Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (review)

Abstract

Mitchell Greenberg's new book is an extension of his previous work on the seventeenth century, but it also marks a departure. True to form, he is still primarily interested in reading French literature of the time through the lens of psychoanalysis—the melancholy Lacanian renunciation of the desiring body in favor of the paternal Name/Law, for instance, is one of the notes he continues to strike best. Likewise, he also remains committed to the proposition that (as he has put it elsewhere) "something happened in the seventeenth century," which is to say that the structures and tensions he is able to delineate in the literature of the period have to do with a passage to the "modern": if one can do, say, Lacanian readings of Classical French literature, Greenberg has implied that this is because modern psychological categories emerged during, and from, the culture of Absolutism. These two argumentative thrusts—psychoanalytical and historical—are very much present in Baroque Bodies, but whereas previously Greenberg tended to give close readings of single texts using a limited number of distilled psychoanalytic topics, in his new book he crosses his primary material with an impressively wide array of psychoanalytical literature, from the clinical to the theoretical. The overall impression, perhaps confirmed by the biographical blurb indicating that he is currently an analytic candidate, is of someone now less identified as a literary critic/historian, and more as a psychoanalyst of culture. The positions hardly need be incompatible, but the change of emphasis does have repercussions on the type of reader who will enjoy this book.