Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel ed. by Hall Bjornstad and Katherine Ibbett (review)

Reviews 251 the other.Gemma Daou reveals a surprisingly reductive perspective in Marin Mersenne’s attempts to discredit the science of Giordano Bruno on the grounds of the latter’s pantheism. Pascal’s condescending attitude toward libertine reasoning regarding the (im)mortality of the soul and divine grace provides the focus of Francesco Paolo Adorno’s contribution.A third section enters the domain of early modern philosophy. Anne Staquet traces occurrences of “libertin” and (much more frequently) “athée” in Descartes, arguing that the question of Descartes’s place in debates about libertinism is more complex than modern historiography would suggest. Jacqueline Lagrée takes the discussion to Spinoza, providing a table that either matches or contrasts Spinoza’s positions on various issues vis-à-vis the stances of erudite libertines. The book’s fourth part centers on radicalism and libertinism. Gianni Paganini develops a reading of the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus, a text that relativizes and historicizes the erudite libertine notion of a disabused intelligentsia opposed to a mystified populace. This clandestine work is shown to favor egalitarianism in a state of nature, and this (1659) long before Rousseau. Martin Schmeisser returns to Garasse and specifically to his attacks on Vanini. Schmeisser argues that it is anachronistic and inaccurate to see in Vanini—much of whose thought was rooted in Aristotle while also undermining anthropocentrism—a Darwinian avant la lettre. The volume ends with two essays on politics: Jean-Michel Gros presents the topic of the coup d’État as treated in Naudé and La Mothe Le Vayer, respectively. Thomas Berns compares and contrasts Averroës and Machiavelli to question individualizing notions of the libertine in favor of forms of collective identity associated with this ever-shifting term, a strong word that this book highlights in its full complexity. University of Iowa Roland Racevskis Bjornstad, Hall, and Katherine Ibbett, eds. Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel. Yale French Studies 124. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2013. ISBN 978-030 -019420-3. Pp. 176. $30. The impetus for this collected volume is a comment Walter Benjamin made in a 1927 letter to his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “I sometimes think about writing a book on French tragedy as a counterpart to my Trauerspiel book.” Benjamin added that his “plan for the latter had originally been to elucidate both the German Trauerspiel and the French tragic drama in terms of their contrastive nature.” This passage is cited in the Preface (1–2), as well as in all but one—Éric Méchoulan’s—of the eleven articles in the volume, almost as if each author were responding to an essay prompt on what Benjamin meant by this potential project. Benjamin is referencing Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, known in English as The Origin of the German Tragic Drama; although, as Hall Bjornstad and Katherine Ibbett remind us, this is a mistranslation, for it ignores the core differences Benjamin established between Trauerspiel—the“mourning play”—and tragedy. Recognizing the divide between the genres, and, by extension, the gulf separating the shadowy German Baroque from the brilliance of French Classicism,is of particular importance to the volume’s contributors since they will endeavor to draw out how the Trauerspiel, as a genre, idea, or configuration , resides in celebrated texts of the grand siècle, and especially in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. The editors gesture toward the imaginary: “We suggest paying attention to things that are not written, to the mourning drama of the unfinished project” (8). Valuing what academia habitually disdains—flights of fancy, blurred chronologies,and unfinished work—the study acknowledges how deducing,surmising, and hypothesizing are elemental practices of literary scholarship. Despite the repeated evocations of the nonexistent text, each contributor is a careful and knowledgeable reader of Benjamin’s existing text and aptly draws on the defining characteristics of the Trauerspiel to illuminate its presence in Pascal (Emma Gilby and Hall Bjornstad), Corneille (Claude Haas, Timothy Hampton, Katharine Ibbett, John D. Lyons, Hélène Merlin-Kajman),and Racine (Christopher Braider,Susan Maslan,and Éric Méchoulan). Although they focus on repetitive elements—“creatureliness,”a vision that“knows no eschatology,” melancholy princes, crooked crowns, intriguers and tyrant-martyrs— the readings are...