Julie's death

Julie's death : the screen as cut, vision, envelope

The screen cut : encounter and absence

La Mort de Julie, print by Gravelot, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, Amsterdam, Marc-Michel Rey, reissue. 1761 (the original being without prints)

Julie lies on her bed of agony, dying or dead we don't know, the text deliberately floats on the subject. She is there, exposed as a spectacle to the small world of Clarens, exposed indirectly, by means of the letter, to the gaze of the one for whom M. de Wolmar is writing, the gaze of Saint-Preux, the gaze of the reader. Julie at the scene of her death is the object of the representation.

Julie is lying on her deathbed, dying or dead we don't know, the text deliberately floats on the subject.

Represent, make present : it's not simply a question of reproducing elsewhere, on another medium (here, the letter), what has been encountered in the space of reality (Julie's room), of transforming into mimetic structure what the τύχη, chance and encounter, what the arbitrary irregularity of the conjuncture had provided : M. de Wolmar opening the curtain of Julie's bed precisely as she was drawing her last breath, the husband surprising this elusive passage as one would surprise a lover.

" I heard during the night a few comings and goings which did not alarm me : but on the morning that all was tranquil, a dull noise frayed my ear. I listened, and thought I heard moans. I rush in, open the curtain¹... St. Preux !... dear St. Preux !... I see the two friends² motionless and holding each other embraced ; one fainting, and the other expiring. I cry out, I want to delay or collect her last breath, I rush. She was no longer³. "

The gaze of desire settles on a slip in the night. The man's gaze, marked by the cut in the curtain, meets the embrace of the two women, the female figure of the intertwining that slips away, behind the curtain, into the shadow of death. Cut on one side, and symbolic castration of the man from whom the woman always escapes  intertwining on the other side, the intersection of what is visible, exposed, and what cannot be represented.

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The fragility of randomness thus posited immediately installs a depression of meaning. Julie dead, passed fleetingly to death, something is no longer there that Rousseau designates not spiritually as the soul but materially as the breath, " her last sigh ", something that reaches into, damages Julie's representation and at the same time constitutes it, something that links representation either to absence, or to necrosis or corruption or prohibition : there is nothing left to see, we must not see and, more profoundly, being is missing.

The work of art sets out to make up for this deficiency of being, to bring what is not or no longer in the order of the visible, to inscribe it in culture, to integrate it into remembrance. Representation is therefore not so much imitation as simulacrum : εἴδωλον, the tempting and forbidden idol, φάντασμα, which is still translated ghost in classical language. Representation is an image that returns from beyond, from what, from behind, will remain incomprehensible. There will thus be two successive deaths of Julie, the real and then the symbolic, the second being constituted by what is absent in the first only to return afterwards.

L'écran vision : récession imaginaire et transport 

Julie's death is incomprehensible, at once meaningless and impossible to accept  it first presents itself, in the nocturnal solitude of the bed with closed curtains  it then represents itself, in what takes the place of a secularized burial ritual, in the presence of the assembled community. Between the two deaths, the one played out fleetingly at night in the alcove, then the one decided publicly and ritualized in broad daylight before all assembled Clarens, a journey is made, in space, in time⁴, in emotion, more than a journey then, a transport : M.de Wolmar leaves to warn Julie's father, who sends his valet to get the news. The two journeys, the first by land, the second by lake, do not intersect, the two men do not⁵ : the sharp sharpness of the initial encounter (of Wolmar's desire with Julie's death) thus unravels, and the vision, the knave's affabulation comes to obscure what, in the night's encounter, has been sliced :

" Amid the exclamations wrung from him by his zeal and good heart, his eyes still glued to that face, he thought he caught sight of a movement : his imagination fractured  he saw Julie turn her eyes, look at him, nod. He rises to his feet and runs through the house, shouting that Madame is not dead, that she has recognized him, that he is sure of it, that she will come back. That's all it took  everyone came running, the neighbors, the poor people who were making the air resound with their lamentations, all cried out  she's not dead ! Word spread and grew, and the people who loved the marvelous eagerly accepted the news, believing it as they wished, each seeking to make themselves happy by appealing to the common credulity. Soon the deceased had not only beckoned, she had acted, she had spoken, and there were twenty eyewitnesses of circumstantial facts that never happened. " (P. 736.)

The unbearable reality of death is superimposed by the image of a resurrected Julie: this fantasy, this phantom of Julie, conceals the unbearable horror of what has happened ; but at the same time it engages the process of representation. The regression of the real into its imaginary denial, the passage from narrative to false vision, constitutes the device of the scene to come, of the collective entombment, of this socialization of the unrepresentable that integrates it, turns it inside out in representation. Indeed, it is the false news spread by the valet that brings everyone to their feet, and it is through this that the federating "transport" that will constitute and animate the ceremonial assembly is circulated and crystallized. The people flock to the image of Julie, who is not dead, to symbolically participate in her death. This false image, which obscures reality, simultaneously precipitates the reversal of the depression of meaning, of the inaugural absenteeism into expression, into representation of Julie's death.

Does Julie's death, moreover, make an image other than a negative one ? The real death, like the second symbolic death, only reaches us in the flash of a momentarily thwarted occultation : the bed's curtains, then Saint-Preux's veil spread by Claire over the dead woman's face, stand between us and the horror, marking the deficiency of being and at the same time filling it, covering the hole left by death and signifying it, converting it into something that makes sense, not in the manner of the linguistic sign - the incomprehensible escapes language, representation originates below discourse - but as a kind of minimal signifier that comes to delimit and regulate the space of an essential communication where everything is played out upstream of saying, either horrifying immediacy or sensitive illumination.

Semiology of the screen : function, sign, object

The curtain, the veil, Julie's sign as seen by the valet - these minimal signifiers, these things that stand on the borderline between the depression and crystallization of meaning, the precipitation into the abyss and sublimatory transport, we'll call them a screen. More than a metaphor, this is the conjunction of a "something" (almost object, almost sign) and a function. The function of representation, that abstract mechanism which acts as a supplement of absence when someone represents something, can only become operative by involving " something " which acts as a screen.

Sometimes this " something " is named, designated as a screen : the chimney screen conceals but diffuses the fire  the chemist's screen protects the experimenter's eye and breaks into the forbidden spectacle of nature's hidden springs  the hand screen, or fan, steals the gaze and in return unfolds the deceptive pattern of its painted decoration ; the cinema screen creates emptiness and blackness so that meaning can be projected onto it  the television screen fetishizes the image, domesticates and circumscribes absence in the intimacy of the apartment or house.

While the screen is always almost an object, it can take many forms ; it's its function in representation that allows the critic to designate it as a screen, either serving as its support, or that, at the threshold of the virtual space it opens up, it materially marks the limit, the passage, the crystallization.

The screen's function is twofold  by delimiting the space of representation, by circumscribing in the vague space of reality a restricted space of depression and, at the same time, of crystallization of meaning, the screen provides the stage device, or the framework of enunciation. In this way, the screen theatricalizes and images meaning. It not only defines space  it is also the medium of a fleeting passage, an exchange of the textual and the iconic, of a logic of discourse and another logic productive of meaning, more erratic, often subversive, immediate and uncontrollable, relying on image, gesture and body, effusion and sensitive communication.

The screen, then, delimits a space and produces another kind of meaning. The delimitation of space is particularly clear on the print decided upon by Rousseau⁶ to illustrate Julie's death. The bed's open, knotted curtain divides the space in two. On the right, Julie lies dead in the shadows, tipped backwards, almost removed from the visible at the very moment she is exposed. On the left, the spectators express their grief in theatrical gestures: one falls to his knees, another wrings his hands, a third covers his eyes with his fists. The people are the vague space of the performance, marked by tumult and turmoil. Julie morte, isolated, delimited by the sheets of the bed, constitutes at the heart of the espace restreint the object of the representation.

The scene represents Julie's death through the articulation of these two spaces. The restricted space represents the unrepresentable, the signified of the scene, Julie dead. The vague space represents the representation, the signifier of the scene, i.e. the ritual, the words, the gestures that implement the signification: the noisily and theatrically assembled spectators constitute the signified. Between the signifier (the spectators, the vague space) and the signified (Julie morte, the restricted space), the bed's curtain designates the semiotic cut or bar, the separation of signifier and signified.

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Between signifier and signified, on this edge, two figures stand out, on the left Claire extending Saint-Preux's veil, on the right, M. de Wolmar from behind, at the foot of the bed, head bowed in sad abandon, arms slightly spread, marking without the theatricality of popular demonstrations a restrained emotion and to /// so to speak veiled. Claire and M. de Wolmar make up for the opening of the curtain, doubling the screen that the first death has raised: Claire by extending the veil, M. de Wolmar by interposing his back between the dead woman and our gaze as spectators. Both regulate the interplay of the two spaces and, at the same time, take what is at stake in the performance out of the realm of pure textuality. Wolmar's shadow, Claire's veil delimit and signify, in the failure of the curtain and the depression of meaning.

The whole semiological issue is here : what is represented here, and indeed what is always essentially represented cannot be modeled according to a logic of discourse. Discourse stumbles and slips in the face of the essential, in this case death: rumor, false noise, the valet's delirium, discourse fails to deliver the meaning of what is being accomplished. The narrative itself fails to tell of death, since the scene of Julie's death (her second death) only opens once the narration of her death has been completed, once the resources of the conjuncture have been exhausted.

L'écran enveloppe : communication, hymen

Sense imposes itself outside discourse. It's hot, Julie's body⁷ is putrefying : stripped of all rhetoric, the color and smell of death precipitate the scene and say what cannot be said. From behind the screen, the unspeakable Thing returns, bringing together in horror death and funerals, the real and the symbolic, the brutal randomness of events with the ritual and social framing that sanction them. This conjunction takes place simultaneously through Claire's gesture and Wolmar's letter, which makes it clear:

" I saw her return a moment later holding a gold veil embroidered with pearls that you had brought her from India. Then approaching the bed, she kissed the veil, covered her friend's face with it as she wept, and cried out in a booming voice : "Cursed be the unworthy hand that will ever lift this veil ! cursed be the unholy eye that will see this disfigured face !" This action and these words struck such a chord with the spectators that, as if by a sudden inspiration, the same imprecation was repeated by a thousand cries. It made such an impression on all our people, that the deceased having been placed in the coffin in her clothes and with the greatest precautions, she was carried and buried in this state, without anyone being bold enough to touch the veil. " (P. 737.)

Claire's gesture and the veil placed over Julie's body screen and deliver the meaning of the scene. Under the veil disappears " this disfigured face ", stripped of figure, that is, of representation. But the veil doesn't just designate an empty, forbidden space. It is not reduced to a blank in space. It's " a golden veil embroidered with pearls that you brought her from the Indies " an object, then, that can be viewed for itself and, above all, that is part of a story. Given by Saint-Preux, inhabited by Julie, extended by Claire, told by Wolmar, the veil crystallizes the device that links the four characters.

Through it, Saint-Preux dresses Julie as he had wanted to dress her by sending her a Valaisanne habit that allowed her to imagine a luscious bosom where all gaze was forbidden⁸. The veil unites Julie with Saint-Preux in death, signifying the impossible hymen with the forbidden lover.

The veil has to do with the hymen⁹ in the word's double meaning, with the virginal membrane that forbids a woman's sex and with the symbolic union that authorizes its tearing. Contradictorily, it unites Julie with Saint-Preux and forbids the penetration of the gaze, i.e. penetration, thus sealing the wife's paradoxical virginity. The veil expresses, or rather seals, Julie's fidelity to her husband and to her lover, a fidelity that at once /// prohibits, subtracts and represents Wolmar's desire and Saint-Preux's desire.

Then perhaps we can better understand what is at stake in the screen : it is neither a simple metaphor to say that something hides something else, nor an iconographic theme, as the curtain would be in painting¹⁰, even if the screen plays out the metaphor and manifests itself as a theme. Delimitation, signification : the screen articulates these two orders of representation, the geometrical, which governs space, and the symbolic, which constructs meaning. It thus broadens the question of meaning from its most instituted manifestation (rhetorical, discursive, modeled in a word by language) to its most general, most immediate, and often most subversive  expression: gesture, cry, the disposition of objects and people, everything that's already there at the moment speech begins.

Saint-Preux's veil thus screens not only Julie's body, but the triangulation of desire that works on each of the protagonists. Substituting for the function of the now-open curtain, it screens in a different way. The curtain cuts; the veil envelops. The curtain has to do with the phenomenological structure of the gaze, which according to Albertian formalization sees only through a screen cutting off the scopic field¹¹ the veil has to do with the expressive power of the body, which delivers meaning only through contact, through sensitive transport, through effusive contagion¹². The curtain structures classical semiotics based on the division of the sign into signifier and signified and formalized by the grammarians of Port-Royal¹³ ; the veil undoes this semiotics, settles on its collapse, organizing signification according to another model, where meaning springs not from the cut, but from revolt¹⁴.

The geometrical¹⁵, the scopic, the symbolic

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Julie's death thus involves the screen on three levels. At the geometrical level, in the perspective opening of the stage, the bed's curtain determines the device of representation and prepares the cut that regulates both the gaze cast on the stage and the interplay of signifier and signified, vague space and restricted space. At the imaginary, or scopic, level, in the power of affect exerted by the eye, the vision of the old valet screens the spectacle of death and, with the reversal of the situation, prepares the scene itself. The imaginary recession triggered by the valet's vision cannot be read as a simple error, an illusory and unfortunate deviation in an ineluctable unfolding. It socializes the geometrical space, enables the passage from individual ordeal to collective mourning, and opens up the symbolic institution of the stage: the stage becomes a public ceremony. Here we touch on the third level, the symbolic level, which has Saint-Preux's veil as its screen and consecrates the passage from a semiotics of the cut, modeled by language, to a semiotics of the hymen, modeled by image and bodily convulsion.

The screen-cut is based on castration and opens up to sublimation. This is not what orders the text. The hymen-screen triumphs here  it's all marked by revolt, and manifests itself right from the start of the episode. First it's Claire who, at the end of Julie's first death, goes into convulsions :

" she re-entered Julie's [room] every moment, threw herself on her body, warmed it with her own, strove to revive it, pressed it, clung to it with a kind of rage, called out to her with a thousand passionate names, and fed her despair with all these useless efforts.
As I entered, I found her /// completely out of her senses, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing no one, wandering around the room wringing her hands and biting the legs of chairs, muttering a few extravagant words in a dull voice, then uttering high-pitched cries at long intervals that made her shudder. Her chambermaid, at the foot of her bed, dismayed, appalled, motionless, not daring to breathe, tried to hide from her, and trembled with all her body. Indeed, the convulsions she suffered were frightening." (P. 734.)

Claire's revolt first manifests itself in the hysteria of gesture and scream, then as an intimate, bodily revolt, clinically marked by convulsion. Then comes the vision of the valet, also symptomatic, in its own way, of the revolt against death. The cry of the people, for whom Julie is not dead, is a cry of revolt. Finally, the indignation of the maids and then Claire's curse, for whom the sight of the decomposed body and disfigured face is sacrilegious, also express their revolt.

The screen, in all its ambivalence (occultation-representation, depression-expression, delimitation-signification), turns meaning upside down. It is the moment of conflict over meaning and carries this revolt, this turning of representation on its foundations.

Other deaths at stake : the intertextual screen¹⁶

" Madame [n']est [pas] morte " : perversion of vision

The representation turns and plays itself out, in Julie's death, at the moment of the ultimate denial of reality : This moment is inhabited by the valet's word repeated by the people, that Madame is not dead.

" He rises with transport and runs through the whole house, shouting that Madame is not dead, that she has recognized him, that he is sure of it, that she will come back from it. That's all it took  everyone came running, the neighbors, the poor people who made the air resound with their lamentations, all cried : she's not dead ! " (P. 736.)

This cry is not culturally virginal¹⁷ and its homology with the one sounded in the funeral Oration of Henriette of England delivered by Bossuet in 1670  has been noted:

" O disastrous night ! oh dreadful night, when suddenly resounds, like a burst of thunder, this astonishing news : Madame is dying, Madame is dead ! Who among us did not feel struck by this blow, as if some tragic accident had befallen his family? At the first news of such a strange affliction, people rushed to Saint-Cloud from all directions  they found everything dismayed except the heart of this princess. Cries were heard everywhere, pain and despair, and the image of death. The king, the queen, Monsieur, the whole court, the whole people, all are downcast, all are despairing, and it seems to me that I see the fulfillment of this word of the prophet : The king will weep, the prince will be sorry, and the hands will fall to the people, of sorrow and astonishment. " (Oraisons funèbres de Bossuet, ed. Truchet, Garnier, p. 171 ; Ezéchiel, VII, 27.)

Rousseau's inverted cry already precipitates in Bossuet the formation of the stage device, this socialized space of death on which the word, in a second stage, comes to fall, ritually and spiritually ratifying what has been accomplished.

There's no mistaking it : this word unfolds neither a narrative relating an event nor a discourse designating, qualifying this event. It brutally delivers the representation  it is the vision making up for the absence of the onjet, it is that which translates the event into the space, attitude and configuration of those who receive it.

With Bossuet, the word that closes the paragraph is not a spoken word. It is a tableau /// symbolically ratifies the device constituted in the story by the assembled king, queen, court and people. "It seems to me that I see the fulfillment of this word of the prophet," Bossuet concludes. The prophet's word is seen in the same way as the assembly, and is symbolically identified with it. Indeed, Bossuet cites verse 27 of Ezechiel, which does not speak of the catastrophe, but describes the spectacle of the community assembled to receive the catastrophe, right down to the gesture of the people's hands, which becomes the gesture of M. de Wolmar's hands in the engraving. The tableau described in verse 27 stands in contrast to the prophetic discourse of verse 26, announcing that " disaster upon disaster shall come, news upon news ".

In Rousseau, it's also a sacramental word that closes the narrative and ratifies the assembly gathered around the dead woman. Claire's curse (" Cursed be the unworthy hand [...] ! cursed be the unholy eye ") responds to Ezekiel's imprecation. As a curse, it is neither a narrative nor a discourse, but a performance, which does not release a line of reasoning or information, but seals a bond, a social configuration. The Catholic imprecation was given to be seen as a spectacle  the Protestant curse¹⁸ forbids seeing, precipitates the spectacle into the abyss. But in either case, the scopic field is what's at stake on stage.

The embrace of the dead, from cut to connection

Rousseau's borrowing from Bossuet goes beyond the one-off reversal of the famous phrase " Madame se meurt, Madame est morte ! ". Not only does the sudden gathering of the protagonists and the people around the crowd evoked by Bossuet become the central dramatic issue in the scene imagined by Rousseau, but the very embrace in which M. de Wolmar surprises Julie at the end of the night, this dying in the embrace was already encountered in Bossuet :

" But and princes and peoples moaned in vain. In vain Monsieur, in vain even the king held Madame tight by such narrow embraces. Then they could say one and all, with St Ambrose : Stringebam bracchia, sed jam amiseram quam tenebam¹⁹ ; I clutched my arms, but I had already lost what I held. The princess escaped them amid such tender embraces, and death more powerful took her from us in those royal hands. "

Here again, the word that sanctions the event is neither narrative nor discourse. In Bossuet, the reference to Ambrose inscribes the death lament in the patristic tradition  in Rousseau, the appeal to Saint-Preux (" St. Preux !... dear St. Preux !... ") forbids Christian reference and opens the scene to the lover's gaze. Both St. Ambrose and St. Preux circumscribe a visible embrace, to which both the Bishop of Milan and Julie's lover give a spiritual meaning. Bossuet thus announces the separation of soul and body, which constitutes the essential theme not only of his Oraisons funèbres, but of his Sermon on Death²⁰. Rousseau on the contrary establishes in death the paradoxically indefectible and paradoxically virtuous bond of the four protagonists of the drama, Julie and Claire embraced, Wolmar a spectator, Saint-Preux absent but summoned.

Rousseau's rewriting of Bossuet thus accomplishes a radical reversal of meaning : not only does the announcement of death turn into a denial of death (" Madame n'est pas morte "), but Ezechiel's imprecation, which shows the king weeping and the people's hands flailing, turns into Claire's curse, which forbids seeing Julie's putrefied body  finally, the reference to Ambrose, /// which ratifies the Christian separation of soul and body in the dramatic embrace of the king and the young queen, becomes a reference to Saint-Preux, who turns separation into liaison, into that virtuous union of four that recasts morality outside Christianity²¹.

The rewriting here constitutes a fourth screen : Julie's death screens the death of Henrietta of England, whose device it takes up but subverts and secularizes the meaning. God disappears from the Rousseauist scene until Julie's burial, ordered by Claire's sacramental word, without the slightest reference either to Providence, a future life or any hope of resurrection²². On the contrary, Julie's false resurrection emerges here as a return of the repressed, and is dispelled as illusion and superstition. Only the material truth of flesh corruption remains: to the discursive²³ and deceptive sign that resurrected Julie would have made - " he sees Julie [...] give him a nod " and " Soon the deceased had not only made a nod " (p. 736) - is answered by the symptomatic sign²⁴ of the rotting body : " on y voyoit déja quelques signes d'altération " (p. 737). The sign emerges from language. The discursive model and the Christian model are superimposed here to oppose the Rousseauist model, which makes us see reality without God or discourse.

The iconicity of the screen overlays the discourse carried by the funeral oration, and makes sense according to a different semiological logic. It's not just a question of vision: Bossuet's words constantly play with vision, and it's always a vision that he's staging. We recall how Bossuet introduced Ezekiel : " it seems to me that I see the fulfillment of this word ". In other Bossuet texts, the staging of the vision is even more spectacular. Thus the Sermon on the Death and Immortality of the Soul is presented as a meditation on the resurrection of Lazarus and John's words to Christ in front of his tomb : Domine, veni et vide²⁵. Bossuet's entire speech amounts to the vision of the open tomb :

" Will I be allowed today to open a tomb before the court, and will eyes so delicate not be offended by such a funereal object ? "

As for Christ's injunction, it's an injunction to raise the screen to see :

" it is he who orders the stone to be lifted, and who seems to say to us in turn : Come and see for yourselves. Jesus does not refuse to see this dead body as an object of pity and a subject of miracle ; but it is we, miserable mortals, who refuse to see this sad spectacle, as the conviction of our errors ".

The discourse is reduced to a game of substitution, a variation to designate the aim of the gaze : the abject thing, " this dead body ", is elevated to the dignity of object, " an object of pity ", then turned into subject, " a subject of miracle ", miracle properly signifying the given to be seen (miraculum from miror). Once the reversal proper to vision has taken place, the spectacle unfolds before us, " ce triste spectacle ", which takes the place of rhetoric, substituting itself for it to carry away " la conviction de nos erreurs ". Death is thus the decisive moment of discourse's undoing, the moment when only the principial evidence of seeing  remains:

" But, O death, you are mute, and speak only to the eyes ".

Death thematizes the neantization, the absenteeism structurally inherent /// to representation. In the funeral oration, she fixes this principal defection of language, which, far from always already being there, begins by failing. The vision that organizes the phantasmatic return of that which should always be already there, in the time of representation, is born of this initial defect, of these missing words. What first appears, then, is that which, remaining mute, speaks only to the eyes and manifests itself illusorily as return : the disquieting return of the εἴδωλον, the traumatic haunting of the φάντασμα.

For the image as a preliminary to speech, as the primary surface of representation, is not, as we can see, of recent invention. We can't retrace here the entire history and theological, then political, stakes of this articulation of language and image in representation, an articulation that the screen has the function of regulating. In any case, the confrontation with Bossuet clearly shows that Rousseau's invention does not consist in a shift from rhetoric to the visual: it was the century of eloquence itself that proposed the deconstruction of eloquence through spiritual vision, inherited from the theological tradition of the clara visio dei. Rousseau transposes vision into a profane space and, in so doing, founds a materialist semiology, out of step with the various professions of faith that punctuate La Nouvelle Héloïse and L'Émile. Rousseau's screens are profane objects : the bed curtain, which functions as the stone of Lazarus' tomb, belongs to familiar humanity, to bourgeois intimacy. Julie's veil, which takes the place of Christ's shroud and is brandished like a veronica, receives no imprint and delivers no Christian message.

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Economy of reversal in Bossuet

Bossuet had centered his Oraison funèbre on neantization, which both nourished the moral theme of vanity and structured the device of mystical vision. The word of Ecclesiastes served as a preliminary screen  " Ô vanité ! ô néant ! " ; it was the word given to be seen. In the beginning, the space destined for language was nothing but a precipice and an abyss. The whole Bible, the whole text, holds in this vanity, but holds in a negative way, as an empty, principial surface on which to found vision.

Henriette morte is then given to be seen as the object of public representation : " Princess, the worthy object of the admiration of two great kingdoms ", admiration being etymologically the gaze turned upwards, towards the elevated object.

To represent this object, speech fails, speech seems derisory and ineffectual : " Vanity of vanities and all is vanity. This is the only word I have left ". Exegesis is powerless to represent the object  " So I have not scoured the sacred books to find any text that I can apply to this princess. ". The object of representation escapes textuality. An object outside text, outside discursive logic, it is delivered to the randomness of an unchosen word, to the nothingness of a word that denies the word :

" I have taken without study and without choice the first words presented to me by Ecclesiastes, where although vanity has been so often named, it is not yet named enough to my liking for the purpose I propose. "

  From this point of neantization, Bossuet performs a reversal, he crystallizes representation : the principial hollowness will serve as the starting point for the description of the totality of the world. "In a single misfortune, I wish to deplore all the calamities of the human race, and in a single death to show the death and nothingness of all human greatness. Nothingness then turns into the promise of refoundation :

" But am I telling the truth ? Is man, whom God made in his own image, but a shadow ? What Jesus Christ came to seek from heaven on earth, what he believed /// to be able, without ravishing, to buy with all one's blood, is it nothing ? "

The representation of the world is based on a principial neantization (" O vanity ! oh nothing ! "), but it reverses it, transmutes it into a ghostly, foreboding return : nothing becomes a shadow, a nothing, and probably more. The derisory randomness of vanities turns into the promise, the design of Redemption : we then move from conjuncture (" believing with the ungodly that our life is but a game where chance reigns ") to structure (the " rule ", the " conduct ", the law of God).

This reversal remains unstable, and the representation rests on this back-and-forth of the gaze :

" So everything is vain in man if we look at what he gives to the world ; but on the contrary everything is important, if we consider what he owes to God. Again, all is vain in man, if we look at the course of his mortal life ; but all is precious, all is important, if we contemplate the end at which it ends, and the account we must give of it. "

It's not so much a double point of view as a consubstantial reversal that organizes this back-and-forth : the gaze has no choice between earthly and heavenly vision  it is only fulfilled in its spiritual becoming, by orienting itself towards contemplation. What used to be seen as phantom and simulacrum, as disappointing randomness, now manifests itself theatrically as " term " as structure, as tevlo". The reversal has taken place around the Vanité that was on view from the beginning of the Oraison, around the body of Henriette of England, which here constitutes the screen. But the body is still there, the hazard persists beyond sublimation.

And so the back-and-forth proper to the gaze, the circulation of nothingness given to see, to the world that unfolds in saying is perpetuated throughout the performance. In this coming and going, in this circulation, the screen constitutes the unstable but central support of reversion.

The screen is almost an object, but its reversal function (in the sense of sublimation in Bossuet, of revolt in Rousseau) prevents it from settling exactly and definitively as an object. In L'Oraison funèbre de Henriette d'Angleterre, Bossuet calls on spectators to look at the tomb and the altar, at the nothingness of earthly glory and the universality of heavenly glory. But these two points of fixation for the gaze only make sense in the journey from one to the other:

" Let us meditate then today, at the sight of this altar and this tomb, on the first and last words of Ecclesiastes, the one which shows man's nothingness, the other which establishes his greatness. "

Only once this ambivalence has been established by the floating of the gaze from the tomb to the altar, only once this salvific reversal of earthly annihilation into spiritual glorification has taken place, does the screen manifest itself as an interposition between the two glories, the true one of vision and the ghostly one of representation. The dead body of the princess then comes to " offend " the spectacle of her earthly glory :

" precious gift, priceless present, if only possession had been more lasting ! But why does this memory interrupt me ? Alas ! we cannot for a moment stop our eyes on the glory of the princess without death interfering to offend all with its shadow. "

The falsely glorious vision is " offusquée ", intercepted by the shadow of death, just as the false vision of Julie resurrected will come for a moment in Rousseau's work to interpose itself to the gaze of the Clarens audience. The screen doesn't interrupt the spectacle  on the contrary, it constitutes the event as a spectacle, it organizes the performance as a return, as a memory of earthly glory in the spectacle of death, as a "spectacle of the dead". /// the afterglow of a past life at the heart of this vacant space created by Vanity.

The back-and-forth continues  language returns only to be disqualified once again. Terrestrial glory could certainly be the object of discourse  in this it offered only a simulacrum for the gaze to feast upon. Celestial glory then emerges from discourse to find its assumption in the pure splendor of " making see " :

" No, Gentlemen, I can no longer support these grand words [...]. It's time to make people see that everything mortal, whatever is added on the outside to make it appear great, is at its core incapable of elevation. "

" great words " marked by the deception of saying give way to the " time to make see ", which lifts the screen and reveals behind " the deceptive outside " of earthly glory its " bottom " vain and demystified.

This evangelical truth of the vanity of earthly goods cannot pass through language. Vanity eats away at all discourse, to the point where, by the time of the oraison, Henriette's body has completely slipped out of saying :

" Our flesh soon changes nature ; our body takes on another name ; even that of corpse, says Tertullian, because it still shows us some human form, does not remain with it for long : it becomes a je ne sais quoi which no longer has a name in any language  so true is it that everything dies in it, even those funereal terms by which its unfortunate remains were expressed ! "

The image is stripped of the language that names it, disfigured, delineated even. Representation becomes autonomous for a time outside discourse, the object falls below the object, becomes " a je ne sais quoi ", doomed in omnis jam vocabuli mortem, to the death of all naming²⁶.

All Bossuet's eloquence is organized around this double reversal, in the order of discourse, of earthly glory into " un je ne sais quoi qui n'a plus de nom dans aucune langue ", in the order of vision, of earthly shadow and nothingness into the light and dazzle of heavenly glory : the aim of oraison is, in the space left by the vacancy of discourse, to build vision around a point of reversion, a focal object, the body of the dead woman exposed before the altar.

L 'inventio in Bossuet lies not essentially in the content of the message his eloquence delivers, but in the variation of the device that each time brings to the fore a new focal object and, around the screen, new modalities of reversion : Henrietta of England is all glory and nothingness  in the Sermon on Death, the gaze is called to fix on the open tomb of Lazarus, both empty and full, open to the nothingness offered by the sad spectacle of man's misery and open to the " immortal light " spread by the miracle of the resurrection : " come and see in the same object the end of your designs, and the beginning of your hopes ". In the Oraison funèbre de Nicolas Cornet, the late theologian²⁷ is compared to a " hidden treasure ", Matthew's thesaurus absconditus²⁸ :

" So you will see Nicolas Cornet, public treasure, and hidden treasure ; full of heavenly light and covered, as much as he could, with thick clouds ; illuminating the Church with his doctrine and only wanting it to know his sole submission " (Oraisons funèbres, op.cit., p. 79).

The opposition of outside and inside, of container and content, seems at first to divide in a stable way what is of the order of light and meaning on the one hand, what is only cloud and fact /// screen on the other. But then a strange metonymy operates the back-and-forth, establishing the passage from the vague space of the world to the restricted, intimate space of illumination. The reversal is from the content to the envelope, which proves to be the real treasure:

So, it's the envelope that's the real treasure.

" you will see, Gentlemen, in the first point of this discourse the immense and priceless riches which are contained in this treasure ; and you will admire in the second the mysterious envelope, and richer than the treasure itself, in which he has hidden it for us. "

The representation is constituted by this founding metonymy that establishes an equivalence between the restricted space and the screen, between the place, the frame, the enunciation of what is at stake and the surface, the obstacle, the veil, the envelope that come to offend, to disturb the enunciation of what is at stake.

From enclosure to envelope : theoretical issues

Mercury visits veiled Proserpine and Pluto in the Underworld, drawing by Poussin after the right side of Proserpine's sarcophagus, Rome, Palais Rospigliosi, 27.1x21.2 cm, Chantilly, Musée Condé

The representation is not inscribed on a support. It is this support, this mysterious envelope, with writing coming only afterwards, to make up for the black hole of this primary space, this depression, this neantization constitutive of all meaning. Representation is mystery made envelope, the reversal of the materiality of the envelope into the immaterial structure of mystery. Through this metonymic interplay, the incomprehensible dimension of reality (the mystery of the world) is embodied and represented in the restricted, dominated space, the designable, structurable surface of representation. This envelope, this screen that can be seen as a surface and understood as a metonymy, offers the gaze the minimal otherness of domesticated desire. The spectator-reader's relationship to the screen is not one of object: the screen does not move, escape or live. The relationship to the screen, like that of the living to the graves of their dead, is a relationship without distance or risk, without brutality. It reduces the conjuncture  it fetishizes it.

The screen slides from φάντασμα to εἴδωλον, from ghost to fetish : it first manifests itself in death, absenteeism, the depression of meaning  it then turns around to become the tamed sign of the mystery it envelops, the enclosed field of a protected blossoming of desire. Bossuet's eloquence tends entirely towards this corporalization of mystery (the body, the corpse, the envelope), which it violently repudiates, for obvious ideological reasons, but which ceaselessly makes a return towards it, a return, that is to say, representation.

This complex relationship to the body, as both the tamed and repudiated surface of representation, remains the central issue in Julie's death. When Rousseau draws on the Oraison funèbre de Henriette d'Angleterre to write this scene, he is not merely superimposing two deaths, inscribing his fiction in the classical literary heritage.

David, The lictors bring Brutus the bodies of his sons, canvas, 323x422 cm, signed and dated 1789, Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 3693. On the right, a maid veiling her face, modeled on the veiled Proserpine

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From the repudiation of the body to its rehabilitation as an instance of revolt and symbolic refoundation, rewriting operates a /// detour. It's nothing less than the transposition of one system of screens into another: for Bossuet's Christian dichotomies, for the spectacular effects of spiritual melodrama, Rousseau substitutes the muted work of the symptom, the effusion that reshapes the social bond, the communication that thwarts the cut²⁹. This passage, this detour is staged by the focal shift from the enclosure formed by the bed's curtain to Saint-Preux's veil.

The screen-fence separates the signifier (M. de Wolmar who sees death and writes it to Saint-Preux) from the signified (Julie and Claire embracing) and establishes the rupture consubstantial with desire (Julie is the one who is not all, who escapes, who will remain entrenched) : cut and castration combine to elaborate the structure of representation and organize classical semiotics around a screen-bar that divides the sign twice, inside (Siant/Sié) and outside (Signe/Référent). The bar or semiotic cut is the translation, the linear reduction of what, in space, manifests itself as the inclusion of a restricted space in a vague space, the closed bed in the blurred outline of the dark room, the doubly inaccessible body of the woman and the dead woman in the field of M. de Wolmar's gaze. The signified becomes embedded in the signifier as a restricted space of depression and absenteeism, as a depressive distancing of meaning.

David, Seated draped woman hiding her face. 56.6x43.2 cm. Black stone, shading and white highlights on beige paper. Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 922-306-3. Study for the maid veiling her face in the Brutus

The screen-envelope played out by Saint-Preux's veil or Nicolas Cornet's body does not establish separation. It functions as a liaison and reversion between sign and referent.

The screen-envelope played out by the veil of Saint-Preux or the body of Nicolas Cornet does not establish a separation.

There is no separation between a sign and a referent : something extends over the real, makes a sign by creating a link. The sign here is the scopic and symbolic link established by the space of the mortuary display. By focusing all eyes on Julie, she socializes the scene, signifying the community of Clarens that she unites around her. There is no longer any gap, no limit between the real and the represented, between referent and sign, but an overlap that designates a ban: the veiled Julie is the one who is forbidden to look at, on pain of a curse. The veil is the sign, which does not oppose the referent, but metonymizes it, corporealizing it as a membrane laid over an unfathomable beyond, in contact with an outside, a gaze, at the risk of penetration. The veil is the hymen, which in marriage inscribes the woman into society, and in rape or misconduct cuts her off from it, binding and tearing her within. The hymen veils the woman incompletely, procures binding through its tearing.

The veil doesn't entrench ; it envelops, and above all it connects the scene to another, or even to several other scenes. Meaning is not born of a cut, but of this connection, this relation of scenes that proceeds by successive, insensitive shifts of representation on reality, of the structuring of a meaning on the open chance of encounter.

The veil doesn't cut ; it envelops, and above all it connects the scene to another, or even to several other scenes.

Antoine van Dyck, Venetia, Lady Digby on her deathbed, 1633, oil on canvas, 74.3x81.8 cm, The Trustees of Dulwitch Picture Gallery, London, inv. n°184

The representation /// appears caught between the curtain and the veil, between the inclusion of a restricted space of the signified in the vague space of the signifier, and the envelopment, the projection of a forbidden surface on the real, of something that makes a sign on that which, through this sign, is constituted as a link, or even as a symbolic collectivity. Inclusion on the one hand, envelopment or projection on the other  here we find the constitutive structure of the Freudian ego, in its double articulation with the id and with the superego.

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In his Second Topic, Freud in fact shows that the oppositions of the ego to the id or the superego are in fact inclusions or projections.

The foundation of the superego formation process " is what is called an identification, i.e. the assimilation of one self to another, foreign [...]. Identification has been compared, not without accuracy, with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of the foreign person. Identification is a very important form of connection to the other, probably the most original, it is not the same as a choice of object³⁰. "

As for the ego and the id, they are not opposed like two antagonistic territories, and the id is not the object of the ego : the ego was formed on the surface of the id, when perception and consciousness (the Pc-Cs system) brought the id into contact with the outside world. The ego is the result of this contact. It therefore envelops the id, albeit incompletely.

The self, moreover, is constituted as a film, a surface, in a double capacity : it " can be considered as a mental projection of the body's surface ", " it is not only a surface being, but is itself the projection of a surface³¹ ".

At once interface and projection, the " me " thus functions as a screen, insofar as it is the object of self-representation³². It is the articulating surface of the id and the external world, under the gaze of the superego. In the tripartition of id/ego/superego, the slashes therefore signify nothing, other than a connection, envelopment for the first, inclusion for the second.

The screen is not a metaphor, but a function : it is metaphorized in representation as a screen, door, curtain or veil. But what's at stake here is the double threshold of representation, grasped between the incomprehensible beyond and the real, insofar as it's the ego that gives it the screen structure, a structure in space that distances us from the linear model, the signifying chain.

Lacan had established this relationship between the semiotic model and the psychoanalytic model. But the relationship he establishes between the interplay of signifier and signified and the formations of the unconscious does not break with Saussurian linear modeling, even if it pushes it to its limit : the image chosen by Lacan is that of the knot, that point of padding through which the thread of the signifier crosses the mattress of the signified, then, in the mot d'esprit, the chain of signifiance comes, in the same way, to cross and recross the line of rational discourse³³. The Lacanian knot becomes infinitely complicated up to the Borromean knots that identify writing with jouissance : but " when you scribble and so do I, it's always on a page and it's with lines "³⁴. The unfolding of meaning is perceived to the end as the unfolding of a line.

We would like to return, through the screen, to a modeling in space that passes through the recognition of the primacy of image over language in the production of meaning, and of the predetermination of meaning by the spatial device of its enunciation. The Platonic cave, with its /// wall-screen and the painfully posed requirement of reversal³⁵, Simonides' memory chambers³⁶, Freudian projection surfaces all refer, each in their own way, to such iconic and spatial modeling of representation, which a certain post-romantic idea of the hegemony of text and discourse had made disappear from theoretical thinking.

With Bossuet, the essential passage that the screen implemented was the passage from discourse to vision, from the human to the divine. In Rousseau, discourse occupies a marginal and disqualified place from the outset  the essential passage takes place in time, from one scene to another : the screen generalizes scenic doubling, according to an economy of transport that superimposes sensitive exaltation, displacement in space (gesture, journey, voyage) and reminiscence.

We've seen how Julie's two deaths, the one in the early morning in Claire's arms behind the bed's curtains, and the one at the end of the day, before Clarens assembled at the spectacle of the veil covering the dead woman, were both separated and linked by the double journey of M. d'Étange's and M. de Wolmar's old valet. The framed immobility of the scene is inscribed in the slippage, the to-and-fro, the movement of a journey. The failure of the first scene, summed up by Ambroise's formula, jam amiseram quam tenebam (Claire letting death slip through her arms as she clutches Julie), projects a second scene where the unseized moment will be fixed by the veil. This projection of the scene unseized and dispossessed by the conjuncture on stage, which a structure and a device come to recover, materializes in the journey, the missed crossing of husband and valet. This crossover, this exchange, designates the scenic reversal.

This is more than a journey, it's a transport : the arrival of the valet triggers the collective vision and emotion. It transports the crowd. The transport constructs the geometrical design of the scene in space  but at the same time it crystallizes the emotion and revolt that prepare the final reversal, Claire's ritual curse.

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This reversal can only be fully accomplished in the third dimension of transport, the reminiscence that brings the present scene back to a past scene, that relates scenic enjoyment to an earlier image. The event becomes representation because it brings back the insignificance or absurdity of the present moment to the failure of an earlier scene. But this connection is not unequivocal. In fact, a whole network of pre-existing images and devices appears, which the scene feeds on and federates.

Relating Bossuet's and Rousseau's textual economies enables us to better grasp this function of the double threshold that the screen assumes, for the passage from an economy of reversal to an economy of transport amounts to nothing other than a shift of accentuation from one threshold to the other, from the relationship to the signified to the relationship to the referent, from the screen-enclosure and its inclusions to the screen-envelope and its connections.

Velum scissum est, knowledge and death

Julie's death scene only makes sense in its relation to other scenes³⁷, which it neither repeats, nor even completes or fulfills, but rather covers over in the manner of the Freudian screen-memory, proceeding on the original material by condensation and displacement.

We began to show in this perspective how Bossuet's text had been used by Rousseau. But this intertextual play only takes on its full meaning in relation to the internal cross-references to La Nouvelle Héloïse.

The first of these references is explicit and involves a dream : the unconscious work of the φάντασμα (image /// fantasy and representation) is thus clearly established. Rousseau alludes in a note, concerning the " voile d'or brodé de perles que vous lui aviez rapporté des Indes " to Saint-Preux's dream :

" One sees assés that it was the dream of St. Preux, whose imagination Made d'Orbe was always full of, that suggested to her the expedient of this veil. I believe that if we look closely, we will find this same connection in the fulfillment of many predictions. The event is not predicted because it will happen ; but it happens because it was predicted. " (P. 737³⁸.)

The note establishes and immediately reverses the connection between the two events, Saint-Preux's premonitory dream (V,9) and the fulfillment of the dream : the dream did not provide the structure for what is accomplished here, contained neither prediction nor meaning. On the contrary, it constituted the random given, the initial conjuncture to which the second scene - the death, no longer dreamt but fulfilled - retrospectively gives meaning. Julie's death structures the conjuncture; it thus functions both as the fulfillment and denial of Saint-Preux's dream, which desired her death³⁹ and, in her death, projected the other, essential and foundational death, the death of the mother⁴⁰.

For Saint-Preux's dream first incorporates the guilt of Julie, whose choice of love seems to have caused the death of Mme d'Étange :

" I thought I saw the worthy mother of your friend, in her bed expiring, and her daughter kneeling before her, bursting into tears, kissing her hands and gathering her last sighs. I saw again that scene you once depicted to me, and which will never leave my memory. O my mother," said Julie, in a tone that was heartbreaking, "she who owes you the day is taking it away from you! Ah ! take back your blessing, without you it is only a fatal gift for me. My child," replied her tender mother, "you must fulfill your destiny... God is just... you will be a mother in your turn... she couldn't finish... I wanted to look up at her, but I didn't see her anymore. I saw Julie in her place  I saw her, I recognized her, though her face was covered by a veil. I let out a cry; I dashed to pull aside the veil; I couldn't reach her; I stretched out my arms, I tormented myself and touched nothing. Friend, calm yourself  she said to me in a weak voice. The dread veil covers me, no hand can remove it. At this word, I become agitated and make a new effort  this effort wakes me up : I find myself in my bed, overwhelmed with fatigue, and drenched in sweat and tears. " (P. 616.)

The golden veil embroidered with pearls repeats the veil from Saint-Preux's dream and takes on meaning in relation to it : through the dream, it signifies this death that no one dares declare with words. But the dream itself repeats an earlier scene, " cette scene que vous m'avez autrefois dépeinte ", the death of Mme d'Étange that Claire did not actually describe, merely exonerating Julie (iii, 7). Each time, the episode has undergone a displacement, so that by the time of Julie's actual death the superimposition of the two deaths is forgotten :

III, 7	Mother's death			(Mme d'Étange)
V,9	Mother's death	//	Daughter's death	(Saint-Preux's Dream)
VI, 11			Daughter's death	(Julie)

Saint-Preux's dream thus acts as a screen between the death of the mother and the death of the daughter : it establishes the symbolic equivalence of the two deaths, but at the same time it allows this equivalence to be concealed, the burying of /// the unrepresentable death of the mother under the veil intended to cover the daughter⁴¹.

This repressed equivalence of the two deaths makes a comeback, however, through the returned reference to Bossuet, who delivers the Oraison funèbre d'Henriette d'Angleterre a few months after that of her mother Henriette de France (November 1769, August 1770). Finally, Henriette is the first name Rousseau gives to Julie's daughter, to emphasize that the signifier always refers to the mother.

And whose mother are we talking about here, if not Rousseau's mother, whose fault the child bore ? Just compare the account at the beginning of the Confessions,

" I cost my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes " (I, 7),

and Julie's lamentations to her mother incorporated by Saint-Preux into the dream,

" she who owes you the day takes it from you ! Ah ! take back your benefit, without you it is for me only a fatal gift ".

The Confessions not only provide a second equivalence in death. They also pose the identity of death and fault, the narcissistic introjection of the death of the Other (Julie) into the fault of the " me ".

1.	Julie's death	//	Death of Mme d'Étange	//	Death of Suzanne Bernard, Jean-Jacques' mother
2.	Death of Julie	//	Julie's fault	//	Fault of Saint-Preux	//	Fault of Jean-Jacques

We better understand the meaning of Claire's public curse, which sanctions and transposes after the fact the secret curse with which Jean-Jacques considers himself stricken. Here again, a comparison with the Oraison funèbre de Henriette d'Angleterre is in order, as the preacher avoids the Queen's last words to her husband for the sake of propriety: " Hélas ! Monsieur, you stopped loving me a long time ago  but that is unfair : you never missed me " (p. 183, note 1). Isn't the point of Julie's death, which is the killing of the mother by her son (the son whom Julie saved from drowning, or Jean-Jacques, who caused his mother to die at birth), to represent, in the opposite direction to the fault, unlove? At the beginning of the representation, we find this ghostly depression, this inaugural failure of the mother which, thereafter, never ceases to return.

We had already suggested that the gesture of extending the veil crystallized a whole bundle of relations and meanings. In the same way here, the mother's death, the son's fault, the principial failure constitute the meaning of Julie's death, not as a signified opposed to a signifier, but as a series of connections, a layering from the surface of the device (dead Julie exposed, shown, given to be seen) to its repressed, covered, denied depth (the failure of/to the mother).

We've already suggested that the gesture of extending the veil crystallizes a whole bundle of relations and meanings.

In this layering, the veil images the " me " as a signifying articulation covering, albeit imperfectly, the id of the dream (mother's death) and incorporating the reproving gaze of the Other, the super-ego mimicked by Claire's curse.

But this veil that establishes the signifying link⁴² is itself worked by tearing. It is the " dread veil ", that terrible impossibility for the child, that incomprehensible yet principal given of maternal hymen which the myth of the Annunciation images. At the same time, it is the veil to be torn, to ward off the haunting dream. Milord Edouard takes Saint-Preux to Clarens " without saying a word ", to propose that he see Julie again, to assure himself with his own eyes of what the dream had cast in doubt, of her integrity, her /// health⁴³.

" Alez, visionary," he added, shaking my hand ; "alez la revoir. Happy to show your follies only to people who love you ! Hate yourself, I'm waiting for you ; but on everything don't come back until you've torn that fatal veil fabric in your brain. " (P.  617.)

The veil that covered the double face of the dead woman (mother, daughter) is incorporated into " voile tissu dans votre cerveau ", an internal imaginary veil, voile-φάντασμα whose tearing alone allows access to reason, to knowledge. Incorporation, as we've seen, has to do with the assumption of the law or, in other words, with the formation of the super-ego : something here slips from the imaginary to the symbolic, from sexual openness to openness to knowledge.

It's not Julie's vision that will ultimately determine this saving tear, but the sound, the accent of the two mingled voices of the friends : the tear opens onto a visual hollowness, a lack of presence that is compensated for by the accent of the two mingled voices of the friends : the tear opens onto a visual gap, a lack of presence compensated for by the mysterious accent of feminine pleasure, in Claire's case " je ne sais quoi de languissant et de tendre ", like the sonorous echo of an amorous transport, in Julie's case, an attenuated reprise, an insensitive echo, so to speak, " un accent affectueux et doux à son ordinaire, mais paisible et serein " (p.618). Insensibly, from the fantasy of sexual penetration (tearing the veil), we have slipped to the ordinary, anodyne tone of conversation, from imaginary rape, we have returned to the real insignificance of a sound of voice external to Saint-Preux, detached.

The veil here combines the desire for sexual forcing and the renunciation of this desire in favor of a certain knowledge that constitutes the incorporation of this forcing, or its turning against oneself :

" When he asked me if the veil was lifted, I affirmed it without balancing, and we didn't speak of it again. Yes, Cousin, it has been lifted for ever, the veil that long offended my reason. All my anxious transports are extinguished. I see all my duties and I love them. You are both dearer to me than ever  but my heart no longer distinguishes one from the other, and does not separate the inseparable. " (P. 619.)

The lifting of the inner veil replaces the tearing of the veil extended over Julie/Mme d'Étange. The forcing then reverses : Saint-Preux's encounter with the insignificant exteriority of reality, with the sound of Claire's and Julie's voices, causes the external instance of the Law to penetrate him, through which the sexual object (the desirable body of the mother-daughter) is turned into an object of knowledge, a sororal and double object, " inseparable ", which will come to representation through the spectacle of Julie and Claire embraced in death.

The tearing/lifting of the veil is thus both an opening to the impulsive id, eros and thanatos conjoined in Julie's φάντασμα, and an incorporation of paternal law, law as knowledge and as injunction : the external figure of M. de Wolmar is introjected into the inner instance of the superego (" I see all my duties and I love them ").

But this tear is at the antipodes of the semiotic/symbolic cut. Where the castration of the screen-curtain, the screen-fence, posited separation, crystallization, cutting, the veil produces only liaison-déliaison : " mon cœur ne distingue plus l'une de l'autre et ne sépare point les inséparables. " (P. 619.) Julie's desired body has turned into the double sororal body of Julie and Claire, the object of desire has become the double structure of knowledge: the dialogue between Claire and Julie, between the tragic confidante and heroine, deploys nothing other than this double structure through which the dialectic of institution and principle operates. /// symbolic, insofar as the symbolic appears polarized between the primordial point of pure revolt, the absolute demand for justice (the Thing, the principle) and the linguistic weave of the world, the regulation of law by discourse⁴⁴.

Freud's posited co-presence of sexuality and thought thus manifests itself as the obverse and reverse of the screen, as the very movement of lifting, tearing, turning back the veil. It obeys not the logic of the phallus, but that of the hymen, which combines bonding and unbonding, the envelopment of the id and the introjection of the superego.

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The torn veil is the image and textual element that links the letter of Saint-Preux's songe (V,9) to the one in which Saint-Preux evokes the death of Mme d'Étange (III, 6), a letter that opens with the painful cry :

" At last the veil is torn  this long illusion has vanished  this hope so sweet is extinguished. " (P. 317.)

Jean Starobinski has shown how the motif of unveiling informed all of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work, with the veiled idol of the Allegorical bark that Christ comes to break and the veiled Galatea of the Pygmalion serving as emblems for the whole of Rousseau's philosophical, critical and existential enterprise : denunciation of the " veil of illusion " that feeds superstition and social injustice ; unveiling of true human nature, stripped of its masks and restored to its natural authenticity  advent, affirmation of consciousness through the work of unveiling that writing operates⁴⁵.

It is questionable, however, whether what is at stake in the unveiling is indeed the revelation of an ideal beauty, a pure truth of nature. Beyond the screen is not the order of aesthetic and moral idealization : the veiled statue of the Allegorical Muse is the horrifying, cannibalistic idol of superstition and archaic terrors ; the beautiful Galatea of the Pygmalion reveals not so much her beauty beneath the veil as her reflexive nature : she is pure " moi ", " C'est moi ", " Ah ! encore moi " (p. 1231), where the sculptor plunges into narcissistic death. Rather than Poppea's veil⁴⁶, Rousseau's veil could be that of Proserpine, who forbids the contemplation of death to the visitor to the Underworld.

 

 

The tearing veil turns the dynamic of desire on its head in a rush towards knowledge and death. It refers to the veil of the Temple which is torn at the death of Christ :

" Towards the ninth hour Jesus proclaimed with a loud voice : Eli Eli lema sabacthani ? that is : my God, my God, why have you forsaken me ?
Some of those who stood by said when they heard him : He is calling Elijah.
[...] And behold, the curtain of the sanctuary was split in two from top to bottom, the earth was shaken, the rocks split " (Matthew XXVII, 46-51).

Velum scissum est : the veil of La Nouvelle Héloïse cannot, associated as it is with tearing on the one hand, religious death on the other, fail to refer to the veil of the Jerusalem temple that separated the Holy from the Holy of Holies and is torn at the moment Jesus expires, to mark the end of the old law and the promise of the new. The torn veil is the moment of the father's absence, of the depression of meaning, of the emptiness of being, but it also opens up to symbolic refoundation, a refoundation whose support is the maternal body, hatched and closed, abyssed in death, guilt and the recovery of the drive, open to birth, to consciousness, to the Platonic reversal towards the light of reason.

Volume presentation

The studies that make up this volume have been grouped into three parts that seek to account for the three essential aspects of the screen that we have attempted to identify, using Julie's death scene in La Nouvelle Héloïse as an example.

The uncircumscribed

First of all, a theory of representation based on the screen presupposes a shift from a linear, textual (or, more narrowly, narratological) model to a spatial, iconic model integrating the primacy of image over language, of medium over signifier. The screen thus makes it possible to account for literature and art in general as a game between a vague and a restricted space. The space of representation, caught between two thresholds, is the restricted space where the signified is introjected and inscribed. But what representation aims at is the double beyond the signified, the field of the signifier on the one hand, and the space of the real on the other. This aim of culture that unfolds at the edge of the screen, the screen alone can reveal it in its essential dimension of incircumscribed.

The uncircumscribed is what needs to be reduced. The structural challenge of such a model consists in coming out of narration as the novel's basic structure to envisage the implementation of devices whose function is to encircle, to circumscribe the randomness of reality, the rustle of conjuncture. Literature then appears as a strangely disquieting fetishization of a configuration that repeats itself. Circumscribing the world's uncircumscribed through writing is the writer's perilous and neurotic attempt at structural reduction. His starting point is not the discursive linearity of a rhetorical model, but precisely this uncircumscribed real that presents itself to him and overwhelms him, which he will have to incorporate as εἴδωλον, as fetish. The fetish is that which, in representation, forms a screen.

The screen thus designates a failure in representation, but at the same time, through the fetish, it makes up for it. What in the image or text acts as a screen takes the place of structure, suggests, organizes a structure that is, so to speak, non-structural, irreducible to rhetorical modeling, a structure in space, a device. At the end of Madame Bovary⁴⁷, Mme Caron and Mme Tuvache overhear from the attic a scene between Emma, crushed by her debts, and Binet, the tax collector. They see but cannot hear. The silence of what is being said is matched by the mystery of Binet's "indescribable ivories". The space of the studio, with its unrepresentable objects, makes up for the failure of Emma's discourse, as if Flaubert were providing the device for a scene whose pathetic display he otherwise refused.

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Here we touch on a second ambivalence of the screen  as the circumscription of a device, not only does it take the place of structure, it supplements it, but it gives the theme by providing the focal object of representation. Both frame and content, the screen, in Flaubert's scene, regulates the spatial device and provides, at its focal point, an indescribable object.

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In Claude Simon's Histoire⁴⁸ the indescribable object is the mother's face, vainly summoned by the narrator to the scene of her death. An inaccessible face, hidden by the priest in the dazzling chasuble, a mask-face, geometrized into a triangle or a knife blade, or imaginatively projected behind the frosted glass of an anodyne bank scene, it is properly disfigured.

Claude Simon insists on the process of recollection that drives representation. He metaphorizes this process with the image of a pile of postcards or photos delivered in bulk, or with the " meandering  cut-outs" (Triptychs) of a puzzle in the process of completion. The real cut is not the one /// arranges the cards or puzzle pieces into a " whole image ", according to a narrative logic that Claude Simon systematically and methodically defeats, but one that provides the delineation of a disappointing au-devant (the puzzle, the photos, the priest at the mother's bedside, the frosted glass distorting the bank scene) and a black, unrepresentable en-deçà (the table, the mother's knife-face, what happens behind the frosted glass).

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The sharpness, the materiality, of the au-devant screens the real, but uncircumscribed, consistency of the en-deçà. For the mother's death in Histoire, like Julie's death in La Nouvelle Héloïse, aims to envelop, through this complex system of screens, screens internal to the scene and screens of the scenes that project one into the other, this properly incomprehensible mystery of the uncircumscribed.

The clarity, the materiality of the foreground screens the real, but uncircumscribed, consistency of the beyond.

Enveloping, delineating and, thereby, repressing : the knife blade that metaphorizes the mother's inaccessible face doesn't so much represent castration as this repression into the beyond and the support that envelops it, either as " mask " or as " one of those high walls ", in a process of involution, the mother appearing " returned, returned or rather entrenched ".

The face-wrap marked by the reversal settles the logic of the hymen : the cushions supporting the dying woman are " similar to a bridal finery " ; her body is a " tenebrous tabernacle "  her posture is of " permanent orgasm ". Through this face of the dying mother, Claude Simon fleetingly articulates the instance of the law, the principle of jouissance, and the fascination exerted by the slide into the abyss : the image operates this delineation only to dissolve immediately, as in that Triptych gesture where the puzzle is swept away with a wave of the hand.

The heart of representation then manifests itself as the raw, principial reality of a feminine unrepresentable, richly thematized in the imaginary of Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la mer⁴⁹.

At the origin of Gilliatt, the novel's hero, there is no father, but first a cursed screen-house, " viewed ", i.e. a space of the father's ghostly haunting, then a name deformed by language, the name of la Gilliatt, " la femme morte ", the reprobate mother who, from one end of the novel to the other, is transmitted from Gilliatt to Déruchette by the trousseau bequeathed for the hymen.

In this space, the screen is omnipresent : hedge, fog, projected shadow, hypocritical mask, the screen hides the monster, abject figure of the witch of Torteval, of the octopus, of the " cut-throat of the Ocean ", and at the same time fascinating figure of the beloved virgin, herself identified with the boat. The point here is to break in and represent the unrepresentable beyond. The ubiquitous word "monster" expresses the contradiction between what horrifies and tears at the vision, but at the same time surfaces, exposes and shows itself. The descriptions are, as it were, interchangeable  " on ne sait quelle masse informe, une silhouette monstrueuse qui sifflait et crachait, une chose horrible qui râlait comme une bête et qui fumait comme un volcan, une espèce d'hydre bavant dans l'écume " (I, 3, 1). Here, Hugo describes Durande, the boat  it could have been the octopus. "Something inexpressible" is at stake, "this thing" that Hugo depicts in the steamboat, the Durande, and then in the octopus, to give it the metaphysical depth of the "Unknown". The Unknown is the uncircumscribed that the performance takes as its target and threshold  there's little history, few twists and turns in Hugo's work, whose legendarily slow and ample pace develops the space and depth of a situation, of a device, rather than the spring and dry relaxation of narrative and event. It's all about /// leave the narrative to enter the vision, and immediately explore its founding limit. This limit is an envelope, it tears, " sudden tearing of the shadow " (I, 1, 7) or torn fog that " half-opened like pincers ", " une déchirure se fait dans le brouillard " (I, 6, 6), " partout la déchirure ", (II, 1, 2), but delivers in the beyond only from the abyss.

The novel can therefore be seen as a gigantic dispositif : at its base and beginning, there is the space of the Channel Islands, worked by the formless. In the definitive edition (1883), the narrative is in fact deferred from an entire book, " L'Archipel de la Manche ", written in 1865, but left out of the first edition for economic reasons : the book describes the ruin of the relief worn away by the sea, the deformation of the islands by the exploitation of granite quarries (" Tout se déforme, même l'informe ", Arch., 22). The formlessness works and invades the scene, corrupting even the language, this French with Norman archaisms on which English is superimposed. The Anglo-Norman space, its gnawed islands, its ruined language, its undefined sea, is the space where the uncircumscribed works.

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At the heart of this space, and at the heart of the novel, is the Dover reef, where first Clubin's failed ruse grounding the Durande, then Gilliatt's struggle to save the steam engine, is played out. This struggle is organized around a double system of screens that confront Clubin and Gilliatt in succession, in the same order. First, there's the fog, which geometrically cuts across the performance space "like a vast, moving, vague cliff. It cut across the sea like a wall " ; " A soft gray partition cut across the boat " (I, 6, 4). The storm⁵⁰ presents itself to Gilliatt as the same liquid rampart, the same threatening hymen : " Out of it came a wall. A great wall of cloud, barring the expanse from side to side ", " this wall of mist ", " this wall of air " " increased the eclipse, and continued its gloomy interposition " (II, 3, 6). Faced with it, he builds barricades and claires-voies, screen against screen, to protect himself from the unknown, from the horror of the abyss. Gilliatt succeeds where Clubin had failed  he uses and turns the unknown against him, he participates in the beyond, taking advantage of the tide, capitalizing on a wreck tear, using water pressure to stem the waterway.

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Then comes the other screen, which confronts man no longer with the lyrical-epic beyond of the ocean, but with the mysterious beyond, the hollow heart of the reef, the octopus's cave. There, the screen no longer manifests itself as a bar, as a cut, but as an envelopment, as a marvellous wall and sinister linen⁵¹, as an embrace and convulsion of diaphragm⁵², as the neantized reverse side of feminine commerce (from which Clubin like Gilliat⁵³ are excluded). The hymen is at stake.

This double system of screens that regulates the Dovers' adventures is itself framed by Gilliatt 's voyeuristic passion: the screen is then the wall or hedge where Gilliatt settles as a voyeur to contemplate the bathers or the witch of Torteval  it is lurking in the crevice of a wall that he falls in love with Déruchette (I, 4, 1-2), to the point of risking Durande's rescue It's from the same crevice, on his return, that he overhears Pastor Ebenezer's declaration of love to Déruchette, and decides to forego the marriage that was his due. Finally, it is the same voyeuristic passion that, in the last pages of the novel, leads Gilliatt to the suicidal rock from which he can contemplate the blissful couple on the deck of the /// Cashmere (cloth-named boat, ultimate hymen fetish) passing then vanishing in front of him, as he drowns.

But the screen of the sea, the screen of the octopus and the screen of Gilliatt's desire⁵⁴ are merely different stratifications of the same face-to-face encounter with the uncircumscribed. The symbolic break, the envelopment and imaginary projection⁵⁵, the geometrical interposition between the voyeur and the thing seen tend the narrative towards this illusory beyond, until the test of truth, the reversal of the voyeuristic device : when Rantaine kills the customs officer (Clubin " guettait le guetteur ", I, 5, 8), when Gilliatt is caught by the octopus (" guetté, il guettait ", II, 4, 3) the stranger vanishes into the fatally inverted trap.

Meanwhile, in the suspense of the narrative, the unknown is the point of aim of the representation, designated as " something inexpressible ", as " this thing " between monster and wonder. Hugo establishes a complex system of equivalences. The monster is the octopus. The octopus is the hypocrite, like Clubin⁵⁶. But the octopus is also the feminine, horrifying opposite of the sublime Déruchette : " Durande and Déruchette, it's the same name. Déruchette is the diminutive " (I, 3, 7). It is under the name Durande Déruchette Lethierry that the young girl marries Ebenezer (III, 3, 3).

The boat is monster and wonder. It designates as its object that vague ambivalence constitutive of the novel's ruined space. The Durande is the fetish of the uncircumscribed and delivers its stake : a steam engine, it represents progress, crystallizing the crushing advent of modernity. The story unfolds against the backdrop of an unprecedented economic boom.

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The phantasmatic ambivalence of the monster and the marvel, which Hugolian screens regulate, contains beyond this economic stakes and significance (the whole story revolves around the fifty thousand francs stolen and then returned to mess Lethierry, the owner of the Durande), a political dimension. Hugo himself suggests that the storm is a revolution: " It seems that the ocean, which is a despot, can also be brought to its senses by barricades. " (II, 3, 6.) It is space as that which is inhabited by the people or by its phantasmatic equivalents, as the work of the thing, that is at stake (" il fallait être "de la chose" ", I, 5, 6  " Je viens pour la chose ", I, 5, 7), space of the " épars " and the " impalpable " at Plainmont (I, 5, 4), space of the " résidu ", " on ne sait quel gisement humain " molding at la Jacressarde, where " Les choses, sans compter les hommes [...] were indescribable" (I, 5, 6). It is in this spatial floating of the Thing that Hugo draws the spring, the resource of his political revolt.

In Les Misérables, the chapter " Éclaircissement et assombrissement " brings out of the unknown the anonymous word that decides to maintain the barricade until death :

" This word freed everyone's thoughts from the painful cloud of individual anxieties. [...] it was some ignored gown-holder, an unknown [...] who vanished into the darkness after having represented for a minute, in the light of a flash, the people and God. " (Les Misérables, V, 1, 3.)

The geometrical screen of the barricade is superimposed on the raised and lowered screen of revolt, this opening to the unknown knowledge of the community facing death.

The same screen is found in Quatrevingt treize, where the shadow theme identifies with the revolutionary process initiated by the Convention :

" At the same time /// that it gave off revolution, this assembly produced civilization. [...] From this chaos of shadows and this tumultuous flight of clouds came immense rays of light parallel to the eternal laws. Rays that remained on the horizon, visible forever in the sky of the peoples " (Quatret treize, II, 3, 9).

The Unknown diffuses. It is the uncircumscribed, uncontrollable place of horror and wonder⁵⁷, from which barbarism and law, death and refoundation spring. Hugo engulfs his characters in this machine of symbolic production : Gilliatt drowns in it ; Lantenac, in Quatrevingt treize, emerges from " l'ombre " to rush into the furnace, save the three little beggars and deliver himself by his bravery to the revolutionaries (III, 3, 2).

We saw, in Histoire, that the vision of the uncircumcised implied the cutting edge of an entrenchment  that was the knife-face of the mother, here it's the blade of the guillotine that threatens Lantenac and then Gauvain :

" a strange thing, [...] a silhouette made of straight, hard lines having the appearance of a Hebrew letter or one of those Egyptian hieroglyphs that were part of the alphabet of the ancient enigma " (III, 7, 6).

The screen of this blade-surface, this erected cut marks the limit of what is written and what remains an enigma in the manner of " the sort of immense capital H formed by the two Douvres having the Durande for a hyphen ", which signs with Hugo's initial the mysterious heart, the central and entrenched space of Travailleurs de la mer (II, 1, 1).

The decapitating, delineating face-to-face with the uncircumscribed operates the symbolic reversal :

" A hero emerged from the monster ; more than a hero, a man. More than a soul, a heart" (III, 6, 2.)

Hugolian space is this torn, sensitive and revolted surface of the hymen, a surface that takes on the dimensions of the sky :

" The sunset was no more than a bloody blade.
It was reminiscent of some great duel
Of a monster against a god, both the same size;
And it looked like the frightening sword of heaven,
Red and fallen to the ground after a battle. "

The lines from L'Année terrible describing insurgent Paris standing up to the enemy repeat the turning of the monster into a god that was already present in Les Travailleurs de la mer, this knife-edge reversal that identifies the process of representation with the very movement of revolution.

The screen thus subversively inhabits representation, in which it regulates the passage from the symbolic institution (narration, discourse, the work's obvie message) to its principle, which it covers and lets glimpse : uncircumscribed principle, spring of revolt, and more generally spring of crystallization which, through the logic of hymen, ensures symbolic refoundation.

 

The dissolution of the image prevents the return of the repressed into this closed field of representation, which reduces it, fetishizes it, emasculates it. The uncircumscribed then haunts representation as a nostalgic horizon of the world's immense randomness, as a lyrical beyond. The lyrical beyond thematizes in representation this vague space from which it has entrenched itself.

The history of the screen thus shifts unexpectedly in the nineteenth century through this opening of the lyrical beyond : to understand what was at stake in this opening, we need to start with the photographic revolution⁵⁸, which we need to relate to the daguerreotype, the diorama, the panorama and even the magic lantern. This technical discovery triggers a crisis /// of representation marked first and foremost, in geometric terms, by the disappearance, or eviction, of the creative hand  we move from a representational support on which the artist's hand traces something to a support installed in a device (camera obscura or panorama room) where light imprints transformations and meanings without the intervention of the human hand. In the past, the graphic screen interposed between artist and nature the creative gesture of the hand depositing signs (textual or iconic) on a support. Now, the Real is projected directly onto the medium of representation, the photosensitive plate or even, by metaphorical extension, the painter's canvas and the writer's page.

The old art of grafh;, angrily opposed to the new technical invention, appears imaginatively contaminated by it. Suddenly, the technical dimension of the medium makes sense  the writer is fascinated by the materiality of writing, the manuscript, the initials, graphology. As for creation, it is now conceived as a sensitive impression in the darkroom of the creative head, then as immediate execution on paper.

This contamination is experienced tragically. Frenhofer in Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu, Lantier in Zola's L'Œuvre , attempt the impossible fusion between the old graphic screen (the cut-screen of the graphosphere) and the new optical screen (the sensitive then photo-sensitive screen of the videosphere). This fusion decomposes the canvas and precipitates the artist's death.

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This is because, to triumph over this historical mutation, representation must conquer new spaces, identify the uncircumscribed with the infinite horizon of the world. In Romantic poetry, the uncircumscribed becomes a lyrical beyond. Freed from the surface of the canvas, the sheet of paper, the poet experiences his creation as bodily contact with nature, as the tactile proximity of " me " and the world.

This touching, this corporization compensates for the dehumanization caused by the technicized mechanism of representation-projection in the videosphere. Lyricism thus appears both as a return effect of grafh; (the body interposes itself between the artist and nature) and as the decisive installation of the new optical device of representation.

It's the touch, the corporization that compensates for the dehumanization caused by the technicized mechanism of representation-projection in the videosphere.

Behind the succession of schools, realist with Zola, then symbolist with Mallarmé, this historical mutation, beyond the reciprocal contaminations of the two competing models, only accentuates and confirms itself. The screen becomes fetishized, becomes a Japanese fan  it is thus manipulated, the ultimate and frivolous return of the grafh; in a space of representation that is now completely optical : the layout of the Mallarméan poem on the page, the cinematographic unfolding of a verbal flow that no punctuation cuts, but that a visual layout orders, henceforth constitute writing itself as a dead symbol and as a reborn index.

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The function of the title echoes this evolution in the mediological status of the written thing. The title is supposed to condense and signify the content of the work it opens. It is also the seductive, familiar, appropriate fetish, the advertisement that opens onto the unknown continent of a text that at first presents itself only as foreign. Finally, the title is the screen on which the two imaginary projections coincide, that of the reader, that of the artist, a double reverie opening onto the lyrical, uncircumscribed beyond of representation.

André Breton systematically exploits this triple function of the title⁵⁹ (synthetic designation, advertising fetishization, dreamlike projection). If he subverts the function of designation through a deranged/disturbing use of ready-made expression (Literature, Mont de piété, Les Pas perdus), if he exacerbates fetishization through open, outré, parodic recourse to advertising resources (the coffee bags of /// Félix Potin, signs for novelty stores, such as an advertisement for the newspaper Montorgueil dentaire), Breton is caught up in projection  behind the title of the collection Poisson soluble not only appears the painting by Matisse, whose luminous goldfish stand out against the dark green background of the canvas. Childhood images also surface, the butterfly that landed on André Breton's lips, " marvellous little living gag " and " jar of goldfish " that " circulates in my head ". The childish enigma of the poison fish conceals a haunting dislocation that lies at the very root of the surrealist deconstructive experience. The disquieting strangeness of this aquatic penis, which combines death (poison) and " mother-water " (Julien Gracq), constitutes the principial basis on which language unravels - to the point of Breton's temptation of suicide - and literature is refounded.

Thus manifests the first threshold that borders the screen of representation, that elusive limit through which the continual involution that incorporates the outside of reality into the inside of representation takes place. The second threshold is interior and more secret. The screen covers another uncircumscribed, intimate, more than mysterious, properly incomprehensible. To raise the screen in the representation is to confront a "something" that nothing structures, yet whose unassignable presence appears foundational. This " something " that takes the place of a foundation for representation has to do with the feminine (just as ivorywork has to do with Emma, the puzzle with the dead mother, or Durande with Déruchette), so that representing always consists, in some way, in representing the feminine. The feminine thus thematizes the elusive beyond of representation.

It is indeed this en-deçà that Brantôme's Les Dames galantes⁶⁰ aims for, in the staging of the Duc d'Alençon's " tres-belle coupe d'argent doré ", where " estoyent carved bien gentiment et subtillement au burin plusieurs figures de l'Aretin " and animal couplings, including that of the lion and lioness, which an error by Aristotle caused to be reputed monstrous until the eighteenth century.

When the duke " festinoit les dames et filles de la cour ", he obliged them to drink the wine from this cup. Brantôme describes their reactions and speeches: " le plus et le meilleur estoit à contempler " the constrained looks and hypocritical posture of these innocent faces that the images incited to debauchery. " Bref, cette coupe faisoit de terribles effets, tant y estoyent penetrantes ces images, visions et perspectives ".

These images of the cup, contemplated in the secrecy of the lady's tête-à-tête with the wine, remain invisible to the other guests, who observe their effects on the face of the lady who has lent herself to the game. In its own way, then, the cup is indescribable. The women's contentment and discourse are a facade for what's going on inside them, for what lies beyond feminine jouissance. The cup doesn't work any magic; it's the interface between jouissance and representation, between the game of the "little cruet" in the secrecy of the alcove and the pleasurable but lawful public consumption of the feast. The image, somewhere between lust and bestiality, represents this boundary : it is not the thing itself, but its representation, a goldsmith's work that can be exhibited at the banquet ; the obscene engraving, however, is visible only to the drinker, with whom it establishes a dangerous intimacy  the engraving thus lies below the festive verbalization it allows, where the sexual content, the " sallauderies " are covered over, distanced, evaded :

" Les unes disoyent : Voilà de belles crotesques ! Les autres : Voylà de plaisantes mommeries ! Les unes disoyent : Voylà de beaux images ! The others : /// Voylà beautiful mirrors ! Les unes disoyent : L'orfevre estoit bien à loisir de s'amuser à faire ces fadezes ! Les autres disoyent : Et vous, Monsieur, encore plus d'avoir acheté ce beau hanap. "

Grotesque, mômerie, image, mirror, fadaise, hanap : words revolve around the thing, which they metonymize, covering, obliterating thus the obscene spring of its below, this " nothing that picquast them to the mitant of the body ".

Brantôme contrasts his cut with the one " que trouva Renault de Montauban en ce chasteau dont parle l'Arioste " in chants 42 and 43 of Roland furieux. Renaud meets a knight in the forest who, after asking him if he was married, invites him to his palace, at the center of which, in a square courtyard, stands a fountain adorned with eight statues of women each leaning on two figures of praise singers. Next to the fountain, a feasting table is set. At the end of the meal, the chatelain brings a golden cup full of wine and puts Renaud to the test:

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che se porti il cimier di Cornovaglia
il vin ti spargerai tutto sul petto,
né gocciola sarà ch'in bocca saglia :
ma s'hai moglie fedel, tu berai netto (ch. 42, str. 103, vv. 2-5)
" If you wear the horns (the Cornish crest), the wine will spill over your chest, and not a drop will enter your mouth, but if you have a faithful wife, you will drink neat. "

Renaud refuses the ordeal. The squire, after congratulating him on his marital confidence, tells him of his misfortunes : it was the fairy Mélisse who gave him this cup, which Morgane (or Morgue) had given to her brother Arthur to discover Guinevere's betrayal⁶¹. He was able to drink unhindered, but Mélisse then gave him the features of a handsome local young man and, with a few gems, he easily seduced his own wife, causing the young woman to flee to the young lord he had counterfeited.

Brantôme contrasts his cup, which naturally, but without scandal, produces cuckolds, with Ariosto's, which publicly reveals infidelity. In Brantôme, the cup introduces the cut of an en-deçà and a façade, the secret vision and desire aroused by the cup opposing the circumvented words of the banquet, whereas in Ariosto the cup, which gives nothing away to be seen, does not function as a fetish, forbids this cut of jouissance and of the scene by the revelation it triggers, in a screenless device.

The château does, however, constitute a device that prepares the screen. This fortress with its fountain of living water allegorizes the female sex in an ambivalent way through the marvelous statues of the celebration of the fin amor and through the diabolical ordeal of the cup, which is nothing other than, in the face of courtly myth, the test of reality. The castle sets up the logic of the hymen: it is the narrative trap that, in Ariosto, blocks the inflationary flow of events in the enclosed space of mystery and ordeal; it is the trap in which the phallic flight of discourse is caught (note the discrepancy between the episode of the cup and the story of the squire, where it is not the cup that reveals his wife's infidelity). But Ariosto's cup is also, at the antipodes of the trap, that focal point that prepares the stage for crystallization, that concentration of speech symbolized by the poets' open mouths surmounted by female statues, in a position that reverses that of Aretin's figures.

Brantôme fetishizes Ariosto's device, constitutes as an object this cup which, refused by Renaud, merely stopped fleetingly only to immediately relaunch the narrative sequence (Ma lasciate, Signor, ch'io mi ripose, at the end of Canto 42, between the appearance of the cup and Renaud's refusal).

From the scene of the Breton cycle evoked by Ariosto to the face-off between Renaud and the chatelain, /// then at the Duc d'Alençon's feast in Brantôme, the cup is gradually transformed from a narrative motif into a screen device. The symbolic transformation that takes place in the representation of female jouissance, the establishment of a taxonomy of ladies' desire pass through this establishment of the screen as a device within the text, inseparable from the interplay of intertextual screens (Boccaccio, Bandel, Marguerite de Navarre).

With Aragon⁶², this mystery of the woman is tied up in Henri Matisse, roman, with the enigma of the Ingres painting, this Madame de Senonnes whose veil represents both the secret of a creation that seems so easy to Matisse, and its flip side, Aragon's difficult relationship to novelistic creation. The enigma then appears as an enigma of what lies behind the constitutive screen of the gaze, where the horror of the real and the principle of all symbolic elaboration come together.

To express this enigma, manifested in writing by the courtly celebration of Elsa, Aragon, unable in the '40s to confront the novel, then takes the long detour of painting, as if the resistance there were less, the secret more accessible. But painting is only summoned to better manifest the return, the resistance of textuality sheltered by the protective device of the screen. Thus, in Aurélien, the mask of l'Inconnue de la Seine, the double face of Bérénice whose open eyes paradoxically form a screen, but also Aurelien's garçonnière encamped at the tip of Ile Saint-Louis, between the two legs of the Seine, represent the Thing to which writing tends, fascinated, and shelter it at the same time, reinstating in representation that share of shadow that the civilization of the image tends to threaten.

Veiled gazes

The second aspect of a theory of representation based on the screen concerns not the structural model, but the phenomenological mechanism at work here. We have seen how the screen is dependent on a certain culture of the gaze, if not inaugurated, at least masterfully formalized by Alberti's De pictura. It is because Alberti defines vision as the projection of a cone that is cut by the screen-image of representation, and theorizes pictorial representation as the adaptation of the visual pyramid to the pictorial support, that the screen imposes itself in our culture, discreetly but, so to speak, hegemonically, as the phenomenological mechanism that will serve as a model for all representations.

The phenomenology of the gaze thus constitutes the heart of the process of representation. At the origin of the work, at the beginning of all representation, a gaze is forbidden, cut off, veiled. We have seen that it is impossible to envisage mimesis as a universally dual, technically regulated relationship between a reality and an imitation: the whole of classical culture is inhabited by this mediating gesture of the hand, by this creative hand that interposes itself between nature and the work⁶³. But the hand could be just one of the avatars of grafhv's own interposition. Mimesis originates first and foremost in these veiled glances that thematize its relationship to the uncircumscribed, that fundamental frustration of the visual cone that had to be intercepted, stopped for the image to take on consistency.

To conceal the gaze with the hand is therefore first and foremost to concretely figure what, in any case, for there to be representation, is a screen. The gesture is inaugural, and takes on a sacred dimension. Shielding then proceeds from a double movement: it is to conceal the unspeakable, but to designate it all the same, indirectly, by suggesting through the image what is there behind  to represent David playing the harp in front of Saul, Rembrandt veils the king's face, overcome by emotion and overcome by madness. The velvet curtain signifies the night that overtakes the mind. /// of the king and which no representation could directly depict, in the same way that Timanthe had represented, in his Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon veiled because the painful face of a sacrificing father exceeded all figuration⁶⁴.

The gesture of veiling the gaze is therefore twofold. It is the gesture of Agamemnon veiling his pain in his hands before the sacrifice of Iphigenia ; it is the gesture of man sheltering his eyes to contemplate the forbidden light of God⁶⁵. What we wish to see is crossed out each time, but signified precisely because it is crossed out. Here, the screen enables us to grasp the essential articulation between desire and mimesis. This articulation is double, and here we find the double threshold of representation, the intimate threshold of pain and the threshold open to the exteriority of the sacred.

There is the gesture of veiling  there is also the figure of the veil, which curiously signifies the place and reverse of the Law, shame and virtue. Whether an image of veiled virtue in the threatened intimacy of the Enlightenment, or a veil of modesty retrenching women as a metaphor for political repression in the dictatorships of the Islamic world, the process of masking always presents itself as, or on the contrary unleashes against it, a detour, a ruse to represent the unrepresentable. Screening becomes the necessary condition for a representation that must protect itself. The screen reveals more than just the subversive mechanics of circumventing the forbidden: the figure of the veil is, ambivalently, the obverse and reverse of the Law insofar as it is introjected into representation and incorporated into the ego, even if the latter refuses to accept it. The screen is then no longer the artifice, the enemy, but the very support of revolt and symbolic refoundation.

This symbolic reversal of the screen is particularly noticeable in Diderot's Lettres à Sophie Volland⁶⁶. At the beginning of this correspondence, there is the black hole of the first 134 lost letters and, in 1759, this inaugural catrastrophe of an unspeakable, torturous scene, Mme Volland probably surprising her daughter in the philosopher's arms.

From then on, shame and prohibition shattered the candor of the affair, opening up the relationship to literature, right up to Diderot's last years. From then on, the letter writer's relationship with the woman he calls Sophie will always be conceived in the mode of interposition, of the triangulation of desire. First and foremost, it is the mother's presence that acts as a screen:

Sophie's mother's presence acts as a screen.

" This mother will therefore prevent all the sweet and innocent things we meditate " (4. 06. 59).

Mme Volland, the monstrous Morphyse, blocks sexual communion, provokes absenteeism, melancholy depression and the funereal reverie of the walk to Marly (10. 05). But the affair then returns as a representation of " sweet and innocent things ", as a gentle liaison. The mother separates the forbidden beyond, the place of unrepresentable knowledge, the sofiva pursued by the philosopher's desire, from the licit, innocent beyond, where correspondence will unfold, the space of language, conversation and philosophical elaboration. Between the two, she stands as an archaic enigma:

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" Your mother's soul is sealed with the seven seals of the Apocalypse. On her forehead is written : mistère. I saw two sphinxes in Marli, and I remembered her. She has promised us, she has promised herself more than she is able to keep." (10.05.59.)

Mme Volland guards the sacred enclosure of Sophie's body  the comparison with the sphinx implicitly identifies this body with the forbidden body of Jocasta : Diderot speaks only four times, belatedly and allusively, of his mother in his writings, but gives her first name to his two daughters.

Desire /// Sophie's desire is at once sexual desire, desire for knowledge and desire for the mother, represented by the motif of interposition. Morphyse is a figure from the Apocalypse. But soon it is the medium of the letter that is compared to a chapter of the Apocalypse (28. 07. 62), when paper itself is not, materially, a space of darkness where writing dissolves. Having returned late from a show, Diderot writes in the dark:

Diderot's letter is a medium.

" Wherever there will be nothing, read that I love you " (10. 06. 59).

The figure of Mme Legendre, the homosexual and incestuous sister, thus comes to stand between Diderot and Sophie only as a substitute for the fading mother, the amiable and libertine, all in all representable, flip side of the principial forbidden and depression. She is not only the Uranian Urania who steals her friend from the jealous lover; she relays the mother's enigma, that mystery of the screen that between desire and thing, between shame and virtue, envelops a certain knowledge.

Diderot relates to Sophie an entire conversation with Mme Legendre on the meaning of " je vous aime " :

" Common things are riddles that are explained to her. " (20. 09. 65.)

Mrs Legendre seems to refuse to understand the sexual implication of such a statement. By her refusal, and beyond that by her position in the epistolary exchange, she figures the reality of female jouissance and sex and at the same time the forbidden, the enigma enveloping this reality.

" And then little by little I bring her to recognize that she really desires something more than what she confesses " (ibid.).

The something below the screen constitutes this limit of representation that thematizes modesty and turns into the knowledge of virtue. To the two sisters, Diderot writes :

" Don't be mortified that I'm teaching you something in literature and phylosophy. Wouldn't you be proud enough all your lives to be my mistresses in morals, and especially in practical morals ? You know what is right, you feel what is just, you have a sensitive heart and a delicate mind  it is you who are men, and it is I who am the cicada making noise in the countryside. " (20. 10. 60.)

The sexual inversion solicited by Uranie and Sophie's relationship metaphorizes the symbolic reversal that, in female dereliction, lays the foundations of Enlightenment morality and virtue. The Uranian enigma screens this shifting en-deçà and at the same time nourishes its mechanism.

The metaphors of the curtain, the box, repeatedly relay this device, as in this evocation of Sophie's passionate speech complacently received in confidence by Uranie :

" Your sister likes you ; I admire how she lends herself to your delirium. Let's not quite lift that little curtain ; it's quite enough to have pushed aside one point of it. If you only knew, my friend, how sullen the most passionate speeches are to those who listen to them in cold blood ! Uranie sees us both in the hut through the bars  she comes to lean on the hole and chat cheerfully with us. It's wisdom that takes a turn at Petites-Maisons, and conceals from the locals, out of humanity, that they are mad. " (22. 09. 61.)

Uranie is wisdom, σοφία, Sophie. The tempting figure turns into the legislating figure, the jealous Other is the desired Same. The screen device is then threatened. Between Uranie and Sophie, the screen of mystery must be preserved: the little curtain of the alcove, the curtain of intimacy between Diderot and Sophie, must not be lifted, and this separation must be maintained even in burlesque form; the alcove curtain then becomes the bars of the hut, the grille separating the shut-ins of the madhouse from their charitable visitors. The performance thus /// Uranie, re-establishes the liaison, the communion of Diderot and Sophie, under the inquisitive eye of the beautiful reasoner, which is superimposed on older glances, the horrifying eye of Morphyse, the apotropaic eye of the sphinx of 1759.

The screen device that structures the Lettres à Sophie Volland therefore doesn't just respond to a Diderotian fantasy of maternal interception, reactivated by the figures of Morphyse and Uranie. It is the imaginary relay of the symbolic factory that, in Diderot, turns the feminine mystery of libertinage into an intellectual project, a philosophical elaboration : the cackling of the Bijoux is modeled in the Lettre sur les sourds ; jealousy towards Uranie in the Lettres à Sophie Volland is turned into feminine revolt in La Religieuse ; the mystery of Jacques's loves is politicized into another figure, noble and rebellious, the valet, the Seneca of the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron.

The unity of the corporeal and the political in the operation of the screen is even clearer in Salman Rushdie's novel titled Shame, la honte⁶⁷. The screen of Shame is above all the screen of names : the name of the country first, this Pakistan forming a palimpsest on the past, a word fabricated to obscure the Indian past of this land of artificial borders. The characters' names are also screens, the hero Omar Khayyam Shakil borrowing his name from that of the forgotten medieval Persian poet, successfully translated and betrayed into English in the nineteenth century, in the manner of Rushdie himself, translated man, exiled from his own language to write the off-center, distorted history of his country. Shakil's brother is Babar, named after the sixteenth-century Mongol conqueror : yet, by inversion, Babar will be the resistance fighter and writer, Shakil the unashamed man who crosses screens.

The onomastic screen generalizes into a linguistic  screen: Rushdie perpetually shifts the narrative point of view, superimposing two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same place. He creates " chutneified " or agglutinated terms (like nextwithoutsaying  or whichwhichwhich) that make images in the manner of Arabic calligrams. He practices the superimposition of planes, as at the end of the novel, when the description of the dictator's crimes is syncopated by flashbacks to the bestial destiny of his daughter Sufiya Zinobia, an allegory of Shame that corporates the political horror perpetrated by the father.

The construction of the language, the layout of the narrative sequences each participate in their own way in this concatenation of screens, not so much projection screens (although the cinema screen plays some role here where death, political and burlesque, comes into play) as screens sliding one over the other, superimposing each other in the manner of Claude Simon's images, to cover the unrepresentable depth of the political scene.

This covering is corporatized by the figures, magical or demented, of the forbidden feminine. These are Shakil's three sister-mothers. It's Bilquis perpetually enveloped in the screens of modesty, from the cloak thrown over her by young Raza Hyder to the partitions behind which he entrenches her in the palace, the black fabrics and veils that cover her, the shrouds she sews she's Sufiya Zinobia, Raza's daughter and then Shakil's wife, the pure and idiotic woman who has remained half-debilitated since her childhood illness, whose blushing body symptomizes the shame of father and country.

Facing this overlay, this symptomatization of shame in name, language, body, Rushdie disposes of the perverse eye of Omar Khayyam Shakil discovering the esoteric library behind the screen of the thirty birds (the screen of jouissance ?), scrutinizing the world in the crevice of a wall, finally professionalizing his voyeurism when he becomes a doctor. Shakil is the gaze stripped of shame  he is the /// shameless narrator-voyeur  shame is the screen, the feminine envelope that covers the barbarity of the world. Representing the world presupposes a shameless gaze  representing the unspeakable presupposes a disqualified gaze.

What you need to know

Finally, a theory of representation based on the screen presupposes a hermeneutic of subversion and revolt, radically opposed to the rhetorics of representation, for whom the creative act is first and foremost an act of submission (to technical rules, an ideological framework, even an imaginary grid). Placing the screen at the heart of representation means tending the latter entirely towards the transgressive act of lifting the screen, a lifting that we hope will reveal what we need to know.

The object of this knowledge may be aesthetic : the entire literature of the Salons is concerned with identifying the ideal model of the Beautiful⁶⁸ that lies behind the more or less successful productions of the exhibitions it reports on. The painter's work, immediately visible to the viewer but enclosed in its technical particularism, is a screen for the painter's ideal, universal but hidden. To lift the screen is not so much to find the painter's secret as to encounter the very secret of nature. Lifting the screen is the artist's dream : to open the work to the mystery of the base on which it rests, to the very principle of its representation, not only its technical principle (its tools, its medium), but, indissolubly, its symbolic principle.

What device better represents transgression than one that places the voyeur in the exposed position of a precarious discovery ? The voyeuristic apprenticeship involves the perilous lifting of a screen that allows access to a knowledge that is not only sexual, but philosophical, the very knowledge of the things of the world. It is through these things glimpsed, fleetingly revealed, through this incomprehensible heart of representation that comes to the surface behind a door or on a staircase, that the hermeneutic quest of the apprentice novel's subject, libertine heroine or worldly hero, takes place.

For libertines⁶⁹, the unveiling of the sexual scene and the development of deist or even atheist discourse participate in the same liberating gesture, the same lifting of the screen. For the screen of the Enlightenment is above all a screen that is lifted, at a time when the rhetorical structure of mimesis is entering a crisis, and the images that emerge from its collapse oscillate between the promise of freedom and emancipation and the sign of a cultural catastrophe and a relapse into barbarism.

At Balzac⁷⁰, scenes glimpsed by stealth, half-open doors, prying windows, metaphors of the veil being torn, function at first glance as an interception between the hero and the world. But this interception cannot be identified exclusively either with the hero's separation from the world, or even, as we have seen in the libertine novel, with the hero's understanding of the world. Goriot, surprised by Rastignac's crushing of his richly carved vermeil crockery, transforms refined scultpure into a shapeless mass of stamped ingot paste. As for the small glass door of the studio where David Séchard works, it too hides paper in the form not of a writing surface, but of paste. Behind the screen, the Balzacian object is deformed, moving away from classical mimesis to represent the modernity of the world. Goriot's ingots, David's reams of paper, function as screens for phantasmatic projection: Goriot, who lives vicariously, moulds his silverware, dreaming of his daughters' happiness, projecting himself, through the money he provides, into their world; David moulds his nettles, dreaming of fortune and glory; the mysterious, indescribable object surprised by the /// The voyeur is not only intercepted by doors, windows or indiscreet partitions  it is the medium in which to project imaginations that have become indexical...

For the flip side of voyeuristic entrevision is projection : the subject does not force knowledge of the world  something of the world on the contrary is projected into him. The blank screen of the novelistic character's consciousness suddenly represents that something that should not have been seen. A reality imposes itself on a surface. The very idea of a visual surface is identified with the knowledge of reality that the " me " introjects, with this inner gaze that splits and founds the law.

Thus, the three stories that make up Jean Giono's Un Roi sans divertissement⁷¹ foreground the motif of the quest, tending towards what must be known, as evidenced by the obsessive return of this verb in the text. The story of the murders committed by V. in a small mountain village and his execution by Gendarmerie Captain Langlois is presented as the elucidation of a " mystery " (55)⁷² that goes beyond that of the police investigation and touches on the conjunction of death and the beauty of blood standing out against the snow⁷³ the story of the hunt organized the following year by Langlois, who had become commandant de louveterie, and ending with the execution of the wolf cornered on a rocky outcrop, tightens the noose around a mystery that is not so much that of the beast as that of Langlois himself, whose inner decline is revealed the third story, of Langlois's marriage and suicide, tracks behind the mystery of " la marche du monde " (157) that of the man's relationship to the feminine, a relationship that is disappointing and oppressive, from the strange friendship that binds him to Saucisse and Mrs. Tim to the enigmatic visit to the " embroiderer " locked in her house, with its bulging windows, and finally the marriage from which nothing is to be inferred (" Perfect," says Langlois, "that's exactly what it is : to deduce nothing ", p.221) with a girl from Grenoble who won't ask any questions.

The story in a way covers an enigma that turns from the object (the criminal, the beast, the woman are here the indescribable objects, in the manner of Binet's ivoireries or Brantôme's cup) to the subject (Langlois) and presents itself as a stake in knowledge and a face-to-face encounter with death, the same face-to-face encounter that made the mother's face appear from behind the screen in Claude Simon's Histoire or the octopus in Les Travailleurs de la mer. The enigma unravels the narrative, which Giono baffles to his heart's content by changing narrators (from the impersonal investigator to Frédéric II, to the " nous " of the village community, to Saucisse, Langlois's confidante), that is, above all, by floating, by preventing the fixation of a point of view. The object of the narrative also floats  it does not immediately, and never definitively, appear that Langlois is what must be known, the one whose destructive mystery must be unraveled.

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A fluctuating narrator narrates something indeterminate  in bits and pieces: you couldn't get out of narration more decisively. Moreover, with Langlois, " rien ne signifiait rien " (119) : another semiology is at play. What imposes itself in the text as order and recurrence is rather of the order of the device, and of a screen device : it is first of all the beech tree (9, 33, 37, 40, 63) whose branches hide the white face of the last dead woman, Dorothée " lying on bones " (79), covering the other dead. But the envelopment of the beech's branches, this high screen, could be nothing more than a metaphor for the envelopment of the clouds and then of the snow that covers the village from above (14-15, 24), where the stain " of fresh pink blood " that /// makes a window behind the falling flakes prefigures the haunting return of blood standing out against the white expanse (25, 40, 44, 49, 146, 170, 246), like a repetition of the scene from Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval⁷⁴.

Behind the screen is the turning of the monstrous into beauty, of crime into justice. From the outset, Giono presents the beech tree as a figure of this principial reversal (9), at once reassuring and disquieting, like the arches of the stables (28-29) that make up the village's infrastructure, marked by entanglement, intertwining, in contrast to the " straight walls, those angles like up there that make cardboard, [...] that make 1843, modern ; [...] while, outside, [...] prowl the eternal threats. "

Covered by the beech tree, by the fog like a " curtain of clouds ", by the vaults, or by the superimposition of images (like that of the clockwork shepherdess on Dorothée's dead face when Frederick II discovers her, p.69, or the images of the wolf, p.137), this ageless en-deçà of the screen, between pain and the sacred, between Iphigénie and epiphany, is properly incomprehensible. The word comes up several times, first in reference to Ravanel's pig being slashed by the homicidal maniac (" ça, alors, c'était incompréhensible ! So incomprehensible, so disgusting ", p. 22), then to describe the figure of Anselmie the villager overwhelmed by grief for her missing man (" incomprehensible body, in petticoats, bodices, turnings, belts, that jiggle, fagotent and entourloupent him on all sides à contresens ", p. 48), then to note the obscurity of Frederick II's motives in tracking V. the criminal on the mountain (" Perhaps even a little ashamed to have come this far with incomprehensible reasons ", p. 71), and finally to pose the ultimate certainty of a bloodhound that animated Langlois and no longer animates him (" I don't believe, myself, that a man can be so different from other men as to have incomprehensible reasons ", p. 161).

The incomprehensible gradually wins over Langlois, conveyed by the knowledge of the phallic woman, of Saucisse, the ex-prostitute of the soldiery : " You say that nothing is done by the operation of the Holy Spirit and I say that perhaps everything is done by the operation of the Holy Spirit precisely " (162).

The feminine gradually emerges in the novel, from behind the  screen; it gains the space of representation, disrupting sexual difference. It begins with Langlois's clothing, back in the village as a commander, his "impeccable boots [...] that made his foot smaller than a woman's". Langlois becomes feminized by the elegance of his clothing, and passive: little by little, he comes under the domination of the black mother and the whore, Mrs. Tim and Saucisse. His horse, who is his double (97), is affected by the same ambivalence : " D'ailleurs, Langlois lui disait : "Ah ! coquine" (however it was indeed a horse and not a mare) " (95). Saucisse, the ex-prostitute with the eerily phallic name " la dame du café de la route ", takes part in the beating in a man's coat: " But what's sticking out of that coat ? Isn't that the dress we saw him in this morning ? " (142.) As for the evocation of Langlois's military past in Algeria, it proceeds in reverse transvestism : " he said that it wasn't rabbit skin to have your ass rubbed by arbis disguised as women " (160).

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Finally, the scene at the home of the " brodeuse ", this mysterious widow entrenched in the dark underbelly of her house with its bulging gates, cluttered with the ghostly vestiges of a past splendor, places Langlois in the position of the silent spectator entangled in the feminine interplay of a dialogue about linen, sewing and clothing, while the figure /// The male figure is reduced to the indistinguishable figure of a full-length portrait plunged into shadow.

The male figure is reduced to the indistinguishable figure of a full-length portrait plunged into shadow.

Langlois then falls under the screen : " Langlois, after having been pallid, had turned his head slightly away to cover his face with shadow and conceal his contentment " (177) ; the linen makes a screen for Saucisse voyeuse : " I took as a pretext the examination of a bubbled satin apron [...] to change places and try to catch a better glimpse of Langlois " (179). Here, Langlois takes the place of the hunted beast. He sinks into his armchair: " I placed the apron in front of me in such a way that, by showing a deep and somewhat prolonged admiration, I was able to realize that the skin of Langlois's temple was smooth and without a crease  it was that he was in contemplation " (180). Langlois contemplates the tableau, the specter of a lost and/or inaccessible, incomprehensible masculinity. He melts into this spectral shadow enveloped and uncovered by the embroiderer's linen, the culmination of the recurring reference to clothing, to envelopment, to everything that constitutes the feminine covering of the thing, to this hymen that the novel represents first under the figure of the beautiful blood spilt, then as a screen of linen (we find again the devices of Shame), finally as a marriage that precipitates into death.

The hymen envelops, but destroys, as old Saucisse howls, at eighty : " To think that we spent our lives, we, our wives and our children, and that we had our dining rooms in the living guts of some kind of big bug " (186).

Relating Un Roi sans divertissement with two other chronicles, Les Grands chemins and Deux cavaliers de l'orage allows us to draw, behind the recurrence of these enveloping screens, the projection of the same narcissistic fantasy.

In Gerhard Meier's The Canal⁷⁵, the episode built around the evocation of Sacco and Vanzetti combines the poetic construction that moves the writing around the screen-memory and its recollection and the screen-objects that are the alarm clock, the autumn leaf, the sheet stretched for the outdoor film projection : what is projected onto the white screen awakens a dangerous knowledge mysteriously attached to the unrepresentable killing of the two victims.

This projected knowledge, whether of the order of personal fantasy or horrified vision of the world, then reveals its affinity with death : here we find the profound articulation of the Rousseauist scene, which behind the screen of Proserpine's veil projects the killing of the mother as symbolic refoundation.

 

Stéphane Lojkine, August 1999

Notes

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The iconographic device could be inspired by the Morts de Socrate, very much in vogue in the 1760s-1770s (Nicolas Wagner, " Un thème des lumières : la femme qui meurt ", L'Information littéraire, n°29.3, June 1997, pp. 109-114).

Julie on the eve of her death had solemnly marked her attachment to Protestantism :" I have lived and I die in the Protestant communion which draws its sole rule from Holy Scripture and reason " (p. 714).

Περιάγειν, τετραμμένος, ἀποστρεφόμενον: the rich vocabulary of turning around shows enough that this is the essential movement of Platonic unveiling.

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