[In the following essay, Lewis analyzes Perrault's writings with respect to Cartesian ideas about visualization and self-sensation, arguing that Perrault simultaneously—and ingeniously—resisted and appropriated René Decartes' insights.]

In 1661, more than thirty years before the Mother Goose Tales began to appear, Charles Perrault published a short story entitled “Le Miroir, ou la métamorphose d’Orante.”¹ Appearing at a moment when the writing of portraits and self-portraits was a fashionable pastime, this tale recounts the life of Orante, a brilliantly skillful and unstintingly accurate, if overly frank, practitioner of the verbal portrait. Orante makes a strong, provocative impression on the people he describes—an impression that depends on how they look. He inspires the love of a dazzling young woman named Caliste, who revels in his elaborate, impeccably exact descriptions of her superb beauty; she practices a kind of narcissism without a mirror, hearing her beauty spoken by Orante rather than seeing it. Watching over the couple as a kind of fairy godfather is none other than the god of love, who admires Caliste's beauty and Orante's talent for provoking women to embellish themselves. But alas, the fate of the beautiful Caliste is to prefigure the horrific defacement of Madame de Merteuil in the Liaisons dangereuses: like Merteuil, the gorgeous girl is deformed by the ravages of smallpox. This exposes her to neglect by Cupid and to verbal assault by the depictive poet Orante: he is so caught up in his uncompromising mimetic destiny that he scrupulously describes her dreadful ugliness to her. Her angry response is to stab him repeatedly with a hefty hairpin; enduring her ire, the mortally wounded poet, still chattering away, slowly expires while pursuing his aggressive description of her deformities.

Afterward the god of love, who still cares for Orante, arrives on the scene of the debacle. He is too late, we are told, to bring the poet back to life; the dead man's soul has already taken flight from his body. But the god is resourceful and manages to preserve Orante's marvelous art of graphic exactitude by having his body converted into a mirror. This mirror is, moreover, a distinct improvement over the live portraitist. A stable, impassive instrument, it simply reflects, reproducing images perfectly without the evaluative, accusatory edge of the portrait in words. Moreover, the mirror provides the god a double satisfaction: it not only takes over Orante's function of prompting seductive women to perfect their beauty, but affords the god himself an experience of narcissistic captivation; the mirror reflects both self and other with felicitous effects of pleasure and provocation. The shift, then, from descriptive speech to mirror image takes on a strongly positive connotation; the mirror, by virtue of the enchanting relations of self-reflection it makes possible for its viewer, occupies a privileged place in the order of visual representation.

THE PRESTIGE OF THE VISUAL

Charles Perrault produced this early story more than twenty-five years before launching his major polemical and critical work, Le Parallèle des anciens et des modernes.² Published over a decade during which the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns reached its most strident level and then, after 1694, subsided, the Parallèle consists of five somewhat stilted dialogues. Conceived as a systematic reply to Nicolas Boileau and the partisans of the Ancients, they are given over to orderly debates in which the deck is transparently stacked in favor of Perrault's contention that the artists and thinkers of his times were equal or superior to those of antiquity. If the writerly activity exemplified by Orante in Perrault's youthful tale seems to resonate harmoniously with the mature work of the apologist for contemporary art, it is not simply because Perrault adorned his story with a lesson or commentary praising the art of portraiture in the novels of a modern writer, Madeleine de Scudéry. Much more vitally, it is because the Parallèle ascribes to poetry a fundamentally representational function. In volume 3 of the Parallèle, Perrault's spokesman, the Abbé, treats the work of verbal art quite unreservedly as a painting or a picture. “La Poësie,” he writes, “n’est autre chose qu’une peinture agréable” (Poetry is nothing other than a pleasing painting; 3: 7-8; 199).³ Poetry has a pleasure function that is primarily visual: “Celuy qui lit ou qui écoute reciter un poëme bien fait,” the Abbé notes in his next response, “n’a qu’à livrer son imagination aux images qu’y forme la Poësie, sans faire autre chose de sa part, que de les regarder” (One who reads or hears a well-wrought poem recited merely needs to give one's imagination over to the images that poetry forms within it, without doing anything other than looking at them). Clearly Perrault, who argues forcefully for according to painting an esteemed status equal to that of the belles lettres and who makes the heightened appreciation of painters and their works a key component of his apology for the Moderns, is closely aligned with one of the most striking trends in seventeenth-century thinking about art: its tendency to anchor itself in the authority of the visible, to treat visual experience in its diverse aspects—the pleasures of looking or being looked at, the form and formation of images, the bonding and communication at work in eye contact—as a pivotal human activity and source of value. Among the celebrated literary examples of this trend in France, we might cite what critics term Racine's poetics of the gaze, an expressive instrument that takes the eyes and discourse about them as the communicative channels of passion and its representation, or La Bruyère's probing analyses of facial images and of the exchange of looks in his Caractères, or again, Pascal's thoughts about perspective, the laws of which guide us to analytically satisfying points of view in geometry or architecture or pictorial art but elude us in ethical inquiry. With their line on the diverse components of the field of vision, these classical writers anticipate a point Freud will pursue in describing the dynamics of the gaze and the order of scopophilia, the zone of voyeurism and exhibitionism where sight is the transmitter of sexual drives to pleasure and pain. Much like Racine, Freud treats the look or gaze as a pathway or channel that makes for a kind of convertibility or network of equivalence linking the act of seeing, the seen object, the image of seeing, and the image of the object: all four of these distinguishable phenomena within visual experience are subsumed and thereby bound in an associative chain by the single word vision. Well before the seventeenth century, this key term had acquired its vast range of designation and connotation.⁴

The promotion of the visual was not, to be sure, simply a development in the world of art; the trend was ubiquitous and was connected, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the gradual emergence of aesthetics (from the Greek aisthetikos, pertaining to sense perception) as an autonomous sphere of reflection. An early signpost was offered by the field of optics, where pioneering work by Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes presided over a general tendency to accredit representation by mirrors and lenses. Descartes, for example, stresses the scientific work made possible by telescopes in La Dioptrique. The general trend in this emergent science ran counter to the Platonic depreciation of the senses—sight chief among them—that was inherited from medieval philosophy and remained a skeptical commonplace in the moralist tradition.

Echoes favorable to this new scientific confidence are quite evident in Perrault's discussion of optical devices in the Parallèle. The book as a whole not only accredits the visual and an axiology that it informs; it reflects the wide range of that value system's operation through a somewhat eccentric feature of its global structure. The first four dialogues make up a homogeneous ensemble on the horizon of aesthetics: in the first two (1688), discussion moves from general considerations about the authority of the Ancients to the domain of the plastic arts; then in 3 (1690) and 4 (1692), Perrault deals with the verbal arts. In these two dialogues, he opposes eloquence to poetry in terms that, while they leave intact the conventional categorizations of classical rhetoric, anticipate preoccupations with the differences between speech and writing that will intensify in the work of Rousseau.

But then, at the end of a period corresponding to the time of composition of the celebrated fairy tales (1691-96), Perrault produces a fifth and late dialogue (1697)—the oddball, as it were—in which the arts play a relatively minor role. Here the advance of knowledge and science becomes the central concern, and unsurprisingly, praise for optics and the optical instruments of modern science is effusive. The conversation of the disputants touches upon many different areas of inquiry and technology: astronomy, astrology, geography, navigation, mathematics, warfare, fireworks, physics, medicine, and philosophy (including logic, ethics, and metaphysics). Far and away the dominant subject is philosophy itself, and the key evaluation of Ancients and Moderns involves measuring Descartes against Aristotle. Descartes is not just the main representative of seventeenth-century thought; he is the only one; and for the Modernist, Cartesian rationalism appears to be the only late-century position to be reckoned with. This situation allows us to draw one significant conclusion forthwith, before coming to grips with the somewhat complicated, quite ambivalent critical assessment that Book 5 eventually elaborates. The Parallèle testifies very clearly to Descartes's preponderant influence; and Perrault's comprehensive sweep across the philosophic and scientific terrain gives us a sense of what a popularized, recuperated Descartes could look like to a cultivated public in the 1690s.

VISUALIZATION IN DESCARTES

From the stance that Perrault adopts in his defense of the Moderns, Descartes's work appears to have provided a crucial conceptual underpinning for the seventeenth century's privileging of the visual. In his work on optics, the elevation of sight and light is thematized—made spectacular, we might say—from the start. It is relevant to recall, for example, the opening proposition of La Dioptrique, introducing the discussion of light and visual mechanics: “Toute la conduite de notre vie dépend de nos sens, entre lesquels celui de la vue étant le plus universel et le plus noble, il n’y a point de doute que les inventions qui servent à augmenter sa puissance ne soient des plus utiles qui puissent être” (Our approach to life depends entirely on our senses, and since sight is the most universal and noble among them, there is no doubt that the most useful inventions possible are those that serve to increase its power).⁵ We might also underscore Descartes's elaborate mechanistic account of human vision in his early treatises on the world—Le Monde ou traité de la lumière—and on man—Le Traité de l’homme. The effort he puts into explaining the role of the animal spirits in eyesight is so phenomenal that readers of the popular Discours de la méthode may very well wonder why that example, rather than the more controversial account of the circulation of blood, is not used when Descartes, in Book 5, makes his move from metaphysics to physics and presents his summary account of the laws of nature. The conjoined analyses of sight and light in these works of the young physicist signal an association that is crucial in Descartes's metaphysics, and that persists as an unwavering constant in the visual metaphorics and thematics of French classicism.

But the explicit accent on the visual in Descartes is doubtless less revealing than the more subtle moves he inscribes in his text when his thought strives to be, in a strict philosophical sense, foundational. An important case worthy of numerous afterthoughts is that of the famous method itself. Its first and grounding rule is the rule of évidence—of that which stands out to or for sight, that which is directly, immediately perceptible. A skeptical Descartes asks what we learn about knowledge from looking inside the mind detached from past assumptions and from sensory experience, and given over to self-inspective intellection. We discover, Descartes asserts, that the indubitable idea that commands our allegiance has to be clear and distinct. Since at that preliminary stage his exclusive models for such a transparent, self-evident truth are those of algebra and geometry, the distinctive mark of a clear idea tends from the start to assume a certain kind of visual contour, to figure the clear idea as unmistakably delineable form or shape. From the standpoint of geometric abstraction, the idea of such a clear idea incorporates its visualization: ideality is visual; the idea is to be seized and evaluated in its appearance as an image. The act of perception involves a subject's contact with an object that may indeed be carried out by the senses of touch or hearing, but the disclosure of truth in the form of ideas—no matter how narrowly it may be restricted to the self-contained sphere of the mind—emerges in the appearance of that object to sight. The conception or positioning of truth as immediacy that is not oneness requires the delicately differential touching achieved by vision.

A second, complementary case occurs in the Méditations métaphysiques soon after Descartes has reached the point of asserting the cogito as a proposition he cannot deny. Since not even the evil genius can delude him into thinking he does not exist as long as he is thinking, Descartes is able to assert his existence in thought: the proposition ego sum, ego existo is necessarily true, he asserts, whenever he pronounces it or conceives it in his mind (“quoties a me profertur, vel mente concipitur, necessario esse verum”).⁶ One might already glimpse here, in the reference to conception in the mind, a certain slippage toward visualization, toward the ideality of mathematics, toward what the third Meditation identifies as the proper notion of the idea: an image of things, as opposed to volitions and judgments, which involve the action of the mind adding something to a simple idea. But in the cogito, conception is not yet image formation; it is only the barest, hardly shaped or figured positioning of a simple thought in the mind; seeing is not yet operative in the proposition itself: “I am” at this point is not yet “I see.” The truth of the proposition is a function of its uninterpreted articulation in ordinary language. (The text of the second Meditation allows us to use this term advisedly, as the celebrated passage about a ball of wax contains two references to the use of ordinary parlance, or loquendi, forms of everyday speech not normally subject to question.)⁷

Descartes's problem as a thinking being is the extreme difficulty of getting any further than knowing that he is when he says he is; it is the difficulty of knowing that he exists continuously, of knowing what he is, of drawing attributes for the thinking subject out of propositions like “I think” or “I am.” He manages to advance just a bit in the famous passage about the ball of wax that dominates the second half of the second Meditation. There he discovers the primacy of introspection and homes in upon the crucial gesture of inspecting his own mind. The wax brings perception—primarily sight—into play as if it were coincident with thought itself. The conclusion elaborated in the penultimate paragraph goes much further than the predictable assertion, elaborating on the cogito, that seeing the wax object confirms the truth of the existence of the subject. The slightest apprehension by the subject of its seeing suffices to provide this verification: “For if I judge that the wax exists from the fact that I see it, it certainly follows still more evidently that I exist myself, from the mere fact that I see it. For it might be that what I see is not really wax; it might be as well that I do not even have eyes for seeing something; but it cannot happen that when I see, or when I think I see (which I no longer distinguish from seeing), I who am thinking am not something.”⁸

Descartes's parenthetic remark—“quod jam no distinguo” (what or which I no longer distinguish)—notes the equivalence for the introspective subject of the clauses “when I see” and “when I think I see.” What we glimpse here is no longer just a possible slippage: differentiation is set aside; the displacement onto seeing of that undeniable thinking that evinces the subject's existence presses thinking and seeing into coalescence and near-equivalence. After this opening or folding or displacement of thought onto sight, of cogitation—cogito—into visualization—videam—Descartes proceeds, in the third Meditation, to situate the rule of evidence as the first derivation from his meditation on the cogito: “In this first knowledge, there is nothing except a clear and distinct perception of what I assert.”⁹ And when he reaches the point of asserting the objective reality of ideas, the visibility of the idea is again a crucial conclusion: “So that natural light shows me perspicuously that the ideas are in me as images.”¹⁰

What commentators call the cogito derives from Descartes's contextualization or sublimation of the cogito itself: it is the representation of knowing thought carried out by this fundamental step within the itinerary of the Méditations, the move from the cogito to the rule of evidence, from the proposition asserting existence to the conception or vision of the mind's existence, from knowledge inherent in the speech of the subject to knowledge in the form of an image. Recourse to this metaphorical shift or shuttle or tropos, whereby the sayable is shunted into the visible, speech into image, assertion into figuration, knowledge into representation, the mind into the sphere of natural light, exerts a far-reaching yet subtle hold over the discourse of Cartesian idealism; far-reaching, in structural terms, since, as we shall see, the Cartesian subject, as soul or spirit, constructs its relation to the material world through the same metaphoricity or process of envisualization, controlled by the same rules and procedures. While this metaphoric relation is expressed in foundational terms in the rule of évidence and in the doctrine of the objective reality of ideas, in general Descartes's ontology strives to make the linkage or articulation between thought or idea and image or picture a natural, inevitable, thus almost invisible pattern or structure, no more subject to doubt than ordinary language. It is this thought-configuring movement of sublimation, which makes for the rule of metaphor and for the primacy of the metaphor positioning thought as vision, that I call the Cartesian turn.

The pertinence of the term turn, as opposed to trope or metaphor, lies in its capacity to evoke not only the formal cast of Descartes's reflection, but also its historical significance, as a turning point in the history of philosophy. A particularly salient contextualization of the cogito, which moreover repeats the Perraldian tack of situating Descartes's metaphysics in relation to modern science, is offered by Martin Heidegger's essay “The Age of the World Picture.”¹¹ For Heidegger, Descartes initiated the turn of modern science and research away from its ancient and medieval precedents by interweaving in his work two decisive events: “the world is transformed into picture and man into subiectum.”¹² In the conjunction of these two developments, Heidegger perceives the simultaneous and interdependent emergence of objective science, which construes the world as an object for man's examination, and of anthropology or anthropomorphism as the framework for the philosophical interpretation of life-experience. Heidegger's rendering of the cogito picks up on the coalescence of thought with vision that we have been stressing here. The thrust of his reading is, however, pointedly historical, inasmuch as it accentuates Descartes's abandonment of the theologically centered metaphysics sustained by (Christian) scholastic philosophy in favor of a truth grounded in the position of the knowing subject. The cogito is thus articulated in response to an imperative to endow the subiectum, assuming the role of truth's unshakable ground with self-certainty:

What is this something certain that fashions and gives the foundation? The ego cogito (ergo) sum. The something certain is a principle that declares that, simultaneously (conjointly and lasting an equal length of time) with man's thinking, man himself is indubitably co-present, which means now is given to himself. Thinking is representing, setting-before, is a representing relation to what is represented (idea as perceptio). …

Every relation to something—willing, taking a point of view, being sensible of [something]—is already representing; it is cogitans, which we translate as “thinking.” Therefore Descartes can cover all the modes of voluntas and of affectus, all actiones and passiones, with a designation that is at first surprising: cogitatio. In the ego cogito sum, the cogitare is understood in this essential and new sense. The subiectum, the fundamental certainty, is the being-represented-together-with—made secure at any time—of representing man together with the entity represented, whether something human or non-human, i.e., together with the objective.¹³

In this commentary designed to explain the mutual interdependence of Descartes's epistemological subjectivism and his scientific objectivism, Heidegger pinpoints with consummate acuity the linkage within the sub-ject of the ground (sub-) to its projection or thrownness (ject). The linkage makes it not a simple presence, but always already a representation, not an idea without form or relation to an object, but “idea as perceptio” or image; it is a subject seizing its self-certainty in its imaging of itself for itself, and it is this historically durable and momentous articulation of a certain minimal, indispensable (self-)representation—of a fold within the fabric of subjectivity marking its permeability to the work of difference—that repeats itself as and in the wake of the Cartesian turn.

THINKING AS FEELING

No doubt one should not lose sight of a shadow that the Cartesian turn leaves in its wake. The turn toward the external order of representation in the ball-of-wax passage leaves in the background another Descartes, whose cogito is distinguishable from the sublimated cogito of the historically influential—since recuperable—Descartes principally in question here. Over against the dominant (thematized, doctrinalized) thinking of a philosophic subject who undertakes, in the latter part of the second Meditation and throughout the third Meditation, to construct an articulation of his certainly apprehended existence with the objective world, the ego sum, ego existo and the practice of radical doubt briefly set forth an original, primitive experience of thinking as it appears to itself that is not yet, as we noted above, assimilable to seeing. In the opening chapters of Généalogie de la psychanalyse, Michel Henry situates the key to what he interprets as Descartes's essential, grounding intuition or apprehension of being or life in an assertion Descartes makes in the second Meditation, just before the shift in purview that the ball of wax brings into play. Descartes has been pursuing his attempt to clarify the nature of the “existing thing” revealed in the cogito, emptying his thought of anything subject to doubt, granting that he may be duped by his imagination or by his own creator, and finally going so far as to suppose he is sleeping. Even at that point when all mental representations have to be ascribed to illusion, he writes, “It seems to me that I see [at certe videre videor], that I hear, that I am warm, this cannot be false; properly speaking, that is what in me is called feeling [quod in me sentire appelatur]; and that, considered in these precise limits, is nothing other than thinking.”¹⁴

According to Henry, the critical distinction here is between videre—which depends on a relation of ek-stasis, that is, on the constitutive structure of representation, the differential movement that places what is seen before a gaze—and videor—a passive see(m)ing internal to thought and fundamentally different from the seeing of videre: “Videor désigne la semblance primitive, la capacité originelle d’apparaître et de se donner en vertu de laquelle la vision se manifeste et se donne originellement à nous” (Videor designates the primitive seeming, the primary capacity of appearing and self-sensing through which vision initially emerges and becomes perceptible to us).¹⁵ And as the two propositions that succeed the videre videor indicate, its order is that of feeling and thinking:

C’est donc dans le sentir que Descartes déchiffre l’essence originelle de l’apparaître exprimée dans le videor et interprétée comme l’ultime fondement, c’est comme sentir que la pensée va se déployer invinciblement avec la fulgurance d’une manifestation qui s’exhibe d’elle-même en ce qu’elle est et dans laquelle l’épochè reconnaît le commencement radical qu’elle cherchait. … Videor, dans videre videor, désigne ce sentir immanent au voir et qui fait de lui un voir effectif, un voir qui se sent voir.¹⁶

It is thus in feeling that Descartes detects the original essence of appearing expressed by videor and interpreted as the ultimate ground; it is as feeling that thought will invincibly unfold with the compelling force of a manifestation that reveals itself as what it is and in which the épochè recognizes the radical beginning that it was seeking. … Videor, in videre videor, designates this feeling that is immanent to seeing and that makes it a real seeing, a seeing that senses itself seeing.

The concept of perception by the five senses, which embraces the activity of sight designated by videre, is then separate from this primitive, radically interior sensing or self-sensation,

le se sentir soi-même qui donne originellement la pensée à elle-même et fait d’elle ce qu’elle est, l’originel apparaître à soi de l’apparaître. Le se sentir soi-même en lequel réside l’essence de la pensée n’est pas seulement différent du sentir qui s’appuie sur l’ek-stase, il l’exclut de soi et c’est cette exclusion que formule le concept d’immédiateté. Mais l’ek-stasis fonde l’extériorité, elle est son développement en soi.¹⁷

The self-sensing that gives thought to itself at its origin and makes it what it is, the original appearing to self of appearing. The self-sensing in which the essence of thought resides is not only different from the feeling that is based on ek-stase, it excludes it from itself, and this exclusion is formulated in the concept of immediacy. But ek-stasis grounds exteriority; it is its development in itself.

In its grounding core, the thinking that comes to itself in the cogito is thus an affectivity, a surge of self-apprehension within the tightly bound immediacy of “auto-affection,” of the self-feeling that Descartes probes further, in elaborating on the psychic processes he terms the passions of the soul, when he takes the acts of will proper to the soul to be identical with its perceptions of the desire that the will effectuates.¹⁸

For Henry, the Cartesian itinerary we have followed in ferreting out the turning of thought into vision is to be understood not merely as a turning point—Heidegger's perception of Descartes positioning modern man as a subject and the world as a picture—but more critically as a turning away from the authentic revelation achieved in the cogito: the turn away consists in substituting the relation of the cogito to its cogitatum for the cogito itself; it is a fall of the subject's radical interiority into representation, an absorption of the videor by the videre. Henry thus criticizes Heidegger for reducing the cogito to the subject's act of self-representation and for reducing the ego of Descartes's ego cogito to man. But from the standpoint of seventeenth-century Cartesianism, his account of Descartes's infidelity to his own meditation is interesting because, for Descartes's followers and adversaries alike, it exposes a problem of understanding, a source of indetermination or confusion concerning fundamental concepts: terms such as aperception, clarté, and distinction, applicable to the initiatory coming into presence of feeling in a context devoid of light or sight (as in a “pure” experience of pain) also function readily with their “standard” meanings in the sphere of ekstasis, and by extension, terms such as passion, pensée, and âme, used to designate the order of the originary experience of thought as feeling, likewise tend to bring that experience onto the register of representation. One of Henry's telling illustrations is precisely the term passion. In its original acceptation, passion designates a rudimentary passivity inherent to feeling as self-sensation (self-sensing comes to itself in and of itself; it is passive insofar as its attending to itself simply happens in itself, insofar as it appears to itself without the intervention of any separate agency, external or internal). Thus the word passion covers and unites conceptually both the “actions” and the “passions” of the soul sensing itself in its primordial appearing to itself as the affectivity—an activity that is passivity—of thought. By contrast, however, in the very same articles of part 1 of the Traité des passions, Descartes repeatedly recognizes a general sense of the word passion, used to designate perceptions the soul “reçoit des choses qui sont représentées par elles” (receives from the things that are represented by them).¹⁹ Thus his psycho-physiological discourse on the passions is already fully caught up in a framework of representation that treats the body and the soul as agents acting upon each other.

Another salient example analyzed by Henry is the term clarté, which connotes illumination and which is opposed to confusion and obscurity in the order of ekstasis, of cognition and intelligibility.²⁰ But in the invisible order of feeling, of primitive affectivity and immediacy, where the sharply delineated contours of representation before a seeing subject are not yet in question, clarté is in a sense identical to confusion and obscurity; it marks the effect of self-sensing experienced as the integral coalescence of thinking-feeling-being, as a taking-hold—rather than a bringing-into-focus—that in its oneness is necessarily and irreducibly confused and obscure. As Henry points out in his brief commentary on Malebranche,²¹ in the development of Descartes's thought and of Cartesianism, the fundamentally introverted cogito that unfolds prior to the intervention of the Cartesian turn—of the ek-static slide into representation—leaves a semantic residue that cannot be fully eradicated. To the extent that radical doubt and the seeming but unseeing cogito, even if betrayed, persist or return as the informing commencements to which Descartes's successors refer, it is necessary to assume that traces or after-effects of the obscured or forgotten understanding of terms such as passion and clarté can emerge in the (self-)representational rearticulations of the Cartesian turn itself.

PERRAULT'S DESCARTES

To perceive Descartes's informing presence in French writing during the reign of Louis XIV, one might wish to study, in the first place, how these rearticulations get refined or skewed in a theoretical register—as, for example, in the theory of representation elaborated in the Logique de Port-Royal or in Pascal's critique of Cartesian epistemology. In the register of literary practice, however, reappropriations of or resistances to the Cartesian turn are less transparent and more elusive. If we set aside ritual acknowledgments saluting Descartes's rationalist method and his provisional ethics, his inflective presence in the literature of French classicism is a relatively muted, modulated one. Its principal manifestation—unavoidably rather superficial—derives from the gradual diffusion of the reigning metaphor representing thought as vision or image into the general thematic accreditation of sight, light, and well-delineated visual form. The narrative substance of “Le Miroir, ou la métamorphose d’Orante” forms a spectacular instance of this thematization. By treating the inanimate mirror as a distinct improvement over the living portraitist, the tale forcefully underscores the prestige of the visual.

If Charles Perrault's writerly activity affords us an exceptionally revealing vehicle for studying late-century Cartesianism, it is primarily because it presents an explicitly marked relation to the Cartesian underpinnings, enabling us to look for a directly telling linkage. It is helpful, moreover, that the marking, a late-career testament from a privileged witness of the culture of the splendid century, occurs in writings in both of the registers mentioned above—theory in the Parallèle and his Pensées chrétiennes, literary practice in his occasional poetry as well as the Contes. It is also noteworthy that in deploying the pliable structure I am calling the Cartesian turn, Perrault persistently and artfully reinvested the trajectory leading from understanding (intellegentia) to imagination (imaginatio) with an axiological, if not polemical edge. In “Le Miroir,” the itinerary leading from precisely stated knowledge to clear pictorial representation appears to subtend a simple allegorical statement about the ends of portraiture. The narrator unhesitatingly associates himself with Cupid's standpoint, depicting as an artistic advance the move from the verbal portrait produced by the witty Orante to the more perfect and alluring, yet also less aggressive and invasive visual representations reflected by the mirror. A massive repetition of an equivalent judgment, enunciated from the standpoint of poetics and cultural history, has been documented by Elizabeth Berg in her study of the relation between eloquence and poetry in the Parallèle. In dialogues that helped inaugurate a movement toward the autonomy of aesthetics in the late seventeenth century, the Abbé accounts for the higher esteem in which poetry is held by contrasting the orator's rhetoric to the poet's imagery: to move from the former to the latter is to advance toward greater pleasure, dignity, and security.

But what about Perrault's explicit attention to Descartes the philosopher in the final dialogue of the Parallèle? As we saw earlier, Perrault leaves us no doubt that he leans heavily on the Cartesian tradition of his time, and if the epistemological Descartes who assumes and reasserts the primacy of the visual in the conception of thought is treated superficially, he is nonetheless an important legitimizing and structuring ground for Perrault's value system. Yet the Parallèle is complicated, to some degree at least, by the recourse to dialogue; and the interest of the debate in Book 5 stems largely from the critical slant taken not only by the Abbé, Perrault's spokesman, but also by the Abbé's usually naive crony, the Chevalier, and even to a certain extent by their adversary, the Président, a defender of the Ancients. Once the Abbé has finished explaining why Descartes's physics is superior to Aristotle's, the Chevalier begins assailing the Abbé with his insistent objections to the Cartesians. The Descartes who looms in the background appears to be less the idealist discovering the shape and significance of his own thinking than the dualist struggling to deal with the mind/matter dichotomy. The resistance to Descartes generally revolves around an objection repeated ad nauseam by the knight: the Cartesians flounder when they try to explain how a corporal being can think or know, or how it is that men have spiritual souls while beasts have only material ones, or how beasts can feel or know while lacking judgment or reason. The problem zone is indeed that of dualism as it emerges not so much in Descartes's foundationalist discourse about questions of epistemology and ontology as in the last two books of the Discours de la méthode or the later Meditations (5 and 6), in less rarefied discourse on questions of metaphysics and anthropology. In this orbit, elaborating the relations of mind to matter and of soul to body occasions obstacles, gaps, and complexities incomparably more forbidding than those of the inspection of the mind.

This challenge to Descartes prompts the Abbé to change his strategic course. Instead of defending Descartes against the ancient philosophers vaunted by the Président (Aristotle, Democritus), he locates him in the past vis-à-vis the Moderns of his own time. The latter have continued to advance philosophic understanding, thanks in part, he notes (5: 173; 327), to the analytic and scientific methods developed by Descartes. It is thus possible for the Abbé to adhere to some Cartesian principles and procedures, including the critique of received ideas, while nonetheless laying out in considerable detail reservations about certain Cartesian ideas that Perrault expresses more economically in the Pensées chrétiennes (paras. 11-12, 57-59). His critique, if incidental remarks are set aside, incorporates three main objections, all of which have at least a nominal connection to the status of sight and vision:

1. One of these criticisms mounts an attack, which is elaborated more seriously in the Pensées chrétiennes (paras. 11-12), on Descartes's ontological proof (based on the innate idea of a perfect being) of the existence of God in the third Meditation. Its interest lies not so much in Perrault's strong preference for the cosmological proof of God's existence (reasoning back from the existence of the universe to the necessity of a creator) as in the caricatural construal of the ontological proof. The Chevalier situates it as a derivative of fallacious claims about clear and distinct ideas: “Je pense qu’il y a un Dieu, & par ce que cette pensée ou idée me paroist tres claire & tres distincte, donc il y a un Dieu” (I think there is a God, and since this thought or idea seems clear and distinct to me, there is then a God; 5: 194; 322). The fustian reasoning here simply reverses the movement of the fourth Meditation, where Descartes hinges the general validity of the criteria of truth—clarity and distinctness—he had identified by scrutinizing his experience of the cogito on his equally indubitable idea of God. Yet the exchange among the three interlocutors yields a remarkable consensus on a central issue: adopting a simple-minded understanding of the first rule of the method presented in Chapter 2 of the Discours de la méthode, all confidently dismiss the principled link between truths that are certain and ideas that are clear and distinct.

2. A related objection apparently targets the third rule of the method, which requires the ordering of thoughts “en commençant par les objets les plus simples et les plus aisés à connaître” (beginning with the simplest, most readily known objects). The Abbé blames Descartes “d’avoir voulu nous expliquer dans le détail l’essence & la constitution des corps simples” (for having wanted to explain to us in detail the essence and constitution of simple bodies; 5: 165, 325). He goes on to explain that the human mind, aside from forming simple ideas (presumably fundamental terms that remain undefined, such as space, time, number, and element), is capable of two operations, dividing and assembling (it would not be difficult to show, using rules 2 and 3 of the method and parallels between the appeals to architectural metaphors in the Discours and the Parallèle, that Perrault's viewpoint here is loosely Cartesian). It is possible to achieve knowledge of an object only by dividing it “en son genre & en sa difference” (into its genus and its species; 5: 166, 325). Thus, for example, in pursuing the knowledge of man and animals, one proceeds with division after division “jusqu’au souverain genre, qui est L’Estre, lequel ne pouvant plus se diviser en genre & en difference, ne peut plus aussi estre défini, ni bien connu, par consequent” (until reaching the sovereign genus [or type], which is being; the latter, since it is no longer divisible into genus and species [type and characteristic], is therefore neither definable nor knowable; 5: 167, 326).

Implicit in the curiously scholastic operation that leads Perrault to construct his own version of the tree of Porphyrus (reproduced in the Pensées chrétiennes, para. 81) is a resistance, also perceptible in the Abbé's denunciation of the practice of radical doubt (5: 195-96, 333), to the very premises of the foundationalist analysis that leads back to and then through the cogito.²² For the commonsensical characters of his dialogue, if the reductive process of disassembly that leads to the simple origin—the inaugural ground or building block—of a cognitive construct such as physics or metaphysics can present the basic object or experience it discloses as a certainty, it is nevertheless unthinkable to endow it with clarity in their sense of the term, precisely because a truly simple entity, in its oneness, is indivisible. Had Perrault studied Descartes's discussion in the Principes de la philosophie of what happens when someone feels intense pain, he would no doubt have been unreceptive to the qualifying proposition in which Michel Henry anchors his definition of the particular clarity proper to the cogito: “encore qu’il n’aperçoive rien clairement que le sentiment ou la pensée confuse qui est en lui” (whereas he perceives nothing clearly except the feeling or indistinct thought within him).²³ The bias built into Perrault's tree of Porphyrus, isolating l’Estre as an unknowable genus-without-species, disallows this clear apperception of a feeling or inchoate thought; its frame of reference, detached from the elemental sentiment appearing on the hither side of representability, requires the ground of visibility introduced by the Cartesian turn.

3. Perrault's most forceful, elaborate, and historically significant objections to the thought of Descartes center on the theoretical difference between man and animals.²⁴ Like La Fontaine and many others, Perrault protests against the account of animals as machines or automatons set forth in Chapter 5 of the Discours de la méthode. Citing cases of animal behavior, he insists that denying feeling, reason, and knowledge to animals is counterfactual, that differentiating man from animals has to be based on human “intelligence”—that is, on the mental faculties that enable man to work with abstractions and universals. “La difference essentielle de l’homme consiste à pouvoir se faire des notions abstraites & spirituelles de toutes choses, & sur tout de Dieu” (The essential characteristic of man consists in being able to form abstract and spiritual notions of all things, and especially of God; 5: 209-10; 336). What makes this issue pivotal, however, is the turn the debate takes when its focus narrows to the question of spirituality: do animals have a soul, and if so, of what sort? Hesitant to assert that animals have a spiritual soul, Perrault falls back on the guarded claim that it is reasonable to accord them hypothetically a corporal soul. Given this tentative stance, his problem is not to prove the hypothesis, but merely to show that it is plausible.

AN AMBIVALENT MIRROR: IMAGINING THE ANIMAL COGITO

Since the Abbé's case for the animal soul has to be made in response to the commonsensical objection that experience makes it hard for us to conceive of corporal thinking, it is not surprising that he sets out to question the conditions under which an idea or phenomenon may be relegated to the status of the inconceivable or the impossible. His point in this passage (5: 217, 338), as he resists hasty or ill-informed dismissals of the unthinkable, resonates intriguingly with Boileau's notion of the sublime, a strange quasi-concept—neither a style nor a rhetorical practice, but simply a turn of expression. … Boileau initially associates the sublime or marvelous dimension of the great work with two familiar motifs—first, the immediate connotation of elevation, of a powerful uplifting effect, and second, the arresting experience of the ineffable or inconceivable, the inexpressible effect designated by the famous cliché, “je ne sais quoi,” that is, literally an “I don’t know what it is,” or more colloquially “that special something but I can’t say what.” The elusive “je ne sais quoi” escapes or blocks or overwhelms the mind's representational grasp and records allusively the impact of experience that lies beyond the awesome analytic frontier where a positive definition or delineation of an idea or image or event or figure of language becomes impossible. In this uplifting poetic movement of inspiration and psychic integration that Neil Hertz calls, in The End of the Line, the sublime turn, the swell of an overpowering, figure-effacing brilliance inundates the space of the Cartesian turn and suspends its delineatory movement. To the extent that the sublime turn toward inspiration, spontaneity, immediacy, and fulgurant illumination overrides the ek-static, scopic, spectral, figural formation of truth with an upsurge of arresting revelation, its movement is the symmetrical converse of the Cartesian turn from revelation into representation: its beckons backward toward the commanding, initiatory appearance of truth, undifferentiated and undeniable, that is encountered in the cogito itself. In Perrault's resistance to Descartes, can one detect any intimation of an interest in that rarefied experience, any inclination to accompany Boileau in allowing, within the sphere of artistic representation, a certain reversal or suspension of the Cartesian turn?

For the most part, the Perraldian position in the Parallèle is the one we expect: his defense of sublime style and his resistance to the sublime go hand in hand with the Modern's loose Cartesianism, marked by his emphasis on rational, analytic understanding and plausible, technical explanations. Thus the Abbé's appeal to the inconceivable or inexplicable in order to ascribe verisimilitude to any view—his or Descartes's—of the mind/body and man/beast distinctions seems unexpected and paradoxical. The quite Cartesian example that he adduces to explain his point makes it at once all the more intricately intriguing and, in approach, typical of Perrault's strategy in the Parallèle. For his reflection centers on the way the mirror—figured in “Le Miroir, ou la métamorphose d’Orante” as the very emblem of visibility—functions as an optical instrument. Suppose, he says, you had never before seen a mirror or any image-reflecting surface, and somebody told you that in another country there are very thin objects that represent perfectly—even better than a painter can—anything one sets in front of them. You would find the idea astonishing and essentially inconceivable, but would you be right to claim that it is impossible?

The Abbé's suggestive simile measuring the refractory idea of a corporal soul against this amazing mirror typifies Perrault's intellectual posture because it is anchored not so much in analysis or argument as in his incessant appeal to comparison and analogy. If the display of this analogical bent is unsurprising insofar as the ongoing differentiation of Ancients and Moderns is concerned, and if it is also … quite consistent with Perrault's views on rhetoric and eloquence, it is still remarkably extensive and insistent. In its insinuatory form, the rhetorical question about the reflective power of the mirror vis-à-vis the person who has never encountered one resembles Molyneux's famous question for the eighteenth-century philosophes about what a man blind since birth would see if he suddenly acquired the faculty of sight. The rhetorical gambit enables the Abbé to play upon his interlocutor's wish to avoid the stigma of relative ignorance or imaginative naiveté. His implied message is amply clear: you may find thinking bodies or corporal souls inconceivable or awe-inspiring because neither your experience nor your faculties have prepared you to understand them; yet your inability to conceive of them does not make them impossible; it only make you ignorant or inexperienced or weak-minded. In short, one person's blindness does not mean that others cannot see.

The full interest of this one invocation of the mirror in the Parallèle becomes apparent, however, only when the Chevalier reacts by questioning, precisely, the Abbé's recourse to rhetoric: “mais enfin ce n’est qu’une comparaison” (but, ultimately, that is only a comparison; 5: 218; 338). Forced to recast his analogy in argumentative terms, the intrepid Abbé treats his interlocutors to this rather complex reasoning:

Si la seule disposition des parties de certain corps, leur donne la faculté de representer toute sorte d’objets, pendant que tous les autres corps sont privez d’une faculté si admirable, il ne doit pas y avoir de l’inconvenient que la seule disposition des parties de certains corps leur donne la faculté de sentir & de connoistre, pendant que tous les autres corps sont privez d’un si grand avantage. Vous me direz qu’il y a bien de la difference entre la faculté de representer des objets, & celle de les connoistre, & moy je répondray qu’il y a aussi bien de la difference entre ce qui rend un corps capable de representer des objects, & ce qui le rend capable de connoistre les mesmes objects; & que si le simple poliment qu’on donne à une glace brutte de miroir, en la frottant, luy communique le pouvoir de former les images de toutes choses, on ne doit pas s’estonner que l’ame d’un animal, quoyque corporelle, soit capable de sentiment & de connoissance, si l’on considere l’admirable construction de toutes les parties du corps de ce mesme animal, la maniere ineffable dont ses sens sont organisez, la vitesse des esprits vitaux et animaux qui le remüent (5: 219-20; 339).

If the mere organization of certain bodies gives them the capacity to represent any kind of object, while all other bodies are deprived of such an admirable capacity, there should be no problem if the mere organization of the parts of certain bodies gives them the capacity to think and to know, while all other bodies are deprived of such a great advantage. You will tell me there is quite a difference between the capacity to represent objects and the capacity to know them, and I shall answer that there is also quite a difference between a body's capacity to represent objects and its capacity to know them; and that if the simple polishing of the surface of a natural mirror endows it with the capacity to form images of all things, we should not be surprised that the soul of an animal, although corporal, is capable of feeling and knowledge, [especially] if we consider the admirable construction of all the parts of the body of this animal, the ineffable way its senses are organized, the quickness of the animal spirits that invigorate it.

This passage is remarkable because it rises to a theoretical level passably rare for Perrault and his time. Under the general term of difference, it names a discontinuity that can be figured as a divide or a gap, and then proceeds to delineate a context for the work of difference. The Cartesian objection anticipated by the Abbé—who is fully aware of the contrast between the insensitive, inanimate mirror and the active, sensing animal—posits the difference between representing and knowing. Now it is just such a distinction within intellection—the difference between knowing existence and visualizing it—that separates the cogito, as the primitive ground of knowledge, from the mind's idea or conception of the cogito, which brings that immediate knowledge into the realm of a certain interior representation or visibility. But where the foundationalist Descartes, struggling against the radical doubt he has unleashed, is at pains to validate the continuity of thought and perception, to reduce the original gap between self-sensation and self-representation, to posit a rigorously controlled overlapping of the “I think, I am” with an uplifting “I see,” Perrault's spokesman, with his contrast between the mirror and the animal body, seems to underscore, not the coalescence of representation with feeling and knowing, but an essential and irresolvable difference between them. Indeed the Abbé marks the difference doubly, since he grafts onto the discontinuity between representation and knowledge what he takes to be its cause, the less complex, more mechanical nature of the reflecting body versus the nobler, more dynamic, and more intricate resources of the knowing body.

A difference of this kind is, to be sure, what returns to the fore in the realm of human thought when we trace the move from idealist ontology to dualist anthropology in the work of Descartes. Lying beyond the Cartesian turn and thus within the order of representation that it continues to shape, such a difference comes into play early in the sixth Meditation, for example, when Descartes distinguishes the formation of images and ideas from reasoning or pure intellection (“primo examino differentiam quae est inter imaginationem & puram intellectionem”).²⁵ Here Descartes anchors the crucial opposition of spirit to body in the difference between the enabling ground of representation, visibility, and that of knowledge, mind. The latter engages reason, intelligence, and communicative powers that Cartesian rationalism reserves for man, whereas animals, while lower than man, can perfectly well be endowed with a primitive faculty of representation. In this differential mode that is crucial to the discourse of rationalism on the unique nature of man as a thinking, speaking being whose essence is spiritual, the image has to be, as it were, reseparated from cognition and discourse, and then reintegrated into their elaboration through what amounts to a remobilization of the Cartesian turn. The position of the imagination—defined by Descartes as an “application of cognitive faculty to an intimately present body” (applicatio facultatis cognoscitivae ad corpus ipse intime praesens)²⁶—is thus secondary and derivative in relation to the primacy of thought, speech, and knowledge. As a process of envisualization or image-formation, the Cartesian turn now consists in this embracing application of mind to body, which is carried out by what is twice represented, in the succeeding discussion of geometrical figures, as the “attentive” or “focusing” mind (aciem mentis). The turn within the mind-body relation that makes for the fusion of cognition with imagination once again relies, as it did in the cogito, on the subtle slippage of thought into vision.

By contrast, when the Abbé expounds on the form and function of an animal soul, he implicitly relocates the groundwork in which knowledge is anchored. The shift, corresponding precisely to Heidegger's gloss that locates the Cartesian turn inside the cogitation of the founding cogito, is already evident in his extended comparison of animals and men (5: 197-211; 333-37): “Quand je regarde mon chien, & que mon chien me regarde, les images que nous concevons l’un de l’autre, sont également corporelles & materielles” (When I look at my dog and my dog looks at me, the images we conceive of each other are equally corporal and material; 207). Here, as in the passage cited above in which the mirror situates the mechanics of representation as a natural phenomenon involving nothing more than the play of light on a reflective surface, the Abbé's example places the starting point of the beastly and human animals' perceptive experience, not in thinking or feeling, but in the forming of images occasioned by sight of an object. The representation of objects that can be achieved mechanically, as a result of well-arranged physical parts, is the ground on or out of which “la faculté de sentir et de connoistre” emerges. Is it then reasonable to read the conjunction of sentir and connoistre, repeated near the end of the quoted passage by the reference to an animal soul “capable de sentiment & de connoissance,” as a marking of equivalence comparable to the linkage of thinking to feeling in the cogito, and thereafter, still more venturesomely, to grasp in the movement from representation to knowledge within the animal's material soul a reversion toward a grounding apprehension of being as self-sensation, thus a reversal of the Cartesian turn?

At least two claims built into Perrault's text open the way for such a reading. The first is implicit in the primary argument through which he allows his spokesman to adumbrate, after Descartes, the lineaments of a modern, proto-materialist psychology that the eighteenth-century philosophes will detach from the metaphysical framework to which Perrault remains devoutly committed. The Abbé seeks essentially to point out that the possibility conditions for the operation of a corporal soul are observable in animal bodies. He punctuates the argument in the middle by introducing the Cartesian's objection that representation without thinking does not produce knowledge in a strong sense—that is, insofar as it differs from representation. In answering, he invokes the admirable complexity of the psychic organism, a neurological system in which the movements of sensory impulses and relations to objects or stimuli are vital. To the extent that feeling and knowledge are assimilated to those thoroughly integrated corporal movements, they are, as in the cogito, at one with each other. These psychic impulses can be understood as fundamental signs of existence, and thus as the irreducible components of what I shall call hereafter “the animal cogito.”

The second claim, more elaborate and delicate, is articulated immediately after the passage comparing the material soul to the mirror. The Abbé is pursuing the vein of reflection that grasps the animal cogito unfolding from a representational base that is already in place. The principle to which the appeals harks back to the Cartesian account of the mind-body relation (“an application of the cognitive faculty to an intimately present body”) and resonates with the Heideggerian embedding of the subiectum in an object-relation, in a “being-represented-together-with” the entity represented. The Abbé asserts in regard to man, then repeats in regard to beasts, that there is a necessary commensurability or congruence between a conceptual faculty and its object (“il faut qu’une puissance, comme je viens de le dire soit proportionnée à son objet”; 5: 221; 339). In the case of animals, which can achieve via imagination a restricted knowledge of “choses materielles & individuelles” but not the higher knowledge of “choses spirituelles et universelles” (5: 206; 335) accessible via intelligence, this means that the shape and medium of their knowledge correspond in nature to those of the object: if the animal soul can reasonably be defined as material, it is because the animal has the capacity to produce material representations of single material objects. Presumably, then, it is only as such, as an isolated object, that it can perceive itself.

The obvious weakness of this rationale is that it so readily allows the difference between knowledge and representation to dissipate. Its still considerable interest lies in the direction the Abbé's account of corporal reflection takes as it quickly glides back into the modeling of knowledge on visual perception. The predictable folding of animal cognition into the already present substructure of representation effectively reverses the outward thrust of the Cartesian cogito from the interior appearance of thought into visualization. Yet with that inward movement toward a grounding core of reflection that makes it the always already operative structure of cognition, the Abbé also appears to draw back from the materialist challenge with which the animal's psychophysical cogito confronts the primacy of spirit in Descartes's foundationalism and to restore, indeed strengthen, the predominance of the Cartesian turn. In effect, only for a moment, and in vague terms, does his effort to conceive of the animal cogito escape from the relation of a viewing subject to its object; and when the visual relation in which it is decisively reinscribed returns, its effect is to confer upon the animal cogito a structure not parallel to the immediate self-sensing of Descartes's founding spiritual cogito, but rather already aligned with the envisioning warp of the Cartesian turn.

Owing to the irrepressibility of the Cartesian turn within Perrault's attempt to articulate his resistance to Descartes, the Abbé's stance in the Parallèle ultimately entails the unwitting compromise that offsets his overt contestation with a deep-seated compliance. Although Perrault's apparent confidence in his critique of Descartes is not devoid of a certain fatuousness, the revelatory potential of his effort to force a further reckoning with the animal/human distinction should not be underestimated. The passage we have just examined in which the Abbé's resistance begins to flounder remains note-worthy for two reasons. First of all, it exposes the fundamental thrust of Perrault's critical intuition about Descartes in its simplicity and force: his speculation on animal knowledge opens onto an impulse—a need that Descartes meets with the Cartesian turn—to impose on the cogito itself, reduced to its foundational core, a reflexive or representational vector. Alternatively, this can be understood as an inclination to give up the search for a deeply fundamental ground of knowledge and to situate the cogito at a higher level, already fathomed by the order of representation. At that level, where the issue is no longer the relation of subject to object, but that of mind to body, Perrault does manage to oppose Descartes unequivocally: allowing only for the “proportionality” of mind to mind and of body to body, he effectively rigidifies the dualism that Descartes sought to overcome by structuring the imaginative faculty as an “application” of mind to body.

Beyond this, the Abbé's arbitrary assumption of likeness between subject and object puts an ultimately atomistic twist on Perrault's materialist fantasy. In reducing and binding the primitive moment of animal cognition to a single, simple material cognatum, the Abbé blocks whatever interior reflexive or self-sensing apprehension the animal might experience at the point of its inception as reflection, thereby depriving the bestial subject of the possibility of making the kind of connective, self-and-world-building turn into representation that the Cartesian cogito makes possible for man. While the animal cogito, bound by the isolated material object and thus actualizable only in punctual recurrences of the same perceptive experience, apparently does dissolve into feeling, it is not so much the feeling of thought freely seizing itself in its vital self-sentiency as simply the mechanically ordered sensation of instinctual process. As such, as affectivity caught up in the mindless, repetitive chain of stimulus and response, how can this feeling be conjoined with cognition and made constitutive of consciousness? The question here is not precisely an echo of the one raised by the Cartesian cogito: how does feeling come to fold back on itself in a movement of self-sensation? The mystery is not so much how a certain primitive representation for a seeing subject can inhabit this affective milieu as what such a representation might be: can it be anything other than the discontinuous play of discrete material images affecting the seeing body according to the laws of the nervous system?

The problem here is that the Abbé's speculations, while they sidestep the difficulty of describing animal consciousness directly, are inextricably immersed in his extended comparison and contrast of the animal soul to the mirror. Although the beast's capacity for representation can be likened to the optical mechanics at work in mirroring, the capacity for knowledge that makes animals more sophisticated and nobler than the impassive physical object involves a representational mechanics—evoked by the mythic first encounter with a mirror—that remains ineffable (“la maniere ineffable dont ses sens sont organisez”). The grounding perception at work in the animal cogito is precisely the restrictive, unthinking image-formation figured by the object-depicting mirror, endowed with its extraordinary power of exact representation. Clearly, that marvelous mirror can no longer quite stand here for the superiority of stable visible representation, as it does in the story of Orante's metamorphosis. Instead, because the Abbé conveys his ambivalent posture through the discourse he constructs around the mirror, it assumes a pivotal articulatory function. When contrasted with the animal body, the mirror figures simultaneously the inferior status of mimetic representation in relation to the higher plane of knowledge and understanding and the anchoring of that knowledge in a ground of visual representation. When considered in itself as the Abbé's singular example situating knowledge as a function of experience and perspective, the mirror illustrates both the splendor of the perfectly faithful imaging and the need to leave a space for the unfamiliar, the incalculable, or the inconceivable in the account of the truth. In its ambivalence, then, the mirror takes on the paradoxical potential to symbolize no less what sustains than what collapses the critical gap between representation and knowledge. Insofar as this crucial difference continues to inhabit intellection, it challenges the adequacy of mimetic representation for the expression of truth and disputes the value of clear and distinct ideas, perhaps even to the point of beckoning toward an unthinkable ground that escapes from clear apperception in the cogito itself. Yet insofar as the difference gives way to the integration of knowledge and representation, it signals a reinforcement of the Cartesian turn and of the values associated with visualization. It is, then, as if the Parallèle's mirror occasions a staying of the continuist movement that undergirds the value of visualization, even as it continues to emblematize that value; it is as if, for Perrault, the price of resisting the Cartesianism that undergirds the privilege of the visual in his axiology is his own retrenchment in the Cartesian turn.

SUBLIMATIONS OF THE COGITO: THE INCONCEIVABLE IN LITERATURE

If Perrault's resistance of Descartes ultimately lapses into compliance, the balancing act that at once denies and reasserts the convergence of visual perception with understanding, that overlays the original metaphoric construal of the cogito (knowing as vision) with its inverted equivalent (vision as knowing), does put a characteristically Perraldian twist on the Cartesian turn. For the purpose of situating this claim about Perrault's manner of appropriating the most exacting thought of his time, it seems relevant to point out, in advance of the analysis I shall offer in Chapter Two, that in dealing with Boileau and the sublime turn, he takes a closely analogous tack in much the same fashion, that is, with the same, acute attention to the explicitly disputed points and with little, if any, discernible awareness of the points of convergence.

In the fourth dialogue of the Parallèle, the two partisans of the Moderns, the Abbé and the Chevalier, are criticizing examples of the sublime or marvelous that Boileau, following Longinus, found in Homer's epics. As a counterexample worthy of the term sublime, the somewhat cavalier Chevalier suggests nothing other than the marvelous one finds in “contes de Peau d’asne” (4: 120; 227), that is, more or less popular or vulgar folktales, and as his particular example, he mentions not the gold-defecating ass we find in Perrault's versified tale “Peau d’asne,” but rather the seven-league boots of the prose tale “Le Petit Poucet.” In the reasoning that eventually emerges in this quite curious passage, Perrault's power play consists in advocating his own diluted sublime, which is essentially the grandiloquent rhetoric that Boileau disdainfully regarded as sublime style, while simultaneously appropriating Boileau's strong sublime, grounded in inspired authorship.

As the Abbé's commentary recognizes, the marvelous elements of the fairy tales, such as the magic boots, do retain something of the inconceivable or unfathomable experience and striking, poetically gripping quality that the sublime turn brings into play. Yet that may be only a secondary point. For since the tales persistently fold the inexplicable or imponderable back into the dominant order of reason and verisimilitude, they bend toward a compromise formation that leaves in place, though comfortably under artistic control, an unresolved tension between the sublime and sublime style, between the marvelous of a compellingly illuminating figure or inconceivable experience and a naturalized marvelous, as it were, that is subject to rational, technological understanding. In its structure and import, this double-edged operation recalls the Abbé's attempt to defend the idea of a corporal soul by constructing an account of animal cognition. His initial move is to validate the notion of the inconceivable as it is illustrated by the marvel of mirroring; yet this inconceivable factor is dissolved into a rational, functional account as the mechanics of reflection are described. These two opposed but articulated views of the mirror underlie the more complex compromise formation that relates—in a crisscrossing or chiasmatic configuration—the Cartesian cogito to the animal cogito. The latter, anchored in the physical and subject to technical understanding, nonetheless retains its marvelous, ineffable aspect, while the former, although anchored in the indivisible ground of being that Perrault's ontological schematic situates as inaccessible, can nonetheless—via the Cartesian turn—order the cognitive field of representation.

Thus whether the dialogues of Perrault's Parallèle confront the Cartesian turn into representation or the sublime turn away from it, they work their way toward compromise formations or configurations that turn upon the same fundamental opposition, that of the conceivable to the inconceivable. The Chevalier's allusion to the fairy tales suggests that Perrault's fictional constructs in the Contes may also turn upon this opposition, situated as that of the marvelous to the rational. It happens, moreover, that the tale to which the Chevalier refers, “Le Petit Poucet,” can be read not only as a typical case of this compromise, but as an allegorical narrative of its formation. The daring move that ultimately enables the hero to triumph consists in stealing the magic boots worn by the ogre who is trying to kill him and his brothers. That theft of the magic boots would be Thumbkin's seizure of the marvelous or sublime that displaces it into the realm of the clever hero's esprit. As for the term esprit—variously translatable as mind, spirit, soul, wit, intelligence—it is already the locus of a formidable compromise formation. On the one hand, the term points to the consummate strategic intelligence of Perrault's savvy heroes, who acquire the eloquence and mastery of the honnête homme, the perfect gentleman whose art of living is subject to codification and whose reasoned outlook privileges scientific understanding; this dominant rational spirit clearly falls within the perspective of sublime style, rhetoric, poetics, eloquence. Yet this very same spirit or “spirituel” also reserves within itself a subordinate but ineradicable space for a still unassimilable force, for spontaneity, inspiration, mystery, folly, and chance; it remains open to the work of a strong, irrecuperable sublime. The key term spirit—esprit—thus becomes a kind of signifying crossroads or condensation point, comparable in articulatory power to the mirror in the Abbé's speculations on corporal knowledge. Its semantic capaciousness enables Perrault to deploy and sustain the difference between the sublime and sublime style even while his dominant line is, so to speak, a sublimation of the sublime, a construction that drains the surpassing energy of the sublime turn into a vision of art as a craft, a pleasureful exercise. But can the spirit of the fairy tales also subject the Cartesian turn to a compromise formation comparable to this one and to those we have ferreted out of the Parallèle?

A number of Perrault's tales weave allegories of the spirit, as it were, in which the twists or reversals in the narrative effectively rearticulate his sublimation or recuperation of the Cartesian cogito. The emblematic case of this allegorical operation is a formidably suggestive story entitled “Riquet à la houppe,”” a comical hero-naming title that means roughly “Richard (or perhaps Ricky) with the tuft of hair on his head” and identifies the determined protagonist as a wealthy runt.²⁷ The story tells how a marriage gets made—a marriage between Riquet, a cleverly eloquent and spirituel but hideously ugly prince, and a stupendously beautiful princess who is woefully stupid (or mindless, we might well say). The fairy godmother has empowered the young man endowed with esprit to make a gift of mind or spirit to the woman he loves; and symmetrically, the young woman who has beauty is empowered to bestow beauty or handsomeness upon the man she loves. The text seems to allegorize transparently the terms of Perrault's discourse on art and beauty in the Parallèle. The narrator's explanations link esprit unmistakably to speech as a discursive practice, and beauty to the prestige of the image, of pictural representation; and there is also a hardly subtle connection of the verbal to the male characters and the visual to the females, as the two queens and the two princesses are initially preoccupiedwith the visible qualities of beauty and ugliness. Riquet's triumph in the tale consists in exercising his verbal and spiritual talents well enough to bring his eventual wife through her resistance to his ugliness and, by inducing her to commit herself through performative speech, to obtain from her the reciprocal gift that makes him handsome. It looks like a victory of esprit, of mind, asserting its priority and control over the perceptual; the exercise of esprit eventually determines through what light or perspective objects will be seen and appreciated. So the scenario of exchange and the narrative structure seem to confirm the empire of a male-dominated order in which the hero's speech reduces the heroine to a certain practice of vision or re-vision that runs essentially counter to the tale's first moralité, which reasserts the priority of the visual, of perspective, of sight driven by desire: “ce que l’on voit dans cet écrit,” notes the moralité at the end, “est moins un conte en l’air que la vérité même” (what we see in this text is less an ephemeral tale than truth itself; 285).

But of course, upon closer examination, the story turns out to be much trickier than this, and does contain evidence to support the lesson of that first moralité. Although Riquet, the hero, is the efficacious practitioner of spiritual speech, he takes his most forceful stand on the preeminent value of beauty. “La beauté,” he tells the Princess, “est un si grand avantage qu’il doit tenir lieu de tout le reste” (Beauty is such a great advantage that it must hold sway over all the rest; 282) The power his successful speech acts confer on her is the power to make him objectively lovable, to create him as an object of her desire in the realm of the visible. “Vous pouvez me rendre le plus aimable de tous les hommes” (you can make me the most lovable of all men; 283), he tells her, enabling her to move into a position of self-mastery and appropriative desire as she carries out her commitment to him. Or again, on the level of the Cartesian opposition between the human and the animal, at first glance the Princess appears to pass through a metamorphosis from the animal—the term for her insistent self-qualification is bête—to the human as she receives the gift of gab; but we also find Riquet going through a similar metamorphosis, since he was born so ugly, according to the tale's opening sentence, that he seemed to lack human form. His humanity is not, moreover, simply the effect of her spoken wish; it is still more immediately the effect of her gaze constituting his humanized appearance: “La Princesse n’eut pas plus tôt prononcé ces paroles, que Riquet à la houppe parut à ses yeux l’homme du monde le plus beau, le mieux fait et le plus aimable qu’elle eût jamais vu” (No sooner had the Princess pronounced these words than Riquet appeared to her eyes as the handsomest, shapeliest, and most lovable man she had ever seen; 284-85; my italics). At the end of the tale a further account of this metamorphosis shifts the intervention of love that occurs in “Le Miroir, ou la métamorphose d’Orante,” where the mirror image is valorized, into the realm, still visual, of illusion: according to some, the narrator tells us, “l’amour seul fit cette Métamorphose” (love alone produced this metamorphosis; 285). After this, a long sentence reports what the Princess saw in Riquet, how his disturbing bodily features appeared charming to her. Among those features were his eyes: “Ses yeux, qui étaient louches, ne lui en parurent que plus brillants. … Leur dérèglement passa dans son esprit pour la marque d’un violent excès d’amour” (To her, the fact that his eyes were crossed just made them seem more brilliant. … To her mind, their abnormality was the mark of a violent excess of love). Now this astonishing transposition reconstitutes the visual as the channel for the undeniably determining force of love, whether or not one reads there a veritable visualization, or we might say envisualization or insighting, of esprit, a reconstitution of the mind as a seeing mind that looks out and, through vision, imposes its imaginative frames on the bodily world, so as to make the world a kind of eroticized eye.

“Riquet à la houppe” thus displays a vacillation between two currents, one associating the power and mastery of a masculine order with intelligence and reasonable speech, the other promoting the value of a feminine order, presented in the conventional association with visibility and wish-fulfilling beauty. A great many other components of the story could be grafted onto this central opposition. But the basic structure of an exchange between speech and sight—between the verbal and the visual—that turns out to be motivated by desire suffices to introduce precisely the kind of complication that the Abbé generated with his ambivalent mirror in the Parallèle: the supreme value of the image, of beauty, is indeed asserted, but only to be modalized and left under a cloud as the tale gradually discloses its dependency on the verbal and its susceptibility to illusion.

Yet it remains arguable that this tale, like “Le Petit Poucet” the ambivalent passages in the Parallèle, simply introduces a discontinuous factor—the sublime, the work of difference, illusion—that resists and perturbs a dominant value or perspective—rhetorical eloquence, mimeticism, well-wrought form—without seriously threatening to undermine it. Indeed, one could presume that the order of representation resulting from the Cartesian turn would thrive on meeting the challenge and compromising with it. Such literary compromises—built around a fluid, commodifiable concept of esprit—promote the elaboration of a unified neoclassicism that reintegrates the deep and radical reflection on inspired art we encounter in Boileau into the edifice of a complacent cultural rationalism. Similarly, Perrault's easygoing and ambivalent Cartesianism paves the way for the construction of the rationalist aesthetics he espouses in the Parallèle precisely by loosening the tightly articulated Cartesian turn and appropriating its yield in the form of themes or local insights. By forgetting the vigilant rigor with which Descartes structures and verifies the passage from saying to seeing, by dispensing with the methodic analysis of experience in the service of truth in favor of constructing elaborate comparisons and analogies that promote an accommodation of reason with verisimilitude, Perrault manages to restructure the relation of the verbal to the visual, enabling them to function as the polar terms of a reciprocal exchange. That drastic relaxation of the foundationalist, scientific impulse is perhaps typical of what happens to philosophical reflection in the hands of a so-called man of letters; it is certainly anticipatory of the pattern that thinkers from the eighteenth century onward would appropriate in representing the passage of ideas into art as a process of sublimation.

Notes

1. For short tales like “Le Miroir,” I have chosen to indicate only the inclusive pages (in this case, 84-95) rather than encumber the commentaries with a raft of numbers for quotations that can be easily tracked down.

2. The source I cite for the Parallèle (Slatkine Reprints, 1970) reproduces four of the original pages on a single large page. Accordingly, I shall generally provide two sets of numbers: the original volume and page number in vol. 3, followed by the Slatkine pagination. The first of these numbers correlates systematically with the pagination reproduced in the very useful 1964 edition of the Parallèle published by Hans Kortum, which includes a noteworthy introductory essay by H.-R. Jauss.

3. In expanding upon this analogical definition with great insistence by invoking the painter's techniques, the Abbé studiously omits any reference either to the doctrine of ut pictura poesis or to contemporary discussions of the doctrine of imitation.

4. For a probing critical account of the Freudian view, see Irigaray, Speculum, especially the treatment of the male gaze as the source of phallomorphic metaphors (in “Another ‘Cause’—Castration,” 46-55).

5. Descartes, Oeuvres philosophiques, 1: 651.

6. Descartes, Méditations, 78. This and other quotations are translated from the Latin text in the widely available Garnier-Flammarion paperback edition. I have benefited from the recent Livre de Poche edition by Michelle Beyssade, who supplements the Latin text and the 1647 translation by the Duc de Luynes with her own retranslation in modern French.

7. Descartes, Méditations, 90, 92.

8. Ibid., 94; my italics.

9. Ibid., 96-98.

10. Ibid., 110.

11. Heuristic considerations—the essay provides a conveniently compact distillation—prompt me to cite this account of Heidegger's line on the cogito, rather than the much more elaborate one set forth in his two-volume study on Nietzsche.

12. Heidegger, “Age,” 133.

13. Ibid., 149-50.

14. Descartes, Méditations, 86; my italics.

15. Henry, Généalogie, 27. For my purposes, Henry's exceptionally emphatic resistance to a representationalist recuperation of the cogito has the advantage of marking the oppositions with maximal clarity. Aside from others (Derrida, Nancy) who resist the slippage to which Henry objects in Heidegger's reading, he is hardly alone in commenting on the apperception of feeling in the Traité des passions (see, e.g., Beyssade, Philosophie première, 202-14). On the interesting difficulties of Henry's reading see Borch-Jacobsen's probing essay “The Unconscious, Nonetheless,” in The Emotional Tie, 123-54.

16. Henry, Généalogie, 28-29.

17. Ibid., 31.

18. See Descartes, Passions de l’âme, para. 5, 19, 26.

19. Ibid., para. 17. See also paras. 21, 25.

20. See Henry, Généalogie, 72-74.

21. Ibid., 82 86.

22. Descartes, Oeuvres, 3: 118.

23. Neither in the Parallèle nor in the Pensées chrétiennes does Perrault display an awareness of the irony of a “modern” appealing to the classificatory scheme of the neo-Platonic Porphyrus (remembered primarily as the editor of Plotinus's works, but also as a student of Longinus).

24. The modern reader needs to distinguish the relatively slight interest of Perrault's lightweight discourse on the cogito or on the proofs of the existence of God from the considerable interest and importance of the man/animal distinction. In part, the interest stems from the fact that Perrault pursues the question with remarkable vigor and tenacity, and in part it has to do with the historical significance of efforts to replace Descartes's mechanistic model of animal behavior at a moment when the “life sciences” were about to emerge. See Foucault, Mots et choses, chap. 5, “Classer”; and Roger, Sciences de la vie.

25. Descartes, Méditations, 164.

26. Ibid.

27. The name Riquet is commonly treated as a diminutive of Richard, which incorporates components (rich + ard) that evoke a rich man. For a discussion of the name and its connotations see Marin, Food for Thought, 165-68.

Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Perrault's Contes in the text and the notes are to Marc Soriano's 1989 edition.