Plenary Session
Sunday July 21st, 2002
Grand Auditorium
Plenary Session, in the Grand auditorium, Seating 1800, with simultaneous translation in five languages.
reception at 8:30 am
Les travaux commenceront à 9h30 heures précises.
Lacan draws on the testimony of the Précieuses, paying tribute to the model they propose, but the lesson he attributes to them is sometimes reduced to a few assertions, whose key to we hope in vain to find in the Précieuses. There is no use expecting to find in the ruelle what has come off the couch and which, in addition, must be situated within the twenty years of Lacan’s teaching during which references to the Précieuses were recurrent.
Of the two positions held by literary critics1 , for certain, the affirmation of the existence of a “precious” position held by particular individuals, and the refusal, for others, to believe in this, Lacan adheres to the first, the reality of the phenomenon of the Précieuses in its historical, political, social, moral and literary dimensions, in accordance with Adam2 or Lathuillère3 , and today Myriam Maître4 .
This choice gives rise to another, that of circumscribing this phenomenon in time, between 1654 and a little later than 1660, according to the most finely calculated estimates: at the end of the Fronde, during the Regency of Anne of Austria, before the accession of Louis XIV, the Roi-Soleil.
What credibility can be given to the texts we dispose of? No woman of the epoch claimed for herself the title of “précieuse”. They remained “attached to the oral forms of language creation, and it is difficult to detach their participation in the domain of literature from the most general forms of mundane sociability”, as Myriam Maître explains5 . The critics give great value to the Abbot de Pure’s6 la Prétieuse , but opinions diverge: is the work nothing more than a compilation of “everything that has been said since the Renaissance for or against the intellectual, social and conjugal emancipation of women”7 , or the careful report of a convinced alcovist “who has first hand knowledge of the circles of the précieux 8 ”? We can also cite Clélie, Histoire romaine, the third of four novels published under the name of Georges de Scudéry, the only one for which we are sure that the author is his sister, Madeleine, and whose ten volumes, in osmosis with the themes debated in the ruelles, accompanied the “precious” period; les Précieuses ridicules, which tolled the bell of the vogue of the circles of Précieuses, but introduced Molière and his troop “among those the gazettes talked about9 ”; and finally the Dictionnaires de Somaize10
Primary love, genital love
Lacan has recourse to the Précieuses in one of his first seminars1 , in relation to a paradoxical thesis12 , by which the object appropriate to sexual satisfaction in a relation of genital love is derived from a primary object relation, closed in on itself. Tenderness, this “plus” which gives to the genital tie its stamp of true love, would then have a pregenital origin.
But where then do these “mirages of love which drape the genital act13 ” come from, Lacan exclaims, if not from an intersubjectivity, which requires the Other, in which feelings are modulated?
To support his arguments, Lacan unfolds the map of Tender. An allegoric map, according to the vogue of the times, but Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s, which was not the first, outdid the others. She invented it in the six months she had accorded to the young and recent academician, Paul Pellisson, who was courting her — she herself was already a Beauty d’après —, to succeed in obtaining, from the enviable place he occupied among the “Special friends”, a place among the “Tender friends”, those closest to her heart. How many roads are there, from Special to Tender? Pellisson asked in his haste to reach the goal14 . Mademoiselle de Scudéry drew him the famous map; she introduced it into the first volume of her Clélie15 . The river Inclination leads directly to Tender, but there are other causes of tenderness by inclination and other roads to attain it. They pass by Tender by Inclination, Tender by Esteem, or Tender by Recognition. And why not trifle gallantly with Pretty verses or Love letters; or Submission and Tender Care.
Do not expect from Lacan a psychological analysis of the novel of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Only the turns and figures created by “this pleasant society entirely consecrated to the perfecting of language”16 interest him. He examines Somaize in detail17 and takes from him, “among a thousand others”, this form — le mot me manque — gleaned from the mouth of the poet Saint-Amand, whose phrase, quoted in the second version of his dictionary — Je sçay bien ce que je veux dire, mais le mot me manque (I know very well what I want to say, but I can’t find the word) — rings so new at the time, that he must translate it: Je ne puis m’expliquer comme je voudrois.
These inventions for conversation, within the context of the seminar, are judged with reference to the creative function of speech, but also to its stumbling blocks. “There is a relation between the map of Tender and psychoanalytic psychology18 , Lacan considers, which turns around the forgetting of a word: Signorelli haunts the ruelle.
Physical love, ecstatic love
In his third seminar, Lacan underlines the importance of the movement of the Précieuses for the history of the language, of thought and of decorum.19
From the hotel, not far from the Louvre, which the marquise of Rambouillet made into “the temple of taste and the tribunal of literary reputations”20 , to the hotel of the rue de Beauce, in the Marais, where Mademoiselle de Scudéry officiated under the name of Sapho, there was a continuity in the practice of what has been named the salons, but also a rupture due to the irruption of an unprecedented phenomenon, which placed in the foreground the feminine question. Madeleine de Scudéry was one of the poles.
Paul Bénichou21 thinks it possible to define preciosity not with reference to literature, even though the Précieuse is “smitten with literature”, but with reference to two constitutive aspects of this feminine question: the moral domain of the rights of love, specific to the philosophy of the Précieuses and the social domain of the rights of women, which touches on the feminine condition within society.
Preciosity was to take up the traditional positions of romantic and courtly literature, which Bénichou sums up like this: religion of love, disavowal of the natural instinct, appeal to intelligence to sublimate it. Which produced the opposed criticisms preciosity met up with, both of displaying an excess of austerity — the Précieuses were called Jansenists of love — and of encouraging debauchery.
In his third seminar, Lacan mentions again Somaize and quotes Bary22 , but gives his attention to “the organism of language” (not yet the structure), for which we must have, he says, “the most complete file possible”23 . According to this new perspective, the missing word receives another explanation: if it is missing, it means it is there. The Freudian thesis of forgetting is left aside, and will be formally rejected in 1965.24
The precious turns are now related to the verbal phenomena of the president Schreber’s psychosis considered with respect to the particularity of his divine erotomania. Lacan calls on the medieval opposition between the physical and the ecstatic theory of love.25
The psychotic, who loves his delusions as himself (here, Lacan is in accord with Freud), does not satisfy the principle of ecstatic love, according to Rousselot, which is to love “from person to person”. He has not given up his love of self; his manner of loving is due to nature (phusis). Nevertheless, his relation to the Other subsists, but it is a radically heterogeneous Other, which he can only grasp through the signifier, a shell emptied of this intersubjectivity within which the “parole pleine” is founded. He does not have access to the ecstatic love “of pure duality”. Having a relation only to the form of speech, he loves with a dead love26 in which he is abolished as subject.
Lacan constructs an analogy between this psychotic love and the degradation of love that he observes, from courtly love to romantic love, passing by l’Astrée, “where false shepherds driving improbable sheep, spend their time discussing love27 ”, and by precious love, which are as many steps on the path of this “descent into triviality” of the forms of “falling in love”. The tie between the spectator and the image in the obscurity of a dark room would be the ultimate refuse of this.
Schreber in love, dragging his murdered soul along the deserted paths of the map of Tender, with which he peoples the lifeless villages of an “imaginary profusion of modes of being”, joins in his verbal mannerism the form of precious language, and brings light to it. Preciosity is depreciated by this: “inscription of love in words without importance”, Lacan was to conclude some years later28 . But the context had changed.
Socratic love, courtly love
In effect, woman had come to the center of the question of love. How does her person disengage itself from the gangue of her function? How does she acquire her liberty?
Nothing in feudal society, Lacan observes, corresponds to a promotion of woman, a liberation. The courtly model, which participates in a process, already undertaken, of the civilization of behavioral standards, had little effect on the relations between the sexes and the amelioration of the feminine condition29 . And from the jurisdiction of amorous casuistic in the courts of love to the social art of conversation which finds its orientation in the Map of Tender, the gains were of little importance.
It is in the context of the “vassalage instituted between the lover-knight and his Lady”, where fidelity “is opposed, as much to the ‘satisfaction’ of love as to marriage”30 , that the function of the courtly poet, Lacan underlines31 , begins to be exercised. His poetic exercise plays with the ideals of the Lady. But it is not possible to sing of the Lady without supposing a barrier which isolates her.
Lacan was to break with traditional explanations. If there is a parallel between a sublimatory path and the rise of the Lady to the zenith of western eroticism, it is because the courtly poet brought into the light of sublimation, “at the place skillfully constructed with refined signifiers”, the void of the Thing32 . A means of introducing the feminine object by the singular door of privation, of inaccessibility.
The seminar on the transference recalls in its turn the historical decline of love, going further back in time. The comparison of two periods as far apart as that of the Symposium, in which the problem of love is formulated in words of full importance, where to speak of love is to speak of theology, and the XVIIth century, in which love has taken on “this air of doting pastoral” permits Lacan to refute the rapprochement made by Léon Robin33 , translator of the Symposium , of some part of Agathon’s praise of Love (Robin comments that his children, Well-being, Refinement (?), Languor, Graciousness, Ardor, Passion (il faut que je vérifie tous ceux-ci dans Symposium), are “realized abstractions”) and the Map of Tender34 .
The accent placed on the Socratic reversal of the function of the one who desires is what this seminar brings to the question. Responding to Agathon’s speech, Socrates introduces “the function of lack as constitutive of the relation of love”35 .
Gallant love, precious eros
The Precieuses reappear at the end of “Propos directifs pour un Congrès sur la sexualité féminine”36 . Their movement, reaffirmed as such, is presented as the vehicle of a homosexual eros. That is where the difficulty resides. Can some evidence of “the salient features of the most common experience”, which permit Lacan to detect in the clinic the position of sex as to its object, be found in the Précieuses?
It is not difficult to find in the history of the Precieuses arguments to support the thesis of a sapphism that moral standards could not tolerate. Homosexuality may even have protected the “ferociously masculine” territory of “the literary friendship37 ” from feminine intrusions. But this homosexual eros in the feminine cannot be confused with the “amorous visibility38 ” of a feminine couple admitted into the City, nor even less designate an extended practice.
It is by the thread of a clinic centered on the “feminine part of what is in play in the genital relationship” that the homosexual side of feminine desire in the Précieuses must be captured.
1. – Lacan remarks the key position of the phallus in the libidinal development of woman, but he revises the coordinates: a) it is only through the medium of man that woman has access to the Other that she is for herself, b) this phallic mediation does not drain all the current of the drive: not all of femininity passes by the eye of a needle.
2. – Feminine homosexuality is proposed as the best path to enlighten “the access which leads from feminine sexuality to desire itself”. And since the phallic reference is conserved, we can understand Lacan’s question: what “other destiny” for the desire to preserve the maternal phallus than fetishism, which remains in the domain of masculine perversion?
3. – The young homosexual in Freud’s case description had chosen, by defiance, to elevate the father, showing him, in a relation of courtly love, that it was possible to give what one did not have. The homosexual does not forasmuch renounce her sex, her supreme interest being directed towards femininity.
What about the eros of the Precieuses? From the vehement lyrism of Sapho’s Harangue to Erinne39 :
Place yourself in a state to sustain (…) the glory of our sex, make our common enemies [men] admit that it is as easy for us to conquer, by the force of our mind as by the beauty of our eyes (…), let the entire earth see (…) that you alone had the advantage of having reestablished the glory of all women.
…to the conversations that run through the Clélie, “an other face of woman”40 appeared. From then on, Mademoiselle de Scudéry was on conquered ground. The partitions are accomplished. The precious discourse exalts femininity, but it confines to the outskirts the gallant as well as the coquette.
The Précieuse does not want the gallant man who mixes
… au respect d’un berger
l’impatience d’un satyre41
…or to say it in a loftier tone, who admits the joys of love — to the exclusion of libertinage — among the “refinements of civilization”. The “male of the précieuse” is in unisson with the assembly, except for a few spare faux-pas, scolded abundantly – which makes his presence indispensable.
With the same firmness, the Précieuse rejects the feminine masquerade; its panoply, its artifices: synthetic beauty, prudery, jousts with another women to “take her Lover away”, mannerisms of false preciosity or ridicule are all severely condemned.
It is not the criticism of marriage which permits us to define a “specific Précieuse mentality”, but the tender friendship42 , this Tender Love, whose invention has been attributed to Mademoiselle de Scudéry43 .
1. A friendship which, far from having broken its tie with love, is the love that is given when it refuses to satisfy desire. The tender friendship is the quintessence of love.
…I sustain that the greatest and most doubtless mark of a grand passion, is to see a Lover who, despite all his torments, receives with pleasure the slightest testimony of friendship that his Mistress can give him44 .
2. A friendship, masculine or feminine, as can be understood in a brief correspondence between Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Mademoiselle Descartes45 , who ardently desires to meet her. Sapho responds:
I know well the price of your voice. I would like you to know as well that of my friendship, for in a word, Mademoiselle, I am loveable only because I know how to love my friends tenderly and disinterestedly, which distinguishes me from many others.
After being assured that her correspondent had never had a lover, she asks for her heart:
Ne le refusez pas à ma tendre amitié
Qui vaut mieux que l’amour de plus de la moitié.
Mademoiselle Descartes is fervent:
On ne peut refuser un cœur
Que l’illustre Sapho demande.
and then is let down :
You seem to have saved me from the dangers of love, only to have me perish in those of friendship…
And exhales her complaint in a last distich:
Vous me faites aimer, et j’aurai la douleur
De ne voir jamais ce que j’aime.
3. A friendship which does not tie like to like. A social tie other than that which cements masculine communities is at work in these feminine circles brought together by conversations. If we credit the exchanges between the protagonists of the Clélie and those reported by the Abbot of Pure, the discourses develop in an extreme fancifulness, haphazardly, despite the theme proposed at the beginning of each new meeting. The Précieuses display their merits each in her own way, in an effort to speak with elegance and precision, one by one, without waiting for a consensus. This assembly of particularities is only held together by the horizon which for each Précieuse comprises her passion and her mystery: this femininity for which they were inventing a new art of loving.
Here we have the sort of paradox underlined by Lacan: this continual enriching of information within a sphere so little organized exceeds its dissipation and resists entropy. While the ties homogenizing masculine homosexual communities, in appearance tightly structured, but neither consuming nor producing information, increased entropy and led to the degradation of the community.
Entropy, here, must be understood within the framework of information theory (and not thermodynamic theory) and the information it is question of is not qualitative (the contents of information), but quantitative (the informative elements)46
Finally, to the zeal in favor of tender friendship, we must join the interest of the Précieuses for the reform of language. Myriam Maître recalls the traits involved: jargon, farragoes, neologisms, nominalizations, spelling reform, the cutting off of dirty syllables, the avoidance of obscene words47 This point of her hypothesis will be taken up below.
Common error and sexual discourse
The precious phenomenon is evoked once again, in the opening of the Séminaire “…ou pire”, in relation to feminine homosexuality. Ten years have gone by, Lacan is engaged in the logical formulation of the not-all and the effects of the impossible inscription of the sexual relation for human beings. He does not omit to remind us of the importance of his 1960 Propos.
The question of feminine homosexuality is restudied within a new approach to the difference between the sexes and the error it comports, this common error, which turns the phallic signifier, signifier of the distinction between the sexes, inscribed within language, into the organ as an incarnation of the real of this distinction48 . It is a naturalization of the distinction by language49 . Moreover, the error is about jouissance — supposed to be an “instrumental” jouissance — and sustains a sexual discourse on the pairing of the sexes.
While the neurotic, grasping that the organ is nothing but an instrument enthroned by the signifier, might be able to avoid the common error, to escape from the sexual discourse and open up to the analytic discourse; while the transsexual, in order to avoid the common error and the sexual discourse it covers, wants to get rid of the organ; the female homosexual, remaining in the common error which deceptively founds the distinction between the sexes on the organ as a natural referent, attacks the signifier she has no use for.
This is what the Précieuses accomplish with their “excess in the word(s) of love” [excès aux mots de l’amour], but not without refuting some of them — and Lacan, punning on the consonance of Ecce Homo, a Christic symbol with a vocation of fetish, comments: “There is no risk they might take the phallus for a signifier.”
Armande from the Femmes Savantes steps forward then, knowledgeable and prudish, a character perfectly in the style of Molière, but of whom Lacan makes a Précieuse who defends women’s liberty. Her “Fie, I say” is a challenge addressed to the signifier “sans pair” (without an equal) * as Lacan once named it and of which he says she wants to shatter it in its status of letter (crack, ruin, undo, undermine) in order to do away with it at term. (ou: she wants to shatter the letter of it…J’aurais mis une note de référence sur “le signifiant qui tombe en lettre”, mais je ne sais pas où elle se trouve)
Myriam Maître’s thesis on the concern of the Précieuses to purify the language is worth citing here. She relates it to a search for purity based on a “Cratylian representation of language”50 :by striking at the word, the Précieuse believed they would get rid of the thing. This realist conception of the “corporeality of language” would be what founded the “ethical project” to construct a language which would honor propriety. A language, in any case, which would make the discourse of love easy, as Lacan remarks with regard to the female homosexual.
Beyond the columns of Hercules
The “nebulous of the Précieuses51 ” is the trace of a step in a history of love in the Western world. They are representative of a “philosophy of love” (Bénichou), in which feminine demands and the reform of language converge in the exigency to speak with elegance in the service of a feminine homosexual eros. Lacan, who cites neither the Abbot of Pure, nor Mademoiselle de Scudéry and who moreover does not isolate the Précieuse as a type, raises the example of Armande (a character who owes more to Molière than to History) to the dignity of an intemporal paradigm.
Is the mystery of the ruelles, if it is effectively that of femininity, forasmuch, unveiled? Let’s go back to the Map of Tender.
Clélie — that is Mademoiselle de Scudéry — gives this explanation.
So this nice Girl, wishing to make it known on this Map that she had never had love, & that she would never have in her heart anything other than tenderness, has the River of Inclination empty into a Sea that is called the dangerous Sea; because it is quite dangerous for a Woman, to go a bit farther than the last Limits of friendship; & she then has it that beyond this Sea is what we call Unknown Lands, because in effect we do not know at all what there is there, & we do not believe that anyone has been so far except Hercules…52 .
We would not attribute to Mademoiselle de Scudéry a vision as limited as her commentator53 , when he writes: “Clélie; as a good Mediterranean, does not imagine anything beyond the columns of Hercules and the perfect love, for her, disappears in the Atlantic mist.”
On the contrary, she does imagine.
Herbert Wachsberger
* NdT :For the equivocalness of the term : « sans pair » means « peerless », but «une paire » means « a pair » and pair/impair means « even/odd ». The phallic signifier then, S1, has not its equal, and does not enter into the series of oppositions of other signifiers of a language, never constitutes with another a pair.
Notes:
1. Maître, Myriam, Les précieuses. Naissance des femmes de lettres en France au XVIIesiècle, Editions Champion, 1999, p. 12.
2. Adam, Antoine, « La préciosité », Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises, 1951, n°1 (Le baroque ; La préciosité), p. 35-47.
3. Lathuillère, Roger, La préciosité. Étude historique et linguistique, volume I, Position du problème – Les origines, Librairie Droz, Geneva, 1969. Only the first volume has appeared.
4. Maître, Myriam, op. cit.
5. Ibid. p 17.
6. Abbé Michel de Pure, La Prétieuse ou le Mystère des ruelles, texte published from the original edition with a new notice on the abbé de Pure, a bibiography and notes by Emile Magne, VII-XCII, volume I (First and second parts) and II (Third and fourth parts), Paris, Librairie E. Droz, 1939.
7. Duchêne, Roger, Les Précieuses ou comment l’esprit vient aux femmes followed by Antoine Baudeau de Somaize : Les Véritables Précieuses, Les Précieuses ridicules mises en vers, Le Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses, ou la Clé de la langue des ruelles, (1660), Le Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses (1661) and other annexes, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001.
8. Adam, Antoine, Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, volume II, L’Époque de Pascal, Editions mondiales, Paris, 1962, p. 156.
9. Duchêne, Roger, op. cit., p. 9.
10. Baudeau de Somaize, Antoine, I. Dictionnaire des Prétieuses par le sieur de Somaize, 1656 edition. – II. Le grand dictionnaire des Pretieuses, I-III, reprint of the Paris, 1661 edition, Slatkine Reprints, 1972. Includes : Le grand Dictionnaire des Pretieuses, Historique, Poetique, Geographique, Cosmographique, Cronologique & Armoirique, first part, 1661, 314 pages. – Le grand Dictionnaire historique des Pretieuses, second part, 1661, 320 pages. – La clef du grand Dictionnaire historique des Pretieuses, 46 pages.
11. Le Séminaire, livre I, Les Écrits techniques de Freud, 1953-1954, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, Editions du Seuil, 1975, p. 238.<
12. Balint, Alice (1939), « Amour pour la mère et amour de la mère » and Balint, Michael (1947), « L’amour génital », in Amour primaire et technique psychanalytique, Payot, Paris 1972, pp.110-142.
13. Le Séminaire, livre I, op. cit., p. 238.
14. Mongrédien, Georges, Madeleine de Scudéry et son salon, Editions Tallandier, Paris, 1946.
15. Scudéry, Georges de, Clélie. Histoire romaine, volumes I-X, Slatkine reprints, reprint of the 1660 edition, Geneva, 1978.
16. Le Séminaire, livre I, op. cit., p. 295.
17. Probably the Dictionnaire des Prétieuses of 1656.
18. Le Séminaire, livre I, p. 295.
19. Le Séminaire, livre I, op. cit., p. 238.
20. Picard, Roger, Les salons littéraires et la société française, 1610-1789, Brentano’s, 2e edition, New York, 1943. Cf. also Fumaroli, Marc, « La conversation » (1992), in Trois institutions littéraires, Editions Gallimard, Folio histoire, Paris, 1994, pp. 111-210.
21. Bénichou, Paul, Morales du grand siècle, Editions Gallimard, folio essais, Paris, 1994 (1st edition 1948), p. 246ff.
22. Bary, René (Berolas, according to Somaize’s Historique des Pretieuses) « is an Author who worked for the endoctrination of the Pretieuses who knew no Latin ». His Rhétorique françoise, 1653, was rich in advice to enrich and ennoble expression. An example : « instead of saying : what I am presenting to you is a circle, one must say : the thing which we are dealing with is a surface of which all the sides are equally distant from the center. » (« …la chose dont je vous entretiens est une surface qui est de tous côtés également distante de son centre. » Quoted by Pelous, Jean-Michel, Amour précieux, amour galant (1584-1575). Essai sur la représentation de l’amour dans la littérature et la société mondaines, Paris, Libraiie Klincksieck, 1980, p. 417.
23. Le Séminaire, livre III, op. cit. p. 287.
24. « Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse », seminar of May 12, 1965, soon to be published.
25. Rousselot, Pierre (1907), Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au Moyen Age, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 1988, p. 7.
26. Le Séminaire, livre III, op. cit., p. 287.
27. Lafond, Jean, preface to l’Astrée of Honoré d’Urfe, folio, Paris, 1988, p. 7.
28. Le Séminaire, livre VIII, Le Transfert, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, Editions du Seuil, 1991, p. 59.
29. Roussel, Claude, « Courtoisie et féminité : le jeu des dames », in Du Goût, de la conversation et des femmes, studies collected by Alain Montandon, Centre de Recherche sur les Littératures Modernes et Contemporaines, Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1994, pp. 149-165.
30. Denis de Rougemont, L’amour et l’Occident, definitive edition, Librairie Plon, 10/18, Paris, 1972, p. 35.
31. Le Séminaire, livre VII, L’Éthique de la psychanalyse, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1986, p. 178.
32. Ibid. p. 193.
33. Note 3, p. 44, of the translation of Symposium by Léon Robin (1929) Editions Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1981.
34. Lacan, Séminaire livre VII, p. 131
35. Lacan, Séminaire livre VIII, p. 140
36. In Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1966, p. 736.
37. Maître, op.cit., p. 587
38. Bonnet, Marie-Jo, Les deux amies, Essai sur le couple de femmes dans l’art, Editions Blanche, Paris, 2000, p. 57.
39. Madeleine de Scudéry, Les Femmes illustres ou les Harangues héroïques, 1642, prefaced by Claude Maignien, côtés-femmes éditions, Paris, 1991, p. 162.
40. Godenne, René, Les romans de Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Librairie Droz, Genève, 1963. The developments on love in the Clélie owe much to this work.
41. Charleval, quoted by Pelous, op. cit. p. 198.
42. Pelous, op. cit. p. 340.
43. Quoted by Maître, op. cit., p. 587.
44. Clélie, op. cit., volume VI, p. 979.
45. In Rathery et Boutron, Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Sa vie et sa correspondance avec un choix de ses poésies, Léon Tachener, Librairie-Editeur, Paris, 1863, pp. 393-403.
46. Lacan gives the sources of his reflection on entropy in the livre II of the Séminaire.
47. Maître Myriam, op. cit., the entire chapter entitled « L’amour, geste langagier », pp. 570-633.
48. Lacan, Jacques, « …ou pire », seminar of December 12 1971, under edition.
49. Steinberg, Sylvie, « L’inégalité entre les sexes et l’égalité entre les hommes. Le tournant des Lumières », Esprit (L’un et l’autre sexe), March-April 2001, pp. 23-39.
50. Maître, op. cit , p. 618.
51. Maître, op. cit., p. 655.
52. Clélie, tome I, p. 405, quoted by Pelous, op. cit., p. 16.
53. Pelous, op. cit., p. 17.
Sur le caractère historique du phénomène précieux :
(1654-1661
pour une périodisation étroite, 1643-circa 1750 pour une périodisation
large)
ADAM (Antoine), « La préciosité », Paris, CAIEF, n° 1, 1951, p. 35-47. Le premier pas vers une approche historique de la préciosité. Pour l’essentiel, repris dans Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, 1957, rééd. Albin Michel, coll. « Bibliothèque de l’Evolution de l’Humanité », 1997, 3 vol., tome II L’époque de Pascal.
DUCHÊNE (Roger), Les précieuses, ou comment l’esprit vint aux femmes, Paris, Fayard, 2001. Enquête chronologique sur la naissance d’un mythe ambigu et d’une supercherie littéraire, dont Molière fut le principal acteur. Suivi des principaux textes concernant les précieuses, de Somaize en particulier.
LATHUILLERE (Roger), La Préciosité. Etude historique et linguistique, Genève, Droz, 1969. Première partie d’une thèse qui situe le phénomène précieux dans le temps et dans l’espace, et le définit comme l’interaction de phénomènes moraux, sociaux, linguistiques et littéraires.
MAÎTRE (Myriam), Les précieuses. Naissance des femmes de lettres en France au XVIIe siècle, Paris, H. Champion, 1999. Enquête historique sur celles que, de façon souvent très ambiguë, on nomma précieuses : dernières Dames et premières femmes de lettres, pour la plupart attachées à l’idéal d’un façonnage de l’élan passionnel par la conversation, au moment où naît la « littérature ».
TIMMERMANS (Linda), L’accès des femmes à la culture (1598-1715), Paris, H. Champion, 1993. Thèse très complète sur le débat d’idées que suscite la culture féminine. Pages 104-122 consacrées à la préciosité, et passim.
Sur l’amour, le tendre
DAUMAS (Maurice), La tendresse amoureuse, XVI-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Perrin, 1996, coll. « Pluriel » 1997.
FILTEAU (C.), « Le Pays de Tendre : l’enjeu d’une carte », Littérature n° 36, 1979, p. 37-60. Analyse très ingénieuse de la topographie précieuse à la lumière des traités de cartographie et d’anatomie.
PELOUS (Jean-Michel), Amour précieux, amour galant (1654-1675), Essai sur la représentation de l’amour dans la littérature et la société mondaines, Paris, Klincksieck, 1980. Montre comment la « subversion galante » vient à bout de « l’orthodoxie tendre », au tournant du siècle.
Sur le « parler précieux »
BRUNOT (Ferdinand), Histoire de la langue française des origines à nos jours, tome III : la formation de la langue classique (1933), rééd. avec une bibliographie par Roger Lethuillère, Paris, A. Colin, 1966, Ière partie, « La Préciosité » p. 66-74.
DENIS (Delphine), « Ce que ‘parler prétieux’ veut dire : les enseignements d’une fiction linguistique au XVIIe siècle », L’Information grammaticale n° 78, Paris, juin 1998, p. 53-58.
LATHUILLERE (Roger), « La langue des précieux », Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature, XXV, 1, Paris, 1987, p. 243-269.
A dix ans de distance, ces deux articles proposent deux lectures contrastées du langage précieux, selon qu’on le pense attesté ou au contraire forgé. Le débat reste ouvert, notamment à propos de l’influence de Guez de Balzac (si l’on n’a peut-être pas « parlé précieux », il semble bien qu’on ait « parlé Balzac », ou failli le faire).
Approches inspirées de la psychologie et de la psychanalyse
BENICHOU (Paul), Morales du Grand Siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1948. Sur la « névrose précieuse », « antinomie du bonheur et de la dignité » (p. 326-328 en coll. « Idées »), voir le chapitre consacré à Molière.
HEPP (Noémi), « A propos de la Clélie : mélancolie et perfection féminine », Mélanges offerts à Georges Couton, P.U. de Lyon, 1981, p. 161-168.
MORLET-CHANTALAT (Chantal), La Clélie de Mademoiselle de Scudéry. De l’épopée à la gazette : un discours féminin de la gloire, Paris, H. Champion, 1994. L’opposition entre « mélancoliques » et « enjouées » structure l’esthétique scudérienne en même temps que sa « morale du monde ».
SELLIER (Philippe), « La névrose précieuse : une nouvelle Pléiade ? », Présences féminines. Littérature et société au XVIIe siècle français, Actes de London, « Biblio 17 », Paris/ Seattle/ Tübingen, 1987, p. 95-125.
Quelques textes accessibles
DESHOULIERES (Antoinette Du Ligier de La Garde, dame), Poésies, 1688, très nombreuses rééditions jusqu’au début du XXe siècle.
LAFAYETTE (Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de), Œuvres complètes, éd. R. Duchêne, Paris, François Bourin, 1990. Romans, nouvelles, ainsi que la correspondance d’après l’éd. de Beaunier.
LAMBERT (Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de), Œuvres, éd. R. Granderoute, Paris, Champion, 1990. Amie de Fontenelle, elle regrette « le précieux » de l’hôtel de Rambouillet et continue de promouvoir au début du XVIIIe siècle ce qu’elle appelle une « métaphysique d’amour », qui perfectionne les âmes bien nées.
MOLIERE,
- Les Précieuses ridicules. L’édition de référence reste celle de Micheline Cuénin, Genève/Paris, Droz/Minard, 1973, avec des documents et un « lexique du vocabulaire précieux » contestable mais très intéressant. Bonne édition aussi en Livre de Poche par Claude Bourqui, 1999.
- Les femmes savantes, éd. Cl. Bourqui, Le Livre de Poche, 1999.
SCUDERY (Madeleine de),
- Clélie, histoire romaine, première partie 1654, éd. critique par Chantal Morlet-Chantalat, Paris, H. Champion, 2001.- Célinte, nouvelle première, 1661, éd. par A. Niderst, Paris, Nizet, 1979.
RATHERY et BOUTRON, Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Sa vie et sa correspondance, avec un choix de ses poésies, Paris, 1873, Genève, Slatkine Reprints, 1971.
SOMAIZE (Antoine Baudeau de), Le Grand Dictionnaire des Pretieuses, éd. Ch. L Livet, Paris, Jannet, 1856, 2 vol. Voir, plus accessible mais sans annotation, l’éd. donnée par R. Duchêne dans Les Précieuses, Fayard, 2001.
PURE (abbé Michel de), La Pretieuse ou le mystère des ruelles, dédiée à telle qui n’y pense pas, Paris, 1656-1658, éd. E. Magne, Paris, Droz, STFM, 1938-1939, 2 vol.
SABLE (marquise de), Maximes, in Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, éd. J. Lafond, Paris, R. Laffont, coll. « Bouquins », 1992.