Terms of "Indearment": Lyric and General Economy in Shakespeare and Donne

Abstract

Renaissance poetry has long been linked to historical and political cultural issues: social ambition, eroticized power politics, and poetic self-promotion.2 More recent criticism ties economic metaphors in lyric to historical and contextual issues such as usury, coining, and counterfeiting, yet in addressing those practices and policies such criticism tacitly defines the economic as a closed system or mode of management and controlled exchange; it conflates economy and restric tive economy3 But only to read the discourse of economy with such conceptual limits is to be blind to George Batailles work on general or unrestricted economy, work from which I take my epigraph, and to foreclose interpretive and conceptual possibilities for the ongoing study of lyric and early modern culture. General economy, which shadows or (for Bataille) historically antecedes the hegemony of restrictive economy, refers to unproductive or sacrificial expenditure, to absolute loss, incalculable and unquantifiable; for Bataille, an affirmation of the true gift, of squandering without reciprocity.4 Jacques Derrida found in Bataille s theory affinities with deconstruction and poststructuralist economies of knowledge and signification, in their radical question ing of thought limits, or, as Bataille puts it, the d?pense that undoes la pens?. More recently, in ambitious new work, Scott Shershow has seen in general economy and its connection to the gift (as theorized by Marcel Mauss) a model for radical reconfiguration of community and the political.5 Though these works certainly do not address, and