"Le plus fort lien": Sentimental Fixation and Spectacles of Suffering in Les Liaisons dangereuses

"Le plus fort lien": Sentimental Fixation and Spectacles of Suffering in Les Liaisons dangereuses NEIL SACCAMANO This essay has its origin in an invitation to join a continuing discussion of the relationship between British and French literary culture in the eighteenth century, specifically with reference to the novel.1 For all of their obvious reciprocal influences and citations, English and French eighteenth-century novels often appear to have elicited relatively independent and even discrepant critical discourses in their respective national fields of scholarship. In an effort not to define but to perform these different critical practices with the aim of marking or perhaps narrowing the gap between them, I have consented to represent the English side of the channel in a reading of a major French novel. I take it as my task to raise critical concerns that have some currency in British scholarship but that also acknowledge the cultural crossings between these two nations of letters during the period. Left unattempted in this essay is any effort to formalize critical discourses so that one might then be able to identify a reading, for instance, that belongs recognizably to British studies. In fact, I am uncertain even of the "representativeness" of my reading since, in preparing it, I found myself in the odd situation of having first to objectify and then self-consciously assume a position within the discipline of English that I presumably already occupy in practice and on account of which I was asked to participate in this project. 2 /SACCAMANO In light of this invitation and the questions of disciplinary identity it entails, my essay perhaps unsurprisingly takes its point of departure in the cultural politics of dialogue as a critical and collaborative practice and then proceeds primarily to address the disciplinary or ideological constitution of social subjects in philosophical and novelistic discourses of sentiment. Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses is a productive text to investigate in this context not only, of course, because it itself reads both English and French novels, but also because it invokes reflection on the claims made for both epistolary "dialogue" and the dynamics of sentiment as means to found an ethical society in which the consent or desire of subjects replaces force and mere obedience to law. Through Laclos's presentation of "epistolary subjects" and especially of libertinism, the novel takes aim at one of the basic presuppositions of liberal political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the claim, as Carole Pateman puts it, that "consent, contract, agreement, commitment, or promises, or more broadly, ... the voluntary actions of individuals . . . give rise to political obligation," that "political obligation is a form of self-assumed obligation, or a moral commitment freely entered into by individuals and freely taken upon themselves by their own actions."2 By reading Laclos's dramatizations of sentimental attachment in relation to liberal legitimations of political authority through self-binding subjects, the novel allows us to consider, we shall see, not only the failure of such a project of legitimation but also the dependence of even an affective sociality on the forceful negativity of law that such an ethical society hopes to supersede. As Jürgen Habermas has shown in his early work on the bourgeois public sphere that has been resuscitated in British studies, the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century participates in the more general liberal appeal to a dialogue and critical debate oriented toward consensus in both cultural and political spheres. The privileging of this ethical and political understanding of "dialogue" in the novel is evident, for example, in Richardson's Clarissa, in which we are told that the letters between Clarissa and Anna Howe abound with "affecting Conversations; many of them written in the dialogue or dramatic way," and these letters themselves perform a critical function ascribed to dialogue.3 This critique aims to unsettle the dogmatic or unconditional authority Richardson associates with both aristocratic and patriarchal power by introducing a formal equality. To refuse to enter into dialogue would be, Clarissa reassures the outspoken Anna, "to put myself into the inconvenient situation of royalty: that is to say, out of the way of ever being told of my faults; of ever mending them...