The two main perspectives arising from this logic are presented in two important oeuvres on French Renaissance literature in the first half of the 1970s. On the one hand, misunderstanding of «pleasant» and inner-contradictive text could be interpreted as a power to substitute and subvert reality. On the other hand, misunderstanding could be juxtaposed with a deceit because of the inner-contradictive textual reality. The two works dedicated to the Renaissance literature which will be considered below have only oblique and contextual linkage with Barthes' concept, containing indirect references to the poststructuralist and linguistic turn problematics. However, the very obliqueness of this linkage seems to be the reason for the interpretation of these works not as a blind repetition and reflection of these problematics, but as a kind of independent branch of these problematics.
The transgression between understanding and misunderstanding interpreted as the pleasure of the text was considered in Terence Cave's research as a liberation from reality's law via obtaining the power of authorship, which endorses the author with the ability to establish his own order [Cave 2002]. The overabundance of the text poses as its author's victory over reality, as his ability to suggest to his reader the «improved» variant of reality. According to Cave, the Renaissance literature keeps permanently in touch with the play of crossing borders between the reality and the text, shaping the whole expression of some oeuvre on this play and requiring the reader's involvement in this play as the main content of the text's pleasure. This borderline play is conceptualized by Cave as «sophistication»:
[…] the sophistication of the texts (in the Renaissance literature - N.K.) […] might give them a very different status. Aware of their own limits, exploiting their own duplicity, they outwit any attempt to domesticate them according to the conventions of orthodox criticism, and invite from their readers a reciprocal writing exercise [Ibid: 313].
The main outcome of this description is an unpredictable juxtaposition between the Renaissance literature and poststructuralist literary theory contemporary to Cave [Ibid]. Besides, this «sophisticated» play with the text's «duplicity» and «limits» means not just a conscious intermingling between text and reality, but also a contempt between them, when the «writing exercise» is interpreted as a writer's power and victory. For the «translation» of this concept from the language of poststructuralist theory to the language of the Renaissance literature, Cave refers to the 16th century's genre of cornucopia, or cornucopian text.
Cave considers cornucopia as a principle of plentitude and abundance understood as the main dignity of the text allowing its author to surpass the reality within the artificial reality that he creates. From this perspective, Cave interprets the famous oral metaphors in Rabelais: mouth and lips bear not only the functions of eating and drinking, but also the function of voice, of articulation and expression, representing the power of the words [Ibid: 183-270]. Erich Auerbach suggests a similar reading, when he comments on the image of the world in Pantagruel's mouth crossed by the travelers [Auerbach 1968: 262-284]. Auerbach interprets Rabelais' metaphors as «tasty» texts and the travel in the unknown lands inside the giant mouth as an act of a new land's revelation occurring not via geographical discovery, but via the language as a material for creation. Auerbach also sees the philosophical basis for Rabelais' images of «tasty» texts in the Socratic «midwife» method [Ibid: 282-283].
Cave's cornucopia has become a kind of Renaissance hypertext which combines textual misunderstanding as a contradiction with reality and textual overwhelming of reality. It is remarkable that this combination directly repeats Bathes' concept of the pleasure of the text as a release from the reality as the single order and the logic of consequence which it establishes. Barthes distinguishes the pleasure and the text as its most efficient implement and the most «revolutionary and asocial» activity, contraposing it to both «morality of truth» and «philosophy of meaning»:
Pleasure […] as a trivial, unworthy name (who today would call himself a hedonist with a straight face?), it can embarrass the text's return to morality, to truth: to the morality of truth: it is an oblique, a drag anchor, so to speak, without which the theory of the text would revert to a centered system, a philosophy of meaning. [Barthes 1975: 63].
From Barthes' statement we move to another classical work on the Renaissance literature which concerns the problem of deceit as an opposition to the truth and the meaning. Margaret McGowan in her book Montaigne's deceit [McGowan 1974] partly repeats Cave's presupposition. As usual, the 16th century's literature is contraposed to the whole specter of «post-Saussurean» problematics as the «pre-modern» literature to the modern, so to say, as the literal sense and translucence of the fiction to the modernists' experiments with the literary expression. Consequently, Montaigne, as a pivotal figure of French classical literature, becomes a direct antidote to the struggle by such authors as Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Proust against the literary norms and the classical canon and, consequently, to the structuralist and poststructuralist interpretation of the text, the word, and the literary expression. In spite of this literary history periodization, McGowan suggests another way of interpretation of Montaigne's texts and shows how far from the classical literary norms these texts were shaped.
McGowan proves, by painstakingly analyzing the Essays, that Montaigne had never truly used direct sense and the classical author's direct speech, prescribed to him by the context of the literary canon. Instead, according to McGowan, Montaigne used so-called «art of deceit and dissimulation». This definition means that in the Essays we perceive not the narrator's harangue but instead the artful tapestry of imaginative collisions, opinions, and variants of interpretations. McGowan states that this variance undermines the cogency of the author's suggestion and impacts on the reader not as ready-made arguments to be proven, but as a deceitful, inner-contradictive polyphony. McGowan's whole conclusion on Montaigne's writing coincides with Cave's one on the idea of cornucopia in the French Renaissance, providing the writing-reading experience as the conscious and liberating pleasure in misunderstanding.
One of the most important parts of McGowan's work is the investigation of the broad intellectual context of the Renaissance culture in quests of the reason for such a peculiar role of text and rhetoric. McGowan's conclusion on this issue seems to be very interesting in comparison with Barthes' theory. If the latter paraphrases the pleasant self-contradiction during the reading in the statement: «the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel» [Barthes 1975: 3], McGowan juxtaposes Montaigne's taste for deceit as the crucial element of language, rhetoric, and the text as the whole with the humanist culture's enchantment and perplexity with the idea of Babel and of the confounded languages:
God has allowed languages to multiply and, within the same language, interpretations to proliferate. Inadequacy of language is the biggest obstacle for Montaigne's self-confidence. How can he be sure that he has said what he wants to say in a way that cannot be misunderstood? His basic toll is a dangerous one and it is scarcely aided by Montaigne's changing temper, and the extraordinary diversity he perceives [McGowan 1974].
Similarly, considering Montaigne in a context of the Renaissance intellectual culture, which is interpreted as having a special propensity to the idea of misunderstanding, McGowan supposes Montaigne to be aware of the Essays as the philosophical method stick to the Socratic «midwife» method:
The method (of deceit and dissimulation - N.K.) becomes the philosophy. Neither Montaigne nor Socrates seem concerned to supply a new set of opinions for an outdated one, but rather to shake men out of their mindless assumptions, and to awaken them to genuine intellectual curiosity […] The way to become courageous is to find out what courage is; and such knowledge lies in the process of discovery. We have in the Essais, just as in some at least of the Dialogues of Plato, a blending of eloquence and philosophy <…> Their joining together had become a major subject of discussion for the Renaissance writers (my italics - N.K.). [Ibid: 162-163]
Consequently, in McGowan's interpretation, misunderstanding as a deceit in the Renaissance intellectual culture becomes the method of the «rhetorical» philosophy which makes misunderstanding a crucial methodological tool to achieve the polyphony of meanings.
Another researcher, Victoria Kahn, when dealing with Montaigne does not refer to the term «deceit», in contradistinction to McGowan. She uses the problem of taste as the crucial cognitive method in the Essays and describes this method in the same way as McGowan, as the influence of the Socratic method. For Kahn, the term «taste» expresses the role of individuality, empiricism, and description for the cognition in the Essays and simultaneously the problematization of the term «rhetoric» in the Renaissance culture. Kahn argues that the latter conjoins both the rhetoric as rules of speech, as the normativity of sense (Kahn associates this kind of rhetoric with the tradition of Seneca), and the rhetoric as taste which surpasses the general mode of thinking with the description of detail and its bizarreness:
Montaigne will then be seen to undermine the claims to universality of the judgment of taste by referring to the physical sense of taste, and to undermine the authority of this physical sense by developing a skeptical practice of writing, a practice which attempts to suspend the claims of common sense (my italics. - N.K.) [Kahn 1980: 1269-1270].
The similarity between the text as the implement of taste, as well as of the pleasure, and their common opposition to the text as normativity and «understanding» is literally spelled out in Kahn's article: «With this emphasis on the intrinsic goodness of the physical pleasure we have come a long way from Seneca's traditional reading of the metaphor of taste.» [Ibid: 1275] Consequently, not only «deceit», but also «taste», becomes the term for distinguishing the Renaissance textual practices as subtle and refined play on the reader's misunderstanding which substitutes the understanding (as a basic cognitive skill) with the polyphony of meanings and truths and undermines the very idea of «the morality of truth» and «the philosophy of meaning».
One of the most interesting examples of the conceptualization of such a polyphony in the Renaissance intellectual culture is Nancy Struever's concept of the rhetoric of modalities. According to Struever, the Renaissance and Baroque philosophy (before the extension of Cartesian rationalism) based its method not on the problem's reduction to an abstract formula or logical sentence, but instead on the idea of seizing in the same discourse the whole multiplicity of modalities in which this problem could be solved or interpreted. Struever's approach is quite peculiar because of the great importance for her whole conception of not only the Renaissance and Baroque authors (from Leonardo Bruni to Giambattista Vico), but also of 20th century philosophers. Following the idea of the language and rhetoric as a tool for designing of possibilities, modalities, and variants, Struever proves the similarity between the 16th -17th century rhetoric of modalities and the discourses on the language as possibility in Ludwig Wittgenstein's and Jaakko Hintikka's texts.
Meanwhile, Walter Benjamin is the most important author for the comparison with Barthes cited by Struever. Benjamin's concept of baroque allegory and comparison of this topic with the literature of modernism, first of all with Proust and Baudelaire, is a development of the pleasure of the text problem, which is highlighted by the issue of misunderstanding in the intellectual cultures of the Renaissance and Baroque. This development underpins the interpretation of the liberating power of the text as «the rhetoric of modality», or as a domain of the allowed misunderstanding and self-contradiction, which turns the text into an implement for the coexistence of different possibilities undermining the oneness of the reality and its established order.
Struever describes the whole idea of the rhetoric of modalities as «the principle of plentitude», which seems to be comparable with Cave's interpretation of «the principle of cornucopia.» The early modern idea of text as the true plenty of «hidden possibilities», which «lurk waiting to be realized» [Struever 2009: 10-11] continues and enhances in Struever's conception Barthes' interpretation of the pleasure of the text as the truly deconstructive and revolutionary force. To develop this comparison further we should refer to Gilles Deleuze's dealing with the problem of possibility and event, which is interpreted as the crucial point in Baroque. Using the concept of allegory as Benjamin did for seizing the main crux of the Renaissance and Baroque logic, Deleuze describes the latter as the following:
Sometimes we isolate, purify, or concentrate the object […] Sometimes, on the contrary, the object itself is broadened according to a whole network of natural relations. […] First, basic images tend to break their frames, form a continuous fresco, and join broader cycles […] because the pictured form […] is never an essence or an attribute, as in symbol, but an event […]. The many inscriptions and propositions […] is related to an individual subject who envelops it, and who allows himself or herself to be determined as the owner: allegory offers us Virtues, but these are not virtues in general (my italics - N.K.). [Deleuze 1993: 125].
This broadening of the object contraposed to a «purifying» and «general» mode of thinking and speaking about the object seems to have a lot in common with misunderstanding as a «rhetorical», or «discursive», in the terms of Struever and McGowan, philosophy which is contraposed to «the philosophy of meaning», in the terms of Barthes [Ibid: 126]. According to Deleuze, this philosophy acquires the form of «concetto»:
The concept became a «concetto», or an apex, because it is folded in the individual subject just as in the personal unity […]. Although practicians and theorists of concettism had rarely been philosophers, they developed rich materials for a new theory of the concept reconciled with the individual […]. The Baroque introduces a new kind of story in which […] description replaces the object […] the subject becomes point of view or subject of expression. (my italics - N.K.). [Ibid].
The Baroque genre of concettism in comparison with contemporary philosophy is a large issue which requires another article. However, according to Renate Lachmann's definition, the most important feature of this genre is the idea of acumen and wit interpreted as crucial for poetry:
In the acumen treatises of the 17th century the status of rules as a special form of rhetoric and poetics becomes problematical. In defining their conceptual and stylistic forms, the Concettists include instructions for generating such forms: they formulate rules for breaking rules. [Lachmann 1990: XXVII-III].
Alexander Parker's article continues Lachmann's logics: «Baroque Wit denotes the agility of the intellect, or liveliness of fancy, that could see remote relationships of ideas and objects, that could discern similarity in dissimilars, or unity in contradiction, or reality as paradoxical, and so on.» [Parker 1982: XXIII]. These two fragments seem to be sharing Deleuze's discourse on the Baroque fold in both broadening of the object and its conscious replacement with its description, because this object becomes too paradoxical to be seized in any consistent formula.
It is worth saying that Cave, describing the transgressive textual experience as crucial to the whole idea of the Renaissance cornucopian text, marks the fact that Montaigne turns out to be «a fold in his own text» as the main «transgressive» expression of The Essays [Cave 2002: 282]. This literal repetition of Deleuze's key term seems to be underscoring the logic common for all researchers who have been observed so far. This common logic consists of the transgression based on the play with misunderstanding, broadening, obscurity or with plenty of possibilities leading to a self-contradiction. Cave, McGowan, Kahn, and Struever consider, directly or indirectly, this transgression realized in the text as the most efficient alternative to both «morality of truth» and «philosophy of meaning», according to the Renaissance writers.
It is remarkable that one of the most important conditions for such a broadening of The Pleasure of the Text problematics is the coexistence of the term «text» with the term «rhetoric». The latter, despite its partly different context and strong association with the rules and with the classical canon becomes an independent branch of the question of misunderstanding as pleasure which consists in the transgression. The idea of early modern rhetoric as such a way of thinking which has a play with understanding and misunderstanding as its main tool underscores in The Pleasure of the Text the question of possibility and event, so to say, the most «revolutionary» aspect of Barthes' theory. Struever expresses it in her description of Benjamin's method (as the problem of rhetoric, not text), for whom the Renaissance and Baroque appear not only a source, but also a directly expropriated way of thinking: «Benjamin's work is the most subtly rhetorical of all; it performs in the domain of the marginal, fragile; it acts with the aim of continually stretching the competence of the reader to engage with others - other texts, images, readers. Benjamin cultivates our possibilitis.» (my italics. - N.K.). [Struever 2009: 87].
Struever determines as «humanistic anarchism» the whole Benjamin's method, based on the idea of text and rhetoric as the domain of liberating and revolutionary misunderstanding:
» Humanistic anarchism,» radical contestation of delusions of realism, […] belief in possibility as primary domain of operation generates particular habits of action in rhetorical inquiry […]. Benjamin's rhetorical capacities […] generate […] a taste for possibility works against hegemonous explanatory theories, excessive thematising […]. Benjamin […] is solely interested in literature and criticism as intervention, yet the modal status of the intervention is precisely what is at issue. [Ibid].
Therefore, the Renaissance and Baroque materials evince the link between the questions of text and rhetoric by dividing the problem of the pleasant misunderstanding as common for both of them. In addition, the conjunction of these two questions underscores the sense of hidden opportunities contraposed to the oneness of the real order of things, which the very crux of this pleasure and of its revolutionary force consists of. Consequently, the text and rhetoric couple interprets the pleasant misunderstanding as the «humanistic anarchism». It is not the text itself that becomes pivotal here, but the very political and revolutionary intention finds itself in the conscious misunderstanding of the border between language and reality. The Renaissance and Baroque in this logic are interpreted as cultures enormously aware of the possibilities this border has for the problems of power, order, and its contestation.
Another historiographical example which places misunderstanding in the center of the Renaissance culture is the problematics of Machiavellian virtщ. Described with a number of examples and certain advice to the prince, Machiavelli's conception keeps its evanescence because these examples and this advice frequently contradict each other. In this case, the problem of misunderstanding manifests itself in a way comparable to the abovementioned interpretation of Montaigne's The Essays as «the art of deceit and dissimulation». Indeed, Machiavellian politics as the art of deceit could be considered as a well-established common-place. However, for the problem of misunderstanding, the most important fact is that the interpretation of «Machiavellian deceit» as a «machiavellism» in its classical sense of cynicism and rejection of morality for pursuing political success coexists with the interpretation of «Machiavellian deceit» as a kind of political philosophy that turns out to be most topical for the postmodern culture, for instance, in Ankersmit's conception of the Aesthetic Politics [Ankersmit 1997].
Ankersmit describes Aesthetic Politics as contraposed to the political theory, to the essentialism of the everlasting political terms (as «State», «Society», «Community» etc.), and to the stoicism of the direct sticking to these terms in political practice. Considered as an example of the aesthetic politics, Machiavelli's The Prince becomes for Ankersmit the manifestation of the political action itself, deprived of the very idea of political theory and consisting of self-contradictive performativity. Consequently, the only theoretical approach possible in this case is the aesthetics which turns the art of politics into the problem of taste, determining a peculiar politician's reaction in a peculiar situation. Instead of theoretical complication leading to rigorousness, Machiavelli considered politics as a domain of the sublime experience. Although Ankersmit does not analyze his texts too scrupulously, there are several examples of research into Renaissance intellectual history which largely repeat the logic of Aesthetic Politics in the empirical materials.
The impact of the rhetorical and textual component on the whole political philosophy of Machiavelli was considered by Mauricio Viroli. He points out the interpenetration between political and literary action in the Renaissance, where the stylization was significant «because the material under discussion itself possessed magnificence and splendor» [Viroli 2013: 100] Interpreting Machiavelli's political method, Viroli concludes that, for the author of The Prince, political action was garbed in rhetorical and poetical expression. For Machiavelli, on the one hand, literary text and poetics were the key sources of inspiration, and, on the other hand, a tool for studying politics that avoids a loophole between political idealism and realism [Ibid: 42, 80, 88-89]. Consequently, virtщ as a concept becomes consciously self-contradictive and leading to misunderstanding, because in this concept the cognitive aim is not separated from the goal to «encourage man to act in such a way that they might […] attain an utmost divine status» [Ibid: 118]. It seems to be especially conspicuous in Viroli's conclusion about another kind of thematic interpenetration and interdependence among Machiavelli's texts. According to Viroli, the political discourse is densely dissipated among Machiavelli's private correspondence in which the reflection on what the politician's virtщ is becomes intermingled with the descriptions of Machiavelli's reading and erotic experience [Idem 2010: 65-70]. The poetical character of this intermingling reminds one of the term «sublime experience» crucial for Ankersmit. In accordance with this term, Machiavellian political activity and his private life becomes the single and inseparable field for the expression and elaboration of virtщ. It becomes especially remarkable when the erotic feeling is considered in his private letters as an ambiguous way for sublimity, because it affects as both encouraging and enfeebling. The reading of Titus Livy is also described by Machiavelli as a sublime experience, i.e. as his imaginative translocation in the ideal Republican Rome with its politics as the true expression of virtщ not restricted by tyranny or corrupt morals [Ibid]. In Viroli's interpretation, Machiavelli's life becomes a political experience because he fashioned himself as a politician, so that all his texts could be interpreted as broadened contemplation and rumination on political philosophy and on virtщ as its main element.