SOURCE: "Molière's Tartuffe and the Scandal of Insight," in Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 113-40.

[In the following excerpt, Greenberg offers a psychoanalytic explanation for the fearful reaction against Le Tartuffe during the seventeenth-century.]

Unquestionably Le Tartuffe is Molière's most scandalous comedy. From its creation at Versailles as part of the royal festivities known as the "Plaisirs de l'Ile Enchantée" in May of 1664 to its withdrawal from the stage and the royal government's refusal to allow its public performance for a period of several years, the play, in its different versions, ignited a debate rarely paralleled in the annals of the French stage. During the period of its prohibition, Molière, his supporters and enemies engaged in heated controversy over the real or imagined attack on piety and "dévots," and over the social, moral and ethical role of the theater in society. Until its rehabilitation in 1669, the play, perhaps more than any other of the seventeenth century, generated a dizzying whirlwind of charges and countercharges that clearly situates it as the focal point of an entire epistemological dilemma, of a sensitive, overly charged threat to all social order, to, even (if we listen to the ravings of Pierre Roullé) the invasion of the well-ordered world of ecclesiastical and monarchal order by the "satanic": Molière was accused of being "un démon vêtu de chair et habillé en homme."

The nature of this scandal, the way it polarized opinion in the small but acutely politicized world of the court and of the Parisian intelligentsia, may strike modern readers (as surely as it appears to have struck Molière and his supporters) as exaggerated, but queasily disturbing. What was really at stake in this uproar? Was it merely a cabal of religious and political fanatics bent on destroying a playwright who catered too intimately to the whims of a young, undocile king? Or, on the other hand, is it possible that such men as Lamoignon and Péréfixe, the archbishop of Paris, actually saw through the "appearances" of religious scandal to a more profound, more unsettling, less containable disruption that the comedy sets in motion?

Molière claims in his preface that it is not possible to confuse the truly pious with his hypocrite, since, as he states, he has taken all necessary precautions lest this confusion occur:

j'ai mis tout l'art et tous les soins qu'il m'a été possible pour distinguer le personnage de l'Hypocrite d'avec celui du vrai Dévot. J'ai employé pour cela deux actes entiers, à préparer la venue de mon scélérat. Il ne tient pas un seul moment l'auditeur en balance; on le connaît aux marques que je lui donne et, d'un bout à l'autre, il ne dit pas un mot, il ne fait pas une action, qui ne peigne aux spectateurs le caractère d'un méchant, et ne fasse éclater celui du véritable homme de bien que je lui oppose.

(Préface, ed. Rat, p.682)

Nevertheless, despite this and similar denegations, the confusion occurs, occurs with a vengeance and a fury that betray more than just bad faith. The real nature of the confusion seems, and of course this is not novel, to be less a matter of intention less, that is, the scandal of the author's avowed purpose in composing his play—than a scandal of interpretation, of subjectivity, of the subjectivity that inheres in all representation, and the representation that constitutes subjectivity.

This, of course, is what the more subtle censors of the play knew. It would be an act of extraordinary hubris on our part to think that Bourdaloue, for instance, was less perspicacious than we. It was simply that he saw the threat of the play as a real danger to an entire epistemological system, in which not only his religion but his being (as if one could separate the two) were invested. And in this he and his allies were, after all, right. They did see what Molière and the others didn't: that when a work questions the foundations of knowledge, those signifying systems that define certain supposedly "natural" institutions the monarchy, the church, the family—and shows their predicates to be vulnerable, the entire edifice of the social life they subtend is shaken to the point that its eventual collapse becomes inevitable.

Tartuffe's scandal, therefore, is the scandal of literature, of representation. What the uproar over the play reveals is perhaps the first modern (even though unthought-of as such) battle waged between a totalitarian impulse towards domination and mastery—towards the reification of the Law of the Father that at the beginning of Louis's personal reign was too shakily in place not to resort to overt displays of its own insecurity and a signifying system, a semiosis, that by its very nature cannot be contained in an univocal way. In this, then, Molière's play is symptomatic of a much greater threat, of a far more compelling scandal than the ostensible attack on religion. Religion is only a symptom, a particularly acute and sensitive symptom, of one of the ideological apparatuses the play invades. It would, however, be a mistake only to look at the individual symptom and ignore that symptom's insertion in the greater whole. The scandal of Tartuffe is its attack on the totalizing ideology that underlies the world of the "ancien régime," an attack waged by the indeterminacy of its own psycho-semiotic structures.

In order to understand the complex nature of the play's scandal, of the scandal of literature, we would do well to turn to the text and see how it inscribes within itself, and comments upon, its own scandalous plot. The word "scandal" appears twice in the play, twice in one of the most important scenes (IV, i) and both times in the mouth of Tartuffe. In response to Cléante's plea that he reestablish peace between Orgon and his son, Tartuffe responds:

Après son action, qui n'eut jamais d'égale,
Le commerce entre nous porterait du scandale…
(IV, i, 1209-1210)

and:

Mais après le scandale et l'affront d'aujourd'hui,
Le Ciel n'ordonne pas que je vive avec lui.
(IV, i, 1231-1232)

For Tartuffe, Damis's abortive attempt to reveal to his father Tartuffe's lust, the sexuality that threatens the stability of Orgon's marriage and that usurps his own sexual position as master of his wife and head of his household, is the scandal in the play. The outburst has, as we know, a contrary effect: Orgon, taken in by Tartuffe, banishes Damis from his presence, from his house (we shall return to this important act later on). The scandal of the play is the revelation from Tartuffe's own mouth although he uses it as a deflection of his attack on Orgon as husband, and his manipulation of him as father. The scandal which Tartuffe's self-defense underlines is, therefore, not just a supposed attack on piety (although it is that too) but his undermining of the family, that unit upon which all social, political and religious cohesion is based.

Le Tartuffe is central to Molière's production, not only in time but more importantly in the way it concentrates all the concerns of both the farces and the "serious" comedies on the dilemma of the family. Of all Molière's plays, and one might look even more far afield into the familial world of Cornelian or Racinian tragedy, we have no more complete an example of family (grandmother, mother, father, sister/daughter, brother/son, uncle) on the seventeenth-century stage. The play begins and ends with all the members of the Orgon household family either on stage or invoked on stage. The comedy thus repeats, in its structural integrity and in its narrative circularity, the very closure of the family as a fixed immutable unit that the machinations of hypocrisy would attack and subvert.

As the curtain rises this attack is already underway. What the crisis of Mme Pernelle's visit and her verbal onslaught serve to reveal is that an invasion of the family, its decomposition, has begun and that the very center of the familial fortress, the place of the father, is vacant. Although the banter between Mme Pernelle, a figure of both comic and terrifying proportions, and the members of her son's household constantly undercuts the initial impact of this absence, an absence that is articulated either as an abdication or an usurpation, this ambivalent state of familial affairs has far-reaching consequences for the social order as a whole.

Borrowing the term oïkodespotès from J. Habermas who uses it to describe familial-economic organization in Greek society [in L'Espace public], I would suggest that the word fits admirably into our own purposes as a way of introducing the socio-sexual dimension of the role of the Father in Molière's comedy. It combines both the etymological connotations of house, home (and by extension husbandry, "household-economy") with the term for controller, ruler. This latter term echoes with the proleptic resonance of "despot." It is precisely the absence of both these things that Mme Pernelle laments. What she finds most distressing in Orgon's household is the lack of any economy; all of her criticism points to disorder ("la cour du roi Pétaud"), excess, and spending, be it the excess of language ("Vous êtes, ma mie, une fille suivante / Un peu trop forte en gueule"), the lack of being properly "rangé" ("Vous êtes un sot en trois lettres, mon fils … Vous preniez tout l'air d'un méchant garnement, / Et ne lui donneriez jamais que du tourment") or simply financial irresponsibility ("Vous êtes dépensière; et cet état me blesse, / Que vous alliez vêtue ainsi qu'une princesse."). What Mme Pernelle notices, and is frightened by, is that this family is no longer the bourgeois unit she desires. Orgon's family has fallen out of order and into a chaos that frightens and threatens her. It has left the realm of hoarding, enclosure and economy for the more threatening world of "dépense." Confronted with this disorder, a disorder where she no longer has a place, which excludes her, it is not surprising that she, alone among the different members of the family, shares her son's infatuation with Tartuffe. Rather than an usurpation of her son, she (mistakenly) sees Tartuffe as an extension of him, as his surrogate who will aid in the restoration of order in the tumult that surrounds her. In a sense, therefore, but in a very overdetermined sense, Mme Pernelle is placed in the position of appealing to the mistaken unity of Orgon/Tartuffe, which she sees as the Father, that is, the ruler of the house (the oïkodespotès). The desire to be tyrannized, to be subjected to the "despot" in order to find one's place and have one's being ratified, is only the first of a series of sexual/political poles that the comedy of Tartuffe sets in motion as the play begins. Mme Pernelle ardently desires her own subjection to the Law of the Father and his representative as the only salvation both for the family and for herself.

In a perverse reversal, which nevertheless retains its comic thrust, the members of the household also see Tartuffe as a despot. The words used to describe his invasion of the family are clearly charged with political overtones bringing into the center of the domestic realm those searing debates about just and unjust monarchy that so actively engaged political thinkers and writers during the premiership of Richelieu and the troubles of the Fronde. "Un pouvoir tyrannique," "contrôler tout," "s'impatronniser," and "faire le maître" point to him as having taken the place of the rightful head of the household. In this sense we are, or rather the text is, drawing a fine line of distinction in the world of patriarchy between the rights and rewards of a legal, benevolent monarchical/familial power, and the perversion of that power, its usurpation and corruption as "tyranny."

Clearly, then, the play begins as a debate, a debate between the "Mother" who represents a bourgeois order of economy and the concomitant desire for containment (one might even say confinement), setting off one of the poles, the masochistic, around which the whirlwind of scandal will revolve; and the other, the order of the family as "dépense," but dépense that is coded as freedom (perhaps the intrusion, the comic intrusion into this bourgeois household of nobiliary pretensions?). And, at the beginning, as we've seen, the center of the family is already absent. Both physically and metaphysically, the role and place of the Father, the pivotal structure around which the family and thus the State are organized, is empty. It is this absence of the father and the usurpation of his place that sets the play in motion, aspirating into its center, in ever more complex levels of sexual and political disarray, those signifying systems the family both anchors and naturalizes. At the same time the disarray in this family signals a general threat to society. We must not forget that in the tightly structured world of patriarchal monarchy, one can never attack the father without in some way committing a crime of "lèse-majesté," Every father in his household is the mirror of the King, the "father of the Nation," in his kingdom.

The Tartuffe, then, as comedy, situates itself within the same anxiety as the major tragedies of the period, the anxiety of patricide, the desire/fear of the father, of the Father as object both of love and of aggression, and the greater fear, the unthinkable of seventeenth-century French political musings, of a society unhinged from the father's Law, a society which abandons the father and kills its King. It would seem hasty, therefore, to define comedy, in its opposition to tragedy, as "the triumph of the son over the father" [as stated by Mavron in Psychocritique du genre comique] … that opposition may work (or be made to work) only in some abstract psychoanalytic framework which ignores the mutual imbrication of ideology and the unconscious and where, more to the point, in that psycho-ideology, the son is always also the father and vice-versa.

The political role of the father in this play is inseparable from his sexual role, and both are necessary for the grounding of his relation to his world, and to that world's ability to define itself. It will not surprise us, therefore, to learn that the political disarray into which Orgon's family has been thrown immediately takes on sexual overtones is immediately sexualized by the comic rhetoric of Dorine:

Mais il est devenu comme un homme hébété
Depuis que de Tartuffe on le voit entêté;
Il l'appelle son frère, et l'aime dans son âme
Cent fois plus qu'il ne fait mère, fils, fille, et femme.
C'est de tous ses secrets l'unique confident,
Et de ses actions le directeur prudent;
Il le choie, il l'embrasse, et pour une maîtresse
On ne saurait, je pense, avoir plus de tendresse;
…
Enfin il en est fou; c'est son tout, son héros…
(I, ii, 183-190; 195)

Although Dorine's explanation of the new state of affairs of the Orgon household is meant to appear funny, the connotations underlying her speech betray a sexual malaise that the comedy can only hesitantly keep at bay. All the words that Dorine uses to describe the indescribable, to indicate what has suddenly gone wrong with Orgon, point to a sexual attraction that cannot be normalized. What we learn about the relation between the two men is that, from Orgon's side at least, it is a desire for totalization. Tartuffe has taken the place of all his other affections. Orgon treats him with more respect, attention and fondness than if he were a "mistress," and finally, for Orgon, Tartuffe is his "tout" (everything, but more resonantly, his "all," his plenitude).

The relation between Tartuffe and Orgon has been analyzed and commented upon by all those critics who have attempted to explain the play; L. Gossman comes closest [in his Merand Masks] to unraveling the complexity and the danger of this liaison by pointing to its dialectical nature:

Orgon … must believe in his idol himself; he too must feel himself seduced, captivated, carried away, not indeed by any deliberate effort on the part of Tartuffe, but by the very nature of Tartuffe's superior being. At the same time, however, since he wants to have this idol for himself, to enjoy through him the absolute superiority that he recognized in him, he must attach him to himself, win him over, make him into an inalienable part of himself. He must in short seduce Tartuffe.

While Gossman's own discussion is based on a finely tuned analysis of the subject-object dialectic that Tartuffe and Orgon refigure, a dialectic that, as we see in the above quotation, his own vocabulary sexualizes, his analysis does not explore the theoretical implications of its own insights. It will appear obvious that the dialectic that is established between the two men enters into the dynamics of mastery and submission, as that dynamic functions as a sexual, that is a homoerotic, attraction. 1 would not want to reduce the complexity of this textual nexus to a banal discussion of what was obviously unthinkable for the characters and audience of the play: Orgon is not (just), as a character, a representation of repressed homosexuality (to Cléante's question what can he possibly see in Tartuffe, the only answer Orgon can come up with, is the erratic, ejaculative "C'est un homme … qui, … ha! un homme … un homme enfin"). Rather, it seems to me that in the constellation of sexual and political forces the play, as representation of patriarchal society, sets in motion, we must see this homoerotic element as meshing into a larger circle of ideological forces: forces of representation, forces of normalization and of verisimilitude, that constitute the essential parameters of power, and therefore meaning, in the comedy.

Obviously, the very definition of ideology implies its invisibility: ideology is what cannot be directly seen or perceived by the members of any given society, but which nevertheless controls and directs what they apprehend as the limits and possibilities of their own subjective insertion into the "real" that surrounds and eludes them. It should come as no surprise, therefore, were I to suggest that the unraveling of the text's inner network reveals the blind spot of its ideological investments. I would like to suggest that at the very center of the complex textual network there exists a "master code" that permits the functioning of all the signifying systems in the play, that includes in itself the indeterminability of both the sexual and the political investments of the comedy, that accounts largely for the comedy itself of the play, and finally that engages the characters in the ambiguous dialectics of seeming and being, of truth and hypocrisy, that the theater (as a particularly overdetermined instance of representation) both affirms and denies in its own dialectical seduction of the spectators by the spectacle. The single most insistent linguistic sign in the comedy of Tartuffe is the polysemous indeterminacy of the verb "voir" with all the echoes, literal and metaphoric, attached to it. Lest this affirmation seem hasty, I would like to remind us that Molière himself, in the several prefaces and "placets au roi" that he placed before the published version of Tartuffe, engages our interpretation in a network of visual metaphors by his own rhetorical figures:

Voici une comédie dont on a fait beaucoup de bruit… Les marquis, les précieuses, les cocus et les médecins ont souffert doucement qu'on les ait représentés, et ils ont fait semblant de se divertir, avec tout le monde, des peintures que l'on a faites d'eux….

(Préface, p. 681)

Le devoir de la comédie étant de corriger les hommes en les divertissant, j'ai cru que, dans l'emploit où je me trouve, je n'avais rien de mieux à faire que d'attaquer par des peintures ridicules les vices de mon siècle….

(Premier placet, p. 686)

From the beginning, then, Molière describes his play as a "painting" in the metaphorical sense that word carries as a (visual) form of representation. At the same time, in these same defenses of his text, the play is of course called a "poem":

il ne faut qu'ôter le voile de l'équivoque, et regarder ce qu'est la comédie en soi, pour voir si elle est condamnable. On connaîtra, sans doute, que n'étant autre chose qu'un poème ingénieux, qui, par des leçons agréables, reprend les défauts des hommes….

(Préface, p. 683)

There is a slippage in Molière's own rhetoric between words and paintings, between the lexical and the visual, whose difference is erased in their communality as representation. This effacement is interesting, if only when we remember to what degree the study of "optics" invaded seventeenth-century thought, philosophy and representation. The most celebrated example is, of course, the Discours de la Méthode, which was originally a preface to Descartes's own work on optics. It is precisely this slippage between the lexical and the visual that coheres in Tartuffe around the paradigmatic chain of the verb "voir," which in its several and ambivalent meanings engages the very heart of the debate raging around the Tartuffe as a form of representation: it is this ambivalence that engages the seduction of theater, in its collapsing "truth and illusion" into representation that allows for the impossible battle of interpretation that the Tartuffe spawned and which has not ceased to the present day.

The verb "voir," because of its constant oscillation between literal and metaphorical connotations, because of the easy slippage between "seeing" and "knowing," is essential for understanding the way diverse textual networks of the comedy slide into each other creating an homogeneous representation of the "real" of the text. The dynamics of vision, where vision is evoked as an appeal to some available "truth," engages the heart of the play's dilemma between being and seeming that is central to the controversy over religious piety and hypocrisy. It is also imperative for understanding the relation between sexuality and subjectivity as they are revealed and determined by the characters' relation to the scopic drive as it meanders through and across the text, joining and separating the main characters first in a dialectics of voyeurism and exhibitionism, then in this dialectics' imbrication in a thematics of narcissism. Finally, the verb serves as a pivot in the comedy of the play, uniting the spectators to the characters, thus engaging the very dynamics of theater as they are enmeshed in the ideology of patriarchy. In a world of appearances, in a world that exists in order to know and constantly reaffirm the "truth" -that is, in a world that needs constantly to be able to confirm its own sexual and political a-prioris, that needs to dissect reality down to its most indivisible particles, down to the most unassailable grounds, in order thereupon to anchor the subject of this world-seeing is invoked in all its supposed transparency, in all its supposed ability to discern reality from mere appearance. In this supposed visual anchoring of the world, the characters of the Tartuffe are set adrift, unhinged by the very ambivalence of the word, of the act, that they invoke for their own salvation,

As Jacqueline Rose reminds us in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, from the very beginnings of Freud's explorations of the unconscious, of his discovery of the role that sexuality, both repressed and conscious, plays in determining the way the human being comes to situate him/herself in the symbolic gendering of the body, visual representation plays a key role:

Freud often related the question of sexuality to that of visual representation … He would take as his model little scenarios, or the staging of events, which demonstrated the complexity of an essentially visual space, moments in which perception founders … or in which the pleasure in looking tips over into the register of excess … The sexuality lies less in the content of what is seen than in the subjectivity of the viewer, in the relationship between what is looked at and the developing sexual knowledge of the child. The relationship between viewer and scene is always one of fracture, partial identification, pleasure and distrust. As if Freud found the aptest analogy for the problem of our identity as human subjects in failures of vision or in the violence which can be done to an image as it offers itself to view.

Vision is always excessive, always a too-much of pleasure that threatens the subject with dispersion, fragmentation. It is both constitutive of the suture of the imaginary and symbolic registers that situate the subject along the axes of gendering and disruptive of any stable fixing of this gandering. It is always what attempts to "elude" castration and what finally lures the subject into the Law of sexual difference. Paradoxically, the force of the visual, the desire of the scopic drive, is part of the very forging of sexual identity which nevertheless remains insecure, unstable, exposed to the excessive thrust of the drive.

The odd couple that Tartuffe and Orgon present to the incomprehension of their entourage can be read as but two poles of the visual dialectic. On the one hand Orgon seems most radically marked as a desire to see, as a Schaulust, with all the connotations that term has as a particularly coded "masculine," drive: it is a desire to possess, to know, to penetrate; a desire to cut off, divide and make order. It is also (and this will not surprise us), on a metaphysical level, the desire to find an integrity of being, an apprehension of the self as entire that is, in diverse ways, essential to all of Molière's (male) protagonists. It is the desire for integrity that situates Molière's protagonists firmly within a patriarchal economy based precisely on the dichotomization of a "full," "self-sufficient" masculinity, always threatened by the menace of castration, and the "lacking" (because already castrated), excessive economy imputed to "femininity."

In this economy, Tartuffe, in relation to Orgon, exists not so much to see as to be seen, and more to the point, to see himself being seen. He is pure projection, constantly offering himself to the vision of the other(s), either actually, or metaphorically in his rhetoric (and it is here that the slippage between seeing and saying, between the visual and the lexical, that we have already noticed in the préfaces returns in the dynamics of the comedy. I will return to this presently.) He is, in his constant self-positioning, in the way that he is always aware of how he is being seen, in the way he sees himself seeing himself, a perfect example of the "feminine" as J. Lacan would define it.

This feminine, based as it is on the illusion of vision, on the vision of an illusion, is incorporated by Lacan into what he calls (following J. Rivière) the dialectics of the "masquerade." This masquerade is the feminine holding up to the masculine what it wants to see, the masculine participating in this same masquerade by pretending to give the feminine what it wants to have. Together they form the illusory vision of sexual complementarity. In this masquerade of sexual illusions the feminine serves as a form of trompe-1'œil for the masculine.

None of the members of Orgon's household can understand, any more than we, the hold Tartuffe has over their father. From the valiant bourgeois he was during the troubles of the Fronde, doing his duty, defending his king, he has undergone a radical change that has left him "hébété." His stubborn refusal to see what all the members of his household see is, for them, inexplicable. They can only articulate his new state as a bewitchment, a spell. His relation to Tartuffe is described as a "caprice," an "enchantement," a "charme," all words that point to something that escapes the reality of their world, that conjures up a vocabulary of magic, of sorcery, in its attempt at explaining the inexplicable. At the same time these words come from and share the traditional Petrarchan vocabulary of innamoramento, thus carrying with them the shudder of a love that is not natural, that has strayed from its proper object and come, inverted, into the space of domestic intimacy. How can we understand Orgon's passionate attachment to Tartuffe, his "blindness" ("votre aveuglement fait que je vous admire… ") except in the terms in which it is presented to us, except as a visual dysfunction? Orgon, we are told, is "ébloui par un faux éclat," seduced by "cent dehors fardés."

Orgon is the prisoner of a vision, of an image, but at the same time he is primarily trapped within this vision as it focuses on his own desire. In his conversation with Cléante (I, v), Orgon narrates to him his first encounter with Tartuffe, a narration that is entirely inscribed within a visual framework:

Ha! si vous aviez vu comme j'en fis rencontre,
…
Chaque jour à l'église il venait, d'un air doux,
Tout vis-à-vis de moi se mettre à deux genoux.
Il attirait les yeux de l'assemblée entière
Par l'ardeur dont au Ciel il poussait sa prière;
Il faisait des soupirs, de grands élancements,
Et baisait humblement la terre à tous moments.
(I, v, 281, 283-288)

The most remarkable revelation in this narration of his originary innamoramento is its obsessive, repetitive na ture it is an image that occurred "chaque jour" so that in a sense, each sighting is a re-sighting, a recapture of the gaze that is not allowed to wander but always comes back to its own point of departure, and that point inscribes itself in this dialectic as a desire for mirroring, a desire in which what the subject is "looking for" is somehow its own projection reflected in the returned glance of the object. What seduces Orgon is the reflection of himself which Tartuffe presents to him by creating himself as his mirror "Tout vis-à-vis de moi se mettre à deux genoux." In another context, N. Gross tells us [in From Gesture to Idea] why this positioning, in a church, is particularly remarkable: "Tartuffe seems to face Orgon, while his gestures of mortification and worship seem addressed to Orgon, drawing attention to both of them and distracting from the service at the altar." In fact, Tartuffe, by making a spectacle of himself, that is by positioning himself as Orgon's reflection, his mirror, positions this reflection as a vision of unity, of integrity, as the lure of the subject who is complete. He does become Orgon's god. He becomes his double/other, the image of completeness, of wholeness, that ensnares and traps Orgon, a creature of desire and therefore of lack (that this lack be interpreted in spiritual terms, or not, is not the point). Tartuffe entraps his prey, in such a way as to pleasure him: Orgon claims that in his subjugation to Tartuffe ("qui suit ses leçons") he both becomes another and "savors" a profound tranquility ("goûte une paix profonde"). It is this unfathomable repose that most notably marks the aphanisis of the wounded subject we must suppose Orgon to be, his volatilization into a nirvana-esque (re-)union with his own desire. Paradoxically, this "quietude" may be compared in religious terms to a "ravissement," to a dispossession of the self and to its integration in an image in which it exults. In this way, we may compare the ecstatic reaction of Orgon to the famous "infant" described by Lacan jubilating at his captured image in the mirror:

Il y suffit de comprendre le stade du miroir comme une identification au sens plein que l'analyse donne à ce terme: à savoir la transformation produite chez le sujet quand il assume une image….

L'assomption jubilatoire de son image spéculaire par l'être encore plongé dans l'impuissance motrice … nous paraîtra dès lors manifester en une situation exemplaire la matrice symbolique où le "je" se précipite en une forme primordiale….

What, of course, is significant in this jubilation, in this capture of an image of wholeness, is that it precipitates an illusory apprehension of subjectivity as integrity. For any reader of Molière it will come as no surprise that Orgon is just one in a declension of "partial" characters who are problematic precisely because they desire integrity, as does perhaps the whole of the Molierian corpus, while that integrity constantly eludes them. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that this is perhaps the underlying dynamic of all of Molière's great creations, all those plays that supposedly represent the Classical ideal. Think of Arnolphe, Argan, Dom Juan, Alceste, all men, all undone by a flaw that sunders them, renders them "childlike" and therefore comic. This flaw is exaggerated by the very laughter they spawn, which is the laughter of the other to whose place they aspire, though it is forever denied them. We must, therefore see this jubilation as complicitous with the defeat of the integral subject they would be, because it is both jubilatory and mortiferous. The reflection of the mirror stage condemns the subject, the core of whose "ego" is herein constituted, to its own alienation as a necessarily fractured subjectivity. Before Lacan, Freud had warned us of both the jubilatory and the nefarious attraction of doubling. On the one hand the double can represent an enhancing of the ego. On the other, it also signals the ego's destruction:

This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams…. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man, and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.

Tartuffe serves as Orgon's mirror, serves as his double, his completion. He lures him into the seduction of the imaginary, and there traps him, clasps him to himself in an erotic embrace, which like all eroticism has a double valency: both and at the same time exalting and deathly. It is in this visual embrace that Orgon's subjectivity is produced, whole, illusory, as subjugation. Orgon is subjugated to the illusion of Tartuffe as masquerade. There is a mise-en-abyme of subjectivity that only starts here. But it is one way for us to understand the desperate (funny?) attachment Orgon demonstrates towards Tartuffe, to understand the pathos in his cry, "Non, vous demeurerez: il y va de ma vie," when Tartuffe pretends he will leave the household. For in this "cri de cœur" we hear the fear and anxiety of a subject who knows that without his mirror he no longer exists, no longer knows the sweetness of "une paix profonde" that he can only find, not with his family, not with his wife, but with his "semblable," his "frère."

Only when we understand the totalizing, death-dealing capture of Orgon by Tartuffe can we begin to understand the enormous threat Tartuffe, as masquerade, as hypocrite, and as supreme narcissist, presents for the safety and stability of Orgon's, and the King's, family. Narcissism, from its very inception as myth, is intimately related to, cannot be separated from, death, and that death is itself carried along, supported, by the fascination of the visual/image.

Orgon believes what he sees: "Je suis votre valet, et crois les apparences," he tells his wife. Orgon's blustering betrays one of the valences of narcissism the childish belief in the power of one's own ego to dominate the world, to create reality ("Mais je veux que cela soit une vérité," he tells his daughter, "Et c'est assez pour vous que je l'aie arrêté") that in its violent, imperialistic form meshes perfectly with the greater, more perverse narcissism of Tartuffe. Tartuffe's narcissism, his ability to project an image of himself that is totally enclosed on itself, an image that exists without a discernible desire that would betray its lack, its point of fracture, is best realized in his production of himself as a work of art, as an artifice, and finally, as far as Orgon is concerned, as a perfect "trompelœil," in the sense that J. Baudrillard has given that term:

On sent que ces objets se rapprochent du trou noir d'où vient la réalité, le monde réel, le temps ordinaire. Cet effet de décentrement en avant, cette avancée d'un miroir d'objets à la rencontre d'un sujet, c'est, sous l'espèce d'objets anodins, l'apparition du double qui crée cet effet de séduction, de saisissement caractéristique du trompe-l'œil: vertige tactile qui retrace le vœu fou du sujet d'étreindre sa propre image, et par là même de s'évanouir. Car la réalité n'est saisissante que lorsque notre identité s'y perd, ou lorsqu'elle ressurgit comme notre propre mort hallucinée.

Tartuffe's entire being exists as a work for the eyes. For him, to be is to be seen. He exists only insofar as he can enter into and colonize the visual field of the other, draw that other into his artifice, and there kill him.

Certainly his entrance on to the stage, an entrance that has been, as Molière reminds us ("J'ai employé pour cela deux actes entiers à préparer la venue de mon scélérat," Préface, p.682), minutely prepared, is only the most obvious indication that Tartuffe exists to satisfy the appetite of the eye. Molière inscribes one of his very few didascalia "Tartuffe, apercevant Dorine" to tell us how Tartuffe is to make his entrance. Tartuffe enters the world of the play not only with all eyes fixed upon him, but knowing that those eyes are there, knowing that they are waiting for him, knowing that he is there to satisfy the appetite of those eyes. Tartuffe enters the universe of the play, and the world of the playgoers, seeing himself being seen. He is there to draw the eye's attention to himself, and by so doing, to trick it, to betray it: he offers himself as an image that passes itself off as real, as substantial, but which in reality is only a mirror, the eye caught in the game of seeming/being. Tartuffe's role, his enormous narcissistic production of himself, is precisely to situate himself in the field of vision of that (those) eye(s) and to hide/reveal by that visual seduction the artificiality (that is, the essence, as "art" artifact production) of the "world."

I have been attempting to describe the dialectics of mastery and subjugation that links Orgon to Tartuffe as a form of homosexuality subtended by the dynamics of seeing/being seen that is polarized in the couple they form. I would like to carry this dynamic one step further. I have intimated that Tartuffe is narcissistic in a way that would, in the ideology of patriarchy that informs this comedy, associate him with a perversely passive femininity. Even in his first "tête-à-tête" with Elmire even, that is, when he is alone for the first time with the object of his desire Tartuffe articulates his satisfaction through a strangely visual construction:

J'en suis ravi de même, et sans doute il m'est doux,
Madame, de me voir seul à seul avec vous.
(III, iii, 899-900)

The self-enclosed reflexivity of the construction "me voir" points, it seems to me, to the essential feature of Tartuffe's self-perception, as a closed off, self-contained wholeness. It is this state that appears as a non-desirous being that works to entrap Orgon. This self-enclosure, which we have already noted in the didascalia, the way he enfolds the visual world on himself, creating himself, one could say, as the "visible spot (tache)" that ensnares the eye, reflects a narcissistic hold on the world that Freud associates primarily with "beautiful women, noble felines, and great criminals." This type of character has, we are told, "great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love" ("Narcissism," p. 89). Tartuffe's presentation of himself, his production of himself as image/lure, is therefore particularly attractive for Orgon. First because of the way this illusion of self-enclosure seduces him, but more importantly when we look behind the image to see (as A. Green reminds us), beyond the appearance, the invisible object whose lure exerts such seduction on the beholder.

I would like to suggest that behind the appearance of Tartuffe, behind Tartuffe as image, hides a more dangerous, more threatening fantasy, the fantasy of union. This fantasy is hinted at not only in Orgon's own words, "paix profonde," but also in Dorine's derision, "son tout," "son héros." This "hero" is, of course a mistress, and hides, I would suggest, the "image" of the One, towards which all narcissism tends as the pre-Oedipal unit of the child and mother. I am hinting at Tartuffe's seduction of Orgon being essentially the play of a certain desire for the Mother. (Let us remember that the words that describe Tartuffe, "gros," "gras," "le teint vermeil," as well as the scene in which these words occur a scene that associates Tartuffe with nourishment, the pleasure of ingestion lurk in the memory of the text as one more possible association to the maternal as both attractive and repulsive.) What this particular illusion of unity reminds us of is, paradoxically, the floating image of a stage of pre-sexuality, of an amorphous composite body that exists before the scission, before the imposition of the Law of the Father, and the child's entrance into sexual difference and into language that traduces that difference. Orgon is seduced by Tartuffe as image and this, I suggest, is the real danger of Tartuffe: the danger of the "imaginary" instance that coexists in a tenuous dialectic with the institution of the symbolic as the Law of the Father, and that represents for that law a destabilizing drive.

The character who is meant to represent Tartuffe's moral opposite, Cléante, is also, in terms of the visual imagery that dominates the rhetoric of the play, the most interesting for his completely opposite visual valency in the economy of the text. Whereas Tartuffe, as hypocrite, is characterized by his imaging of himself, his production of himself as artifact that forces its recognition in the play's field of vision, Cléante is characterized, ethically, by his invisibility. He is, he tells us, in his use of words, transparent:

Et je vous ai trouvé.
Pour vous en dire net ma pensée en deux mots.

Je vous le dis encore, et parle avec franchise.

Cléante is clear and frank. In this he seems to be different from the other characters, who all exist in a universe of unclear signs, or at least in a world in which they are suspicious of their ability to interpret signs correctly. They would seem to represent a lingering malaise that signals us that for them, for the world of the play, for the world of Molière, the revolution in epistemology that (according to Foucault) was occurring at this time, carrying the world out of the order of resemblances and into the order of transparency, has not as yet taken place. Or rather, it is taking place for some but not for others. For the other characters who are constantly interpreting Tartuffe's actions, who suspect him of being a hypocrite, there still remains, attached to the relation of words and things, an obscurity, an apotropaic talismanic quality that pushes them to interpretation without that interpretation being articulable as anything other than a "suspicion," a wary mistrust in which the possibility of their own error, their own inability to interpret correctly, floats just below the surface of their discourse.

Cléante, on the other hand, does not seem to have these problems, these doubts ("Je sais, pour toute ma science / Du faux avec le vrai faire la différence"). His identifying mark in the comedy is precisely a stance in the world that does not need interpretation. He is what he says. This, however, is neither as easy nor as unproblematic as it first appears. On the contrary, in a sense Cléante, the "honnête homme" of the play, is in perhaps the most ideologically overdetermined subject-position. If by "Classicism" we mean that epistemic moment when the difference between words and things is reduced to the merest hair's breadth, where words are the transparent signifier of reality, Cléante's definition of himself as "transparent" makes of him Classicism incarnate. With the transparency of Classicism coded as progress, we must ask ourselves what does it mean, in an Absolutist state, for a subject to be invisible to himself, to others, to power?

"Honnêteté" is what exists in society by not being seen. It is the position of the subject who is so entirely subjugated to the gaze of the Other (Monarch) that he has become one with this gaze. He has internalized it to such a degree as to become one with it. An "honnête homme ne se pique de rien" means that in the world of "honnêteté" one is "honnête" in one's inability to react in any way that would make one visible, call attention to one's presence, that would separate one from the total, symmetrical reflection of the Sovereign's gaze, or if we wish, of the gaze of society (an accepted set of social/value judgments) and be particularized. To the degree that Cléante is "frank" ("net") he is precisely not visible, cannot and will not exist as an "attrape-l'œil," as a spot that can stop, fix, the gaze of the world. It seems, therefore, that when a critic like G. Defaux states that Cléante is the center of the play, that Cléante is Molière's representative, he is correct, but perhaps not for those reasons he offers, for Defaux does not seem aware of the terrible price of invisibility, its terrible collusion with a power it apes, and that has already vampirized it (Cléante), and its (his) position in the world.

The dynamics of the play, as we have been discussing them up to this point, all swirl around the visual, around the production and seduction of images and subject-positions. Tartuffe, as I have suggested, is the most coded visual presence in the play: his hypocrisy is dangerous precisely because it is essentially a false image, but one so intimately camouflaged that it confuses the essence of "true" meaning with only a superficial appearance of devotion. It is precisely this confusion, this invasion of "the true" of, that is, an entire system by which a culture renders its productions verisimilous, "natural" that is effaced by its colonization by the imaginary, by the seduction of the image. In a further twist of our own interpretation, it now appears that what is really at stake in Tartuffe, what is the cause of its "scandal," is that the Law of the Father upon which the entire ideology of patriarchy is grounded, the symbolic order based on castration and difference, is being invaded and undermined by the Imaginary. Released from its subordination to order by Tartuffe's seduction of the Father, the Imaginary now threatens to overwhelm the entire domain of patriarchal authority.

If Tartuffe were only a "visual" image he would be much less effectively threatening. From the visual field Tartuffe parasitizes the symbolic itself by his mastery of devotional rhetoric (and from this rhetoric the entire semiotic order of Christianity). Not only does Tartuffe exist as a visual reflection for Orgon: more importantly, his narcissistically invested homilies and recriminations serve as a linguistic mirror that reflects back a troubling, troubled subjectivity to those who share the metaphysical premises of a language grounded in a severely dichotomous opposition between good and evil, sacrifice and redemption, heaven and hell. It is a discourse whose predicates suppose and uphold a universe of Law, of order, of God.

The slippage we have noted in Molière's own rhetoric between visual and lexical representations is encoded in the text of the play, where Tartuffe uses words to reflect back to his interlocutors his and their own bad faith:

Dès que j'en vis briller la splendeur plus qu'humaine,
De mon intérieur vous fûtes souveraine;
De vos regards divins l'ineffable douceur
Força la résistance où s'obstinait mon cœur.
Elle surmonta tout, jeûnes, prières, larmes,
Et tourna tous mes vœux du côté de vos charmes.
Mes yeux et mes soupirs vous l'ont dit mille fois,
Et pour mieux m'expliquer j'emploie ici la voix.
(III, iii, 973-980)

Clearly in his mouth words serve as both offensive and defensive weapons. The seduction takes place in the moment of slippage, in the abandonment where one rhetorical trope evolves into the other. It is at this moment of aphanisis of language, its apparent vaporization as vision, that Tartuffe seduces Orgon, and hopes to seduce Elmire.

It is in this dangerous passage from the visual to the lexical that Tartuffe is most pernicious. Tartuffe's use of language brings out the inherent ambivalence of words, their status of sign rather than reality. Language is not a crystalline mediation between words and things but a turbulent, beckoning, ever-changing reflection of the person to whom the speaker addresses himself. Tartuffe uses words in such a manipulative way as to make them into self-conscious reflections not of some exterior reality but of their own unreality, of their own status as "social productions." Tartuffe's rhetoric, as seduction, infuses words with desire, unhinging them from any anchoring in a "reality," and sets them adrift as pure illusion. The effect of this seduction by rhetoric is to point out not the "truth" of a world grounded in language, but its vanity, its hollowness: what this language points to is itself. This is not a small accomplishment, for in the fervent religious climate of the seventeenth century (but also in ours as well, where perhaps not religion, but certainly other equally invested ideological systems, continually try to disguise their own predicates), when the medium of the message is shown to be free-floating it undermines any attempt at fixing a meaning that would be immutable, absolute.

In Tartuffe's mouth words are dangerously seductive, for they never point to any reality that is not him. His speech is an artificial, narcissistic mirror that Tartuffe turns to the world to capture in his person/discourse not its presence, not its material weight, but its metaphysical assumptions, its "invisibility": that is, those beliefs—religious, metaphysical, philosophical that structure the world, that legislate the parameters inside of which individuals are subjected to Law. By his manipulation of the words governing that legislation Tartuffe points to their artificiality, their status as "artifact," rather than to their status as fact, and thereby undoes not only the illusion of "truth," and of religion, but also that of the family and of the State. Once these institutions have been set adrift as in the mirror of words, the subject formed at their interstice, as well as the very possibility of subjectivity, is shown to be impossible.

The full implications of this threat to the patriarchal family are staged for us in the scene that pits Damis against Tartuffe and which ends with Orgon's committing the most "unnatural" act on the seventeenth-century stage. This scene is particularly perverse in its demonstration that there is no truth (for Orgon) other than the truth of Tartuffe's image (verbal and visual). What strikes us about the scene is the representation of contrition, Tartuffe's miming the pose of supplication he is on his knees and how this image is used to counter the veracity of his confession, a confession that, although using words to say the "truth," reflects to Orgon not guilt but spiritual superiority. The dovetailing of word and image authorizes Orgon to hear, to interpret, those words in a sense that is directly contrary to their literal meaning, but perfectly consonant with their cosmetic function. All these words do is to use a rhetoric of Christian contrition to seduce Orgon, who does not hear the "truth", but sees an image:

The scene which starts out with the exultation of the son who has finally, he believes, the proof of Tartuffe's perfidy in hand ends not with the conversion of the father to truth, but with the banishment of Damis. Damis is chased, cursed, from his father's house:

Vite, quittons la place.
Je te prive, pendard, de ma succession,
Et te donne de plus ma malédiction.
(III, vi, 1138-1140)

In his stead, Tartuffe is enthroned as his replacement:

Je ne veux point avoir d'autre héritier que vous,
Et je vais de ce pas, en fort bonne manière,
Vous faire de mon bien donation entière.
(III, vii, 1177-1179)

This scene can only be read as the final triumph of Tartuffe over the Law of the Father, if we understand Damis's banishment as a metaphorical castration of the son. In the ideology of patriarchy this must be also and coterminously a castration of the Father. By depriving himself of his "legal" progeny (in social, economic, and political terms) he is effectively and retroactively denying his own position in the realm of patrilineal descent and undoing his role as familial centre. It is for this reason that the father's "cutting off" of his son is the most heavily invested act in the play. It is here that the greatest threat to the family occurs. It is no longer in the realm of the repressed, but passes into the domain of the real with potentially fatal consequences.

This act, the direct consequence of Orgon's perverted seduction by Tartuffe, is an "unnatural" act in several resonant senses. First, as I have mentioned, the castration of the son is also a self-mutilation—the deprivation of one's future as a man in a male-ordered economy of descent. By "castrating" the son the father effectively destroys the ties, the ties of sublimation, that bind him both to his past (his father) and his future (his son) along a well-ordered progression of male prerogative, based precisely on the repression of castration and its sublimation in an universal obedience that binds all men together in a masculine essentiality under the Law. When Orgon refuses this sublimation, he not only threatens his own subjugation to the genealogical order of descent that defines him, gives him a place and an identity: he also threatens the "order" as such. He is effectively denying family as a system of male privilege.

Even more, it is clear that this destitution is intimately connected with a homosexual desire to be united to Tartuffe through the latter's union with his own daughter. When we consider the conflicted, unconscious sexual attractions between parents and offspring, Orgon's imposition of Tartuffe on Mariane, his insistence on their marriage, can only be seen as a sexual ploy whereby Mariane is being used to mediate Orgon's own unavowable ambivalence. She serves as the mediating object not only of Tartuffe's lust, but of Orgon's, and even more perversely, of Orgon's lust for Tartuffe. It is only through her that Orgon can ever achieve the unthinkable, but no less desired, union with Tartuffe. Only by eliminating the son, the symbol of his own investment in heterosexual masculinity, and by substituting, through a marriage to his daughter, a new lover/son, can Orgon, in one more avatar of exchange, be placed in his daughter's bed and there be united with the Father/son of his own desire. Thus by threatening the family as its very heart, by substituting for an economy of masculine descent and prerogative a descent through the female (the prospective marriage of Mariane to Tartuffe), by the intrusion of an homoerotic passion (produced, as we've seen, by the lure of the imaginary) into the world of heterosexual ordering (the symbolic ordering of sexuality) there results a strange crossing-over of familial/sexual lines that effectively condemns first the family, and then the State that it reflects, to its ruin.

By the end of Act III, therefore, the family seems to be mortally wounded. Sexually and politically it has been undone. It needs only the economic "coup de grâce" of Act IV to be effectively eliminated. It is at this juncture, when all seems lost, when Orgon seems to have abandoned all contact with (familial) reality, all contact with himself, that the family regroups around Elmire, that strangely ambivalent figure of femininity (mother/wife/mistress), to save itself from its own demise.

By all reckoning Act IV is one of the most "hilarious" in Molière's comic production. While up to this point it may appear that I have left aside, forgotten, that the Tartuffe is a comedy I have only been waiting to arrive at the high point of the comic to demonstrate what I stated at the beginning of this essay: that the visual is integral to the comic aspect of the play, that it is the pivotal link between the internal world of the spectacle and the exterior reality of the parterre, and that rather than undermining my own argument it the comedy is essential for understanding the imbrication of laughter and ideology in the formation of the Classical subject.

When things are at their most desperate Elmire steps in to take the matter in hand. Although presented as a rather shallow character, Elmire has insight enough to know that the only way to re-establish flagging familial order an order in which, we note, she, like the other women, is but an object of exchange among men is to engage Orgon where he is most vulnerable, most desirous, in his scoptophilia:

J'admire, encore un coup, cette faiblesse étrange.
Mais que me répondrait votre incrédulité
Si je vous faisais voir qu'on vous dit vérité?
(IV, iv, 1338-1340)

Quel homme! Au moins répondez-moi.
Je ne vous parle pas de nous ajouter foi;
Mais supposons ici que, d'un lieu qu'on peut prendre,
On vous fît clairement tout voir et tout entendre,
Que diriez-vous alors de votre homme de bien?
(IV, iv, 1343-1347)

The comedy of this scene that Elmire stages for the pleasure of her husband and ours is, I suggest, intimately connected to the scopic drive as it orchestrates what is, finally, a "dirty joke" in the sense Freud gives to this term:

Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.

I am less interested in the particulars of this scene than in its dynamics. What finally is funny? What makes us laugh? Clearly, it seems to me, the cause of our mirth is Elmire's discomfiture, her vulnerability to Tartuffe's lust from which she expected to be protected by her husband, while her expectations are deceived. Our laughter is produced precisely because Orgon does not burst forth from his hiding place to save his wife from the sexual advances of Tartuffe. We laugh because he constantly delays appearing, constantly waits for something else. His waiting, which increases Elmire's anxiety, makes us laugh. What exactly, we might ask, is he waiting for? What, in other words, does he want to see? The answer to this enigma, the punch line of the joke, is given us by him in response to his own mother's refusal to believe Tartuffe's duplicity (a reversal, a comic come-uppance that repeats Orgon's own "blindness" at the beginning of the play) in Act V. To her incredulity, to her refusal to believe, what now he knows to be true knows it because he has "visual proof he sputters out the truth of his own desire, the cause of our laughter in Act IV:

In the ellipses of the three dots ("Would you have wanted me to wait until he had … her in front of my very eyes?") is the punch line of our visual joke. The answer is, of course, "yes" (and "no"). What Orgon was waiting for, what kept him in his hiding place and kept us laughing, was, I would suggest, his desire to see the "primal scene" of adult sexuality. He wanted (we wanted) to "see" Tartuffe reveal his desire, unveil the "phallus" that had masqueraded as "indifference" (that is, not there, not visible, "no-thing") and by so doing recreate an Oedipal scenario that would "correctly" sort out the confused sexual roles, that would establish the primacy of the symbolic over the imaginary and re-insert, into confusion, order. In other words, we were all waiting to see Tartuffe rape Elmire.

What this scene also underlines for us is the sadistically aggressive side of the scopic drive that pleasures in the suffering sacrifice of Elmire, thus pointing to the collusion between the laughter evoked by Molière's comedy with an entire patriarchal order that is based on the sacrifice, destruction, of women. This "destruction" is not, however, a simple exploitation. Elmire situates herself in this scene; she in fact orchestrates this scene, which places her in the center of everyone's gaze as a sexual object. It is as if the only choice left to women in an Absolutist, patriarchal monarchy was the pleasure in the masochistic sacrifice of their subjectivity. In order to exist, they must opt for the negative empowerment of their own alienation. Women must assume the alienating position of object (object of exchange) in the sexual attraction/rivalry of men. Elmire places herself squarely in the visual field of Orgon (and, by extension, of the spectators, whose own gaze is relayed by Orgon's) as the mediating object, the sexual object of exchange between the men. This object "exchanges" a male homoerotic binding for the sadistic consumption of the female, who exists in this scene as the symbol of sexual difference. She is the "difference" that assures men of their difference, as power, as superiority. In this scene of sado-masochistic aggression and laughter, Elmire assumes the non-identity that is hers in a patriarchal society, sacrifices her subjectivity in order to save

that society from its own self-destruction in a homoerotic embrace that would effectively signal the disappearance of all those signifying systems based on the initial, essential imposition of sexual scission, of the entire semiotic order based on phallocentric symbolization which is generated around the fear/fantasy of castration.

The importance of Elmire's self-sacrifice cannot be underestimated for the dynamics of subjectivity that subtend the production of the comedy in the play. As I've suggested, what she stage for the pleasure/appetite of Orgon's eye is the origin of his "I," that is the origin of his subjectivity as that subjectivity comes into being through the imposition of difference, through the imposition on the imaginary of the Law of scission, which is, as Lacan has claimed, coterminously the entrance into language/sexuality. What the primal scene orchestrates, what it fantasizes, is the "origin of the individual who always sees him/herself figured in the scene," [as stated in Fantasme Originaire, Fantasmes des origines, Origines du Fantasme] as the product of sexual difference. We can thus also understand why structurally Orgon cannot come to his wife's rescue, for in this scene, caught up as he is in his/its fantasmatic power, he exists not as husband, but as child. He has effectively been placed in such a way that his Schaulust, that has held him in its sway, is here brought back to its/his originary moment, where it is directed at what it always wanted: to see sex, to see sexual splitting (as difference) and in that splitting to found Orgon's subjectivity as gendered. The trauma of the scene, as Freud reminds us in his analysis of the Wolfman [in "A Case of Infantile Neurosis"] is precisely

the wish for the sexual satisfaction which he was at that time longing to obtain from his father. The strength of this wish made it possible to revive a long-forgotten trace in his memory of a scene which was able to show him what sexual satisfaction from his father was like; and the result was terror, horror of the fulfilment of the wish….

Freud theorizes, in another essay ["Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction of the Sexes"] that the fear of this castration is inseparable from the "narcissistic interest" young boys have in their genital organ. By following this hypothetical line of reasoning, we are thus able to see the coming together in this scene of all the visual/psychic elements that have structured the play all along their coming together and their sorting out, through Orgon's "shock" (trauma) of seeing what all along has been denied him. This shock shatters the utopic plenitude of Orgon's vision of Tartuffe. In a sense it is the shock of visual excess that imposes on the subject held in the sway of the imaginary the cutting weight of the symbolic, of sexuality as difference. The vision is a sexual one in that it reveals the sex of the Father/Mother. By revealing (uncovering, showing) their truth, it does away with Tartuffe's "illusion," his masquerade, and its projection of non-difference. This flashing, blinding vision of sexuality re-situates Orgon into the order of masculine, sexual economy, returns him to the center of his oikos as "Father" (that is, no longer sexual mate of Tartuffe, but sexual rival), and reinstates the integrity of the family:

Comme aux tentations s'abandonne votre âme!
Vous épousiez ma fille, et convoitiez ma femme!
J'ai douté fort longtemps que ce fût tout de bon,
Et je croyais toujours qu'on changerait de ton;
Mais c'est assez avant pousser le témoignage:
Je m'y tiens, et n'en veux, pour moi, pas davantage.
(IV, vii, 1545-1550)

Orgon's re-inscription in his "place" comes, alas, too late. He no longer is master of his household. In fact, there is no longer any household. Tartuffe is now in legal possession of Orgon's house, and in a scathing reversal orders Orgon and his family out:

C'est à vous d'en sortir, vous qui parlez en maître:
La maison m'appartient, je le ferai connaître.
(IV, vii, 1557-1558)

So the comedy that began with the absence of an oikodespotès ends (almost) in the very real absence of oikos. The family, defined most radically by its situation as that unit that lives together under one roof, is now roofless, no longer "domesticated" but cast out on to the street, with (as we soon learn) its head under the threat of death. The family is symbolically, but also legally and very physically, at the point of its dispersion, its ruin, its extinction.

It is, of course, at this juncture, when all seems lost, when Tartuffe as pure lust has reduced the family to nothingness, that some exterior force must intervene to save the family and thus the state from its demise. When we understand the intimate connection that the sexual/political economy of the family has for the regime of Absolute monarchy, how it is the basic and most heavily invested of all those "apparatuses" by which the state defines itself, maintains itself and its subjects in the proper relation to their own sexuality, to that sexuality as "proper" and "natural," the ending of the play no longer seems quite so contrived, the deus ex machina no longer so unmotivated. Rather, this deus ex machina, which in this instance is a rex-(s)ex-machina is so totally imbricated in the ideology of family, patriarchy and sexuality that has been threatened by Tartuffe's image-ing of himself that it/he cannot enter on to the scene of comedy. He enters it as the "invisible" (the prince is not seen, he is represented), as the "real" veiled phallus the sign of power/desire that functions as the Law of the symbolic who, through the very visual imagery that has disoriented the subject/father of the play, restores it/him to its and his rightful place.

The entire metaphoric structure of the last speech, the speech of truth and resolution, describes the Prince, his power, in visual terms. What distinguishes the Prince is that his vision, as opposed to the unreliable father's, is infallible:

Nous vivons sous un prince ennemi de la fraude,
Un prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les cœurs,

Et que ne peut tromper tout l'art des imposteurs.
(V, scène dernière, 1906-1908)

The prince sees through artifice. He alone sees what is true and is capable of separating out truth from falsehood. His vision is piercing, penetrating; it sees beyond appearance into the "soul" of his subjects, into their true nature: "D'abord, il a percé, par ses vives clartés / Des replis de son cœur toutes les lâchetés" It is also an irresistible force ("de pièges plus fins on le voit se défendre"). His vision is "straight" ("droite vue") and upholds a rigid understanding ("ferme raison") of the workings of human nature. What these obvious references bolster is the phallic presence of the prince, the prince as phallus, who, precisely, controls and directs the "excessive" drive of Schaulust into culturally acceptable channels of desire. In a strange, paradoxical way, this sovereign who is described as an "Omniscient eye/I," as the invisible but all-present, all-knowing model who watches over all his subjects, who sees into their innermost recesses, who knows who's been bad or good:

Et c'est le prix qu'il donne au zèle qu'autrefois
On vous vit témoigner en appuyant ses droits,
Pour montrer que son cœur sait, quand moins on y pense,
D'une bonne action verser la récompense,
Que jamais le mérite avec lui ne perd rien,
Et que mieux que du mal il se souvient du bien
(V, scène dernière, 1939-1944)

and who deals out fit punishments or rewards - is never there. He is not localizable except in a discourse of invisibility, a discourse of his vision/power that cannot be seen but is everywhere. In a sense, what this panoptic power of the prince represents is his power to be part of every one of his subjects. They are part of his gaze (the best example, again is Cléante). This vision is an internalized sense of one's being watched, of living under an omnipotent eye. What this sense of being contained in the eye of some never-present beholder represents is the coming into being of a subjugation and subjectivization that, although repressive, is felt as salutary: it saves the family (that is, us) from its own demise. It is only under the eye of this just Monarch/father, in his adoration by his subjects, in their subjugation to him, that the play can end. The anxiety caused by Tartuffe's near-destruction of the family, his playing too freely with all those systems that his manipulation of images shows to be too vulnerable to ground subjectivity in any way that is not already undermined, is itself overcome by and through the "incorporation" of the Absolutist gaze. At the end of the play the family, newly situated at the very center of its invisible Lord's field of vision, significantly reestablishes its preeminent situation at the center of the represented universe. Sure of its newly bolstered foundations, the family, as the mediating locus of an Absolutist imperative of the sexual and economic organization of society, can safely propel itself into a future of perpetual continuation, and this "comedy" that almost fell into the tragic can at last end, as all comedies do, with the promise of marriage.