Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (review)

“The question of how one begins to write,” Jacques Lezra observes well into Unspeakable Subjects, is “generously” posed throughout Don Quixote (157). The same question arises for any reviewer of Lezra’s intricate and brilliant study of “eventiality” and “unspeakable subjects.” At the heart of this book—to bend its own use of body parts to our purposes—are two of the most rigorously theoretical chapters on Cervantes in print. At the heart of the heart of this book is a hand, specifically, Cervantes’ hand. The reader ponders that “truncated hand” after a salubrious run through Freud, Descartes, and virtually all the major critical discourses of European modernity and postmodernity.

Cervantes’ maimed hand gives way to Don Quixote’s eroticized hand and, at the book’s end, to the severed head of a pirate in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a “grammatical event” in a play shown “to abound grotesquely with parts of bodies” (289–90). The history of Ragozine’s disembodied head “tells allegorically” the story of the passage from tropological systems to the political and institutional events—for example, King James’s six proclamations against piracy—for which they seem to substitute (282). This instructive meditation on Jacobean maritime policy does not remain mute, as do so many affirmative readings of Measure for Measure, about “the capricious authoritarianism” of Duke Vicentio, a character whose sexual preference, despite his marriage proposal to Isabella, may not incline him “toward women” (258). How a text can improperly “name” what remains unspeakable is the burden of this chapter and of the book that it closes.

We live eventful histories, Lezra claims, and the literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and sociology of the last fifteen years best succeed in characterizing these histories when they show how “living” becomes incommensurable with the especially meaningful moment marked out as an “event,” be it a revolution, an accident, a trauma, or a repression. Lezra sees the “birth” of the history of the body in Don Quixote as an event: there was “no history of the body before the novel: indeed, bodies are (still) literally unthinkable before the novel” (191). But an event may also be an Adamic moment of naming, as in the granting of a chivalric epithet like “the Knight of the Sad Countenance” (163) or in the production of a figure like “Freud” (37). Unspeakable Subjects provides a three-pronged exposition—generic, rhetorical, materialist—of the genealogy of the event and its consequences for any contemporary analysis of the subject.

This is an unspeakably learned book, whose “reference matter” alone, including copious endnotes and a bibliography, adds up to 106 pages, about a quarter of the book. A twenty-page discussion of the genealogy of the event in contemporary critical discourse draws on multiple thinkers and their fractious camps: Nietzsche, Foucault, Bouchard, Goldmann, and Lacan play out a compelling narrative of political events and psychological traumas, assisted by Deleuze, Derrida, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Laclau, Luhmann, Lyotard, Miller, Mouffe, Quine, Rorty, and Judith Butler. This is also a superbly playful book, whose genealogy requires us to traffic in explicitly Borgesian anachronism. After opening with a lengthy Lucretian fable, Lezra suggests that “Lucretius will always be Nietzschean, to the same extent (if differently) that Nietzsche will be Lucretian.” A vivid review of coming attractions or readerly “collisions” follows: “We are seldom as close to Shakespeare as when we pursue with the greatest labor the most attentive readings of Freud; and the conditions under which we can come to understand the being-Nietzschean of Lucretius (or vice-versa), or the Freudianism of a play like Measure for Measure, are always in eventful ways radically Cervantine” (25).

Lezra’s own attentive reading of Freud, preceding the chapters on Descartes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, focuses on the spectral mother present in the complex tropology of the unconscious. In the provocative chapter “Freud’s Sickle”—a knot of problems that is “the distinctive mark of our modernity”—Lezra...