view is that mimetic fidelity will guarantee inner fidelity. Once the truth has been grasped by the contemplative gaze (i.e., theoria), it cannot be changed in any essential way, only repeated; hence the subject who has taken possession of the truth is himself assured of maintaining a stable identity. Internal continuity comes about as a result of fidelity to the external model. In particular, this is the function that the spectator ascribes to exemplary lives: an exemplum, or figure that stands apart (ex-emplum) and yet stimulates imitation and generalization, can help strengthen the individual through its unique virtue. An individual who constantly strives to resemble an ex-emplum that is in itself a marvel of constancy is actually striving to achieve an identity of his own. To live up to such a standard, or at least to begin to do so, it ought to be enough merely to recall the exemplum or its emblem, an effigy on a medal. The impersonal literature of adages and lessons will be effective to the extent that the reader puts all his personal energy into his response. But histories will be even more effective. We have only to fix our gaze upon examples so admirable that we cannot help rehearsing them within ourselves:

Until you have made yourself such that you dare not trip up in your own presence, and until you feel both shame and respect for yourself, (C) let true ideals be kept before your mind [Cicero], (A) keep ever in your mind Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in whose presence even fools would hide their faults; make them controllers of all your intentions; if these intentions get off the track, your reverence for those men will set them right again. They will keep you in a fair way to be content with yourself, to borrow nothing except from yourself, to arrest your mind and fix it on definite and limited thoughts in which it may take pleasure; and, after understanding the true blessings, which we enjoy in so far as we understand them, to rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation. That is the counsel of true and natural philosophy, not of an ostentatious and talky philosophy like that of Pliny and Cicero.50

We must turn our eyes toward exemplary individuals so that we can in turn imagine their eyes fixed on us: under the scrutiny of those who are set over us much as teachers and parents are, we are assigned our private truth, we learn the act of reaffirmation that constitutes our personal identity, and we do so purely in confrontation with ourselves (dans la pure présence à soi).

The efficacy of the example depends in large part on its being a completed event; the image of moral perfection that it holds out is conjugated in the past perfect tense. The sharpness of its outline is associated with its remoteness in time. But the past of the example is for those devoted to it secretly inhabited by the future of the must-be. What the exemplary man was we must be in our turn, we shall be if we apply ourselves with all the energy at our disposal. For the ex-emplum, as I hardly need point out, is a preexisting cultural form that offers itself for us to emulate: the goal is to construct our own egos, to shape ourselves by surmounting all that is amorphous and vague in everyday life. It is to surround all that is soft and fluid in our “conditions and humors” with a firm outline copied from life in order to gather our substance together and cause it to solidify. A stamp is thus always impressed upon us. (La Boétie, Montaigne says, is a ‘soul of the old stamp.’’51)

The imitation of the exemplum is a simulacrum, but a simulacrum that aims at identification. It is a role, but a role into which we must pour ourselves by allowing its law to inhabit us. We give ourselves over wholly to the formative power of the example. The latter, by giving us contour and firmness, at first seems either to rob us of our spontaneity or to oblige us to repress it. But before long the example has invaded us fully, pervaded our life. And our second spontaneity will then effortlessly carry out the acts required by the embodied model. To assimilate the exemplary lesson: such is the classical program of a pedagogy whose aim is to inculcate norms through imitation of great lives in which those norms have seen actualized. (This is a good point at which to measure the distance that separates the world of humanism from the contemporary cultural situation. In the humanist world, the example stands out against a horizon of achieved perfection—the ancient world; or else it offers itself in the form of a figure that is at once familiar and transcendent—Christ. By contrast, contemporary ideals—heroes, stars, charismatic figures, many of them ephemeral and interchangeable—are usually taken from the contemporary world itself; they are frequently subject to “manipulation,” which, since exemplary figures are a powerful means of directing our desires, allows them to be exploited for economic and political ends.) 

The ancient exemplum is a figure in a theater that has nothing to do with the theater of the world (un théâtre absolu); it is separated from our world as the “Italian stage” is separated from the hall: the ex-emplum speaks, it carries the force of an admirable maxim, it is simultaneously maxim and act. Even more: it judges us, for it determines the scale of values, the measuring rod against which our merits and demerits are gauged. Exemplary words and images are too powerful ever to vanish from memory. Their imprint is indelible: for the example, as we shall see more than once, is usually deployed in a memorable scene, in which we are offered the hero’s words inextricably intertwined with his life and death. We shall be looking more closely in what follows at two important illustrations of this point: the death of La Boétie and the suicide of Cato.

Quote from the book Montaigne in Motion (Jean Starobinski)

Jean Starobinski - Poppaea's Veil

The hidden fascinates. "Why did Poppaea conceive the idea of masking the beauties of her face, except to make them dearer to her lovers?" (Montaigne). In dissimulation and absence there is a strange force that compels the spirit to turn toward the inaccessible and, for the sake of conquest, to sacrifice all it possesses. Fairy tales, works of realism as far as the mechanism of desire is concerned, know only hidden treasures, concealed in some dark depth. If these treasures must belong to someone, they will go to the one who has renounced everything, even the hope of becoming their master. The essence of mystery is to compel us to regard as worthless and tiresome anything that does not make it more easily accessible. Yes, the shadow has the power to make us release all our prey simply because it is shadow and provokes in us a nameless anticipation. Fascination persuades us, so that we may belong to it, to give up everything, even concern for our own lives. It takes all we have simply by promising everything we want. At first we were able to dream of laying hold of what lay hidden, but the roles were quickly reversed: all at once we found ourselves passive and paralyzed, having renounced our will and allowed ourselves to be inhabited by the imperious call of absence.

Moralists, of course, have deemed this sacrifice outrageous. What! Lose all that one has for an illusion! Allow oneself to be robbed of the present and to live forever after in destructive ecstasy? Scorn visible beauty for love of what does not exist? The passion for the hidden has not lacked critics, who reproved it sometimes for concealing the allure of the devil, sometimes that of God. But what we need is an explanation of the passion not unduly hasty to dismiss it as a mystification.

The hidden is the other side of a presence. The power of absence, if we attempt to describe it, leads us to the power possessed in varying degrees by certain real objects. These objects point beyond themselves toward a magical space. They are indices of something they are not.
Obstacle and interposed sign, Poppaea's veil engenders a perfection that is immediately stolen away, and by its very flight demands to be recaptured by our desire. Thus the impediment created by the obstacle gives rise to a vast profundity, which is mistaken for essential. The fascination emanates from a real presence that obliges us to prefer what it hides, to prefer something remote, which it prevents us from attaining even as it offers itself. Our gaze is irresistibly drawn into the vertiginous void that forms in the object of fascination: an infinity opens up, devouring the real object by which it made itself sensible. In truth, if the object of fascination calls for the abdication of our will, it is because that object itself is annihilated by the absence it provokes. This strange power in a way stems from a lack, an insufficiency in the object. Rather than hold our fascination, it allows itself to be transcended in a perspective of the imagination, an obscure dimension. But objects can seem insufficient only in response to an exigency in our gaze, which, awakened to desire by an allusive presence and finding no employment for all its energies in the visible thing, transcends it and loses itself in an empty space, headed for a beyond from which there is no return. Poppaea runs the risks that her face, unveiled, will disappoint her lovers, or that her eyes, wide open and beckoning, will seem still covered by a dark veil: desire can no longer cease to search elsewhere.

To be fascinated is the height of distraction. It is to be prodigiously inattentive to the world as it is. But this inattention in a way rests upon the very objects it neglects. Having responded too impetuously to the veiled seductress, our gaze hurtles beyond the possessable body and is captured by the void and consumed in the night. Poppaea Sabina (in the "portrait" of her painted by an unknown master of the School of Fontainebleau) allows her body to be glimpsed beneath the gauze, and smiles: she is not culpable. Her lovers do not die for her; they die for the promises she does not keep.

If one looks at the etymology, one finds that to denote directed vision French resorts to the word regard [gaze], whose root originally referred not to the act of seeing but to expectation, concern, watchfulness, consideration, and safeguard, made emphatic by the addition of a prefix expressing a redoubling or return. Regarder [to look at, to gaze upon] is a movement that aims to recapture, reprendre sous garde, [to place in safekeeping once again]. The gaze does not exhaust itself immediately. It involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery or reconquering what is about to escape. What interests me is the fate of the impatient energy that inhabits the gaze and desires something other than what it is given. It lies in wait, hoping that a moving form will come to a standstill or that a figure at rest will reveal a slight tremor, insistent on touching the face behind the mask, or seeking to shake off the bewildering fascination with depths in order to rediscover the shimmering reflections that play on the water's surface.

Some, invoking the example of Greece, have argued that the realm of the visible, the realm of light, was also the realm of measure and order: figures circumscribed by their forms, space made rhythmic by a harmonious module, by a law granting to each vantage an empire at once sovereign and precarious. But there is a hidden extravagance in the apparent triumph of measure. The will to delineate, geometrize, and fix stable relationships implies a violence beyond the natural experience of the gaze. The space of geometrical measurement is the product of a vigilant effort, which, compass in hand, revises the affective prejudices to which living space owes its "deformations." It is hard to deny that in this there is extravagance of the second degree, which consists in seeking equilibrium by rejecting the spontaneous extravagance of desire and anxiety.

It is difficult for the gaze to limit itself to ascertaining appearances. By its very nature it must ask for more. In fact this impatience inhabits all the senses. Beyond the usual synesthesias, each sense aspires to exchange its powers with the others. In a celebrated Elegy Goethe said: the hands want to see, the eyes want to caress. We may add: the gaze wants to speak. It is willing to give up the faculty of immediate perception in exchange for the gift of fixing more permanently whatever flees its grasp. By contrast, speech often seeks to efface itself in order to clear the way for pure vision, for intuition perfectly oblivious of the noise of words. In each realm the highest powers are apparently those that impose a sudden, overwhelming substitution. And do not forget that the night of the blind is replete with unfulfilled gazes or, rather, gazes diverted toward the hands, converted into gropings. In the absence of a visual function, the gaze, an intentional relation with others and with the horizon of experience, may assume compensatory forms, proceeding by way of an attentively cocked ear or through the fingertips. For by gaze in this context I mean not so much the faculty of collecting images as that of establishing a relation.

Of all the senses, sight is the one most obviously ruled by impatience. A magical wish, never entirely fulfilled yet never discouraged, accompanies each of our glances: to seize, to undress, to petrify, to penetrate: to fascinate—that is, to illuminate the flame of the hidden in an immobile pupil. All are implicit actions, which do not always remain mere intentions. By revealing the intensity of desire, sometimes the gaze produces real effects. "How many children if looks could impregnate! How many dead if looks could kill! The streets would be filled with corpses and pregnant women." Can it be that Valery did not notice all the corpses and pregnant women in our streets?

If not betrayed by an excess or want of light, the gaze is never satisfied. It opens the way to an unrelenting assault. Intelligence, cruelty, and tenderness only begin to tell the tale. They remain unappeased, unslaked. These passions awaken in the gaze and grow through the act of vision, in which, however, they find too little to satisfy them. Sight opens all space to desire, but desire is not satisfied with seeing. Visible space attests to both my power to discover and my powerlessness to attain. Everyone knows how sad the concupiscent gaze can be.

Seeing is a dangerous act. It is the passion of Lyncaeus, but Bluebeard's wives die of it. On this point there is striking unanimity in myth and legend. Orpheus, Narcissus, Oedipus, Psyche, and Medusa teach us that the soul that seeks to extend the scope of its vision is destined to blindness and night: "Truly, the dagger fell from her hands, but not the lamp. She had too much to do, and had not yet seen all there was to see" (La Fontaine). The burning of the oil (or of the gaze) awakens the sleeping god and brings about Psyche's dizzying fall into the desert.

The gaze, which enables consciousness to escape from the place occupied by the body, is an excess in the strict sense of the word. Whence the severity of the Church Fathers: of all the senses, sight is the most fallible, the most naturally culpable—"Do not fix your eyes on an object that pleases them, and remember that David perished by a glance" (Bossuet). The "concupiscence of the eyes" includes and epitomizes all others: it is the quintessential evil. "Under the eyes all the other senses are in some way included. And in common parlance to feel and to see are often the same thing." Here Bossuet is merely repeating Saint Augustine. Our hunger to see is perpetually subject to frivolous curiosity, idle distraction, and cruel spectacle. The least pretext is enough to capture our eyes, to lure our spirit from the path Poppaea's Veil of salvation. Augustine found it most difficult to deny himself the pleasures of the circus. But the arena is not the only place where animals devour one another, and everything becomes theater for the ascetic unfaithful to his resolutions: "When I sit at home and watch a lizard catching flies or a spider wrapping insects that fall into its web, is not my attention conquered?" Yet the very same people who castigate the indiscretion and dispersion of the worldly gaze invoke the same power to direct it toward "supernatural light" and intelligible forms. What they see as the natural extravagance of the gaze ceases to be culpable if directed beyond this world. Augustine, wresting himself free of the temptations of light, "that queen of colors," hopes that darkness will favor the advent of a new light, this time spiritual, invisible to the eye of the flesh. Access to the idea, whose very name refers to the act of seeing, is "like a vision emancipated from the limitations of sight" (Maurice Blanchot). In carnal curiosity as well as spiritual intuition, the will-to-see claims second sight as its right.

It is my hunger to see more, to repudiate and transcend my provisional limits, that impels me to question what I have already seen, to hold that it is a * misleading decor. Thus begins the strange rebellion of those who, in order to grasp reality beyond appearances, make themselves enemies of what is immediately visible: they denounce the illusion of appearances without suspecting that by revoking the privileges of first sight they leave second sight little hope, in their impatience reducing the admirable theater of vision to ruins. Probably they have no choice. In the exigent gaze lies a whole critique of the primary data of vision. This critique cannot avoid discourse in one of its many forms: geometry, with its logical arguments, corrects the vague apprehensions of the eye with the purity of the abstract; poetic language seeks to transpose visible appearance into a new essence, because to speak, to name things, tends to prolong (if not complete) the work of safekeeping that in the gaze remains forever incomplete and precarious. The extremity of the gaze is already something more than gaze, and pursues its aim in the act whereby vision renounces and sacrifices itself. Yet criticism, having condemned deceptive appearances, is not incapable of turning on itself. If a little reflection takes us away from the sensible world, a more demanding philosophy brings us back—as if, having braved the limits of the horizon and traversed the void, the gaze had no alternative but to return to immediate evidence: everything recommences here. Montaigne, in this view, would have proposed the most aggressive critiques of appearance in the name of a truth to be unveiled, a fascination to be conjured away, attacking masks and shams only to arrive in the end at a wisdom that would allow itself to be "molded by appearances" and would accept the veil by means of which Poppaea is able to arouse in us such delicious discomfort and impatience. Skepticism first warns us against universal deception, then leads us very gently to the idea of recommencing knowledge with a wisdom that, under the protection of the reflexive gaze, trusts in the senses and in the world the senses reveal.

My studies here are all concerned in one way or another with literary works that deal with the pursuit of a hidden reality, a reality temporarily dissimulated yet within the grasp of anyone who knows how to force it out of hiding and compel its presence. What was needed, accordingly, was to retrace the history of a gaze lured by desire from discovery to discovery. It was also necessary to show, in a variety of circumstances, how the pursuit of what lies hidden, being an exorbitant ambition, poses the risk of failure and disappointment.

This book is much less and much more than a systematic exploration of a theme. Much less, because I felt no need to catalog all the expressive means (physiognomy, seduction, language of signs) and perceptual devices (world view, interplay of surfaces and depths) involved in the exercise of vision. Much more, because by consistently attending to the fate of the demand implicit in the gaze and unsatisfied by first appearances, I was obliged to trace an adventure that was almost always played out in the interval between the intended prey and the eye that wished to subdue it. The gaze was the living link between the person and the world, between self and others: the writer's every glance questions anew the status of reality (and of literary realism) as well as the status of communication (and of human community). Hence I am not dealing with an artificially isolated theme of literature. In this inquiry I try to understand what constitutes the necessity of the works studied.

For writers—and also, despite appearances, for painters—the adventure continues beyond the first view, even if unsatisfied desire must later, after losing contact with the sensible, return us there. In these essays my aim is to describe a language that begins with a glance, at times dazzled, at times lustful, at times defiant, and then proceeds Poppaea's Veil along other, often deviant paths in pursuit of what it finds lacking in its original vision. To have declined to follow the same path (or absence of a path), to have shunned its risks, would have been to flout the underlying law of the gaze, which refuses to be satisfied with what it is offered initially. Full knowledge of vision's excess is required, full understanding of the extravagance that causes the gaze to overstep its bounds and risk blindness. 

 By refocusing on distant objects (whose fate is often merely to be glimpsed) consciousness begins by transforming itself. Its own tension, its own desire, undergoes metamorphosis. Hence these essays seek not so much to describe the specific world of sight as to retrace the shifting fate of the libido sentiendi in its relation to the world and to other human consciousnesses.

In Corneille everything begins in dazzlement. But dazzlement is a precarious thing, which lasts only a fleeting instant. Drawn to brilliant objects, the Cornelian hero struggles against falling adoringly into their clutches. The bedazzled consciousness throws off passivity and seeks to effect a reversal of roles. It aspires to be dazzling itself, to achieve the power that comes with brilliance. It claims this privilege first of all through the language of generosity. But glorious speeches are not enough. It is necessary to proceed to action—to action promised, perhaps imprudently, in language. Boasts of valor bind the hero and make inevitable the decision that consecrates his greatness. Thus is man born to the admirable destiny that he has invented for himself: he offers himself triumphant to the world's gaze.

His greatest happiness lies neither in the act of seeing (voir) nor in the energy of doing (faire) but in the complex act of demonstrating (faire voir). What exploit, what wish will reveal the hero's everlasting brilliance and spread his renown? The one effective course of action, the one certain to produce the desired "effect," is self-sacrifice, in which the individual turns all his energy against himself, denying himself so completely as to be reborn for all eternity in the eyes of generations called to witness. In this way the hero establishes an immortal name. For this, however, he requires the consent and vigilant complicity of crowds of onlookers: if doubt is cast on human memory and the endurance of renown, everything crumbles in obscurity and vanity, leaving nothing but a dusty stage set; the generous hero becomes nothing but a parody of himself, a ridiculous actor in a "comic illusion."

In Racine passion and desire control everything. A strange weakness, a fatal blindness, prevents Racine's heroes from fully dominating their actions. An obscure and wicked force dictates their crimes, subjects them to misfortune, and exposes them to our piteous regard. They are beset by bewildering uncertainties that reason is unable to surmount. Though not incapable of recognizing their downfall, critical awareness does not prevent them from hastening to their ruin. Full lucidity comes to them only when it is too late, and the clarity of tragic knowledge coincides with a feeling of total impotence in the face of irrevocable misfortune.

An attentive reading of Racine's plays, a methodical analysis of his expressive means, reveals that the gaze takes the place of theatrical gesticulation and becomes the act par excellence. It expresses the pained keenness of a desire that knows in advance that possession equals destruction but is unable to renounce either one. For Racine the tragic is not associated exclusively with either the structure of the plot or the fatality of its outcome. It is the very heart of the human condition that is condemned, since every desire is caught in the inevitable failure of the gaze. No one accepts this failure. Racine's characters struggle in vain, which only compounds their guilt. Voyeurism—the desire to possess solely through sight, to wound through the act of looking—is exacerbated by the feeling that it must remain forever unsatisfied. In the crudest scenes, in which the power to torture is expressed exclusively in the gaze, the frustrated torturer suffers as much as his victims. In the very heart of desire, in the intense glow of visual lust, we can thus make out a desperate, self-consuming flame. Incapable of obtaining the desired object, desire can transcend its suffering only by choosing catastrophe, only by dying in darkness. The hero plunges into the abyss, while in a heaven filled with light the implacable gods bear sovereign witness to a disaster that exalts their omnipotence.

For Rousseau the happiness of childhood lay in living a carefree life under the gaze of a witness raised to the level of benevolent deity. But soon this benevolence gave way to a sense of all-enveloping hostility. From then on it became impossible to desire publicly even the most innocent of pleasures without incurring criticism or ironic comment. Shamefaced desire was forced to beat a retreat, give up the idea of possession, and resort to the clandestine glance. Now we can understand why Rousseau exhibits such clear signs of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Fearful of guilty contacts or initiatives, he contents himself, from a distance, with seeing and being seen. At first these predilections take perverse forms, but later they are disguised and Poppaea's Veil transformed through sublimation: in La Nouvelle Heloise Wolmar, the virtuous atheist, proclaims his desire to become pure vision, a "living eye." In Emile the preceptor finds moral pretexts for observing his pupils' most intimate caresses. The "ridiculous object" is exhibited once again, albeit in novel fashion, in the virtuous cynicism of total confession. But to see and be seen is still too much. The hostility is too great, and Rousseau, incapable of combatting it head on, generally prefers to concede defeat and to retreat into a more secret realm. Desire, once manifest, becomes a latent power. It renounces all external objects. Reveling in itself, it exposes itself to neither error nor punishment. But this inward retreat, with its concomitant dissimulation of desire, is compensated by a discovery that reveals what had remained hidden since the inception of civilization: neglected nature and natural man. This is a most important discovery, since it establishes a norm against which existing societies can be properly judged and a more equitable community can be imagined.

Both the man of sentiment and the child are gripped by a quite irrational conviction, that to avoid looking at external temptations and to abandon hope of external conquest is to avoid being looked at in return, hence a way of escaping hostile scrutiny and warding off persecution. At the center of a world of enchanted fictions, Rousseau reconciles the innocence of time's beginning with love's most searing pleasures. He invents a bewildering and loving spectacle in which nothing prevents him from participating in person. Nothing intervenes to compromise the transparency of happiness regained. As in his child's paradise, his ego binds itself to benevolent counterparts through trusting dialogue: avoiding the misunderstandings inherent in speech, they communicate through the language of signs and understand one another at a glance.

Yet beyond this spectacle of the imagination and by dint of the enthusiasm that overcomes him, Rousseau attains an extreme of ecstasy, a pure sentiment of existence, in which all images disappear. The dreamer's inward gaze having exhausted the pleasures of Active celebration, desire wants to know a still higher degree of satisfaction, and it succeeds in doing so. At this moment all vision is abolished, replaced by a voluptuous stupefaction that is both total light and absolute darkness.

More than anyone else, Rousseau forces us to acknowledge that the gaze, from the moment of its first awakening, bears within it a strange power of separation. It discovers objective space, but only at the price of acquiescing in distance. It obliges us to see things as distinct— distinct from us and distinct from one another. Thus it disrupts a prior unity, a unity originally enjoyed by being (I'etre) in its blind self-absorption. 

When gaze becomes reflection this loss of unity is further accentuated, for to reflect is to relinquish contact with the immediate and to sink ever more deeply into the misfortune of separate existence. Discursive reason, insofar as it is a product of reflexive thought, marks the utmost estrangement from primitive unity. But the trial of division ignites and fans the flames of a desire to regain the lost unity: enduring loss leads to discovery of the need for communication, which will repair the fragmentation of reality. Logical reflection must not be banished. To be rid of it one must follow it unflinchingly to its ultimate conclusion. When speech, having done its job, falls silent, consciousness enlightened by reason returns to the law of sentiment and to the undivided unity of the beginning. A cycle is completed: separate vision and the evil of reflection lead consciousness down a path that returns to the original happiness.

Rousseau is far from an irrationalist, but his rationalism goes along with the conviction (shared by the romantics) that "existential" truth belongs to the realm of time—or of the instant—and not to the realm of objective space subject to the quantitative operations of reason. Don't forget that this adventure of consciousness, whose goal is to transcend the servitude of conventional language, is presented to us entirely through the vehicle of language. If the reflexive gaze, rigorously pursued, can lead beyond the misfortune of reflection, then perfected language (that is, poetry or opera) seeks and finds an analogous power to transcend. It seems clear that Rousseau made a decisive contribution to the revelation of this power.

Stendhal, like Rousseau, began by experiencing a sudden shock of shame when confronted by the ironic gaze of others. But with Stendhal the feeling of guilt was less onerous. This accounts for the extraordinary vivacity of his riposte. How should one respond to a hostile gaze? By becoming someone else, transforming or masking oneself. Stendhal responds to an external affront by mounting a disciplined counteroffensive. His metamorphoses only appear to be escapes. One problem preoccupies him constantly: how to portray himself, how to influence the situation in such a way that his enemies, vanquished, cease to fight and unwittingly become allies in his own projects, auxiliaries in his pursuit of happiness. In extreme cases he would have to make himself fascinating by means of magic. Stendhal dreamed of this, not without self-indulgence. For a long time he believed that with logic, lessons from professional actors, and his knowledge of Destutt de Tracy he would be able to create a seductive and triumphant character for himself. The society in which he lived was so vile that anyone who hoped to succeed required a mask. Direct energy and strength of character were regarded as suspect. Stendhal played the game well enough, though he expressed nostalgia for those times and places when men won power and esteem through noble deeds. Why didn't he settle for what he had? What dissatisfaction drove him to ask for more? In the end he required nothing less than literature, which he saw as a game of chance. He created characters who lived lives different from his own but in whom he could feel himself living. He looked to the future to provide his audience. Above all, he transformed himself through the effect that the written work had upon his life.

And what about reading? What about the critical gaze? The exigencies that animate it are not unlike the ones we find in the creators. Sight is asked to lead the mind beyond the realm of vision into that of meaning. The critical gaze deciphers words in order to intuit their full meaning: this perception is a visual act only in the metaphorical sense. Thus the critical gaze loses itself in the meaning it awakens. It blazes a trail, but only to make pure pleasure possible without laborious access (Mallarme's "pur plaisir sans chemin"). It transforms the written signs on the page into living speech and, beyond that, establishes a complex world of images, ideas, and feelings. This absent world was waiting for help, anxious for protection. Once awakened, however, this imaginary world requires the reader to make an absolute sacrifice: it no longer allows him to keep his distance. It demands contact and involvement; it imposes its own rhythm and its own destiny.

The critic is a person who, while consenting to the fascination of the text, nevertheless seeks to maintain his right of scrutiny. He desires greater penetration: beyond the manifest sense that is revealed, he perceives a latent significance. Beyond the initial "sight reading," further vigilance is necessary if he is to advance toward a second meaning. Do not overestimate that term, however: unlike medieval exegesis, modern criticism is interested not in deciphering an allegorical or symbolic equivalent of the original text but in revealing the vaster life or transfigured death inherent in it. Frequently the search for what is most remote leads to what is nearest at hand: to what was obvious at first glance, the forms and rhythms that seemed merely to hold the promise of a secret message. After a long detour we come back to the words themselves, where meaning chooses to reside, and that gleaming mysterious treasure we had felt compelled to seek in a "deeper dimension."

The truth is that the critical gaze is drawn toward two opposing possibilities, neither of which can be fully achieved. The first is to lose oneself in intimate intercourse with the fabulous consciousness glimpsed in the work: comprehension then becomes a matter of progressive pursuit of total complicity with the creative subjectivity, a passionate participation in the sensual and intellectual experience unfolded in the work. Yet no matter how far he goes in this direction, the critic can never stifle the conviction that he possesses a separate identity, the banal but insistent certainty that he is not one with the consciousness with which he desires union. Even assuming that it is possible for him to utterly confound himself with that consciousness, the result, paradoxically, would be loss of his own voice. He would inevitably fall silent. Through sympathy and mimickry the perfect critical discourse would give the impression of the most complete silence. Unless he manages in some way to break the pact of solidarity that ties him to the work, the critic is capable only of paraphrase or pastiche. One must betray the ideal of identification in order to acquire the power to speak of this experience and to describe, in a language other than that of the work, the life one has found there. Thus, in spite of our desire to drown in the vital depths of the work, we are obliged to stand at a distance if we are to speak of it at all. So why not deliberately establish a distance capable of revealing in a panoramic view the surroundings with which the work is organically associated? We might attempt to identify certain significant relations unnoticed by the writer; to interpret his unconscious motives; to understand the complex interactions between, on the one hand, a life and a work and, on the other hand, their social and historical circumstances.

This second possible mode of critical interpretation I shall call the panoramic gaze. The eye wishes to lose none of the patterns revealed by distance. In this expanded field of view, the work is of course the primary focus, but it is not the only object that commands attention. It is defined by other, nearby objects and makes sense only in relation to its context. There's the rub: the context is so vast, the number of relations so large, that vision succumbs to a secret despair. 

The whole picture consists of so many elements that the single gaze can never gather them all in. What is more, the moment one decides to situate a work in terms of historical coordinates, the scope of the inquiry can be limited only by an arbitrary decision. It could in principle be expanded to the point where the literary work ceases to be the primary focus, now reduced to one of many manifestations of an era, a culture, or a "world view." As the gaze expands to embrace more and more correlative facts in the social world or the author's life, the work vanishes. Hence the triumph of the panoramic gaze is also a kind of failure. The panoramic gaze causes us to lose sight of the work and its meanings by trying to give us the world in which it is immersed.

Perhaps the most comprehensive criticism is that which aims at neither totality (the panoramic view) nor intimacy (intuitive identification). It is the product of a gaze that can be panoramic or intimate by turns, knowing that truth lies in neither one nor the other but in the ceaseless movement between the two. Neither the vertigo of distance nor that of proximity is to be rejected. One must aim for that double excess in which the gaze is always close to losing its power entirely.

Yet criticism is wrong, perhaps, to seek to discipline its gaze in this way. Often it is better to forget oneself and make room for surprise. We may then be rewarded by the feeling that the work is developing a gaze of its own, directed toward us, a gaze that is not only a reflection of our interrogation. An alien consciousness, radically other, seeks us out, fixes us, summons us to respond. We feel exposed by its probing. The work interrogates us. Before speaking for ourselves, we must lend our voice to the strange power that queries us. Yet docile as we may be, there is always the risk that we will prefer comforting tunes of our own invention. It is not easy to keep our eyes open, to welcome the gaze that seeks us out. But surely for criticism, as for the whole enterprise of understanding, we must say: "Look, so that you may be looked at in return."

Jean Starobinski THE LIVING EYE