ON RACINE

by

Roland Barthes

Translatedfrom the French by

Richard Howard

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

On Racine by Roland Barthes
Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 83-62615
ISBN: 0-933826-56-7 (paperback)

Original title Sur Racine, ©Club Fran«<ais du Livre, 1960, and Editions du Seuil,
1963. English translation copyright © 1964 by Hill and Wang, Inc. All rights
reserved. Published by arrangement with Hill and Wang, Inc., a division of Far­
rar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Publication of this book has been made possible in part by grants from the National En­
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 TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

The literal versions of the quotations from Racine serve

an illustrative purpose only; they are not intended to stand
as independent translations.-R.H.
 FOREWORD

THESE THREE essays on Racine are the result of vari­

ous circumstances, and I shall not attempt to give them
a retrospective unity here.
The first ( "Racinian Man" ) appeared in the edition of
Racine's plays published in 1960 by the Club Fran�ais du
Livre. Its language is somewhat psychoanalytical, though
not its treatment: in principle, because there already exists
an excellent psychoanalytic study of Racine, by Charles
Mauron,1 to which I owe a great deal; in fact, because the
analysis presented here is not concerned with Racine at all,
but only with the Racinian hero: it avoids inferring from
the work to the author and from the author to the work;
it is a deliberately closed analysis : I have put myself in
Racine's tragic world and tried to describe its population
(which may readily be abstracted under the concept Homo
racinianus ) , without reference to any source in this world
( to be found, for instance, in history or biography ) . What
I have attempted to reconstrsct is a kind of Racinian
anthropology, both structural and psychoanalytic : struc­
tural in content, because tragedy is here treated as a system
of units ( "figures" ) and functions;2 psychoanalytic in
form, because only an approach ready to acknowledge the
fear of the world, as I believe psychoanalysis is, seems to
1 Charles Mauron, L'Inconsci.ent dans l'oouvre et la vie de

Racine (Gap, Ophrys, 19 57).

2 This first essay is divided into two parts. One might say, in

structural terms, that the first is systematic (it analyzes figures and
functions ) and the second sy!ltagmatic (it considers in extension
the systematic elements at the level of each work ) .
VII
vm FOREWORD

me suitable for dealing with the image of man confined.

The second essay ( "Racine Spoken" ) is a review of the
Theatre National Populaire performance of Phedre.3 The
occasion is past, of course, but affords an opportunity to
compare psychological and tragic interpretations, and by
so doing to determine whether Racine can still be acted.
Moreover, although this essay is concerned with a prob­
lem of theatre, it will be seen that the Racinian actor is
praised only insofar as he renounces the prestige of the
traditional notion of character for that of figure, in other
words, for the form of a tragic function, as analyzed in the
first part.
As for the third essay ( "History or Literature?") , it is
entirely concerned, through Racine, with a general prob­
lem of criticism. The text, first published in the Debats
et Combats section of the periodical Annales,4 suggests
an implicit interlocutor: the university-trained literary his­
torian, who is called upon to undertake a true history of
the literary institution ( if he calls himself a historian ) or
openly to assume the psychology to which he refers ( if he
considers himself a critic ) .

A word remains to be said about Racine's contempora­

neity. There is good reason for talking about Racine today;
in the last ten or twelve years his work has been involved
in every critical effort of some importance made in France :
sociological with Lucien Goldman; psychoanalytical with
Charles Mauron; biographical with Jean Pommier and
Raymond Picard; phenomenological with Georges Poulet
and Jean Starobinski; so that, by a remarkable paradox,
the French author most frequently associated with the
idea of a classical transparence is the only one to have made
all the new languages of the century converge upon him­
self.
As a matter of fact, transparence is an ambiguous value;
it is both what cannot be discussed and what there is most
to say about. Hence it is ultimately his very transparence
that makes Racine a veritable commonplace of our litera­
ture, the critical object at zero degree, a site empty but
8 Published in Theatre populaire, no. 29 (March, 19 58).
' Annales, no. 3 ( May·June, 1960 ) .
 FOREWORD 1x

eternally open to signification. If literature is essentially,

as I believe, a meaning advanced and at the same time a
meaning withdrawn, Racine is doubtless the greatest
French author; his genius is then to be located in none
of the virtues that have successively made his fortune (for
the ethical definition of Racine has constantly shifted ) ,
but rather in a sovereign art of accessibility, which permits
him to remain eternally within the field of any critical'
language.
This accessibility is not a minor virtue; it is indeed the·
very being of literature, carried to its paroxysm. To write
is to jeopardize the meaning of the world, to put an in­
direct question that the writer, by an ultimate abstention,
refrains from answering. It is each of us who gives the an­
swer, bringing to it his own history, his OWfl language, his
OWfl freedom; but since history, language, and freedom
are infinitely variable, the world's answer to the writer is
infinite: there is no end to answering what has been writ­
ten beyond hope of an answer: asserted, disputed, super­
seded-the meanings pass, the question remains.
This explains, no doubt, why literature has a trans­
historic being; this being is a functional system of which
one term is constant ( the work ) , and the other is variable
(the world, the age that consumes this work ) . But in
order to play the game, in order for us to be able to speak
about Racine even today, we must respect certain rules :
on the one hand, the work must be truly a form, must
truly designate a meaning in question, not a closed mean­
ing; and on the other ( for our own responsibility is just
as great ) , the world must answer the work's question as­
sertively, must endow with its own substance the meaning
proposed. In short, the fatal duplicity of the writer, who
asks when he appears to be answering, must correspond
to the duplicity of the critic, who answers under cover of
an interrogation.
Allusion and assertion, silence of the work even as it
speaks, and speech of the man who listens-that is the
infinite respiration of literature in the world and in history.
And it is because Racine has perfectly honored the allu­
sive principle of the literary work that he commits us to
the integral performance of our assertive role. Let us there-
x FOREWORD

fore affirm, each in behalf of his own history and his own
freedom, the historical, or psychological, or psychoanalyt­
ical, or poetic truth of Racine. Let us test on Racine, by
virtue of his very silence, all the languages our century
suggests. Our answer will never be anything but ephemeral,
which is why it can be complete. Dogmatic yet responsible,
we need not shelter our answer behind a "true" Racine
whom our age alone (by what presumption? ) has discov­
ered; it will be enough if our answer to Racine engages,
beyond ourselves, the entire language by which our world
expresses itself and which is an essential part of the history
it calls its own. R.B.
 CONTENTS

page
Foreword Vll

I RACINIAN MAN 1

1. The Structure 3
The Chamber 3
The three exterior spaces : death,
escape, event 5
The horde 8
The double Eros 10
Disorder 14
The erotic "scene" 17
The Racinian tenebroso 21
The fundamental relation 24
Techniques of aggression 27
"On" 34
Division 36
The Father 38
Reversal 41
Transgression 45
The "dogmatism" of the Racinian hero 47
Tentative solutions 50
The confidant 53
The fear of signs 55
Logos and praxis 58
XI
I. RACINI AN MAN
 I. THE STRUCTURE

THERE ARE three Mediterraneans in Racine : Classi­

cal, Hebrew, and Byzantine. But poetically, these three
spaces form only a single complex of water, dust, and fire.
The great tragic sites are arid lands, squeezed between the
sea and the desert, shade and sun raised to the absolute
state. One need merely visit Greece today to understand
the violence of limitation, and how much Racinian trag­
edy, by its "constrained" nature, corresponds to these sites
Racine had never seen : Thebes, Buthrotum, Troezen­
these capitals of tragedy are villages. Troezen, where
Phaedra dies, is a scorched knoll fortified by rubble. The
sun produces a landscape that is pure, distinct, depopu­
lated; life is without shade, which is simultaneously repose,
secrecy, exchange, and flaw. Even outside the house, there
is no real breath of air: there is the scrub, the desert, an
unorganized space. The Racinian habitat knows only one
dream of flight : the sea, the ships; in Iphigenie, a whole
people remains imprisoned by the tragedy because the
wind fails to rise.
The Chamber
This geography sustains a special relation between the
house and its exterior, between the Racinian palace and
its hinterland. Although there is only one setting, accord­
ing to the rules, one might say that there are three tragic
sites. There is first of all the Chamber: vestige of the
mythic cave, it is the invisible and dreadful place where
Power lurks : Nero's throne room, Ahasuerus' palace, the
Holy of Holies where the God of the Jews lives. This
3
4 ON RACINE
cavern has a frequent substitute : the King's exile, porten­
tous because no one ever knows if the King is living or
dead (Amurath, Mithridates, Theseus ) . The characters
speak of this undefined site only with respect and terror,
they scarcely dare enter it, they pass before it with anx­
iety. The Chamber is both the abode of Power and its
essence, for Power is only a secret : its form exhausts its
function, it kills by being invisible. In Bajazet it is the
mutes and black Orcan who deal out death, extend by
silence and darkness the terrible inertia of the hidden
Power.1
The Chamber is contiguous to the second tragic site,
which is the Antechamber, the eternal space of all sub­
jections, since it is here that one waits. The Antechamber
( the stage proper) is a medium of transmission; it par­
takes of both interior and exterior, of Power and Event,
of the concealed and the exposed. Fixed between the
world, a place of action, and the Chamber, a place of
silence, the Antechamber is the site of language : it is
here that tragic man, lost between the letter and the
meaning of things, utters his reasons. The tragic stage is
therefore not strictly secret;2 it is rather a blind alley, the
anxious passage from secrecy to effusion, from immediate
fear to fear expressed. It is a trap suspected, which is why
the posture the tragic character must adopt within it is
always of an extreme mobility (in Greek tragedy, it is the
chorus that waits, that moves in the circular space, or
orchestra, in front of the palace ) .
Between the Chamber and the Antechamber stands a
tragic object which menacingly expresses both contiguity
1 TI1e function of the throne room, the Royal Chamber, is

well expressed in these lines from Esther:

Au fond de leur palais leur majeste terrible
Affecte a leurs sujets de se rendre invisible;
Et la mort est le prix de tout audacieux.
Qui sans etre appeze se presente a leurs yeux. ( I, 3 )
Their dread majesty elects to remain deep within their palace,
invisible to their subjects; and death is the reward of any
intruder who is seen there without being summoned.
2 On the enclosure of the Racinian site, see Bernard Dort,

Huis Clos racinien (Cahiers Renaud-Barrault VIII, Paris ) .

 RACINIAN MAN 5
and exchange, the tangency of hunter and prey: the Door.
Here one waits, here one trembles; to enter it is a tempta­
tion and a transgression : Agrippina stakes all her power at
Nero's door. The Door has an active substitute, necessary
when the Power wants to spy on the Antechamber or
paralyze the character within it, and this is the Veil
(Britannicus, Esther, Athalie ) . The Veil (or the Wall
that has ears ) is not an inert substance intended to con­
ceal, it is an eyelid, symbol of the masked gaze, so that
the Antechamber is a site-object encircled by a space­
subject. The Racinian stage is thus a spectacle twice over:
to the eyes of the Invisible and to the eyes of the specta­
tor ( the site that best expresses this tragic contradiction ·

is the Seraglio of Bajazet) .

The third tragic site is the Exterior. Between Ante­
chamber and Exterior, there is no transition; they are
joined as immediately as the Antechamber and the Cham­
ber. This contiguity is expressed poetically by the "linear"
nature of the tragic enclosure : the palace walls plunge
down into the sea, the stairs lead to the ships ready to
sail, the ramparts are a balcony above the battle itself,
and if there are hidden passages, they no longer constitute
part of the tragedy, they are already Flight. Thus the line
that separates tragedy from its negation is thin, almost
abstract; what is involved is a limit, in the ritual sense of
the word : the tragedy is simultaneously prison and pro­
tection against impurity, against all that is not itself.

The three exterior spaces:

death, escape, event
TI1e Exterior is in fact the site of nontragedy; it con­
tains three kinds of space : that of death, that of escape,
that of the event. Physical death never belongs to tragic
space : this is reputedly for reasons of propriety;1 but what
propriety rejects in carnal death is an element alien to
tragedy, an "impurity," the density of a reality scandalom
because it no longer proceeds from the order of language,
which is the only tragic order: in tragedy one never die�

1 Atalide kills herself on stage but expires off. Nothing illus·

trates better the disjunction of gesture and reality.

6 ON RACINE
because one is always talking. And conversely, for the
hero, to leave the stage is to die, one way or another.
Roxanne's Go/'s to Bajazet are death sentences, and this
movement is the model of a whole series of exits in which
it is enough for the executioner to dismiss or banish his
prey to cause death, as if the mere contact with the outer
air was enough to dissolve or blast : how many Racinian
victims die because they are no longer protected by this
tragic site which nonetheless, they said, made them suffer
mortaJly ( Britannicus, Bajazet, Hippolytus ) . The essen­
tial image of this exterior death, in which the victim
slowly suffocates out of the tragic air, is the Berenician
Orient, which interminably summons the heroes into non­
tragedy. More generally, transplanted outside the tragic
space, Racinian man languishes ( s'ennuie ) : he experiences
all real space as a succession of chains ( Orestes, Antiochus,
Hippolytus ) : here suffering is evidently a substitute for
death : all behavior that suspends language causes life to
stop.
The second exterior space is that of esc;;ape : but escape
is never named except by the inferior caste of friends and
servants; the confidants and minor figures ( Acomat, Zares )
constantly recommend escape to the hero on one of those
countless ships that cruise in front of every Racinian
tragedy, representing how immediate and how easy its
negation is2 ( there is only one ship-prison in Racine, the
one on which the captive Eriphyle falls in love with her
ravisher ) . The Exterior, moreover, is a space ritually
transmitted, that is, entrusted and assigned to all the non­
tragic personnel, like a kind of reverse ghetto, since it is

'Nos vaisseaux sont tout prets et le vent nous appelle ..

(And. I II, I)
Our ships are ready and the wind favorable . . .

Des vaisseaux dans Ostie armes en diligence . . (Ber. 1,3 )

Ships hastily armed in Ostia . . .

Deja sur un vaisseau dans le port prepare ... (Baj. III,2)

Already on a ship made ready in the harbor . • .
 RACINIAN MAN 7
the amplitude of space that is taboo here, confinement
that is a privilege: it is to and from the Exterior that this
race of confidants, servants, messengers, matrons, and
guards come and go, responsible for feeding tragedy with
events : their entrances and exits are tasks, not signs or
act�. In that infinite (and infinitely sterile) conclave
which is every tragedy, they are the officious secretaries
who preserve the hero from profane contact with reality,
spare him what might be called the trivial kitchenry of
doing, and transmit the event to him only when it is
pared down, reduced to the state of pure cause. This is
the third function of exterior space : to keep action in a
kind of quarantine accessible only to a neutral population
responsible for sifting events, extracting the tragic essence
from each and bringing on stage only fragments of the
external world, distilled as news, ennobled as narratives
{battles, suicides, returns, murders, feasts, miracles ) . Con­
fronting this exclusive order of language which is tragedy,
action is impurity itself.
Moreover, nothing indicates better the physical dis­
parity of the two kinds of space, internal and external,
than a curious phenomenon of temporal distortion that
Racine has described typically in Bajazet: between ex­
terior time and confined time occurs the time the mes­
sage takes, so that one is never certain the event reported
is the same as the event produced. The external event is
actually never finite, it does not complete its transforma­
tion into pure cause. Confined. in the Antechamber, re­
ceiving from the world outside only the nourishment
brought to him by the confidant, the hero lives in an ir­
remediable uncertainty : he misses the event. There is
always too much time, the time- of space itself. This quite
Einsteinian problem constitutes most of the tragic ac­
tions.8 In short, Racinian topography is convergent; every-
a Mais, comme vous savez, malgre ma diligence,
Un long chemin separe et le camp et Byzance;
Mille obstacles divers m'ont meme traverse,
Et je puis ignorer tout ce qui s'est passe. (Baj. 1,1 )
But, as you know, for all my haste, the road between the
camp and Byzantium is a long one; a thousand different
8 ON RACINE
thing leads to the tragic site, but everything is locked there.
The tragic site is stupefied, caught between two fears,
two hallucinations: that of extent and that of depth.

The horde
This, then, is a first definition of the tragic hero : he is
a man confined, a man who cannot get out without dying;
his limit is his privilege, captivity his distinction. Take
away the servant class, paradoxically defined by its very
freedom, and what is left in the tragic site? A caste glo­
rious in proportion to its immobility. Where does it come
from?
Darwin, Atkinson, and later Freud ( in Totem and
Taboo ) have suggested that in the earliest period of our
history, men lived in savage hordes. Each horde was sub­
ject to the most powerful male, who possessed women,
children, and property without distinction. The sons were
dispossessed of everything, for the father's strength pre­
vented them from obtaining the sisters or mothers whom
they coveted. If the sons happened to provoke the father's
jealousy, they were pitilessly killed, castrated, or driven
out. Hence, according to these authors, the sons ultimately
banded together to kill the father and take his place. Once
the father was out of the way, discord broke out among
the sons; they quarreled bitterly over his inheritance, and
it was only after a long period of fratricidal struggles that
they managed to establish a rational alliance among them­
selves: each renounced his desire for his mother or sisters:
the incest taboo was instituted.
Such a history, even if it is only a "romance," is the whole
of Racine's theatre. If we make one essential tragedy out
of eleven, if we arrange in a kind of exemplary constella-
obstacles lay in my path, and I may know nothing of all
that has occurred.
Ce combat doit, dit-on, fixer nos destinees;
Et meme, si d'Osmin je compte-les journees,
Le Ciel en a deja regie l'evenement,
Et le Sultan triomphe ou �it en ce moment. (Ba;. I,2)
This battle is supposed to settle our fate; and even if I num­
ber Osmin's days, Heaven has already settled the outcome,
and the Sultan triumphs or flees at this moment.
 RACINIAN MAN 9
tion this tribe of some fifty tragic characters who inhabit
Racinian tragedy, we shall discover the figures and the
actions of the primeval horde : the father, unconditional
master of the sons' lives (Amurath, Mithridates, Agamem­
non, Theseus, Mordecai, J ehoiada, even Agrippina ) ; the
women, simultaneously mothers, sisters, and mistresses,
always coveted, rarely obtained (Andromache, Junia, Ata­
lide, Monimia ) ; the brothers, always enemies because they
are quarreling over the inheritance of a father who is not
quite dead and who returns to punish them ( Eteocles and
Polynices, Nero and Britannicus, Phamaces and Xiphares ) ;
lastly, the son, mortally torn between terror of the father
and the necessity of destroying him ( Pyrrhus, Nero, Titus,_
Pharnaces, Athaliah ) . Incest, rivalry among the brothers,
murder of the father, overthrow of the sons-these are,
the fundamental actions of the Racinian theatre.
We are not certain just what is being represented here.
Is it, as in Darwin's hypothesis, an extremely early folk­
lore theme, the virtually asocial state of humanity? Is it,
as in Freud's hypothesis, the primal history of the psyche,
reproduced in the childhood of every man? I merely ob­
serve that the Racinian theatre finds its coherence onlv
on the level of this ancient fable, situated far beyond hi s­
tory or the human psyche : 1 the purity of the language,
the grace of the alexandrines, the precision of the "psy­
chology," the conformism of the metaphysics are very
slight protections; the archaic bedrock is there, close at
hand. This original action is p_Qt performed by ch£lrac�ers,
in the modem sense of the word; Racin(!, with the age,
called them much more appositely actors; we are dealing,
essentially, with masks, with figures that differ from each
other not according to their public status but according to
their place in the general configuration that keeps them
con_fin.�cl; sometimes it is their function that distinguishes
them ( father opposed to son, for instance ) , sometimes it
is their degree of emancipation with regard to the most
1 "Racine paints a man for us not as he is, but somewhat

beneath and beside himself, at the moment when the other mem­
bers of his family, the doctors, and the magistrates would in
fact begin to be concerned, if it were not just a play,'' (Charles
Mauron, L'Inconscient dans l'ceuvre et la vie de Racine,)
10 ON RACINE
regressive figure of their lineage ( Pyrrhus represents a
more independent son than Nero, Phamaces than Xiphares,
Titus than Antiochus; Hermione represents a fidelity less
supple than Andromache's ) . Thus the Racinian discourse
affords great masses of undifferentiated language, as if,
through different speeches, a single person were expressing
himself; in relation to such profound utterance, the ex­
tremely pure contour of the Racinian language functions as
a veritable command; here language is aphoristic, not real­
istic; it is expressly intended for quotation.

The double Eros

The tr�gic unit is thus not the individual but the figure,
or, better still, the function which defines thaLfigure. In
the primeval horde, human relations fall into two chief
categories: the relation of lust and the relation of author­
ity; it is these that recur obsessively in Racine.
The Racinian Eros is double. The first Eros is born be­
tween lovers who share a very early community of exist­
ence: they have been raised together, love each other (or
one loves the other) from childhood (Britannicus and
Junia, Antioch us and Berenice, Bajazet and Atalide ) ; here
love is generated by duration, a gradual maturation proc­
ess; there is, then, a mediation between the two partners,
a mediation of time, of the past, in short, of legality: it is
the parents themselves who have established the legitimacy
of this love. The beloved woman is a sister for whom lust
is authorized and consequently appeased; such love might
be called the soror:!l fugs; its future is tranquil, for it is
thwarted only by what is outside itself; its success appears
to derive from its very origin : because it has consented to
start from a mediation, misfortune is not fatal to it.
The other Eros, on the contrary, is an immediate one;
it is born abruptly; its generation admits of no latency,
it appears in the manner of an absolute Event, which is
usually expressed by a brutal passe defini (ie le vis, elle
me plut, etc. ) . This �ros-Event is the one that attaches
Nero to Junia, Berenice to Titus, Roxanne to Bajazet,
Eriphyle to Achilles, Phaedra to Hippolytus. The hero is
seized by it, bound as in a rape, and this capture is always
��a visual order ( we shall return to this matter) : to love
 RACINIAN MAN 11
is to see. This double Eros is incompatible, one cannot
proceed from one to the other, from love-as-rape ( which
is always condemned ) to love-as-duration ( which is always
coveted ) , and this impossibility constitutes one of the
fundamental forms of Racinian failure. Of course, the
unsuccessful lover can always try to replace the immediate
Eros by a substitute; he can, for instance, enumerate the
reasons to which he is appealing;1 he can try to introduce a
mediation into this relation, can appeal to causality;
he can suppose that merely by seeing him often enough,
his beloved will come to love him, that coexistence, the
basis of sororal love, will ultimately produce that love. But
these are, precisely, reasons-that is, a language destined
to mask an inevitable failure. The sororal Eros is actually
given as a utopia, far in the past or in the future, whose
institutional version will be marriage ( so important for
Racine ) . The true Eros, the one that is paint ed, in other
words immobilized in the tragic tableau, is the immediate
Eros. And precisely because this is a predatory Eros, it
supposes an entire physics, or strictly speaking an optics
of the image.
We know nothing of the age or the beauty of the
Racinian lovers. Periodically, critics debate whether Phae­
dra is very young, if Nero is an adolescent, if Berenice is
middle-aged, if Mithridates is still attractive. We know
of course the norms of the period; we know that "one could
declare one's love to a girl of fourteen without her being
rightly offended thereby," and that "a woman is ugly after

1 Ouvre:z les yeux, Seigneur, et songeons entre nous

Par combien de raisons Berenice est a vous. (Bb. 111,2) .
Open your eyes, my lord, and consider here the reasons why
Berenice belongs to you.
Quoi! Madame, les soins qu'il a pris pour vous plaire,
Ce que vous avez fait, ce que vous pouve:z faire,
Ses perils, ses respects, et surtout vos appas,
Tout cela de son cawr ne vous repond·il pas? (Ba;. 1,3 }
But, my lady, think o f all he has done to please you, and all
you have done, all you can do still, his dangers, his respec�
and most of all your own beauty-does all this not answe1
for his heart?
12 ON RACINE
she has lived thirty years." But this matters little. Racinian
beauty is abstract in that it is always named: Racine says
that Bajazet is lovable, that Berenice has beautiful hands;
the concept somehow gets rid of the thing.2 We might
say that here beauty is a propriety, a class characteristic,
not an anatomical disposition: n o effort is made toward
what might be called the body's adjectivity.
Yet the Racinian Eros ( at least the immediate Eros,
which will henceforth be our concern here ) is never subli­
mated; emerging fully armed, entirely finished, from pure
vision, it is immobilized in the perpetual fascination of
the adverse body, it constantly reproduces the original
scene that has formed it (Berenice, Phaedra, Eriphyle,
Nero relive the birth of their love3 ) ; the recital these
heroes make of it to their confidant is obviously not a
matter of_i_n(oriiE tion but a veritable obsessive protocol.
Moreover it is because love, in Racine, is a pure ordeal
of fascination that it is so difficult to distinguish from
hate; hate is openly physical, it is the acute sense of the
othe� body. Like love, it is born from sight, feeds on it,
and like love it produces a current of joy. Racine has given
us the theory of this carnal hatred in his first play, La
Theba"ide.4
2 Cette (iere princesse a perce son beau sein ... (Theb.V, 5)
This proud princess has stabbed her lovely breast . . .
]'ai senti son beau corps tout froid entre mes bras . . . (V,5)
I felt his splendid body turn cold in my arms . . .

On sait qu' elle est charmante, et de si belles mains

Semblent vous demander ['empire des humains (Ber. 11,2)
We know she is charming, and such beautiful hands seem
to ask you for the throne
Bajazet est aimable; il vit que son salut .. . (Baj.1,2)
Bajazet is appealing; he saw that his survival . . .

8 More generally, such narratives are not at all the dead wooc!

of the tragedy; quite the contrary, they are the hallucinatory­

that is, in a sense, the most profound-part.
' The theory of physical hatred is given in La Theba"ide, IV
I . The feudal system had sublimated the Eros of the adversarie:
 RACINIAN MAN 13
What Racine expresses immediately, then, is alienation,
not desire. This is evident if we examine Racinian sexual­
ity, which is a sexuality of situation rather than of Nature.
In Racine, sex itself is subject to the fundamental situation
of th� tragic figures among themselves, which is a relation _

of force. There are no characters in the Racinian theatre

(which is why it is quite futile to argue about the indi­
viduality of the dranuztis personae, to wonder whether
Andromache is coquettish or Bajazet virile) ; there are
only situations, in the almost formal sense of the word :
everything derives its being from its place in the general
constellation of strengths and weaknesses. The division of
the Racinian world into strong and weak, into tyrants
and captives, covers in a sense the division of the sexes :
it is their situation in the relation of force that orches­
trates some characters as virile and others as feminine,
without concern for their biological sex. There are viriloid
women (they need merely participate in Power: Axiane,
Agrippina, Roxanne, Athaliah ) . There are feminoid men,
not by character but by situation : Taxiles, whose coward­
ice is softness, accessibility to Alexander's strength; Bajazet,
both captive and coveted, doomed by a strictly Racinian
alternative to murder or to rape; Hippolytus, who is in
Phaedra's power, desired by her and a virgin as well
(Racine tried to "defeminize" Hippolytus by making him
Aricia's lover, but without success, as the judgment of his
contemporaries attests-the initial situation was too
strong) ; lastly Britannicus, hated by Nero, is nonetheless
in a certain erotic relation with him, for it is enough that
hate coincide with Power for sex to be ambiguous; Nero
delights in Britannicus' suffering as in that of a woman
loved and tortured.ri Here we find a first sketch of Ra­
cinian fatality: a simple relation, in origin purely circum­
stantial (captivity or tyranny) , is converted into a biolog-

by subjecting_the d1,1e_l to a knightly ritual. We find a trace of

this sublimation in Alexandre (the conflict between Alexander
and Porus ) ; Alexander is chivalrous-but he is, precisely, outside
the tragedy.
1 The erotic relation between Nero and Britannicus is explicit

in Tacitus. As for Hippolytus, Racine has made him Aricia's

lover to keep the public from taking him for an invert.
14 ON RACINE
ical datum; situation is converted into sex, chance into
essence.
The constellations change little in Racinian tragedy, and
sexuality is generally immobile. But if, by exception, the re­
lation of force yields, if the tyranny weakens, sex itself tends
to be modified, inverted. It is enough for Athaliah, the
most virile of Racine's women, to become sensitive to
Joash's "charm" and relax her power for her sexuality to
be disturbed : once the constellation appears to be modi­
fied, a new division affects the character's being, a new
sex appears, and Athaliah becomes a woman.6 Inversely,
those who are by condition outside any relation of
force ( that is, outside the tragedy ) have no sex. Con­
fidants, servants, advisers (Burrhus, for instance, is scorn­
fully excluded from Eros by Nero7 ) , never accede to sexual
existence. And it is obviously in the most manifestly asex­
ualized characters, matron ( Oenone ) or eunuch ( Aco­
mat) , that the spirit most contrary to tragedy declares
itself, the spirit of viability: only the absence of sex can
authorize a definition of life not as a critical relation of
forces, but as duration, and this duration as value. Sex is
a· tragic privilege insofar as it is the first attribute of the
original conflict: it is not the sexes that create the con­
flict, it is the conflict that defines the sexes.
Disorder
Thus it is alienation that constitutes the Racinian Eros.
As a consequence, the human body is not treated in plas·

• Ami, depuis deux jours, je ne Ia connais plus.

Ce n' est plus cette reine eclairee, intrepide,
Elevee au-dessus de son sexe timide . . .

EUe flotte, elle hesite; en un mot, elle est femme.

(Ath. III, 3 )
Friend, for the last two days I n o longer recognize her. She is
no longer that enlightened, fearless queen, raised above her
timid sex . . . She wavers, she hesitates; in a word, she is
a woman.
7 Mais, croyez-moi, l' amour est une autre science,
Burrhus; et je ferais quelque difficulte
D'abaisser jusque-za votre severite (Brit. III,l )
But love, believe me, is knowledge of another kind, Burrhus;
and I should find it hard to reduce your severity to its level.
 RACINIAN MAN 15
tic, but in magical terms. As we have seen, neither age
nor beauty has any specificity here: the body is never
given as an Apollonian object ( for Racine, Apollonism is
a canonical attribute of death, in which the body becomes
a statue, that is, a glorified, ctrranged past) . The Racinian
body is essentially disturbance, defection, disorder. Gar­
ments-which as we know extend the body in an equivo­
cal way, both masking and flaunting it-are responsible
for dramatizing the state of the body: they weigh down
in transgression, they come undone in agitation; the im­
plicit gesture, here, is disrobing ( Phaedra, Berenice,
Junia ) ,1 the simultaneous token of transgression and at­
traction, for in Racine carnal disorder is always a kind of
blackmail, an attempt to compel pity ( sometimes carried
to the point of sadistic provocation ) .2 This is the implicit
function of all the physical disturbances so abundantly
recorded by Racine: blushing, blanching, the abrupt suc­
cession of one and then the other, sighs, and finally tears,
whose erotic power is so familiar. Here reality is always
ambiguous, both expression and act, escape and blackmail:
in short, the Racinian disorder is essentially a sign, that is,
a signal and a commination.
The most spectacular agitation, that is, the one best
suited to tragedy, is the kind that attacks Racinian man
at his vital center, his language.8 Suspension of speech,
1 Belle, sans ornements, dans le �mple appareil
D'une beaute qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil. (Brit. 11,2)
Lovely, unadorned, clad simply in her beauty torn from sleep.
LAissez-moi relever ces voiles detaches,
Et ces cheveux epars dont vos yeux sont caches. (Bh. IV,2)
Let me bind these loosened veils, and smooth the hair that
hides your eyes.
Que ces vains omements, que ces voiles me pesentl (Phed.
1, 3 )
How these vain adornments, how these veils weigh m e down!
11.Aisse, laisse, Phenice, il verra son ouvrage . . . (Ber. IV,2)
Leave me as I am, Phenice, he will see what he has done . . .
8 Among others:
J'ai voulu lui parler, et ma voix s'est perdue . • . (Brit. 11,2)
16 ON RACINE
whose sexual nature has been suggested by certain authors,
is very frequent in the Racinian hero; it perfectly expresses
the sterility of the erotic relation, its immobility. To be
able to break with Berenice, Titus turns aphasiac, in one
and the same movement withdraws and apologizes. Here
"I love you too much" and "I don't love you enough"
find, economically enough, a common sign. To_avoid
fsp�ch is_tp avo�d_ _!h_�_ _!_�_latjol1_Q( f9���!- t� �yoi_d.Jra� :
__

only the extreme heroes can attain this limit ( Nero, Titus,
Phaedra ) , from which their tragic partner leads them back
as quickly as possible, constraining them in a sense to re­
cover a language (Agrippina, Berenice, Oenone ) . Mute-
t ess has a g�.§_t_�:�r�l :II!_l!J_ogy; the swoon, or at least its noble
ersion, immobility. This is always a kind of bilingual
_
ct: as --e-scape, such paralysis tends to deny the tragic or­
der; as blackmail, it still participates in the relation of
force. Each time a Racinian hero resorts to bodily dis­
order, we have the indication of a tragic bad faith : the
hero feints with tragedy. All such behavior tends, in ef­
fect, to a frustration of tragic reality, being a rejection
( an ambiguous one, moreover, since to reject tragedy may
be to rediscover the world ) , a simulation of death, a
paradoxical, even a useful death, since one comes back to
life. Naturally, disorder is a privilege of the tragic hero, for
he alone is engaged in a relation of force. The confidants
may share the master's agitation-more often they at­
tempt to calm it-but they_ never employ the ritual lan­
guage of disorder : a handmaid does not faint. For ex­
ample, the tragic hero cannot sleep ( except if he is a
monster, like Nero, whose sleep is wicked ) . Archas sleeps;
Agamemnon lies awake, or better still, indulging in a

I tried to speak to her, and my voice failed . . .

Et des le premier mot, ma langue embarrassee

Dans ma bouche vingt fois a demeure glacee. (Ber. 11,2 )
And at the first word, my tongue froze in my mouth, how­
ever often I tried to speak.
Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler . .. (Phed.
I,3 )
My eyes went blind, I could not speak . . .
 RACINIAN MAN 17
noble-because tormented-form of repose, he dreams.
In short, the Racinian Eros brings bodies into con­
frontation only to destroy them. The sight of the adverse
body disorders language,4 troubles it, whether by exag­
gerating it (in the excessively rationalized harangues ) or
by silencing it. The Racinian hero never achieves ade­
quate behavior toward the adverse body: real frequentation
is always a failure. Then is there no moment when the
Racinian Eros is happy? Yes, precisely when it is unreal.
The adverse body confers happiness onl!' when it is an
image; the successful moments of Racinian Eros are al­
ways memories.

The erotic "scene"

The Racinian Eros expresses itself only through a re­
cital, a narrative. Imagination is always retrospective, and
memory always has the distinctness of an image: that is
the protocol that regulates the exchange of real and un­
real. The birth of love is recalled as a veritable "scene" :
the recollection is so well ordered that it is perfectly acces­
sible, it can be summoned up at leisure, with the greatest
likelihood of effectiveness. Thus Nero relives the moment
when he fell in love with Junia, Eriphyle the moment
when Achilles seduced her, Andromache the moment
when Pyrrhus exposed himself to her hatred (since hatred
follows a process no different from love) ; with agonized

' Naturally, the fascination of the adverse body also occurs in

situations of hatred. Here is how Nero describes his relation to
Agrippina:
Eloigne de ses yeux, f'ordonne, je menace . •

Metis (je t'expose ici mon dme toute nue)

Sitot que mon malheur me ramene a sa vue,
Soit que je n'ose encor dementir le pouvoir
De ces yeux ou j'ai lu si longtemps mon devoir
Mais enfin mes efforts ne me servent de rien;
Mon genie etonne tremble, devant le sien. (Brit. 11,2 )
When she cannot see me, I threaten, command . . . But ( I
am showing you m y heart laid bare ) as soon as I am unlucky
enough to be in her presence, I dare not dispute the power
of those eyes that for so long defined my duty . . . All my
efforts are futile: my awed spirit trembles before hers.
18 ON RACINE
longing, Berenice sees over and over the apotheosis of
Titus, Phaedra is stirred to find in Hippolytus the image
of Theseus. What we have is a kind of trance: the past
becomes present, though without ceasing to be organized
as a memory. The subject lives the scene without being
submerged or deceived by it. Classical rhetoric possessed a
figure of speech to express this imagination of the past,
hypotyposis (Figure-toi Pyrrhus, les yeux etincelants . . .
[fmagme Pyrrhus, his eyes gleaming . . . ] ) ; a treatise of
the period 1 says that in hypotyposis "the image takes the
place of the thing" : one cannot define hallucination
better. These erotic scenes are, in effect, veritable hal­
lucinations, recalled in order to nourish pleasure or pain
[aigreur], and subject to a whole protocol of rehearsal and
repetition. The Racinian theatre, moreover, knows a still
more explicit state of the erotic hallucination, the dream :
Athaliah's dream is, literally, a premonition; mythically, it
is a retrospection : Athaliah merely revives the Eros that
links her to the child (that is, once again, the scene where
she first saw him ) .
In the Racinian Eros, then, reality is constantly de­
ceived and the image aggrandized: memory receives the
legacy of fact-it leads.2 The advantage of this deception
is that the erotic image can be arranged. The striking
thing about the Racinian hallucination is its plastic aspect :
the kidnapping of Junia, the rape of Eriphyle, Phaedra's
descent into the Labyrinth, Titus' triumph, and Athaliah's
dream are tableaux, they are deliberately classified under
the norms of painting. Not only are these scenes com­
posed, but the characters and objects in them assume an
arrangement calculated with a view to a total meaning,
they compel the observer (and the reader ) to an intel­
ligent participation, but also and above all they have the
special quality of painting: chiaroscuro. Nothing is closer to
the Racinian hallucination than a painting by Rembrandt,
for instance : in both cases, matter is organized in its very
immateriality, it is the surface that is created.
1 Pere Bernard Lamy, La Rhetorique ou l' art de parler ( 1 67 5 ) .
• Mais, Phenice, ou m'emporte un souvenir charmant? (Ber.
1,5)
But, Phenice, where is this charming memory leading me?
 RACINIAN MAN 19
Every Racinian hallucination presupposes-or produces
-a combination of shadow and light. The source of the
shadow is captivity. The tyrant regards prison as a dark­
ness in which to immerse himself and gain peace. All the
Racinian captives (there is one in nearlv every tragedy)
are mediating or consoling virgins; they afford the hero his
respiration (or at least that is what he asks of them ) . The
solar Alexander loves in Cleofile his captive; the radiant
Pyrrhus finds in Andromache the supreme shadow, that of
the tomb where the lovers sink into a mutual peace;3 for
Nero, the incendiary, Junia is both shade and water
(tears) ;4 Bajazet is a creature of shadows, confined in the
Seraglio; Mithridates compensates for the breadth of his
military expeditions by a single captive, Monimia (this
exchange is a bargain he openly strikes) ; Phaedra, daugh­
ter of the Sun, desires Hippolytus, a man of the forests
and their shade; imperial Ahasuerus chooses the timid
Esther, raised in the shadows; Athaliah, finally, is moved
by Eliakim, a prisoner of the Temple. Everywhere, in
every case, the same constellation is reproduced: the dis­
quieting Sun and the beneficent shadows.
Perhaps this Racinian shade is more a substance than a
8 The tomb-for-three actually becomes a tomb-for-four in the

suppressed scene:
Pyrrhus de mon Hector semble avoir pris la place. (And. V,3 )
Pyrrhus seems to have taken my Hector's place.
' Fidele a sa douleur et dans l'ombre enfermee . . . (Brit.
11,2)
Faithful to her grief, and imprisoned in the shadows .
Ces tresors dont le Ciel voulut vous embellir,
Les avez-vous r�us pour les ensevelir? (II, 3 )
Have you received these treasures by which Heaven has
adorned you only to bury them?
Et pouvez-vous, Seigneur, souhaiter qu'une fille
Qui vit presque en naissant eteindre sa famille,
Qui, dans l'obscurite nourrisant sa douleur . . . ( 11,3 )
Could you ask, my lord, that a maiden who almost a t her
birth saw her family wiped out, who nursed her grief in ob­
scurity . . .
20 ON RACINE
chiaroscuro; its even and outspread nature turns darkness
into felicity. Shade is extent, sudace, so that at the limit
it is possible to conceive of a felicitous light, provided it
possesses this same equality of substance : such light is the
day (and not the Sun, murderous because it is an explo­
sion, an event and not an environment ) . The shade is not
a Saturnian theme here, it is a theme of release, of
effusion, and it is, quite specifically, the utopia of the
Racinian hero, whose inferno is constriction. Shade, more­
over, is associated with another effusive substance, tears.
The thief of shade is also a ravisher of tears : for Britan­
nicus, captive and therefore shadowy himself, Junia's
tears are merely an evidence of love, an intellective sign;
for the solar Nero, these same tears sustain him like a
strange, precious nourishment; they are no longer a sign
but an image, an object detached from their intention, on
whose substance one can inwardly feed, as though on some
hallucinatory victuals.
Inversely, what is denounced in the Sun is its discon­
tinuity. The Sun's daily appearance is a wound inflicted
upon the natural milieu of the night;5 whereas shadows
can linger, can last, the Sun knows only a critical develop­
ment, a crowning misfortune inexorably repeated ( there is
a natural harmony between the solar nature of the tragic
climate and vendettal time, which is a pure repetition ) .
Generally born with the tragedy itself (which is a day ) ,
the Sun becomes murderous along with it : conflagration,
vertigo, ocular wound, it is an outburst. Doubtless if the
Sun manages to adjust, to temper, to contain itself in a
sense, it can recover a paradoxical keeping: splendor. But
splendor is not a quality proper to light, but a state of
substance : there is a splendor of the night.

6 0 toi, Soleil, o toi qui rends le jour au monde,

Que ne l'as-tu laisse dans une nuit profonde! (Theb. 1,1 )
0 Sun, who grants the world the day, why have you not left
that world in deepest night!
It was not for nothing that Racine wrote from Uzes (in 1 662 ) :
Et nous avons des nuits plus belles que vos jours.
And we have nights lovelier than your days.
 RACINIAN MAN 21

The Rctcinian tenebroso

This brings us to the heart of the Racinian hallucina­
tion : the image transposes the antagonism itself in the
arrangement of its substances, or better still, tr��poses the
dialectic of executioner and victim; the image is a depicted,
theatricalized conflict, it acts out reality in the forms of
antinomic substances; the e10tic scene is a theatre within
the theatre, it seeks to enact the most vital but also the
most fragile moment of the conflict, the one when the
shadow is about to be penetrated by a burst of light. For
we are dealing here with a veritable inversion of the com­
mon metaphor: in the Racinian hallucination, it is not the
light that is drowned in darkness; the shadows do not
invade. It is the contrary : shadows are pierced by light, the
darkness is corrupted, resists, and yields. It is this pure
abeyance, the fragile atom of duration in which the Sun
reveals the night without yet destroying it, which con­
stitutes what might be called the Racinian tenebroso.
Chiaroscuro is the selective substance of decipherment,1
and is just what the Racinian tenebroso is: both tableau
and theatre, or tableau vivant, frozen movement, accessi­
ble to an endlessly repeated reading. The great Racinian
tableaux2 always offer this great mythic (and theatrical )
combat of darkness and light:3 on one side, night, shadows,
ashes, tears, sleep, silence, timid sweetness, and continuous
presence; on the other, all the objects of stridency: weap­
ons, eagles, fasces, torches, standards, shouts, brilliant
garments, linen, purple and gold, steel, the stake, Barnes,
and blood. Between these two classes of substances, there
is an ever-immanent but never-achieved exchange that
1 Roland Kuhn, Phenomenologie du Masque a travers le test

de Rorschach ( Desclee de Brouwer, Paris ) .

2 These are the great Racinian tableaux :
The kidnapping of Junia (Brit. 11,2)
Titus' triumph (Ber. 1, 5)
Pyrrhus as criminal (And. 1,4)
The rape of Eriphyle (Iph. 11, 1 )
Athaliah's dream (Ath. 1 1,5)
8 This mythic combat is sketched in another form in the Ra­

cinian seascapes, ships burning at sea.

22 ON RACINE
Racine expresses by a specific word, the verb relever
[gather, collect], 4 to designate the constitutive (and de­
lectable ) act of the tenebroso.
We understand why in Racine there is what we might
call a fetishism of the eyes.5 By nature the eyes are a
light offered to the darkness : dimmed by prison, clouded
by tears; the perfect state of the Racinian tenebroso:
eyes in tears and raised to heaven.6 This is a gesture which
painters have often treated as a symbol of martyred in­
nocence. In Racine, it doubtless means this, but in partic­
ular it affords us a personal sense of substance : not only
does light purify itself by water, lose its explosive bril­
liance and spread into a felicitous, even surface, but the
ascensional movement itself indicates perhaps less a sub­
limation than a memory-that of the earth, of the dark­
ness these eyes have lef t : it is a movement apprehended
in its very process, so that it represents simultaneously, by
a precious paradox, the two terms of the conflict-and of
pleasure.
We realize why the image thus constituted has a
traumatic power : external to the hero since it is a memory,
it represents for him the conflict in which he is engaged as
an object. 111e Racinian tenebroso constitutes a veritable
photogeny, not only because the object is purified of its
inert elements and because everything in it either gleams
or is extinguished, that is, signifies, but also because, given
as a tableau, it doubles the actor-tyrant (or the actor­
victim ) , makes him a spectator, permits him to perform
over and over, in front of himself, the sadistic ( or maso-
� . . . Relevaient de ses yeux les timides douceurs. (Brit. 11,2 )
. . . Gathered the timid sweetness from her eyes.

I A problem discussed by G. May, D'Ovide a Racine, and by

J. Pommier.
8 Triste, levant au ciel ses yeux mouilles de larmes . . . (Brit.
11, 2 )
Sadly raising her tearful eyes to heaven . . .
De mes larmes au Ciel j'offrais le sacrifice. (Es. 1,1 )
Tears whose sacrifice I offered to Heaven.
 RACINIAN MAN 23
chistic ) act. It is this doubling which constitutes all Ra­
cinian erotics; Nero, whose Eros is purely voyeuristic,7
ceaselessly organizes an identical scene between Junia and
himself, in which he is both actor and spectator, and
which he regulates down to its very subtle failures, deriv­
ing his pleasure from a delay in asking pardon for the
tears he has provoked ( reality could never guarantee a
time sequence so well adjusted ) , and arranging by mem­
ory an object both subjugated and inflexible.8 This refin­
ing imagination, which permits Nero to direct love's
tempo, is employed by Eriphyle to rid the hero's figure of
its erotically useless elements; all she ( ceaselessly ) remem­
bers about Achilles is that bloody arm which has possessed
her and whose phallic nature is, I suppose, sufficiently
obvious.9 Thus the Racinian tableau is actually an anam-

7 Je me fais de sa peine une image charmante. (Brit. 11,8 )

Out of her suffering, I make a charming picture for myself.
8 J'aimais jusqu'a ses pleurs que je faisais couler.
Quelquefois, mais trop tard, je lui demandais grace. (Brit.
11,2 )
I loved even the tears I made her shed. Sometimes, but too
late, I asked her to forgive me.

8 Cet Achille, l'auteur de tes maux et des miens,

Dont la sanglante main m'enleva prisonniere . . (Iph. II, I )
.

That Achilles, author of your misfortunes and of mine, whose

bloody hand took me prisoner and carried me off .

Dans les cruelles mains par qui je fus ravie

Je demeurai longtemps sans lumiere et sans vie.
Enfin mes tristes yeux chercherent la clarte;
Et me voyant presser d'un bras ensanglante,
Je fremissais, Doris, et d'un vainqueur sauvage
Craignais de rencontrer l'effroyable visage. ( 11, 1 )
For a long time I lay inert in the cruel hands that had seized
me. Finally my wretched eyes opened, and seeing a bloody
arm clutching me, I shuddered, Doris, fearing to discover my
ravisher's dreadful face.
lphigenia understands perfectly-which is remarkable for so
virtuous a girl-the exact nature of Eriphyle's erotic traumatism.
It is true that jealousy is the source of her intuition:
24 ON RACINE
nesis : the hero keeps trying to return to the source of his
failure; but since this source is his pleasure itself, he is
petrified in his past: in him, Eros is a retrospective force:
-the image is repeated, never transcended.

The fundamental relation

Thus we are referred back to a human relation in which
the erotic is only a stage. Conflict is basic in Racine,
we find it in all his tragedies. It is never merely a conflict
of love that sets in opposition two beings, one of whom
loves and the other does not. The essential relation is one
-
of authority, love serves Q�J9.rexeal it. This relation is
so general, so formal, one might say, that I should not
hesitate to represent it in the form of a double equation :
A has complete power over B.
A loves B, who does not love A.
But what we must note is that the relation of authority
extends to the erotic relation. The relation of love is much
more fluid : it can be masked ( Athaliah and Joash ) , prob­
lematic ( it is not certain that Titus loves Berenice ) ,
pacified ( lphigenia loves her father) , or inverted (Eriphyle
loves her jailer ) . The relation of authority, on the con­
trary, is constant and explicit; it need not affect only a
single couple throughout the tragedy;1 it can be revealed
Oui, vous l'aimez, perfide.
Et ces memes fureurs que vous me depeignez,
Ces bras que dans le sang vous avez vu baignes,
Ces morts, cette Lesbos, ces cendres, cette flamme,
Sont les traits dont l'amour l'a grave dans votre arne. (11, 5 )
Yes, deceitful girl, you love him. And those very transports
you describe-those deaths, that Lesbos, those ashes, that
flame-are the features by which love has engraved him in
your soul.
1 These are the fundamental couples of the relation of force

(there may be other, episodic ones) : Creon and Antigone. Tax­

iles and Axiane. Pyrrhus and Andromache. Nero and Junia.
Titus and Berenice (a problematic or disjunct relation ) . Roxanne
and Bajazet. Mithridates and Monimia. Agamemnon and Iphi­
genia (a pacified relation ) . Phaedra and Hippolytus. Mordecai
and Esther (a pacified relation ) . Athaliah and Joash. These cou­
ples are complete, as individualized as the figure permits. When
 RACINIAN MAN 25
fragmentarily; we find it in various forms-widened, some­
times broken, but always recognizable. For example, in
Bajazet the relation of authority is doubled : Amurath has
complete power over Roxanne, who has complete power
over Bajazet. In Berenice, on the contrary, the double
equation is disjunct: Titus has complete power over Ber­
enice (but does not love her ) ; Berenice loves Titus (but
has no power over him ) : it is this very disjunction of the
roles in two different persons that causes the tragedy to
miscarry. The second member of the equation is there­
fore functional in r�_lgtion to the first : Raf!!l�:-�. thel!tre is
not a theatre of love. Its subject is_ the use of a force
within a situation that is generally erotic (but not neces­
sarily so-: · we need only think of Aman and Mordecai) .
It -Is this situation as a whole which Racine calls
viol�ce;2 his theatre is a theatre of violence. s r '/ NJ "- "
,

The reciprocal feelings of A and B have no basis other

than the original situation in which they are placed by a
kind of petitio principii, which is really the poet's creative
act. One is powerful, the ot�_er is_ S_!!bject, one is a tyrant,
the other is a captive, butthis relation would be n_qthing__if
it were not doubled by a veritable C<?ntiguity: A and B are
confined in the same place. It is ultimately the- tragic site
that establishes the .tragedy. Aside from this arrangement
or disposition, the conflict always remains unmotivated;
as early as Let Thebaide, Racine specified that the ap­
parent motives of a conflict (here, a mutual desire to rule)
are illusory-posterior "rationalizations." Feeling seeks its
essence, not its attributes in the Other: it is by hating each
other that the Racinian partners call each other into
existence : Eteocles hates Polynices, not his pride. Place
( contiguity or hierarchy) is immediately converte_d Into
essence: it is because the Other is there that he alienates.
Aman suffers the martYrdom . of . seeing Mordeca'C �otion­
less at the palace gate; Nero cannot bear his mother to be

the relation is more diffuse, it remains no less capital : the Greeks

and Pyrrhus. Agrippina and Nero. Mithridates and his sons. The
gods and Eriphyle. Mordecai and Aman. God and Athaliah.
11 Violence: "constraint exerted to oblige someone to do what

he does not wish to do."

26 ON RACINE
physically on the same throne with him. Moreover, it is
this dasein of the partner that contains the seeds of mur­
der. Insistently reduced to a horrible spatial constraint, the
human relation can be clarified only by a clean sweep : what
occupied a place must disappear from it, must be driven
out of sight. The Other is an obstinate body that must be
possessed or destroyed. The radicalism of the tragic solu­
tion derives from the simplicity of the initial problem : the
entire tragedy seems to consist of a vulgar not enough
room for two. The tragic conflict is a cri,si�_QLspace.
Since space is closed, the relation is _��tionless. At the
start, everything favors A, since he has B at his mercy and
it is precisely B whom he desires. And in a sense, most of
Racine's tragedies are virtual abductions : B escapes A only
by death, crime, accident, or exile; when the tragedy is
oblatory (Mithridate ) or reconciled (Esther ) , it is only
by the death of the tyrant (Mithridates ) or of an expia­
tory victim (Am an ) . What suspends, immobilizes the
murder is an alternative : A is so to speak paralyzed be­
tween brute murder and impossible generosity; according
to the classic Sartrian schema, it is B's liberty that A seeks
to possess by force; in other words, he is engaged in an in­
soluble paradox: if he possesses, he destroys; if he releasesp
he frustrates himself; he cannot choose between absolute
power and absolute love, between rape and oblation. The
tragedy is precisely the representation of this immobility.
A good example of this impotent dialectic is the rela­
tion of indebtedness that unites most Racinian couples.
Situated first in the heaven of the most sublime morality
( "I owe you everything," the Racinian subject says to his
tyrant ) , gratitude is soon revealed as a poison. We know
the importance of ingratitude in Racine's life (Moliere,
Port-Royal ) . The Racinian world is one of elaborate
bookkeeping: there is a constant calculation of favors and
obligations. For example, Nero, Titus, Bajazet owe them­
selves to Agrippina, Berenice, Roxanne : B's life is A's prop­
erty de facto and de jure. But it is precisely because the
relation is obligatory that it is stalled : it is because Nero
owes the throne to Agrippina that he will kill her. The
somehow mathematical necessity of gratitude designates
the time and place of the rebellion : ingratitude is the
 RACINIAN MAN 27
obligated form of liberty. Doubtless, in Racine, this in­
gratitude is not always acknowledged : Titus uses a great
deal of tact about being ungrateful. If ingratitude is diffi­
cult, it is because it is vital; it concerns the hero's very life.
The model of Racinian ingratitude is in effect parental : the
hero is to be grateful to his tyrant exactly as the child is to
be grateful to the parents who have given him birth. But be­
cause of this very fact, to be ungrateful is to be born anew.
Here ingratitude is a veritable accouchement (and an
unsuccessful one, moreover ) . Formally, obligation (as its
name indicates ) is a link, that is, in Racinian terms, the
very sign of the intolerable: one can break it only by a
real shock, a catastrophic detonation.

Techniques of aggression
Thus the relation of authority is actually a function :
tyrant and subject are attached to each other, live by each
other, derive their being and situation from each other.
Hence we are I:lOt concerned with a relation of hostility. In
Racine there is never an adversary, in the ritual sense that
this word could have in feudalism or even in Corneille;
the only chivalric hero of the Racinian theatre is Alex­
ander (he himself explains how greedily he seeks out the
"good enemy" 1 ) , and Alexander is not a tragic hero.
There are enemies who agree to be enemies, that is, who
are also accomplices. The form of the combat is thus
not a confrontation, but a settling of accounts : there are
certain debts that must be liquidated.

1 Oui, j'cti cherche Porus; mctis quoi qu'on puisse dire,

Je ne le cherchais pas ctfin de le detruire.
J'avouerai que brulant de signaler mon bras,
Je me laissai conduire au bruit de ses combats,
Et qu'au seul nom d'un roi jusqu'cdors invincible,
A de nouveaux exploits mon coour devint sensible. (Alex.
IV,2 )
Yes, I sought out Porus, but for all that may be said, I did
not seek him out to destroy him. I confess that being eager
to indicate my prowess, I chose my course by the sound of
his combats, and that merely upon hearing the name of a
king hitherto invincible, my heart quickened at the thought
of new exploits.
28 ON RACINE
All of A's offensives aim at giving B the very being of
nothingness : it is actually a question of making the Other
live as a nullity, of making his negation exist, or, rather, of
making it last. It is a question of continuously stealing
B's being, and making out of this dispossessed state B's
new being. For example, A entirely creates B, raises him
out of nothingness, and plunges him back into it at will
(as Roxanne does with Bajazet2 ) : or he provokes in B a
crisis of identity: the tragic pressure par excellence con­
sists in forcing the Other to ask himself, "'\Vho am I?"
( Eriphyle, J oash ) . Or else A gives B the life of a pure re­
flection; we know that the theme of the mirror, or of the
double, is always a theme of frustration. This theme is
frequent in Racine: Nero is the reflection of Agrippina,3
Antiochus of Titus, Atalide of Roxanne. There is, more­
over, a Racinian object that expresses this spectacular sub­
jection : the Veil. A hides behind a veil as the source of an
image seems to hide behind a mirror. Or again, A breaks
B's en_velope by a kind of inquisitorial aggression : Agrip­
pina seeks to possess her son's secrets; Nero overhears
Britannicus, who is actually a pure transparence: even
Aricia tries to penetrate the secret of Hippolytus' virginity,
as one might break open a carapace.4
2 Songez-vous que fe tiens les portes du palais,
Que fe puis vous l'ouvrir ou fermer pour famais,
Que j' ai sur votre vie un empire supreme,
Que vous ne respirez qu' autant que fe vous aime?
Rentre dans le neant dont fe t'ai fait sortir. (Baf. 11,1 )
Do you realize that I command the palace gates, and can
open or close them to you forever, that I hold supreme sway
over your life, that you draw breath only so long as I love
you? . . . Return to the void from which I plucked you.
8 Non, non, le temps n'est plus que Neron, feune encore,

Me renvoyait les vamx d'une cour qui l' adore,

Lorsqu'il se reposait sur moi de tout l'Etat,
Que mon ordre au palais assemblait le senat,
Et que derriere un voile, invisible et presente . . . (Brit. 1,1)
No, the time is past when Nero, still young, offered me the
attractions of an adoring court, when he shared the burdens
of State with me, when my orders summoned the Senate to
the palace, when behind a veil, invisible yet present
• Mais de faire flechir un courage inflexible,
 RACINIAN MAN 29
Evidently, it is always a matter of frustrations much
more than of thefts ( and here we might speak of a Ra­
cinian sadism ) : A gives in order to take back, that is his
essential technique of aggression; he tries to inflict upon
B the torture of an interrupted pleasure ( or hope) . Agrip­
pina conceals Nero's tears from the dying Claudius, Junia
escapes Nero at the very moment he is about to possess
her, Hermione gloats over hiding Andromache from
Pyrrhus, Nero compels Junia to act coldly toward Britan­
nicus, and so on. Suffering itself can be deceived, and this
is perhaps the major grievance of the Racinian hero against
divinity: that it does not even assure unhappiness : this is
Jocasta's bitter reproach to the gods [Ze Ciel] .11 The most
complete image of this fundamental deception is given
in Athaliah's dream : Athaliah holds out her hands to em­
brace her mother, but touches only a horrible void.6
De porte-r la douleur dans une dme sensible,
D'enchainer un captif de ses fers etonne,
Contre un joug qui lui plait vainement mutine:
C'est za que fe veux, c'est 14 ce qui m'irrite. (Phed. 11,1 )
But to bend an inflexible will, to inflict pain in a sensitive
soul, to imprison a captive amazed at his own fetters, vainly
rebelling against a yoke that delights him : that is my desire,
and what eludes me.
For Phaedra, who loves Hippolytus in an entirely different man­
ner, this movement becomes positive, maternal : she wants to
accompany Hippolytus into the Labyrinth, to make herself, with
(and not against ) him, the midwife of the secret.
6 Ainsi, toujours cruel, et toujours en colere,
Il feint de s'apaiser, et devient plus severe:
Il n'interrompt ses coups que pour les redoubler,
Et retire son bras pour me mieux accabler. (Theb. 111,3)
Thus ever cruel and ever enraged, Heaven feigns peace, only
to become more severe: it interrupts its blows only to re­
double them, and withdraws its arm only to overwhelm me
further.
8 Et moi, je lui tendais les mains pour l'embrasser.
Mais je n'ai plus trouve qu'un horrible melange . . . (Ath.
II, 5 )
And I held out my hands to embrace her, but found no more
than a horrible jumble . . .
30 ON RACINE
Frustration can even be a kind of diversion of impulse, the
theft or undue attribution of feeling: Antiochus, Roxanne
receive the signs of a love that is not meant for them.
The common weapon of all these cancellations is the
Look : to look at the Other is to disorganize him, then to
petrify him in his disorder, that is, to maintain him in the
very being of his nullity. B's answer is entirely confined to
his words, which are here truly the weapon of the weak.
It is by speaking his misery that the subject tries to move
his tyrant. B's first aggression is complaint: he submerges
his master in it, but this is a complaint against injustice,
not against suffering. The Racinian grievance is always
egotistic and demanding, based on good conscience. B
complains in order to reclaim but reclaims without rebel·
ling; he implicitly calls Heaven to witness-in other words,
makes the tyrant into an object in God's eyes. Androm·
ache's complaint is the model of all these Racinian com·
plaints, strewn with indirect reproaches and concealing
aggression under lament.
The subject's second weapon is the threat of death. It
is a precious paradox that tragedy should be a profound
order of failure, yet that which might pass for the supreme
failure is, in tragedy, never serious. Here death is a name,
a part of speech, the final term of a contestation. Very
often, death is merely a way of indicating the absolute
state of a sentiment, a kind of superlative destined to
signify a zenith, a heraldic sign. The frivolity with which
the tragic personnel manipulates the idea of death ( an·
nouncing much more often than effecting it) attests a
still·infantile humanity, in which man is not completely
fulfilled : opposite all this funeral rhetoric, we must put
Kierkegaard's phrase : "the higher one sets man, the more
terrible death becomes." Tragic death is not terrible; it is
generally an empty grammatical category. Such a death,
moreover, is opposed to dying: there is only one death-as­
duration in Racine--Phaedra's. All the other deaths are
actually acts of_jJJ�ckmail, th� _ IIlachinery of an aggression.
There is first of all a sought-for death, a kind of modest
immolation, responsibility for which is left to chance, to
danger, to divinity, generally combining the advantages
of warrior heroism with those of a deferred suicide : Anti·
 RACINIAN MAN 31
ochus and Orestes have sought death for years, in combat
and at sea; Atalide threatens Bajazet with letting Roxanne
kill her; Xiphares desires to expose himself, since Monimia
is denied him, and so forth. A more discreet variety of
this sought-for death is that mysterious end which risks
crowning an intolerable suffering by a kind of unscientific
pathology: this is an intermediary death between sickness
and suicide.7 As a matter of fact, tragedy distinguishes
death-as-rupture from real death : the hero seeks to die in
order to break off a situation, and it is this desire which
he already calls death. Thus tragedy becomes a strange
order in which death is declined in the plura1.8
But the most frequent, because the most aggressive,
tragic death is obviously suicide. Suicide is a direct threat
against the oppressor, it is a graphic representation of his
responsibility, it is either blackmail or punishment.9 Its
theory is openly ( anaeven-somewhat naively ) given by
Creon ( in La Theba"ide ) : as a test of strength, suicide is
profitably extended by hell, since hell allows one to gather
the fruits of suicide, to continue to cause suffering, to
pursue a lover, etc.;10 hell permits the value to survive the

7 Je n'examine point si i'Y pourrai survivre. (Ber. 11,2 )

I shall not consider whether I can survive it.

8 Me feront-ils souffrir tant de cruels trepas,

Sans jamais au tombeau precipiter mes pas? ( Theb. III,Z )
Will they force me to suffer such cruel deaths
Without ever hastening my steps to the grave?

8 Suicide has a rhetorical equivalent, epitrope, a figure by which

an enemy is ironically provoked to do the evil action.

10 • •
Ma presence aux enfers vous fr1t-elle odieuse,
•

Dr1t apres le trepas vivre votre courroux,

Inhumaine, je vais y descendre apres vous.
Vous y verrez toujours l'objet de votre haine;
Et toujours mes soupirs vous rediront ma peine
Ou pour vous adoucir ou pour vous tourmenter,
Et vous ne pourrez plus mourir pour m'eviter. (Theb. final
scene )
Even though my presence in hell is hateful to you, even if
your heartless rejection outlives your very life, I shall follow
32 ON RACINE
person. This is a great tragic goal : thus, even when a real
death occurs, it is never immediate : the hero always has
time to speak his death; unlike the Kierkegaardian hero,
the classical hero never disappears without a last word
(conversely, real death, the kind that happens offstage,
requires only an improbably short time) . The aggressive
nature of suicide is quite apparent in Junia's substitute for
it: by becoming a Vestal, Junia dies to Nero, but to Nero
only: she achieves a perfectly selective death, which will
seek out and frustrate only the tyrant. And finally, the
only real death in tragedy is a death inflicted, murder.
When Hermione makes Pyrrhus die, or Nero Britannicus,
or Amurath ( or Roxanne ) Bajazet, or Theseus Hippolytus,
death ceases to be abstract : words no longer announce,
celebrate, or exorcise it. Instead there are real and sinister
objects that lurk in the tragedy from the start-Nero's
poison, black Orcan's thong, Monimia's royal fillet, Hip­
polytus' chariot. Tragic death never concerns anyone but
the Other : its constitutive movement is to be inflicted.
To these essential weapons ( frustration, blackmail ) is
joined a whole art of verbal aggression, possessed by both
victim and executioner. The Racinian wound is evidently
possible only to the degree that tragedy implies a desper­
ate reliance on language; speech here possesses an objec­
tive power, according to a code familiar in so-called primi­
tive societies : it is a whiplash. In tragedy, there are two
apparently contrary movements, both of which cause the
wound : either speech reveals an intolerable situation, that
is, causes it to exist-this is the case of so many interven­
tions in which the confidant, by an innocent word, desig­
nates the inner lesion11-or else the discourse is indirect,
its intention directly malignant : the calm distance be­
tween verbal ceremony and hannful intent defines the

you below. There you will still see the object of your hate,
there my sighs will still remind you of my sufferings, either
to assuage or torment you, and you will no longer be able to
die to escape me.
n For example, Doris says to Eriphyle about the latter's rival:
L'aimable lphigenie
D'une amitie sincere avec vous est unie. (Iph. 11,1 )
 RACINIAN MAN 33
typically Racinian cruelty that is the tormentor's coldness.12
The mainspring of all these attacks is obviously humilia­
tion : one seeks to introduce disorder into the Other, to
defeat him and consequently to restore the immobility of
the relation of force, to re-establish the greatest distance
between the tyrant's power and the victim's subjection.
The sign of this recovered immobility is triumph; the
word is not so far from its ancient meaning: it is the vic­
tor's recompense to contemplate his defeated partner re­
duced to the state of an object, a thing exposed to the
observer, for in Racinian terms the eye is the most pos­
sessive of the organs.1a
The gracious Iphigenia is bound to you by the sincerest
friendship.
or again, Iphigenia, faced with the coldness of an Agamemnon
determined to sacrifice her, says :
N'osez·vous sans rougir etre pere un moment? ( 11,2 )
Are you ashamed to be a father even for a moment?
It is, of course, in Phedre that the name ( Hippolytus ) is omnip­
otent in its very substance ( I,3 ) .
:u For example, Clytemnestra says to Eriphyle, whom she sus·

pects of having seduced Achilles :

Je ne vous presse point, Madame, de nous suivre;
En de plus cheres mains ma retraite vous livre. (Iph. 11,4 )
I shall not urge you to follow, lady. My departure leaves
you to dearer hands.
lll Vous veniez de mon front observer la paleur,
Pour aUer dans ses bras rire de ma douleur. (And. IV, 5 )
No sooner do you see how pale I turn than you go and laugh
in my rival's arms.
Quel surcroU de vengeance et de douceur nouvelle
De le montrer bientot pale et mort devant elle,
De voir sur cet objet ses regards arretes
Me payer les plaisirs que je leur ai pretest (Baj. IV,5 )
It will soon be a sweet revenge to show him pale and lifeless
before her, to see her eyes fixed on this object, repaying me
for the pleasures I permitted them!
Je veux voir son desordre, et jouir de sa honte. ( Baj. IV,6)
I want to see his confusion, and delight in his shame.
34 ON RACINE

"On"
What constitutes the singularity of the relation of au­
thority-and what has perhaps permitted the mythical
development of a Racinian "psychology"-is that this rela­
tion is conducted not only outside any society, but even
outside any sociality. The Racinian couple ( the tyrant
and the victim ) strug�le in a dcvastat�d, depop��g__ uni­
verse. It is probably this abstraction that has- given credit
tothe legend of a theatre of pure passion; Napoleon dis­
liked Racine because he regarded him as an insipid writer
of love stories. To measure the solitude of the Racinian
couple, we need only think of Corneille ( to return to an
inexhaustible parallel ) ; in Comeille the world (in the
sense of a reality broader and more diffuse than society) ,
surrounds the couple in a vital way: whether obstacle or
reward, in either case the world is a value. In Racine, the
relation is without echo, it is establisheg_ in the artifice of
a pure independence : it is mat; each mem�r i�concerned
only by the other-in other words, 'Qy_ hi�s�f. The blind­
ness of the Racinian hero with regard to others is almost
maniacal : everything in the world seems to seek him out
personally, everything is distorted until it is no more than
a narcissistic sustenance. Phaedra believes Hippolytus is
in love with everyone except her; Aman sees every man
around him bowing except Mordecai; Orestes believes that
Pyrrhus will marry Hermione expressly to deprive him of
her; Agrippina is convinced that Nero punishes precisely
those whom she supports; Eriphyle believes that the gods
favor Iphigenia solely to torment her.
In relation to the hero, then, the world is a virtually
undifferentiated mass : the Greeks, the Romans, the Jani­
zaries, the ancestors, Rome, the State, the people, pos­
terity-such collectivities have no political reality, they are
objects that serve only to intimidate or to justify, episodi­
cally and according to the needs of the cause; or more
exactly, they justify yielding to an intimidation. The Ra­
cinian world, as a matter of fact, has an effect of judg­
ment: it obsen>es the hero and ceaselessly threatens to
censure him, so that this hero lives in the panic of a
what will be said? [qu'en dira-t-on?] . Almost all succumb
 RACINIAN MAN 35
to it: Titus, Agamemnon, Nero; only Pyrrhus, the most
emancipated of the Racinian heroes, resists. For them the
world is terror, an elect non-value, a diffuse sanction that
surrounds, frustrates them, a moral hallucination, fear of
which does not exclude its use ( as Titus indicates in send­
ing Berenice away ) . Moreover it is this duplicity that con­
stitutes the essence of Racinian bad faith.1 In general, the
world, for the Racinian hero, is a public opinion, simul­
taneously terror and alibi.2
Thus the world's anonymity, its indistinction, its scm·
pulously selective reality (it is only a voice ) find their best
expression in all the grammatical forms of the indefinite,
those pronouns alternately accessible and menacing ( on,
ils, chacun ) that constantly remind us, by infinite nuances,
that the Racinian hero is alone in a hostile world whose
name is indifferent to him : on envelops, smothers without
ever declaring itself, it is the grammatical sign of an ag­
gression that the hero either cannot or will not localize.
Further, it is by the on that the hero often accuses his
partner, giving his reproach the caution and the security
of anonymity. The Racinian conjugation involves some re­
markable inflections : je exists only in a form swollen to
the point of explosion, of division ( in soliloquy, for in·
stance ) ; tu is the person of the received and reversed
aggression ( Perfide! ) ; il, that of deception, when the be·
loved can be referred to as an object falsely distant, before
the attack upon him ( l'ingrat) ; vous is the person of the
decor, of the avowal, or of the masked attack (Madame) ;
on or ils designate, as we have seen, a diffused aggression.

1 Racine himself seems to have experienced the world (except

during his last two years ) as opinion : he made his way only by
the attention of the Great, and explicitly wrote only to receive
that attention.
2 In Comeille the world-so present, so high a value-is never

a public opinion. We need merely compare the tone of the

Comelian Titus to that of the Racinian Titus :
Ma gloire la plus haute est celle d'etre a vous . . .
Et soit de Rome esclave et maitre qui voudral (Tite et Ber�­
nice, III,5 )
My greatest glory is to belong to you . . . Let Rome's slave
and master be who he will!
36 ON RACINE
There is one person lacking in the Racinian conjugation :
nous. The Racinian world is divided in an inexpiable
way : we, the pronoun of mediation, is unknown there.

Division
We must remember that d�yision . is_tbe_.fundamental
structure of the tragi� universe. It is even its distinctive
sigt!_ and . privilege. For example, only the tragic hero is
divided; confidants and counselors never debate; they
calculate actions, not alternatives. Racini.mL division is
rigorously binary, the possible is never anything but the
contrary. This elementary partition doubtless reproduces
a Christian idea;1 but in the profane Racine, there is no
Manicheism, division is pure form : it is the dual function
that counts, not its terms. Racinian man does not debate
between Good and Evil : he debates, that is all; his prob­
lem is on the level of structure, not of character.2
In its most explicit form, cleavage seizes first on the je
that feels in perpetual conflict with itself. Love here is a
kind of catalytic power accelerating the crystallization of
the two sides. Soliloquy is t1Ie_m:qp_�r e�pr:��-��9n of division.
The Racinian soliloquy is necessarily articulated into two
contrary members ( Mais non . . . , He quoi . . . ,
etc. ) ; it is a spoken consciousness of division, and not a
true deliberation.3 This is because the hero always feels
driven by a force external to himself, by a very remote

1 See, for instance, the canticle Racine adapted from Saint Paul:
· Mon Dieu, quelle guerre cruellel
Je trouvtl deux hommes en moi • • • ( Cantique spirituel, no.
3)
My Lord, how fierce the struggle!
I find two men within myself . . .

1 Need we recall that cleavage is the first characteristic of a

neurotic state: every neurotic's ego is split, and consequently his

relations with reality are limited. See Nunberg, Principes de psy­
chanalyse, P.U.F., 1957.
8 We may oppose the sterile deliberation of the Racinian hero

by the real deliberation of old King Danaos, in Aeschylus' Sup­

pliants. It is true that Danaos must decide between peace or war
-and that Aeschylus is regarded as an archaic poet!
 RACINIAN MAN 37
and terrible otherness, of which he feels himself to be the
plaything, which can even divide time from his own per­
son, which can cheat him of his own memory,4 and which
is strong enough to reverse him, causing him to shift, for
instance, from love to hate.5 We must add that division
is the normal state of the Racinian hero; he recovers his
unity only in certain ecstatic moments, precisely and
paradoxically when he is beside himself: rage deliciously
solidifies this lacerated ego. 6
Naturally division involves not only the ego, but also
the figure, in the mythical sense in which this term has
already been defined; the Racinian theatre is full of dou­
bles, which continually raise division to the level of the
play itself: Eteocles and Polynices, Taxiles and Cleofile,
Hector and Pyrrhus,7 Burrhus and Narcissus, Titus and
Antiochus, Xiphares and Pharnaces, Nero and Britannicus,
and so on. As we shall see in a moment, division, what­
ever suffering it entails, permits the hero to solve his es­
sential problem, loyalty. Divided, the Racinian being is
in a sense deported from his personal past into an external
past that he has not made. His disease is to be disloyal to
himself and too loyal to the Other. One might say that he
himself suffers the cleavage that he has not the courage
to impose upon his partner: fused with his tormentor, the
' Hermione forgets that she herself has ordered Orestes to mur­
der Pyrrhus. (And. V,5 )
1 Ah, je l'ai trop aime pour ne le point hair. (And. 11,1 )
Oh, I have loved him too much not to hate him now.

• Ahl je vous reconnais; et ce juste courroux,

Ainsi qu'a tous les Grecs, seigneur, vous rend a vous. (And.
11,5 )
Ah, I recognize you now, and that just wrath, my lord, re­
stores you to yourself as to the Greeks.
Ma colere revient, et je me reconnais. (Mith. IV,5 )
My rage returns, and I know myself once more.

7 Despite the disdain this interpretation has provoked, I am

convinced that Hector and Pyrrhus share an ambivalence in An­

dromache's eyes.
38 O N RACINE

victim partly detaches himself from himself. This is why

division also permits him to live : it is the price paid in
order to survive: schism is the ambiguous expression of the
disease and the remedy.
The Father
Who is this Other from whom the hero cannot detach
himself? First of all-that is, most explicitly-it is the
Father. There is no tragedy in which he is not actually or
_virtually present.1 It is not necessarily Blood or sex2 that
constitutes him, nor even Power; his be!!l_g is _his_J!.nterior­
ity : what comes after him is descended from him, ineluc­
tably committed to a problematics of loyalty. Th�Father
is the Past. And it is because his definition lies far behind
his attrib utes (Blood, authority, age, sex ) that he is ac­
tually and always a total Father; transcending Nature, he
is a primordial, irreversible fact : what has been is, that is
the code of Racinian time.3 Naturally for Racine this
identity is the ultimate disaster, ineffaceable, inexpiable.
It is in this sense that the Father is immortal : his im­
mortality is marked much more by return than by sur­
vival. Mithridates, Theseus, Amurath ( under the features
1 The fathers of the Racinian theatre : La Thebai'de-Oedipus

( Blood ) . Alexandre-Alexander ( Father-as-god ) . Andromaque­

the Greeks, the Law ( Hermione, Menelaus ) . Britannicus-Agrip­
pina. Berenice-Rome ( Vespasian ) . Bajazet-Amurath, elder
brothers ( delegated to Roxanne ) . Mithridate-Mithridates. Iphi·
genie-the Greeks, the gods ( Agamemnon ) . Phedre-Theseus.
t.sther-Mordecai. Athalie-Jehoiada ( God ) .

2 In addition to Agrippina, Mithridates and Mordecai are

expressly father and mother simultaneously:
Mais moi, qui des l'enfance eleve dans son sein . . . ( Mith.
IV,2 )
But I, raised in his bosom from childhood . . .
Mais lui, voyant en moi la fille de son frere,
Me tint lieu, chere Elise, et de pere et de mere. ( Es. I, l )
But he, recognizing me as his brother's daughter, dear Elise,
acted as both father and mother to me.

3 On Racinian time, see Georges Poulet, Studies in Human

Time, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.
 RACINIAN MAN 39
of the black Orcan) return from death, remind the son
(or the younger brother, which is the same thing) that the
Father can never be killed. To say that the Father is im­
mortal means that the Anterior is motionless: when the
Father is ( temporarily) absent, everything falls apart;
when he returns, everything is alienated. The Father's ab­
sence constitutes disorder; his return institutes the trans­
gression.
Blood, which is granted an eminent position in Racinian
metaphysics, is an extensive substitute for the Father. In
either case, what is in question is not a biological reality,
but a form : Blood is a more diffuse and consequently more
terrible anteriority than the Father : it is a trans-temporal
being that abides like a tree : it subsists integrally and pos­
sesses, retains, ensnares. Thus Blood is literally a law,
which means a bond and a legality. The only movement
permitted to the son is to break, not to detach himself.
Here, too, we find the constitutive impasse of the authori­
tarian relation, the catastrophic alternative of the Racinian
theatre; either the son kills the Father, or the Father de­
stroys the son : in Racine, infanticides are as numerous as
parricides.4
The inexpiable struggle between Father and son is that
between_ God and His creature:;. God or the gods? ln the
Racinian theatre the two fables exist side by side, classical
and Jewish. But actually Racine retains only the oppressive
and grace-wielding nature of the pagan gods : by the

• In the seventeenth century, the word "par,ricide" extended to

every attack against authority (Father, Sovereign, State, the gods ) .

As for infanticides, there is one in nearly every play:
Oedipus committing his sons to murderous hatred.
Hermione (the Greeks, the Past) causing the death of
Pyrrhus.
Agrippina smothering Nero.
Vespasian (Rome ) frustrating Titus.
Mithridates and his sons.
Agamemnon and lphigenia.
Theseus and Hippolytus.
Athaliah and Joash.
Further, there are two curses from mother to son in Racine:
Agrippina and Nero (V,7 ) , Athaliah and Joash (V,6 ) .
40 ON RACINE
curse they attach to the Blood, the gods merely guaran­
tee the inexpiable character of the Past; their plurality
conceals a unique function, which is also that of the Jew­
ish God : vengeance and retribution, but a retribution that
always exceeds the transgression,6 so that we are always
concerned with a God somehow anterior to the restrictive
law of retaliation. The only true Racinian God is neither
Greek nor Christian, but the God of the Old Testament,
in His literary and, indeed, epic form : Yahweh . All the
Racinian conflicts are based on a single model, that of the
couple formed by Yahweh and His people. For both, the
relation consists of a reciprocal alienation : the omnipo­
tent Being is personally attached to His creature, protects
and punishes him capriciously, maintains him, by repeated
onslaughts, as the chosen term of an indissoluble couple
-( divine election and tragic election are both terrible ) . In
his tum,-- the creature feels toward his Creator a panic
,sentiment of attachment and terror, and of guile as well.
In short, son and Fa�her, slave and master, victim and
tyrant, lover and beloved, creature and divinity are linked
by a dialogue without issue and without mediation. Every
case is one of an immediate relation, which is denied es­
cape, transcendence, forgiveness, and even victory. The
language in which the Racinian hero speaks to Heaven is
always a language of combat, and of personal combat. It
is either irony (Voild de ces grands dieux la supreme ;us­
tice! (Such is the ultimate justice of these great gods!] ) or
chicanery ( Un oracle dit-il tout ce qu'il semble dire? (Does
an oracle say all it seems to say?] ) or blasphemy ( Dieu des
Juifs, tu l'emportes! (God of the Jews, you have won!] )
The Racinian God exists in proportion to His malignity;
devourer of men, like the earliest divinities,6 His habitual

6 Sa haine va toujours plus loin que son amour. (Mith. 1,5 )

His hatred always reaches farther than his love.
• Et le sang d'un heros, aupres des Immortels,
Vaut seul plus que celui de mille criminels. ( Theb. III, 3 )
And a hero's blood is worth more to the Gods than that of a
thousand criminals.
 RACINIAN MAN 41
attributes are injustice, frustration,7 contradiction.s But
His very Being is Wickedness.

Reversal
We must recall here that the mainspring of tragedy-as:
spectacle is the same as that of any providential meta­
physics : reversal. To change all things into their opposite­
is both the formula of divine power and the very recipe of
tragedy.1 Reversal is, in fact, the fundamental figure of all
Racinian theatre either on the level of minor situations, or
on the level of an entire play ( Esther, for example) . Here
again, we find the obsession of a two-dimensional universe:
the world consists of pure contraries that are never medi-

J'ai mendie la mort chez des peuples cruels

Qui n'apaisent leurs dieux que du sang des mortels. (And.
11,2 )
I have begged for death among cruel peoples who appease
their gods only by human blood.
7 Mais, helas! quand sa main semble me secourir,
C'est alors qu'il s'apprete a me faire perir. (Theb. III, 3 )
But alas, when Heaven seems to favor m e i s just when it is
preparing my destruction.
8 Voile} de ces grands Dieux la supreme justice!
Jusques au bord du crime ils conduisent nos pas;
Ils nous le font commettre et ne l'excusent pas. ( Theb. III,
2)
Such is the ultimate justice of these great Gods! They lead
us to the brink of crime, compel us to transgress, and do not
forgive us for doing so.

1 The theory of the tragic reversal dates from Aristotle. A re­

cent historian has attempted to express its sociological signifi­

cance: the meaning of the reversal ( "to change all things into
their opposite," in Plato's phrase ) is the expression of a society
whose values are dislocated and upset by the abrupt transition
from feudalism to mercantilism, that is, by a sudden promotion
of money ( fifth-century Greece, Elizabethan England ) . But in
this form, such an explanation cannot apply to French tragedy;
a further ideological treatment is required, as in Lucien Gold­
man's The Hidden God and George Thomson's Marxism and
Poetry.
42 ON RACINE
ated. God raises up or casts down-that is the monotonous
movement of creation. Examples of these inversions are
countless. It is as if Racine constructed his entire theatre
on this model, which is, etymologically speaking, the
peripeteia, and only afterwards invested it with what is
called psychology. This is evidently a very old theme,
that of the captive crowned, or the tyrant deposed, but in
Racine this theme is not a "story," it has no epic density;
it is in fact a form, an obsessive image that is adapted to
a varying content. The reversal affects a totality : the hero
has the feeling that everything is caught up in this rocking
motion : the whole world oscillates, there is no alloy in the
minting of Destiny, precisely because Destiny always seizes
on a situation already organized, provided with a meaning,
a figure ( a face) .2 The reversal affects a universe already
created by an intelligence. The direction of the reversal
is always depressive ( except in the "sacred" tragedies ) : it
casts things down from their height, and its image is the
fall 3 ( Racine's is probably a descensional imagination, as
the Cantique spirituel no. 3 suggests :4 the reader will re- ·
a This solidification of the experienced situation is expressed in

such formulas as : contre moi tout s'cJSsemble [everything unites

against me]; tout a change de face [everything has changed its
aspect], etc.

8 The theory of the fall is given by Aman's wife, Zares:

Ou tendez-vous plus haut? Je fremis quand je voi
Les abimes profonds qui s'offrent devant moi:
La chute desormais ne peut etre qu'horrible. (Es. III, l )
Why do you seek to rise still higher? I tremble, seeing the
deep gulfs that yawn before me: henceforth, the fall can only
be dreadful.
' Referring to the two men in the self :
L'un tout esprit, et tout celeste,
Veut qu'au Ciel sans cesse attache,
Et des biens eternels touche,
Je compte pour rien tout le reste
Et ['autre par son poids funeste
Me tient vers la terre penche. ( C"ntique spirituel, no. 3 )
One, all spirit and celestial, bids me bind myself to Heaven,
concerned w;th eternal things, and count the rest for nought,
 RACINIAN MAN 43
call the analysis of the Racinian tenebroso ) . As pure act,
reversal has no duration, it is a point, an explosion (what in
classical language is called a coup ) , one might almost say
a simultaneity :5 the hero, struck down, holds in a single
lacerating perception the former state of which he is dis­
possessed and the new state that is assigned to him. As a
matter of fact, as in division, the awareness of life is
nothing but the awareness of reversal : to be is not only to
be divided, but to be reversed.
Now wliat constitutes the special nature of the tragic
reversal is that it is exact and, so to speak, measured. Its
fundamental design is symmetry. Destiny turns each thing
into its contrary as though in a mirror: inverted, the world
continues, only the direction of its elements is switched. It
is the awareness of this symmetry that terrifies the stricken
hero; what he calls the comble, the crowning blow of a
change, is the very intelligence that always seems to lead
fortune precisely to its opposite; with terror he sees the
universe subject to an exact power: for him, tragedy is the
art of precision ( the Latin ipse, the essence of the thing) .8
while the other by his mortal weight drags me down to earth
below.
5 The atemporality of reversal is obviously emphasized by the

unity of time ( which proves once again to what a degree these

rules are not mere conventions, but the living expression of a
complete ideology) :
Je me vois, dans le cours d'une mAme journee . • • (Brit. II,
3)
I find myself, in the course of a single day . • •

• The conjunction expressing the tragic precision is lorsque [just

when] : ;ust when . . . (statement of the crowning blow) , then

. . . (statement of the fall ) . It is the Latin cum . . tum .

. . , a complex that is both adversative and temporal (simul­

.

taneous ) . The examples are numberless, in other grammatical

forms:
Je n'ai done traverse tant de mers, tant d'"£tats
Que pour venir si loin preparer son trepas. (And. V,l ) , etc.
Then I have crossed so many seas, so many nations, only to
come so far to decide his death.
In the order of situations too, examples are very numerous; I list
 44 ON RACINE
Thus the world is ruled by a spite that can always find
the negative core of happiness itself. The structure of the
tragic world is designed, so that the world is constantly
plunged back into immobility : symmetry is the plastic
nature of immediation, of failure, of death, of sterility.7
Wickedness is always precise, so that one might say
that Racinian tragedy is the art of wickedness : it is be­
cause G�<!_ mapjpulates_tfu: symmetry that He establishes
a spectacle, 8 Hi�_l!!_alignity__ is aesthetic, He gives man a
splendidSliOw, that of his abasement. This reversive opera­
tion, moreover, has its own rhetoric : antithesis, and its
versified figure: la frappe [the strike] 9 ( obviously the
alexandrine admirably serves the dimorphous organization
of the Racinian world10 ) . As organizer o_f the tragic spec-,
tacle, God is called D�stiny. Now we understand what the
__

at random : it is precisely in Narcissus that Britannicus confides;

it is precisely when Eriphyle knows about her birth that she must
die; it is precisely when Agamemnon condemns his daughter that
his daughter rejoices in his kindness; it is precisely when Aman
supposes he is at the pinnacle of glory that he falls; it is precisely
by trying to save her lover that Atalide destroys him, etc.
1 Without forcing the comparison between the aesthetic or

metaphysical order and the biological order, we may nonetheless

remark that what is always exists by dissymmetry. "Certain ele­
ments of symmetry may coexist with certain phenomena, but
they are not necessary. What is necessary is that certain elements
of symmetry not exist. It is dissymmetry which creates the phe­
nomenon." Pierre Curie
8 Prennent-ils done plaisir a fctire des coupables,
Afin d'en fctire ctpr�s d'illustres miserctbles? (Theb. III,2 )
Then do the gods delight in making criminals, in order to
tum them, afterwards, into illustrious victims?
And in the preface to Esther: "I could conduct the whole of my
action with only those scenes that God himself, so to speak, has
prepared."
9 Claudel, apropos of Racine: "That is what frctpper means,

as we say to strike a coin, or a thought that has been struck off

. . . something that I should call the detonation of the obvious."
( Cahiers Renaud-Barrault VIII, Paris )
10 Antithesis is as old as the world, the alexandrine common

to a whole civilization. No doubt there is always a finite number

 RACINIAN MAN 45
Racinian Destiny is : not quite Cod, it is a this side of God,
a way of not naming His wickedness. Destiny permits the
tragic hero partially to blind himself as to the source of
his misfortune, to situate its original intelligence, its plas­
tic content, without designating responsibility for it : Des­
tiny is an act modestly cut off from its cause. This kind of
paradoxical abstraction is readily understood if we recall
that the hero can dissociate Destiny's reality from its es­
sence : he foresees this reality, he is ignorant of this essence;
or better, he foresees the very unforeseeability of Destiny,
he experiences it as a form, a mana, the place exempt from
reversal,11 he assimilates himself spontaneously to this
form, feels that he is becoming pure and continual form
himself,12 and this formalism permits him modestly to
avoid God without, all the same, abandoning Him.
Transgression
Thus tragedy is essentially an action against God, but
an action infinitely suspended and reversed. All of Racine
lies in that paradoxical moment when the child discovers
that his father is wicked, yet wants to remain his child.
This contradiction admits on only one solution (and this
is the tragedy itself: that the son assume the Father's
transgression, that the creature's guilt exempt the Creator.
of fonns. This does not keep them from having particular mean­
ings. Criticism cannot refuse to interrogate a fonn merely because
it has a universal character. I regret that we do not yet have a
"philosophy" of the alexandrine, a sociology of metaphor, or a
phenomenology of the figures of rhetoric.
11 Destiny [le Destin] is the name of a force that applies to

the present or the future. For the past there is another word,
since here the mana has already received a content: Fate (le
Sort ) .
u See the significant correction :

Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m'entratne. (And. I, I )

I surrender blindly to the destiny that sweeps me on,
instead of:
Je me lh·re en aveugle au transport qui m'entraine.
I surrender blindly to the rapture that sweeps me on.
46 ON RACINE
The Father overwhelms unjustly : it will suffice to deserve
his onslaughts retroactively for them to become just. Blood
is precisely the vehicle of this retroaction. We might say
that every tragic hero is born innocent : he becom�s guilty
in order to save God.1 Racini;m theology is an inverted
redemption : it is man who atones for God. Thus we see
what is the function of Blood (or of Destiny) : it gives
man the right to be guilty. The hero's guilt is a functional
necessity : if man is pure, then God is impure, and the
world falls apart. Hence man must cling to his transgres­
sion as his most precious belonging : and what surer means
of being guilty than making oneself responsible for what
is outside oneself, previous to oneself? God, Blood, the
Father, the Law-in short, anteriority becomes incriminat­
ing in essence. This form of absolute guilt suggests what
in totalitarian politics is called objective guilt. The world
is a tribunal : if the accused is innocent, the judge is guilty;
hence the accused takes upon himself the judge's trans­
gression.2
Here we see the exact nature of the relation of authority.
A is not only powerful and B weak. A is guilty, B is inno­
cent. But since it is intolerable that Power_should be un­
-
just, B . takes A's tninsgression on lilrriself : the Qppressive
relation is reversed into a punitive relation, though with­
out ever halting a whole interplay of blasphemies, feints,
1 Mon innocence enfin commence a me peser.
fe ne sais de tout temps quelle injuste puissance
Laisse le crime en paix et poursuit ['innocence.
De quelque part sur moi que je toume les yeux,
fe ne voix que malheurs qui condamnent les Dieux.
Meritons leur courroux, justifions leur haine . . . (And. III,i )
My innocence at last is beginning to weigh upon me. I do
not know what unjust power always leaves crime in peace,
and persecutes innocence. Wherever I look, I see nothing
but miseries that condemn the gods. Let us deserve their
wrath, let us justify their hatred . . .
1 Feudalism in ancient China : "One yields to a stranger only
on condition that one commit a transgression; the feudal tie re­
sults from the transgression which "must" be committed and
from the forgiveness which it is the purpose of this transgression
to obtain." Granet, Annee sociologique, 1952, p. 22.
 RACINIAN MAN 47
breaks, and reconciliations between the two partners. For
B's acknowledgment is not a generous oblation : it is the
terror of opening his eyes and seeing the guilty Father.3
This mechanism of guilt nourishes all Racinian conflicts,
including the erotic ones : in Racine, there is only one
__

relation, that between God and His creature.

-- .... - . -· -·

The "dogmatism" of the Racinian hero

This terrible alliance is fidelity. In relation to the
Father, the hero feels the horror of being ensnared : he is
caught in his own anteriority as in a possessive mass that
smothers him . This mass consists of a shapeless accumula­
tion of ties : 1 betrothed, parents, nation, even children­
all the figures of legality are figures of death. Racinian
fidelity is funereal, disastrous. It is what Titus experiences,
for example: while his father was alive, he was free; once
his father is dead, he is fettered. Hence it is essentially by
his destructive force that we measure the Racinian hero :
it is necessarily his infidelity that emancipates him. The
most regressive figures a��-Jho__se.._who _.remain fused with
the F�th��• . enveloped in his substance ( Hermione, Xi­
phares, lphigenia, Esther, J ehoiada ) : the Past is a right
which such figures represent proudly, that is, aggressively,
even if this aggression is guarded (Xiphares, Iphigenia ) .
Other figures, while remaining unconditionally subject to
the Father, experience this fidelity as a funereal order and
express it by an indirect indictment (Andromache, Orestes,
Antigone, Junia, Antioch us, Monimia ) . While others­
and these are the true Racinian heroes-accede fully to
the problem of infidelity (Haemon, Taxiles, Nero, Titus,
Phamaces, Achilles, Phaedra, Athaliah, and, most emanci­
pated of all, Pyrrhus ) : they know they are trying to break
a In contrast to the famous Oedipus complex, we might call

this movement the Noah complex: one son laughs at the Father's
nakedness, the others look away and conceal it.
1 0 cendres d'un epoux! 6 Troyenst 6 mon perel
0 mon fils, que tes jours coutent cher a ta mere! (And. III,
8)
0 ashes o f my husband, 0 Trojans, 0 m y father, and 0 my
son, how dear your days cost your mother!
48 ON RACINE
off, but do not find the means to do so; they know they
cannot shift from childhood to maturity without a new
accouchement,2 which is generally crime, parricide, matri­
cide, or deicide; they are defined by the refusal_lo inherit;
this is why we might apply a word of Husserl's to them and
call them dogmatic heroes; in the Racinian vocabulary,
they are les impatients. Their effort of disengagement is
opposed by the inexhaustible force of the Past; this force
is a veritable Erinys3 that prevents the institution of a
new Law, in which everything would at last be possible.4
That is the dilemma. How escape it? And first of all,
when? Fidelity is a panic state, it is experienced as a con­
finement whose termination would be a terrible shock.
This shock nonetheless occurs : it is the intolerable ( the
Racinian e'en est trop [it is too much to bear] or again
the comble [the crowning blow] , the extremite martelle ) .
The suffering that the link induces is actually an apnoea,5
and thereby provokes the hero to action; asphyxiated, the
-Racinian hero wants to precipitate himself outside his
fidelity. But the tragedy suspends this very movement.
Racinian man is caught in his disengagement: he is the
.!_ll an of the _qye faire? [what is to be done?], not of the
faire [doing] ; he appeals to, he invokes, an action, he does
not perform it; he proposes alternatives but does not de-

2 Burrhus is the one character who tries to transform Nero

from son to Emperor. Speaking of other counselors:

Dans une longue enfance ils l'auraient fait vieillir. (Brit. I,
2)
They would have let him grow old in a long childhood.
8 In its aggressive, vengeful, Eriniac aspect, fidelity is a strongly

Hebraic notion : "But from the midst of the Jewish people, there
always rose men who revived the weakened tradition and re­
newed Moses' admonitions and commandments, insisting that
the lost beliefs be restored." Freud, Moses and Monotheism.
• "Anime d'un regard, je puis tout entreprendre [Inspired by one

look, I can undertake anything]," Pyrrhus says to Andromache

-that is, if you help me break with the Erinys Hermione, I
shall accede to the new Law.
1 The contrary of suffering is breathing, as we say we can

breathe again after some terrible ordeal.

 RACINIAN MAN 49
cide between them; he is compelled to act but does not
project himself into action; he knows dilemmas, not prob­
lems; he is a reject more than a project (except, once
again, for Pyrrhus ) ; for him, to act is only to change. This
suspended nature of the alternative is expressed in count­
less Racinian speeches; its usual articulation is Ah plutOt
. . . [Ah rather . . .] , which means : anything, even
death, rather than going on like this.
The liberating movement of Racinian man is purely
intransitive, which is already the seed of failure : action
has nothing on which it can fasten, since the world is
alienated from the outset. The absolute division of the
universe, the result of the couple's self-imprisonment, ex­
cludes all mediation; the Racinian world is a world of two
terms, its status is paradoxical, not dialectical : the third
term is missing. Nothing shows this intransitive nature
better than the verbal expression of erotic feeling. Love
is a state without a grammatical object: faime, faimais,
vous aimez, il faut que j' crime enfin [I love, I loved, you
love, at last I must love]-it seems that in Racine the verb
"to love" is by nature intransitive; what is given is a force
indifferent to its object and, in a word, the very essence of
the act, as if the act exhausted itself outside of any goal.6
Love is at its very outset dispossessed of its goal, it is de­
ceived. Deprived of reality, it can only repeat, not develop
itself. This is why the fajll!!� _Qf th� �acinian hero finally
results from an i�ability to_ conceive of time except_ _�s a
_ _

re�tion : the alternative always tends to repetition, and

repetition to failure. Racini_;tn,__quration is n�y�r:._IJ}�!!J,r_�i_ye,
it is . circular, it accumulates and harks back bu.t never
trarisfoli!is anything (Berenice is the purest example of
e J'aimais, Seigneur, j'aimais; je voulais etre aimee. (Ber. final
scene )
I loved, my lord, I loved; I wanted to be loved.

Another essentialized verb is "to fear" ( craindre ) :

Qu'est-ce que vous craigne:r.? . . .
Je l'ignore moi-meme,
Mais je crains. (Brit. V,l )
What is it you fear?
I don't know myself, but I fear.
50 ON RACINE
this rotation, from which nothing, as Racine so perfectly
puts it, emerges ) . In the grip of this motionless time, the
act tends toward the rite. Thus, in a sense, nothing is
more illusory than the notion of a tragic climax or crisis :
it resolves nothing, it merely severs.7 Such time-as-repeti­
tion is naturally the kind _ th;:tt_ defines the _ vendetta, the
infinite and seemingly motionless generation of crimes.
From La Thebciide to Athalie, the failure of all the Ra­
cinian heroes is to be inexorably reinstated in this circular
time.8
Tentative solutions
Reiterative time is to such a degree God's time that
for Racine it is the time of Nature itself; so that to break
with this time is to break with Nature, to tend to an anti­
physis: for example, it is to deny, in one way or another,
the family and natural filiality. Some Racinian heroes at­
tempt to perform this liberating movement. It must always
7 On the contrary, Aeschylean tragedy, for example, does not

sever, it resolves ( the Oresteia institutes the human tribunal ) :

"1be bonds are loosened, the remedy exists." (Aeschylus, Aga­
memnon)

8 Agrippina's curse on Nero:

Ta fureur, s'irritant soi-m�me dans son cours,
D'un sang toujours nouveau marquera tous tes jours. (Brit.
V,6 )
Your frenzy, exasperating itself in its course, will mark all
your days with forever new bloodshed.
Athaliah's curse upon Joash :
Je me flatte, j'espere
Qu'indocile a ton joug, fatigue de ta loi,
Fidele au sang d'Achab qu'il a re�u de moi .
On verra de David l' heritier detestable
Abolir tes hormeurs, profaner ton autel
Et venger Athalie, Achab et Jezabel. (Ath. V,6 )
I only hope and pray that, rebellious to your yoke, weary of
your rule, loyal to the blood of Ahab he has received from
me . . . this loathsome heir of David will soon abolish your
honors, profane your altar, and revenge Athaliah, Ahab, and
Jezebel.
 RACINIAN MAN 51
be a question of accepting a third term in the conflict.
For Bajazet, for example, this third term is time: he is
the only tragic hero to follow a dilatory course of behavior,
to__lfait, and thereby he threatens the tragedy in its es­
sence;1 it is Atalide who restores him to tragedy, to death,
by rejecting any mediation in her love : despite her gentle­
ness, she is an Erinys, she retrieves Bajazet. For Burrhus'
Nero, the third term is the world, the Emperor's real task
( this Nero is progressive) ; for Narcissus' Nero, it is crime
erected into a system, "deliberate" tyranny ( this Nero is
regressive in relation to the other ) . For Agamemnon, it
is the false Iphigenia, cunningly invented by the priest.
For Pyrrhus, it is Astyanax, the child's real life, the con­
struction of an open, new future as opposed to the vendet­
ta] law represented by the Erinys Hermione. The_'h_op�, in
this hideol!sly alte_!!1.!1! tY� world, js always to accede to a
tertiary order, in which the cltJO of executioner and victim,
Father and _ son, wiJl finally be transcended. Such is per­
haps the optative meaning of all those trios of lovers who
pass through the tragedies, less like the classic elements of
the adulterous triangle than like the utopian image of an
exit from the sterility of the original couple.2
1 Antitragic lines:
Peut-etre avec le temps f'oserai davantage.
Ne precipitons rien . . . (Bai- 11,1 )
Perhaps with time I shall venture more. Let us not proceed
too rashly . . .
2 Hermione says of Andromache, and Pyrrhus:
Nous le verrions encore nous partager ses soins. (And. V,3 )
\Ve would still be seeing him divide his lov� between us.
Orestes, going mad :
Reunissons trois cceurs qui n'ont pu s'accorder. (And. final
scene )
Let us unite three hearts that have been unable to agree.
Junia, to Nero and Britannicus:
Souffrez que de vos cceurs rapprochant les liens . . . (Brit.
Ill,8 )
Permit me to draw your hearts together once again . . •
52 ON RACINE
But the major solution, the one invented by Racine
(and no longer by one or another of his figures ) , is bad
faith: the hero is pacified by eluding the conflict without
resolving it, by entirely deporting himself from the Father's
shadow, by assimilating the Father to absolute Good. This
is the conformist solution. Such bad faith inhabits all the
Racinian tragedies, it touches a figure here and there, pro­
vides him with a moral language; it prevails explicitly in the
four "happy" tragedies of Racine : Alexandre, Mithridate,
Iphigenie, Esther. Here, the tragedy is in a sense trans­
ferred, like an abscess, to a black, apparently marginal
character, who serves as an expiatory victim for the rest
of the group ( Taxiles, Phamaces, Eriphyle, Aman ) . The
tragic character is actually expelled as an undesirable. Once
he has gone, the others can breathe, live, leave the tragedy,
no one is there to look at them any longer : they can lie
to each other and the world, celebrate the Father as a
natural Law, enjoy the triumph of their good conscience.
As a matter of fact, this elision of tragedy can only be
accomplished at the cost of a final accommodation : the
Father must be doubled, so that from him can be derived
·
_a transceiioent, generous figure, detached from the vindic­
tive Father by the distance of a great moral or social func­
tion. This is why, in all these tragedies, there is both a
Father and a King, distinct from each other. Alexander
can be generous, since the vendetta} law is transferred to
Porus; Mithridates is double : as Father, he returns from
death, disturbs, punishes, but as King, he dies, forgives;
Agamemnon wants to kill his daughter, but the Greeks,
the Church ( Calchas ) , the State ( Ulysses ) save her;
Mordecai imposes the Law, possesses Esther, but Ahasuerus
challenges the Law and exalts Esther. Perhaps we may see
in this cunning division the very act by which Racine con·
tinually divided his life between his King ( Louis XIV)
Titus to Antiochus:
Vous ne faites qu'un cceur et qu'une ame avec nous. (Ber.
III, I )
You make, with us, but one heart and one soul.
Here and elsewhere, there is the trace of a curious Racinian
Dostoevski-ism .
 RACINIAN MAN 53
and his Father ( Port-Royal ) . It is Port-Royal that is in the
background of all Racinian tragedy, generating the para­
digmatic figures of fidelity and failure. But it is Louis XIV,
the indulgence of the Father-as-King, who inspires all the
solutions of the tragic impasse : it is always by the King
that the tragedy is spoiled, and moreover it is to all these
"rectified" tragedies that Louis XIV gave his warmest ap­
proval.

The confidant
-
Between failure and bad faith, there - is, however, o_ne
__ _

possible way ou(-!hat �Q_f_4i�le�t�� 'rragedl:'-Jk>es not ig­

nore this p,Q��!bility; _J;>JJt i.thas..he.�-�- �J>l.e to a_dmit it only
by banalizing its_ functional _ figu;r�; the confi�ant. In ·
Racine's day, the role's popularity was waning, which per­
haps increases its significance. The Racinian confidant
(and this is in accord with his origin ) is linked to the hero
by a kind of feudal tie, a devotion; this li���Qn _designates
him as a _true do':!ble, prQpa_�!Y__c:lelegatc:_�__t�-���1l!I!e_;Ill �he
triviality__ Qf .!h�f.Q!!BicL:l!IA_o f its soJution, in short, to
establish the nontr�gj� _p:Irt of t�e ·tra�gyJri�� J� teral · z<;>ne
where language _is�- c:H�c:recl_i..t�cl. l;>econ�e� d()��.1 As we
know, the hero's dogxnatism is continually countered by
the confidant.j__ empiricism. Here we must recall what has
already been observed apropos of the tragic enclosure. For
the confidant, the world exists; leaving the stage, he can
enter reality and then return from it : his insignificance
authorizes his ubiquity. The first resuJ! of _ this droit de
sortie is that for him the univ�eases_JQ_�J>solutely
antino�2 �ssentially constituted by an alternative con­
struction of the world, alienation yields once the world be-
1 Phaedra makes Oenone responsible for ridding her of the

business of the act, so that she retains, nobly, and childishly,

only the tragic result:
Pour le flechir enfin tente tous les moyens (Phed. III, I )
To sway him, make use of every means.

2" It is only in social existence that such antinomies as sub­

jectivism/objectivism, spiritualism/materialism, activity/passivity
lose their antinomic character • .Marx, Economic and Philo­
."

sophic Manuscripts of 1 844.

54 ON RACINE
comes multiple. The hero lives in the universe of forms,
alternations, signs; the confidant in the world of content,
causality, accident. Doubtless he is the voice of reason (an
utterly stupid reason, yet with something of Reason all the
same) against the voice of "passion"; but this means, in
particular, that he voices the possible against the impos­
sible. Failure constitutes the hero, it is transcendent to
him; in the confidant's eyes, failure touches the hero, it
is contingent to him. Whence the dialectical nature of
the solutions_ he_ ( UJ!S'!_(:Cessfullyl _proposes, whic]:l always
consist in mediatizing_the alternative.
For the hero, then, the confidant's medicine is therefore
aperitive, it consists first of all in opening up the secret, de­
fining the exact status of the hero's dilemma; the confidant
tries to produce an illumination. His technique seems
crude, but it is a tested one : he must provoke the hero
by naively representing to him a hypothesis contrary to
his impulse, in a word, the confidant must "blunder" 3 (in
general, the hero "reacts" to the strategy, but rapidly con­
ceals it under a flood of justifying words ) . As fQ_�Jhe be-

�����n��� ! � �tC�i ; ���B�� ��: ?: !t�� ���

h an e f
� - s i t s �n
the �rid to the means. Here are the most frequent examples
of stich behavior : to escape (which is the nontragic ex­
pression of tragic death ) ; to wait (which, again, is to op­
pose time-as-repetition by reality's time-as-maturation ) ;4
3 Theramenes says to Hippolytus that it is precisely a matter

of fulfilling the latter's love for Aricia :

Quoil vous-meme, Seigneur, la persecutez-vous? (Phed. 1,1 )
Then do you yourself, my lord, turn against her?
6 Cedez, mon frere, a ce bouillant transport:
Alexandre et le temps vous rendront le plus fort. (Alex. III, 3 )
Yield, brother, to this seething frenzy: Alexander and time
will make you the stronger.
Laissez a ce torrent le soin de s'ecouler. (Ber. III,4 )
Give this torrent a chance to subside.
Mais ce succes, Madame, est encore incertain.
Attendez. ( Baj. III, 3 )
But this success, Lady, is still uncertain. B e patient.
 RACINIAN MAN 55
to live ( vivezl this injunction, i n the mouths of all con­
fidants, stigmatizes the tragic dogmatism as a desire for
failure and death : if only the hero would make life a
value, he would be saved ) . In all three forms, the last one
imperative, the viability recommended by the confidant is
indeed the most antitragic value possible. The �o!!fida_nt's
role iLD.()J only .to_ rep_resenL!t•..l>.!!t also tQ �9.!l:!!t�!.. the
alibis by_ which the hero 111a��� h_i_s wiJl to Jail by. �Jajio
extern_�I !9 the fragecJY._and in a sense explanatory of it. He
sympathizes with the hero, in _other .w.o..rds, attenuates his
respon_si'biJi ty : he believes him free to escape- outnot to
do wrong, forced into failure yet accessible to its outcome.
This is quite the contrary of the tragic hero, who claims
utter responsibility when it is a question of taking on him­
self an ancestral transgression he has not committed, but
declares himself impotent when it is a question of tran­
scending it; who seeks to be free, in a word, by being a
slave, but not free by being free. Perhaps in the confidant,
though he is clumsy and often utterly stupid, we already
have a hint of that whole line of irreverent valets who will
oppose the lord and master's psychological regression by a
supple and happy mastery of reality.

The fear of signs

The hero is confined. The confidant surrounds but can­
not penetrate him; their languages are constantly ex­
changed, never coincide. This is because the hero's con­
finement is a fear, both very profound and very immediate,
maintained on the very surface of human communication :
the hero lives in a world of signs, he knows he is concerned
by them, but these signs are not certain. Not only does
Destinv never confirm them, but it even adds to their con­
fusion by applying the same sign to different realities; once
the hero begins to trust one meaning ( or as he says, flat­
ters himself [se flatter] ) , something intervenes, disjoins
the hero, and flings him into chaos and deception; thus
the world seems to him masked by "colors," and these
colors are traps. The beloved object's withdrawal ( or its
oral substitute, silence ) , for example, is terrible because it
is a second-degree ambiguity; one is never sure that it is
a withdrawal : how can the negative produce a sign, how
56 ON RACINE
can the void signify? In the inferno of meanings, with­
drawal is the primary torment (hatred gives the hero much
more security, precisely because it is certain ) .
The world being reduced to the exclusive relation of
the couple, it is the Other who is constantly questioned;
the hero makes enormous and painful efforts to read the
partner to whom he is linked. The mouth being the source
of false signs,1 it is to the face that this reader is constantly
referred. The flesh is a hope of an objective meaning: the
brow (which is like a smooth, denuded face clearly
stamped with the communication it has received 2 ) and
above all the eyes, final instance of the truth.3 But the

J'attendais, pour vous croire,

Que cette meme bouche, apres mille serments
D'un amour qui devait unir tous nos moments,
Cette bouche, a mes yeux s'avouant infidele,
M'ordonnat elle-meme une absence etemelle. (Ber. IV,5 )
I could not believe you until that very mouth, after a thou­
sand declarations of a love which was to unite us forever,
that same mouth, confessing its faithlessness, condemned me
to an eternal absence.
Ahl croyez-vc.us que, loin de le penser,
Ma bouche seulement eut pu le prononcer? (Baf. III,4 )
1l1en can you believe that, far from thinking such a thing,
my mouth could even have spoken it?

' Je verrai le temoin de ma flam111£ adultere

Observer de quel front ;'ose aborder son pere. (Phed. III, 3 )
I shall see the witness of my adulterous lust judge o f my ·

brow when I dare approach his father.

Despite the reputedly conventional character of the classical
language, I am reluctant to believe in the sclerosis of its images.
On the contrary, I believe that this language derives its special
character (and its very great beauty ) from the ambiguous quality
of its metaphors, which are both concept and object, sign and
image.
8 Ma bouche mille fois lui jura le contraire.
Quand meme ;usque-ld fe pourrais me trahir,
Mes yeux lui difendront, Seigneur, de m'obeir. (Brit. 11,3 )
Though my mouth will a thousand times over assure him of
 RACINIAN MAN 57
surest sign is of course the sign that is surprised (a letter,
for example ) : then certain disaster becomes an overwhelm­
ing joy, and finally incites to action. This is what Racine
calls tranquillite.4
This is perhaps the final state of the tragic paradox :
that every system of signification is double, object of an
infinite confidence and an infinite suspicion. Here we touch
the heart of the disorganization : language. The behavior
of the Racinian hero is essentially verbal; but also, by a
movement of exchange, his language constantly represents
itself as a course of action, so that the speech of Racinian
man consists of an immediate movement : it is flung be­
fore us ( I am of course carefully distinguishing language
from style) . If, for instance, we were to paraphrase the
Racinian speech in prose, without any regard for the tone,
what we would find is an agitation formed of movements,
exclamations, provocations, bargainings, indignations, in
short the genetics of a language, not its maturity. The
Racinian logos is never separated from itself, it is expres­
sion, not transitivity, it never leads to the manipulation of
an object or the modification of a fact; it remains always in a
kind of exhausting tautology, the language of language. It is
likely that we could reduce it to a certain number of articu­
lations or clausules of an entirely trivial nature: not be­
cause the sentiments are vulgar (as vulgar critics like
Sarcey and Lemaitre were delighted to believeS ) , but be-
the contrary, even so I may betray myself-my eyes, my lord,
will forbid him to obey me.
Le nom d'amant peut·etre offense son courage;
Mais il en a les yeux, s'il n'en a le langage. (Phed. 11,1 )
Though the name of lover may daunt his courage, he has the
eyes of one, if not the language.
' Libre de soins cruels ou j'allais m'engager,
Ma tranquille fureur n'a plus qu'a se venger. (Baj. IV,5 )
Free of the cruel doubts that beset me, my tranquil rage need
only take its revenge.
5 In the eyes of such critics, Racine, in Andromaque for ex­

ample, put on stage the case of a widow who hesitates, before

remarrying, between her child and the memory of her husband.
58 ON RACINE
cause triviality is the form proper to sublanguage, to that
logos which is perpetually nascent and never fulfilled.
Moreover, this is precisely Racine's success : his poetic
style has been transparent enough to reveal the almost fish­
wife character of the "scene" : the articulatory substratum
is so close to the surface that it gives the Racinian dis­
course a kind of supple respiration, a relaxation, and I
should almost say a "swing."

Logos and praxis

What Racinian tragedy reveals is a veritable universality
of language. Language here absorbs, in a kind of exalta­
tion, all the functions elsewhere assigned to other forms
of behavior; one might almost say that. it is polytechnical:
it is an organ, can take the place of sight, as if the ear
looked;1 it is a sentiment, for loving, suffering, dying are
never anything here but speaking; it is a substance, it pro­
tects ( to be confounded is to cease to speak, to be dis­
covered ) ; it is an order, it permits the hero to justify his
aggressions or his failures, and from them to derive the
illusion of an agreement with the world; it is a morality, it
authorizes him to convert passion into a privilege. Here
perhaps is the key to Racinian tr�g�_: to speak is to do,
the logos takes over the fiinctiQn_s_ _Qf_Heraxis and snhst�
foLit. All the disappointment of the world is gathered up
and redeemed in speech, praxis is drained, language filled.
It is not a question of verbalism; Racine's theatre is not a
garrulous one ( much less, in a sense, than Comeille' s ) , it
is a theatre where action and speech pursue each other
and meet only to escape each other at once. One might
say that speech here is never an action but a reaction. This
may explain why Racine so readily accepted the formal
unity of time-for him, spoken time has no difficulty
coinciding with real time, since reality is speech-and also
why he called Berenice the model of his dramaturgy : here
action tends to nullity, to the advantage of an excessive
1anguage.2

1 The Seraglio makes it possible to turn the ear into a veritable

organ of perception. (Baj. 1,1 )

2 "The hero and the heroine . . . who quite often suffer most
 RACINIAN MAN 59
Thus the fundal!l��_i�l__reality_9f trag�4y is syc_h sne�ch­
as-action.lts function is obvious : to mediatize the relation
of force.Tn a world inexorably divided, tragic figures �om­
municate only by the language of aggression : they make
their language, they speak their division; that is the reality
and the limit of their status. The logos functions here
like a precious turnstile between hope and disappointment:
it gives the original conflict the outlet of a third term ( to
speak is to endure ) , and in doing so is utterly a prctXis;
then it withdraws, becomes language again, leaves the rela­
tion without mediation, and plunges the hero back into
the fundamental failure that protects him. This tragic
logos is the very illusion of a dialectic, it is the form of an
outlet, but only the form : a false door, against which the
hero constantly flings himself, since it is alternately the
image of a door and its reality.
This paradox explains the demented aspect of the
Racinian logos: it is both agitation of words and fascina­
tion of silence, illusion of power and terror of cessation.
Confined in speech, conflicts are obviously circular, for
nothing keeps the Other from speaking again. Language
reveals the delicious and terrible world of infinite and in­
finitely possible reversals; whence often, in Racine, a pa­
tient marivaudage of aggression : the hero becomes exag­
geratedly stupid in order to maintain the contention, _to
postpone the dreadful time of silence. For silence is the
invasion of the true praxis, the collapse of the entire tragic
apparatus : to put an end to speech is to become part of
an irreversible process. At this point, then, appears the
true utopia of Racinian tragedy : that of a world in which
speech would be a solution; but also its true limit : im­
probability. Language is never a proof. The Racinian hero
can never prove himself : we never know who is speaking
to whom.3 Racinian tragedy is merely a failure that speaks
itself.
But because the conflict between being and doing is
--- ·-·· ---- -·- · · · - · -

and do least." ( D'Aubignac, quoted by Scherer, Dramaturgie

fra�ai.se, p. 29. )
8 "Psychologically," the problem of the Racinian hero's au­

thenticity is insoluble : it is impossible to define a truth of Titus'

feelings toward Berenice! Titus becomes true only at the moment
60 ON RACINE
here resolved in seemin.g, an art. of spectacle is instituted.
It is certain that Racinian tragedy is one of the most in­
telligent attempts ever made to give failure an aesthetic
profundity: it is really the art of failure, the admirably
cunning construction of a spectacle of the impossible. In
this it seems to contradict myth, since myth starts from
contradictions and tends toward their mediation :4 tragedy,
on the contrary, immobilizes contradictions, refuses media­
tion, keeps the conflict open; and it is true that each time
Racine seizes upon a myth to convert it into a tragedy, it
is always in a sense to impugn it, to paralyze it, to make it
a definitively closed fable. But precisely, subject to a pro­
found aesthetic reflection, confined in a form, systematized
from play to play so that we can speak of a true Racinian
tragedy, finally adopted by a whole posterity with admira­
tion, this rejection of myth becomes itself mythic : tragedy
is the myth of the failure of myth. Tragedy tends ulti­
mately toward a dialectical function : out of the spectacle
of failure it believes it can create a transcendence of fail­
ure, and out of the passion of the immediate, a mediation.
When all things are destroyed, tragedy remains a spectacle,
that is, a reconciliation with the world.
when he separates from Berenice, that is, when he shifts from
logos to praxis.
" C. Levi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, ch. XI. {Pion. )
 2. THE WORK S

La Thebciide
What is the subject of Let Thebetide? Hatred. There are
many hatreds in Racine's theatre. Axiane hates Taxiles,
Hermione hates Andromache, Nero hates Britannicus, Rox­
anne hates Atalide, Eriphyle hates Iphigenia, Aman hates
Mordecai, Jehoiada hates Mathan. These hatreds are un­
equivocal, one might even call them heterogeneous. There
are also ambiguous hatreds, domestic or erotic, which set
in opposition beings Mturetlly very close : Agrippina and
Nero, Xiphares and Pharnaces, Roxanne and Bajazet,
Hermione and Pyrrhus, Athaliah and Joash. In Let The­
betide, the hatred is of this latter kind. It is a homogeneous
hatred, setting brother against brother, like against like.1
Eteocles and Polynices are so much alike that between
them hatred constitutes a kind of internal current running
through the same substance. Hatred does not divide the
two brothers. Racine keeps telling us that it brings them
closer together; they need each other in order to live and
in order to die, their hatred is the expression of a comple­
mentarity and derives its force from this very unity: they
hate each other for being unable to tell each other apart.
Thus it is not enough to say that they are close: they
are contiguous. Twin brothers, enclosed at the origin of
life within the same egg, brought up together in the same
place, that palace where they now confront each other,2
1 During the seventeenth century, La Thebciide was generally

called Les Freres ennemis.

2 Considerez ces lieux ou vous prites naissance . . . ( IV, 3 )
Look around you. Here you were born .
61
62 ON RACINE
they have never separated; their father's decree has con­
demned them to fulfill the same function, and this func­
tion (the royalty of Thebes ) is a place: to occupy the same
throne is, literally, to occupy the same space;a to fight over
this throne is to dispute the site in which they wish to
lodge their own bodies; it is to break, finally, that law
which has made them twins.
Born of a physical unity, hatred will seek its sustaining
force in the very body of the adversary. Condemned by
Nature and their father's command to an infinite coexist­
ence, the two brothers derive from this entanglement the
precious ferment of their conflict. Even before their birth,
Racine tells us, even in their mother's womb, already
thrust together, the fetuses fought each other.4 Of this
original scene, their life is merely a monotonous repeti­
tion. The throne on which their father places them to­
gether ( for the alternating succession of reigns is obviously
no more than a mathematical substitute for a spatial co­
incidence ) merely repeats this primordial area. What the
brothers seek in order to vent their hatred is not battle,
the abstract, strategic annihilation of the enemy : it is the
individual clinch, the physical conflict and embrace; and
this is how they die, in the lists. Whether it is womb,
throne, or arena, they can never escape the same space

8 Jamais dessus le trone on ne vit plus d'un maitre;

Il n'en peut tenir deux, quelque grand qu'il puisse etre .

( IV, 3 )
More than one master has never been seen on the throne,
which can hold but one, however great it may be

Le trone pour vous deux avait trap peu de place;

Il fallait entre vous mettre un plus grund f!spuce . . ( V,2 )
.

The throne was not large enough for both of you; more room
should have been put between you . . .

' Pendant qu'un meme sein nous renfermait tous deux,

Dans les {lanes de ma mere une guerre intestine
De rtos divisions lui marqua l'origine. ( IV, l )
Even as we were both contained within the same womb, an
inner strife apprised my mother of the origin of our aivisions.
 RACINIAN MAN 63
that confines them, a unique protocol has ordained their
birth, their life, and their death. And the effort they make
to tear themselves away from each other is merely the final
triumph of their identity.
The first Racinian conflict is thus already a hand-to­
hand combat. This, I believe, is the originality of La
Theba"ide: not that two brothers hate each other, a theme
inherited from the earliest folklore, but that this hatred
is the hatred of two bodies, that the body is the sovereign
sustenance of hatred.5 From this moment on, the Racinian
hero's impatience is physical, he always struggles against a
fascination common to love and hate : 6 Eros is an imbigu­
ous power.
Racine understood that insisting on the corporeal nature
of this hatred was the best way to express its gratuitous­
ness. Certainly there is a political dispute between the
brothers over the Crown : Polynices relies on divine right,
Eteocles on popular suffrage; two conceptions of the Prince
seem to be opposed. But in fact, the true Prince is Creon :
he wants to rule. For the two brothers, the throne is
merely an alibi : 7 they hate each other absolutely, and know
it by that physical emotion which seizes them when they

8 Je veux qu'en se voyant leurs fureurs se deploient,

Que rappelant leur haine, au lieu de la chasser,
Ils s' etouffent, Attale, en voulant s'embrasser ( III,6 )
Would that their rage, Attalus, burst out on seeing each
other, so that even as they recalled their hatred, instead of
renouncing it, they might smother each other when they
sought to embrace
Plus il approche, et plus il me semble odieux ( IV, l )
The closer he comes, the more hateful he seems to me
8 Et que dans notre sang il voulut mettre au jour
Tout ce qu'ont de plus noir et la haine et l'amour. ( IV,l )
So that in our blood Heaven chose to reveal the worst of both
hate and love.
1 J'aurais meme regret qu'il me quittdt l'empire (IV, l )
I should even regret his leaving my realm.
64 ON RACINE
are in each other's presence.8 Racine has perfectly divined
this quite modern truth, that it is ultimately the Other's
body which is his purest essence: it is because it is physical
that the· hatred of the two brothers is a hatred of essence.9
Organic, it has all the functions of an absolute: it occupies,
nourishes, consoles, elates, lasts beyond death;10 in short,
it is a transcendence. It sustains life at the same time that
it causes death, and that constitutes its very modern am­
biguity.
For this first Racinian hatred, by a capital confusion, is
already both a sickness and its remedy. Here we must look
back to its origin : the Blood flowing in the veins of the
two enemies, incest, the Father's transgression. Now we
know that in Racine, Blood, Destiny, and the gods are
one and the same negative force, a mana, an. elsewhere
whose vacuum defines human irresponsibility. The two
brothers cannot be responsible for a hatred which comes
to them from a point beyond themselves-and that is
their misfortune-but they can invent its forms, convert
this hatred into a protocol over which they preside en­
tirely: to accept their hatred is already to encounter tragic
freedom, which is nothing but the recognition of a neces­
sity. The two brothers know that they hate each other, as
Phaedra will know she is guilty, and this fulfills the tragedy.
Here we are at the heart of the Racinian metaphysics : by
his transgression man pays for the caprice of the gods, 11
he makes himself guilty in order to absolve the gods. By
committing a crime he has not desired, h e redresses in a
propitiatory fashion the scandalous absurdity of a God who
8
. • Cette approche excite mon courroux.
•

Qu'on hait un ennemi quand il est pr�s de nousl ( IV,2 )

His approach excites my rage. How we hate an enemy when
he is close to us!
1 Ce n'est pas son orgueil, c'est lui seul que fe hais. ( IV,l )
It is not his pride, but only himself I hate.
10
Tout mort qu'il est, Madame, il garde sa col�re. (V, 3 )
Dead a s h e is, my lady, h e keeps his anger still.
u The gods? or God? Racine says, elegantly: le Ciel.
 RACINIAN MAN 65
punishes what H e himself has ordained,12 identifies trans­
gression with punishment, makes the human act both a
crime and a torment, and defines man only to condemn
him. Thus we have a sketch in La Theba'ide of a blasphe­
mous · system that will reach its consummation in the last
tragedies, Phedre, Athalie. The basis of this system is an
inverted theology : man takes upon himself the transgres­
sion of the gods, his Blood redeems their malignity. The
gods have unjustly set hatred between Eteocles and Poly­
nices; by agreeing to live this hatred, Eteocles and Poly­
nices justify the gods.
Between the powerful and guilty gods and weak and
innocent man a kind of compromise is established, which
is Evil; an archaic legality sustains the two terms of the
relation of force: gods and men; such is the economy of
tragedy at its most rigorous. But we know that Racine's
tragedy is a baroque system; an ancient heritage, from both
far back in time and deep down in Racine, struggles here
with the first forces of the bourgeois spirit; Racinian
tragedy is impure, there is always some point of corrup­
tion in it. In La Theba'ide, this point is Creon. Creon
foreshadows a break in tragic legality,13 almost like Pyrrhus
in Andromaque or Nero in Britannicus. He plans to escape
from the parasitical complex that unites the gods and the
brothers. For him, the world exists, and that is his salva­
tion. The hatred of the twins is a movement without ob­
ject, which keeps turning back upon itself; Creon's pas­
sions can stop at a goal external to themselves, permit
themselves real, worldly objects.: he loves a woman, he
wants to rule. His very failure is contingent, it is not a
Destiny. Opposing the collective Law, the tribal Blood,
the cyclical time of the vendetta, he represents the first

12 Voila de ces grands Dieux la supreme justice I

Jusques au bord du crime ils conduisent nos· pas;
Ils nous le font commettre, et ne l' excusent pas! ( 111,2 )
Such is the ultimate justice of these great gods! They lead
us to the brink of crime, compel us to transgress, and do
not forgive us for doing so.
l&This break · is also foreshadowed by Haemon, who defines
his love against the gods. ( 11,2 )
66 ON RACINE
Racinian man who no longer acknowledges the Past as a
value and discovers his own Law solely in himsel£.14
Hence the poetic opposition is not between the two
brothers, it is between them and Creon. Making the
Blood that unites them the very substance of their hatred,
the twins experience Nature as a hell, but do not emerge
from it; they merely substitute for fraternity its contrary;
by inverting the terms of an affective relation, they remain
confined within it, and it is the very symmetry of their
situation that forbids them any escape; they are thrust to­
gether by a relation of aggression, that is, of pure comple­
mentarism. Creon breaks this protocol; he has no enemies,
he has only obstacles : indifferent rather than hostile to
filiality,15 his freedom suffers an explicit derutturation. 1 6
He is already that secondary yet threatening figure we find
in all Racinian tragedy as the destruction of the tragedy :
the individual.

Alexandre
At first glance, Alexandre is a work still feudal in style:
in it we see the confrontation of two equally valorous com­
batants, one of whom is inflexible in opposing the other
who is victorious. The vendetta would go on forever if, by
an act of sublime generosity, the imperial victor did not
end the conflict once and for all : the triumphant Monarchy
supersedes the ancient Law and establishes a new order­
at least this is what Racine wanted to be applauded in
his play.1

"· Et sans me rappeler des ombres des enfers,

Dis moi ce que je gagne, et non ce que je perds. (V,4 )
And without threatening me with the shades from hell,
tell me what I win, not what I lose.
111 Le nom de pere, Attale, est un titre vulgaire. (V,4 )
The name of father, Attalus, is a commonplace title.
18
La nature est confuse et se tait aujourd'hui. (V,2, var. )
Nature is confounded, and keeps silence today.
1 "The true subject of the play . . . [is] . . . the generosity
of this conqueror." ( First Preface )
 RACINIAN MAN 67
As a matter of fact, Alexander and Porus form a false
couple. Alexander is a god, he does not fight; or better
still, provided with real troops and not with verbal arms,
he fights outside the tragedy. The true couple here is
Porus and Taxiles, supported by their doubles, Axiane and
Cleofile; it is they, the two Indian kings, who are the true
freres ennemis. One, courageous and proud, is the haughty
guardian of the vendetta} law; the other seeks to abrogate
it by a value quite unheard-of in tragedy : cowardice. The
entire interest of Alexcmdre ( and it is considerable ) is
Taxiles' cowardice.
Taxiles compromises with the enemy even before fight­
ing him. He knows how to produce the astute alibis neces­
sary to any political collaboration; a pacifist, he appeals to
the values of civilization, evokes the religious and cultural
affinities of the two warring nations, opportunely recalls
that an ancient trade route relates them closely : history
is on the side of peace. He is a born collaborator: Alex­
ander has divined collaboration in him even before he
declares himsel£.2 Further, it is possible that he has a real
passion for cowardice, that he is a traitor by one of those
profound intentions by which a man destroys his freedom.3
His baseness is not circumstantial : he is ready to yield not
only his country to the occupying forces ( for advantages
that are not explicit, moreover) , but also his sister;4 there
� Taxiles says of Alexander:
Il cherche une vertu qui lui resiste moins,
Et peut-etre i1 me croit plus digne de ses soins. ( I, I )
He is looking for a virtue that resists him less, and perhaps
believes me worthier of his attention.
a.cleofi.le says to her brother, describing Alexander's "sub-
jects" :
Ah! si ce nom vous platt, si vous cherchez a l'etre . . ( I, I )
.

Well, if such a name is to your liking, if that is what you

want to be . . .
4 Vous m'avez engagee a soufrir son amour,
Et peut-etre, mon frere, a l'aimer a mon tour. ( 1,1 )
You have committed me to enduring his love, and perhaps,
brother, to loving him myself.
68 ON RACINE

is in him a kind of gratuitous proxenetism (not to use a

more trivial word) ; his cowardice is of so little advantage
to him, is experienced as his freedom, to such a degree
that he treats it with a certain coquetry. In a word, cow­
ardice is a role that he accepts. Its choice is so manifest
in Taxiles that we do not hesitate to ascribe to him several
wicked sentiments of which he has not yet given any
sign, notably ingratitude5 (whose eminence in the Ra­
cinian hell we have noted ) .
Has this cowardice a core, a central fiber? It is a physical
cowardice, as Axiane knows very well. When she wants to
rorce Taxiles to face the truth, it is the fear of battle she
employs : let Taxiles fight, she says ironically, if he wants
to belie his own essence.6 This cowardice, mor�over, has
even a physical name in Racine: it is mollesse [softness] ."
Taxiles is made of a viscous substance that yields only to
triumph more easily. He himself knows his own substance
and can present its theory;8 he experiences Alexander as a
separative force, a "torrent"; one need merely yield to his
passage, then close ranks, reconstitute oneself behind him.
Taxiles' weapon is effacement, his defense evasiveness; the
most cutting remarks do not offend him, "glory" does not
intimidate him ( if he allows himself to be killed, it is in
order to possess Axiane, not to deserve her) ; only the re­
sult counts, which is to obtain Axiane. Hence it is logical
5 Axiane to Taxiles:
Des traitres comme toi font souvent des ingrats. ( 111,2 )
Traitors like you often turn to ingrates.
• Axiane to Taxiles :
II faut, s'il est vrai que I'on m'aime
II faut combattre, vaincre, ou perir sous les armes .
( IV, 3 )
I f it is true that you love me, then you must fight, and
either win or perish in arms . . .
7 Porus, speaking of Taxiles :
Je CTaignais beaucoup plus sa molle resistance. ( II,) )
What I feared much more was his soft resistance.
8 1,2.
 RACINIAN MAN 69
that this "coward" should deliberately accept responsibil­
ity for the power that is most antipathetic to tragedy :
duration.9
Yet within this soft mass there is something that dis­
rupts its homogeneity : Taxiles is in love. His being is
divided,10 his very cowardice is no longer of a piece. The
role then attains-in an absurd way-to the status of the
tragic hero : he is disjunct, an inner scandal violates his
calm, even if it is only the calm of baseness. Here the
duality seizes upon veritable substances : on one side
Taxiles' being, his softness, his elasticity, his gentleness;
on the other, Taxiles' praxis, that unconditional love for
a woman who is hard, self-contained (she does not even
confess her love to Porus ) , ungenerous, and whose words
are as sharp as steel.11 For what links Taxiles to Axiane is
in fact a complementarism : they are united by an exactly
contrary relation : Taxiles' being and his actions are exactly
divided. Thus the Racinian couple here is not Axiane and
Porus, or Alexander and Cleofile, but Axiane and Taxiles,
who thus assume their place in the great Racinian contra­
diction of substances, joining the couples constructed after
their image, the solar and the umbrous : Pyrrhus and An­
dromache, Nero and Junia, Roxanne and Bajazet, Mith­
ridates and Monimia. Shadow-which as we know is
much more a connective tissue than a privation of light­
shadow, here, is a man; it is the woman who is viriloid,
for it is she who wounds, divides, mutilates. Taxiles con­
stantly pursues his own virility, he knows he can receive
8 It is his double, Cleofile, who says so, speaking to Taxiles:
Alexcmdre et le temps vous rendront le plus fort. (111, 3 )
Alexander and time will make you the stronger.
10
Sctis-ie pas que Taxile est une arne incertaine,
Que l'amour le retient quand la crainte l'entraine? ( I, 3 )
For I know Taxiles is a n uncertain soul: love restrains him
when fear might sweep him away.
11
Approche, puissant roi,
Grand monarque de l'Inde, on parle ici de toi. ( IV, 3 )
Approach, powerful king, great monarch o f India, we are
talking about you here.
70 ON RACINE
it only from Axiane; like all Racinian men, he tries to
combine in himself the male and the jailer, to make Axiane
into a captive object, since in Racine this relation alone
constitutes a fulfilled sexuality. But the attempt is ridicu­
lous, for its terms are inverted from the start : the mass
cannot envelop the sword, nor can what connects defeat
what mutilates; this is, in Racine, a failure that is given and
that constitutes the entire meaning of his theatre.
The opposition of substances that organizes the relation
between Taxiles and Axiane is more readily seen if we
consider that Taxiles has a double, Cleofile. 1 2 Of the same
moral substance as Taxiles, 1 3 Cleofile is both his sister and
his mother, for it is from her that Taxiles derives his soft­
ness, that is, his being.14 When he is near Cleofile, Taxiles
is only too much himself, a reconciled hero; but for this
very reason, to turn to Axiane is to turn against Cleofile.
The painful transition from mother to mistress is made,
in Racine, only in disaster: Taxiles loses both, as Nero loses
both Agrippina and · Junia. A double before she is an
enemy, Cleofile perfectly represents that Racinian oscilla­
tion between the same and the other, which never finds
its resolution.
What is interesting about Cleofile is that she is a happy
double-less because she is loved than because she agrees
to the alienation her lover imposes. A captive creature of
the shadows, she enters into a direct relation with the
solar Alexander. Not only does she accept her captivity ( it

12 A perfect duplicity, since Cleofile sells Taxiles, as Taxiles has

sold Cleofile : Axiane says to Taxiles:

Va, tu sers bien le maitre a qui ta soeur te donne. ( 111,2 )
Go, you serve well the master your sister gives you.
18
Cleofile ensnares, her weapon is guile. Axiane says:
Sais-;e pas que sans moi sa timide valeur
Succomberait bien tOt aux ruses de sa smur? ( I, 3 )
I know that were i t not for me, his timid valor would soon
succumb to his sister's wiles.
u Elle en a fait un Iache
. .(V,3)
.

She has made a coward out of him .

 RACINIAN MAN 71
is as a captive that she has loved Alexander15 ) , but she
transforms it into the felicitous shade a god creates : Alex­
ander, she says, purifies whatever he touches,16 abolishes all
contradictions;H he is the absolute source of values.18 Thus
the conqueror's generosity consummates a just order of
substances : a warrior's clemency and moral oblation ex­
press in fact the rare success of a human relation.
The way in which such a world in a sense exorcises
Taxiles' failure is indeed curious, for it already foreshadows
another tragedy by Racine, which offers the same kind of
oblation and will have the same success as Alexandre:
Iphigenie. In these two works, the tragedy is indirect, rele­
gated : absurd in Alexandre in the figure of Taxiles, second­
ary in Iphigenie in that of Eriphyle. In both, it is the
"black" character who takes the tragedy upon himself and
thereby liberates a whole dramatis personae asking only to
live; and in both, once the evil has been localized, the
tragedy exorcised, the living are more than willing to offer
a solemn ( and hypocritical ) homage. To the spectacular
sacrifice of Eriphyle snatching the knife from Calchas'
hands in order to stab herself corresponds the "splendid
tomb" raised to Taxiles by Alexander, Porus� Axiane, and

15 Mon cceur . . .

Se consolait de;a de languir dans ses fers;

Et loin de murmurer contre un destin si rude,
ll s'en fit, ;e l'avoue, une douce habitude. { 11,1 )
My heart . . . had already taken comfort, after languishing
in its bonds; and far from murmuring against so harsh a
destiny, made of it, I confess, a sweet addiction.
11
Son choix a votre f!Om n'imprime point de taches. ( 1, 1 )
His choice adds no blemish to your name.
1� Quoiqu'il brule de voir tout l'univers soumis,
On ne voit point d'esclave au rang de ses amis. ( 1,1 )
Though he aspires to conquer the whole world, you will find
no slave among his friends.
18
C'est a vous de vous rendre
L'esclave de Porus ou l'ami d'Alexandre. { 1, 1 )
The choice is yours, to be Porus' slave or Alexander's friend.
72 ON RACINE
even Cleofile:19 it is the tragedy that is sacrificed in the
later play, buried in this one.

Andromaque
In La Thebdide there is no escape from vengeance ex­
cept through murder; in Alexandre, except through cow­
ardice or superhuman clemency. In Andromaque Racine
poses the same question a third time: how effect the tran­
sition from an old order to a new one? How can death give
birth to life? What are the rights of each over the other?
The old order is jealous : it maintains. It is the order of
fidelity ( in this instance, the seventeenth century em­
ployed a word entirely precious in its ambiguity, both
political and erotic, la Foi ) ; its immobility is consecrated
by a rite, the oath. Andromache has sworn fidelity to Hec­
tor, Pyrrhus has solemnly committed himself to Her­
mione.1 This formalist order is a circle, it is that from
which one cannot escape, enclosure is its adequate defini­
tion. Of course this enclosure is ambiguous : it is a prison,
but can also be an asylum.2 The old order is a security :
Hermione constantly takes refuge in it,3 Pyrrhus longs to
• Et qu'un tombeau superbe instruise l'avenir
Et de votre douleur et de mon souvenir. ( final scene )
And let a splendid tomb inform the future both of your
grief and my memory.
1 Je sais de quels serments je romps pour vous les chaines.
( 111,7)
I know the power of the oaths I am breaking for you.
J'ai cru que mes serments me tiendraient lieu d'amour. ( IV, 5 )
I believed my pledges would stand in place of love.
� This is a fundamental ambiguity in Racine; Andromache,
speaking of Astyanax, says:
J'ai cru que sa prison deviendrait son asile ( II1,6 )
I imagined his prison would become his asylum
8 Notably to get rid of Andromache:
Je co�ois vos douleurs; mais un devoir austere,
Quand mon pere a parze, m'ordonne de me taire.
C'est lui qui de Pyrrhus fait agir le courroux. ( 111,4 )
 RACINIAN MAN 73
emerge from it.4 Thus we are concerned with a veritable
legality, a contract : the Law makes demands, in exchange
for which it offers protection. In the two preceding plays,
this ancient legality ( though bicephalic in each case :
Eteocles and Polynices, Porus and Axiane ) remained un­
differentiated; in Andromaque, though its claims are just
as violent, it is divided.
Hermione is the play's archaic figure, and consequently
(since we are concerned, ultimately, with a crisis of in­
dividualism ) the most successfully socialized. Hermione is
in effect the pledge of a whole society. This society ( "les
Grecs" ) possesses an ideology, the vendetta ( the sack of
Troy, a revenge for the abduction of Helen, constantly
sustains the affective life of the fatherland ) , and an econ­
omy (as in any solidified society, the expedition was both
moral and profit-seeking5 ) ; in a word, this society (and
Hermione with it) enjoys a good conscience.6 Its central
figure, its incessant alibi, is the Father ( Menelaus ) , sup­
ported by the gods, so that to break faith with Hermione
is to reject simultaneously the Father, the Past, the father­
land, and religion itself.7 The powers of this society are
entirely delegated to Hermione, who delegates them to her
double, Orestes. Hermione's jealousy, moreover, is ambigu­
ous : it is an erotic jealousy, but it is also, beyond Her­
mione herself, the exigent claim of a Law that demands

I sympathize with your suffering; but an austere duty, once my

father has spoken, commands me to be silent. It is he who
inspires Pyrrhus' wrath.
• Considere, Phmnix, les troubles que j'evite. ( II, 5 )
Just consider, Phoenix, the difficulties I shall be avoiding.
a Nos vaisseaux tout charges des depouilles de Troie . • .

( 11,1 )
Our ships, laden with the spoils of Troy . . .

8 Pyrrhus' choice offends a caste legality. Andromache is a

foreigner and a captive. ( 11,1 )

1 Va profaner des Dieux la majeste sacree . ..
( IV,5 )
Go profane the sacred majesty of the gods . . .
74 ON RACINE
its due8 and condemns to death all who betray it : it is no
accident that Pyrrhus perishes in the onslaught of the
Greeks, who substitute at the last moment, in the act of
vengeance, for the delegates whom love has rendered un­
reliable. Thus erotic fidelity is here indissolubly linked to
legal, social, and religious fidelity. Hermione concentrates
various functions in herself, though all are functions of
constraint : in love, she constantly describes herself as a
"fiancee," a legal mistress, formally engaged, whose rejec­
tion is not a personal affront but a veritable sacrilege; a
Greek, she is the daughter of the avenging King, delegate
of a devouring Past;9 dead at last, she is a tormenting
Erinys, the constant repetition of punishment, infinite
vendetta, definitive victory of the Past. Murderess of the
male, murderess of the child who is her true rival because
he is the future, Hermione is entirely on the side of death,
but of an active, possessive, infernal death; appearing out
of an ancient past, she is a force rather than a woman;
her instrumental double, Orestes, yields himself up as the
(lamentable ) plaything of an archaic fatality that tran­
scends him; his inclination refers him to something far
behind himself .1 o
Hermione is delegated by the Father, Andromache by
the lover. Andromache is exclusively defined by her fidelity
to Hector, and it is truly one of the paradoxes of the
Racinian myth that a whole body of criticism could see
her as the ideal figure of a mother. She says often enough
that for her Astyanax is merely the ( physical ) image of
Hector,11 that even her love for her son has been expressly
8 J'ai CTU que t6t OU tard, a ton devoir rendu,
Tu me rapporterais un cazur qui m' etait du. ( IV, 5 )
I believed that sooner or later, recalled to your duty, you
would offer me once again a heart that was my due.
8 E t je lui porte enfin mon cazur a devorer. ( final scene)
And at last I shall bring her my heart to devour.
10
Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m'entraine. ( I, I)
I surrender blindly to the destiny that sweeps me on.
n C'est Hector, disait-elle, en l'embrassant toujours;
Voila ses yeux, sa bouche . . .( 11,5 )
 RACINIAN MAN 75
ordered b y her husband. Her conflict i s not that of a wife
and a mother, it is the conflict born of two contrary orders
that have emanated from the same source : Hector seeks
to live both as a dead man and as a substitute. Hector has
enjoined both fidelity to the grave and the son's safety
because the son is himself: there is, actually, only one and
the same Blood, and it is to it that Andromache must be
faithful.12 Faced with the contradiction of her duty, it is
not to her maternity that Andromache refers ( and if she
had done so, would she have hesitated a moment? ) , but
to death, for the contradiction originated with the dead
man, consequently he alone can resolve it; and it is be­
cause Andromache is not a mother but an amante that the
tragedy is possible.
Naturally there is a symmetry between the two fidelities,
Hermione's and Andromache's. As vindicative force be­
hind Hermione, there are the Greeks; behind Hector, for
Andromache, lies Troy. To the Greece of the Atridae cor­
responds, point for point, the Ilium of the Aeneadae, its
ancestors, its families, its gods, its dead. Andromache lives
the vendetta} relation in the same way Hermione does;
she has not ceased to locate Pyrrhus in the conflict of
tribes, she sees him only in that Blood which unites the
two parts of an infinite link. Hermione and she participate,
in fact, in a homologous legality. The difference is that
Andromache is conquered, a captive, and the legality she
perpetuates is more fragile than that of Hermione : as the
enemy of all legality, Pyrrhus attacks Andromache, that is,
the weakest legality. Hermione's past is armed with power­
ful weapons; Andromache's is reduced to a fiduciary value,

It's Hector, she kept saying as she kissed him; these are his
eyes, his mouth . . .

12 We can imagine the hatred a living Astyanax might develop

against this Father who replaces him so utterly: a fine subject for
Racine, the sequel to Andromaque (but this is, to a degree, Bri­
tannicus) . Fidelity to the husband is so devouring, and the son so
closely identified with him, that maternity becomes incestuous:
ll m'aurait tenu lieu d'un pere et d'un epoux. ( I,4 )
H e would have taken the place, for me, o f father and hus­
band both.
76 ON RACINE
can assert itself only verbally (whence Andromache's in­
cessant invocations of Hector) . The Trojan legality's vac­
uum is symbolized by an object that determines all the
offensive moves : Hector's tomb; it is, for Andromache,
refuge, consolation, hope and oracle; by a kind of funereal
eroticism, she wants to live in it, to shut herself up there
with her son, to institute a kind of menage a trois in
death.13 Andromache's fidelity is now merely defensive;
doubtless the weight of Blood still exists, Hector perpetu­
ates Troy; but all the ancestors are dead, and fidelity is
nothing more than recollection, a virtuous sacrifice of life
for the sake of memory.
Andromache's legality is also fragile for another reason.
Andromache actually faces a dilemma of fact, not of judg­
ment; the alternative Pyrrhus forces upon her confronts
her with reality; in a word, however alienated she is, she
holds a responsibility that commits the Other, that is, the
world. Doubtless she attempts to evade it: by leaving it
up to the tomb to decide, then by imagining a kind of
zero state of the outcome ( Laissez-moi le cacher dans quel­
que Ue deserte [Let me hide him on some desert island] ) ,
lastly by choosing suicide. Nonetheless she wants the child
to live, and it is here that she joins Pyrrhus. She realizes
that the child's safety actually sanctions a break in the
legality she represents, and that is why she resists it so
much ( for three acts, which is a great deal for a mother) .
Further, she recognizes all that this safety and this break
imply : a veritable transformation of time, the abolition
of the vendetta} law,14 the formal establishment of a
new convention.u The stake seems so important to her
that she finds only her own death measures up to it. Con-

18 Ainsi tous les trois, Seigneur, par vos soins reunis . . . ( 1,4)
Thus all three of us, lord, reunited by your decree . . .

u Mais qu'il ne songe plus, Cephise, a nous venger. ( IV, l )

Let him have no more thoughts, Cephise, of revenge.
16 The founding of the new Law occurs before the gods, at the

altar where Pyrrhus weds Andromache. This formality makes

Andromache sure of Pyrrhus. She has understood that Pyrrhus
really desires the child's safety.
 RACINIAN MAN 77
demned to represent the Past, she immolates herself when
this Past escapes her. Hermione's suicide is an apocalypse;
as pure sterility, she deliberately, aggressively involves in
her own death the entire legality for which she is responsi­
ble.16 Andromache's suicide is a sacrifice; in germ, it con­
tains an accepted future, and this sacrifice concerns An­
dromache's very being: she consents to be separated from
one part of Hector (Astyanax) , to amputate her function
as loving guardian-she consents to an incomplete fidelity.
Further, her death signifies that Astyanax is no longer only
Hector for her; for the first time, she discovers the exist­
ence of an Astyanax II, living in his own right and not as
a pure reftection of the dead man : her son exists, finally,
as a child, as a promise. This "discovery" has been inspired
by death : Andromache thus becomes a mediatrix between
death and life. Death is delivered of life; Blood is not
only a constrictive force, vehicle of an exhaustion; it is
also a germinative ftuid, viability, future.
Yet this old legality, this order of unconditional fidelity,
whether in its aggressive ( Hermione ) or attenuated (An­
dromache ) form is in a critical state, threatened in either
case by Pyrrhus. The danger is new, because the contesta­
tion no longer comes, as in La Thibciide, from a "natural"
morality ( the objurgations of Jocasta and Antigone in the
name of a sacred filiality) , but from a will to live, divested
from the start of any moral alibi: every way is barred to
Pyrrhus, so that irruption is his fundamental mode of be­
ing. In Hermione's case the Father, in Andromache's the
Rival, all places are already taken : if Pyrrhus wants to
exist, he must destroy. Jocasta opposed the tribal legality
by a more restricted, familial legality. Pyrrhus goes much
further: he makes his· claim in the name of a legality "to
be instituted." The conftict here is no longer between
hatred and love; it is much more harshly ( and justly )
between what has been and what seeks to be. It is no
longer peace that contests violence, there are two violences
at grips : what corresponds to Hermione's frenzy, to An-
18 Je renonce a la Grece, a Sparte, a son empire,
A toute ma famille . . . (V, 3 )
I renounce Greece, Sparta, her empire, and all my fam­
ily .. .
78 ON RACINE
dromache's "clear conscience" is Pyrrhus' "dogmatism." tT
The development of the Racinian myth has relegated
Pyrrhus to a secondary rank. But if we conceive the play
in terms of legality, there is no doubt that Pyrrhus controls
the entire economy of forces.18 What makes him the most
emancipated figure in all Racinian theatre (and probably
the most sympathetic ) is that he is the only character of
good faith : determined to break with Hermione, he seeks
her out ( IV, 5 ) and explains himself without resorting to
any alibi; he does not try to justify himself, he openly as­
sumes responsibility for the violence of the situation, with­
out cynicism and without provocation. His honesty results
from his profound liberation : he does not soliloquize,
he is not uncertain of the signs (contrary to Hermione,
perplexed by a problematics of appearances ) ; he seeks to
choose in himself and for himself between Past and Future,
between the oppressive comfort of an old legality and the
risk of a new legality. For him the problem is to live, to
be born to a new order, a new age. This birth can only be
violent : a whole society is present, watching him, recogniz­
ing him, and sometimes he weakens, his image of himself
on the point of being identified with the image of the
old legality that has formed him . to
But more often this image is intolerable to him, and he
fights to free himself from it. The weight of an unshared
love is identified for him with the hold of the old order;
11
The debate between the two legalities is constantly con­
cealed by a specifically erotic debate; the characters incessantly
shift from one to the other. But this turnabout is not an escape;
love is not a mystification, but merely the sign of a totality that
includes it.
18 It is, moreover, in Pyrrhus that Racine has modified the

classical donnees most. It is, to my knowledge, Charles Mauron

( to whom I am greatly indebted for this analysis of AndroTTUlque,
and in a more general way for the very notion of Racinian legal­
ity) who has restored Pyrrhus to the center of the play. See
L'Inconscient dans l'oouvre et la vie de Racine.
18 J'ai songe, com me vous, qu'a la Grece, a mon pere,
A moi-meme, en un mot, je devenais contraire. ( 11,4 )
Like you, I have suspected I was turning against Greece,
against my father, in a word, against myself.
 RACINIAN MAN 79
to dismiss Hermione is precisely to shift from a collective
constraint to an individual order in which everything is
possible; to marry Andromache is to begin a vita nuova,
in which all the values of the past are blithely refused en
bloc: fatherland, oaths, alliances, ancestral hatreds, youth­
ful heroism-everything is sacrificed to the exercise of
freedom; man refuses what has been instituted without
him,20 fidelity, suddenly robbed of authority, crumbles,
words are no longer a terror, Hermione's irony becomes
Pyrrhus' truth.21
From the destruction of the old vendetta} law, Pvrrhus
wants to create not only a new order of action,22 bu t also
a new administration of time, which will no longer be
based on the immutable cycle of vengeances. For Andro­
mache, Hector and Pyrrhus were analogous as murderers,
one of Greek women, the other of Trojan women. For
Hermione, Epirus was to be a new Troy,23 herself a second
Helen.24 It is this repetition that Pyrrhus wants to prevent.
This means that time must serve not to imitate, but to
ripen; its "course" must modify reality, transform the

110 Nos deux peres sans nous form�rent ces liens . . . ( IV, S )
Our two fathers fixed these bonds without u s . . .

11 Tout cela part . . .

D'un heros qui n'est point esclcrve de sa foi ( IV, S )

All this . . . from a hero who is not the slave o f his faith.

11 Anime d'un regard, je puis tout entreprendre. ( 1,4)

Inspired by one look, I can. undertake anything.

ll8 Qu'on fasse de l'l!;pire un second Ilion. ( 11,2 )

Then make Epirus into a second Ilium.

2' Quoit sans qu'elle employdt une seule priere,

Ma mere en sa faveur arma 1a Grece entiere . • .

Et moi . . .
Je me livre moi-meme, et ne puis me vengerl (V,2 )
Without a single plea, my mother armed all Greece in her
behalf . . . and I . . . I myself stand here before you, and
cannot have vengeance!
80 ON RACINE
nature of things.25 Thus the first act of Pyrrhus' new reign
(when he consecrates the break by leading Andromache to
the altar) is to abolish past time : to destroy his own
memory is the very movement of his new birth.26 Pyrrhus'
break is thus a foundation : he takes complete responsibil­
ity for the child, insists that it live, glories in instituting
a new paternity,27 identifies himself with the child in
every respect;28 while by an inverse movement, as repre­
sentative of the old legality, Andromache constantly
looked back from Astyanax to Hector, Pyrrhus looks for­
ward from himself to Astyanax : he confronts the Fathei
by nature with a Father by adoption.
Granted this birth of Pyrrhus is achieved by blackmail;
we are not in a world of values here; in Racine there is
never a true oblation.29 What is frantically sought is
211 He quoi! votre courroux n'a-t-il pas eu son cours?
Peut-on hair sans cesse? et punit-on toujours? ( I,4)
Then has your rage not yet run its course? Is hatred never
to end, punishment to be eternal?
Metis enfin, tour a tour, c'est assez nous punir. ( I,4)
We have made each other suffer enough.
• Madame, il ne voit rien: son salut et sa gloire
Semblent �tre avec vous sortis de sa memoire. (V,2 )
My lady, he sees nothing: his safety and his glory seem,
along with you, to have vanished from his memory.
wr Je vous rends votre fils, et je lui sers de pere. ( 1,4)
I restore your son, and will be a father to him.
fe voue a votre fils une amine de pere. (V, 3 )
I promise your son a father's devotion.
211 Je defendrcri sa vie aux depens de mes jours. ( 1,3 )
I shall defend his life at the cost of my own.
Pour ne pas l'exposer, lui-m�me se hasarde. ( IV, l )
Rather than endanger Astyanax, Pyrrhus risks his own life.
111 Berenice's oblation is in fact a resignation. Mithridates does

not die in order to give Monimia to Xiphares. Alexander's obla­

tion costs him nothing, for he is a god. There is only one Racinian
character who fulfills his sacrifice : Haemon, in La Thebaide.
 RACINIAN MAN 81
happiness, not glory-the reality of erotic possession, not
its sublimation. But this blackmail finds its justification in
Andromache's very resistance; its object is a being utterly
alienated in her past and who is not herself. What Pyrrhus
wants from Andromache is that she, too, make a break;
against the Past, he uses the Past's weapons, at the risk,
moreover, of an enormous loss. That Andromache glimpses
Pyrrhus' profound intention and to a certain degree re­
sponds to it is suggested by the variant of Act V, scene 3.
Here Andromache takes leave of the old legality.30 In any
case, even if out of critical scruple one prefers not to take
this suppressed scene into account, the outcome of the
play is unambiguous : Andromache expressly takes up where
Pyrrhus left off. Once Pyrrhus is dead, she decides to live
and to reign, not as a mistress finally rid of an odious
tyrant, but as a true widow, the legitimate heiress of
Pyrrhus' throne.31 Pyrrhus' death has not liberated An­
dromache, it has initiated her: Andromache has made her
conversion, she is free.

Britannicus
Nero is a man of alternatives. Two paths lie before him :
to make himself loved, or to make himself feared,1 Good

80 Andromache addresses Hermione:

Vous avez trouve seule une sanglante voie
De suspendre en mon coour le souvenir de Troie. (V,3, var. )
Yet only you have found a bloody way of suspending, in my
heart, the memory of Troy.
81 Aux ordres d'Andromaque ici tout est soumis;
Ils let traitent en reine, et nous comme ennemis.
Andromaque elle-meme, a Pyrrhus si rebelle,
Lui rend tous les devoirs d'une veuve fidele . ( V,S )
. •

Here everything is subject to Andromache's orders; they

treat her as their queen, and us as their enemies. Andromache
herself, once so opposed to Pyrrhus, now pays him all the
respects of a faithful widow . . .

1 Lets de se faire aimer, il veut se faire craindre

(1,1 ) . . .

Tired of making himself loved, he seeks to make himself

feared . . .
82 ON RACINE
or Evil. The dilemma apprehends Nero in his entirety:
his time ( will he accept or reject his past? ) and his space
(will he have a "private life" that is the opposite of his
public career? ) . We see that the tragic day is entirely
functional here; it will separate Good from Evil, with the
formality of a chemical experiment-or of a demiurgic
act : the shadow will be distinguished from the light; as
a dye suddenly reddens or darkens the test substance it
touches, so Evil will be demonstrated in Nero . And even
more than the direction he chooses, it is the choosing that
is important here: Britannicus is the representation of an
act, not of an effect. The accent is on a veritable praxis:
Nero creates himself, the play is a birth. Doubtless it is
the birth of a monster; but this monster will live, and
perhaps it is in order to live that he makes himself a
monster.
Nero's alternative is pure, that is, its terms are sym­
metrical. Two figures define it, forming what we might
call Nero's double postulation. Burrhus and Narcissus are
homologues. As a virtuous counselor, History would actu­
ally suggest Seneca. Racine was afraid that the intellectual
would not seem in sufficient opposition to the cynic and
substituted a soldier who is not rhetorically skilled; in
order to persuade Nero, Burrhus must abandon language,
fling himself at his master's feet, threaten to kill himself.
It is enough for Narcissus to speak; naturally, to be effec­
tive, his words become indirect. Burrhus' language is topi­
cal, which is why it fails; Narcissus' is dialectical.
For Burrhus' failure is the failure of a persuasion, not
of a system . Burrhus' solution is not without value, and
Nero listens to it. This solution is essentially worldly : if
Nero makes the world recognize him, if he agrees to being
defined, created by the eyes of Rome, if these eyes are the
only power that makes him exist, he will be happy. We
know that for Racine the world is not reality, it is only a
reflexive, anonymous form of consciousness : it is public
opinion (What will be said of you? ) . But this form is
demiurgic; in Burrhus' mind, it is enough to give birth
to Nero, bring him from childhood to maturity, endow
 RACINIAN MAN 83
him, actually, as a paternal figure.2 Man, according to
Burrhus, is quite plastic in the eyes of the collectivity;
there is no nucleus of resistance in him, passion is an
illusion.3 The effort Burrhus asks Nero to make is that of
a reduction to transparence; even the renunciation of
desires is a source of peace only because it is reflected by
the approval of the multitude.
For Narcissus, this same world justifies, on the contrary,
an opacity in man; man is an irreducible nucleus of ap­
petites, the world merely an object facing this "dogma­
tism." Burrhus refines the world, and Narcissus debases it,4
but it is always in the perspective of a perfect symmetry,
always at the price of an artificial distance between the
world and the self, that they promise Nero life . In short,
nothing can decide between them, not even Nero's situa­
tion. Nero is Emperor, he is omnipotent; but this circum­
stance, as always in Racine, where Power is the very main­
spring of tlte action, only purifies the alternative: tyranny
permits satisfaction, but also makes sacrifice possible; the
symmetry is strict, setting fear in opposition to love. Nero
is thus confronted with a kind of infinite turnstile; neither
of the two systems represented to him possesses an evident
value, for they are merely inverted signs: concord with the
world ( driving a chariot, acting in plays, writing poems )
can momentarily become a defamatory sign. According to
which clue should the choice be made? Alienated by each
system, the world cannot answer: the solutions vanish,
Nero is flung back on his problem.
This problem remains that of a birth, or if one prefers,
of a transition, an initiation: Nero seeks to become a man,
he cannot, and he suffers. This suffering, according to the

• Ahl que de la patrie il soit, s'il veut, le pere. ( 1,1 )

Let him be the father of his country, if that is what he
wants I
a On n'aime point, Seigneur, si l'on ne veut aimer. ( 111,1 )
One loves, my lord, only if one wants to.
' Politically, Narcissus is an "ultra"; he refers to the people
more or less as Polynices does. ( IV,4)
84 ON RACINE
Racinian principle, is, if not physical, at least coenaes­
thetic, it is a suffering of the link, the bond. There is not
so much a Neronian being as a Neronian situation, that
of a paralyzed body desperately striving toward an auton­
omous mobility. As with Pyrrhus, it is essentiaiiy the
Past that seizes upon [agrippe] 5 Nero-the childhood,
the parents, even the marriage chosen by the Mother6-
the Past that has not been able to give him a paternal
status, in short, morality. But Racinian tragedy is never the
direct contestation of a morality. The tragic world is a
substantial world; Nero does not confront concepts, nor
even persons, but forms, which he attempts to oppose by
other forms. Since his mother obliges him to share his
secrets with her, Nero will try to create a new secret for
himself, a solitary one from which his mother is excluded;
this is the meaning of that redoubtable Door Agrippina
attempts to force,7 and of that sleep Nero insists on,
as if he were dissolving the biological association of Mother
and child. What he seeks is an autonomous space-for
him the throne is such a space, in which to assert his vital
dimension.8 In this specifically material form, Nero's sub­
jection relates to one of the oldest themes of alienation,
that of the reflection ( or of the double ) : Nero is merely a
mirror ( for example, he reflects back on his mother the
6 It is impossible not to relish the onomastic coincidence that
makes. Agrippina the symbol of seizure [agrippement] and Narcis­
sus the symbol of narcissism.
8 Mon amour inquiet deja se l'imagine
Qui m' amene Octavie, et, d'un mil enfldmme,
Atteste les saints droits d'un nmud qu'elle a forrrae. ( 11,2 )
My apprehensions already see her bringing Octavia to me,
and with burning eyes asserting the sacred rights of the
match she has made.
' Faut-il . . .
Qu'errant dans le palais sans suite et sans escorte,
La mere de Cesar veille seule a sa porte? ( I,1 )
Must Caesar's mother, then, trailing unattended through the
palace, wait by herself at his door?
• Il m'ecarta du trdne ou je m'allais placer. ( I,1 )
He thrust me from the throne I was about to tab.
 RACINIAN MAN 85
power h e has received from her11 ) ; the optical system of
which he is a prisoner is perfect, his mother can remain
hidden ( behind a veil 10 ) , and sometimes a second screen
darkens the mirror when Burrhus and Agrippina dispute
possession of the reflection.11 Now, as we know, the theme
of the double is magical, one's person is bewitched, and
indeed the relation between Agrippina and Nero is a rela­
tion of enchantment: it is the Mother's physical body that
fascinates the son, paralyzes him, turns him into a sub­
missive object, as though under hypnosis, to the spell of a
hypnotist's gaze.12 Once again we see the ambiguity of the
notion of Nature in Racine: Agrippina is a natural mother,
yet Nature is nothing but asphyxiation. Agrippina be­
siegesP a definition of that Racinian anti-physis which
8 Quelques titres nouveaux que Rome lui de{ere,
Neron n'en r�oit point qu'il ne donne a sa mere.
Whatever new honors Rome confers upon him, Nero re·
ceives none that he fails to give to his mother.

Non, non, le temps n'est plus que Neron, jeune encore,

Me renvoyait les va?ux d'une cour qui I'adore . . . ( 1,1 )
No, no, the time is past when Nero, still young, offered me
the attentions of an adoring court . . .
10
Et que, derriere une voile, invisible et presente . . . (I,l )
When behind a veil, invisible yet present . . .
u Ai·je done eleve si haut votre fortune
Pour mettre une barriere entre mon fils et moi? ( 1,2 )
Then have I raised your fortunes so high to set a barrier
between my son and me?
12 Eloigne de ses yeux, j'ordonne, je menace . . .
Mais . . .
SitOt que mon mctlheur me ramene a sa vue . .
Mon genie etonne tremble devant le sien. ( 11,2 )
Far from her eyes, I can threaten, command . . . But as
soon as I am unlucky enough to be in her presence . . . my
awed spirit trembles before hers.
18 • • J'ctssiegerai Neron de toutes parts. ( III,5 )
•

I shall besiege Nero from all sides.

86 ON RACINE
will explode in an openly blasphemous mode in Athctlie.
Thus Nero, at the outset, is an undifferentiated organ­
ism. For him the problem is one of secession : he must
disjoin the Emperor from the son.14 This disjunction, ac­
cording to the Racinian mechanism, must be a shock that
acquires its energy in a very pure vital sense, an immediate
feeling of expansion, which I have already called dogma­
tism ( the refusal to inherit) , which Racine calls im­
patience, and which is an organism's absolute rejection
of what contains it. Physical paralysis and moral obliga­
tion are swept away in the same discharge. The refined
form of the link being gratitude, Nero becomes, above all,
ungrateful; he decides he owes nothing to his mother; like
boys who insolently cast in their parents' faces the re­
sponsibility for their birth, he defines Agrippina's gifts
to him as dictated by interest alone.15 His immoralism is
strictly adolescent : he refuses any mediation between his
desire to exist and the world; his desire is for him a kind
of categorical dctsein that the whole world must acknowl­
edge at once.16 This kind of detonation between desire

Early in the play, Agrippina already lays siege to Nero's door.

When she curses him, she attributes to herself an Erinys' function
in advance:
Rome, ce ciel, ce jour que tu r� de moi,
Partout, a tout moment, m'offriront devant toi.
Tes remords te suivront comme autant de furies . . . (V,4)
Rome, the air you breathe, this very life I gave you will
everywhere, at every moment, set me before your eyes. Your
remorse will follow you like the furies . . .
" ll l'eut par cet affront . . .

. . . que tout l'univers aprenne avec terreur

A ne confondre plus mon fils et l'Empereur. ( I,2 )
By this affront, he means the world to learn, with terror,
that my son and the Emperor are no longer one and the
same.
lB
IV,2.
18 ll faut que j'aime enfin. ( III, 1 )
Now I must love.
 RACINIAN MAN 87
and its fulfillment is signified by an abrupt gesture: the
order given to the guards ( to arrest, to escort, which is
always, as we know, a way of escaping from language,11
hence from the tragedy. Nero speaks little, he is fascinated
by acts.18
This character, theatrical as presented by History, pos�
sesses a radical pragmatism on the stage; Nero denies his
acts any decor, envelops them in a kind of ineffable a�
pearance, eliminates their substance to purify their effect.
This is the meaning of the Neronian caress: Nero em�
braces,l9 because the embrace reveals the murder only
after it has been perpetrated. This "ineffability" has a
funereal substitute : poison. Blood is a noble, theatrical
substance, the sword an instrument of rhetorical death;20
but Nero desires Britannicus' elimination, not his spec�
tacular defeat. Like the Neronian caress, poison insinuates
itself, and like the caress it reveals only its effect, not its
means. In this sense, caress and poison belong to an im�
mediate order, in which the distance from plan to crime
is reduced absolutely; the Neronian poison, moreover, is
a swift one, its advantage is not delay but nudity, the
rejection of the bloodstained stage.

Adieu. fe souffre trop, eloigne de funie. (III, I )

I must leave you, for I suffer too much, separated from
Junia.
17 Agrippina, on the contrary, is a creature of language. Her

words are a substance with which she smothers her son and
which Nero inevitably opposes by Bight, silence, and elision.
18 Nero's concealed surveillance of Junia in the famous scene

6 of Act II is an act in the full meaning of the word and ex­

tremely rare in Racinian tragedy.
18
Ses bras, dans nos adieux, ne pouvaient me quitter. (V, 3 )
His arms, i n our farewells, could never let m e go.
111 The bloody wound is explicitly contrasted with poisoning:
-Quoit du sang de son frere il n'a point eu d'horreur?
-Ce dessein s'est conduit avec plus de mystere. (V, 5 )
Was he not horrified to shed his brother's blood? This plan
was executed more mysteriously.
88 ON RACINE
Such is Nero's problem. To solve it, he will ultimately
adopt the Narcissan system ( to gain acknowledgment from
the world by terrifying it ) , but only after having suggested
his own solution throughout the play-and Nero's solu­
tion is Junia. He owes Junia only to himself. Opposing all
that comes to him from others, all that smothers him­
power, virtue, advice, morality, a bride, crime itself­
there is only one part of himself that he has invented, his
love. We know how he discovers Junia, and that this love
is born of the very particularity of his being, of that spe­
cial chemistry of his organism which attracts him to
shadows, to tears. What he desires in Junia is a cornple­
mentarism, the peace of a different yet chosen body, the
repose of the night; in short, what this asphyxiated crea­
ture craves, as a drowned man gasps for air, is respiration .21
Here Woman, according to the oldest gnostic traditions
(revived by Romanticism ) is the mediatrix of peace, the
means of reconciliation, initiatress into Nature (as opposed
to the false, maternal Nature ) ; whether it is childishness
or intuition, Nero regards his love for Junia as an ineffable
experience that no worldly description ( and notably that
which Burrhus gives of it ) can exhaust.22
Junia is the consoling virgin by essence, since Britannicus
finds in her exactly what Nero is looking for: she is the
woman who weeps and garners tears, she is the water that
envelops and releases, she is the shadow of which Nero is
the solar complement. To be able to weep with Junia­
that is the Neronian dream, achieved by Nero's fortunate
double, Britannicus. Between them, the symmetry is per­
fect: a trial of strength links them to the same father, to

21
Si . . .
Je ne vais quelquefois respirer a vos pieds. ( 11,3 )
Unless . . I may draw breath occasionally at your side.
.

= Mais, croyez-moi, l'amour est une autre science. (111,1 )

But love, believe me, is knowledge of another kind.

Naturally, this conflict between Law and subversion is expressed

through a conflict of generations.
 RACINIAN MAN 89
the same throne, to the same woman; they are brothers,23
which means, according to the Racinian Nature, insepara­
ble enemies. A magical (and according to history, an
erotic24 ) relation unites them : Nero fascinates Britanni­
cus,25 as Agrippina fascinates Nero. Having issued from
the same point, they merely reproduce each other in
contrary situations : one has dispossessed the other, so that
one has everything, the other nothing. But it is precisely
here that the symmetry of their positions is articulated :
Nero has everything, yet he does not exist; Britannicus
has nothing, yet he exists; being is refused to one, granted
to the other. Possession cannot achieve being because
being, in this case, does not come from the world, as
Burrhus and Narcissus attempt to persuade Nero, but
from Junia. It is Junia who causes Britannicus to exist
and who rejects Nero into the chaos of a destructive Past
and a criminal future. Between Nero and Britannicus,
Junia is the absolute and gracious arbitress.26 By a figure
appropriate to Fate, she reverses the world, turning Britan·
nicus' misfortune into grace and Nero's power into im·
potence, possession into nullity and deprivation into being.
By the mere caprice of her glance, inclining to one side,
turning away from the other by a choice as unmotivated
as that of the divine numen, the consoling woman be·
. Britannicus, mon frere. ( II, 1 )
. . . Britannicus, my brother.

"' "It is related by several writers of the period that many

days before the murder, Nero had abused the boyhood of Britan·
nicus frequently." (Tacitus, Annals, XIII, xvii )

"" Il prevoit mes desseins, il entend mes discours. ( 1,4 )

He forestalls my plans, hears everything I say.
a� If we momentarily forget the Racinian bad faith, which

posits Nero as a monster and Britannicus as a born victim,

Junia's arbitration curiously anticipates Bernard Shaw's Can­
dida: between a husband who is a self.confident victor and a
lover who is a delicate poet, Candida is obliged to choose the
weaker: she chooses, naturally, her husband. The weaker, here, is
evidently Nero. Junia chooses Britannicus because Fate is wicked.
90 ON RACINE
comes the revenging woman, the promised fecundity be­
comes eternal sterility; scarcely born into the world, Nero
is struck down by the most horrible of frustrations : his
desire is doomed though its object remains, the woman
he asked to give him birth dies without dying.27 Nero's
despair is not that of a man who has lost his mistress, it
is the despair of a man condemned to grow old without
ever having been born;
Berenice
It is Berenice who desires Titus. Titus is linked to
Berenice only by habit.l Berenice, on the contrary, is
linked to Titus by an image, which in Racine means by
Eros; this image is naturally nocturnal,2 Berenice delight­
edly returns to it each time she evokes her love; for her,
Titus has the voluptuousness of a Bash of light in the
darkness, of a tempered splendor; projected by a strictly
Racinian protocol into that "nuit enflammee" [torchlit
night] when he received the homage of the people and
the Senate before his father's bier, he reveals his corporal
essence in an erotic image, the luminescence of tenderness :
he is a total principle, an air, both light and atmosphere.
No longer to breathe that air is to die. This is why Berenice
goes to the extreme of offering a simple concubinage!�
( which Titus rejects ) ; this is why, too, deprived of its
sustenance, this image can only die away in a rarefied air,
distinct from that of Titus, which is the gradual vacuum of
the Orient.
Thus it is essentially to Berenice and to her alone that
rn Madame, sans mourir elle est morte pour lui. (V,8 )
Madame, without dying, she is dead to him.
1 We are acquainted with Titus' Eros only by his allusion to

Berenice's "beautiful hands."

1 De cette nuit, Phenice, as-tu vu la splendeur? ( I, 5 )
Phenice, have you ever seen a night more splendid?
a Ahl Seigneur, s'il est vrai, pourquoi nous separer?
fe ne vous parle point d'um heureux hymenee . . . ( IV, 5 )
Ah, my lord, if that is true, why must we part? I am not
asking for a marriage . . .
 RACINIAN MAN 91
the erotic power belongs in this play. Yet this power,
contrary to the habitual intent of Racinian tragedy, is
not doubled by political power : the two powers are sepa­
rate, and that is why the tragedy concludes in an ambigu­
ous manner, as if exhausted, deprived of the tragic spark
that as a rule is generated by the excessive condensation
of these two powers in a single person. Powedul, Berenice
would . kill Titus; in love, Titus would marry Berenice; their
mutual survival is a kind of breakdown, the sign of a tragic
experiment that fails. Not that these two disjunct figures
do not make desperate efforts to attain tragic status : Titus
does everything he can to be in love, Berenice wages a
desperate struggle to dominate Titus, each using in turn the
habitual weapon of the tragic hero, blackmail by death;
and if Titus ultimately imposes his solution, it is in a
shamefaced fashion; if Berenice agrees to it, it is at the
price of an illusion : that of believing herself loved.4
Here we see how deceptive the symmetry of the classical
invitus invitam can be; there is no equality of situation
between Titus and Berenice. Berenice is entirely possessed
by Eros; for Titus, the central problem is again a problem
of legality : how to break a Law, how to escape an asphyxi­
ation? As we know, there is in Racine an intoxication of
fidelity. This agony, attested to in all Racine's tragedies,
finds its clearest expression in Berenice in the fact that the
unfaithful Titus is given a faithful double : Antiochus.
Antiochus is the reflection of Titus, a relation all the more
natural in that Titus is the source of light.5 And Antiochus'
fidelity to Berenice is the essence of fidelity, he identifies it
' Ce jour, je l'avouerai, je me suis alarmee:
J'ai cru que votre amour allait finir son cours.
fe connais mon erreur, et vous m'aimez toujours. (V,7 )
That day, I admit, I was frightened, believing your love had
run its course. I acknowledge my mistake, for you love me
still.
Actually, she has no more evidence of this than at the start.
5 Quand l'amoureux Titus, devenant son epoux,
Lui prepare un eclat qui rejaillit sur vous. ( I, 3 )
When adoring Titus, marrying her, bestows upon her a
luster that is reflected in you.
92 ON RACINE
with his very being;6 eternal-that is, joining past and
future in a single trajectory-and unconditional ( Antio­
chus is faithful without hope7 ) , this fidelity has a legal
basis : Antiochus was Berenice's first lover,8 he received
the maiden from her brother's hands. His link to Berenice
has the solemn guarantee of a form, it is a true legality
( whereas the unfaithful Titus has managed to be loved
without cause, by a veritable rape9 ) . Titus and Antiochus
are thus divided only as the double postulate of the same
organism, governed by a skillful division of labor: to Titus,
infidelity; to Antiochus, fidelity. And once again, of course,
it is fidelity that is discredited : Antiochus is a weak double;
humiliated, vanquished, he suffers expressly from a loss
of identity : 10 such is the price of fidelity. Yet this carica-
• He bien! Antiochus, es-tu tou;ours le meme?
Pourrai-;e, sans trembler, lui dire: Je vous aime? { I,2 }
Now then, Antiochus, are you still the same man? Can I,
without trembling, tell her: I love you?
' Je pars, fidele encor quand ;e n'espere plus. { I,2 )
I leave you, still faithful though I no longer hope.
8 • • il vous souvient que mon camr en ces lieux
•

Rep�t le premier trait qui partit de vos yeux. { I,4}

Remember, it was in your birthplace that your eyes sent their
first beams into my heart.
e Je l'aimai; ;e lui plus. {11,2 }
I loved her; I pleased her.
10
Tandis que, sans espoir, ha"i, lasse de vivre,
Son malheureux rival ne semblait que le suivre. { I,4 }
While without hope, despised, weary of life, his wretched
rival seemed merely to follow after him.
Cent fois, ;e me suis fait une douceur extreme
D'entretenir Titus dans un autre lui-meme. ( I,4}
How many times I indulged myself by listening to Titus in
another incarnation.
Pour fruit de tant d'amour, faurai le triste emploi
De recueillir des pleurs qui ne sont pas pour moi. { III,2 }
The reward of so much love was my sad task of reaping the
tears that were not shed for me.
 RACINIAN MAN 93
tural fidelity i s necessary to Titus : it i s really the disease
by which he lives, and it explains why he maintains a
suspect familiarity with it. Not only does Titus associate
Antiochus with his dilemma, constantly letting him see
his love for Berenice : the rival must be a witness,1 1 less
perhaps out of sadism than out of a need for unity;12 but
further, he constantly delegates his role to Antiochus,
makes him his spokesman13 ( and we know to what degree
the voice is sexualized in the Racinian theatre, and singu­
larly in Berenice, the tragedy of aphasia14 ) by one of
those procurations of the rival lover so customary in Ra­
cine.u; Of course, it is each time that Titus is unfaithful
that he needs to delegate his role to the faithful Antiochus;
it is as if Antiochus is there to stabilize Titus' infidelity, to
exorcise it. Titus frees himself of a fidelity that is asphyxiat-

11 Et lorsque cette reine, ctssurant sa conqu�te,

Vous attend pour temoin de cette illustre f�te; ( I, 3 )
And when this queen, confirming her conquest, asks you to
this illustrious banquet as a witness;
Je n'attendais que vous pour temoin de ma joie. ( I,4)
I needed you alone as the witness of my joy.
Soyez le seul temoin de ses pleurs et des miens. (111,1 )
Be the sole witness of her tears and of mine.
12 Vous ne faites qu'un cceur et qu'une c1me avec nous. (I11,1 )
You make, with us, but one heart and one soul.
18 Et je veux seulement emprunter votre voix. ( 111,1 )
All I ask is to borrow your voice.
u Et, des le premier mot, ma langue embarrctssee . ( 11,2 )
. .

And at the first word, my tongue froze in my mouth

Sortons, Paulin: je ne lui puis rien dire. (11,4 )
I must leave her, Paulinus: I can say nothing.

Helctsl quel mot puis-je lui dire? ( IV,7 )

Alas, what can I say to her?
111 Roxane delegates her role to Atalide; Pyrrhus confides
Hermione to Orestes; Mithridates entrusts Monimia to Xiphares.
94 ON RACINE
ing him; by means of Antiochus, he hopes to elude his
essential conflict, to achieve the impossible: to be both
faithful and unfaithful without transgression. Antiochus
is his good conscience-that is, his bad faith.
For it is not true that Titus must choose between Rome
and Berenice. The dilemma is between two moments
rather than between two objects : on one hand, a Past that
is an extended childhood, in which the double subjection
to the Father and the Mother-mistress is experienced as
a security18 ( Hasn't Berenice saved Titus from debauchery?
Isn't she all things to him? ) ; on the other, since the death
of the Father ( who may have been murdered by the
son17 ) , a responsible future, in which the two figures of
the Past, Father and wife ( all the more threatening in that
the lover-child is obliged to her ) , are destroyed in one and
the same movement. For it is the same murder that gets
rid of both Vespasian and Berenice.18 Vespasian dead,
Berenice is condemned. The tragedy is precisely the in­
terval that separates the two murders.
Now-and this is Titus' profound guile-the first mur­
der will serve as an alibi for the second : it is in the name
of the Father, of Rome, in short of a mythical legality,
that Titus will condemn Berenice; it is by feigning to be
coerced by a general fidelity to the Past that Titus will
justify his infidelity to Berenice; the first murder becomes
a petrified life, noble alibi, theatre.19 Rome, with its laws
that jealously defend the purity of the imperial blood, is
an ideal instance for justifying the repudiation of Berenice.
Yet Titus does not even manage to give this instance an
heroic appearance; he debates a fear, not a duty : for him
18
raimais, je soupirais dans une paix profonde . . . ( 11,2 )
I loved, I sighed in a deep peace . ..

17 J'ai meme souhaite la place de mon pere . ( 11,2 )

I even coveted my father's place . . .
18
Mais a peine le Ciel eut rappele mon pere ( II, 2 )
But Heaven had no sooner claimed my father .
19 • • Je me propose un plus noble theatre
• ( 11,2 )
. . . I prefer a nobler theatre .. .
 RACINIAN MAN 95
Rome i s only a public opinion that terrifies him; trembling,
he constantly evokes the anonymous what will people
say? 20 The court itself is too specific a personality to
threaten him; he derives his fear-and consequently his
justification-from a public that is as generalized as possi­
ble. As a matter of fact, Rome is a pure hallucination.
Rome is silent,21 Titus alone makes the city speak,
threaten, coerce; the hallucination is so utterly a role
in the protocol of the breaking-off that on occasion, like
those hysterics who momentarily forget they have a para­
lyzed arm, Titus stops being afraid; Rome vanishes, Titus
no longer knows what part he is playing.
Thus Berenice is not a tragedy of sacrifice, but the story
of a repudiation for which Titus dares not assume re­
sponsibility. Titus is tom not between duty and love, but
between a project and an act. That is the celebrated rien
[nothing] : the insignificant yet laboriously covered dis­
tance that separates an intention from its alibi. Once the
alibi is found and theatrically presented (Titus goes so far
as to mime his own death22 ) , the intention can be fulfilled,
Berenice dismissed, fidelity liquidated, without even the
risk of remorse : Berenice will not be the Erinys she had
imagined.23 Berenice is persuaded. This result, quite in-
so Et ces noms, ces respects, ces applctudissements
Deviennent pour Titus autant d'engagements . . . (V,2 )
And these titles, this homage, this applause all becomes, for
Titus, so many commitments . . .
21 Tout se tait: et moi seul, trop prompt a me troubler,
J'avance des malheu rs que je puis reculer. ( IV,4 )
All is silent: and only I, too easily alam1ed, entertain disas­
ters I could dispel.
22 Moi-m�me en ce moment sais·je si je respire? ( IV,7 )
A t this moment, do I myself know whether I a m still alive?
81 • • Que rna douleur presente et ma bonte passee,
•

Mon sang, qu'en ce palais je veux meme verser,

Sont autant d'ennemis que je vais vous laisser:
Et, sans me repentir de rna perseverance,
Je me remets sur eux de toute met vengeance. ( IV, 5 )
I know that my present pain and my past kindness, my
96 ON RACINE
congruous in Racinian tragedy, is accompanied by another
singularity : the figures of the conflict separate without
dying, the alienation ceases without catastrophic recourse.
That is doubtless the meaning of the Berenecian Orient :
a distancing of the tragedy. In this Orient are gathered all
the images of a life subject to the most antitragic power
that exists : permanence (solitude, boredom, sighs, wander­
ing, exile, eternity, servitude, or joyless domination ) .
Among these images, two dominate, like statues mocking
the tragic crisis : silence and duration. These two new
values are accepted by the very creatures of the Orient:
Antiochus and Berenice. Antiochus is the man of silence.
Doomed by the same impulse to be both mute and faith­
ful, he has kept silent for five years before speaking to
Berenice; he conceives of his death only as a silent one;24
his final helas is a return to a definitive silence. As for
Berenice, she knows that once the tragedy is over, time is
nothing but infinite meaninglessness, for which the many
seas are merely a spatial substitute :25 restored to duration,
life can no longer be a spectacle. Such, then, is the
Berenician Orient : the death of theatre. And on the ships
anchored in Ostia, with Antiochus, Titus sends the whole
tragedy into the Oriental void.
blood that I am quite willing to shed in this palace, are so
many enemies that I bequeath you : and without regretting
my perseverance, I leave all my vengeance up to them.
:u. Berenice autrefois m'dta toute esperance;
Elle m'imposa meme un eternal silence.
Je me suis tu cinq ans .. .( I,Z )
Berenice long ago robbed me of all hope, even imposing
upon me an eternal silence. I have kept still for five
years . . .
Surtout ne craignez point qu'une aveugle douleur
Remplisse l'univers du bruit de mon malheur . . ( I,4)
.

And you need not fear that blind suffering will fill the uni­
verse with the rumor of my misfortunes . . .

• Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous,

Seigneur, que tant de mers me separent de vous? (IV,S )
In a month, in a year, how will we endure, my lord, that so
many seas divide us?
 RACINIAN MAN 97

Bctjazet
Baia:zet constitutes a close inquiry into the nature of
the tragic site. As we know, this site is closed by definition.
Until Ba;azet, the enclosure of the Racinian site has re­
mained circumstantial; it is generally a room in the palace;
the environing palace itself forms a secret and menacing
mass ( notably in Britannicus, where the tragedy is already
a labyrinth ) . In Ba;a:zet, the site is intentionally closed,
as if the entire fable were merely the form of a space:
the Seraglio.1 TI1is Seraglio, moreover, was regarded at
the time as the chief curiosity of the play, as if the public
sensed in this institution a kind of topical character, one
of the most important themes of the human imagination,
that of concavity.
This closed site is not, however, autarchic; it depends on
an Exterior. It is this "organic" ambiguity that is the
basis of the entire play. In the Seraglio, two terrors com­
bine : blindness and subjection. Roxanne is the first to
express the ambiguity of the Seraglio; she wields that ab­
solute power2 without which we know there would be no
Racinian tragedy, yet she possesses this power only as the
Sultan's delegate; she herself is subject and object of an
omnipotence. The Seraglio is rather like an arena in which
Roxanne is the matador: she must kill, but under the eyes
of an invisible judge who surrounds and watches her; as
in the arena, where the bull is doomed and the man risks
his life nonetheless, an improvised yet fatal game is played
1 Racine does not distinguish the Seraglio (or Sultan's palace)
from the harem ( or women's apartments ) .
2 Songez-vous . . .

Que ;'ai sur votre vie un empire supreme;

Que vous ne respirez qu'autant que je vous aime? ( II, I )
Do you realize that I hold supreme sway over your life, and
that you draw breath only so long as I love you?
Rentre dans le neant dont je t'ai fait sortir. ( II, I)
Return to the void from which I plucked you(
Maitresse du serail, arbitre de ta vie . . (V,4 )
.

Mistress of the Seraglio, arbiter of your life .

. .
98 ON RACINE
in the Seraglio. In either case, the closing and opening of
the circle are both norms and acts : the Seraglio is a
ceremonial and mortal site.
It is because Amurath is an invisible witness that the
Seraglio is a panic milieu; it is a world that can receive
illumination from no quarter, yet knows itself to be subject
to an external certitude that terrorizes it. The Seraglio
never knows where Amurath is, because external time
has a different speed from tragic time, so that the distances
surrounding it are unreal :3 who can prove that an order is
not modified between the moment it is issued and the
moment it arrives? The Seraglio is like the world : in it man
struggles against the uncertainty of signs, observed by a
power that changes them at will. Atalide, Roxanne,
Bajazet, Acomat are blind; anxiously they question each
other for signs. And yet these victims are executioners :
they kill under the eyes of what will kill them.
The Seraglio's first contradiction is its sexuality; it is a
feminine or eunuchoid habitat, a desexualized place, con­
taining a mass of undifferentiated beings;4 it is elastic yet
full, like water.3 The person who moves about most natu­
rally within it is Acomat; Acomat is not explicitly, in
Racine, a eunuch ( as he was in Segrais' tale ) , but he has
the attribute of asexuality, old age, which he himself
presents as a state of nonparticipation.6 At the same time,
3 Mai.s, comme vous savez malgre rna diligence,
Un long chemin separe et le camp et Byzance . . .
E t je puis ignorer tout ce qui s'est passe. ( I, 1 )
But as you know, for all my haste, the road between the
camp and Byzantium is a long one . . I may know noth­
•

ing of all that has happened.

• Cette foule de chefs, d'esclaves, de muets,
Peuple que dans ses murs renferme ce palais. ( 11,1 )
Within its walls this palace contains a host of chieftains,
slaves, and sultans' mutes.
6 • •un calme heureux nous remet dans le port ( 111, 2 )
•

A fortunate calm brings us back to port

. . . voudrais-tu qu'a mon age
Je fisse de l'amour le vil apprentissage? ( 1,1 )
\Vould you have me turn love's base apprentice at my age?
 RACINIAN MAN 99
this castrated site is beset by terrible erotic pressures; first
Amurath's, whose invisible gaze ceaselessly penetrates the
hysterical mass contained within the Seraglio; then Rox­
anne's and Atalide's. And within this positive sexuality,
chiefly delegated to women, the ambiguity persists, mixing
roles; sexual power shifts from one to another, from Amu­
rath to Roxanne, who is virtually a substitute for the Sul­
tan; from Roxanne to Atalide, who is delegated to repre­
sent the favorite's voice7 in an encounter with Bajazet
(we have already remarked on the degree to which speech
is sexualized in Racine ) .
Naturally, this sexual ambiguity reaches its peak in
Bajazet : Bajazet is of an indeterminate, inverted sex,
transformed from a man into a woman. Contemporary
criticism remarked on what it called the fadeur [insipidity]
of the character; in recent productions, there has been an
attempt to revirilize tl)e role;8 but Bajazet's fadeur is not
a matter of character {it is of no interest to argue whether
Bajazet is this or that) , it is defined by his situation. The
Seraglio inverts him, even physically : Bajazet is a male
confined 9 in a female milieu where he is the only man.
He is a drone who is fed and fattened by Roxanne for
his genital power. Like those geese stuffed to make their

Que veux-tu dire? Es-tu toi-meme si credule

Que de me sou�onner d'un courroux ridicule? ( IV,7 )
What do you mean? Can you be so credulqus as to suspect
me of an absurd passion?

7 Roxane . . .
Du creur de Ba;az.et se reposait sur moi
Le voyait par mes yeux, lui parfait par rna bouche. ( 1,4 )
Roxanne entrusted Bajazet's heart to me . . . saw him
through my eyes, spoke to him by my mouth.

8 A. Adam, Histoire de la litterature fran�aise au XVII' siecle

(Domat, 1958 ) , vol. IV, pp. 345 ff.
' Ainsi done pour un temps Amurat desarme
l.Aissa dans le serail Baiaz.et enferme. ( 1,1 )
So for a time Amurath, disarmed, left Bajazet confined
within the Seraglio.
1 00 ON RACINE
livers succulent, Bajazet is imprisoned in the shadows,10
set apart, ripened for the pleasure of the Sultana, who
moreover will manipulate his murder as one controls an
orgasm;11 initially possessed of a powerful sexuality,12 he is,
we sense, little by little desexualized by the virile Rox·
anne. But above all, his sexual ambiguity results from
the fact that he is a prostituted male: Bajazet is handsome,
he gives himself to Roxanne in order to obtain something
from her, he openly employs his beauty as an exchange
value.ls It is this totally parasitical state14 that desexualizes
Bajazet: in Racine, as we know, the "sexual" roles are
essentially defined by the relation of authority, and there
is no other erotic constellation in his theatre but that of
power and subjection.
From Bajazet to Roxanne, the inversion of roles refers
to the opposition of the two kinds of Racinian Eros,
Eros-as-habit and the Eros-as-event. Bajazet is subject to
the former; his feeling for Atalide irs gradually elaborated
during the course of a shared childhood, 15 it is an affection
10
Je plaignis Bajazet, je lui vantai ses charmes,
Qui, par un soin jaloux dans l'ombre retenus . . . ( 1,1 }
I drew her sympathy to Bajazet, praised his charms that
had been jealously kept in obscurity . . .

n Je perdrais ma vengeance en la rendant si prompte. ( IV,6 }

I would waste my revenge by making it so swift.
1:0 Car enfin Bajazet dedaigna de tout temps
La molle oisivete des enfants des sultans. ( 1,1 }
For after all, Bajazet always disdained the soft idleness of
the children of sultans.
111 Bajazet est aimable; il vit que son salut
Dependait de lui plaire, et bientOt il lui plut. ( 1,1 }
Bajazet is appealing; he saw that his survival depended on
pleasing her, and pleased her before long.
u Je vous dois tout mon sang; ma vie est votre bien. ( II, I }
I owe you my heart's blood; my life is yours.
u Des nos plus jeunes ans, tu t'en souviens assez,
L'amour serra les namds par le sang commences. ( I,4 }
 RACINIAN MAN 101
o f identity ( Atalide and h e are of the same Blood 1 8 ) ; we
are here concerned with that sororal Eros, which we know
to be essentially fidelity, legality, but also impotence to be
born, to become a man. Roxanne, on the other hand, like
Pyrrhus, like Nero, is defined by a force of severance; a
plebeian, that is, alien to the tragic Blood, her function is
to break with legality; for her, marriage is not only physical
possession but the institution of a new alliance, subversion
of a previous Law.17 Her desire for Bajazet is therefore the
rejection of time as a value and the consecration of the
Event; it participates in that second Racinian Eros, in
which passion constantly erupts without cause, without
density, an abstract act (as is expressed by countless verbs
in the passe simple: il lui plut, je la vis, je l' aimai, etc. ) .
A dogmatic hero, Roxanne nonetheless struggles within
the most asphyxiating milieu known to Racinian tragedy;
the roles she extends-Pyrrhus, Nero, Titus-could still
identify a concept behind the physical force that coerced
them. Roxanne must duel against absence; and for the
first time, the engagement is of an openly spatial order.
The Seraglio clings to Roxanne as condition, as prison, and
From our earliest childhood, surely you remember, love
tightened the bonds that blood had tied.

Quoit cet amour si tendre, et ne dans notre enfance .

( 11, 5 )
Betray that tender love, born o f our childhood! . . .

Deja plein d'un amour des l'enfance forme . . (V,6).

Already filled with a love full-fledged in childhood .

1' Du pere d'Amurath Atalide est let niece. (1,1 ) .
Atalide is the niece of Amurath;s father.
17 Je sais que des sultans l'usage m'est contraire . . . ( I, 3 )
I know that the custom of the sultans is not my own .
Malgre tout mon amour, si, dans cette joumee,
Il ne m'attache a lui par un juste hymenee;
S'il ose m'alleguer une odieuse loi . . (1,3)
.

If, despite my love, he does not wed me this very day; if

he dares cite some hateful law . . .
1 02 ON RACINE
as labyrinth,18 that is, as obscurity of the signs : she never
knows who Bajazet is. When she does know, the ambiguity
ceases, her misfortune is at the same time an outcome,
a release 1 9 (but it is also the end of the tragedy) . The birth
of her desire is caught in this quicksand : the Seraglio
quickly smothers even an Eros-as-event; Roxanne's love is
born of blind contiguity: it is because she has not seen
Bajazet that Roxanne desires him; it is by Acomat's voice
(another procuration ) that Bajazet seduces her.20 The
Seraglio diverts and falsifies what constitutes the essence
of the Racinian Eros, sight; but at the same time it
intensifies it : Roxanne desires a captive ( eternal form of
the Racinian constellation ) , but she desires him all the
more in that she herself is a captive. In a word, the
Seraglio, by its double function as prison and as contiguity,
constantly expresses that contradictory movement of re­
linquishment and resumption, of intensification and frus­
tration, which defines the Racinian torment. This is
Racine's "Oriental" side: the Seraglio is literally the
smothering caress, the death-dealing embrace. In Britan­
nicus the funereal substance of this caress was poison;
in Bafazet it is strangling; perhaps because Nero's thematics
is of an incendiary order, his weapon is logically the gelid;

18 Nourri dans le seretil, fen connais les detours. ( IV,7)

Raised in the Seraglio, I know its hidden ways.
18
Ahl je respire enfin; et met joie est extr4me
Que le traitre une fois se soit trahi lui-m4me . .
Met tretnquille fureur n'et plus qu'cl se venger. (IV, S )
Ah, a t last I ca n breathe, savoring my delight that for once
the traitor has betrayed himself. . . . My tranquil rage
need only take its revenge.
1!0 Je plaignis Bctjetzet, je lui vttnteti ses chttrmes,
Qui . . .
Si voisins de ses yeux, leur etaient inconnus.
Que te dirtti·ie enfin? La Sultane eperdue
N'eut plus d'etutre desir que celui de sa vue. ( 1,1 )
I drew her sympathy to Bajazet, praised his charms that
. . . for all their proximity were unknown to her. What
else need I say? The Sultana, dazzled, thought of nothing
but. seeing him.
 RACINIAN MAN 103
since Amurath's thematics (or Roxanne's, who represents
him ) is of a respiratory order, with his countermanded and
reissued orders, his weapon is the cord.
By its endlessly ambiguous, ceaselessly inverted structure,
as a site both captive and imprisoning, acting and acted
upon, smothered and smothering, the Seraglio is the pure
space of the Racinian universe. Disastrous as it is, the
economy of this universe is, in spite of everything, an
equilibrium : the beings that populate it are sustained be­
cause they bear the weight of antagonistic forces-at least
during the time of the tragedy, which is a time both
eternal and nonexistent. Fear supports fear,21 caresses
sustain asphyxiation, captivity stimulates desire. Thus to
leave the Seraglio is to leave life itself, unless one agrees
to live without tragedy, as the eunuch Acomat does,
thereby representing the dialectical solution;22 Acomat is
the man of the ships,23 objects whose antitragic function
we have already noted. But only Acomat, as a character
alien to the tragedy, can escape from the Seraglio into life;
for him the sea means freedom. For the others, access to
the monster is irreversible; the Seraglio ingests, it never
restores : when the sea gate opens, it is only to receive
death.24
111 Comme il les crctint sans cesse, ils le craignent toujours. (1,1 )
Even as he unceasingly fears them, they forever fear him.
211 La plus sainte des lois, aht c'est de vous sauver. (11, 3 )
The most sacred law of all is to save yourself.
211 Deja sur un vaisseau dans le port prepare . . ( III,2 )
.

Already on a ship made ready in the harbor . . .

Et jusqu'au pied des murs que la mer vient laver,

Sur mes vaisseaux tout pr�ts . . (V,2 )
.

And at the foot of these walls, lapped by the sea where my

rigged ships . . .

24 Et, quoique sur la mer la porte fut fermee,

Les gardes, sans tarder, l'ont ouverte a genoux
Aux ordres du Sultan qui s'adressent a vous. ( III,8 )
And though the sea gate was shut, the kneeling guards
have opened it upon the Sultan's orders in your behalf.
1 04 ON RACINE

Mithridate
The tragedy of Mithridate occurs between the two
deaths, sham and real, of the same man.1 Or, one might
say, Mithridate is the story of a death botched and re­
peated, almost as one might retake a film sequence that
hadn't turned out right. The first time, the camera made
a mistake and took the real Mithridates; the second time,
the drapery is in place, Mithridates can die: that is the
right version.
Mithridates' first death opens a period of anarchy; the
King's tyranny imposed an order that disguised Evil dur­
ing his lifetime; once the King is dead, Evil erupts (as
in Phedre) , language is liberated, corruption is revealed,
things appear as they are: the two brothers are enemies,
rivals in politics and in love. Both accept the Father's
death : it is as if they had killed him; nothing distinguishes
them, they are equally guilty, as the pact of silence ( hence
of complicity ) Pharnaces proposes to Xiphares attests.
From this equal and generalized subversion ( and it is in
this that Mithricldte is a tragedy of bad faith ) , Racine
will extract a distinct Good and Evil : he will separate
Xiphares from Pharnaces. Good will be attached to
Xiphares : he will be loved by Monimia, will be patriotic
and respectful of the Father, though he is as much his
rival as his brother. These are qualities of grace, qualities
of essence, not of situation. The situation makes Xiphares
guilty : he steals his father's wife, though this father raised
him from childhood, assuming the Mother's functions,2
which was not the case with Pharnaces; Xiphares lies to
this father, who prefers him;3 he betrays him to the very
degree that Mithridates expressly entrusts Monimia to
him; finally, according to the physics of tragedy, Xiphares
1 The tragedy opens immediately on Mithridates' sham death.

( I, I)
• Mais moi, qui, des l'enfance eleve dans son sein . . . ( IV, 2 )
But I , raised in his bosom from childhood .
a Seigneur, le croirez-vous qu'un dessein si coupable
( III, 3 )
M y lord, how could you believe that so wicked a plot
 RACINIAN MAN 105
is guilty of his mother's transgression.4 Yet it is precisely
this cluster of culpabilities that makes Xiphares a good
son : he loves the judge in his father;5 he makes every effort
to win not an acknowledgment of his devotion, but for­
giveness. And the Father's sanctification evidently involves
an absolute subjection to the Law. Xiphares is the man of
the Past : he has loved Monimia virtually since childhood,6
he is defined by this sororal Eros, which is always the
expression of an ambiguous tie, both security and fear.
Pharnaces is not, strictly speaking, the contrary of
Xiphares, he is rather his emancipated double; his seces­
sion from the Father is completed, and within it he func­
tions comfortably. He is the only Racinian hero, after
Pyrrhus, who can assert his freedom without assigning
it a color-that is, the alibi of a language7-unlike
Xiphares, whose words inundate and conceaLS This is why,
' Elle trahit mon pere . . .
Quel devins-je au recit du crime de rna mere!
Je n'eus devant les yeux que mon pere offense . . . ( I, I )
She betrayed my father. How the account of my mother's
crime transformed me. All I could see was my offeuded
father . . .
' Mais vous avez pour juge un pere qui vous aime. ( 11,2 )
But your judge is a loving father.
8 Ftlttlt-il vous dire ici que le premier de tous
Je vous vis, je formai le dessein d'etre a vous,
Quand vos charmes naissants, inconnus a mon pere,
N'avaient encor paru qu'aux yeux de votre mere? ( I,2 )
Need I tell you now that I was the first to see you, and
dreamed of being yours when your dawning charms, un­
known to my father, had been seen as yet by no eyes but your
mother's?
7 He bien! sans rrze parer d'une innocence vaine,
ll est vrai, mon amour merite votre haine. ( III,2 )
Indeed, without tricking myself out in a lying innocence, it
is true that my love deserves your hatred.
8 Rome, mon frerel 0 ciell qu'osez-vous proposer?
. . ( III,.

1)
Rome, brother! 0 godsl What are you daring to sug­
gest? .
1 06 ON RACINE
like Taxiles and Pyrrhus, Phamaces is at the extreme limit
of the tragic institution. The theatrical link here is be­
tween Xiphares and Mithridates, the wrathful Father and
the groveling creature. The Father's return, after a sham
death, has the nature of a theophany;9 Mithridates comes
back from night, from death.10 But the god is only sug­
gested here; he has not plunged into hell, as Theseus will,
he has not communicated with the dead; his death was
a ruse, not a myth. His very immortality is merely hinted
at; invulnerable to poisons, he will die nonetheless-this
god is a false god. Xiphares, desperately guilty, awaits an
omnipotent judge, and that is the meaning he and Moni­
mia assign to the King's resurrection.11 But this god-as it
is revealed by the interval between the deaths-this god
is a cunning old man. The Father's death has caused Evil
to break out; the Father's return merely exacerbates it,
burdens it with a new incestuous rivalry, with a petty
treason. In fact, it is the Father who has stolen Monimia
from Xiphares.12 This judge, this god, if he is one, is a
prejudiced judge, a wicked god. Unable to please, he can
only tyrannize;13 equivocal, even his ambiguity is malig-
9 Quand mon pere parait, je ne sais qu'obeir. { I,5 )
When my father appears, I can only obey.
10
Les Romains, vers l'Euphrate, ont attaque mon p�re,
Et trompe dans la nuit sa prudence ordinaire.
Apres un long. combat, tout son camp disperse
Dans la foule des morts, en fuyant, l'a laisse. {I,l )
The Romans attacked my father on the Euphrates, and over­
came his ordinary vigilance by a night maneuver. After a long
battle, those of his men who had not been killed fled and
left him among the dead.
u Qu'avons-nous fait! { I,4)
What have we done!
18 Qu'il te suf/ise done, pour me justifier,
Que je vis, que j'aimai la Reine le premier. (I,l )
Let it be enough to justify me; in your eyes, that it was I
who saw the Queen first, who loved her first.
il.8 Faut-il que desormais, renoncant a 'VOUS plaire,
Je ne pretende plus qu'a vous tyranniser? { 11,4)
 RACINIAN MAN 1 07
nant, his caresscs�nce again- · are murderous;14 lastly
and principally-for this is the constitutive feature of
Racinian divinity-this judge employs a falsified scale of
values, but intelligently falsified : he can always hate a
little more than he loves.15 Legality is a perfect instru­
ment of tyranny for him : he has received Monimia from
her father,16 holds her by Law, demands fidelity, makes
the wedding into a death, once again consecrating the
identity of bed and tomb, the tragic ambiguity of the
altar, which is both nuptial and funereal. The object
representing his power is that royal fillet, alternately dia­
dem and cord, by which he flatters and kills Monimia. In
a word, then, he is an accountant-god, who never gives
without taking back : what he loses here he seeks to regain
there. Monimia, in his liturgy, is the compensation for his
defeats,17 for he has only one language, that of Possession.
This is the hideous Father a guilty son regains. At this
point, the tragedy expresses the truth of the Racinian uni­
verse : the wicked gods whom man can justify only by
acknowledging himself to be guilty-precisely the relation
of Xiphares to Mithridates. But we know that there is
often a point where Racinian tragedy is corrupted, and
that point is bad faith. In Mithridate, this corruption
operates through the old King's sacrifice. This sacrifice
has nothing tragic about it, since it is meaningless : Mith­
ridates is already doomed when he absolves. His oblation
is artificial, he forgives what no longer concerns him, and

And since there is no hope of pleasing you, must I hence­

forth seek only to tyrannize you?
1• IZ feint, il me caresse, et cache son dessein. ( IV,2 )
He pretends, he caresses me, and conceals his intent.
u; Sa haine va toujours plus loin que son amour. ( I, 5 )
His hatred always reaches farther than his love.
18
Songez qu'a ce grand roi promise par un pere . . . ( II, I )
Remember, you were betrothed to this great king by your
own father . . .
17 Mais vous me tenez lieu d'empire, de couronne. (V,5 )
But you are my substitute for empire and crown.
1 08 ON RACINE
leaves the tragedy with indifference, as Berenice left it with
resignation. Deprived of any oblative meaning, his death
becomes, actually, a tableau, the decorative display of a
false reconciliation; according to the nascent but violent
taste of the period, the tragedy tums into an opera :
Mithridate is a rectifoed tragedy.

Iphigenie
This is doubtless the most secular of Racine's tragedies,
as is signified by the fact that the characters are no longer
various figures, doubles, states, or complements of the
same psyche, but real individuals, psychological monads
clearly distinguished from each other by rivalries of inter­
ests, and no longer linked together in an ambiguous
alienation. Iphigenie is a "great dramatic comedy" in
which Blood is no longer a tribal bond, but merely a family
one, a simple continuity of advantages and affections. The
critical consequence is that we can no longer reduce the
roles among themselves, attempt to reach the singular
nucleus of the configuration; we must take them one after
the other, define what each of them represents socially and
no longer mythically.
Tragedy, beset on all sides by the powerful bourgeois
current that was flooding the period, has here taken refuge
in Eriphyle. Of unknown birth-she constantly reminds us
of the mystery of her origin, whose obscurity torments her
and causes her to exist, since she will die of knowing itl­
Eriphyle exists in order not to exist; her being is the jeal­
ousy of the gods,2 her praxis is evil, which she spreads like

1 Un oracle effrayant m'attache d mon erreur,

Et, quand je veux chercher le sang qui m'a fait ncdtre,
Me dit que sans perir je ne me puis connaUre. (11,1 )
A dread oracle enforces my ignorance, prophesying that if I
seek to learn the identity of my blood, I shall do so only on
pain of death.
1 Le Ciel s'est fait, sans doute, une joie inhumaine
A rassembler sur moi taus les traits de sa haine. (11, 1 )
Doubtless Heaven has taken an inhuman joy in overwhelming
me with the full measure of its hatred.
 RACINIAN MAN 1 09
a light.a Her relation to the jealous divinity is so personal
that she snatches from the priest's hands the knife he is
about to immolate her with : the priest-in her extraor­
dinary phrase-is a profaner.4 She longs to die in order
to know herself, thus fulfilling the fundamental tragic
contradiction, that of Oedipus. Her Eros is the most tragic
Racine has defined. Absolutely hopeless,5 it is consequently
without language ( there is no "scene" between Achilles
and Eriphyle ) , simply generated by a violent traumatism :
the rape on Achilles' ship, the embrace, eyes closed then
opening on a bloody arm, the discovery at last of a face,
abandonment-that is what attaches her to her ravisher by
an impulse that is strictly contra naturctm.6 Everything in
her is a break with something else; she is the rejected being
pctr excellence.7 But this rejected being is perhaps also the
Tu verras que les Dieux n'ont dicte cet oracle
Que pour croitre a la fois sa gloire et mon tourment. ( IV, 1 )
You shall see that the gods have uttered this oracle only to
swell both Iphigenia's glory and my torment.
8 • •Que peut·etre, approchant ces amants trop heureux,
•

Quelqu'un de ·mes malheurs se repandrait sur eux. (11,1 )

That perhaps, approaching these all-too-happy lovers, some
one of my miseries might spread to them.
• Le sang de ces heros dont tu me fais descendre
Sans tes profanes mains saura bien se repandre. (V,6)
The blood of those heroes to whose race you restore me can
shed itself without your profane hands.
11 Ne me demande point sur quel espoir fondee
De ce fatal amour je me vis possedee. (11,1 )
Ask not what hope I had in surrendering to this fatal love.
8 Cet Achille . . .
De qui, jusques au nom, tout doit m'etre odieux,
Est de tous les mortels le plus cher d mes yeux. ( 11,1 )
That Achilles, whose very name should be hateful to me, is
the dearest of all mortals to my sight.
� Je refUS et je vois le jour que je respire
Sans que pere ni mere ait daigne me sourire. ( II, 1 )
I was given the light of day, the air I breathe, without father
or mother ever deigning to smile upon me.
1 10 ON RACINE
only free being in the Racinian theatre : she dies for noth­
ing, without any kind of alibi.
The tragedy thus attached to the character of Eriphyle�
the bourgeois drama can deploy its bad faith. Around
Eriphyle, or rather in front of her, stirs a whole world.
The stake of all this agitation is Iphigenia. Linked to
Eriphyle by a similarity of situation, Iphigenia is her sym·
metrical opposite: Eriphyle is nothing, Iphigenia has every­
thing; Agamemnon's daughter, she participates like him
in the world of total Possession. She is provided with
celebrated parents, countless allies, a devoted lover; she has
virtue, appeal,8 purity. In her there is nothing unmotivated;
her love is the product of an accumulation of causes :&
she is the creature of a good conscience. Though the gods
pretend to condemn her, she is always on their side, and
even her death is a profound assent to the providential
order : her death is just, that is, justified, assigned a pur·
pose, incorporated into an exchange economy, like a
soldier's death . It is to her father that she dedicates herself;
for her, Agamemnon is the total Father, he intercepts even
the gods : it is not them lphigenia obeys, but her father,
abdicating even her suffering into his hands. We under·
stand that such an object10 should scarcely question what

Moi, qui de mes parents toujours abandonnee

Etrangere partout, n'ai pas meme en naissant
Peut-etre re(;u d'eux un regard caressantl (II, 3 )
Abandoned by my parents, I am an alien wherever I go, who
perhaps never received so much as a smile from them even
when I was born!
8 Et deja de soldats une foule charmee,
Surtout d'Iphigenie admirant la beaute . . . ( I,4 )
And already a delighted crowd of soldiers surrounds Iphigenia,
admiring her beauty . . .

8 Sa gloire, son amour, mon pere, mon devoir,

Lui donnent sur mon arne un trop juste pouvoir. ( 11,3)
Achilles' glo ry, his love, my father, and my duty give him too
just a power over my soul.
10
Ma vie est votre bien. ( IV, 5 )
My life is your chattel.
 RACINIAN MAN 111
her responsibility is. Doubtless she must believe she· is in­
nocent in order to desire to be resigned; but her being is
not in injustice, but in the availability of her "b1ood,"
offered to Agamemnon, to Achilles, to Calchas, to the
gods, to the soldiers, whose undifferentiated property it
seeks to be.
Yet this character-object is the stake of a microcosmic
society that brings together, around a very specific affair of
State ( an unforeseen obstacle to a great punitiv�hence
profit-seeking-expedition ) , very different ideologies,
though all, for perhaps tl1e first time in Racinian theatre,
are perfectly socialized. First of all, there is the State
power, Ulysses; he possesses the features of what Voltaire
admiringly called Ze grand politique: a sense of the collec­
tive interest, objective understanding of the facts and of
their consequences, lack of self-esteem, enveloping all this
pragmatism in a sententious rhetoric and the continuous
blackmail of high morality.11 Ulysses is supported by the
clerical power. Calchas is an important character : always
absent and always threatening, in the image of the Ra­
cinian God; nothing, neither marriage nor murder nor
war, can be done without him. The terrible privilege that
allows him to communicate with the gods nonetheless
follows, with a quite temporal appropriateness, the prosaic
necessities of policy; to sacrifice the King's daughter is
indeed a costly operation; in the manner of a skillful
ecclesiastic, Calchas finds the elegant solution, the one
that satisfies both spiritual appearances and the demands
of reality. Eriphyle is not mistaken in seeing Calchas as
merely a profane creature, something the way a mystic
would judge a priest to be too secular. Behind each, more­
over, stands a different race of gods; Calchas' are vulgar
gods, committed to testing man prosaically; behind
Eriphyle stands the tragic god who is sustained only by
the purest Evil; the former are merely the mockery of the
latter; in them the tragic vendetta is degraded, reduced
to bargaining for economic profit; they are already nothing
more than the morality that under the name of sacrifice
11
Il me representa l'honneur et la patrie. ( I, I )
He bade me consider honor and country.
1 12 ON RACINE
justifies the harsh law of profit : a little blood for great
wealth.12
The Mother and the son-in-law, in league, represent a
contrary ideology: the claim of the individual against a
tyrannical state. Both insist that the "person" is a suffi­
cient value, and that consequently the vendetta is obso­
lete: for Clytemnestra and Achilles, transgression is no
longer contagious; it is illogical that the whole family
should pay for Helen's abduction.13 This claim is re­
inforced by its own self-righteousness. Clytemnestra, a
virile and ambitious woman (her daughter's marriage,
which she has "arranged" herself,14 is in her eyes a
valuable social promotion ) ,15 has nothing of a Niobe
about her. For all the "pathos" Voltaire found in her,
she maintains a positivist spirit : for example, she entrusts
her fate to Achilles and not to the gods, human action
being more certain; or again, she disputes the oracle, con­
testing its literal meaning, subjecting it to the interpreta­
tion of reason rather than to the blindness of faith;16 re­
belling against the old Law, she anticipates the shift from
Father to husband.17 Achilles goes even further; he neither
12 Le seul Agamemnon, refusant la victoire,
N'ose d'un peu de sang acheter tant de gloire? (I, 3 )
Will only Agamemnon, abjuring victory, shrink from shed­
ding a little blood to purchase so much glory?
u Si du crime d'Helene on punit sa famille,
Faites chercher c) Sparte Hermione, sa fille. ( IV,4)
If Helen's family is to be punished for her crime, then bring
her daughter Hermione from Sparta.
11
Je vous l'ai dans Argos presente de ma main. ( 11,4 )
I myself introduced him to you in Argos.
111 • • • le fils de Thetis va m'appeler sa mere. ( Ill, I )
. . . the son of Thetis will call me his mother.
18 Un oracle dit-il tout ce qu'il semble dire? ( IV,4 )
Does an oracle say all it seems to say?
17 • •vous etes en ces lieux
•

Son pere, son epoux, son asile, ses Dieux. ( 111,5 )

 RACINIAN MAN 1 13
has nor wants a sense of the collective interest; he is his
only master. Whether he fights-it matters little for whom
-or marries lphigenia, without a dowry,18 he does these
things because such is his pleasure : to act, he needs neither
the alibis of war nor the obligations of family.19 This an­
archist warrior is as offhand with regard to priests20 as to
the gods themselves;21 in his eyes, the Father is entirely
secularized.22
This father is a false god. His being is based on having;
he possesses everything: wealth, honors, power, alliances,23
but in terms of character he has nothing; his praxis is
oblique ( already Euripides' word for him ) . His hesitations
have no reference to the division of the tragic hero; in
him, it is not even paternal love and national duty that
are in conflict, but rather public pressures, those voices
responsible for what people say, so powerful in the Ra-
In this place, you are her father, her husband, her asylum,
and her gods.
18 Content et glorieux du nom de votre epoux . . . ( III,6 )
Content and even proud to be known as your husband
19 Content de son hymen, vaisseaux, armes, soldats,
Ma foi lui promit tout, et rien ci Menelas. ( IV,6 )
I f she will accept m y hand, ships, arms, men, I pledge her
all, and Menelaus nothing.
20 Get oracle est plus Stlr que celui de Calchas. ( 111,7 )
This oracle is surer than Calchas'.
21 Les Dieux sont de nos fours les maitres souverains,
Mais, Seigneur, notre gloire est dans nos propres mains. (1,2 )
The gods dispose of our days, my lord, but our glory is in
our own hands.
:12 Lui, votre pere? A.pres son horrible dessein,
Je ne conruzis plus que pour votre assassin. ( 111,6 )
Your father? After that dreadful plan of his, I know him
only as your murderer.
28 Roi, pere, epoux heureux, fils du puissant Atree,
Vous possedez des Grecs la plus riche contree. ( I,l )
King, father, happy husband, son of powerful Atreus. you
possess the richest realm of Greece.
114 ON RACINE
c1man universe : in favor of the sacrifice weigh not the
gods, but the advantages of an expedition whose profit is
not quite concealed by its glory;24 against the sacrifice,
there is, of course, a paternal feeling (Agamemnon is not
a monster, but a mediocre man, an average soul ) , but this
sentiment constantly requires the reinforcement or the
resistance of others. Like every weak person, Agamemnon
lives abusively in language; it is by language that he is
attacked : he fears and Bees Clytemnestra's speeches;25 and
it is by language that he protects himself, nebulously
swathing himself in aphorisms, bitter reflections on human
nature.28
· All these persons ( for genuinely individual claims are
at stake) are agitated, at odds, or more particularly as­
sociated within a reality that is in fact the central charac­
ter of the play : the family. In Iphigenie there is an in­
tense family life. In no other play has Racine presented a
family so solidly constituted, provided with a complete
nucleus ( father, mother, daughter) , · with collaterals
( Helen, around whom the dispute rages ) , relatives (hus­
band and wife hurl them at each other27 ) , and an im­
minent alliance ( the "rights" of the future son-in-law are
hotly argued 28 ) . Obviously, in this solid bloc entirely

"' Pour tout le prix enfin d'une illustre victoire

Qui le doit enrichir, venger, combler de gloire (III,6)
• • .

For all the travail, then, of an illustrious victory that will

gain him wealth, revenge, and glory . . .

• A mon perfide epoux, je cours me presenter.

Il ne soutiendra point la fureur qui m'anime ( III,5 )
I shaH hasten to my faithless husband. He will not withstand
the fury that burns within me.
• Heureux qui, satisfait de son humble fortune . . . ( 1,1 )
Happy the man who, content with his humble lot . . .

11 Laissez d Mel4las racheter d'un tel prix

Sa coupable moitie, dont il est trop epris . ( IV,4)
. .

Let Menelaus pay such a price for his guilty wife, since he's
so infatuated with her .
18 IV,6.
 RACINIAN MAN 115
preoccupied by a great material interest, Eriphyle ( that
is, the tragic hero ) is really the intruder, whom all will
sacrifice (and the Louis XIV public with them ) to the
success of the clan. In Iphigenie there is a singularly pro­
saic quality in human relations, precisely because these
relations are family matters, in the modern sense of the
phrase; a prosaic language that occasionally suggests the
tone of the bourgeois disputes of Molierean comedy;29 but
especially, and throughout, a prosaic psychology, for what
in noble language we call the assaults of one character
upon another are nothing but the unit that will animate
our realistic theatre for centuries, the unit we call, by an
ambiguity that has a preciosity of its own, the "scene," or
as Giraudoux puts it, "one of those weekly conflagrations
that break out in families where feelings run high." ao
Now the family is not a tragic milieu; apprehended as
a vital group, and one might almost say as a species-that
is, animated by a true expansive force-it cannot make
the impossibility of life into a value and a goal. It is true
that when the play begins, the problem posed is properly
tragic : must Iphigenia be sacrificed or not? This alterna­
tive offers, it seems, no unexpected way out, no invented
solution : the answer is either yes or no. Yet Racine (and
this is the profound meaning of the work, its novelty as
the preface insists ) affords this tragic dilemma a non­
tragic solution; and this solution is furnished precisely by
the one tragic character. Kill Iphigenia or not? the tragedy
asks. And Racine answers: kill her and at the same time
do not kill her, for to immolate Eriphyle is to save the
meaning of the murder without accepting its absolute
nature. Racine here suggests something like a dialectical
solution, no doubt a formal and still barbaric one ( the
true dialectical solution would have been to invent a way
of doing without the winds and the gods ) , but incon­
testably testifying, in this second half of the seventeenth
• -Ahl je sais trop le sort que vous lui reservez.
-Pourquoi le demander, puisque vous le savez? ( IV,6 )
Oh, I know only too well the fate you have i n store for her.
Then why ask about it, if you already know?
80 Jean Giraudoux, Racine (Grasset ) , p. 39.
1 16 ON RACINE
century, to that new spirit, that naturalistic current of
which Moliere was the remarkable representative : without
Eriphyle, Iphigenie would be a very good comedy.

Phedre
To name or not to name, that is the question. In Phedre
it is language's very being that is put on the stage : the
profoundest of Racine's tragedies is also the most formal;
for the tragic stake here is less the meaning of language
than its manifestation, less Phaedra's love than her avowal.
Or more exactly : to name Evil is to exhaust it entirely.
Evil is a tautology, Phedre a nominalist tragedy.1
From the outset, Phaedra knows she is guilty, and it is
not her guilt that constitutes a problem, it is her silence :2
that is where her freedom is. Phaedra breaks this silence
three times : before Oenone ( I, 3 ) , before Hippolytus
( Il, S ) , before Theseus (V, 7 ) . These three outbursts have
a mounting gravity; from one to the next, Phaedra ap­
proaches an increasingly pure state of language. The first
confession is still narcissistic, Oenone is merely her ma­
ternal double : Phaedra disburdens herself to herself, seeks
her identity, makes her own history; her confession is an
epic one. The second time, Phaedra binds herself magically
to Hippolytus by a performance: she represents her love,
her avowal is dramatic. The third time, she confesses pub­
licly before the person who by his mere being has insti­
tuted the transgression; her confession is literal, purified
of all theatre; her language is totally coincident with the
fact, it is a correction: Phaedra can die, the tragedy is ex-
1 Quand tu saura.s mon crime, et le sort qui m'accable,
Je n'en mourrai pa.s moins, j'en mourrai plus coupable. ( I, 3 )
When you learn what my crime is, and the fate that over­
whelms me, I shall die not less, but more guilty.
-Hippolyte? Grands Dieux!
-C'est toi qui l'a.s nomme. (I,3)
Hippolytus? 0 gods!
You are the one who spoke his name.
2 Phedre, atteinte d'un mal qu'elle s'obstine a taire . . ( 1,1 )
Phaedra, stricken by a disease she refuses to name . . •
 RACINIAN MAN 1 17
hausted. We are dealing, then, with a silence tormented
by the notion of its own destruction. Phaedra is her silence:
to break this silence is to die, but also to die can only mean
having spoken. Before the tragedy begins, Phaedra already
wants to die, but this death is suspended :3 only speech
will release this motionless death, restore to the world its
movement.4
Phaedra, moreover, is not the only figure of secrecy;
not only is her secret contagious, Hippolytus and Aricia
also refusing to give any name to Phaedra's disease,5 but
further, Phaedra has a double who is also constrained by
the terror of language: Hippolytus. For Hippolytus as for
Phaedra, to love is to be guilty before that same Theseus
who forbids his son to marry as a consequence of the
vendetta} law, and who never dies. Further, to love and to
speak that love is, for Hippolytus, the same scandal; once
again the guilt of the emotion is not distinguished from
its nomination. Theramenes speaks to Hippolytus exactly
as Oenone speaks to Phaedra.6 Yet as Phaedra's double,
Hippolytus represents a much more archaic state of mut-

3 Une femTTl£ mourante et qui cherche a mourir • • . ( I,1 )

A woman dying, and longing to die • . .
4 Et la mort, a mes yeux derobant la clarte,
Rend au jour, qu'ils souillaient, toute sa purete. (V,7 )
And death, darkening my eyes, restores all its brightness to
the day they tainted.
6 Hippolytus to Theseus :
. . . Je devrais faire ici parler la verite,
Seigneur; mais je supprime un secret qui vous touche. (IV,2 )
I should let truth speak for me here, my lord, but I pass
over in silence a secret that concerns you alone.

Hippolytus to Aricia:
. . . et que jamais une bouche si pure
Ne s'ouvre pour conter cette horrible-dventure. (V, 1 )
. . . lips so pure must never part to utter this horrible tale.
e Theramenes to Hippolytus :
Vous perissez. d'un mal que vous dissimulez. ( I,1 )
You are dying of a disease you insist on concealing.
1 18 ON RACINE
ism, he is a regressive double; for Hippolytus' constriction
is one of essence,7 Phaedra's is one of situation. Hippo­
lytus' oral constraint is openly given as a sexual constraint:
Hippolytus is mute because he is sterile; despite Racine's
worldly precautions, Hippolytus is the rejection of sex,
anti-Nature; his confidant, by his very curiosity, attests
to the monstrous character of Hippolytus, whose virginity
is a spectacle.s Doubtless Hippolytus' sterility is directed
against the Father; it is a reproach to the Father for the
anarchic profusion with which he squanders life.9 But the
Racinian world is an immediate world. Hippolytus hates
the flesh as a literal disease. Eros is contagious, one must
disinfect oneself, avoid contact with the objects it has
touched : Phaedra's mere glance at Hippolytus corrupts
him, 1 0 his sword becomes loathsome once Phaedra has
touched it.11 Aricia, in this regard, is merely the homo-
., Hippolytus' love for Aricia is a challenge to essence:
Maintenant je me cherche et ne me trouve plus. ( 11,2 )
Now I seek and no longer find myself.
I Et meme, en le voyant, le bruit de sa fierte
A redouble pour lui rna curiosite. (II, 1 )
And even as I saw him, the rumor of his pride magnified
twice over my curiosity about him.
I Mais quand tu recitais des faits mains glorieux,
Sa foi partout offerte et re(:ue en cent lieux . . .
Tu sais comme, a regret ecoutant ces discours,
Je te pressais souvent d'en abreger le cours . . .
Et moi-meme, a mon tour, je me verrais lie? ( I,1 )
But when you recounted his less glorious deeds, his faith
pledged and accepted in a hundred places . . . you know
how reluctant I was to hear such things, how I often urged
you to skip the recital . . . and now it is my turn to see
myself corrupted.
10
Je ne puis sans horreur me regardez moi-meme. (11,6)
I cannot look at myself without horror.
u Il suffit que rna main l'ait une fois touchee,
Je l'ai rendue horrible a ses yeux inhumains;
Et ce fer malheureux profanerait ses mains. ( III,1 )
It is enough for my hand to touch his once, to make it
 RACINIAN MAN 1 19
lo�ue of Hippolytus : her vocation is sterility, not only by
Theseus' decree,12 but by her very being. t a
Constriction is thus the form that accounts for shame,
for guilt, and for sterility, and Phedre is on all levels a
tragedy of the imprisoned word, of life repressed. For
speech is a substitute for life: to speak is to lose life, and
all effusive behavior is experienced initially as a gesture of
dilapidation : by the avowal, the Hood of words released, it
is the very principle of life that seems to be leaving the
body; to speak is to spill oneself, that is, to castrate one­
self, so that the tragedy is subject to the economy of an
enormous avarice.14 But at the same time, of course, this
blocked speech is fascinated by its own expansion : it is
at the moment Phaedra guards her silence most intensely
that by a compensatory gesture she flings off the garments
which envelop her and tries to reveal her nakedness.15 We
realize then that Phedre is also a tragedy of accouchement.
Oenone is truly the nurse, the midwife, who seeks to liber­
ate Phaedra from her words at any price, who "delivers"
language from the deep cavity in which it is confined.
This intolerable confinement of the self, which is both
mutism and sterility in the same impulse, is also, as we
�now, the essence of Hippolytus : Aricia will thus be Hip-

horrible in his inhuman eyes; and this wretched sword would

profane his hands.
11
Il defend de donner des neveux a ses freres,
D'une tige coupable il craint un rejeton,
II veut avec leur sceur ensevelir leur nom. ( 1,1 )
He forbids her to bear children, nephews to her brothers,
fearing a new branch of that guilty stock, and would bury
the name with their sister.

13 Tu sctis que de tout temps a l'amour oppos4e . . . ( 11,1 )

You know I have always opposed love
u J'ai pris let vie en haine . . . (I, 3 )
I have taken a loathing to life . . .

111
Que ces vains omements, que ces voiles me pesent ( 1,
. . •

3)
How these vain adornments, how these veils weigh m e down!
1 20 ON RACINE
polytus' midwife as Oenone is Phaedra's; if Aricia is inter·
ested in Hippolytus, it is precisely in order to pierce him, 1 6
to make his words Bow at last. Further, in fantasy it is this
midwife's role that Phaedra would play for Hippolytus;
like her sister Ariadne, untangler of the Labyrinth, she
wants to unravel the skein, reel off the thread, lead Hip·
polytus out of the cavern into daylightP
Then what is it that makes speech so terrible? First of
all, it is because it is an act that the word is so powerful.
But chiefly it is because it is irreversible : 18 no speech can
be taken back. Surrendered to the logos, time cannot be
reversed, its creation is definitive. Thus by avoiding speech,
one avoids action,19 shifting the responsibility for it to
others; and if one has begun to speak out of an "involun­
tary distraction," it is no use breaking off, one must go on
to the end. 20 And Oenone' s ruse consists not in retracting
Phaedra's confession, in annulling it, which is impossible,
18
Mais de faire flechir un courage inflexible,
De porter la douleur dans une dme sensible , . .
C'est let que je veux, c'est let ce qui m'irrite. ( 11, 1 )
But to bend an inflexible will, to awake pain in a sensitive
soul . . . that is my desire, and what eludes me.
17 C'est moi, Prince, c'est moi, dont l'utile secours
Vous eut du l..Abyrinthe enseigne les detours .. ( 11,5 )
.

I am the one, Prince, whose help would have taught you

the way out of the Labyrinth's meanders . . .
18
In Phedre, a tragedy without marivaudage, words are never
taken back: there are no "scenes."
lJl La charmante Aricie a-t-elle su vous plaire?
-Theramene, je pars, et vais chercher mon pere. ( I,1 )
Can it be that the charming Aricia has won your heart?
-Theramenes, I am leaving, to seek my father.
zo Puisque j'ai commence de rompre le silence,
Madame, il faut poursuivre . . ( 11,2 )
.

Since I have begun to break the silence, lady, I must go

on

. . . Ah! cruel, tu m'as trop entendue . . ( 11,5 )

.

No, cruel Hippolytus, you have heard too much already

 RACINIAN MAN 121
but in reversing i t : Phaedra will accuse Hippolytus of the
very crime she herself is guilty of; speech will remain in­
tact, simply transferred from one character to the other.
For language is indestructible : the hidden divinity of
Phedre is neither Venus nor the Sun. It is that god "ter­
rible to perjurers" whose temple stands at the gates of
Troezen, surrounded by ancestral tombs, and before which
Hippolytus will die. Theseus himself is the true victim of
this god : though he has been able to return from the Un­
derworld, to recover the irrecoverable, he is the one who
speaks too soon. Semidivine, powerful enough to dominate
the contradiction of death, he nonetheless cannot unsay
what he had said : the gods send back the word he has
uttered, in the form of a dragon that devours him in his
son.
Of course, as the panic drama of defenestration, of open­
ing, Phedre employs an abundant thematics of conceal­
ment. Its central image is the Earth; Theseus, Hippolytus,
Aricia and her brothers21 are all descended from the Earth.
Theseus is a strictly chthonian hero, a familiar of the
underworld whose asphyxiating concavity his palace repro­
duces;22 a labyrinthian hero, he has been able to triumph
over the cavern, to pass back and · forth between darkness
and light, to know the unknowable and yet to return, while
the site natural to Hippolytus is the shadowy forest, where
he nourishes his own sterility.23 Confronting this telluric
bloc, Phaedra is divided : through her father, Minos, she

u Reste du sang d'un roi, noble �ls de la Terre . . . { II, I )

Last descendant of a king, noble son of the Earth

. . . et la terre humectee
But a regret le sang des neveux d'Erechtee.(II, I )
And the drenched Earth reluctantly drank the blood of the
nephews of Erechtheus.
22 Il me semble deja que ces murs, que ces voutes . . . ( III,
3)
Already it seems as if these walls, these vaults . . .
111 Nourri dans les forets il en a la rudesse. ( 111,1 )
He has the savagery of the forests where he was raised.
1 22 ON RACINE
participates in the order of the buried, of the deep; through
her mother, Pasiphae, she is descended from the Sun. Her
principle is a troubled vacillation between these terms.
She ceaselessly suppresses her secret, returns to the interior
cavern, but ceaselessly, too, a force drives her to leave it,
to expose herself, to join the Sun; and ceaselessly she
testifies to the ambiguity of her nature : she fears the light,
yet invokes it;24 she thirsts for the day, yet taints it. In a
word, her principle is the paradox of a black light,25 that
is, of a contradiction of essences.
Now this contradiction has, in Phedre, an absolute form :
the monster. At first, the monstrous threatens all the char­
acters; they are all monsters to each other, and all monster­
seekers as well.26 But above all, it is a monster, this time

114 Vous ha'issez le jour que vous veniez chercher. (I, 3 )

You hate the very daylight you came to find.
• Je voulai.s en mourant . . .
. . . derober au jour une flamme si noire. (1, 3 )
B y dying, I sought to cleanse the day of a flame so black.
• Phaedra to Hippolytus:
Delivre l'univers d'un morutre qui t'irrite. (11,5 )
Rid the world of a monster that pains you.

Aricia about Phaedra :

. . . Vos invincibles mains
Ont de monstres sans nombre affranchi les humains.
Metis tout n'est pas detruit, et vous en laissez vivre
Vn . (V, 3 )
. .

Your invincible hands have rid humanity of countless mon­

sters, but not all are destroyed, you have left one alive

Phaedra to Oenone:
. . . Va-t'en, monstre execrable. (IV,6)
Leave me, you loathesome monster.

Hippolytus about himself:

Croit-on que dans ses {lanes un monstre m'ait porte? (III,2 )
Was I born from some monster's womb?
 RACINIAN MAN 1 23
a real one, which intervenes to resolve the tragedy. And
this monster is the very essence of the monstrous-in other
words, it epitomizes in its biological structure the funda­
mental paradox of Phedre. It is the force that bursts out
of the depths of the sea, it is what pounces upon the
secret, breaks it open, ravishes it, tears it apart, scatters
and disperses it. To Hippolytus' principle of enclosure cor­
responds tragically-that is, ironically-his death by the
dismemberment, the pulverization, broadly extended by the
narrative, of a body hitherto essentially compact. Thera­
menes' narrative27 constitutes, then, the critical point
where the tragedy is resolved, that is, where the previous
retention of all the characters is undone by a total catas­
trophe. So it is actually Hippolytus who is the exemplary
character in Phedre ( though not the principal one) ; he is
truly the propitiatory victim, in whom the secret and its
explosion achieve their most gratuitous form. And in rela­
tion to this great mythic function of the broken secret,
Phaedra herself is an impure character. Her secret, whose
outcome is in a sense tried out twice, is finally released
through an extended confession. In Phaedra, language re­
covers in extremis a positive function : she has time to die,
there is finally an agreement between her language and
her death, both have the same measure ( whereas even the
last word is stolen from Hippolytus ) . Like a sheet of water,
a sl<?w death creeps into her,28 and like a sheet of water
too, a pure, even language emerges from her; tragic time,
Phaedra about Hippolytus:
Je le vois comme un monstre effroyable a mes yeux. ( 111,3 )
I regard him as a monster hideous to my sight.
27 There is a fine commentary on Theramenes' narrative by

Leo Spitzer, in Linguistics and Literary History, Princeton Uni­

versity Press, 1948.
liB ,.az voulu . . .
.

Par un chemin plus lent descendre chez les morts.

rai pris, i'ai fait couler dans mes bnllantes veines
Un poison . . (V,7 )
.

I sought to go down among the dead by a slower path, I

have taken a poison that is flowing now through my burn­
ing veins . . .
124 ON RACINE
that dreadful time which separates the spoken order from
the real order, is purified, nature's unity is restored.
Phedre thus proposes an identification of interiority with
guilt; in Phedre things are not hidden because they are
culpable ( that would be a prosaic view, Oenone's, for ex­
ample, to whom Phaedra's transgression is merely con­
tingent, linked to the life of Theseus ) ; things are culpable
from the very moment that they are hidden : the Racinian
being does not release himself, and that is his sickness :
nothing better attests the formal character29 of the trans­
gression than its explicit identification with a disease;30
Phaedra's objective guilt ( adultery, incest ) is actually an
artificial construction, intended to naturalize the suffering
of the secret, to change form into content usefully. This
inversion coincides with a more general movement, which
establishes the entire Racinian edifice: Evil is terrible to
the very degree that it is empty, man suffers from a form.
This is what Racine expresses so well apropos of Phaedra
when he says that for her, crime itself is a punishment.31
Phaedra's entire effort consists in fulfilling her transgres­
sion, that is, in absolving God.
Esther
The scandalous character in Esther is Aman. This traitor
does not belong to the great legal association that unites
the Jews, Esther, Mordecai, and Ahasuerus in the proud
awareness of their rights. In this new providential universe;
Aman comes out of tragedy, that tragedy formerly in­
habited by Taxiles, Pyrrhus, Nero, and Eriphyle. For ex­
ample, as is Nero by Agrippina, Aman is immobilized by
Mordecai's gaze, Mordecai obsesses him,1 darkens the en-
29 Claude} seems to have observed this formal character of Phae­

dra's disease when he says : "Phedre is an atmosphere all to it­

self."
ao Phedre, atteinte d'un mal qu'elle s'obstine a taire . . . ( l,i)
Phaedra, stricken by a disease she refuses to name
81 Preface, end of the first paragraph.
1 Son visage odieux m'afflige et me poursuit. ( II, I )
His hateful countenance offends and haunts me.
 RACINIAN MAN 1 25
tire universe in his eyes,2 robs the world of its savor.3 But
like Eriphyle, he has freely chosen his alienation; his
hatred of Mordecai has no race rivalry" for its motive, and
no rivalry of function ( as will be the case between Mathan
and Jehoiada ) : Aman hates him in an entirely pure fash­
ion. Like Eriphyle, too, he faces the Jewish bloc as or­
phan5 and intruder, doubly alien as an Amalekite and a
Macedonian. He has created himself, has succeeded by his
own efforts, and does not acknowledge the law of Blood;6
actually his betrayal is, once again, merely the inverted
name of his liberation. Indeed Aman wants only one thing:
to be recognized. In this court where glory always reveals
some economic interest,7 Aman has only one motivation :
2 - Vous voye:z: l'univers prosteme devant vous.
-L'univers? Tous les jours un homme . . . un vil esclave,
D'un front audacieux me dedaigne et me brave. (11,1 )
You see the universe at your feet.
The universe? Every day there is one man . . . a vile slave
whose impudent face scorns and challenges me.
• Et toute 1114 grandeur me devient insipide,
Tandis que le soleil eclaire ce perfide. ( II, 1 )
And all my greatness dims, as long as the sun shines on thi$
wretch.
• Mon dme, a 1114 grandeur toute entiere attachee,
Des interets du sang est faiblement touchee. (11,1 )
Concerned only with greatness, my soul disdains the interests
of blood.
8 Dans les 1114ins des Persans jeune enfant apporte . . . ( 11,1 )
Given .over to the Persians while still a boy . . .

8 J'ai su de mon destin corriger l'injustice. ( II, 1 )

I have been able to alter the injustice of my lot.
Oui, ce Dieu, je l'avoue, est un Dieu redoutable.
Mais veut-il que l'on garde une haine implacable? ( III,5 )
Yes, I admit this God is a powerful one, but would He have
me harbor only an implacable hatred?
" Je te donne d'Aman les biens et la puissance. ( III,7 )
I give you Aman's possessions and power.
1 26 ON RACINE
the voluptuousness of honor.s A single being denies it to
him : Mordecai. Mordecai is a motionless gaze that says no,
and between him and Aman exists the same relation as
between God and the creature to whom He refuses His
grace. It is this very frustration that binds Aman to Mor­
decai : like the heroes of the old profane tragedy, he refuses
to flee, to leave the tragedy.
The order · from which Aman is excluded is familiar,
existing in all Racine's tragedies, at various depths; it is
the order of legality. Legality is here openly assumed by
God, at least the God of the Old Testament. Thus it is
for the first time a completely triumphant legality, en­
dowed at last with an absolute good conscience: God is
no longer contested, the child seems definitively reconciled
with the Father, who gives him his name, his voice. Dog­
matism, that refusal to inherit which agonized so many
Racinian heroes, is exhausted; there is no longer, on the
contrary, anything but a glory, an intoxication of heritage,
a solemn consolidation of the Blood-of the Past, in a
word-which is both that of profane legality and of Jew­
ish legality, of the Covendnt.
This mythic trajectory-which here takes a course op­
posite to the tragic one, from dispersion to covenant, from
infidelity to fidelity-is followed by the Jewish people.
Esther takes up the Jews in that Racinian state par excel­
lence: ingratitude. They have broken the Covenant,9 and
for this have been punished from generation to genera­
tion,10 according to the vendetta! law; for them it is a
question of "returning to grace," a movement that has al-

8 L'honneur seul peut flatter un esprit g�nereux . . . ( 11,5 )

Honor alone can persuade a generous spirit . .
.

• Sous les Assyriens leur triste servitude

Devint le juste prix de leur ingratitude. ( III,4 )
Under the Assyrians, their wretched bondage became the
just reward of their ingratitude.
10
Nos peres ont peche, nos peres ne sont plus,
Et nous portons la peine de leurs crimes. (1, 5 )
Our fathers sinned; now they are dead, and we bear the
burden of their crimes.
 RACINIAN MAN 1 27
ways fascinated Racine. For legality-which appeared in
so many other tragedies as a Nature so asphyxiating that
to free oneself was to venture upon an anti-physis-legality
becomes Nature again : it is when they were without the
Law that the Jews constituted a monstrous people, singular
in relation to the entire universe, scandalous by their very
solitude.u Yet this God defined by the new Nature re­
mains an unjust and cruel God, so remote that the world
is a void before Him; but, precisely, such a God "legalizes"
aggression, sanctions wadare, and renders destruction inno­
cent; in short, He makes it possible to live reconciled and
dispense with sacrifice at the same time.
Esther is the path of this renewal. She not only restores
the creature to his God, but also Power to the temporarily
dispossessed Father, Ahasuerus to Mordecai. Ahasuerus is
only a fraction of the divine power: doubtless, like all
Racinian authority, he is both invisible and dazzling,12
precipitating the creature into a crisis of identity: before

u Oui, ce sont, cher ami, des monstres furieux. (111, 3 )

Yes, dear friend, they are savage monsters.

Il nous croit en horreur a toute la nature. ( I, 3 )

He believes all nature detests us.

Du reste des humains, ils semblent divises .

Et detestes partout, detestent tous les hommes. ( 11,1 )
They seem divided from the rest of the human race . • •

and hated everywhere, hate all men.

11 Au fond de leur palais leur majeste terrible
Affecte a leurs sujets de se rendre invisible. ( 1 , 3 )
Their dread majesty elects to remain deep within their palace,
invisible to their subjects.

Sur ce trdne sacre, qu'environne la foudre,

J'ai CTU VOUS VOir tout pret a me reduire en poudre. ( 11,7 )
On that sacred throne, enveloped in thunderbolts, I saw you
ready to reduce me to dust.

Des eclairs de ses yeux l'reil etait ebloui. ( 11,8 )

Dazzled by the light flashing from his eyes.
1 28 ON RACINE
him, Esther is without origin, obliged to define herself by
the primordial tragic question who am 1? ( or at least here,
for Esther is a false tragedy, who is she? 13 But this God
is also a creature. He seeks His complement;14 a solar be­
ing, He finds in Esther shade, the dim luster of a face with­
out embellishment, a brilliance tempered by tears.15 The
creator is Mordecai; he is for Esther the total Father,16
she is his absolute propertyP It is Mordecai himself who
has dedicated her as virgin-victim to the God-bridegroom;
he manipulates her actions as he would those of an autom­
aton.18 He is: his scandalous station at the palace gates
is the very sign of the permanence of his being; he is the
true essence, the link, the God of the Past, the immobility
before which everything is either object or instrumen t;
like Jehoiada, he concentrates within himself both sacred
13 Le Roi, jusqu'a ce jour, ignore qui je suis. (I, l )
The King, to this day, knows not who I am.

AUez, oset au Roi declarer qui vous etes. (I, 3 )

Go now, dare to declare to the King who you are.
u Tout respire en Esther l'innocence et let paix.
Du chagrin le plus noir elle ecarte les ombres,
Et fait des jours sereins de mes jours les plus sombres. ( 11,7 )
Everything in Esther breathes innocence and peace. She dis­
pels the shadows of black disappointment, and makes my
darkest days into days of peace.
15 Et moi, pour toute brigue et pour tout artifice,
De mes larmes au Ciel j'offrais le sacrifice. ( 1,1 )
All the cunning and artifice I had were the tears whose
sacrifice I offered to Heaven .
18
. Me tint lieu, chere Elise, et de pere et de mere. ( I,1 )
. meant, dear Eliza, both father and mother to me .
11
. Votre vie, Esther, est-elle a vous? ( I, 3 )
But is even your life, Esther, your own?
18
Celui par qui le Ciel regie met destinee
Sur ce secret encor tient met langue enchantee. ( 1,1 )
He by whom Heaven rules my fate seals my lips on this
secret as well.
 RACINIAN MAN 1 29
power and temporal ingenuity; the capricious, gracious,
dazzling god ( Ahasuerus ) is himself only an object in the
hands of this ashen, static figure, a veritable specter of
inertia19 to which the Racinian psyche here submits and
dedicates itself, as Esther to her creator.
The price of the world reconciled, immobility re-estab­
lished, the Past renewed, infidelity abolished, is subjection
to the Father-Priest and Leader of peoples. Esther is not
only a circumstantial entertainment for children; it is ac­
tually a promotion of childhood, the triumphant identi­
fication of irresponsibility and happiness, the election of
a delicious passivity savored by a whole chorus of virgin­
victims, whose chants, both praise and plaint, form a kind
of sensual milieu of Racinian happiness.
Athalie
As in Racine's first tragedy, here are two enemy brothers,
Judah and Israel; these two brothers have but one Father,
God or his unitary kings, David, Solomon. One of the
brothers is the good son, he acknowledges the Father's
omnipotence and keeps his law; the other is the bad son,
he rebels and goes over to false fathers. The former is a
captive in the besieged Temple; the latter is powerful. The
two brothers fight to the death, one in the name of the
Father, the other against the Father. Naturally, fidelity to
the Father is chiefly memory, the choice of the Past, and
the fratricidal coqflict is given from the first lines of the
tragedy as a catastrophic break in time :1 to the ceremonial
19 Lui, {ierement assis, et la tete immobile . . .
Du palais cependant il assiege la porte . . .
Je l'ai trouve couvert d'une affreuse poussiere,
Revetu de lambeaux, tout pale. Mais son mil
Conservait sous la cendre encor le meme orgueil. ( II, I)
Proudly sitting there, head motionless . . . besieging the
palace gate . . . I have seen him there in the dust, clad in
rags, his face pale : but his eyes beneath the ashes still kept
that same pride.
1 Que les temps sont changes! . . .
L'audace d'une femme . . .
En des fours tenebreux a change ces beaux fours. ( I, I )
How the times have changed! . . A woman's temerity .
.

has turned those happy days into days of darkness.

1 30 ON RACINE
time-that is, the time constituted by return and repeti­
tion,2 the stationary time of the legal Father-is opposed
a contradictory time, since it is actually the mockery of
time, forgetfulness-in other words, ingratitude.8 Thus is
posited, in this final tragedy, directly and so to speak on
the very scale of the myth, the central figure of the entire
Racinian universe : schism.
The origin of the schism is obviously a breaking of the
Covenant that unites God and His people, the Father and
the son; the stake of the tragic conflict, as in Esther, is the
restoration of this collective contract.4 We know that the
break with legality is the movement which undermines the
Racinian psyche. Schism is an amplified, exposed break.
Here, it is no longer an individual who attempts to sepa­
rate himself from the Blood ( Pyrrhus or Nero ) , it is the
Blood itself that divides, engenders two antagonistic
strains, two rival legalities, one of which imitates the other.
In short, the schismatic lineage itself possesses a blood, a
transtemporal being; it has its internal vendetta,5 and that
is its horror: it resembles the legitimate lineage in every
point. It is no longer a question here of a man's solitary
effort to break the terrible vendetta} law; it is a question
of the conflict of two distinct but symmetrical vendettas,
of two homologous Bloods that issued from the same seed.
In its profane state, the Racinian division pits je against

2 Je viens, selon l'usctge ctntique et solennel . . . (I,1 )

I come, according to the ancient and solemn custom . . •

8 Le reste pour son Dieu rnontre un oubli fatctl . . . (I,1 )

The others betray a fatal forgetfulness of their God .
' Roi, pretres, peuple, allons, pleins de reconnaissance,
De Jacob ctVec Dieu confirrner l'alliance. (V,7 )
King, priests, people, come with grateful hearts to confirm
the covenant of Jacob with God.
11 Athaliah :
Oui, rna juste fureur, et j'en fais vanite,
A venge rnes parents sur rna posterite. (11,7 )
Yes, my righteous rage-and of this I am proud-has avenged
my parents upon my posterity.
 RACINIAN MAN 1 31
on, freedom against its environment, respiration against
asphyxiation. In its religious state, schism sets two finite
objects in opposition; it brings face to face doubles (and
no longer one against all) : two divinities ( Yahweh and
Baal ) , two priests ( Mathan and Jehoiada ) ,6 two kings
(Athaliah and Joash ) , two fathers (Athaliah and Je­
hoiada ) ,7 and two temples. 8 The conflict here no longer
has the form of an encirclement, but of a confrontation.
Until Phedre, it was either poison or the strangler's cord
that ruled the tragedy. But the curtain Jehoiada draws to
reveal his Levite soldiers is a partition that both unites and
separates two worlds, both armed : for the first time, the
Racinian stage is formally accessible to weapons. In no
other tragedy by Racine does there exist a duel as naked
as that which joins Athaliah to J ehoiada ( that is, to God ) ,
the son to the Father; this duel i s n o longer indiscrimi­
nately an embrace and a caress, it is a battle, and its lan­
guage is, finally, blasphemy.9
The stake of the schism is obviously a being who is
descended equally from both lineages and whose posses­
sion they both dispute. Joash is constituted both by the
identification of the two Bloods and by their division : this
paradox comprises the very being of the schism. In Joash
8 Qu'est·il besoin, Nahal, qu'a tes yeux je rappeUe
De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle . . . ( III, 3 )
What need is there, Nahal, for me to remind you of the
famous dispute between Jehoiada and myself?
7
Quel pere
Je quitteraisl Et pour .
-He bien?
-Pour quelle mere {11,7)
What a father I should be leaving! and for . . •

For?
For what a mother!
8 Enfin, au dieu nouveau qu'elle avait introduit,

Par les mains d'Athalie un temple fut construit. ( III, 3 )

Then, a temple was built by Athaliah's hands to the new god
she had introduced.
8 • Dieu des Juifs, tu l'emportes/ (V,6 )
• •

God of the Jews, you have wont

1 .,J -7 O N RACINE

the two Bloods are in equal proportion, and Jehosheba

rightly wonders in anguish which will triumph, the pater­
nal or the maternal strain;10 it is a question, of course, of
an archetypal filiation : once Joash is restored to his father,
Ahaziah, the paternal lineage is identified with the male
order (David, Jehoshaphat, Jehoram ) , the maternal line­
age with the female order (Jezebel, Athaliah ) , so that this
final Racinian conflict is a mythic conflict of the sexes. The
problem, therefore, is whether the child of the schism
can put an end to the schism; if what is constituted by
division can restore the original unity; if, as in life, two
contraries can fructify; if, in a word, the paradox is viable.
Racine manifests Joash's problematical nature by con­
stantly subjecting him to the test of identity11 (which we
know to be the tragic test par excellence ) : appearing out
of darkness and death,12 who is Joash? The question, de­
spite the apparent denouement of the tragedy, is by nature
without an answer ( tragedy consists precisely in choosing
questions without an outcome, so as to nourish in a sure
way the appetite for failure ) . Doubtless Joash's enthrone­
ment and the murder of his mother seem to make him
lO Q ur sar't . . .
·

Si Dieu, le separant d'une odieuse race,

En faveur de David voudra lui faire grclce? ( 1,2 )
\Vho knows if God, separating him from a hated race, will
choose to spare him in David's behalf?
u
. . . Je suis, dit-on, un orphelin . . _

Et qui de mes parents n'eus jamais connaissance. (11,7 )

I am, it is said, an orphan . . . who has never known his
parents.
12 Une profonde nuit enveloppe sa race . . . ( 111,4 )
The darkest night surrounds his descent . . .

Tout Juda, comme vous, plaignant la destinee,

Avec ses freres morts le crut enveloppe. ( IV, 3 )
All Judah, even as you, bemoaning fate, believed him lost
with his dead brothers .

. . . A ['aspect de ce roi rachete du tombeaul (V, l )

At the appearance of this king, restored from the grave!
 RACINIAN MAN 1 33
definitively the son of the Father, that is, the son recon­
ciled with the Father. But Jehoiada's prophecy transforms
the false providential tragedy into a true tragedy : the
Father's triumph will be only the moment of an eternal
ambiguity, the term of an inexpiable division. Recovered
by the Mother at the very moment he kills her,13 Joash
will return to the fundamental fratricidal condition : he
will kill his brother Zacharias; and the antiphonal verses
the Chorus devotes to him ( 111,8 ) finally consecrate him
in his tum as a figure of division.
In Racine, as we know, there is a contradiction between
his ethic and his aesthetic. Good, which he chooses, is a
conformist abstraction in his work; his apparently positive
characters are boring, nothing but great empty masks.
Evil, which he condemns, is alive; beneath the apparent
heinousness, nuances, temptations, regrets are stirring, as
if the "black" hero contained the very nucleus of Racinian
subjectivity. This aesthetic contrast actually masks a meta­
physical contradiction, one that is familiar to us : God is
empty, and yet it is God that one must obey. On Jeho­
iada's side, that is, the side of triumphant legality, the
situation is somber, monotonous : a God of battles, whose
pardon is given only evasively; a fanatic and treacherous
priest,14 who openly incites to murder;1�> a vindictive child
intelligent only in proportion to his native cruelty; par­
tisans consummate in the art of bad faith, virgins when
sympathy is wanted, soldiers when destruction is in order.
It is as if the father were omnipotent only by an absolutely
arbitrary decision of the son.
On the side of subversion, the scene is quite different,
there is a structure of Evil. For example, where Jehoiada
18
Voici ce qu' en mourant lui souhaite sa mere . . . (V,6)
This is what his dying mother wishes him . . .
" Racine justified Jehoiada's deception by referring to the ruses
of Jesus and Saint Lawrence, which did not keep Voltaire from
being outraged.
111 Dans l'infidele sang baignez-vous sans horreur;
Frappez et Tyriens, et meme Israelites. ( IV, 3 )
Do not shrink from bathing in infidel blood; strike Tyrians
and even Israelites alike.
1 34 ON RACINE
is indefinite, a mere petitio principii, Mathan has a his­
tory, is defined by the relation of aggression that unites
him to Cod : an apostate priest,16 a rival ousted by the
regular officiant, his hatred of the Jewish Cod is above all
a regret for having broken the Law, seceded, betrayed the
Father.17 Like all Racine's excluded figures, his status is
triple : he finds only a void outside the legality that has
rejected him;18 it is his hatred that sustains his life; Evil
attracts him in its pure, cataclysmic state.19
Athaliah too is a personal enemy of the Jewish Cod, she
lives with Him in a relation of alienation. She too is an
excluded figure: confronting the closed world of legality,
a racist world if there ever was one, she is the Outsider.20

18 Mathan, de nos autels infame deserteur . . . ( 1,1 )

Mathan, infamous deserter of our altars . . .

17
. . . et son impiete
Voudrait aneantir le Dieu qu'il a quitte. ( 1,1 )
And his impiety would annihilate the God he has aban­
doned.

u Ami, peux·tu penser que d'un zele frivole

Je me laisse aveugler par une vaine idole,
Par un fragile bois que, malgre mon secours,
Les vers sur son autel consument tous les jours? ( Ill, 3 )
Friend, can you suppose that out of some trivial zeal I would
allow myelf to be deceived by a foolish idol, by a piece of
wood that for all my care is daily devoured by the worms
upon its altar?

18 Heureux si, sur son temple aclzevant ma vengeance,

Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d'impuissance,
Et parmi le debris, le ravage at les morts,
A force d'attentats perdre tous mes remordsl ( III, 3 )
Happy if, wreaking my vengeance upon his temple, I can at
last prove his hatred impotent, and among wreckage, ruin,
and the dead, by violence quell my remorse!

20 • • une impie etrangere

•

Du sceptre de David usurpe tous les droits. (1,1 )

. . . an infidel alien to David's scepter usurps every privi­
lege.
 RACINIAN MAN 1 35
But her subversive power goes much further than Mathan's
maniacal wickedness. She has a true power over Nature:
she can change the name of things,21 can turn herself from
Queen into King,22 that is, compete with the sex of the
adverse lineage. She is a midwife, exploring forbidden
secrets; not only does she try to fathom the original ob­
scurity of the child, to "deliver" Joash from Eliakim, Being
from Appearance, but she even profanes the Temple,
which means quite precisely that she penetrates the secret
of which the Temple is the significant form.23 In short,
she concentrates in herself all the functions of an anti­
physis, but thereby opens herself to the world : she loves
wealth, she can govern, impose peace, if necessary be gener­
ous, permit enemy gods to coexist. In short, she has the
sense of imperium;24 her political breadth of vision con­
trasts with the fanaticism of the priest party, of which
the little King is entirely the product and the instrument.

. . . une impie etrang�re

Assise, helasl au tr6ne de tes rois . . ( II,9 )
.

. . . An infidel alien seated, woe! upon the throne of your

kings . ..

111 L'audace d'une femme . . .

En des jours tenebreux a change ces beaux jours. (1,1 )
A woman's temerity . . . has turned those happy days into
days of darkness.

• . . . Dans un des parvis, aux hommes reserve

Cette femme superbe entre, le front leve . . ( 11,2 )
.

Into one of the courts reserved for men, this arrogant woman
made her way, head high . . .

. . . cette reine eclairee, intrepide,

J!;levee au-dessus de son sexe timide . . (III, 3 )
.

. . . that enlightened, fearless queen, raised above her timid

sex . . .
• The acts of opening and closing the Temple are the very

respiration of the action, like the opening and closing of the

Seraglio in Bajazet.

24 ll, 5.
1 36 ON RACINE
Further, she experiences anxiety,25 that is, good faith;
and freedom of being as well : she can change,26 turn back
into a woman under the influence of Eros (for this is the
link that unites her to J oash : a charm, a fascination of
love) .27 She sees in fidelity a death, she feels ready to
break the vendetta} law at last; in the tragedy, it is Athaliah
who approaches the contra-tragic solution. By proposing
to take in the child (exactly as Pyrrhus sought to adopt
Astyanax ) , she recommends a free fusion of the two
Bloods, the just restoration of a universe torn by schism.
Out of the two rival legalities, she tries to make a single,
new legality, to transform infanticide into adoption, to sub­
stitute for the natural filiality, source of crimes, a chosen
filiality, pledge of reconciliation.
We know that Jehoiada is rejection itself. Confronting
Athaliah's desire to open, he fiercely returns to the vendet­
ta} circle, converts the murder of the child into the murder
of the Mother, submits unconditionally to symmetry,
prophesies the infinite generation of crimes, and forces
Athaliah herself to return to the law of Blood; not only,
by his rejection, does God drive her back into ancestral
evil, but, in the features of her mother, Jezebel, punishes
her by the most horrible of annihilations, the dispersion

115 Cette paix que je cherche et qui me fuit toujours. (11, 3 )

This peace that I seek and that ever eludes me.

1111 Ami, depuis deux jours je ne la connais plus . . . ( III, 3 )

Friend, these last two days, I no longer recognize her .

fl7 La douceur de sa voix, son enfance, sa grace,

Font insensiblement a mon inimitie
Succeder . . ( II, 7 )
.

The sweetness of his voice, his very childishness, his grace,

gradually persuade my enmity to give way to . . .

Soit qu'elle eut meme en lui vu je ne sais quel charme . . .

( III, 3 )
O r because she has discovered some mysterious charm in
him . . .
 RACINIAN MAN 1 37
of her bones, which are thrown to the dogs.28 Such is the
price one must pay to give, according to the last-and
how ironic!-words of the Racinian theatre : to "the or­
phan a father."
a� Dans son sang inhumain les chiens desalteres,
Et de son corps hideux les membres dechires . ( 1,1 )
. .

So that the dogs drank her inhuman blood, and the limbs of
her hideous body were torn asunder . . .

Mais je n'ai plus trouve qu'un horrible melange

D'os et de chairs meurtris et traines dans la fange,
Des lambeaux pleins de sang et des membres affreux
Que des chiens devorants se disputaient entre eux. ( 11, 5 )
But all I found was a horrible jumble o f bones and outraged
flesh lying in the mud, blood-soaked skin and hideous limbs
the starving dogs fought over among themselves.
I I. RACINE S P O K E N
 . IT APPEARS that today's public consumes Racine in
a purely anthological fashion. In Phedre it is the character
of Phaedra one comes to see, and even more than Phaedra,
the actress herself: how will she "do" it? Some critics of
our stage actually date their careers by the Phaedras they
have seen. The text itself is received as an ensemble of
raw materials, from which pleasure takes its choice: musi­
cal lines, famous tirades stand out against a background
of obscurity and boredom : it is for this actress, these lines,
these tirades that we go to the theatre; the rest we put up
With, in the name of culture, in the name of the past, in
the name of a poetic thrill patiently waited for because
it has been localized by centuries of the Racinian myth.1
The public (though I dare not say "the popular" ) Racine
is this mixture of boredom and diversion, that is, essen­
tially a discontinuous spectacle.

1 The famous tirades:

La fille de Minos et de Pasiplute. [The daughter of Minos
and of Pasiphae.].
Si je la haissais, je ne la fuirais pas. [If I hated her, I would
not flee her.]
Soleil, je te viens voir pour la derniere fois. [Sun, I come to·
look upon you for the last time.]
Ariane, rna smur . . [Ariadne, my sister . . . ]
.

C'est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attachee. [It is the goddess

Venus clinging fast to her prey.]
Presente je vous fuis, absente je vous trouve. [I flee your
presence; in your absence I find you.]
Charmant, jeune, tra1nant tous les cmurs apres soi. [Charm­
ing, young, trailing every heart after him.]
Theramenes' narrative, etc.
141
 1 42 ON RACINE
Now Racinian delivery, as it is commonly practiced
today, from the Comedie-Fran�aise to the Theatre Na­
tional Populaire, both flatters and embarrasses this taste
of the public's : flatters because it offers a discontinuous
meaning, quite in accord with that anthological prefer­
ence I have just mentioned; and embarrasses because this
parceled-out, anthological meaning is recited, that is, sus­
tained by an artificial voice production. From all appear­
ances, Racinian delivery is the bastard result of a false
conflict between two contrary and yet illusory tyrannies :
clarity of detail, and musicality of ensemble, psychological
discontinuity and melodic continuity. Whence the evident
embarrassment of actors and public confronting a theatre
they attempt to treat both as psychological drama and as
oratorio.
As for the anthological delivery of the Racinian text, we
will recall that this is a traditional element of the bour­
geois aesthetic: bourgeois art is an art of detail. Based on
a quantitative representation of the universe, it believes
that the truth of an ensemble can be only the sum of the
individual truths that constitute it, that the general mean­
ing of a line, for example, is nothing but the pure and
simple addition of the expressive words that compose it.
As a result of this, an emphatic significance is attributed
to the greatest possible quantity of details : the bourgeois
actor ceaselessly intervenes in the flow of the language,
"brings out" a word, suspends an effect, constantly sig­
nifies that what he is saying now is important, has a
certain hidden meaning. This is what is called speaking
a text.
This pointillist art rests on a general illusion : not only
does the actor believe that it is his job to connect a psy­
chology and linguistics, according to the ineradicable
prejudice that regards words as translating thought, but
he also imagines both this psychology and this linguistics
to be composed of discontinuous elements that corre­
spond to each other before corresponding within them­
selves. Each word becomes for him a precise task ( and
what trouble he takes with it ) , so that he tries to manifest
at any price an analogy between the musical substance
and the psychological concept. This analogy, which is
 RACINE SPOKEN 14 3
false, can be expressed only by one rather poor means :
by emphasizing certain words. But, of course, the em­
phasis is then no longer musical, it is purely intellective :
what is stressed is a meaning; the actor speaks his Racine
somewhat the way a writer underlines or italicizes certain
words of his text, a didactic but not an aesthetic method.
This parceling out of meanings had as its goal the
facilitation of the listener's intellectual labor: the actor
undertakes to do his thinking for him. Between the bour­
geois tragic actor and his public there is a singular relation
of authority, which may be susceptible of a psychoanalytic
definition : the public is the child, the actor a mother
substitute, preparing the food, offering fare already pre­
digested, which the public consumes quite passively. This
is a general relation that we encounter in many other arts
besides the theatre. There is, for example, in musical
performance the rubato, which is also an emphatic ex­
pressivity of detail, the substitution of the particular
meaning for the general meaning, of the interpreter for
the consumer. We can say that Racinian diction is for the
most part tyrannized by a preoccupation with the rubato.
And just as the rubato, by its indiscretion, destroys the
natural meaning of a musical text, similarly in Racinian
delivery the excessive significance of the detail destroys
the natural significance of the whole. At its limit, this
predigested Racine becomes unintelligible, for the ac­
cumulation of excessively clear details produces an obscure
ensemble: in art, too, there is a dialectical law that the
whole is not merely the sum of its parts.
The emphasis on detail has an even more unfortunate
consequence : it distorts the communication of the actors
among themselves. Preoccupied by the interpretation of
his text detail by detail, the actor no longer addresses
anyone, except some tyrannical god of Meaning. Though
the actors look at each other, they do not speak to each
other; we do not know to whom Phaedra and Hippolytus
speak their passions. But what is more serious, they do not
even speak them for themselves; in general, the play they
offer us is frankly neither a drama ( in which the characters
define themselves by a true interpellation ) nor a lyric
poem (in which the voice dreamily expresses a pro-
1 44 ON RACINE
fundity ) . It sounds as if the actor were struggling not
with himself or with other men but with a kind of obscure
language, and as if his only task were to make it somewhat
intelligible. Racinian interpretation has not yet acceded
to an adult status : it is a desperate exercise of translation,
not the manifestation of human relationships.
In the case of Racine, this hypertrophy of detailed sig­
nificance is extremely embarrassing for the actor; for if he
submits to the Racinian myth, he must sacrifice both to
clarity of detail and to musicality of the ensemble, must
pulverize the text into a host of meaningful effects and
still link them together in a general melody. We know
how sacrosanct the notion of a Racinian music is : we
must sympathize with the actor tyrannized by this truly
ineffable phantom which obliges him nonetheless to ob­
serve the lines, to sing the vowels, to sound out the final
clusters of consonants-in short, to orchestrate his speech
as if it were a score.
Here again, vice derives from an excess of scruple. Clas­
sical art is musical; but responsibility for the music is as­
sumed by a perfectly defined technique: the alexandrine.
The classical alexandrine openly exploits all the music of
the language, and it is an indiscretion analogous to that
of the rubato to add to it a secret music proceeding from
the actor and not from the "scientific" donnees of the
verse. It is because the alexandrine is defined technically
as a musical function that there is no need to speak it
musically; it does not invite the actor to be musical, on the
contrary it relieves him of the responsibility of being so.
We may say at the limit that the alexandrine excuses the
actor from having talent. As in any codified theatre, rules
are openly substituted for subjectivity, technique for ex­
pression. There are many relations between the rigor of
the classical rules and the imperative syntax of gestural
and vestimentary symbols in the Oriental theatre : both
are there to exhaust the actor, to substitute his knowledge
for his inspiration.2 Can we conceive of a Chinese actor
2 The alexandrine is obviously a "distancing" technique, in

other words a deliberate separation of the signifier and the thing

signified. By what seems to me a real misconception, our actors
continually try to reduce this distance, and to make the alexan-
 RACINE SPOKEN 1 45
who would indiscreetly combine respect for an ancestral
symbolism and a personal expressivity borrowed from our
naturalism? In all those arts in which technique systemati­
cally replaces expression, the actor's talent can only be the
perfect knowledge of this technique and the consciousness
of its end ( in the two senses of limit and goal ) . A Ra­
cinian actor who knows what the alexandrine is does not
have to sing it : the alexandrine sings by itself if it is left
free, free to manifest its essence as alexandrine.

These problems are very important because, in a lan­

guage as "distant" as that of classical tragedy, the choice
of delivery vastly predominates over the choice of inter­
pretation. One might say that there is nothing left to
interpret in Racine once one has decided on the way of
"speaking" him; or more exactly : a "distant" diction
would naturally involve a tragic interpretation. This is, for
my part, the lesson I have learned from the Theatre Na­
tional Populaire production of Phedre,3 in which one
may say roughly that the two styles meet. Thus to speak
of the interpretation of Maria Casares ( Phaedra ) and that
of Alain Cuny (Theseus ) is merely to set naturalistic de­
livery in opposition to tragic delivery.
Maria Casares risked a great deal and lost a great deal,
in the T.N.P. Phedre. But what must be said first is that
it is not at all certain that Phaedra is a "good role"; or,
rather, it is a role whose coherence is uncertain, it is a
divided role, both psychological ( in the manner of the
Racinian "amoureuses," Hermione or Roxanne ) and tragic
(by "tragic role" I mean a role in which communication
with the gods is determinant) : Phaedra is sometimes
guilty (which refers to the tragedy proper ) and sometimes
jealous (which refers to a mundane psychology ) . This mix­
ture testifies to the ambiguous character of Racine's late
plays, in which the tragic element ceaselessly and dis­
cordantly clashes with the psychological element, as if

drine into a natural language, either by making it prosaic or,

conversely, by making it musical. But the truth of the alexan·
drine is neither to destroy nor to purify itself: it is in its distance.
8 Palais de Chaillot, 1958, directed by Jean Vilar.
1 46 ON RACINE
Racine had never been able to choose between the pure
tragedy that he never wrote, but that left a tormented trace
of in the majority of his plays, and the bourgeois drama that
he instituted for subsequent ages, of which Andromaque
and Iphigenie are consummate examples.
vVhat is certain is that in the sequence of the Racinian
theatre, the importance of God (or of the gods ) con­
stantly increases : the Racinian God exists more and more
powerfully because he is more and more hated. Phaedra
is, in a sense, one of the very last witnesses to this hatred,
and it is in this that she communicates with the gods
who oppress and destroy her (Venus ) ; but at the same
time she is still ( in relation to Andromache ) and already
( in relation to all the heroines of the bourgeois theatre )
a jealous and plotting amoureuse. On the one hand, her
disaster testifies to Fate; she loves without freedom, as in
the ancient tragedy. But on the other hand, responsibility
for this misfortune is in some way assumed by an activity
( and not only by a conscience ) : Phaedra fabricates her
destiny, she does something, under pressure from Oenone,
who, like every confident, represents the antitragic spirit.
Moreover, we find the same ambiguity, the same aesthetic
impurity on another level : Phedre is a tragedy of secrecy,
but also a love story. TI1is collapse of tragedy was in­
evitable from the moment Racine made Hippolytus a
lover, contrary to the Greek story.
Thus it is extremely difficult to act Phaedra because the
character is divided, not psychologically but aesthetically.
Maria Casares acted one of the elements thoroughly, the
psychological element, and it was here, I believe, that she
was in error; her interpretation was essentially rationalistic
in that she acted Phaedra's passion as a disease, not as a
destiny; there was obviously no longer any communication
with the gods in her role. But at the same time-and this
is what was regarded by our highbrow critics as a regretta­
ble shortcoming-this love-as-disease had no substances,
passion no longer being given to it except as the strict
awareness of its own strangeness : we never saw the rela­
tion that unites Phaedra to Hippolytus; we saw Phaedra
in love, but not in love with Hippolytus, because Maria
Casares' Phaedra never did anything but conceive herself.
 RACINE SPOKEN 147
In a word, the unfortunate paradox of this interpretation
was to make Phaedra into what we might call a hystericctl
consciousness, which was likely to displease everyone and
did not fail to do so: for hysteria alienated the partisans
of a tragic (and not a pathological ) distance between
Phaedra and her passion-Maria Casares playing Phaedra
as if she were personally involved; while her reflexive char­
acter profoundly disappointed the champions of a sub­
stantial and immediate passion.
As a total anarchy, Vilar's production was certainly un­
fair to Maria Casares, for if there is one role the director
must take in hand, it is the role of Phaedra, by reason of
the aesthetic division I just referred to. The role of
Theseus, on the contrary, contains no natural obstacle,
and it is in the "status" of the role to derive every ad­
vantage from an invisible direction. Theseus is, in effect,
he who appears; his essence is to appear, since his doing so
suffices to modify the hnman relations. Simplicity is a
constitutive element of the role of Theseus, as division
is a constitutive element of the role of Phaedra. This did
not keep Cuny's success from being a personal one: he
passed the decisive test of the Racinian theatre, which is
delivery or "diction." This success resulted from two
demystifications: Cuny did not parcel out the meaning, and
did not sing the alexandrine; his diction was defined by a
pure and simple dasein of speech.
In classical tragedy, speech is defined by a great dis­
proportion between what is signified and the means of
signifying. A tirade, for example, exists semantically by
only three or four capital articulations, as if the tragic
language were chiefly concerned with manifesting changes
of attitudes rathet than those attitudes themselves. Cuny
seemed to have understood that tragic discourse proceeds
in great, motionless blocks, stages;4 he did not "bring out"
the words, the inflections, the accents; he did not inter­
vene in his own discourse except to manifest its major
' The 'explication de texte" as it is practiced in our educational
system, consists precisely in defining these stages, that is, extract­
ing from a great number of signifying elements the single thing
signified that is hidden there.
1 48 ON RACINE
changes clearly. In short, his diction was massive ( that is,
it proceeded in and by masses ) .
Such massiveness produces two results. First, the Ra­
cinian discourse becomes at last fully intelligible, the
obscurities of the language, the syntactical contortions im­
posed by the metric vanish under the massive proportion
of the intentions. And then, above all, the psychology is
"distanced" : Theseus is not the cuckolded husband of
an adulteress ( terms which constantly threaten every
interpretation of the Racinian theatre) ; he is essentially a
tragic function, he for whom the secret exists, by whom it
is revealed, the fixed (although, and especially, absent)
center of a general tropism of culpability. Cuny's Theseus
was truly in relation with the gods, truly a chthonian being
who had been among the dead, a kind of enormous,
pensive animal who turned on the "psychology" of his
family ( those passions, those lies, those regrets, those
cries ) a gaze that had seen the underside of the earth.
And, thereby, the tragedy was instituted at last: to per­
form tragedy, it is necessary and sufficient to act as if the
gods existed, as if one had seen them, as if they had
spoken : but then what a distance from oneself to what
one says!
Of all these problems, all these difficulties, even all
these impossibilities, Jean Vilar had visibly washed his
hands. It was as if he had decided on a policy of pes­
simism : Racine isn't theatre, and I'll prove it. But for all
his laisser-faire, Vilar could not be unaware that the
Phedre performed without him would not be a negative
Phedre, the proof of an impossibility, but on the con­
trary a Phedre laden with all the prejudices of the past.
Vilar's punishment is not the strictures of our critics,
which must have confirmed him in his long-standing rejec­
tion of Racine, but the passivity of his public, which ap­
plauded an unsigned production. Pontius Pilate is not a
gentleman who says neither yes nor no, he is a gentleman
who says yes; while washing his hands, Vilar has said yes
to the whole myth of Racine. In this irresponsible produc­
tion, we recognize all the good old allegorical attributes :
the dark curtains, the anonymous chair, the veils, the
pleated gowns, the cothurns of an antiquity updated as
 RACINE SPOKEN 149
always by our Parisian haute couture; the false postures,
the raised arms, the fierce glances of Tragedy. For there
exists a stock Racinian folklore, as there exists a stock old­
soldier comedy; and it is to it that each actor, if he is left
to himself, will naturally tum for inspiration : Vilar's di­
rection is nothing more than a permission granted to do
so.
Yet it is just the myth of Racine that is the enemy. Its
history has not yet been written; we know only that it
dates from Voltaire; we may suppose that it is historically
a bourgeois myth, and we see today what critics and what
publics continue to sanction it. Racine is certainly a very
impure, even baroque author, one might say, in whom
elements of genuine tragedy mingle discordantly with the
already vigorous germs of the future bourgeois theatre; his
work is sharply divided, aesthetically unreconciled; far
from being the radiant summit of an art, it is the very
type of a transitional oouvre, in which death and life strug­
gle against one another. Naturally, the myth of Racine is
essentially a security operation : it seeks to domesticate
Racine, to strip him of his tragic elements, to identify
him with ourselves, to locate ourselves with him in the
noble salon of classic art, but en fctmille; it seeks to give
the themes of the bourgeois theatre an eternal status, to
transfer to the credit of the psychological theatre the great­
ness of the tragic theatre, which at its origin, we must not
forget, was a purely civic theatre: in the myth of Racine,
eternity replaces the City.
I do not know if it is possible to act Racine today. Per­
haps, on stage, this theatre is three-fourths dead. But if
one tries, one must do so seriously, one must go all the
way. The first askesis can only be to sweep away the
myth of Racine and all its allegorical cortege ( simplicity,
poetry, music, passion, etc. ) ; the second is to renounce
looking for ourselves in this theatre: what we find of
ourselves there is not the best part, either of Racine or of
ourselves. As with the ancient theatre, Racine's theatre
concerns us much more, and much more valuably, by
its strangeness than by its familiarity : its relation to us is
its remoteness. If we want to keep Racine, we must keep
him at a distance.
I I I. H I S T O RY
O R LITERAT U R E ?
 THERE USED TO BE a program on the French Broad­
casting System that was both naive and touching: touch·
ing because it tried to suggest to the public that there is
not only a history of music, but that there are also rela·
tions between history and music; naive because there rela­
tions seemed to be exhausted by a simple date. We
were told, " 1 789-Convocation of the Estates-General;
Necker recalled; Galuppi's Concerto Grosso no. 4 in C
major" without its ever being made clear if the author of
the program wanted to persuade us that there exists an
analogical relation between Necker's recall and Ga­
Iuppi's concerto, or to suggest that both belong to the
same causal entity, or on the contrary to alert us to a
piquant coexistence, as if it were necessary to make us
measure all the dissimilarity between a concerto and a
revolution; unless, of course, it was a matter of perfidiously
demonstrating, in the guise of history, the disorder of
aesthetic productions, the vanity of a total history, by
letting the absurdity of such a method speak for itself,
setting in apposition the naval defeat of La Bogue and
the sonatas of Corelli, the election of President Doumer
and Honegger's Cris du Monde.
So much for this program; in its naivete it merely raised
for the radio public that old problem of the relation be·
tween history and the work of art, .which has been actively
argued, with various fortunes and refinements, ever since
there has been a philosophy of time, that is, since the last
century. Here are two continents : on one side, the world,
its swarm of facts-political, social, economic, ideological;
1 53
1 54 ON RACINE
on the other, the work-apparently solitary, always am­
biguous, simultaneously susceptible of several meanings.
How splendid, of course, if these two continents had com­
plementary shapes, so that although far apart on the map,
they could, by an ideal translation, be fitted together,
rather the way Wegener pasted Africa and America into
one piece. Unfortunately, this is only a dream : the fonns
resist, or worse still, they do not change at the same rate.
In fact, up till now, solutions to this problem seem to
have been proposed only in the light of certain constituted
philosophies, those of Hegel, Taine, Marx. Outside of the
systems, we find a thousand comparisons, of admirable
scholarship and ingenuity but, evidently by a final modesty,
fragmentary, for the historian of literature stops short once
he approaches history itself: from one continent to the
other a few signals are exchanged, a few complicities sug­
gested. But in essentials the study of each of these two
continents develops autonomously : the two geographies
suffer communication difficulties.
Here is a history of literature ( any one : we are not
establishing a prize list, we are reflecting on a status ) ; it
has nothing historical about it but the name. It is a series
of monographs, each of which, almost without exception,
stakes out an author and studies him for himself; history
here is merely a succession of individual men. In short,
this is not a history, it is a chronicle. Of course the effort
of generality exists ( and increasingly ) , dealing with genres
or schools; but it is always confined to literature itself;
a bow is given in passing to historical transcendence, an
hors d'oeuvre to the main dish : the author. Every literary
history thus refers us to a sequence of closed criticism :
where is the difference between history and criticism? We
can, without a methodical shock, switch from Thierry
Maulnier's Racine to the chapter on Racine in Adam's
Histoire de la litterature franqaise au XVI16 siecle: it is the
language that changes, not the point of view. In either
case, everything starts from Racine and radiates out in
various directions-here toward a poetics, there toward
a tragic psychology. At best, literary history is never any·
thing but the history of works.
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 55

Can it be otheiWise? To a certain degree, yes : a literary

history is possible, outside of the works themselves ( as I
shall show presently) . But in any case, the general resist­
ance of the literary historians to tum, precisely, from lit­
erature to history teaches us this : that there is a special
status of literary creation; that not only can we not treat
literature like any other historical product (which no one
would rationally suppose) , but that this special nature of
the work is essentially paradoxical, being both the sign of
a history, and the resistance to that history. It is this
fundamental paradox that appears, more or less lucidly,
in our histories of literature; everyone senses that the work
escapes, that it is something else than its history, the sum
of its sources, influences, or models : a hard, irreducible
core, in the undefined mass of events, conditions, collec­
tive mentalities; that is why we never possess a history of
literature, but only a history of litterateurs. Generally, in
literature, there are two postulations : one historical, to
the degree that literature is an institution; the other psy­
chological, to the degree that it is a creation. Hence we
require, in order to study it, two disciplines, different both
as to object and method. In the first case, the object is the
literary institution, the method the historical method in its
most recent developments; in the second case, the object
is literary creation, the method psychological investigation.
It must be said at once that these two disciplines do not
have the same criteria of objectivity; and the entire mis­
fortune of our literary histories is to have confused them,
constantly encumbering literary creation with petty facts
of history, and combining the most demanding historical
scruple with postulates that are by definition highly con­
testable.1 Confronting these two tasks, we shall here ask
for no more than a little order.

1 Marc Bloch used to say of certain historians: "Is it a ques­

tion of determining whether a human act really occurred? Then
they cannot bring enough scruples to their research. But when
they turn to the reasons for this act, the merest appearance
satisfies them : generally based on one of those apothegms of
banal psychology which are neither more nor less true than their
opposites." Metier d'historien, p. 1 02.
1 56 ON RACINE
Let us not ask of history more than it can give: history
will never tell us what is happening inside an author at the
moment he is writing. It would be more effective to re­
verse the problem and ask what a work tells us about its
times. Let us thus resolutely take the work as a document,
a particular trace of an activity, of which only the collec­
tive aspect, for the moment, interests us; let us see, in a
word, what a history not of literature but of the literary
function might be. For this consideration, we possess a
convenient, though evidently hasty guide: some remarks
by Lucien Febvre, reported by Claude Pichois, in a con­
tribution to the problem that concerns us.2 It will suffice
to confront the points of this historical program with sev­
eral recent works of Racinian criticism, one of the most
vigorous bodies of criticism that exists (we have said that
in literary matters, history and criticism are still confused ) ,
to establish certain general lacunae, to define certain tasks.
Lucien Febvre calls first for a study of the milieu.
Despite its critical vogue, the expression "milieu" seems
uncertain. If it means the extremely limited human group
that surrounds the writer, each member of which is more
or less known (his parents, his friends, his enemies ) , Ra­
cine's milieu has often been described, at least in its cir­
cumstantial aspects; for the studies of milieu have often
been merely recensions of minor biographies, the anec­
dotic history of certain friendships or better still of certain
feuds. But if we conceive of a writer's milieu more organi­
cally, more anonymously, as the locus of certain habits of
thought, certain implicit taboos, certain "natural" values,
certain material interests of a group of men actually as­
sociated by identical or complementary functions-in
short, as a portion of a social class-the studies become
much rarer. For the essential part of his career, Racine
participated in three milieus ( often in two of these at the
same time) : Port-Royal, the court, the theatre. About the
first two, or more exactly about their intersection (and
that is what counts for Racine) , we have the study by
Jean Pommier on the Jansenist and worldly milieu of
a Claude Pichois, "Les Cabinets de lecture a Paris durant Ia

premiere moitie du xix" siecle," Annales (July-September, 1959 ) ,

pp. 5 2 1 -34.
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 57
the Comtesse de Gramont; we have, further, the social
and ideological analysis Lucien Goldman has made of
the "rightist" wing of Jansenism. On the theatrical milieu,
to my knowledge, there is little information except in
anecdotic form, and no synthesis; here, more than ever,
biographical fact eclipses historical fact: did Racine have a
daughter by the Du Pare? This problem exempts the his­
torian from examining the customs of the theatrical milieu,
especially from seeking its historical meanings. In this
numerically modest list, let us note the vice at once: the
extreme difficulty of attaining the generality of a milieu
through a work or a life; once we look for a certain con­
sistency in the group studied, the individual withdraws; at
the limit, he is scarcely necessary, unless he is actually in
the way. In his Rabelais, Febvre has really aimed at a
milieu; is Rabelais central to it? Not at all; he is rather a
polemical point of departure ( polemics being Febvre's
Socratic daemon ) , the emotional pretext for correcting an
overmodem interpretation of sixteenth-century atheism­
in short, a crystallizer. But if too much is accorded to the
author, if the genius is observed too indulgently, it is the
entire milieu that explodes into ancedotes, into literary
"promenades." a
On Racine's public ( the second point in Febvre's pro­
gram ) , there are many incidental remarks, valuable figures,
as we might expect ( notably in Raymond Picard ) , but no
recent synthesis; the heart of the matter remains quite
mysterious. Who went to the performances? According to
Racinian criticism, Comeille (crouching in a loge ) and
Mme. de Sevigne. But who else? The court, the town­
exactly who? And still more than the social configuration
of this public, it is the very function of the theatre in
the public's eyes that would interest us : diversion? dream?
identification? distance? snobbery? What was the propor­
tion of all these elements? A simple comparison with more
recent publics raises real historical problems. We are told
in passing that Berenice achieved a great succes de larmes.
But who still cries at the theatre? One might hope that the
3 Debated as his Port-Royal is, Sainte-Beuve had the astonish­

ing merit of describing a true milieu, in which no single figure

is privileged.
1 58 ON RACINE
tears inspired by Berenice would tell us as much about
those who shed them as about the man who made them
flow, that we might be given a history of tears, that some­
one would describe for us, starting here and widening the
inquiry to consider other features as well, the entire af­
fectivity of the period ( ritual or genuinely physiological? ) ,
exactly as Granet has reconstructed the manifestations of
mourning in classical China. Here is a subject more than
likely, but as yet never exploited, though concerned with
the star century of our literature.
Another historical object (suggested by Febvre) : the
intellectual training of this public (and of its authors ) .
Now the indications we are given as to classical education
are scattered; they do not permit a reconstruction of that
mental system any pedagogy supposes. We are told, again
in passing, that the Jansenist education was revolutionary,
that students were taught Greek, that the class was taught
in French, and so on. Can we not go further, either in the
detail (for example, the "experience" of a class ) or the
depth of the system, its contacts with ordinary education
( for not all of Racine's public was Jansenist) ? In short,
cannot someone attempt a history, even a partial one, of
French education? In any case, the lacuna is particularly
noticeable on the level of these literary histories, whose
role should be precisely to afford us information about
everything in an author that is not the author himself.
Indeed, the criticism of sources appears of a trivial interest
compared to the study of the truly formative milieu, that
of the adolescent.
Perhaps an exhaustive bibliography would furnish us
the essential of what we want on all these points. I am
merely saying that the time for a synthesis has come, but
that this synthesis can never be achieved within the
present forms of literary history. Behind these lacunae, as
a matter of fact, there is a vice that, if only the vice of a
point of view and not of information, is nonetheless funda­
mental : the "centralizing" privilege granted the author.
Everywhere it is Racine who passes history in review before
him, around him; it is not history that cites Racine. The
causes, at least the material ones, of this situation are
clear. Racinian scholarship is, on the whole, university
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 59
scholarship; such works can therefore not transgress, with­
out using limited subterfuges, the very forms of higher
education : on one side philosophy, on another history,
and beyond, literature. Between these disciplines, in­
creasingly numerous and more readily acknowledged ex­
changes occur; but the object of research itself remains
predetermined by an obsolete context, one increasingly
contrary to the notions the new human sciences are form­
ing of man.4 The consequences are grave : by focusing on
the author, by making the literary "genius" the very
source of observation, we relegate the properly historical
objects to the rank of nebulous, remote zones; we touch
on them only by accident, in passing. In the best in­
stances, we indicate their existence, leaving to others the
responsibility of dealing with them someday; the essen­
tials of literary history thus fall into default, abandoned by
both the historian and the critic. It is as if, in our literary
history, the man, the author, takes the place the event
holds in historia historians: important to know on an­
other level, he nonetheless blocks the whole perspective;
true in himself, he induces a false vision.
Without even mentioning the unknown subjects, vast
territories that await their colonists, consider a subject
already splendidly spaded by Picard : the condition of the
man of letters in the second half of the seventeenth cen­
tury. Starting from Racine, obliged to stay with him,
Picard has been able to offer only one contribution here,
for him history is still, fatally, the raw material for a por­
trait. He has seen the subject in all its depth (his preface
is categorical on the point ) , but this is still only a prom­
ised land. Obliged by the primacy of the author to pay as
much attention to the "affaire des Sonnets" as to Racine's
income, Picard makes his reader search high and low for

' It is quite obvious that the fonns of education follow the

ideology of their times, but with variable lags; in the days when
Michelet was beginning his lectures at the College de France, the
overlap, or rather the confusion, of disciplines ( notably philos­
ophy and history ) was quite close to the romantic ideology. And
today? The form explodes, as we see by certain signs : the ad­
junction of Sciences Humaines to Lettres in the name of the
new Faculte itself, the teaching at the :£cole des Hautes :£tudes.
1 60 ON RACINE
this social information whose interest he has clearly seen.
Moreover, he informs us only as to Racine's condition.
But was this really exemplary? What about the others,
including, and especially, the minor writers? No matter
how often Picard rejects the psychological interpretation
( was Racine an "arriviste"? ) , Racine's person constantly re­
turns and embarrasses him.
There remain, around Racine, many other attitudes to
explore, the very ones that form the last point in Febvre's
program : what we might call the phenomena of collective
mentality. Knowledgeable Racinians have indicated them
in passing, expressing the pious hope that someday, quite
aside from Racine, they would be explored. For example
Jean Pommier calls for a history of the Racinian myth,
which would afford invaluable enlightenment in the realm
of the psychology we (simplifying) call bourgeois, from
Voltaire to Robert Kemp. For example, Adam, Jasinski,
and Orcibal call attention to the popularity and the vir­
tually institutional use of allegory in the seventeenth cen­
tury, a typical phenomenon of collective mentality, to my
way of thinking much more important than the persuasive­
ness of the keys themselves. Again, Jean Pommier asks for
a history of the imagination in the seventeenth century
(and notably of the theme of metamorphosis ) .
We see that the tasks of this literary history, whose
obligations are being assessed here, are not inconsiderable. I
glimpse others, suggested by the simple experience of a
reader. This one, for example : we have no modem work
on classical rhetoric; generally the figures of thought are
relegated to a museum of pedantic formalism, as if they
had existed only in a few treatises by Jesuit fathers;5 Ra­
cine, however, is full of such figures, though he is reputed
to be the most "natural" of our poets. Yet there is a whole
interpretation of the world that language imposes, through
these figures of rhetoric. Does this interpretation have to
do with style? With language? With neither one nor the
other; what is involved is actually an institution, a form
of the world, as important as the historical representation
6 See, for example, that by Father Lamy, La Rhetorique ou l'art

de parler ( 1675 ) .
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 61
of space among the painters : unfortunately, literature is
still waiting for its Francastel.
This question too, which I see raised nowhere ( not even
in Febvre's program ) except among certain philosophers,
which is doubtless enough to discredit it in the eyes of
the literary historian : what is literature? What is wanted
is nothing less than a historical answer : what was litera­
ture ( the word, moreover, is anachronistic) for Racine
and his contemporaries, precisely what function was en­
trusted to it, what place in the hierarchy of values, and so
on? Actually, it is hard to imagine that one could under­
take a history of literature without inquiring first of all
into its very being. Further, what, literally, can a history
of literature be if not the history of the very idea of lit­
erature? Yet this kind of historical ontology, bearing on
one of the least natural values in the world, is nowhere
to be found. And we do not always feel such a lacuna to
be innocent : if we inquire in minute detail into the
accidents of literature, it is because its essence affords no
cause for doubt; to write appears then as natural as to
eat, to sleep, or to make love--it does not deserve a his­
tory. Whence, in so many literary historians, that in­
nocent phrase, that inflection of judgment, that silence
intended to testify to this postulate : that we should read
Racine not of course in tenns of our own problems, but
at least under the eye of an eternal literature, of which one
may discuss its modes of appearance, but not its very
being.
Now literature's very being, when restored to history, is
no longer a being. Secularized, but to my mind all the
richer, literature once again becomes one of those great
human activities, of relative fonn and function, whose
history Febvre has constantly called for. Thus it is only
on the level of literary functions ( production, communica­
tion, consumption ) that such a history can be written, and
not at the level of the individuals who have exercised
them. In other words, literary history is possible only if
it becomes sociological, if it is concerned with activities
and institutions, not with individuals. 6 We see to what
' See in this regard I. Meyerson, Les Fonctions psychologiques
et les oouvres (Paris, Vrin, 1 948 ) , p. 223.
1 62 ON RACINE
kind of history Febvre's program leads us, to the very op­
posite of the literary histories we know : the raw materials
would still be found in them, in part at least, but their
organization and meaning would be contrary. The writers
would be considered only as the participants in an institu­
tional activity that transcends them individually, exactly
as in the so-called primitive societies the witch doctor par­
ticipates in the magical function. This function, being
fixed in no written law, can be apprehended only through
the individuals who exercise it; yet it is the function alone
that is the object of knowledge. Hence it is a question of
effecting in literary history as we know it a radical con­
version, analogous to that which may have caused men to
shift from royal chronicles to history proper. To complete
our literary chronicles by a few new historical ingredients,
here an unpublished source, there a refurbished biography,
will serve no purpose : the form must burst, and the object
be converted. To amputate literature from the individual!
The uprooting is evident, even the paradox. But a history
of literature is possible only at this price--even at the
price of specifying that the history of literature, neces­
sarily based on its institutional limits, will be, simply, his­
tory.

Let us now tum from the history of the function to

that of the creation, which is the constant object of the
literary histories we possess. Racine stopped writing trage­
dies after Phedre. This is a fact; but does this fact refer
to other facts of history? Can we extend it? Very little­
its development is chiefly one of depth; to give it a mean­
ing, whatever it may be ( and a great variety have been
imagined ) , we must postulate a self, a being for Racine,
even if this being was in the world-in short, we must
touch on a substance without proof, which is subjectivity.
It is possible to apprehend objectively in Racine the
functioning of the literary institution; it is impossible to
claim the same objectivity when we wish to grasp in
Racine the functioning of creation. This is another logic,
these are other requirements, other responsibilities. It is
a question of interpreting the relation of a work and an
individual : how can this be done without referring to a
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 63
psychology? And how could this psychology be anything
but chosen by the critic? In short, every criticism of lit­
erary creation, however objective, however partial it
claims to be, can only be systematic. There is no reason
to complain of this, but only to ask for the candor of the
system.
It is virtually impossible to deal with literary creation
without postulating the existence of a relation between
the work and something besides the work. For a long
time it was believed that this relation was causal, that the
work was a product: hence the <;ritical notions of source,
genesis, reflection, and so on. This representation of the
creative relation seems less and less defensible: either the
explanation deals with only an infinitesimal part of the
work, it is trivial; or it proposes a massive relation whose
crudity provokes a thousand objections ( Plekhanov, the
aristocracy and the minuet ) . The notion of product has
thus given way gradually to the notion of sign: the work
is the sign of something beyond itself; criticism would
then consist in deciphering the signification, in discover­
ing its terms, and chiefly the hidden term, the thing sig­
nified [signifie] . It is at present Lucien Goldman who has
produced the most developed theory of what we might call
the criticism of signification, at least when applied to a
historical object; for in relation to psychical objects, psy­
choanalytic and Sartrian criticism were already criticisms
of signification. Hence we are concerned with a general
movement that consists in opening the work, not as the
effect of a cause, but as the signifier [signifiant] of the
thing signified.
Although our scholarly criticism (shall I say, to simplify,
our university criticism? ) still remains, in its essentials,
loyal to the ( organic, not structural ) notion of genesis,
it so happens that Racinian exegesis tends to deal with
Racine precisely as a system of significations. From what
viewpoint? That of allegory ( or key, or allusion, depend­
ing on the authors ) . We know that today Racine provokes
a whole reconstruction of "keys"-historical ( Orcibal ) or
biographical (Jasinski ) : was Andromache the Du Pare? Is
Orestes Racine? Was Monimia the Champmesle? Is Atha­
liah William of Orange? and so on. Now however rigorously
1 64 ON RACINE
or loosely we treat it, allegory is essentially a signification,
bringing together a signifier and a thing signified. Racinian
criticism does not discuss whether it might not be more
interesting to study allegorical language as a phenomenon
of the period than to examine the probability of this or
that key. What we retain is simply this : the work is re­
garded as the ltmguage of something, here a certain politi­
cal fact, there Racine himself.
The trouble is that the decipherment of an unknown
language for which there exists no document analogous to
the Rosetta stone is literally improbable, unless we resort
to psychological postulates. Whatever effort of rigor or
prudence the criticism of signification imposes on itself, the
systematic character of the reading is to be found on
every level. First of all, on the level of the signifier itself.
Precisely what is it that signifies? A word? A line? A
character? A situation? A tragedy? An entire body of
work? 7 Who can ascertain the signifier, outside of a prop­
erly inductive path, that is, without first positing the sig­
nified, before the signifier? And this, still more systematic :
what are we to do with the parts of the work that do not
signify, at least according to what we are told about the
parts that do? The analogy is a wide-meshed net: three­
fourths of the Racinian discourse- gets through . And once
we undertake a criticism of significations, how stop part
way? Must we refer anything that fails to signify to a
mysterious alchemy of creation, expending on one line
treasures of scientific rigor, and then, for the rest, lazily
surrendering to a strictly magical conception of the work
of art? And what proofs of signification are we to give?
The number and convergence of factual indices ( Orcibal ) ?
Here we do not even attain the probable, merely the
plausible. The "success" of an expression (Jasinski ) ? It is
7 Charles I having entrusted his children to Henriette d'Angle­

terre with these words: "Je ne puis vous lasser de gages plus cher
[I can leave you no dearer pledge]," and Hector entrusting
Astyanax to Andromache with this line : "Je te laisse mon fils
pour gage de ma foi [I leave you my son as a pledge of my
faith]," Jasinski sees here a significant relation, and deduces a
source, a model. To appreciate the probability of such a significa­
tion, which may quite well be merely a coincidence. I refer the
reader to Marc Bloch's discussion in Metier d'historien (pp. 60 ff ) .
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 65
admittedly a postulate to infer from the quality of a line
to the "lived" quality of the sentiment it expresses. The
coherence of the signifying system ( Goldman ) ? This is,
to my mind, the only acceptable proof, every language
being a powerfully co-ordinated system; but then, for the
coherence to be manifest, it must be extended to the
entire muvre, that is, we must accept the risk of a total
criticism. Thus, on all sides, the objective intentions of the
criticism of signification are thwarted by the essentially
arbitrary status of every linguistic system.
Arbitrary even on the level of the thing signified : if
the work signifies the world, at what level of the world
are we to halt the signification? Contemporary events
( the English Restoration for Athalie ) ? The political situa­
tion ( the Turkish crisis of 1 67 1 for Mithridate ) ? The cur­
rent of opinion? The "vision of the world" ( Goldman ) ?
And if the work signifies the author, the same uncertainty
begins all over again: at what level of the person are we to
establish the thing signified? The biographical circum­
stance? The emotional level? A psychology of age? An
archaic psyche ( Mauron ) ? In each case, we are choosing
a level less in terms of the work than of our preconceived
idea of psychology or the world.
Criticism of the author is generally a semiology that
dares not speak its name. If it dare, . it would at least know
its limits, would announce its choices; it would know that
it must always count on two arbitrary factors, and hence
assume them. On the one hand, for one signifier, there
are always several possible things signified .� the signs are
eternally ambiguous, the decipherment is always a choice.
In Esther, are the oppressed Israelites the Protestants, the
Jansenists, or humanity deprived of redemption? Is La
terre qui boit le sang d'Erechthee [the earth that drinks
the blood of Erechtheus] a bit of mythological color, a
precieux touch, or the fragment of a strictly Racinian
hallucination? Is Mithridates' absence the exile of a certain
temporal king or the threatening silence of the Father? For
one sign, how many things signified! We are not saying
that it is no use testing the likelihood of each one; we are
saying that you can finally choose only by taking a stand
on the mental system in its entirety. If you decide that
1 66 ON RACINE
Mithridates is the Father, you are acknowledging a psy­
choanalytical insight; but if you decide that he is Comeille,
you are referring to a psychological postulate just as arbi­
trary, however banal it may be. In either case you are
committed to a decision to· check the meaning of the
work here and not there.8 Most critics suppose that a
superficial braking guarantees a greater objectivity : by
remaining on the surface of the facts, one respects them
more, the timidity or banality of the hypothesis being a
pledge of its validity; hence a very scrupulous, often very
subtle recension of the facts, but prudently cut off from
interpretation at the very moment when it would become
enlightening. We note, for instance, in Racine an obses­
sion with eyes, but we refuse to speak of fetishism; we
point out characteristics of cruelty, but we are reluctant to
invoke sadism, on the pretext that the word did not exist
in the seventeenth century ( rather as if we refused to
reconstruct the climate of a country in a past period on
the excuse that dendroclimatology did not exist at the
time } ; we note that around 1 67 5 opera supplants tragedy,
but this change in mentality is reduced to the rank of
circumstcmce: it is one of the possible causes of Racine's
silence after Phedre. Now this prudence is already a sys­
tematic view, for things do not signify more or less, they
signify or they do not signify : to say that they signify
superficially is already taking a stand on the world. And
all significations being acknowledged to be presumptive,
how can we help preferring those that resolutely locate
themselves at the deepest level of the person ( Mauron )
or of the world ( Goldman ) , where one has some chance
of achieving a genuine unity? Venturing a certain number
of keys, Jasinski suggests that Agrippina represents Port­
Royal. Splendid; but is it not evident that such an equiv­
alence is dubious only to the degree that it remains a
partial one? The further one takes the hypothesis, the
more enlightening it is, the more likely it becomes; for
one can find Port-Royal in Agrippina only by inferring
from each a threatening archetype installed at the deepest
8 Sartre has shown that psychological criticism ( that of Paul
Bourget, for instance ) stopped too soon, precisely where the ex­
planation should have begun. Being and Nothingness, pp. 56 3 ff.
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 67
level of the Racinian psyche: Agrippina is Port-Royal only
if one and the other are the Father, in the fully psycho­
analytic sense of the word.

As a matter of fact, the brake the critic applies to sig­

nification is never innocent. It reveals the critic's situa­
tion, fatally leads to a criticism of the critic. Any reading
of Racine, however impersonal it forces itself to be, is a
projective test. Some declare their references : Mauron is
a psychoanaylst, Goldman a Marxist. It is the others one
would like to question. And since they are historians of
literary creation, how do they represent that creation to
themselves? Just what is a work in their eyes?
First of all and essentially, an alchemy; on one side,
the raw materials-historical, biographical, and traditional
(sources ) -and on the other ( for it is obvious that there
remains an abyss between these raw materials and the
work ) , a je ne sais quoi with vague and noble names : the
generative impulse, the mystery of the soul, the synthesis,
in short Life. To this latter side, little attention is paid,
except, modestly, to respect it; but at the same time it is
forbidden to be touched: that would be to abandon
science and scholarship for the system. Hence we see the
same minds exhausting themselves in scientific rigor over
an accessory detail ( how many thunderbolts hurled over
a date, or a comma) and falling back for essentials, with­
out a struggle, on a purely magical conception of the
work. On one hand, all the mistrust of the most demand­
ing positivism; on the other, the compliant recourse to
the eternal tautology of scholastic explanations. Just as
opium causes sleep by a dormitive virtue, so Racine creates
by a creative virtue: a curious conception of the mystery,
which constantly takes pains to find insignificant causes
for it; and a curious conception of scholarship, which
makes it the jealous guardian of the unknowable. The
amusing thing is that the romantic myth of inspiration
( for Racine's generative impulse, after all, is nothing but
a profane name for his Muse ) is here linked to a whole
scholarly apparatus; thus from two contradictory ideolo­
gies9 is born a bastard system, and perhaps a convenient
8 H. Mannheim has shown the ideological character of posi-
168 ON RACINE
swivel-joint, the work being rational or irrational depend­
ing on the needs of the case; as an old song puts it:
When I'm a bird, look at my wings . . .
When I'm a mouse, long live the rats!
When I am reason, look at my proofs. When I am a mys·
tery, keep off.
The notion of considering the work as a (mysterious )
synthesis of (rational ) elements is probably neither false
nor true; it is simply one way-a quite systematic and
utterly dated way-of representing things to oneself. An­
other, and no less peculiar, way is to identify the author,
his mistresses, and his friends with his characters. Racine
is Orestes ctt twenty-six; Racine is Nero; Andromache is
the Du Pare; Burrhus is Vitard; and so on-how many
such propositions there are in Racinian criticism, which
justifies the excessive interest it takes in the poet's fre­
quentations by hoping to find them transposed (another
magic word ) in the personnel of the tragedies. Nothing
is created out of nothing; this law of organic nature is
shifted without the shadow of a doubt to literary creation :
the dramatis personae must be inspired, in fact, by per­
sons. If at least a certain "indifferentiation" was assigned
to the generating figure, if there was an attempt to ap­
prehend the phantasmatic zone of creation; but no--o n
the contrary, we are offered imitations as circumstantial
as possible, as if it were acknowledged that the ego retains
only such models as it cannot distort; from model to copy,
what is required is a naively superficial common term :
Andromache represents the Du Pare because both were
widows, faithful, and provided with a child; Racine is
Orestes because both had the same kind of passion, and so
on. This is an absolutely partial view of psychology. First
of all, a character can be created out of something quite
different from a person : a propensity, a desire, a resistance,
or even, more simply, from a kind of endogenous organi­
zation of the tragic situation. And then especially, if there
is a model, the meaning of the relation is not necessarily
tivism, which, of course, has not kept it from being fruitful.
Ideologie et Utopie ( Riviere, 1956), pp. 9 3 ff.
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 1 69
analogical : there are inverted, antiphrastic filiations; it is
not a very bold stroke to imagine that in creation, phe­
nomena of denial and compensation are as fruitful as
phenomena of imitation.
We are here approaching the postulate that controls
every traditional representation of literature : the work is
an imitation, it has models, and the relation between the
work and the models can only be analogical. Phedre puts
on stage an incestuous desire; by virtue of the dogma of
analogy, an incestuous situation will be sought in Racine's
life ( Racine and the Du Pare's daughters ) . Even Gold­
man, careful as he is to multiply the stages between the
work and the thing signified, yields to the analogical pos­
tulate: Pascal and Racine belonging to a politically disap­
pointed group, their vision of the world will reproduce
that disappointment, as if the writer had no other power
than to copy himself literally.10 And yet, suppose the
work were precisely what the author does not know, what
he does not experience? It is not necessary to be a psy­
choanalyst to conceive that an act ( and especially a literary
act, which expects no sanction from immediate reality )
may very well be the inverted sign of an intenton; that,
for example, under certain conditions (whose examina­
tion should be the very task of criticism ) , a faithful Titus
can ultimately signify an unfaithful Racine, that Orestes is
perhaps precisely what Racine considers himself not to be,
and so on. We must go further, must ask whether the
chief effort of criticism should not bear on the processes
of distortion rather than on those of imitation; supposing
that one proves a model exists, the interesting thing is to
show in what ways it is distorted, denied, or even disap­
pears; "the imagination is distortive; poetic activity con­
sists in perverting images" : this proposition of Bachelard's
still figures as a heresy, to the degree that positivist criticism
continues to grant an exorbitant privilege to the study of
10 Infinitely less flexible than Goldman, another Marxist,
George Thomson, has established a brutally analogical relation
in Marxism and Poetry between the subversion of values in the
fifth century B.c., whose trace he believes he finds in Greek
tragedy, and the shift from a rural to a mercantile economy,
characterized by an abrupt promotion of money.
170 ON RACINE
origins.11 Between Knight's estimable work, a recension of
all Racine's borrowings from the Greeks, and Mauron's,
which attempts to understand how these borrowings have
been distorted, one cannot help thinking that the second
comes closer to the secret of creation.12
Particularly since analogical criticism is ultimately as
risky as the other. Obsessed, if I may say so, by the "spot­
ting" of resemblances, it knows only one method : induc­
tion. From a hypothetical fact, it draws consequences that
are soon certain, constructs a certain system in terms of
a certain logic: if Andromache is the Du Pare, then
Pyrrhus is Racine, et cetera. "If," writes Jasinski, "guided
by La Folle Querelle, we could believe in an amorous
misadventure of Racine's, the genesis of Andromaque
would become clear." One seeks, and naturally one finds.
Resemblances proliferate a little like alibis and explana­
tions in the language of a paranoiac. We must not com­
plain about this-the demonstration of a coherence is
always a fine critical spectacle-but is it not evident that,
though the episodic c�mtent of the proof may be objective,
the postulate that justifies looking for it is utterly sys­
tematic? If this postulate were acknowledged, if the fact,
without our renouncing the traditional guarantees of its
establishment, were finally to cease being the scholarly
alibi of a psychological option, then by a paradoxical re­
turn, erudition would finally become fruitful, to the degree
that it would open the way to manifestly relative significa­
tions, no longer tricked out in the colors of an eternal
nature. Jasinski postulates that the "profound self" is
modified by situations and incidents, hence by biographi­
cal data. Now this conception of the self is as far from
psychology as Racine's contemporaries could have imag­
ined it as it is from present conceptions, for which the
11 On the myth of origins, see Bloch, Metier d'historien, p. 6

and p. 1 5.
u There is no reason for criticism to take the literary sources

of a work, a character, or a situation for bare facts: if Racine

chooses Tacitus, it may be because there are in Tacitus halluci­
nations that are already Racinian: Tacitus, too, is answerable
to a psychological criticism, with all its choices and all its un·
certainties.
 HISTORY OR LITERATURE? 171
profound self is precisely that which is defined by a fixity
of structure ( psychoanalysis ) or by a freedom that creates
the biography instead of being conditioned by it (Sartre) .
As a matter of fact, Jasinski projects his own psychology
into Racine, as each of us does; · as does Adam who is
certainly entitled to say that a certain scene of Mithridate
touches "what is best in us"-an expressly normative quite
legitimate judgment, provided, however he does not sub­
sequently declare "absurd and barbaric" Spitzer's inter­
pretation of Theramenes' narrative. Shall we dare say to
Jean Pommier that what delights us in his erudition is that
it indicates preferences, noses out certain themes and not
others-in short, that it is the living mask of several ob­
sessions? Will it someday no longer be a sacrilege to psy­
choanalyze the university? And to come back to Racine,
does anyone suppose that we can dismantle the Racinian
myth without passing in review all the critics who have
discussed Racine?

We might be entitled to ask that the psychology which

underlies scholarly criticism and which is, on the whole,
the same psychology that presided over the birth of the
Lansonian system, consent to renew itself a little, to fol­
low Theodule Ribot a little less. But we do not ask any
such thing-we simply ask that this psychology acknowl­
edge its choices.
Literature offers itself to objective inquiry by its entire
institutional side ( although here, as in history, the critic
has no advantage in masking his own situation ) . As for
the other side of the matter, that subtle link that unites
the work and its creator, how can we deal with it except
in committed terms? Of all the approaches to man, psy­
chology is the most improbable (literally, unprovable) ,
the most marked by its time. This is because, in fact, the
knowledge of the profound self is illusory : there are only
different ways of uttering it. Racine lends himself to
several languages : psychoanalytic, existential, tragic, psy­
chological ( other can be invented, others will be in­
vented ) ; none is innocent. But to acknowledge this inca­
pacity to tell the truth about Racine is precisely to
acknowledge, at last, the special status of literature. It lies
172 ON RACINE

in a paradox : literature is that ensemble of objects and

rules, techniques and works, whose function in the general
economy of our society is precisely to institutionalize sub­
;ectivity. To follow this movement, the critic must himself
become paradoxical, must lay the fatal bet and talk about
Racine in one way and not in another: he too belongs to
literature. The first objective rule here is to declare one's
system of reading, it being understood that no neutral
one exists. Of all the works I have cited,13 I contest none;
I can even say that in various respects I admire them
all. I regret only that so much care should be put in the
service of a confused cause: for if one wants to write
literary history, one must renounce the individual Racine
and deliberately undertake the study of techniques, rules,
rites, and collective mentalities; and if one wants to in­
stall oneself inside Racine, with whatever qualification­
if one wants to speak, even if only a word, about the
Racinian self-one must expect to see the humblest
scholarship suddenly become systematic, and the most
prudent critic reveal himself as an utterly subjective,
utterly historical being.
1ll Works cited in this essay:
A. Adam, Histoire de Itt litterature fr�aise au XVII•
siecle, vol. IV, Domat ( 19 58 ) .
M. Bloch, Apologie pour l'histoire ou metier d'historien,
Armand Colin ( 19 59 ) .
L. Goldman, Le Dieu cache, Gallimard ( 19 55 ) .
M. Granet, l!;tudes sociologiques sur la Chine, P.U.F.
( 19 5 .3 ) .
R. J asinski, Vers le vrai Racine, Armand Colin ( 19 58 ) .
R. Knight, Racine et la Grece, Boivin ( 1950 ) .
C. Mauron, L'lnconscient dans l'revre et la vie de Racine,
Gap, Ophrys ( 1957 ) .
J. Orcibal, La Genese d'Esther et d'Athalie, Vrin ( 19 50 ) .
R . Picard, La Carriere de Jean Racine, Gallimard ( 1956 ) .
Thierry Maulnier, Racine, Gallimard ( 1947 ) .