“Visions are seldom all they seem”: La Princesse de Clèves and the end of Classical illusions

Abstract

Voir ouvre tout l'espace au desir, mais voir ne suffit pas au desir. (J. Starobinski, L'Œil vivant , p. 13) She had lived quietly with her old mother, of whom she was the sole support. (Freud, “A Case of Paranoia,” St. Ed . 14, p.263) The Princesse de Cleves is, I would suggest, the most theoretical text of the French seventeenth century. I am here using “theoretical” advisedly, and with less coyness than may at first appear. Across its origin, “theory” leads us back to a vision, to a sighting of the world arranged for the eye, for the appetency of the eye, as a “scene”, a “tableau.” With its source in thea , the Greek root meaning “look”, “see,” it intersects with “theater” as that space which is presented to the eye, given to vision, as a production, as an arrangement that transcends the indifferent heterogeneity of the world in an image of (created) order, a theatrum mundi . Nevertheless, the chiasmatic juncture, the imbroglio of theory and theater, their inseparable origin in/as a vision, reminds us that there is never any simple division possible between the “intellectual” scaffolding of a metaphysical vision and the merely physical ocularity, framing the way we see the world in its supposedly objective reality. Both exist in collusion, the inextricable conjunction of illusion with reality, being with seeming, exterior reality with interior reality.