Seeing things: The dire visibility of the French baroque

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has characterized in her work La folie du voir (1986) the period commonly called the "baroque" in early modern Europe as the privileged moment of the "folly of seeing." The articulation of a principle of "Etre, c'est voir" [to be is to see] during the years 1580--1670 is for Buci-Glucksmann emblematic of the baroque eye (I?). Her title indicates also an extravagance, an insanity of vision that arises from the conjunction of an admiration for the marvelous and the rhetoric of mathesis, taxinomia and genesis that Michel Foucault sees in the Classical episteme. The baroque effervescence of marvelous objects, colonial fetishes and early modern clutter catalogued in cabinets of curiosities and encyclopedic museums, revels in hypotyposis, the rhetorical "laying before the eyes" of these objects.; The arrangement ["dispositif"] of Jacques Lacan and the baroque in Buci-Glucksmann's reading teases out Lacan's own invitation to read the baroque in his essay on anamorphosis. His famous reading of Holbein's painting The Ambassador unearths the vanitas skull that is hidden obliquely by anamorphosis, which mirrors the subject seeing himself in retrospective hallucination. This common symbol of death, its gaze and its work upon the early modern subject's body are all part of what I call the "dire visibility" of the period---a matrix of vision associated with terror and incessant repetition of Death. Death's massiveness, its bodily weight, constellates in three chapters. The first is on Maurice Sceve's Delie, where I give a critical reading of the conjunction of gender and death in the written and the seen the dire le visible of the emblem. The second chapter is more international in focus due to seventeenth century alchemy's Catholic nature. I study the grotesque and abject body in Ben Jonson, Michael Maier and Annibal Barlet. The last chapter is on the body and political space in seventeenth century comet literature, comparing an early seventeenth century popular pamphlet with the portrait of the king in Pierre Bayle's Pensees diverses sur la comete (1683).