Table Of ContentLANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY
General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
published titles
Nonnan Bryson
VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze
Teresa de Lauretis
ALICE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema
FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES (editor)
Mary Ann Doane
THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s
Alan Durant
CONDITIONS OF MUSIC
Jane Gallop
FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction
Peter Gidal
UNDERSTANDING BECKETI: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the
Works of Samuel Beckett
Peter Goodrich
LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Paul Hirst
ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY
Andreas Huyssen
AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and
Postmodernism
Nigel Leask
THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION IN COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL
THOUGHT
Michael Lynn-George
EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND THE ILIAD
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD
THE TALKING CURE: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language (editor)
Louis Marin
PORTRAIT OF THE KING
Christian Metz
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier
Jeffrey Minson
GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the
Eccentricity of Ethics
Michel Pecheux
LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY
Jean-Michel Rabate
LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S
CANTOS
Jacqueline Rose
THE CASE OF PETER PAN OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S
FICTION
Brian Rotman
SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero
Raymond Tallis
NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory
David Trotter
CIRCULATION: Defoe. Dickens and the Economies of the Novel
THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modern
American, English and Irish Poetry
forthcoming titles
James Donald
THE QUESTION OF EDUCATION: Essays on Schooling and English
Culture, 1790-1987
Ian Hunter
CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of Literary Education
Laura Mulvey
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES: Collected Writings
Denise Riley
'AM I THAT NAME?': A Conceptual History of Feminisms
Peter Womack
IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands
Portrait of the King
Louis Marin
Translation by Martha M. Houle
Foreword by Tom Conley
M
Macmillan Press
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges
translation assistance provided for this book by the French
Ministry of Culture.
First published in the USA (University of Minnesota Press) 1988
First published in the UK (Macmillan) 1988
Copyright © 1988 by the University of Minnesota.
Originally published as Le Portrait du roi, copyright © 1981 by Les Editions de
Minuit, Paris.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published in the UK by Macmillan Press Ltd., Houndsmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Marin, Louis
Portrait of the king.-(Language,
discourse, society series).
1. Monarchy-France-History-17th
century
I. Title II. Le portrait du roi. English
III. Series
354.4403' 12'09 JN2369
ISBN 978-0-333-46391-8 ISBN 978-1-349-19061-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19061-4
Contents
Foreword: The King's Effects Tom Conley vi
Introduction: The Three Fonnulas 3
Overture: The King, or Force Justified. Pascalian Commentaries 16
First Entrance: "The State Is Me," or the King's Narrative
The King's Narrative, or How to Write History 39
Interlude: The Discourse of the Flatterer, or the King's Eulogy 89
The Fox's Tactics 94
Racinian Strategies 105
Second Entrance: "This Is My Body," or the King by Sacrament
The Royal Host: The Historic Medal 121
Interlude: Royal Money and Princely Portrait 138
Third Entrance: "A Portrait of Caesar Is Caesar," or the King in His Frame
The King and His Geometer 169
The Prince's Palace 180
The Magician King, or the Prince's Fete 193
The King's Portrait 206
Finale: The Legitimate Usurper, or the Shipwrecked Man as King 215
Appendix: Donkey Skin 239
Notes 257
Bibliography 273
Index 285
Foreword
The King's Effects
Tom Conley
Le Portrait du roi is a hermetic book. Readers familiar with Louis Marin will im
mediately recognize its role in the evolution of his writing. Many of the articles,
seminars, and projects included in this book develop from the sparkling research
he initiated on ideology and space in Utopiques: jeux d'espace (1973) and La
Critique du discours (1975). In the former he takes up the relations of ideology,
politics, and topography in culture from the time of Thomas More to what he
calls the "desperate" Utopias of Disneyland and Disneyworld. In his first book,
collections of art, literature, cartography, and city planning inform his views of
imaginary kingdoms. Three years later in the Critique du discours, Marin en
gages a protracted dialectical study of the central roles that Jansenist rhetoric and
Pascal's logic had played in the formation of modem world-views. The two
books underscore how the power of official modes of representation - whether in
the logic of reason our times have inherited from schematic thinking in the wake
of Descartes or in the spatial allegories of contemporary cities-work through
human subjects when they practice their most innocuous activities. A person on
foot in a modem city is no less indoctrinated than anyone writing a dissertation
following the laws of usage that chart the frame of common sense.
Portrait of the King develops the methods and conclusions of the two former
books to produce the most forceful, indeed accessible, of all his studies of the
paradigms of power that the modem age has inherited from the archaic orders of
the age of Louis XIV. A patient reading of Marin's work-and it does require
patience and time - yields the conclusion that in the arts of representation are
found the real origins and organs of social control.
vi
FOREWORD 0 vii
In this respect Marin's work will find positive reception among followers of
the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Louis Althusser the political scientist, and
Ernest H. Kantorowicz, a historian of theological rituals. Geertz discovered that
in pre-modem and non-Western societies power is defined and managed through
the relations held between a figure who produces a representation of itself and
those who imitate it. Between the leader who makes displays and those who en
gage in them is established the difference separating a monarch from his subser
vient bodies. For as long as subjects admire by imitating the orders put to them
in fields of ritualized life, a continuity of social distinctions can be held. Althus
ser, the political scientist whose austere readings of psychoanalysis and Marx in
spired much of the ferment of May 1968, argued that the power of a society is
often controlled by those who know how to handle ideology. By that term he
meant not, as Webster has it, a science of the history and evolution of human
ideas, but rather the state of idealism in which subjects bathe themselves in their
everyday lives. Marin engraved Althusser's definition at the cornerstone of
Utopiques. "'The representation of the imaginary relations that individuals of a
given society hold with their real conditions of existence' " (Utopiques: 18, quot
ing Althusser) might also figure at the beginning of Portrait of the King. Who
ever institutes a collectively imaginary order monitors the desires and dreams of
multitudes. Power is therefore enabled as much or more from control of ideas
about life as from that of military forces or other visibly repressive agencies.
Aesthetic displays bearing no ostensible relation with politics become instru
ments of force ensuring the strength of an order. Althusser labeled this an "in
stitutional" mode of representation, one that historian of archaic behavior Ernest
H. Kantorowicz studied in The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: 1957). He showed
that the medieval conception of royalty used the Catholic theology of the Corpus
Mysticum to elaborate juridical practice, to define the meaning of the crown and
pattern ritual displays of kingship. Power was constituted through the "effect"
of the Catholic mass when subjects unconsciously absorbed them in the secular
areas of political life. As in the areas studed by Geertz and Althusser, an aes
thetic activity grounded the shape and practice and power.
Marin's work develops from similar sets of matrices. A precious document
for any study of the relations that have been held between art and power, it dem
onstrates that the West since the seventeenth century has its beginnings not only
in the growth of capital economy but no less crucially in the "hidden" persua
sions of public medias. Not that Marin is a Vance Packard: a logician in the line
of the religious figures he studies, Marin suggests that France made decisive
changes in the pageantry, literature, theater, and other archaic modes of display
it had inherited from the medieval church and the dazzlement the Valois lineage
had cultivated in the sixteenth century. In fact, with Colbert and Le Brun are the
origins of the logic of contemporary medias. The correlations are so obvious and
viii 0 FOREWORD
forceful that even the formal craft of Portrait of the King seems to mask the im
plications of its hypotheses both from itself and its readers.
Although closed in its design, the book's symmetries reveal much about the
order and substance of its contents. The hermetic shape is arguably its own ide
ology. The book implies that the prismatic history of the "effects" of Louis
XIV's aesthetic productions are extensions of our own relations with television,
magazines, the fine arts in our best museums, and other phenomena that embody
the range of popular and elite culture. Here the author appears as a staunchly
Freudian historian - perhaps in the line of Michel de Certeau' s last two chapters
of L'Ecriture de /'histoire (1975)-by determining that our obsession with the
past allows us to write of the present through the opening of an abyss of time at
the basis of any historical investigation. What was then allows the here and now
to be born of a return in movement to and from an imaginary object produced in
the action of disinterring. For this reason the age of the Sun King of Portrait of
the King is fraught with fear of the return of a totalitarian dictature. Clearly the
order of Louis's age fascinates the author; he vivifies it through formal dis
courses of semiotics and psychoanalysis, but he also keeps it at bay, protecting
both its aura and his obsessive identification with it from the tarnish of historical
fact. It remains as a partial object, a wound of sorts, that the author caresses. He
holds the force of its conclusions in the imaginary field of the seventeenth cen
tury that he unearthes and creates for us.
In its own synthetic shape are englobed and reflected the forms of power it
studies. Three formulas, Marin asserts, dominate the logic of reason in seven
teenth-century France. Soon after Louis XIV acceded to the throne on March 9,
1661, the king's motto was circulated. "L'etat, c'est moi"; no better expression
could be forged to bear the stamp of its own self-willed authority. And no doubt
because it rings and rhymes with both the Christian maxim of the Eucharist, Ceci
est mon corps (hoc est meum corpem) and the Port-Royalists' utterance reflective
of both the Gospels and numismatic style, "Le portrait de Cesar, c'est Cesar"
(in chapter fourteen of the second part of the "Art of Thinking"). The three
maxims are mutually self-informing. Their quasi-identity invokes the enigmas of
power, of representation, of violence, and aesthetics of a world, although only
300 years past, that only appears to be light years away. It remains distant in its
mix of medieval and archaic practices, to be sure; but Louis's world is uncannily
near because orders of force used to produce human subjects and social contra
diction have changed little in the passage from Louis to the modern state. Marin
superimposes the three formulas to connote how such an alignment produced a
triadic symbolic identity of state, truth, and god. Whatever pertained to one or
der was also of the others.
Symmetry is sovereignty. The tautology of each statement (or in terms of
speech-acts, of their performative functions) incites exasperation and frustration
mixed with admiration. They elicit a mix of contradictory responses which mo-
FOREWORD 0 ix
mentarily immobilize those to whom they are directed. (They are not unlike
media-slogans which resound and redound with the same self-legitimizing circu
larity: "The Right Choice"; "We Do it Right"; "The World Is Going our
Way.") All are forms of metadiscourse, expressions which produce their own
truth in the closed symmetry of their formulation. The self-containment of
"L'etat, c'est moi," "Ceci est mon corps," and "Le portrait de Cesar, c'est
Cesar" achieves what one century earlier, in the time of civil war preceding
Henry of Navarre's ascendancy, was coined as the wish for a centralized and uni
fied France: "Un roy, une loy, une foy" [one king, one law, one faith]. By the
time of Louis XIV the orders of kingship, legislation, and religion, which had
been only tentatively aligned at the tum of the century, are stamped into one.
They become the basis of an official aesthetics. In the wake of the vanguards
of its early years, our century has been taught to spurn the idea of creative
dictatures which impose on masses the ways that they must play, obey, live their
public and private lives, and even imagine themselves in history and science. A
careful reading of Portrait of the King will leave us with the uneasy feeling that,
as in the Age of Louis, our entire lives are determined by institutional models of
representation. Poetry and fantasy may indeed be aporias in the fearful symme
tries of the discourses producing our names and bodies, but their creative ele
ments are nonetheless contained within the overriding order of "dominant"
modes of representation-that is, signs which are so pervasive that the distinc
tion between dominant and dominated modes no longer has currency. Whether
of 1660 or 1990, all modes ofrepresentation are dominant, and no less than the
ways ideology, because it is unconscious, pervades all symbolic activity.
For this reason the hermetic order of Portrait of the King seems to pre-empt its
conclusions. The reader is free to enter anywhere and everywhere but will inev
itably be led back to its imposing triad of state, religion, and art. Each of the
three maxims is used to subtitle one of the sections. Over the portal of the first
"entry" is "L'etat, c'est moi"; this section (roughly a third of the sum) deals
with the writing of history immortalizing the young Sun King upon his accession
to the throne. In this first third of the book Marin examines Pellisson's "Rapport
a
Colbert exposant un projet de l'histoire de Louis XIV," a blueprint for an aes
thetic biography destined to yield "immortal effects." Before the advent of the
secular state, historiography created itself through encomium. Epideictic rhetoric
assigned itself the task of immortalizing its patron by comparing the king to
myths wrought in complex symmetries and geometrical figures. Emblematic and
heraldic combinations of language and image gave moral substance to contin
gency. Placed in simultaneously logical, tabular, discursive, and allegorical con
figurations, facts were carved from orders where design could lend a stable and
hermetic appearance to the confusions of contingency. Future events could be in
cluded in the pregiven structures divinizing the king's human origins.! In this
way the historical project depended upon an almost entirely visual frame of nar-
