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Foreword A Space of One's Own by Tom Conley Harvard University Deborah Lesko Baker's remarkable study of voice in Louise Labe turns the first great poetess of the classical years of the French Renaissance into a moderne. Labe is not a "modern" in the sense of the querelle of the following century, but a gendered subject, like everyone since time immemorial, who is born into a world of inequality. The author we discover in this patiently argued and engaging study could be the noblewoman of Lyons, "la belle cordiere," as much as she might be . the "person without qualities" of our age and of the next century , a figure whose pertinent characteristics resemble our own in anonymity. Among many contributions that this book makes to early modern stud~es are the links it establishes between a particular and privileged author in a literary canon and the register of common experience. The "subject of desire" is a human being of any time and any space. Baker would probably argue that Labe conveys to us the sensations of life that media-culture and the ideology ofefficiency in electronic communication are attempting to eradicate. The subject who is now born into a "WOrld-wide-webbing" of instant exchange of information on electronic highways-over which travel is reduced to the distance that a cursor covers on a television screen-is discouraged from heeding the disquiet and even the trauma of what one critic calls our "being dropped" into the world. In our schedules of life and death and of being female and male, "we are dropped into a situation whose meaning is unknown to us, at least in the beginning. We have to learn something that has already happened." From our biological beginnings we need to apprehend "what it is to live, what it is to die, what it is to be female or male" (Lyotard 102). Institutions that we explore include schools, family, narratives, and friends, and also extend to "imaginary representations-literature, movies, and so on-in order to answer these questions" (103). In our age the instantaneity of exchange becomes an agent that naturalizes ix Foreword truth or that makes the work required to ponder its existence seem easier than it is. An illusion of its possibility or of its presence is dictated by the efficiency of computers. The inspired labor, the travail, ofLab6's writings denies this dream ofa utopia of communication. For Baker, Lab6's labors can be understood as the painful and vital process of separation that brings the subject into the world and that builds a necessary and lifelong sense of identity through trial and error and through an unending relation with the unknown. The "subject of desire" stands at the juncture of the present and the idea of a future that is not at all a mirror of subjective impressions of the past. This process of separation and of doubt about the order of time might, if we were to follow Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's arguments about seclusion and subjectivity, be called childhood. In the case of Labe it might amount to the writing of poems. In their process of continuous separation, they acquire a signature of their ownin , say, the memory-image of two Ls, the elles of II that carry mute es with them for the purpose of mollifying the angular and ascending form of their graphemes-erafted from an amalgam of other writing and other poems. In their variation the sources are treated differently and invested with new life and an almost physical breath. The condition of dialogue-or the creation of intermediate spaces opened between bodily sensation, muscular movement, and the near-simultaneous apprehension and emission of discourse -becomes precisely the area in which a feeling of being , of gender, of style, and of autonomy and interdependence is gained. Baker calls it "a kind of conditional experience that complements and enriches the imaginative struggle" that the reader of the CEuvres obtains in following the fault line ofLabe's separation from her sources. The dialogical sensibility, the very basis of poetry, inflects everyone of the poems. "Fragments of lived moments," the poems form a mosaic that is dialogue itself, a way of identifying but also of confusing the lines of gender and class into which subjects have been "dropped." Baker advances the point with meticulous precision in her readings of Lab6's tears. They seem to be the very ink of her poetry. They draw lines of tension on...

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