Corps et interprétation (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) by Clotilde Thouret et Lise Wajeman (review)

'In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art'; Susan Sontag's call in Against Interpretation (1964) echoes through many of this fine volume's nineteen articles, which share as a first principle the notion that the construction of meaning is inseparable from the question of reception. Returning to the etymological sense of 'aesthetics', meaning an understanding through the senses, these essays place the body at the centre of the reader's or the viewer's experience of the literary or artistic object. In their efficient Avant-propos, editors Clotilde Thouret and Lise Wajeman note that interpretation is not a purely intellectual act that operates only linguistically; instead, the material body is the 'lieu de l'interaction de l'âme avec le monde' (p. 13), and thus we must be attentive to the role of the body in making sense, and the art work's effect upon that body. The subsequent essays are organized thematically rather than chronologically, and they cover a broad range of material, from Cervantes, Tintoretto, and Racine to opera, satirical poetry, and garden design. The potential of this comparative approach is somewhat stymied by the lack of a general bibliography and an index; the latter might have helped the reader to gain a clearer sense, for instance, of the impact made on the field by Jacques Rancière, who is cursorily referenced in a number of the essays. The overall standard of the research is high, and six contributions in particular stand out. François Lercercle's opening essay offers a close reading of Gian Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro da Cortona's Trattato della pittura e scultura (1652) to show how the viewer's red-blooded body muddies the difference between sacred sexual images, an ambiguity that clearly has problematic consequences for religious iconophilia. In a suggestive analysis of the grotesque body in seventeenth-century French writings, Hélène Merlin-Kajman discusses the representation of individual subjects who are beset by particular emotions. Jean-Vincent Blanchard analyses a guide to the great waterfalls of the royal palace at Saint-Cloud to consider how monumental architecture engages the beholder's affective responses and thereby aims to forge a new political subject. Sophie Marchand's excellent contribution on theatre audiences in late eighteenth-century France analyses how the material conditions of spectatorship (the seating of the parterre) impact upon interpretation and the autonomy of the dramatic fiction in a period of political upheaval. In a subtle analysis of portraits of dwarves at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Italian courts, Paola Pacifici and Bérengère Voisin explore how the deformed body both blocks and stimulates interpretation by engaging the beholder's own physiological sensibilities; an illustration of one of these paintings would have been most welcome. Finally, Delphine Lesbros examines the erotic dimension of aesthetics, in her analysis of works of art that have compelled viewers to reach out and touch these objects of desire. The high quality of many of these wide-ranging essays marks out this volume as of interest to scholars and students of early modern European culture.