The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment by John C. O'Neal (review)

I once heard a bon mot about Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) that began by recapping the lengthy, gruesome description of the attempted regicide Damiens' public execution that begins the study. Only after the reader has made it through hundreds of pages of analysis—the rise of the modern penal system, panopticism, and bio-power—does the realization finally hit: for Foucault, the bloody spectacle of the debut represents "the good old days." The punchline caricatures something real: Foucault's various accounts of the French eighteenth century purposefully worked athwart a certain view of the epoch—promulgated in part by the parti philosophique—that emphasized universal humanity, reason, and progress. He was not the first to pose difficult questions about and to the Enlightenment. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had previously positioned Sade's scenarios as the logical end point of the rise of instrumental reason and a foretaste of twentieth-century horrors. Along complementary lines, post-structuralists would find in the epoch and its thinkers the emergence and lionization of the self-transparent, self-present, autonomous "subject" and would set about undoing such delusions. Faced with challenges of this sort and in part inspired by them, literary scholars and historians of eighteenth-century Europe have demonstrated the historical, geographical, and institutional variations and limitations of what can no longer be called, without serious reservations, the Enlightenment. They have examined the textual and intellectual complexities of major figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, as well as presented a rich, multifaceted picture of the period involving erstwhile minor figures, curious episodes, and micro-histories.

John C. O'Neal's book, while in many respects it fits with these recent scholarly approaches, does something otherwise unusual: it unearths and embraces in largely canonical writers and texts what the author deems with evident partisanship the progressive values of the French Enlightenment as such and finds in them the seeds of modernity—our modernity. Implicitly and at times explicitly responding to the critics of the Enlightenment, O'Neal's book might be called a revisionist history of the earlier revisionist histories. As the title makes clear, central to this history is "confusion": a muddying of assumed distinctions, a mixing of strata, a disordering so that new and better orders might arise. Through its lens, the progressive utopian dream of the French Enlightenment comes into focus: "not the separation, but a métissage of peoples—a harmonious mix of classes, cultures, genders, sexes, and races" (214). That sounds nice, of course, although it is when the analysis turns to confusion's relations—complexity and unruly paradox—that, for me, O'Neal's analyses are at their most engaging, informative, suggestive, and truly revisionist. That is, this study is strongest when the tension between nascent modernity and a coeval postmodernity is not resolved, when the act of confusing, for pedagogical or tonic purposes, encounters the possibility of confusion as a permanent condition, when a mise en abyme—to use one of O'Neal's favourite terms—is not just a heuristic device but threatens to become an inescapable epistemological vortex.

And what of the "poetics" in O'Neal's title? It broadly indicates that in order to grasp the deployment of confusion, we must acknowledge the important role of language. In many cases, the "rhetoric of confusion" or "narrative tactics of confusion" would also be apt. The opening chapters on the dramas and novels of Marivaux and Crébillon fils make clear why this must be so. About Marivaux, O'Neal argues that the discourses of sentimentality and sensibility, which emphasize shared human capacities, enable a reticent critique of class to emerge. The argument in general is not news: Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (2008), for example, has examined how sentimental literature helped give rise to levelling notions of humanity. O'Neal's reading of Marivaux does...