Discours De Research Articles

La filosofía moral cartesiana y el control hacia el ser humano

<div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Este artículo presenta un análisis más profundo de la filosofía moral cartesiana en el </span><span>Discours de la méthode</span><span>, </span><span>Les passions de l’âme </span><span>y en los </span><span>Principia philosophae</span><span>, igualmente en la búsqueda de argumentos que hagan evidente alguna relación de control de unos seres humanos sobre otros, y el mecanismo mediante el cual esta hipotética relación de control entre seres humanos se pudiera manifestar. </span></p></div></div></div>

The Prize-Bearers: A Brief Introduction

The Prize-Bearers:A Brief Introduction Dominik Zechner [H]e refused all awards and degrees,declined membership in all honoraryinstitutions, granted no public interviews,and chose not to be photographed, asthough to associate his face with his fictionwere a ridiculous irrelevancy. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (11) Saying “thanks,” and meaning it, is quite a hard thing to do. That may be why the German version of the acceptance speech is called a Dankesrede—to make things difficult. The great poet, writer, or thinker must offer thanks to those who grant recognition. Yet, the obligation to thank, infantilizing the one impelled to show appreciation, marks a moment of powerlessness, the restraint of distressing passivity. Stating one’s gratitude nonetheless takes guts, all the more so if it happens publicly, vor den Augen der Welt. Words of thanks, no doubt chosen with care and a sense of exposure, can sting or linger as rhetorical time bombs, and constitute an instance of deferred retaliation in response to the violence of being called upon, urged to assume the pose of gratitude. Acceptance speeches have hardly ever been the object of study. We can provisionally view them as constituting a kind of rogue or sub-genre, barely determinable according to normative standards of critical discourse. Hent de Vries, in his contribution to this dossier, designates the lecture that frames the reception of an award as a [End Page 1155] “public spiritual exercise.” He continues: “It exemplifies and raises the very stakes and tasks of critical thinking and the discerning judgment with which it must come.” Situated on the murky intersection among literary effort, philosophical reflection, commentary, and political statement, the Dankesrede coaxes the summoned writer out of his or her comfort zone, placing him or her on a tentative pedestal as signatory of a recognizably distinguished oeuvre. Prompted to respond to a nomination and accept the award, the writer stands before a decision. Not everyone is overjoyed by a token of external recognition. On the contrary, a number of recipients were tempted to decline the honor. Perhaps a greater number very often refuses to refuse the prize and chooses, despite a swell of resistance, to deliver a speech. An invention of the 20th century, literary prizes have prompted a rich dossier of public Rechtfertigungen, an outlandish prose of hesitant gratitude crossed over with aggressive defiance. How do we situate the acceptance speech in relation to the literatures it presumes to defend and speak for? If we believe the rhetoric of its most prestigious recipients, the prize was not sought and represents rather an embarrassing, if not traumatic intrusion, an unwelcome imposition of institutional branding. Often unwanted and sidelined, in many cases a mere nuisance, it is not more than a kind of roaming supplementarity. Floating in-between discourses, the characteristic attributes of the acceptance speech hover at the margins of established categoremes and classifications. Yet, the archive comprising the prose of acceptance remains rich and multifaceted; it proves deserving of scholarly attention and invites hermeneutical spunk: Freud’s Goethe lecture, Paul Celan’s seminal “Meridian,” Jacques Derrida’s Discours de Francfort—to name but a few instances—acceptance speeches have innovated the ways we read texts, if not the way writers read and review their own works and worlds for which they are in part responsible. Acceptance speeches have accounted for massive discursive disruption and impact, in many cases they have taken on considerable canonical weight and interpretive authority. A striking case in this respect, “Der Meridian” has become something like a password, a shibboleth, opening up a royal passage into Celan’s oeuvre, performing a perhaps unwanted centering of the work. The acceptance speech allows the work to showcase itself in terms of a heightened readability—it offers a toolkit, an ensemble of philosophemes that may appear to unlock the hermetic seclusion of a given set of texts, serving the imperatives of schoolbook intelligibility and easy-to-grasp mnemonic jingles, catchphrases, and quasi-theoretical buzzwords. Hence, it may well be the case that the [End Page 1156] acceptance speech unwittingly endows a literary work with the curse of ultra-legibility, as though the obscurest literary endeavor were to become...

Descartes among the Novatores

In the Discours de la methode, Descartes presents himself as a heroic figure, standing up against the current Aristotelian orthodoxy in philosophy, and offering something new, a mechanist physics and the meta- physics to go along with it. But Descartes was by no means the only challenger to Aristotelian natural philos- ophy: by Descartes's day, there were many. Descartes was read as one of this group, generally called the nova- tores (innovators) in Latin, and often severely criticized for their advocacy of the new. Descartes himself wanted to separate his philosophy from that of the novatores, who were thought to seek novelty rather than truth. But it was not so easy to distance himself. Many contemporary commentators, like Charles Sorel, put Descartes squarely in their camp, but at exactly the moment when novelty and innovation in natural philosophy was changing from being worthy of scorn to being praiseworthy.

Reading Descartes as a Stoic

Reading Descartes as a Stoic: Appropriate Action, Virtue, and the Passions Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego) Although Descartes does not use the terms officium or devoir with any frequency, his ethics gives a central place to the notion of appropriate action in a sense reminiscent of the Stoics’s kathekon. Within this category are included a human being’s duties to God and to other human beings, and actions whose aptness stems from their promotion of the survival and health of the body. While noting these parallels, I also show how Descartes’s accounts of virtue and the passions diverge from Stoic views, ascribing these differences in part to his acceptance of the threefold division of goods (moral, bodily, external) rejected by the Stoics. Introduction Stoicism has served as a reference point for many interpretations of Descartes’s moral philosophy. Descartes himself provides support for such an association in letters to Princess Elisabeth and in works from the Discours de la methode to Les Passions de l’âme. Yet caution must be exercised in extrapolating from this evidence. In contrast to Neostoic writers such as Justus Lipsius and Guillaume Du Vair, Descartes claims no allegiance to Stoicism or to any other sect of the ancients, whose methods he finds inadequate. Moreover, there are substantial doctrinal differences between Descartes and the Stoics. Given this, the attempt to label him a “Stoic” in any strict sense of the word must be rejected. 1 Despite this conclusion, I believe, there remains a case for reading Descartes as a Stoic, or for adopting Stoicism as a framework within which to interpret his moral philosophy. Taking up this perspective requires assuming that Stoicism is relevant to the comprehension of Descartes’s ethics, but it does not commit one to the thesis that Descartes is a Stoic, or that Stoicism is unique in the light it casts on his views. As I intend my title, it signifies the strategy of elucidating Descartes’s ethical theory by probing the parallels between it and Stoic ethics. Irrespective of Descartes’s intentions or his knowledge of Stoicism, his ethical thought follows channels dug by the Stoics. By making these traces explicit, we can deepen our understanding of his moral philosophy and of the extent to which ancient patterns of ethical thought persist in the early modern period. 2 In what follows, I pursue this strategy with special attention to the Stoic concept of kathekon, or officium, expressed variously in French as ‘convenable’ and ‘devoir’, and in English as ‘proper function’, ‘appropriate action’, and ‘duty’ (to mention only a few of the possibilities). The range of Cf. Olivo 1999, who surveys the earlier literature on the topic. Among other recent studies that explore Stoic elements in Descartes’s ethics, see Marshall 1998; Mehl 1999; Shapiro 2011. 2 In speaking of Descartes’s “moral philosophy” or “ethics”, I refer to the views expressed in his late letters and in the Passions, as against the “morale par provision” of the Discours or “la plus haute et la plus parfaite Morale” projected in the preface to the French translation of the Principia. On the relation among these different versions of his moral philosophy, see Rodis-Lewis 1957; Kambouchner 2008.

Reworking Descartes’ mathesis universalis

Descartes-Agonistes is the magnum opus of John Schuster, formerly of the University of New South Wales, honorary fellow at the University of Sydney. Its roots go back to the dissertation he wrote 35 years ago under Thomas Kuhn at Princeton University. As Schuster correctly remarks, some regard his dissertation as an underground classic. I count myself among them: Schuster’s work has been directional in my work on the history of early modern science. Schuster himself prefers to regard his dissertation as ‘a vestige’ of a history of science of the 1970s that he has since gone beyond. In the 1980s, he elaborated and published on some central insights in a series of seminal articles, but his work on Descartes really got into its stride again around the turn of the millennium (Schuster 1980, 1990; Gaukroger et al. 2000). This book is the acme of this work, and grand it is: clocking 600 pages (excluding appendices) it extends, deepens and reinforces his analysis of Descartes into a dense and penetrating exposition. The result is a cogent interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy that is of vital importance to our understanding of early modern science and philosophy. In developing a new dynamical image of Descartes’ work and its significance for the scientific revolution, Schuster has closely collaborated with fellow expat Stephen Gaukroger. They understand the work of Descartes from its intellectual development in intense interaction with the knowledge cultures of his time. In this way, the published works are read as products of responses to and deliberate moves in a lifelong struggle with promising ideas, disillusioning insights, and ingenious reflections on the production of knowledge. This offers an alternative for the usual modern reading of Descartes, explaining his ideas from his ‘main’ philosophical works, the Meditationes and the Discours de la Methode. At the same time, it overcomes the unease of historians of science for whom Descartes represents

‘Animale- macchina’ e ‘genio maligno’: due idee non cartesiane nell’ Harmonie universelle di Mersenne

In this note I criticize Robert Lenoble’s thesis concerning the presence of beast-machine theory in Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636-37). I claim that the paragraph on which Lenoble grounds his interpretation presents, instead, a central concept for the Cartesian studies, namely that of the ‘evil genius’. The evil genius argument is used by Mersenne in relation to the problem of perception and knowledge, moreover, it is used against skepticism before the publication of Descartes Discours de la methode

Escribir filosofía en una lengua sin tradición filosófica. El problema de la lengua en los orígenes de la Modernidad

This article analyzes some of the reasons that led to the adoption of vernacular languages as philosophical languages between the 14th and 17th centuries in France and Italy. The article focuses on Descartes’s Discours de la methode (1637), Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue (1542) and Dante Alighieri’s Convivio (circa 1304-1307). The three works not only chose to write philosophy in a language with no philosophical tradition, but also offered a philosophical rationale for this decision. The article exposes and analyzes that set of arguments. Key words: philosphy, vernacular language, Descartes, Sperone Speroni, Dante Alighieri.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant? Étienne de la Boétie on corruption and transparency

Étienne de La Boétie (1530–63) is a central, if enigmatic, figure in modern French political philosophy. While his name is most famous for his friendship with Montaigne, his Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse of Voluntary Servitude) is a tour-de-force of humanist political writing, a youthful paean to liberty arguing that subjection to tyrants is the result of popular corruption. This article argues that the text can be read as a reflection on the perils and promise of transparency. Reading La Boétie helps us see two radically different ways in which members of a polity can be known to one another – two models of transparency – and it offers an important, but ultimately unsettling, political ideal based on a classical conception of civic friendship. The article draws out the importance of this ideal for modern anti-corruption efforts.

Liberi pensatori e inganni politici. Da La Boétie a Toland

In the sixteenth-century France shaken by religious wars, Etienne La Boetie wrote a short essay entitled Discours de la servitude volontaire. It was devoted to the relationship between rulers and subjects and focused on the deception of subjects through the arrogance of tyrants. The topics of the essay, firstly “adopted” by the French Hugeonots in their polemic against Catholics, are later borrowed and widely developed in England in the eighteenth century, when the task of unveiling and shaking off deception is central in the Freethinkers' struggle against the imposture of politicians and clergy. Among them, John Toland emerges for his originality, in so far as he replaces the traditional couple imperium sacerdos with new strategies of dissimulation, in order to popularise his own philosophy.

Apercevoir, perceptio i perception: Декарт перед проблемою самоперекладу

The paper explains the contextual discrepancy between the grammatically related terms apercevoir/percevoir/percipere, aperception/perception, as well as perceptio/perception in French philosophical vocabulary of the mid-17th century. Bilingual Descartes’s philosophy is a peculiar testing area for changing the traditional meanings of these terms. In the Latin texts of Cartesius the word percipere and the noun perceptio denote, correspondingly, the process and the result of perception. However, the difficulty appeared during the preparation of the French texts of Descartes’s Latin works, since percevoir/perception, the natural French corres-pondents for percipere/perceptio, did not have the epistemological connotations and denoted «getting, collecting» (money, taxes etc.). Therefore Descartes chose for situational correspondents of percipere a number of French verbs with similar meaning (concevoir, connaitre etc), sometimes apercevoir («notice») and never percevoir. For the noun perceptio he selected no-tion, connaissance and very rarely perception in the new epistemological meaning «percep-tion», which was pretty difficult to comprehend for the French-speaking milieu of those days. As to the term aperception, it is totally artificial, and it was suggested by Leibniz in 1714 in order to denote the act of conscious perception. References AUGUSTIN, Saint Les Confessions / introd. et notes par Joseph Trabucco; texte latin et trad. fr., Garnier freres, 1938, 2 vol. DESCARTES Rene, OEuvres, ed. C. Adam et P. Tannery, 11 vol., reed. Vrin, 1996. LEIBNIZ Gottfried Wilhelm, Discours de metaphysique, suivi de Monadologie et autres textes, ed. etablie, presentee et annotee par Michel Fichant, Gallimard, 2004.

The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes

Immediately setting the tone, the author begins with a statement that is characteristically bold, sweeping, and, as it later turns out, somewhat overblown: ‘The following book sets out to topple a tenacious idol to which most accounts of the early modern West pay homage’ (p. 3). While the first chapter of The Matter of Mind provides a detailed analysis of Descartes's Méditations sur la philosophie première (first published in Latin in 1641), the other five chapters are devoted to Boileau, Pascal, Molière, Corneille, and the painter Nicolas Poussin. In the process, Christopher Braider's stated objective of decentring Descartes's dualist separation of mind and body as the underpinning concept of modern rationality evolves into broader commentaries on seventeenth-century literature and painting. Braider does often return to his main theme, which depicts Cartesianism, much like classicism itself, as a locus of conflict and contestation, rather than as the triumphant emergence of what Michel Foucault would later call an epistémè: ‘the Cartesian ideal of disembodied rationality that is supposed to have dominated the major representatives of Classical French culture was never as uniformly victorious as period proponents or latter-day antagonists have a common stake in asserting’ (p. 153). Instead of Descartes's systematic formulation of abstract reason, Braider posits Montaigne's experience-based scepticism as having permeated early modern thought. In this respect, the author of Discours de la méthode (1637) seems less than central to what Braider nevertheless calls in his subtitle the ‘Age of Descartes’. Similarly, Braider insists, the Cartesian cogito was not a dominant or foundational model during the seventeenth century: ‘For all its self-conscious intellectualism, the fundamental matter of French classical culture was the body rather than the mind’ (p. 33). Throughout his book, even as as he extends his investigations beyond the issue of Descartes's putative centrality to the intellectual life of the early modern period, Braider displays an impressive level of erudition. Less felicitously, he also indulges in peremptory pronouncements that grow wearisome and could benefit from some degree of nuance. Thus Corneille's Le Cid (1637) is proclaimed to be ‘conspicuously neo-feudal and so signally anti-monarchic’ (p. 17). The play certainly exalts a flamboyant hero from an idealized feudal past and expresses reservations as to the development of royal absolutism, but is it anti-monarchic? In other instances, the author's assertions have the advantage of being both vivid and engaging: ‘Rather like sex à califourchon, the enjambment enacts the figure's hermaphroditic transgressiveness, itself in turn the figure of its subversion of rational sense’ (p. 210). As his self-reflexive note of caution indicates, Braider appears to be well aware of the potentially irritating rhetorical consequences of his parti pris: ‘I hope the excesses I commit will be more faithful, or at least less egregious, than those I try to avoid’ (p. 39). Whether he succeeded in toppling the idol of Cartesian dualism will be for each reader to judge. All of them will most likely be impressed with the intellectual range and critical acumen displayed by Braider throughout this highly stimulating study.

Is there a proper way to use the voluntary servitude hypothesis?

This article explores the problem of voluntary servitude identified by Etienne de La Boétie in his Discours de la servitude volontaire. The article argues that there is a wrong way and a right way to interpret La Boétie's claim that we voluntarily submit to the power of the tyrant. The wrong way—promulgated by a whole tradition of western political philosophy—uses the voluntary servitude thesis to make a claim about the inevitability of domination and the unsuitability of people for self-rule, thus obscuring its true emancipatory gesture. The right way to use La Boétie's thesis is to lead us on an investigation of the risks and pitfalls we must avoid in our pursuit of liberty.

Descartes's 'morale par provision': A Re-evaluation

This article takes as its starting point Descartes's statement in his Discours de la méthode, ‘Je me formai une morale par provision, qui ne consistait qu'en trois ou quatre maximes’. It offers an overview of criticism on Descartes as ethical thinker, revisiting in particular Michèle Le Dœuff's thoughts on Descartes in her L'Imaginaire philosophique (1980), and gives a reconsideration of the ethical content of Descartes's work. Notably, it considers previous early modern uses of the term par provision, with special reference to the correspondence of Nicolas Peiresc. Analysing these earlier occurrences of the term can give us a more precise understanding of what Descartes sought to communicate in the maxims of the morale par provision, and of how the maxims may connect with his later work. The article concludes by suggesting that par provision can best be understood as relating to informality. The morale par provision grants this quality an ethical significance, as Descartes shows an enduring interest in retrospective justifications and informal adjustments.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Ottoman Attempts to Catch Up with Europe

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Ottoman Attempts to Catch Up with Europe

Timely Meditations on the Use and Abuse of History: Léon Werth's Déposition: Journal de guerre 1940-1944

This article studies the question of history during the dramatic moments recorded in Léon Werth's Déposition: Journal de guerre 1940-1944. Analyzed in reference to Nietzsche, Descartes, and Lévinas, Werth's journal approaches history in a manner timely for then and now. Probing his own knowledge of and relation to France's unsettling defeat and Occupation by Nazi Germany,Werth undertakes his own version of a Cogito that leads not to some linear chain of syllogisms, but instead to an acute sense of implication in and even responsibility for history. Werth's lucidity, engagement, and ethics constrast favorably with Nietzsche's elitist, exclusionary vitalism as well as with the rationalist solitude of the Descartes' Discours de la méthode. His probing reflexions on his relation to historical events offer significant parallels to the philosophical project of Emmanuel Lévinas.

Lors est ce jour grant joie nee: essais de langue et de littérature françaises du Moyen Age ed. by Michèle Goyens, Werner Verbeke

romance relates the story of Guillaume, prince of Sicily, kidnapped at a tender age by a werewolf. Concurrently, we learn of the Spanish prince Alphonse, who was transformed into that werewolf by his stepmother. The adventures of this duo turn the romance into a mirror for princes (125–26), as the werewolf demonstrates chivalric virtue despite his bestial appearance. The anonymous author’s skill as a versifier and story-teller are well established by Sconduto. Sconduto concludes her study with several late Renaissance discussions of werewolves, a topic in vogue in theological and literary circles. Among these are Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Claude Prieur’s Dialogue de la lycanthropie (1596) and Beauvoys de Chauvincourt’s Discours de la lycantropie (1599), to name but three. Religious strife in the sixteenth century had led to an increased interest in werewolves, now closely tied to witchcraft and to worship of the Devil. These primary sources have been carefully studied by Montague Summers (Werewolf [1933; rpt. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003]) and Adam Douglas The Beast Within: A History of the Werewolf [New York: Avon, 1992]), both quoted repeatedly by Sconduto. She ends the chapter on the werewolf renaissance with a summary of the last major werewolf case in Western Europe (169), the trial of the Coutras adolescent Jean Grenier or Grainier (169–78), and a demonstration of 1603 judicial efforts to separate lycanthropy from mental illness . Sconduto concludes that werewolves of the twelfth century are a different breed than those of the sixteenth and that it is the latter group that haunts the modern imagination (200), observing that werewolves are “a reflexion of their time” (200). The author provides translations of all non-English citations; Old and Middle French texts are printed, Latin texts not. This book probably began as a dissertation, and at times, it still reads as such. It is disappointing that Sconduto’s research survey did not include German-language secondary works (e.g., Manfred Bambeck’s “Das Werwolfmotiv im Bisclavret” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 89 [1973]: 123–47). Tracing the werewolf motif is a meritorious idea, and Sconduto has found every example of note. Though it is doubtful that she has added to our understanding of well-studied tales such as Bisclavret, she has made the fascinating story of Guillaume de Palerme better known, for which she is to be commended. Given current popular interest in werewolves (a search of Amazon.com brought up more than 2,000 items relating to the theme), Metamorphoses could well be a useful enticement, luring students to medieval French literature. University of Louisville (KY) Wendy Pfeffer GOYENS, MICHÈLE, et WERNER VERBEKE, éd. Lors est ce jour grant joie nee: essais de langue et de littérature françaises du Moyen Age. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2009. ISBN 978-905867 -740-2. Pp. xv + 198. $55.00. This collection of eight essays addressing various aspects of medieval French language and literature was assembled in honor of Willy Van Hoecke, a distinguished Belgian philologist, who retired in 2004 after a remarkably productive 40-year career. Although the essays cover a wide range of literary and linguistic topics, they are primarily focused on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Claude Buridant (Université de Strasbourg) in a lengthy, well-documented 806 FRENCH REVIEW 84.4 essay of 50 pages, “Phraséologie historique du français,” examines the role of certain fixed phrases in Old French, exploring patterns of creation and resistance to change, and assessing the importance of this linguistic phenomenon in the production of literary texts. The essay integrates Buridant’s own contributions to this area of research into a larger “aperçu panoramique” (43) reflecting the work of numerous philologists. Brigitte Callay (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania) focuses on a problematic verse from the prologue of Guillaume d’Angleterre (“Crestiëns dit, qui dire siaut...”), exploring the rich ambiguities and complexities of the verb, dire, as utilized in other Old French texts. Colette Van CoolputStorms (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) focuses on differences between the Romanz de Dieu et de sa Mere by Herman de Valenciennes, composed toward the end of the twelfth century, and the Biblical passages which Herman recasts in his...

Hills of Contemplation and Signifying Circles: Spenser and Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie

SOME DECADES AGO, in a study that over the years has provoked both admiration and objection, Robert Ellrodt argued that Spenser probably read Ficino's Sopra VAmove in the 1588 edition of a translation by the French Neoplatonic poet Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, first published in 1578 as Discours de I'honneste amour sur le Banquet de Platon. ' For Ellrodt, one of the benefits to be had from sorting out which Renaissance Platonists (I would add semi-Platonists or quasi-Platonists) lie behind Spenser's poetry is the help that such work might provide in determining the degree to which Spenser felt a tension between Christianity and Platonism and to what extent they merged in his mind, logically or not. Certainly Le Fevre, one of the most syncretic poets of the Renaissance, if one of the most obsessed and self-repetitive, felt no such tension. In the 1578 edition of Discours, for example, his dedicatory letter to de (sister of Henri III) reports that Ficino thought Plato had prophesied the coming of Christ, bringer of Sapience and Love.2 After all, MARIE is an anagram of AIMER, and there are clear parallels between Plato's love and the kisses in Solomon's Song of Songs-no wonder that Marguerite de Valois is an anagram of Gise le Verite d'Amour (lies [dwells?] the truth of Love). The flattery is overdone, Spenser might have thought, but flattering queens is what poets do, even if part of this French poet's name, anagrammatized at the end of the epistle, is L'Un Guide Orfee. Orpheus did not flatter queens, after all, although that omission might seem a mistake if we remember his death at the hands of angry women.In this essay I will suggest that there were political as well as literary reasons for English poets to have known Le Fevre, at least by name, and that his poetry, particularly his long cosmological poem La Galliade (1578), is worth remembering, even worth reading, by those who study Spenser. After describing the poem I will take as an example of Spenserian moments that gain further resonance when set next to this French poem the scene (Lx) in which St. George is guided by the hermit Contemplation up a hill, one that the narrator compares to Sinai, Olivet, and Parnassus and from which, with a further ascent, the knight can see the New Jerusalem.3 James E. Phillips cites this passage from The Faerie Queene at the start of his helpful essay on Spenser's religious syncretism.4 To give this hill and a not dissimilar one in La Galliade a fuller context, I will also offer a small mountain range of ones that Spenser and his contemporaries might have known.Le Fevre was himself as syncretic a poet as Spenser was likely to find, a devout and meticulously orthodox Catholic with a liking for divine circles, ecstatic ascents, anagrams, and number symbolism whose mind for all its theological orthodoxy hovered somewhere between Platonism and Renaissance occultism. His range of languages was impressive. In Paris he published translations ofjeronimo Munoz on the supernova of 1572 (1574), of Francesco Giorgio on L'Hatmonie du monde (1579), of Ficino's Trois livres de la vie (Three Books on Life, 1582), and, in Antwerp, of a tract on baptism by Severus, patriarch of Alexandria (in fact of Antioch). Near Eastern languages fascinated him, as did Italian Neoplatonism and the cosmic circles that were for him even more alive with the sound of music than they were for his French contemporaries.My focus here is on La Galliade, but Le Fevre wrote other books worth remembering. L'Encyclie des Secrets de l'Eternite (1571) merges biblical poetry and divine kisses with macro- and micro-cosmography, celebrations ofDavid with Orphic odes. The picture of Le Fevre that prefaces it, giving his age as thirty, is encircled by Greek words praying-in an anagram of his full name-May Holy David bud forth as One Orphically, while below the image a Hebrew poem claims that, like a merged soul, spirit, and body, this poet merges three in one: Virgil, Orpheus, the upstanding Greek (with a pun on Or-Pe in Hebrew, light of the mouth), and David, the leader and singer (Fig. …

Two principles of despotism: Diderot between Machiavelli and de la Boëtie

One of the key concepts in XVIII century political thought was despotism. Also Diderot utilised this complex idea. According to him, who followed Hobbes and Montesquieu, despotism was the result of the love of power, which was able to bring forth the passion of fear in the society. In this sense, Machiavelli belonged to this line of reflection: like that of Hobbes, his system was intended to show the danger of despotism and to learn the true foundation of natural law. But rethinking this paradox Diderot was led to elaborate a new theory of despotism, no longer based on the mechanism of power. His interpretation of Machiavelli – and Hobbes – had opened up a new perspective, which did not move from the enigma of power – Machiavelli's and Hobbes’ chief concern – but from the nature of subjection. Along this path Diderot came across de la Boëtie's Discours de la servitude volontaire, which explained the origin of despotism in a different way. Despotism was not the result of the passion of fear, but of that of interest. The discussion of these two different ideas of despotism led Diderot to a new perspective from which he answered the problem of liberty in an original way.

Fewrige Freystadt: Erste Neuedition seit 1637. Text und Materialien by Andreas Gryphius, Johannes Birgfeld

266 Reviews furthermore, students' knowledge ofMHG is declining. (Indeed, students' know ledge of any kind ofGerman isdeclining, so thateditions ofMHG textswith English translations such as that planned by Kathleen Meyer (see Kragl, pp. 799-800) are becoming evermore common.) In volume IIKragl presents his editorial principles (pp. 797-830), gives a detailed description of themanuscripts and fragments (pp. 830-96), and has also produced a thorough, critical, and lucid-in short,very useful!-overview of research on Lanzelet todate, though he consciously refrains fromofferinghis own full interpretation of the work (pp. 897-1020). Finally, he provides a useful commentary on the text (pp. IQ7 1 I280). In sum, this is an extremely useful and eminently usable contribution to Lanzelet scholarship. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM NICOLA McLELLAND Fewrige Freystadt: Erste Neuedition seit I637. Text undMaterialien. By ANDREAS GRYPHIUS. Ed. by JOHANNES BIRGFELD. (Fundstiicke, 4) Hannover: Wehrhahn. 2006. lvi+ 194 pp. o20. ISBN 978-3-932324-38-3. On the night of 8-9 June i637 a fire,starting in a bakery, swept rapidly through the Silesian town of Freystadt (present-day Kozuch6w), leaving a trail of destruc tion. One of the first witnesses was a Lutheran pastor, Paul Gryphius, brother of the twenty-year-oldAndreas Gryphius, who had seen his firstpublished collection of poems, theLissaer Sonette, appear earlier in the year.The young poet was living nearby, at the house of his employer and patron Georg Schonborner, and itwas ap parently at the latter's insistence thathewrote a response to thedisaster, published as Fewrige Freystadt. As he relates the events of thatnight inhis opening prose account, Gryphius pauses to lament the loss of private libraries, to take in an example ofma ternal love in a swallow's vain attempt to rescue her young from the flames, and to reflecton the spiritual lessons tobe gleaned from the catastrophe. The textconcludes with an appeal forhelp to theHabsburg Emperor, and is followed by a long poem in alexandrines, going beyond amere versification of thepreceding prose. Johannes Birgfeld's critical edition draws on two copies of the I637 Lissa publica tion (bothwith marginal corrections which Birgfeld attributes toGryphius) and a fair manuscript copy of the text,again apparently inGryphius's hand. It is supplemented by a general introduction, helpful textual notes, reproductions ofmanuscript pages, and a concluding analysis. Birgfeld makes accessible one ofGryphius's longest prose works, a text which has not been reprinted since i637. The edition contextualizes such poems as the 'Grabschrift' for Gryphius's niece Marianne, whose mother went into labour as the flamesbegan todevour the town ('Gebohren inder Flucht I umbringtmit Schwerd und Brand'), and sheds interesting lighton thepoet's earlywriting career. The edition has twoweaknesses. The firstisstructural.While the long introduction allows Birgfeld toprovide very thorough background information, it involves him in a certain amount of repetition and distracts from the text itself. The second concerns the target readership. Birgfeld acknowledges that this is likely tobe specialists in the fieldof seventeenth-century German literature,but he none the less hopes to appeal to a more general reader,who may have come across 'Tranen des Vaterlandes' or 'Es ist alles eitel' in school or university anthologies. To this end, he provides an introduction toGryphius and to the troubled situation of Silesia in theThirty Years War which is too basic for the book's probable readership, and which leads him to unnecessary exaggerations, forexample his insistence thatcomparing the manuscript and printed copies gives insight into 'das fastkriminalistische und iiu3erst spannende Handwerk der Literatur', or the rather laboured linkbetween the textand Descartes's MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 267 Discours de lamethode, which was published inLeiden on the day of the fire.This edition is, in reality,unlikely to find itsway onto the shelves of the general reader whom Birgfeld courts through his hyperbolic claims, but itwill certainly be useful for thosewith an academic interest in the literatureof thisperiod. KING'S COLLEGE LONDON ANNA LINTON The Reception ofEnglish Puritan Literature in Germany. By PETER DAMRAU. (MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 66; Bithell Series ofDissertations, 29) Leeds: Maney. 2oo6. Vii+214 pp. ?35; $82. ISBN 978-I-904350-38-5. The central claim of thisLondon Ph.D. thesis is thatBritish Puritan literature had a significant impact on...

Mallarmé: la grammaire et le grimoire

Taking the etymological kinship of ‘grammaire’ and ‘grimoire’ as their cue in this opaquely argued study of Mallarmé’s poetic theory and practice, the co-authors (university specialists in linguistics and literature respectively) seek to shed new light on a familiar story: namely, how Mallarmé, influenced by Poe and Baudelaire, replaced a traditional poetic appeal to the transcendental with the silent mysteries of a sacred, quasi-magical text (‘grimoire’) in which language, sufficient unto itself in a godless world, is woven in a complex syntax (‘grammaire’) that reflects ‘la seule “divinité de l'esprit humain”’ (p. 17). After two unsurprising chapters in which Mallarmé adopts Poe's ‘Poetic Principle’ and begins to ‘creuser le vers’ in composing ‘Hérodiade’, Ruppli and Thorel-Cailleteau contend unobjectionably that he found in linguistic study a remedy to the anguish of having to ‘renoncer au rêve d'une élévation de l’âme vers le ciel’ (p. 48). After an innovative but disappointingly short chapter (‘La Linguistique en 1870’) that sketches a contemporary mindset profoundly affected by the religious and metaphysical implications of comparative philology, attention focuses on Mallarmé’s Notes sur le langage (1869–70), twenty-nine sheets of crossed-out manuscript that have survived because his draft translations of Poe's poems occupy the other side. Hitherto a largely undeciphered Rosetta Stone, these notes offer tantalizing glimpses of Mallarmé’s intended doctoral thesis on the ‘science of language’ (and the compulsory thèse complémentaire, in Latin, to be entitled De divinitate), and the principal merit of this book lies in its attempt to contextualize and explicate these glimpses. There are illuminating pages here on how the poet may have derived his conception and practice of reflexivity from Bopp's foundational analyses of Indo-European grammar (language as both object and instrument of knowledge) as well as from Descartes's Discours de la méthode (thinking about thinking, ‘fiction’ as a heuristic device). These insights further inform a brief, suggestive account of Igitur as an allegory of the poet's self-view following his notorious ‘crise de Tournon’. In Les Mots anglais and Les Dieux antiques (seen as counterparts of the projected theses) Mallarmé is shown, respectively, probing the boundaries of linguistic analysis the better to reveal what poetry alone can do as a ‘demonstration’ of language, and then disseminating Max Müller's account of Indo-European myths and religions as linguistically ‘diseased’ versions of an original solar myth (which we knew already from Bertrand Marchal's La Religion de Mallarmé). In the remaining chapters the Mallarméan landscape is either very familiar — the rejection of personal, quasi-musical lyricism à la Verlaine (‘La Tentation de la flûte’), the non-mimetic ‘réflexion’ of an inherently meaningless world at the level of the prosodic (‘Le Vers’) and the paginal (‘Le Champ de la page’) — or else viewed from a highly questionable perspective: for example, the extrapolation from a (misinterpreted) aspiration to ‘Imiter le Chinois’ in ‘Las de l'amer repos … ’ to an alleged miniaturist poetics of exquisite but ostensibly straightforward deixis (‘Les Fleurs de la poésie’, ‘Éventails’). The fourteen chapters of this book are arranged in implicitly chronological sequence, but the discussion of individual poems (for example, ‘Hérodiade’, the ‘Sonnet en yx’) can be cavalier — and occasionally illegitimate (pp. 39, 90) — in its synchronic disregard of important textual revisions. Despite the central theme of a poet shaping the ‘virtualités’ of language, versification itself is rarely analysed: fortunately, perhaps, since the heptasyllabic ‘Toute l’âme résumée … ’ is deemed octosyllabic (p. 191). Poe's was an ‘Imp of the Perverse’, not perverseness (p. 29), a lapse which may explain the unflattering lack of reference to anglophone secondary literature. Lastly, and most importantly, it is simply not true that Mallarmé never contemplated the pejorative sense of ‘grimoire’ (p. 9): his other, finely grammatical and chiastic phrase for it was ‘Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore’. He knew that what he wrote was nearly nonsense, and that in that nearness lay at once its point and his integrity.