Molière and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births by Larry Riggs

Abstract

MLR, IOI .4, 2oo6 I115 issues raises the question of what exactly comprises 'heresy'. The term eventually came to encompass a range of positions from pertinacious contradiction of religious truth to opposition to all sorts of purely philosophical positions within theological argument. Beyond this, the fine line between orthodoxy within an institutional frame work and the highly personal mystical experience of individual believers is the subject of anumber of the essays in this volume. An acceptance ofmysticism as superior to dis cursive theology in the first part of the century, even on the part of Bossuet, gives way to a hardening of attitudes, once the dangers of a galloping individualism were more clearly discerned by aChurch anxious to put beyond question the criteria of its his torical authority as regards the origins of the Church and its founding texts. Bossuet's conversion to a harder line on mysticism was prompted by what he considered the blindness to orthodoxy of Fenelon and especially Madame Guyon, whose positions are lucidly analysed here, along with the latter's proposal of certain biblical women as exemplars of her gender. Again, language is at the centre of Le Brun's preoccupations, in particular regarding the construction and interpretation of what, in the realm of the more 'orthodox' mystics, is essentially a discourse of the ineffable. But, with Madame Guyon, particular scrutiny is applied to the latitude she brought to bear on her 'spiri tual' reading of the biblical text and the figure of Christ. It seemed inevitable that the very notion of 'devotion' inboth singular and plural forms should come under attack in the course of a century which, in spiritual terms, moved from mysticism tomoralism. More crucially still, the concept of individual salvation remained a problem, whatever the place of the believer in the institution of the Church, hence the title of the book. 'Jouissance' is a reference to exalted mystical experience, whereas 'trouble' derives from the sense of abandonment potentially experienced by all believers through the enigma of Christ's words on the cross, which require constant comment: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' This is a good point to end on. Le Brun often leaves quotations in Latin, Greek, and German untranslated. Moreover, the assiduous reader not only has to cope with an often challenging text but even more challenging footnotes. This does not, ultimately, detract from an exceedingly important collection of essays by a scholar with a frightening religious and historical culture, which few can even hope to rival. UNIVERSITYOFMANCHESTER HENRY PHILLIPS Moliere and Modernity: Absent Mothers and Masculine Births. By LARRY RIGGS. (EMF Critiques) Charlottesville: Rookwood Press. 2005. 234 PP. $45.95. ISBN I-886365-55-5. In his revisionist study ofMoliere, Larry Riggs develops an approach sketched in his earlier book on the seventeenth-century French playwright (Moliere and Plurality: Decomposition of theClassicist Self (Bern: Peter Lang, I989)), inwhich he combines insights from post-structuralist and postmodernist theory with borrowings from the theory of performance and ecologically oriented cultural commentary. Following on from Max Vernet's suggestion thatMoliere's comedies can be read as critiques of emerging modern culture, Riggs argues thatMoliere dramatizes the dan gers inherent in the logic of modernity, notably the univocalist tendencies of 'strong' thought as reflected by the aspirations of the rigid, absolutist Subject, shown to be in capable of accommodating the existence and aspirations of the Other. For Riggs, each of the comic types ridiculed byMoliere is an archetype of a certain kind or version of modernity, whether it be Arnolphe's paranoia about women and chance, Don Juan's use of rationalism and mathematics to legitimize his own claim to autonomy, Alceste' s desire for complete knowledge and control of the others, Harpagon's use of usury and encouragement of insatiable desire in his entourage, or the femmes savantes' will to iii6 Reviews impose an abstract and ideologically determined form of knowledge. The hegemony of this 'master model' as the definition of the truly human is precisely what Moli&re denounces. Not only do the plays return these would-be absolutist characters to the world of pluralistic, dialogic communication at the end, they also return them to the fundamental reality of the body. By showing the...