The present analysis proposes a reading of Racine's Greek tragedy Andromaque (1667) through the guiding metaphor of addictive patterns. The author juxtaposes the behaviours of the two primary male characters, Oreste and Pyrrhus, in order to demonstrate how their resistance to their respective passions for Hermione and Andromaque can be compared to the process of recovery from substance abuse. At specific moments throughout the play, these characters each attempt to summon their willpower and overcome a desire that they know is harmful, only to end up succumbing to its intoxicating influence. Oreste and Pyrrhus alternate in their struggles to avoid relapse: as one character resists his passions, the other acquiesces, and vice versa. This vicious cycle of need drives the action of this pathetic tragedy leading up to its dénouement, in which Racine presents the repercussions of tyrannising love: insanity for Oreste, death for Pyrrhus, and political upheaval for Greece

Recently digested evidence from the 1740s confirms both patterns and variety in the sodomitical subculture of Paris in the 1720s and 1730s that historians have already analyzed. Men who desired men understood the methods and hazards of solicitation in the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, where the police deployed decoys to entrap them. Records of arrest demonstrate continuity over three decades as well as evolution in practices of surveillance. In 1748–49, agents interrogated not only the men they arrested but also the men these men mentioned, who named others, almost none of whom ended up in prison. We still do not know why the police prioritized information over imprisonment at this time because we have no documentation about administrative deliberations. Thanks to archival inquiry, however, we can now follow the steps that preceded the shift.

Focusing on section I, 35 and I, 36 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, as well as other related works, this paper examines Nietzsche’s evaluation of François de La Rochefoucauld’s psychological observation in the latter’s maxims. It argues that, in Nietzsche’s view, La Rochefoucauld’s perspicacity in detecting moral psychology is crystallized both in the form of maxim and the messages derived from psychological observation that are conveyed in the maxims. It contends that the readers’ reactions to these maxims also render their passions and desires tangible and intelligible for La Rochefoucauld’s and Nietzsche’s observations of their psyche. Furthermore, by exploring Nietzsche’s contrasting assessments of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, we can also illuminate his own theory of moral psychology.

This paper examines how touch and temporal closeness illuminate the intersubjective nature of Montaigne's Essais. Working against the assumptions towards individuality that often emerge in readings of Montaigne, it asks how the confluences of contemporaneity, contagion, compassion, and community offer alternative ways of understanding the relations between self and other. It considers Erich Auerbach's chapter of Mimesis on Montaigne, ‘L’Humaine Condition', in relation to Montaigne's later comment in ‘Du Repentir’ that he is living through the ‘contagion d'un siecle si gasté’. The paper questions how Montaigne perceives himself to be a part of his contemporary moment, as well as what it means to read Montaigne now in a contemporary way; in so doing, it amends existing definitions of the contemporary as an individual concern. This article ends by theorising that the contemporary is indeed a form of contagion – a way of thinking beyond periodisation and the boundaries it imposes.

This paper discusses the prominence given by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau. It locates its cause in the dialogue’s account of the quarrel in contemporary French music, between Italian opéra comique and French opera seria, in particular, Rameau. Hegel makes his account of this section of Diderot’s dialogue his first clearly explicit account of a dialectic operating in culture. The French audiences cannot hear the French style of opera with innocent ears, having once taken pleasure in the Italian operas. And movement forward in music, it is implied, will have to go beyond both styles, to please the current audiences.

First published in 1652–1654 and then in a new edition in 1666, the Discours politiques of the académicien Daniel de Priézac (1590–1662) have been characterized as a statement of Aristotelian politics in the service of absolutism. The aspect of interest in this article is Priézac’s hitherto unnoticed practice of quoting from La Boétie’s La Servitude volontaire. It may seem strange that a treatise so often associated with anti-tyrannical literature should be used in a work of political thought defending the monarchy and the state. Priézac’s attempt to exploit it takes place against the background of the Fronde. Priézac was also a protégé of Séguier, to whom the Discours were dedicated; and Séguier owned an (extant) manuscript of La Boétie’s treatise. Through a combination of close reading and historical contextualization, this article will elucidate this absolutist turn in the reception of La Boétie.

In honouring Michael Moriarty's thought on Roland Barthes, a further honouring is offered of Roland Barthes through re-translation of an excerpt of Fragments d'un discours amoureux.

This chapter deals with a university viva that took place in Paris on 25 July 1641. The thesis that was being examined hinged on a particular theological point: the question of whether the verb ‘to be’ may apply univocally to God and to humans. Antoine Arnauld had argued that it could indeed, and his student Charles Wallon de Beaupuis was now following his example. However, events soon took an unexpected turn when Arnauld changed his mind in situ. Here, I set the viva episode in the intellectual context of the summer of 1641 more broadly: a time when the protagonists in the viva episode were also responding to Descartes’s Meditations. Subsequent narrations of the viva episode by historians of Port-Royal prompt us to return to seventeenth-century ethical thinking on ‘générosité’ and ‘grandeur’.

This essay examines some instances of mimicry in Jean Calvin’s Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, qui se nomment spirituelz (1545). Calvin’s denunciation of the spiritual libertines, an obscure antinomian sect which had recently spread from the Low Countries to northern France, is made all the more vehement by a fear that others might confuse some aspects of their theology with his. Mimicry of his opponents’ Picard dialect is one way among several of marking off their voices from his own. Although Calvin shows himself elsewhere capable of trenchant humour (for example, in the Traité des reliques) examples of speech-parody are rare in his work, possessing a farcical quality more readily associated with Rabelais (the episode of the ‘écolier Limousin’) or Molière (Nérine in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac). The blending of heretical voices with regional ones raises broader questions of language and nation, just four years before the publication of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549).

The exceptionally diverse and extensive literary output of the Jesuit poet Pierre Le Moyne is full of apparent paradoxes and ambiguities which have always proved a challenge to commentators, from his own contemporaries to the present day. This article takes as its starting point the recent recovery of a detailed account of Le Moyne’s first known creation, a spectacular dramatic production put on by the Jesuit college in Reims, to consider a pervasive, but relatively unstudied, feature of his works: the poet’s frequent allusions to the theatre, and, beyond this, the relationship between his strikingly original imagination and the creative techniques of dramatists and actors. It is argued that these are crucial to the ways in which he sets out to engage his worldly readers, and to encourage a receptive response to the moral and spiritual ideals which he seeks to transmit.