SOURCE: "'So Unsecret to Ourselves': Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 413-23, 33-40.

[In the excerpt below, Charnes discusses how Shakespeare represents his characters in Troilus and Cressida and examines the distinctions between public and private forms of desire in the play.]

. . . 1 have a mortal fear of being taken to be other than I am by those who come to know my name.. . . Praise a hunchback for his handsome figure, and he is bound to take it as an insult. If you are a coward and people honor you as a valiant man, is it you they are talking about? They take you for another.

Montaigne, On Some Verses of Virgil

This is, and is not, Cressid.

Troilus (5.2.145)

Troilus' bitter remark as he watches Cressida in the Greek camp may reveal his stupefaction, his inability to comprehend what he sees, his "splitting" of Cressida into "his" Cressida and "Diomed's Cressida." But if we remember that Cressida herself has already warned him that "I have a kind of self resides with you, / But an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another's fool" (3.2.146-48),¹ we can also consider Troilus' remark to be the first lucid assessment he has made of her in the play thus far. This moment marks Troilus' recognition that he has, in fact, made the mistake Montaigne fears: he has taken Cressida for another. And we can well understand Montaigne's fear. To be "taken for another" is not to be taken at all. Rather, it is to be left behind, "exchanged," as it were, for this mysterious "other" for whom one is mis-taken. But what happens when it is one's "self who is the "other" for whom one is mistaken? Or, when the "self for whom one is taken is only a "kind of self," a self that is really beside itself? These questions are central to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, as characters throughout the play mis-take each other and are in turn mistaken. Paradoxically, the figures who inhabit this play are notoriously "known." And yet, it is precisely these legendary figures who are at great pains to secure their own and each others' identities as they try to lay to rest a haunting sense that they are, and are not, "themselves." Troilus' exclamation in the face of Cressida's "betrayal" is paradigmatic not merely of this moment but of the play as a whole. "This is and is not" is a phenomenon that haunts Troilus and Cressida, endlessly repeating and forming the knot to which the play again and again returns.

I

If the meaning of a poetic work can be exhausted through the application of a theory of neurosis, then it was nothing but a pathological product in the first place, to which I would never concede the dignity of a work of art. Today, it is true, our taste has become so uncertain that often we no longer know whether a thing is art or a disease.

C. G. Jung, "Is There a Freudian Type of Poetry?"²

If any Shakespeare play seems to invite exhaustion through the application of a theory of neurosis, it is Troilus and Cressida. Arguably the most "neurotic" of the plays in terms of the skewed relations among and between characters, the play's generic inconsistencies, its resistance to a rehearsible narrative, and its own self-proclaimed "diseased" matter, it is not by any means merely a "pathological product." And yet, I would hesitate to concede it "dignity" as a "work of art," or at least, art or dignity as Jung presumably means them. Those critics who would concede dignity to the play as "art" take it, to borrow Montaigne's terms, for another: if they praise the play at all, they attempt, unconvincingly, to praise a hunchback for his handsome figure. What I propose to do in this essay is to praise the hunchback for his hump. For it is precisely its deformity that gives the play its power. And I intend to address its "art" in its artifice; that is, the way in which the play calls attention to itself at every level as a construct, a made thing, a deliberately badly made thing, in fact, a monstrosity—something that both demonstrates and admonishes. The question to be asked is not whether a thing is art or a disease, but rather, what is it that is artful about disease? As Althusser has said,

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of "seeing", "perceiving" and "feeling" (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.³

Troilus and Cressida posits symptomology as art because it is only the neurotic symptomology in the play that detaches itself and alludes to the ideology from which it is born. What I concede to the play as a work of art is its extraordinary capacity for treachery, its trompe l' oeil effect, which invites theories of neurosis only to anticipate their claims and, finally, to deconstruct their conclusions.

The famous figures who inhabit this play act out, in perverted and self-deceptive forms, a rebellion against a coercion and oppression of subjectivity that cannot and must not be directly confronted or openly challenged. As epic figures, they are deeply inscribed vehicles of ideology, but as dramatic characters, they don't quite fit their inscriptions. Unable to construct alternatives, they are forced to be and not be "themselves." The play, 1 shall argue, represents neurosis in the form of subjectivity crippled by cultural inscription. To say, however, that something is only a pathological product, merely neurotic, would be to deny the subversive signifying power of pathology—the ways in which, although categorized as monstrous and therefore as marginal, it still manages to interrogate the "normal." Neurosis is never merely anything: it is, rather, always some kind of political expression since it is constructed either as opposition to or perversion from norms of thought, feeling, or conduct. But reading neurosis as a political act does not mean valorizing it or asserting that it is the best or most effective form of rebellion. Quite the contrary. A neurosis may posit resistance to oppression, but its symptomology is largely apotropaic—designed to avert rather than openly to challenge. Neurotic symptomology by its nature helps to reinforce and hold in place the original structures of oppression against which it reacts. This is, finally, what makes it neurosis—it is a politics of rebellion turned back upon the self.

It has been argued that in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare represents a longing for a heroism that is irrecuperable, a nostalgia for a time when terms such as honor and glory were still attachable to the heroes whose actions and attitudes defined the terms; that the play encodes a nostalgia for the origins of epic heroism—for the titular epic forefathers whose names its characters carry around their necks like placards. But this argument reproduces the very myth of origins that the play so relentlessly attacks. Even in the so-called "originals"—Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid—there is ironic nostalgia for a lost age of heroism.⁴ Far from lamenting lost heroic ideals, Shakespeare's play betrays the awareness that all notions of heroism, of "true" honor and glory, are in their very moments of conception always located in the past, always "originally" conceived of as irretrievably lost. Consequently, the pursuit of a retrievable, reproducible heroism is itself a neurotic symptom, insofar as it re-writes originary absence as loss. How are Shakespeare's famous characters to "be themselves" when their names convey an absolute "identity" that is itself based upon a myth of loss? If, even as the "original" heroes of the "original" epics, they always already encode nostalgia? Achilles may not want to fight in Shakespeare's play, but even as the "hero" of Homer's epic he didn't want to participate in the war. . . . What does it mean that the most famous warrior in Western literature has never wanted to fight in this most famous of wars?

The tendency to read and write absence as loss may render the nostalgic impulse suspect, but it doesn't necessarily make it "neurotic." In order for the nostalgic impulse to be "neurotic," it would have not only to deny originary absence but to deny even the sense of loss that is the nostalgic revision of absence. Neurotic nostalgia would produce symptoms that at once represent absence as loss and then deny that representation. In Troilus and Cressida the characters exhibit just such symptoms, the etiology of which can be understood in the way their notorious "identities" have been constituted.

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis.

Freud, "Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness"⁵

The figures in Shakespeare's play have complied with the demands of "civilization" insofar as they have been "constituted" by those demands. But we expect Troilus to be "true" and Cressida to be "false" because their story is part of what in turn constitutes "civilization." No other of Shakespeare's characters are as "convicted" as those in Troilus and Cressida. These figures have been thoroughly indicted in the repetitions of the story of Troy. We need not be persuaded that Troilus is "true" and Cressida is "false"—we are convinced before the play has even begun. As Montaigne says about the story of Troy:

There is nothing so alive in the mouths of men as [Homer's] name and his works; nothing so well known and accepted as Troy, Helen, and his wars, which perhaps never existed. . . . Not only certain private families but most nations seek their origin in his fictions.⁶

To seek origins in "fictions" is, I suggest, the historiographical equivalent of nostalgia. As a strategy of producing national "identity," however, it "constitutes civilization" so as to make it comply with particular political demands. Thus, nostalgia and historiography converge in a cultural mythography: a use of the legendary to replace epistemological uncertainty with a fiction of authoritative origins—a fiction designed to confer upon notions of authorship the "authority" of the "authentic."⁷

The invidious problem of "originality" lies at the heart of Shakespeare's play. By choosing one of the most notorious stories of the Renaissance (through the writings of Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton, and Henryson, to name the most influential), Shakespeare takes on the task of giving mimetic spontaneity to, and representing viable subjectivity in, characters who are already deeply encoded in their meaning. Troilus and Cressida, along with their Greek and Trojan counterparts, mean and mean intensely in the Renaissance, long before Shakespeare re-stages them in his play. Their story (which appeared not in Homer but in the versions of the Troy story that were generated in the Middle Ages) had status as a literary construct within a larger legendary context that was itself deployed both as "history" and literary fiction.

It is, I believe, this curious coupling of the great "authority" that surrounded the legend of Troy with its unstable classificatory status, its strange existence as both legend and history, that led Shakespeare to use the story as a way to investigate the deeply conflicted relationship between absolutist authority and its coercive forms, and a contrary fantasy (and I wish to stress fantasy), represented explicitly during this time, of the possibility of a "self-authored" subjectivity. For unlike the "meaning" and deployment of other "notorious" figures, such as Richard III, Troilus' and Cressida's meanings were not overtly linked to political power: their semiotics had not been appropriated by the Tudor royal line to consolidate its own legitimacy. Theirs is primarily (although Shakespeare will alter this) a literary/psychological significance, at least insofar as these are the discourses into which they enter as significant figures. But it is precisely the fact that they are apparently unanchored in the political axis that enables Shakespeare to explore the relationship between "identity" as that which fixes meaning (both personal and political) and "subjectivity"—the unstable heterogeneity that simultaneously constitutes and unfixes even the most "fixed" of names.

Before proceeding any further, I should clarify how I am using the terms "identity" and "subjectivity." To "identify," as the OED tells us, is from idem: to make identical, to treat, to consider or regard something or someone as "the same." It is to determine to be the same with something that is already known, to establish what a given thing, or who a given person, is. Thus, to "identify" someone is to attempt to secure their "meaning," erase their multiplicity, eliminate their indeterminacy—to "fix" them so to speak. But it is also always citational, insofar as it depends upon comparison: to render something the same as something else. I wish to evoke the paradoxical nature of a concept that etymologically collapses two into one: that takes the two terms of a comparison and makes them the same thing. When I refer to the notorious identities of the characters, I will mean the way they are "fixed" by their legends; the way they are determined, by the audience, reader, and even finally by Shakespeare, to "be the same as" their legends make them. Their "identities" will signal the extent to which they are historically encoded and entrapped by their famous names.

Apart from (but in crucial relation to) this, I will use the term "subjectivity" partly in Althusser's sense of being "subjected" to determining ideologies, but without the absolute fixity this sense implies.⁸ In other words, while "subjectivity" does mean being subjected to determining forces, it also implies the experience of undergoing a relationship to these forces. Subjectivity, as I will use it, means the individual's experience of his or her relationship to his or her "identity." Hence a necessary space is opened up between "identity" (which is the "thingness" of self, as it has been constituted by the past) and "subjectivity" (which is the relationship to that "thingness" as it is experienced in the present). In this space the possibility of indeterminacy, as well as a fantasy of autonomous choice in thought, action, or emotion, becomes thinkable. Subjectivity, then, implies a capacity to remain chameleon-like, to avoid being "fixed" or finished. It means resisting being signed into permanent inscription—resisting being "legends."

In Troilus and Cressida the characters' legendary status threatens to crush their representational viability as "subjects." What gives the play its remarkable affective power (despite its reiterative material) is the way Shakespeare solves his own representational problems with this massively overdetermined story by passing them along to his characters. Rather than trying to make these figures "new" to his audience, Shakespeare's strategy is to portray their desire, and their inability, to be new even to themselves; to represent their struggle to produce subjective self-representations that can in fact only be realized at the expense of their notorious identities. Subjectivity in this play is posited as the disruptive effect of simultaneous resistance, and subjection, to the determining force of famous names. The characters' names instantly convey the roles they are required to play—by Shakespeare, by the audience, and, as we shall see, by each other. Their very existence is authorized by these roles. Consequently, to attempt to avoid or subvert their "official" functions is to deconstruct their own origins, to somehow "undo" their own conditions of existence and of meaning. It is to engage in a politics of rebellion against a culturally mandated "self." If, as I claim, subjectivity is the experience of one's relationship to one's own identity, then in this play the subjectivity of the characters materializes in and through their "neuroses": through the return, in various forms, of what they attempt to repress.

II

But though she feels as if she's in a play, she is anyway.
 Paul McCartney, "Penny Lane" ⁹

I'm not an actor. I'm just going to be myself; and
I'll continue to play that role.
 Richard Nixon, television interview, 1968

Walter Benjamin has suggested that Brechtian actors "show themselves showing themselves."¹⁰ The characters in Troilus and Cressida, like the actors who "play" them, also "show" or "play" themselves within the world of the play: self-histrionicism or theatricality is built into their "texts." Shakespeare here anticipates not only Brecht's "epic" theatre, but the theatre of the absurd. No other Shakespeare play so explicitly conjures telos only to dismantle it. But this dismantling is complicated by the fact that there is built into the core of the play an ineluctable textual telos: that is, the action does move toward a preordained end, but this end itself delivers neither a moral nor a providential ethos. It is "merely" textual, insofar as it has been intertextually predetermined, but the ideological corollaries that normally (not, however, "naturally") accompany telos have been negated. Troilus and Cressida reveals the ideological contingency of a telos that is both absolute and utterly devoid of value. What exactly does it mean that the teleology in the play is entirely retro-textual? That, while pointing "forward," it points only backwards to preceding texts? That, while steadily leading us toward the "promised end," the end itself promises absolutely nothing?

No other Shakespeare play gives as strong a sense of being over before it has even begun. We see this adumbrated in the almost immediate reference Pandarus makes to what will, in fact, be the outcome of the play. He and Troilus are arguing about Cressida's beauty in relation to Helen's when Pandarus, in a disingenuous huff, replies to Troilus' question of "Say I she is not fair?" with

I do not care whether you do or no. She's a fool to stay behind her father; let her to the Greeks, and so I'll tell her the next time I see her. . . . Pray you speak no more to me; I will leave all as I found it, and there an end.

(1.1.79-82, 87-88)

The striking sense of stultification that permeates the play is here condensed: to an audience that knows so well that Cressida going to the Greeks will indeed be the "end," these words ironically foreclose on all that will follow. Obviously Pandarus is trying to raise the erotic stakes for Troilus at this moment; but with a doubleness characteristic of much of the play's language, his words, while helping to propagate the "action," undercut the effects of action by literally bypassing it: catapulting the audience/reader ahead to what the outcome of the action will inevitably be. Unlike other Shakespeare plays in which the stories may be well known, this play ironically underscores the always-already-over nature of its material, creating for the audience the same dilemma it poses for the characters. How is one to believe in what is happening in the present moment when the future moment is already encoded as a past moment?

A sense of enervation underlies this opening palimpsest, as we feel characters to be somehow "going through the motions," and rather ineptly at that. The play seems mimetically to represent the process of reification, a process inevitable in the reinscription of the legendary: it enacts reification as it hardens, so to speak, the characters and their actions into the "works" that they already, and inescapably, are. "Let her to the Greeks . . . and there an end." In some sense the play does end here: for all that follows is a drawing out of this moment as Pandarus has articulated it.

The inevitability of the "promised end" is reinforced throughout the play, as references to the future look, Janus-faced, to the past.¹¹ That the characters are given an awareness of their "previous" existences surfaces occasionally in overt form, such as Hector's anachronistic reference at 2.2.167 to Aristotle's Ethics, a work that won't be written until long after Hector is dead, buried, and converted into legend. But unlike other plays in which historical figures make unwitting references to their own historicity (a strategy of irony that privileges the audience's metadramatic position), this play afflicts the characters with an historical "knowledge" that contaminates most, if not all, of their verbal intercourse. We can see this in the strange initial conversation between Troilus and Cressida. As Troilus expresses his "wishes" about their love (3.2.61) to Cressida, she articulates the relationship of "wishes" to expectations and the relationship of both to "fears": "Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason stumbling without fear. To fear the worst oft cures the worse" (11. 69-71). This is and is not a moment of speculation for Cressida (with all its connotations of wishing, hoping, fearing, gambling, and expecting), as she at once tries to envisage ("seeing reason") and to avoid seeing ("blind fear") what the outcome of her behavior will be. When Cressida speaks of fear as a way to "cure the worse," she ostensibly means that fearing the worst leads one to take precautions that will prevent the worst. But to "cure" is also to preserve. To cure is to effect something, to make good, to bring about. In the Renaissance a "cure" was also a duty, a charge, a function of office ("Pan hathe cure of shepe and of shepeherdes," OED). Cressida's surface text speaks her desire to prevent the worst. But the word she uses to speak prevention ("cure") also speaks realization: to "cure" the worst ironically secures the worst. She fears the worst because it is what her reason foresees; and in turn, her "seeing reason" ensures that she will indeed secure it. Troilus responds, "O let my lady apprehend no fear: in all Cupid's pageant there is presented no monster" (11. 72-73). Troilus' denial of Cressida's fears takes the rhetorical form of a ritual apostrophe, a "wish" masquerading as a dismissal (i.e., urging her not to grasp her fears rather than telling her that there are no fears to grasp). This denial signals the particular form of Troilus' "neurosis," which is precisely to not own what he already knows, to not "apprehend" "monsters." To rename Cressida's fears "monsters" is at once to dismiss them as bogeys and to mark them as revelations, as warnings. His repression of his own "knowledge" of the outcome of this story returns in the form of obsessive, even excessive, denial.

If Troilus' "neurosis" is represented by the fact that the very language he uses to deny foreknowledge (here, foreknowledge of loss) encodes it, Cressida's is that she cannot deny what she wishes to deny—that she is "constituted" to be false. For Cressida, fears are "monstruosit[ies]": predictive shapes of disasters yet to come.¹² Cressida panics after confessing her love to Troilus: "Why have I blabb'd? Who shall be true to us / When we are so unsecret to ourselves?" (11. 123-24). Cressida's neurosis is her inability to be "secret" to herself—her futile desire to escape what her "identity," compressed into her name, means. Indeed, how can Troilus be "true" to her when they both seem to know that she will be false to him?

Troil. What offends you, lady?
Cress. Sir, mine own company.
Troil. You cannot shun yourself.
Cress. Let me go and try.
I have a kind of self resides with you,
But an unkind self, that itself will leave
To be another's fool. 1 would be gone:
Where is my wit? I know not what I speak.
Troil. Well know they what they speak that speak so wisely.

(11. 142-50)

Cressida here articulates what will follow in the betrayal scene, in which she "fools" with Diomed (cf. 5.2.102). While some critics have read Cressida's confusion at this moment as a sign of her sense of "self-betrayal," I would argue that she wishes to shun herself at this moment precisely because she knows that she will indeed "leave to be another's fool."¹³ Cressida here speaks literally (a use of language she frequently insists upon, as we see in her exchanges with Pandarus). If Cressida is divided into two "selves" here, it is because the "kind of self that resides with Troilus is Troilus' Cressida, while the "unkind" self (which I read as dissimilar to, unlike, the former self) will be "Diomed's Cressid." When Troilus remarks that she speaks "so wisely," he inadvertently confirms the confession of inevitable betrayal that Cressida has just made. As she says, "to be wise and love / Exceeds man's might" (3.2.154-55). Cressida's "wisdom" is her affliction: how can she simultaneously love Troilus and know that she is destined, as it were, to betray him? While both Troilus and Cressida simultaneously speak and repress their proleptic awareness, they demonstrate different forms of neurosis when they recite their vows to each other. To begin with, both refer to themselves in citational terms:

Troil. Yet, after all comparisons of truth,
As truth's authentic author to be cited,
'As true as Troilus' shall crown up the verse
And sanctify the numbers.
Cress. . . . Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,
'As false as Cressid'.

(3.2.178-81, 193-94)

The language each employs, however, is different. Troilus sees his name as encoding authorship: to be the source of the citation "'as true as Troilus'" is to claim the authority of being "truth's authentic author." Cressida, on the other hand, imagines her citationality in terms of the body. To "stick" her name as the "heart of falsehood" is at once to fix it and to stab it.

It is not surprising that Troilus' self-reference is "authoritative" while Cressida's is "embodied." For this difference in self-conception produces (and reproduces) social forms of gender difference: Troilus becomes the writer and Cressida, the written; Troilus, the doer and Cressida, the done; Troilus, the artist and Cressida, the artifact. Cressida's neurotic strategy is teleological; her language always speaks the promised end, anticipating that end in terms that signal her awareness of herself as a made, finished thing: "Things won are done" (1.2.292). Even as she kisses Troilus for the first time, she asks herself, "O heavens, what have I done?" (3.2.137). Cressida must bear the awareness that every step she takes toward Troilus seals her "fate" as an artifact and secures her signification as the "heart of falsehood."

Our sense of Cressida's "subjectivity" is produced by the disjunction we perceive in her efforts to inhabit the present through a language that relentlessly thrusts her into the future. But this awareness of the future paradoxically casts every present moment as a past moment. Her life is not only already over but already written about, and repeatedly at that. Consequently her "subjectivity" can only be ghostly, insofar as it haunts a life felt to be "done." Her ghostly subjectivity is her neurosis: that which at once symptomatizes a wish to resist reification while helping to reinforce the conditions that bring it about. This leads Cressida at once to resist (by wishing to slow the play down: "You men will never tarry" [4.2.16]), and to abandon any sense of control over her fate. Of course, on one level this is the only sensible thing to do since as a "legend" she cannot control the outcome of her story. But on another level such an abandonment is deeply self-defeating, for it constitutes the present moment of love as the certain experience of loss. What she feels for Troilus is always contaminated by her knowledge of the future moment of betrayal. Cressida leaves Troilus not because his suspicions of her make her feel "unknown," but precisely the opposite: they make her feel too known—they confirm what she knows must be true (hence false) about herself.

Troilus' neurotic strategy is epistemological: it encodes the denial of future knowledge through a language that looks toward the past, a language obsessed with "origins." Of course, Troilus cannot really be "author of himself precisely because he is already legendary; and thus his impulse to establish his epistemological priority to his own name is doomed to failure. If Cressida's neurosis projects her into the future, Troilus' projects him into the past. He imagines himself to be prior to those "true swains in love," who are "full of protest, of oath, and big compare," imagines that his rhymes and oaths are original, not yet "tir'd with iteration" (3.2.171-74). When Troilus discovers that Cressida must go to the Greeks, he acquiesces precisely so as to realize his identity as "truth's authentic author," which, in terms of the play's system of comparative relations, depends upon Cressida's falsehood. Troilus can only be "'As true as Troilus'" if Cressida is "'As false as Cressid'." His denial of what he knows leads him to hasten the outcome of the story: he hurries away from Cressida after their lovemaking; he immediately accepts the verdict that she must go to the Greeks; he offers no resistance to this verdict. And his resignation is at once pathological and understandable. Like Sophocles' Oedipus, Troilus runs to meet his legendary apotheosis, which requires that Cressida be false.

We thus find ourselves moving through a play whose characters constantly remind us of what we already know, figures who seem tired of their own story. This sense of weariness can be accounted for within the "narrative" of the play by the fact that it begins after the Greeks and Trojans have already been at war for seven years. The war goes on and on—and the reasons for war no longer seem convincing or intrinsically important. In fact, they are increasingly incomprehensible. This calls for increasing rationalization on the part of the characters, who must find ways to keep "making sense" of their own activities.

And yet, if the play were merely a representation of reinscription, it would be merely stultifying, merely enervating. What is so striking about this play is that its sense of enervation is so striking—so literally affrontive. If the play reveals the "naturalizing" strategies of ideology, it does so by uncovering the dead letter already at the heart of the legendary. As conviction wanes, persuasion takes over as the dominant way of evaluating and justifying the activities of war. But persuasion engages people at different levels than conviction. Contingent and perspectival, persuasion depends upon the marshaling of visual evidence to confirm rhetorical assertion.¹⁴ . . .

III

I want people to be able to recognize me by just looking at a caricature of me that has no name on it. You see, I want to be great and you can recognize great people like Muhammed Ali and Bob Hope by just looking at a nameless caricature. When everybody can look at my caricature and say, "That's him, that's Richard Pryor!" then I'll be great.

Richard Pryor, The Washington Post, 15 April

1976²²

Obviously Richard Pryor can say this because he lives in a world in which the dominant mode of "publishing" identity is visual. Entertainers today become famous because we see their faces before us on television, in magazines and newspapers, and in films. However, I'd like to suggest that a similar fantasy about the visual runs throughout Troilus and Cressida. For if the fame of the characters is the result of their intertextual citationality, if their notorious deeds and lives can only be conjured by their names, then built into the very heart of their fame is the eclipse of their faces, the gratuitousness of their physical presence. To be famous by name only is to be already relegated to the past: to be, paradoxically, absent. What the visual would secure for Pryor—to have his unique facial features etched into the public eye—is longed for by these famous figures. A famous name, a reputation, is "imitable," but a face is not.

To be instantly recognizable without the need for one's name, or rather, to have the public instantly able to conjure one's name by seeing one's face, is a fantasy deployed to counteract the void of rhetorical citationality, a fantasy that figures a desire to replace an identity that is only referred to with one that is mirrored. To have one's face recognized prior to the announcement of one's name (for Pryor, prior to "Pryor") is to have one's present, physical existence confirmed—to be, in the language of object-relations theory, mirrored. It is also, in the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, to fantasize a return from the realm of the symbolic to the immediacy of that of the imaginary—from the triadic relationship determined by the phallic (signifying) presence of the father to the dyadic relationship determined by the apprehension of one's reflection in the eyes of the mother, and of one's image in the mirror. If merely a reference between two others, one is "identified" but displaced in the process, or rather, replaced by a symbolic "value." But to be mirrored is to be returned to a dyadic relationship in which physical presence is required.

Laura Mulvey, in her well-known analysis of the scopophilia built into modern film, describes this process in terms useful here:

This mirror-moment . . . constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the "I", of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness.²³

The play's "this is and is not" paradigm reveals precisely the "collision" Mulvey describes: it forms the play's matrix of recognition/misrecognition and identification. But this relationship between the self-awareness produced by the mother's gaze and the "congealing" of identity produced by the mirror image is itself problematized and transformed within the play into a conflict between the need to exist in the eyes of an other and the need to control the gender of that other. For if the Lacanian "imaginary" posists a pre-oedipal state of reflection and fascination existing between mother and child, in this play it is the female who "intrudes on the imaginary satisfaction of dual fascination."²⁴ The male fantasy in this play is to move freely between the symbolic (the realm of honor, renown, reputation) and the imaginary (the realm of the confirming, immediate gaze) without any of the threats posed by the "intrusion" of women.

But such movement cannot occur without the use of women. As Eve Sedgwick has said about the set of relations between men that she terms "the homosocial,"

My point is . . . not that we are here in the presence of homosexuality . . . but rather. . . that we are in the presence of male heterosexual desire, in the form of a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females.

(p. 38)

And the purpose of consolidating this "partnership" is precisely to escape the need for confirmation from the eyes of women. René Girard, while arguing rightly that "she [Helen] is at the center of the Trojan war, its object or rather its pretext," is wrong in claiming that "thousands of rival desires converge upon Helen."²⁵ Helen is "at the center"—but as a fulcrum rather than as a core. Helen is, as Troilus says, "a theme of honour and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds" (2.2.200-201): she provides the material for the construction of this male world of mutual fascination and obsession. By using women as themes and spurs of "honour," the male characters can confirm their identities in the realm of the symbolic: they can become their "names." And by appropriating the dyadic imaginary relationship to the realm of the homosocial, by seeking reflection in the eyes of other men, the male characters can conflate the gaze of a differently gendered "other" with the gaze at oneself in the mirror, thus eliding the female from the realm of the imaginary. But why is it necessary to eliminate women from this circuit? What exactly is the threat of the female in this play?

If the use of Helen (and in general, a "traffic in women"²⁶) is necessary to confirm masculine identity, actual sexual engagement with women can dissolve it. Ulysses' complaint in 1.3 about Achilles' tent "theatre" clearly displays his anxiety about maintaining control over the production and use of texts; but it is also shot through with sexual anxiety. What really inflames him is that his policy is called "bed-work," a term that implies sexual activity in the domestic realm. An opposition is set up throughout the play between "bed-work" and "ram"-work. When Achilles and Patroclus call Ulysses' policy bed-work, they transpose the general's arena from battlefield to bedchamber, placing him in a "closet-war."

But Achilles' raillery goes further than merely relocating Ulysses. It then renders him ineffective even in this new location. Ulysses is put in the closet and emasculated. To "count wisdom as no member of the war" is to generate a split between thought and action and to characterize that division in terms of effeminacy versus phallic aggression. Ulysses' "part," his "member" as it were, is "still and mental," granted not even "a finger's dignity." Ulysses' wisdom is here rewritten as a kind of impotence, against which the "large Achilles" is figured as the phallic ram that batters down the wall, whose "rudeness of poise" (blatant, forceful weight or bulk) has "great swinge"—massive, potentially unruly violence—without "reason guiding the execution." In this play, any member that is not used for war is without dignity—literally unerect—and especially members used for actual "bed-work." What keeps the Greek phallus erect is precisely the fact that Helen is in Paris' bed and not Menelaus'. The possession of Helen, as the excuse for the war, provides a "virile" language of sexual aggression that paradoxically signifies impotence when applied to sexual activity. To have sex in the play is to be quite dis-armed.

But Ulysses has his revenge on Achilles in 3.3 by suggesting that Achilles is also engaged in a "closetwar," by suggesting that the "commerce [he has] had with Troy" (1. 204) is sexual:

Ulyss.  The cry went once on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive
And case thy reputation in thy tent. . . .
Achill.  Of this my privacy
I have strong reasons.
Ulyss.  But 'gainst your privacy
The reasons are more potent and heroical:
'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love
With one of Priam's daughters.

(11. 184-94)

To be entombed alive, cased in a tent, is, Ulysses implies, to be in a closet, a bedchamber; and when Achilles claims these as privileges of his "privacy," Ulysses equates his "privacy" with impotence. The suggestion here is that Achilles' supposed "love", for Polyxena renders him less "potent and heroical." According to Ulysses, "better would it fit Achilles much / To throw down Hector than Polyxena" (11. 206-7). "Throw[ing] down" takes on the double meaning of bedding and fighting, as bed-work becomes a poor substitute—ill-fitting—for ram-work. If heterosexual activity is spoken of in terms of war, war is spoken of in terms of homoeroticized sex.

This homoeroticizing of warfare permeates the play, as we see earlier, in 1.3, when Aeneas brings Hector's challenge to the Greek camp, asking "if there be one among the fair'st of Greece" (1. 264) who dares avow love for his mistress "in other arms than hers" (1. 271). Aeneas' explicitly sexualized language of warfare here equates sexual valor with avowals made in martial arms. The "fair'st of Greece" are, in his terms, the men.²⁷ The possession of Helen, the sign of public "desire," provides the conditions necessary for war, while war provides the conditions necessary for what I would argue is the production of a myth of heterosexual desire. In other words, sexual desire in this play, constructed around the possession of Helen, is itself a profoundly ideological category, one that reproduces the conditions that authorize war. But the war in turn only reproduces the conditions that enable desire; and so the play, in Althusser's terms, actually "produces" nothing but its own conditions of reproduction.²⁸ We might posit the circuit thus: possession of Helen generates desire for war, desire for war generates desire for Helen, desire for Helen generates mimetic desire, mimetic desire generates competitive identification between Greek and Trojan men, competitive identification generates homoerotic aggression, homoerotic aggression generates desire for more war, and finally, desire for more war reproduces desire for Helen.

Situating itself in conditions of enervation, repetition, and exhaustion, the play openly poses the problem of how to convince its legendary characters to keep fighting. An ideology must be constructed that will enable the war (and consequently, the retelling of this story) to continue, for only its continuance will enable these figures to "become" their own legends. The desire for Helen is this enabling ideology: one that simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by conditions that derive their coercive power from their ability to conflate public and private forms of desire while maintaining a myth of the difference between them. The purpose of this myth is to disguise intertextual compulsion (the fact that these figures are literally pre-determined to act in a particular way) as personal agency, as "voluntary" activity. While the characters profess to be deeply disillusioned about the fight waged over a "whore and a cuckold," the "production value" of Helen's beauty underwrites the actions that enable the male heroes to "recognize" each other, to generate reputations and renown among themselves. Helen and the war she enables provide these male characters with the necessary means for realizing their notorious identities, as well as for experiencing a kind of displaced sexuality that will not threaten them with loss of "distinction" in their joys (3.2.25).

But controlling the use of Helen's beauty is crucial, since the accompanying fear is that female beauty not appropriated by male agency and turned toward male ends carries with it the threat of the Medusa: that which turns men to stone (rendering them at once rigidly "erect" and incapable of the use of that erection). In this play, however, castration anxiety is not the ultimate threat. As Nancy Vickers has said about the Medusa's head, "that threat is . . . a threat of forgetting."²⁹ And being forgotten would mean losing distinction, losing even the desire for reputation. Female beauty may be, as Mulvey puts it, "an indispensible element of spectacle . . . yet [the beautiful woman's] visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation."³⁰ Anything that works against the story line, that freezes the flow of action, threatens to turn these heroes to stone. And if they cease moving, fighting, acting out their roles, they cannot make legends of themselves. Paradoxically, any "autonomy" in this play is represented as the male ability to turn the self to stone. But in turning themselves into legends, the male characters can at least avoid the terror of being consigned to oblivion, of ceasing to exist in the eyes of the world.

For to be consigned to oblivion is the opposite of being signed into legend. But literature is filled with male heroes who must renounce their "privacy" in order to achieve renown. This is the choice Aeneas is forced to make in the Aeneid. As Leo Braudy puts it, "Fame is a crucial question for Virgil, because it is the place where personal desire confronts historic destiny."³¹ Fame is a crucial question for other authors as well; but the confrontation it forces between "personal desire" and "historic destiny" does not always necessitate a choice between the two.

In Troilus and Cressida "personal" or private desire is a myth, one built out of the same structures that constitute public desire; and public desire is precisely what confirms the "historic destiny" of these legendary figures. That is to say, Troilus' love for Cressida exists in his mind as his own private realm—his world apart from the battlefield, apart from the fight to keep Helen. And yet, the fact that he and Pandarus "produce" Cressida's desirability by comparing her relentlessly to Helen, whose desirability is itself always destined for public commerce and consumption, reveals the artificial distinction between public and private forms of desire, a distinction necessary for Troilus' fiction of himself as "idealistic" lover. Thus, far from providing Troilus with "private" experience, a refuge from the crass world of public "commerce," the desire he produces for Cressida is inevitably contaminated by its metonymie connection to its paradigmatic source.

Consequently, to say that the play forces a choice between "privacy" and honor, "personal desire" and "historic destiny," "closet-war" and Trojan war, would be to imbricate ourselves in the characters' web of bad faith. For these legendary male figures can only conceive of themselves as heroes by maintaining a fiction of private existence, something that they can then renounce for the onerous but "inevitable" burdens of historic destiny. In short, realizing a myth of heroism in this play depends upon renouncing a myth of "personal desire." Troilus and Cressida demonstrates, however, that the two are mutually constituting and inextricable from each other, just as identity and subjectivity are inextricable. The translation, then, of heterosexual desire into homoerotic warfare is a function of the play's ideological legerdemain: the way it attempts to package "historic destiny" as "personal desire."

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have asserted that "there is only desire and social production, and nothing else."³² As provocative as this claim is, it essentializes desire by putting it in a compound, rather than reciprocal, relation with social production. However, if we slightly revise this claim, we can see that Shakespeare's play performs its own kind of materialist psychoanalysis by demonstrating that there is only desire as social production, and nothing else. After all, everyone in this play realizes that the holding of Helen is not the point. The point, rather, is how do we get these epic figures to act out yet again their designated roles, once more, with feeling? How do we get Hector and Achilles to keep being Hector and Achilles? These figures must trick themselves into believing that the war is worth fighting, because without such conviction the narrative stops, the story ends, legendary identity cannot be reproduced, marketed, and staged.

When Ulysses says to Achilles in 3.3 that no man "feels . . . what he owes, but by reflection" (I. 99), Achilles confirms the observation:

 . . . eye to eye oppos'd
Salutes each other with each other's form;
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travell'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself. . . .

(11. 107-11)

We now have the myth of "private" motivation for this public war between Greek and Trojan men; and it tells us that the aim of the "speculation," the hazarding all upon the market value of Helen, is to become visible, present to oneself, to experience as viable subjectivity an identity that has been emptied by its own intertextual redundancy. But according to Ulysses, Achilles' mirroring is not enough:

I do not strain at the position—
It is familiar—but at the author's drift,
Who in his circumstance expressly proves
That no man is the lord of anything,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them form'd in the applause
Where th'are extended. . . .

(11. 112-20)

For Ulysses, ever concerned with "authorship," seeing and being seen is merely prologue. Until one is "communicate[d]," turned into reproducible matter, one doesn't know oneself "for aught." Shot through with imaginary representations, the play nevertheless reveals these figures' relationships to their "real conditions of existence"—or, to put it more plainly, although they feel as if they're in a play, they are anyway.

Despite the longing these male figures feel to "live and die" in each others' eyes, the nature of their "matter" guarantees that even this confirmation is finally only a strategy of the legendary machine, a way of insuring that they will meet their own notorious apotheoses. This exchange between Ulysses and Achilles underscores the tension in the play between a desire for presence that can be secured through vision, a sense of immediacy provided only by a mutual salute of "eye to eye"; and an ideology of presence (the "author's drift"), which is generated not by two bodies face to face but rather by the translation of bodies into texts to be circulated, commodities for consumption by an audience that knows the outcome of this story and expects to get what it pays for. But this translation is, as we have also seen, not entirely without rewards. Through "reputation"—that paradigmatic intercourse between social production and desire—masculine gender identity is consolidated. As a man's "parts" are "form'd" and "extended" in the "applause" of others, he is erected as legend; and as legend, he remains erect.

Joel B. Altman, Janet Adelman, William Bouwsma, Peter Stallybrass, and Helen Deutsch read earlier drafts of this essay; I am grateful to them (and particularly to Joel Altman) for their valuable criticisms and for their encouragement. This essay was partially written during time made available by an AAUW dissertation fellowship.

Notes

¹ All Shakespeare quotations are from the Arden edition of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).

²C G. Jung: Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings: 1905-1961, ed. Jolande Jacobi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 207.

³ Louis Althusser, "A Letter on Art," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 221-27, esp. p. 222.

⁴ See Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986) for an interesting meditation on the historical impulse to locate a "better, more perfect self in the past (p. 8).

⁵ Sigmund Freud, "Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness" in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 29.

⁶ See "Of the Most Outstanding Men" in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1965), esp. p. 570. All Montaigne quotations, including the passage that opens this essay, are taken from this edition.

⁷ The legendary is the site at which the self-consciously fictional slides into the "naturalized" "real." As that which refers to something presumed to be "reality," the legendary elides the space that originally existed between its own constructedness and that "reality" to which it refers, thus imposing its values as originary rather than derivational.

I should point out here that what I assert is the naturalizing tendency of the legendary, Roland Barthes claims is a similar characteristic of myth: "myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the 'natural'." See Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 165. But there is a difference between myth and legend, a difference of transmissibility. By etymology transmitted in writing to be read (legere, legendum), legends are stories that began in local, oral forms, but have been given the transmissible authority, the artificial "thingness," of history. Myths, on the other hand, are defined as beliefs, popular notions, attitudes; less "fixed" spatially (they are not, after all, "stone tablets"), myths are not as easily relegated to or located in the realm of the written, less the province of print culture.

While both myths and legends share an epistemology that conflates fiction and history, while both are taken as "representative" simultaneously of historical events and the significance of those events, the difference resides in how that significance is encoded, transmitted, and applied. I would argue that the legendary has a political and historical "weight" attributed to it that the mythic never quite attains. As Barthes says in Mythologies (trans. Annete Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1972]): "Myth is a type of speech . . . Myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form.. . . Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters its message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no substantial ones" (p. 110). The legendary, we might say, is myth reified. A legend (which, as OED points out, also means a stone tablet for the inscription of writing) is precisely defined by the "object of its message"; and there are "substantial" political and social limits to what can and cannot become legendary.

⁸ See "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 127-86. I refer here to Althusser's theory of the "interpellation" of subjects by preexisting ideological vectors, which then "determine" the nature of that subjectivity. This conception is useful to my discussion of the particular problematics of notorious intertextual identity in this play; for the play does investigate the characters' relations to a set of preexisting determinant forces. In general, however, and elsewhere in this essay, I shall argue that such a view eliminates the possibility of individual agency and, finally, of resistance, in. ways that seem to me not only counterintuitive but logically and politically untenable.

⁹ I am grateful to Doug Bruster, who said to me in conversation that my argument about notorious identity reminded him of "that line from Penny Lane."

¹⁰ See "What is Epic Theatre? [Second version]," Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 15-24. My "quotation" loosely paraphrases Benjamin, who quotes Brecht: "The actor must show an event, and he must show himself. He naturally shows the event by showing himself; and he shows himself by showing the event." Benjamin goes on to say that "the actor must reserve the right to act skillfully out of character. He must be free, at the right moment, to act himself thinking (about his part)" (p. 21).

¹¹ Elizabeth Freund says something similar in "'Ariachne's broken woof: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 19-36: "The play also persistently calls attention to its intertextuality, its anachronicity, its dependence upon a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy" (p. 21). But for Freund, the play's citationality renders it merely "derivative," and empties the characters entirely of any signifying presence that is not merely "referential." Calling the play Shakespeare's "noblest failure," Freund carries the play's own deconstructive tendencies to their ultimate extreme, finishing off in her Derridean argument what I will argue the play fights so subversively to leave behind.

Freund's argument, while powerful on many fronts, attempts to "solve" the problems raised by the play by making the play itself the problem. While Freund claims that "drama is not the literary mode best suited to embody subjectivity" (p. 21), I wish to argue exactly the opposite: that in the Renaissance, drama is the dominant mode in which the provisional and contingent nature of subjectivity can literally be embodied. The figures in Troilus and Cressida may be permanently "identified," insofar as their names encode their legends. But as dramatic characters they exist as "versions" of themselves, as what Marjorie Garber would call (referring to Derrida and to Benjamin) "multiplications of 'the original.'" See the introduction to Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as uncanny causality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p. 15. Consequently, the very fact of claiming physical ground and space through the medium of theatre generates something that cannot be erased. The ghost of a subject persists.

¹² Of course, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "monsters" were not just aberrations but significant aberrations, "portents" of miraculous or disastrous events. The word "monstrous" has at its roots both the Latin monere, to warn or admonish, and monstrare, to show, point out, or demonstrate. The "monstruosity in love" for Cressida resides in what it simultaneously points to and warns of: the "end" of her love for Troilus.

¹³ Janet Adelman, Gayle Greene, Stephen J. Lynch, and René Girard, while each advancing significantly different arguments about the representation of Cressida, all say something similar about this scene. For all four critics, Cressida panics because she has shown her "hand" to Troilus in an erotic world in which playing "hard to get" generates and sustains desire. See Adelman, "'This Is and Is Not Cressid': The Characterization of Cressida" in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 119-41, esp. p. 121; Greene, "Shakespeare's Cressida: 'A Kind of Self" in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 139; Lynch, "Shakespeare's Cressida: 'A Woman of Quick Sense,'" Philological Quarterly, 63 (1984), 357-68, esp. p. 359; and Girard, "The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp. 188-209, esp. p. 190.

¹⁴ As Franco Moretti has said: "To persuade is the opposite of to convince. The aim is not to ascertain an intersubjective truth but to enlist support for a particular system of values. In the seventeenth century—which witnessed the first great flowering of empirical science, and at the same time the collapse of all social Organicity' in the fight to the death between opposing faiths and interest—the perception of this contrast was extremely acute" (Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller [London: Verso Editions, 1983], p. 3).

²² This quote is taken from Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and 1st History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 548.

²³ See "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, 16 (1975), 6-18.

²⁴ See Louis Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 195-219, esp. p. 210.

²⁵ René Girard, "The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen), p. 199.

²⁶ This phrase, "traffic in women," has been coined, as it were, by Gayle Rubin in her influential essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) pp. 157-210.

²⁷ For two very fine recent examples of different methodological and theoretical approaches to the representation of desire in Troilus and Cressida, see Carol Cook's "Unbodied Figures of Desire" in Theatre Journal 38 (1986) and Eric Mallin's "Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida" forthcoming in Representations. Cook's largely (continental) feminist psychoanalytic approach to desire in the play sees the intersection of the war/love plots in terms of what Irigaray has called "hom(m)o-sexuality" (p. 42). Mallin, whose approach is largely new historical, cites (as I do) Sedgwick's discussion of the homosocial and argues that the play interrogates through its representations of homosocial desire (and its attendant misogyny) the breakdown of chivalric ideology within the Tudor court. My account differs from both of these insofar as I argue that all forms of desire in the play are ideological—both heterosocial and homosocial—and always already so: that is, the representation of desire is not a function or mediation of psycho-sexual "drives" but, rather, a representational strategy on the part of the playwright designed to "convincingly" motivate textual and theatrical reproduction. Both Mallin's and Cook's essays came to my attention after this paper was completed; although there are certain similarities among our arguments, our theoretical differences lead us to substantially different (but not necessarily mutually exclusive) conclusions.

²⁸ See "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," pp. 154, 162. Desire in the play corresponds to Althusser's definition of ideology as a "[representation of the] imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (p. 162), insofar as it repackages practices that have publically oriented, ideological aims (the activity and commerce of warfare, the reproduction of "reputation" and "honor") as motivations that are "private" and psychosexually derived.

²⁹ "'This Heraldry in Lucrece' Face'" in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 204-22, esp. p. 220.

³⁰ Mulvey, p. 11 (cited in n. 23, above).

³¹The Frenzy of Renown, p. 123.

³² Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983). My "quotation" paraphrases Deleuze and Guattari:

We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.

(p. 29)

In this formulation (and in their argument in general) there is something called "desire" that exists independently of, and prior to, its "social forms"; something that circulates about on its own, with the power to "invade and invest" the social. While I agree that the social field is "immediately invested by desire," I would argue that desire is also immediately invested by social forms; and that we should understand the term "immediately" to mean "originally."