Moliere's devots de la medecine: Doctors and faux devots viewed through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's oracle effect

The oracle effect, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu in Language and Symbolic Power, is a sociolinguistic phenomenon whereby even ordinary discourse used by social agents claiming affiliation with higher powers resonates with extraordinary pragmatic force for believers in those higher powers. Bringing Bourdieu's oracle effect to bear upon the relationship uniting Moliere's faux devots, doctors, and patriarchs, I analyze Moliere's medical plays as attempts to recast in the role of the doctor the oracular deceiver Moliere was initially prevented from staging in Tartuffe and Dom Juan.;Once Tartuffe was banned (1664) and Dom Juan withdrawn (1665), Moliere recasts the relationship subordinating Orgon to his devot Tartuffe in analogous relationships subordinating patriarchal believers to their oracular physicians. Moliere gives his doctors increasingly large roles and more influence over family affairs. L'Amour medecin (1665), Le Medecin malgre lui (1666), Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669), and Le Malade imaginaire (1673) all emphasize the social power of Faculte delegates, whether "real" or "self-named." In Moliere's oeuvre, performative medical declarations--ordonnances--are used like religious declarations--anathemes, excommunications--to exact belief, veneration, and obedience for oracles claiming affiliation with the Parisian Faculte de medecine. Oracular imposition works because Moliere's fathers look to higher powers to (re)empower them to govern an unruly family.;I conclude that Moliere's doctors are more than comic adjuvants who merely dupe fathers into allowing young couples to marry; they are more than the amalgamated mire and medico of French farce and Italian commedia. Instead, doctors become ominous main characters like Tartuffe, devots de la medecine vying for social power. Moliere insists that oracular medical practice is comical precisely because it is purely discursive, therefore incapable of actually effecting material realities such as sickness and health. Yet the oracular discourse deployed by Moliere's doctors is pragmatically effective--performative--for one type of character--Moliere's patriarchs. In them this discourse produces extreme, and extremely comical, demonstrations of belief.