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  • Mourning Tulli-a:The Shrine of Letters in ad Atticum 121
  • Francesca Martelli

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,Divides one thing entire to many objects;Like perspectives, which rightly gazed uponShow nothing but confusion, eyed awryDistinguish form: so your sweet majesty,Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,Find shapes of grief, more than himself, to wail;Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadowsOf what it is not.

Richard II, II.ii.14–24

This is objet a: an entity that has no substantial consistency, which in itself is “nothing but confusion,” and which acquires a definite shape only when looked at from a standpoint slanted by the subject’s desires and fears—as such, as a mere “shadow of what it is not.” Objet a is the strange object that is nothing but the inscription of the subject itself in the field of objects, in the guise of a blotch that takes shape only when part of this field is anamorphically distorted by the subject’s desire.

Žižek 2006.68–69 [End Page 415]

INTRODUCTION

A motif that recurs in clusters at critical moments in the course of Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus is the claim that he repeatedly makes to be writing to his friend despite having nothing to say.2 The refrain says much about Cicero’s relationship with Atticus and about his reliance on epistolary exchange as a therapeutic and transferential tool. But it also tells us a good deal about Cicero “himself”—a good deal more, at least, than the surface avowal of empty letters would appear to indicate. For more often than not, the void that Cicero refers to with this claim speaks less of a dearth of material in the drama of Roman public life than of the difficulty—or rather impossibility—of accounting for certain traumatic events in the traditional terms of symbolization in which his own subject position is invested. This is why the refrain persists even when the drama is at its most heightened. And why the preoccupations that take hold in the absence of any “real” matter to speak of tend not to ignore or replace these traumas, but to displace their effects from one area of his life to another: from the political to the domestic sphere (and back again).

A prime example of this displacement process may be found in the eleventh book of his correspondence with Atticus, when Cicero writes to his friend from the Pompeian camp at the very heart of the civil war—this critical turning point in Roman and, indeed, world history—in order to tell him, what? That he has nothing to say (Att. 11.4): “You wonder why I don’t write. I’m deterred by lack of material; I have nothing to say worth a letter (‘meas litteras quod requiris, impedior inopia rerum quas nullas habeo litteris dignas’), finding, as I do, no satisfaction in anything that happens or arises here.”3 In lieu of any meaningful discourse, the few letters that Cicero writes to Atticus at this time are largely taken up with domestic affairs. Yet these domestic dramas turn out to present a perfect microcosm of the political situation and might even be said to represent it better than any war report could. For Cicero’s personal life in Book 11 consists almost entirely of family feuds that act as both metaphor for and [End Page 416] symptom of the civil war: brothers fighting brothers and, even more germane, fathers-in-law fighting sons-in-law, as Cicero’s falling out with his son-in-law, Dolabella, mirrors the larger conflict between father-in-law and son-in-law currently tearing apart the Roman state.4 For this subject, who has so internalised the state and fate of the res publica, when public affairs are too distressing to be spoken of directly, they are simply displaced into the way in which he configures events taking place in his private life.

Yet if civil war is an unwriteable void that...

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