The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre

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The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and

the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre

Daniel Larlham

The Eighteenth Century, Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2012, pp. 432-454

(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2012.0039

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The Felt Truth o Mimetic Experience:

Motions o the Soul and the Kinetics o Passionin the Eighteenth-Century Theatre

Daniel LarlhamYale University

In the year 1717 the actor Jean Poisson became the rst proessional stage per-ormer in the French tradition to oer a ull-length manual on matters o tech-nique when his Rfexions sur lart de parler en public appeared on the shelves oParisian bookstalls.1 This relatively unknown treatise by a now-obscure actor

on acting, which rehashes established orthodoxies on stage declamation andwhich has never earned a place within the canon o acting theorys historicaltexts, now derives some interest rom its very typicality, its thorough steepingin the assumptions o its cultural moment. The Rfexions conclude with a pieceo Avis General that restates classical emotional doctrine in early eighteenth-century terms:

All the Rules o Cicero, o Quintilian, and o the Illustrious Moderns who have

been able to write on Declamation are useless to the Orator i he does not ol-

low the rst, which is to understand thoroughly what he is saying and to eel itstrongly himsel, in order to render it eelingly [sensible] to the Listener. When one

is touched [touch] in ones speech, Face, Voice and Gesture lend assistance and

conorm to ones interior movements [mouvemens interieurs] [sic], and i one has

any natural graces at all, through this alone, without much study, one can please

and persuade, which is the sole aim o Eloquence.2

The notion o being touched still circulates within our twenty-rst-centuryvocabulary o emotion, but the phrase interior movements strikes us with theorce o the alien. What could Poisson mean here? The answer lies in Poissonsootnote to the above passage, a quotation rom Ciceros rhetorical treatise DeOratore (55 BCE): Omnis motus animi suum quemdam a natura habet vultum &sonum & gestum [Each movement o the soul has rom nature a certain acial


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LARLHAMTHE FELT TRUTH OF MIMETIC EXPERIENCE 433

expression, sound, and gesture o its own].3 This brie citation hurtles us backacross almost two millennia and into sudden reckoning with the classical un-derstanding o emotion as motus animi: a literal motion o the soul, a pertur-bation o the psychic substance propagating through the body and producing

physiological changes in the organs, muscles, and other inner systems. Thispsycho-kinetic understanding o aect continued to carry authority through-out the medieval and into the early modern periods, when classical emotionaltheory was assimilated to Christian doctrine by Scholastic philosophers o thepassions. As late as the end o the eighteenth century, the French word motionstill carried a primarily kinetic import, signiying agitation, movement eitherin the body or in the soul [agitation, movement ou dans le corps ou dans lme].4

However, by the rst decades o the eighteenth century, the time o Pois-sons writing, the philosophy o the passions had undergone a sea-change,transormed by accounts o soul-body interaction supplied by a new intel-lectual movement: mechanism. At the center o the mechanistic view o thehuman world stood a body highly sensitized to the motive orces acting uponit rom without and highly attuned to the inner movements coursing throughita psychically and physiologically activated body, bound by sense and aectinto a network o relations with the world o objects and others. Less than hal acentury ater the appearance o Poissons treatise, the vision o an impassionedbody, subject to the impressions o both external objects and inner events and

capable o provoking aective experience in others through sudden, direct, andirresistible processes o contagion, had been thoroughly assimilated by bothchampions and critics o the eighteenth-century theatres unashamedly aec-tive mission.5

Eighteenth-century theories o acting translate a post-Cartesian episte-mology o aect into a kinetic model o the interpersonal dynamics o thetheatre event. By rst engaging with the ctional circumstances o his roleperhaps by summoning images impressed (imprim) within his memory orimaginationthe actor animates (sanime) or impassions (se passione) him-

sel. In other words, he generates in himsel those motions o the soul-bodycomposite that are the passions themselves, sometimes also reerred to as a-ections (aections) or sentiments (sentimens). These interior movements(mouvemens intrieurs), which now agitate (agite) the actors physical rame,spread through space and excite (excite) corresponding corporeal sensationswithin the assembled audience. The organic interactivity o the soul-body com-posite means that these sensations are also immediately elt as passions in thespectators souls. It is taken as natural and inevitable that when the actor genu-

inely abandons himsel (sabandonner) to the sequence o passions appropri-ate to his character, the assembled spectators will also surrender themselvesto a corresponding series o internal movements. As a result, the audience isliterallythat is, kinetically and kinestheticallytouched (touch), moved,(mu), or struck (rapp) by the actor s impassioned expressivity.


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434 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Joseph Roach has demonstrated the infuence o Cartesian physiology andthe doctrine o sensibility upon eighteenth-century theatrical theory; Angel-ica Goodden, Erec R. Koch, and Paul Goring have examined the bodily trans-mission o sentiment, or the physiology o persuasion in oratorical treatises

o the period; Shearer West has highlighted the connections between passiontheory, acting practice, and the visual arts in the age o Garrick and Kemble;William B. Worthen has explored the role o the impassioned actors gesturalexpressivity in catalyzing the sympathetic outbursts o emotion so character-istic o the eighteenth centurys sentimental theater; and Sabine Chaouchehas recently traced the dialectic between interior experience and exterior pre-sentation across eighteenth-century French acting theorys most signicanttexts.6 However, contemporary scholarship has yet to recognize ully the debto eighteenth-century theatrical theory to the classical and Scholastic philos-ophy o the passions. Such scholarship oten relies upon a crude dichotomybetween emotionalist and anti-emotionalist positions or its interpretativeramework, rather than examining how a culturally particular epistemologyo emotion-as-motion inorms theorizations o the actors art and o the actor-spectator relationship during the period.7

The rst concern o this study, then, will be to sketch a brie history o thekinetic dimension o passion theory rom classical Greece and Rome throughearly modern Scholasticism and into Cartesian and post-Cartesian mechanism.

My second objective will be to show how the model o a body kinetically acti-vated by sensation and aect impacts eighteenth-century theories o theatricalexperience. In this connection, I examine two key texts that exerted a powerulinfuence over eighteenth-century aesthetics: rst, Nicolas Malebranches Dela recherche de la vrit (1675), which renes, extends, and revises Descartesstreatment o the passions, and, second, the abb Jean-Baptiste Duboss Rfex-ions critiques sur la poesie et la peinture (1719), which applies a mix o Scholasticand Cartesian passion theory to the production and reception o artworks. Ithen shit ocus to Pierre Rmond de Sainte-Albines Le Comdien (1747), the

rst practical-theoretical treatise in the French language devoted entirely to theart o the theatrical perormer. Le Comdien represents the apex o infuence othe model o a kinetically aected-and-aecting body on eighteenth-centurydiscussions o acting practice. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, I willpropose that eighteenth-century perspectives on the body in perormance,careully rereshed, might hold enduring value or contemporary theatricalaesthetics.

Over the last two decades, a corporeal turn8 has been taking place across

the overlapping disciplines o psychology, philosophy o mind, cognitive sci-ence, consciousness studies, and aesthetics, driven by a deepened attentivenessto the role o the body in thought, emotion, intention, action, meaning-making,and intersubjective relation.9 O particular relevance to this studys concerns,empirical data and theoretical speculation surrounding the study o the brains


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mirror neuron system have inspired renewed arguments or the undamen-tal role o body-to-body synchronyor kinesthetic empathybetween per-ormer and spectator.10 Though eighteenth-century theatrical theorists neverquestion the classically derived doctrine that arts essential ontology and ulti-

mate objective ought to be the imitation o nature, reading their works withinthe ramework o then-current models o psycho-physiology reveals anotherkind o mimesis at the heart o the theatre event: the physiological symmetrybetween perorming and spectating bodies, aectively synchronized by pre-cisely corresponding fows o interior motive orce. In other words, or manyeighteenth-century theorists, the elt truth o theatrical perormance dependednot upon the interpretative comparison between onstage and ostage worlds,but upon the mimetic experience o passion, modeled by the actor and undergonevicariously by the spectator. An attentive reading o eighteenth-century theo-ries o theatrical experience (and their infuences in classical and early modernphilosophy) reveals that contemporary terms like kinesthetic empathy andembodied intersubjectivity represent only the most recent articulations o avery ancient and powerul idea.

It must be acknowledged that eighteenth-century acting theorys ocuson the aective and the corporeal over the contextual and the interpretativeis oten unsatisyingly limited. We need not subscribe wholesale to every as-pect o the periods theatrical aesthetics, however, to appreciate the continuing

relevance o the central conviction o this corpus o intensely kinetic mimetictheory: that the movement o aect through the perorming body, which setsspectating bodies into synchronous or reactive movement, ought to be recog-nized as a primary animator o theatrical experience.

THE PSYCHO-KINETICS OF PASSION FROMARISTOTLE TO DESCARTES

Even the brieest sketch o the philosophy o the passions long history must

begin with a return to the classical world.11 Ancient Greek thought understoodthe soul (psuch) to be the vital principle o living creatures, that which ani-mates or moves their material bodies. In the dialogue Phaedrus, or example,Plato describes the soul as the immortal, sel-moving ountain and beginningo motion or the human being.12 Greek philosophy held the soul responsibleor movement, thought, emotion, judgment, desire, perception, imagination,and even the basic processes o nutrition and digestion. Indeed, Aristotles Onthe Soul, passion theorys oundational text, treats each o the souls powers

nutrition, desire, sensation, locomotion, and thinkingas species o psychic mo-tion (kinsis), also maniested as movements o specic parts o the body (suchas the heart, the brain, or the eye).13 Within the hylomorphic ramework o Ar-istotelian thought, the souls movements are the ormal aspect o physiologicalchanges in the corporeal substance. In some cases, the soul initiates its motions;


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in others, external objects in the surrounding world impress themselves uponthe sensory organs, generating motions that nd their way through the bodilymedium to terminate at the soul.14

The Greek word that most closely corresponds to our present-day emo-

tion in terms o its general applicability waspathos, rom the verbpaskh, tosuer, to experience, or to undergo. Aristotle states that the soul experi-ences thepathnot in itsel but through the internal motions and disturbances othe bodily medium.15 For example, angers physiological component is markedby the heating o blood around the heart.16 In the Problems, Aristotle postulatesthat the language used to describe the physiological operations o the passionsis not simply metaphorical: when we describe anger boiling up, rising, orbeing stirred up, we are describing the eeling o blood and heat surgingupward toward the cardiac region.17 Under this account, the sensation o innermovement comprises an integral part o emotional experience.

Stoic philosophy and Galenic physiology would deeply infuence the de-velopment o passion theory over the ensuing centuries, and both schoolso thought relied upon a psycho-kinetic understanding o emotion as motusanimi.18 The Aristotelian paradigm reasserted itsel in the medieval periodwhen On the Soul was translated into Latin around the midpoint o the twelthcentury, eventually becoming the dominant text in medieval philosophy omind.19 Thomas Aquinass Summa Theologica (c. 122574) ollowed Aristotles

view in dening passion as a motion o the souls sensitive appetite. Aquinasalso bolstered the literalness o passion theorys motive terminology by apply-ing Aristotles natural philosophyin particular, his three-phase analysis o thekinsis o natural phenomena in the Physicsto psychic processes.20 Aquinasstwenty-seven quaestiones on the passions (Summa Theologica II.1, 2248), eventu-ally known as De passionibus animae, became the model or the vernacular traitdes passions o sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scholastic philosophy.21

The philosophy o the passions underwent radical reshaping by the swell-ing current o mechanistic thinking in the early to mid-seventeenth century.

The key gure in this transormation was, o course, Ren Descartes. ThoughDescartes presented his own account o the psycho-physiology o the passionsas an utter break rom all previous accounts,22 he retained the essentials o theAristotelian-Thomistic view, or he still regarded the passions as arising rominclinational and aversive movements o the soul.23 Descartess innovation,however, was to provide a minutely detailed, phase-by-phase account o thephysiological production o passion, as well as to situate his understanding othe internal dynamics o aect within a mechanistic universe governed by xed

laws o motion.For Descartes, the universe is a plenum, ull o homogenous matter, out owhich various substances dierentiate themselves on the basis o the size, shape,andmost cruciallythe motion o their particles. All the variety in matter, allthe diversity o its orms, depends on motion, Descartes argued in the Principia


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Philosophiae.24 Within the Cartesian universe, the vast distances between the stars,the expanses o the terrestrial world, and the physical spaces between humanbodies are teeming with invisible particles (corpuscles) in constant collisionalmovement. The motion o any body within such a universe requires the displace-

ment o the bodies surrounding it, generating waves o propagative infuence.For Descartes, the human organism was only one mechanical sub-system withina universe whose operations are sustained by the orce o material bodies act-ing upon one another.25 Descartess mechanistic account o bodily unctioningwas the most prominent model within the seventeenth centurys prolieration ophysiologies26 marked by an iatromechanist tendencythat is, by the attempt toapply models drawn rom physics and mathematics to corporeal processes. Thecentral principle o the iatromechanist position held that lie is movement andthe living beingeven the human beingis a machine.27

Descartess account o passion is explicitly mechano-physiological: in Lespassions de lme (1649), Descartes states that he will approach the soul-body in-teractions that produce passion as aphysicianthat is, as a mechanist physicist.He denes passions as perceptions, sentiments, or motions o the soul [percep-tions, ou des sentiments, ou des motions de lme], which are caused, maintained,and strengthened by certain movements o the [animal] spirits.28 The notion oanimal spiritspneuma psychikon in Greek, spiritus anima in Latin, esprits ani-maux in Frenchgoes back as ar as Greek Stoicism and Galenic physiology.29

Descartes, however, abolishes all historical vagueness rom this physiologicalhypothesis by denitively materializing the spirits: he conceives them as themost agitated [agites] and the most subtle particles o the blood,30 heated to astate o high excitation by the heart.31 The highly volatile animal spirits residein the cavities o the brain and course through the bodys system o nerves,serving as the medium o interaction between the brains pineal gland, primaryunctional seat o the soul, and the sensory organs and muscles.

Reviewing the vocabulary o passion handed down to him through Scho-lastic philosophy, Descartes suggests that passions can indeed be accurately

termed sentiments because they are received in the same way as the objects othe exterior senses, and they are not known by it [the soul] in any other way.32For Descartes, as or his Aristotelian-Thomistic predecessors, the term sentimentencompasses both sensation and aect. Passion is understood as a mode o sensa-tion, and passions impinge upon the soul in the same way that external objectsimpress themselves upon the senses by mechanical action. Descartes goes on toargue, however, that the best term or passion is in act motion:

But we can still better name them the motions o the soul [motions de lme], notonly because this name can be applied to all the changes that occur within it, that

is, to all the diverse thoughts that come to it, but particularly because, o all the

kinds o thoughts that it can have, there are no others that agitate it [lagitent] and

shake it [lbranlent] so strongly as do these passions.33


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Descartess passions are literally kinetic and physiologically intense events inthe inner lie o the human subject.

According to Descartes, passions may be excited in a variety o ways. First,passions may be aroused by external objects, which strike the senses, generat-

ing movements in the sensory organs. These movements travel via the animalspirits in the nerves and represent the objects o perception to the soul on thesurace o the brains pineal gland.34 I the soul holds a disposition toward aparticular object, one o the six principle passionswonder, love, hatred, de-sire, joy, and sadnessor some combination or variant thereo is excited. Theseexcitations o the soul act reciprocally on the body: the animal spirits conveyimpulses to the muscles and internal systems, setting the body into interiorand exterior movement.35 Passions are thus perceived or sensed in the soul butalso experienced in the body as movements o the animal spirits and the physi-ological alterations they produce. Passions can also be aroused by undirectedimaginings, by willul thought-processes o the soul, or even through purelycorporeal dispositions, when the body unctions as an aective automaton,without regulation by the intellect.36 Regardless o its source, however, Carte-sian passion always involves the transmission o motive impulses across mate-rial substrates within the corporeal machine.

Descartes thus presents a mechanistic account o the total integration oemotion and sensationopathos and aesthesis, in the terminology o Greek

philosophy. Indeed, Erec R. Koch locates in Descartess writings on physiol-ogy the most prominent site o the emergence o new model o the body asan aesthetic machine during the seventeenth century.37 Within the Cartesianphysiological system, writes Koch,

Sensibility and passion are stirred in the psyche by a orce, matter in motion, that

impresses itsel on the body and initiates a chain o causal physiological action

and reaction. . . . The body here is aesthetic, in its etymological sense, since its

physiological unctioning is directed toward the production o sensibility, that is,

to sensation and passion or aect.38

Moreover, the impassioned, aesthetically activated body that Descartes depictsin Les passions de lme grounds the human subject in the truth o experience.Descartes writes that we may conuse imaginations with perceptions, but onecannot be [deceived] in the same way when it comes to the passions, in thatthey are so close and so interior to our soul that it is impossible that it shouldeel them without their being truly such as it eels them.39 Within Cartesian

psycho-physiology, there can be no such thing as a alse passion, and the soulsexperience o aective movements becomes a mode o sel-knowing throughthe resources o the body. Or, as Koch puts it, the sensory, kinesthetic, and a-ective capacities o the Cartesian machine allow access to a truth o the bodyand sensation.40


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SENTIMENT INTRIEUR AND PASSIONATECONTAGIONIN MALEBRANCHE

The most important gure in the deense, extension, and revision o Cartesian

philosophy in the latter hal o the seventeenth century was the oratorian Nico-las Malebranche (16381715), who corresponded with Gottried Wilhelm Leib-niz, quarreled bitterly with Antoine Arnauld, and infuenced Bishop Berkeley,David Hume, and John Locke. De la recherche de la vrit (1675), Malebranchesmost infuential work, lays out the most amousand controversialaspectso his philosophy: his theory o occasionalism and his doctrine o the visionin God.41 Malebranche also devotes the entirety o one oDe la recherches sixbooks to the subject o the passions and, in several scattered but provocativepassages, provides a mechanistic model o passionate contagion (contagion)atheme that Descartes himsel never developed at length. It is to these passagesI now turn.

Having presented a thoroughly Cartesian view o sense and imaginationin the opening books oDe la recherche, Malebranche begins Book V with anequally Cartesian denition o passion: I here call passions all the motions[motions] that the soul eels naturally on occasion o the extraordinary move-ments o the animal spirits and o the blood.42 As Book V continues, motionsensible (sensible motion, or sensed motion) becomes a central term or

Malebranche, reerring to the sensation o reciprocal interaction between bodyand soul, when the soul eels itsel moved by the physiological alterations ac-companying passion. Another o Malebranches keywords is sentiment, whichwould best be translated by some synthesis o the English terms sense, sen-sation, and sentiment. There are two species osentiment: the rst involvespurely intellectual (intellectuelle) perceptions o passion, while the secondincludes the physiologically vivid experience o the dierent disturbances(branlements; literally, shakings) that the animal spirits cause in the brain andbody.43 Within Malebranchian thought, sentiment unctions as a mechanism o

natural judgment that endow[s] sensation with epistemic value,44 a corpore-ally grounded mode o sel-knowing.45

Malebranche asserts, ollowing Descartes (and Cicero), that each passionnaturally maniests itsel in a specic physical posture and acial expression.46A greater concern or Malebranche than the production o passion in the indi-vidual, however, is the role o aective contagion in society. For Malebranche,the divine creator has chosen to to link all His creatures with one another byendowing human beings with a disposition to imitate others in all things.47

For Malebranche, instinctive compassion, conscious emulation, and emotionalcontagion all nd their source in the imitative-aective disposition. When anindividual lacks this inclination, states Malebranche, he is by his nature inca-pable o binding himsel to us, and omaking up the same body with us [empha-sis added].48


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The capacity or passionate contagion depends both upon imitative mecha-nisms (ressorts) in the brain as well as the mutual correspondence (mutuellecorrespondance) between human bodies49in particular, the way in which themovement o animal spirits through the bodies o others inevitably provokes a

corresponding fow in our own. Malebranche writes that

not only do the animal spirits propagate naturally into the parts o our bodies in

order to carry out the same actions and the same movements that we see carried

out by others, but also to undergo in some way their injuries and to take part in

their miseries. . . . This transport o spirits into the parts o our bodies that cor-

respond to those we see injured in others makes itsel elt particularly in delicate

persons, who have a vivid imagination and very tender and sot fesh.50

For Malebranche as or Descartes, the imagination is a physical aculty; theintentional-and-aective synchrony he here describes is also prooundly kines-thetic and corporeal, depending on the structural symmetry o human bodies.Malebranches account o the compassion in bodies [that] produces a compas-sion in minds51 resonates strikingly with contemporary mirror neuron theory,though Malebranches understanding o kinesthetic empathy relies upon avery dierent physiological mechanism: the spontaneously coordinated move-ments o animal spirits through the bodys internal pathways (rather than mir-

ror-matched neural activation-patterns and submotor impulses).52

As the magnitude o an individuals passionate experience increases, sodoes its tendency toward propagation. Malebranche states that emotionalcontagion is even greater and more remarkable when the passions are moreviolent, because then the animal spirits are agitated [agits] with more orce.53What is more, those individuals possessing a strong imagination, which Mal-ebranche denes as a disposition o the brain or receiving very deep traces[traces] rom the weakest and least active objects,54 tend to dominate theimaginations o others and impress upon them their own sensory traces.55

This endows the possessors o vivid imaginations with a persuasive capacitythat is essentially physiological rather than rhetorical:

Those who imagine things strongly express them with great orce, and persuade

all those who are convinced by them by their air [i.e., acial and postural expres-

sion] and by sensible impression [impression sensible] rather than by the orce o

their arguments. For the brain o those who have a strong imagination, receives, as

has been said, these deep traces [traces] o the subjects that they imagine, and these

traces are naturally ollowed by a great motion [motion] o the spirits, which ina manner prompt and lively disposes their entire body to express their thoughts.

Thus the air o their ace, the tone o their voice, and their mode o speech, animat-

ing [animant] their expressions, prepares those listening and watching to come to

attention, and to receive mechanically the impression o the image which agitates


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them [recevoir machinalement limpression de limage qui les agite]. For, in short, a man

who is penetrated [pntr] by that which he speaks usually penetrates others with

it; an impassioned [passionn] man always moves [meut] others, and though his

rhetoric be irregular, it never ceases to be very persuasive, because his air and his

manner make themselves elt, and thus agitate [agissent] the imagination o menmore vividly than the strongest speeches pronounced in cold blood, because these

speeches do not fatter their senses and do not strike [rappent] their imagination.56

The mechanism or contagion that Malebranche here describes can be clariedby drawing upon his overall physiology: 1) in the process o imagining, physi-cal traces in the surace o the brain-matter originally made by the impressionso external objects are re-opened; 2) animal spirits fow through these traces,maniesting mental images to the imagination; 3) these images stir passionsand the corresponding movements o the animal spirits, which produce vocaland physical expressions; 4) the motive waves o infuence generated by theimaginers body and voice propagate through space and impress themselvesupon the sensory organs o the beholder; 5) these impressions agitate the ani-mal spirits in the beholders nerves, which rush to his brain, there imprintingimagery corresponding to that in the mind o the imaginer; and 6) this imageryprovokes a corresponding passion in the beholders soul, which maniests itselphysiologically through the fow o animal spirits away rom the brain and

toward the muscles and circulatory system.In sum, Malebranches psycho-physiological mimesis o passion proceedsvia a mechanical chain o action and reaction. Motive fows o aect producewaves o expression and impression, linking individual bodies into the socialcorpus. As we shall see, Malebranches portrait o the preternaturally imagina-tive and expressively animated individual oreshadows depictions o the idealstage perormer in the acting theory o the ollowing century.

THE AESTHETICS OF PASSION: DUBOSS RFLEXIONSNeither Descartes nor Malebranche showed anything more than a passing in-terest in artistic phenomena, but the Cartesian physiology o passion was tomake a rapid incursion into the proto-aesthetic theory o the late seventeenthand early eighteenth centuries. Perhaps the most infuential site o impact wasthe abb Jean-Baptiste Duboss Rfexions critiques sur la posie et la peinture(1719). The ambitious, sprawling Rfexions treat a number o subjects over thecourse o their three-hundred pages: poetry, painting, sculpture, music, drama,

acting, dance, and the nature o genius. Most relevant to the concerns o thisstudy is Duboss theorization o the role o aect within aesthetic experienceand appraisal. In this connection, Duboss debt to Descartes, whom he hails asthe ather o the new philosophy,57 is abundantly clear throughout the trea-tise. Dubos also seems to have been directly infuenced by Malebranches the-


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ory osentiment,58 and possibly by the sensationism o Lockes Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding (1690), whose translation into French Dubos acilitated.Whatever exact constellation o infuences lies behind Duboss thinking, theRfexions usher the aesthetic body o seventeenth-century mechanical phys-

iologya body impassioned by sensory experienceinto the realm o artisticproduction and reception.

The Rfexions open by arguing that human beings are drawn toward theperorming and plastic arts primarily or their physiologically enlivening e-ects. Engagement with artworks sets in movement the [animal] spirits, whichtend to become sluggish, thereby re-invigorating the imagination. For Dubos,the appeal held by aesthetic experience is a sub-species o the more general at-traction that the movements o the passions have or men. Dubos argues thathumankind is so addicted to the enlivening eects o passionate movementthat we preer a tumultuous lie o agitation (agitation) to a tranquil one: menin general suer even more rom living without passions than the passions canmake them suer.59 For this reason, all objects o artistic imitation are not equal:the subjects best suited to arousing passion are the most vivacious, energetic,and aectively charged aspects o human experience.60

Duboss anti-Stoicand, or that matter, anti-Platonicposition on the salu-tary eects o aesthetic invigoration points toward a conviction underlying theRfexions: that aesthetic experience exists on an absolute continuum with lived

experience. This position coexistsunproblematically or Dubos, but uneas-ily or a contemporary readerwith the then-prevailing artistic doctrine o theimitation o nature. Dubos reconciles his mimetic assumptions with the aec-tive thrust o his aesthetics through his theory o articial passions (passionsarticielles). According to Dubos, an artistic imitation must excite in our soul apassion that resembles that which the imitated object would have been able toexcite. The copy [copie] o the object must, in other words, excite in us a copy othe passion that the object would have excited.61 Here a mimetic relationshipbetween the real and true passions (passions relles et veritables)62 experienced

in lie and the articial passions experienced under aesthetically producedconditions takes theoretical precedence over the verisimilar correspondencebetween the artistically rendered object and its real-world counterpart. Inother words, the imitation o worldly phenomena serves primarily as a meanstoward the aesthetic production o passion, which the receiver undergoes as akind o mimetic experience.

Dubos continues his analysis o the power that imitations have over uswhen takes up the theme o the natural sensibility [sensibilit] o the human

heart and its disposition to be easily moved [mu]. Following Malebranche,Dubos asserts that human beings have been ormed with an instinctive capac-ity to share in the agitation (agitation) o all those we encounter: The tearso a stranger move [meuvent] us even beore we know the cause o his weep-ing. . . . He who approaches us with joy painted upon his ace excites [excite] in


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us a sentiment [sentiment] o joy beore we know its cause.63 Duboss positionon the direct, non-deliberative nature o empathic connection is an extreme one:no context o understanding or previous relationship is necessary or a humansubject to be moved by another. Rather, the exterior symptoms o impassioned

individuals act directly upon the sensibly receptive bodies o those they ap-proach, producing sentimental contagion.

Dubos turns immediately to acting to illustrate how his theory o contagionmight apply to aesthetic phenomena. According to Dubos, the very same in-stinct that would make us weep at a mother grieving over her dead son elicitsour empathic response to the theatrical presentation o a similar scene.64 Dubos,simultaneously invoking the classical orthodoxy o Quintilian and Horace andthe Cartesian physiology o emotion, states that actors who truly impassionthemselves [se passionnent veritablement] never ail to move their audiences, ormen who are themselves touched [touchez] touch us without diculty.65 ForDubos, it is the agitation o an actor that causes us to take pleasure in listeningto him speak,66 and the very same physiological mechanism that aectivelybinds together human beings within the world o lived experience also con-nects them with one another in the theatre. Moreover, Dubos dismisses outrightthe commonplace notion that theatrical pleasure depends upon deceptive ap-pearance and instead argues that the spectator receives a direct, physiologicalimpression o passion without his understanding being corrupted.67

Duboss passion theory lays the basis or the most well-known and histori-cally infuential idea put orward by the Rfexions: that aesthetic appraisal con-sists in direct, immediate, sensorially based appreciation rather than refectiveor comparative judgment. Dubos argues that we judge the artistic imitations otouching objects (objects touchans) by means o what we might today call anaesthetic sense:

When it comes to knowing i the imitation that we are presented with in a poem or

in the composition o a painting is capable o exciting compassion or o touching

[attendrir] us, the sense designed or judging is the same sense that would havebeen touched [attendri] i we would have judged the imitated object [itsel]. It is

this sixth sense that lies within us, without our seeing its organs. It is the part o

ourselves that judges based on the impression that it eels [qui juge sur limpression

quelle ressent]. . . . It is, in sum, that which we generally call sentiment [sentiment].

The heart is agitated in itsel and by a movement that precedes all deliberation [un

mouvement qui precede toute deliberation] when the object presented is really a touch-

ing object [object touchant], whether this object has received its being rom nature

or whether it holds its existence as an imitation that art has made.68

For Dubos, a sense o artistic truthulness comes upon an artworks beholderas a sudden apprehension (apprehension), which involves attending to theimpact o artistic objects on ones corporeal being by means o the sensitiv-


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ity supplied by inner sentiment. Dubos argues that reason(raison) should notintervene at all in the process o aesthetic apperception, unless retrospectively,to clariy the causes o our appreciation or antipathy. The Rfexions thus trans-orm Malebranches sentiment intrieur into a mode o embodied cognition that

is equally reliable when attuned to the aective responses produced by art-works or to those provoked by the contingencies o daily lie.

Erika Fischer-Lichte has argued that an aesthetics o eect governedseventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinking about perormance, only to re-cede when the postulate o the autonomy o art rose to precedence at the turno nineteenth century.69 We might just as easily call the eighteenth centurysaesthetics o eect an aective aesthetics, or the excitation o passionate move-ments was regarded as the prime means by which the perorming, visual, andmusical arts could transorm the bodies and minds o their receivers. DubossRfexions were a major orceperhaps the major orcein setting this aectiveand eective proto-aesthetics on its uture course. Although the overwhelm-ing emphasis on emotion over interpretation in Duboss philosophy o art mayleave the contemporary theorist o perormance with grave reservations, thecentral principles o his aesthetics hold continued suggestiveness. While re-garding artworks as imitations o natural objects, Dubos suggests that theirverisimilar signicance is not what strikes us most powerully. Rather, it is theenlivening aspect o aesthetic experience, the aspect that eelsnot looks

like lie that draws us to engage again and again with perormances and plas-tic works. Applied to the art o the theatre, this view would suggest that thetruth or naturalness o theatrical perormance derives not rom a consciouscomparison o copy with original, but upon whether or not an actors onstagedoingsand the aective currents that animate themmove through us, asaudience members, in a way that eels truthul. Under this view, aesthetic ap-prehension, even when it veers toward conscious assessment, cannot be disen-tangled rom the kinesthetic and aective dimensions o spectatorship.

AFFECTIVE EFFICACY AND MIMETIC PERFECTION:ACTING IN THE THEATRE OF SENTIMENT

I now shit ocus away rom philosophy and proto-aesthetics toward texts oacting theory proper, in which the aesthetically activated, aectively eectivebody o the perormer takes center stage. Acting theory as a modern conversa-tion is born out o the spirit o rhetoric in mid-eighteenth century France. Sincethe classical period, the passionately persuasive physicality o the orator and

the histrionically expressive body o the actor had been twinned in discussionso perormance practice. The direct and instantaneous transer o aect romorator to auditor, a oundational assumption o classical rhetorical theory, wasre-articulated during the seventeenth century within a post-Thomistic psycho-physiology o passion. Under the resulting view, the interior movements o


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genuine passion agitating a speakers soul and body would naturally propa-gate across the materially suused space between pulpit, bar, or stage and audi-ence, inciting the very same motions in the bodies and souls o those listening.Thus arose what Roach has dubbed the rhetoric o the passions,70 a theory o

perormative persuasion that valorized above all the speakers ability to deploythe emotionally driven resources o actio (vocal and physical expressivity) inullling the rhetorical objective omovere: to move the auditor in mind, body,and soul. In short, mechanistic thought endowed the orator with the power toact directly, orceully, and persuasively upon the physiology o the listener.71

Acting theory in eighteenth-century France breaks ree o oratorical dis-course with Pierre Rmond de Sainte-Albines Le Comdien (1747). Sainte-Albine,a sometime dramatist, contributor to the Gazette de France, and editor-in-chie otheMercure de France, is best known to posterity through his brie appearance inDiderots Paradoxe sur le comdien. Diderot dismisses him as the middling mano letters who sparked a debate over the authenticity o actorly emotion bywading out o his depth into unamiliar theoretical waters.72 However, Sainte-Albines contribution deserves reappraisal: infuenced by the proto-aestheticso Dubos and the sensationisme o Condillac, Le Comdien moves acting theorybeyond the declamatory paradigm and harmonizes it with the developingeighteenth-century discourse o corporeal sentimentalism.73

For Sainte-Albine, the actor holds a twoold responsibility: to deceive

(tromper) the minds and to move (mouvoir) the hearts o audience members.For Sainte-Albine, the actors art o impassioning himsel (se passioner) de-mands the git o bending his soul to contrary impressions [impressions con-traires] in order to generate contrasting passions in the sequence required bythe dramatist. Sainte-Albine declares the necessity o sentiment in the actorand orwards the classical principle that on the stage one only expresses apassion imperectly i one does not eel it eectively.74 Eective eeling neces-sitates that actors abandon themselves to the movements [sabandonner auxmouvemens] that their [ctional] situations require.75 The actors sel-surrender

to impassioned movement catalyzes a reciprocal, irresistible, and unrefectiveprocess in the spectator: at a tragic perormance, writes Sainte-Albine, weabandon ourselves to the movements which the actor excites [On sabandonneaux mouvemens que le Comdien excite].76

Sainte-Albine denes sentiment, in actors, as the acility o having the di-verse passions to which man is susceptible succeed within their souls.77 ForSainte-Albine, sentiment is the most crucial attribute in the actors makeup, oneor which intellect or study cannot compensate. He endows sentiment with a

physiological basis, stating that the capacity is generally designated underthe name o Entrails [Entrailles].78 Moved by passion, Sainte-Albines actoremploys agitation o the expression to broadcast sentiment throughout theaudience. Actors who possess sentiment are Sovereigns, who rule in total mas-tery over our souls; they are enchanters, who know how to lend sensibility


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[sensibilit] to the most insensible beings.79 In other words, such perormers arecapable o activating within others, at least momentarily, a physiological capac-ity or heightened aective experience similar to their own.

Though an argument or the necessity o genuine histrionic emotion occu-

pies a central place in Le Comdien, Sainte-Albine also supplies a complementarytheory o theatrical representation that assaults Platos longstanding ontologicalargument against poetic perormance. Sainte-Albine argues that painting bringsbeore our eyes only simple appearances and phantoms [phantmes] insteado real objects, while theatrical playing lends speech and action to the beingsit births. Painting can only represent events, Sainte-Albine states; The Actor,in a way, reproduces them.80 Directly reuting the account o imagistic mimesisprovided in Republic X, Saint-Albine argues that dramatic poets are not in actthe paradigmatic producers o unreal objects but the reproductive engendererso actual beings. Furthermore, the theatre is the most potent o all imitative arts,because the live presence o the actor requires o us no [imaginative] supple-ment.81 Dramatists and actors are indeed imitators o the highest order withinSainte-Albines aesthetic ramework, but this assessment comes as commenda-tion rather than criticism. Saint-Albine celebrates the theatres imitative reality.

Continuing in an anti-Platonic vein, Saint-Albine presents the totality o the-atrical illusion as something to be celebrated and pursued rather than rejected.Preacing himsel by reminding his reader that theatrical Spectacle draws all

o its charms rom imitation, Sainte-Albine exhorts actors aspire to make theirRepresentation a total truth, or it is not sucient that its ctions appearto us to resemble the events o which they are the image, . . . we want to be ableto persuade ourselves that the events themselves, and the principal actors inthese events, are present to our eyes.82 At rst, Sainte-Albine seems to cham-pion a verisimilar ideal when he denes theatrical Truth as the concurrenceo appearances, which can serve to deceive [tromper] the Spectators.83 How-ever, it soon becomes clear that, or Sainte-Albine, the truth o Representationdepends entirely upon the actors emotional engagement.

In order to present a true image o the character with which he has beencharged, Sainte-Albines actor must aithully paint the passion appropriateto the character o whom he undertakes to be the copy [tre la copie].84 Sainte-Albine warns that when one does not eel [prouver] the movements that oneintends to make appear, one presents to us only an imperect image o them,and art can never substitute or Sentiment. As soon as an Actor lacks this qual-ity . . . He is as ar rom his character as a mask is rom a ace. Sainte-Albinesdouble imperativesto move and to deceiveare inextricably entangled: rom

the audiences perspective, actors create illusion by making us eel thosemovements that must agitate [agiter] us.85 Sainte-Albines ideals o total illu-sion and mimetic perection depend less on verisimilitude than on the aectiveecacy o the perormer. The actors true eeling automatically and inevitablygives rise to mimetic precision, equated with total deception.86


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How is the actors sel-impassioning to be achieved? Through an act o sel-delusion, Sainte-Albine proposes, analogous to the actors deceiving o theaudience:

Do Tragic Actors want us to partake in illusion? They must partake in it them-selves. They must imagine themselves to be, so that they eectively are what they

represent and a happy delirium [heureux dlire] persuades them that they are those

who are betrayed, persecuted. This mistaking [erreur] must pass through their

minds and their hearts, and on several occasions a eigned misortune must extract

rom them true tears.87

Once the happy delirium has been achieved and the actor is infamed (ir-rit) and touched (attendri) by the impressions (impressions) made upon himby the imaginative situation o the character, passion will paint itsel with-out eort in [the actors] eyes, maniesting itsel without conscious control.The actor who attempts to simulate passionate experience through calculatedmeans, however, will immediately betray the orced state o [his] interior andwill sooner resemble an invalid wracked by some strange ever than a managitated [agit] by an ordinary passion.88 The paradox o Sainte-Albines actor,then, is that in order to present a perect mimetic imageto be the copy othe character he is charged with embodyinghe must orswear the conscious,

artul construction o stage-images. Instead, he must enter into an ideal state oimpassioned immersion in the situation o his character. The resultant embod-ied eeling will produce theatrical truth with an irresistible mimetic necessity.

BEYOND SENSIBILIT:DIDEROT AND THE DISSAPEARANCE OF

THE IMPASSIONED BODY

As had already been stated, Sainte-Albines Le Comdien represents the mecha-

nistically impassioned bodys site o deepest impact upon the theory o thetheatrical perormer. As is now well-known to scholarship, the central tenets oSainte-Albines treatise were translated into English and thoroughly re-workedby the practicing doctor and sometime theatrical theorist John Hill as The Actor(written 1750, revised 1755). Hills text was then reely re-translated into Frenchby the actor Antonio Fabio Sticotti as Garrick, ou les acteurs anglois (1769), whichprovoked Diderots reutation o emotionalism in the Paradoxe sur le comdien(written c. 1773, published posthumously in 1830).89 With iconoclastic jubi-

lance, Diderots dialogue overturns the orthodoxy that the actor must possessheightened sensibilitnervous susceptibility to emotional excitationin orderto move his audience. Diderot argues the very opposite: that sensibilit incapaci-tates the actor, robbing him o his ability to deliver a controlled and composedperormance. Diderots consummate perormer is an unmoved mover, capable


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o provoking waves o aective response in his audience while remaining un-shaken by the perturbations o passion.

The above is the Paradoxes primary argument. However, in dismissing theconsensus view on the actors genuine eeling, Diderot also dissolves the a-

ective basis o preceding theories o theatrical mimesis. He must thereore re-dene the nature o actorly imitation and does so with his notion o the modleidal (ideal model): a ully rendered conception o the role created in the ac-tors imagination in advance o its embodied actualization. Like Platos car-penter in Republic X, the actor o genius develops his individual perormancethrough constant imitation o this modle idal, so that when he arrives on-stage, aithully copying o himsel and the eects he has arrived at duringhis period o study, he can turn out a perormance with unailing mimetic per-ection.90 The Paradoxe thus reconceives the ontology o theatrical perormanceby speciying how the art o acting might be properly described as the imitationo (an imaginatively idealized) nature. Diderots chie concern, however, is con-ceptual completeness, not phenomenological precision. Posited as a technicaldevice employed by actors, the modle idal is, in act, a purely theoretical con-struct, developed at a philosophical remove rom the actuality o perormancepractice and orceully imported into the actors consciousness.

Bodies are conspicuously absent rom the Paradoxe. At times the dialogueshomme sensible is plagued by corporeal phenomenaa heaving diaphragm,

trembling nerves, inopportune bursts o weepingbut even these appearanceso the body are rare. The perorming body thrown into expressive movementby internal fows o aect, which has held center stage in the Paradoxes precur-sor texts, has disappeared. It is replaced by a conusingly abstract entity, abri-cated by Diderot to complete his theory o the actors mimesis: Diderot writesthat the actor shuts himsel up in a great wicker mannequin o which he is thesoul, and that the actor manipulates this apparatus like children who imitatea rightening phantom (antme).91 Like a homunculus puppeteer, the coldand tranquil spectator residing within Diderots insensible actor has become

the motive principle o a hollow acting machine whose surace is constructedor the display osymptms extrieurs (exterior symptoms).92 The passionatelymoved and aesthetically striking body has been spirited out o the Paradoxestheoretical universe. Let in its place is a wickerwork puppet ashioned ater aphantasmic model, into which the actor must disappear in order to make anappearance.

* * *

The alienation o the actor rom his body inaugurated by Diderots Paradoxe hasheld an enduring infuence over acting theory. Around then de sicle, the cel-ebrated French actor Constant Coquelin renewed Diderots orceul analogiz-ing o the actors body with the mimetic media o the plastic arts and his notion


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that artistic creation occurred not in the act o doing but in the conception o animaginative ideal.93 This representationalist-imagistic conception o acting stillinorms many more contemporary theories o perormance. Even a committedphenomenologist like Jean-Paul Sartre, engaging with Diderot, argued that the

actor uses his own ego as an analogon or the maniestation o the imago ohis character. Sartres actor is unrealized as he sacrices himsel to the ex-istence o an appearance and becomes a medium or nonbeing [emphasis inoriginal].94 More recently, theatre semiotics, with its essentially mimetic schemao signier, signied, and reerent, has been apt to conceive o the theatre as animagistic-iconic medium in which human actors convey images o humanbeings imprinted on human bodies.95 Finally, though perormance studies hasdone much to highlight the role o embodiment in perormance practice, mucho the disciplines anti-mimetic impulse is, ironically i not paradoxically, ueledby mimeticist assumptions about the traditional theatres supposedly charac-teristic mode o representation-as-reproduction.

When it comes to the art o the actor, talk o copies and originals, o man-nequins and ideal models, and o the perorming body as a medium or repre-sentation is chiefy metaphorical. Mimetic theories, based as they are in rigidschemata o one-to-one correspondence, oten mistake or realities the imagosand analogons they generate in the realm o theoretical discoursethe onlyrealm in which a living, breathing, thinking, eeling, acting human being can

become a medium or nonbeing. For all their unexamined assumptions,critical blind spots, and rhetorical indulgences, eighteenth-century theories othe perormer beore Diderots intervention hold one great virtue: even whenassuming an ontology o imitation, they keep the aectively charged rela-tion between the perorming body o the actor and the apprehending bodyo the spectator as the oundation o theatrical reality. The basic principles oeighteenth-century thinkers like Dubos and Sainte-Albine accord well withcontemporary critics like Michael Goldman who argue that the theatres realismis not re-presentation o reality but, rather, a orm o reality itsel, embed-

ded in the real lie taking place beyond the boundaries o the perormancevenue.96 Eighteenth-century certainties about the radical continuity betweenlived experience and theatrical experience can help us appreciate that we goto the theatre to be enlivenedthat is, to live through the emotions, expressivemovements, and transitions o thought and intention we apprehend passingthrough perorming bodiesrather than to see lie represented, depicted,portrayed, or imitated.

The movement-based epistemologies o aect covered in this study can serve

an eort to re-embody theatrical aesthetics by reminding us that we monitorour emotions, principally, by attending to their physical symptoms. Our holisticawareness o subjectively experienced bodily states (what psychologists some-times call coenaesthesia or coenaesthesis) is oten dominated by a sensation ointernal motion. In other words, we experience emotions kinestheticallyas


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heavings o the diaphragm, poundings o the heart, contractions in the chest,roilings o the viscera, and thrills that race along the skin-suraceand thesensation o these mouvemens intrieures supplies an essential dimension o ourengagement with aesthetic phenomena. I we bracket o such meaningully

aective experiences as unworthy o interest or impossible to describe, we riskcontributing to an apathetic critical discourse out o touch with the truth othe body and sensation. Such a mode o discourse, unmoored rom corporealgrounding, risks ascension into an Intelligible Realm o conceptual antasy,where models, mannequins, and imagos gleam with cold ideality.

NOTES

1. Jean Poisson was the younger son o Raymond Poisson and Victoire Gurin, cel-

ebrated actors at the Htel de Bourgogne during the latter decades o the seventeenthcentury. Less renowned than his brother Paul (known as Poissonls), Jean Poisson madehis debut at the Comdie-Franaise in 1694 and retired rom the stage in 1710. AllisonGrear has called Poissons Rfexions the rst study o the psychology o acting in Eu-rope (A Background to Diderots Paradoxe sur le comdien, Forum or Modern LanguageStudies 21, no. 3 [1985]: 22538, 232), and Sabine Chaouche has emphasized the treatisessignicance in accelerating acting theorys break rom oratorical theory (Sept traits sur le

jeu du comdien et autres texts: De laction oratoire lart dramatique (16571750), ed., Cha-ouche [Paris, 2001], 38396).

2. Poisson, Rfexions sur lart de parler en public (1717), 34. All translations are mine,unless otherwise indicated.

3. Poisson, 34.4. Jean-Franois Fraud, Dictionaire critique de la langue ranaise (178788).5. William B. Worthen, The Idea o the Actor: Drama and the Ethics o Perormance (Prince-

ton, 1984), 73.6. Joseph Roach, The Players Passion: Studies in the Science o Acting (Ann Arbor, 1996);

Angelica Goodden,Actio and Persuasion: Dramatic Perormance in Eighteenth-Century France(Oxord, 1986), 33; Erec R. Koch, The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality inSeventeenth-Century France (Newark, Del., 2008); Paul Goring, The Rhetoric o Sensibility inEighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, 2005); Shearer West, The Image o the Actor: Verbaland Visual Representation in the Age o Garrick and Kemble (New York, 1991); Worthen; and

Chaouche, La philosophie de lacteur: la dialectique de lintrieur et de lextrieur dans les critssur lart thtral ranais, 17381801 (Paris, 2007).7. These terms belong to the English critic and dramatist William Archer, whose ret-

rospective analysis o eighteenth-century acting treatises in Masks or Faces? (1888) stillexerts a considerable infuence over theatre scholarships consensus knowledge o this

body o theory. The intertextual spine o the emotionalist/anti-emotionalist debate iscapably traced by Grear (22538). See also Edward Duerr, The Length and Depth o Acting(New York, 1962), 21468.

8. The phrase corporeal turn belongs to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, though I use ithere to describe a burgeoning interdisciplinary trend rather than to promote a still incho-ate philosophical project, as did Sheets-Johnstone in her ambitious work o philosophical

anthropology, The Roots o Thinking (Philadelphia, 1990).9. George Lakos and Mark Johnsons Philosophy in the Flesh (New York, 1999) standsas one o the most prominent markers o the corporealist movement in contemporaryphilosophy; Johnsons The Meaning o the Body: Aesthetics o Human Understanding (Chi-cago, 2007) extends a corporealist theory o meaning to aesthetics. A renewed interest


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in the phenomenology o Maurice Merleau-Ponty across humanistic disciplines is alsosymptomatic o the intellectual turn toward corporeality.

10. The term kinesthetic empathy, promulgated by dance theorist Susan Leigh Fos-ter, now circulates widely as a keyword within perormance scholarship (MovementsContagion: The Kinesthetic Impact o Perormance, The Cambridge Companion to Per-

ormance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis [Cambridge, 2008], 4659). See also Foster, Choreo-graphing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Perormance (London, 2011). Foster reerences cognitivescientic studies o mirror neuron unctioning, as does Bruce McConachie, in his recentEngaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York, 2008).

11. In tracing the philosophical history o the passions, I have relied heavily uponSimo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxord, 2004); Anthony Levi,French Moralists: The Theory o the Passions, 15851649 (Oxord, 1964); and Susan James,Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxord, 1997).

12. Plato, Phaedrus, The Dialogues o Plato: Volume One, trans. Benjamin Jowett (NewYork, 1937), 250.

13. See Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell1981), sections 428b, 432b, 433a.

14. Aristotle, On the Soul, 408b.15. Aristotle, On the Soul, 403a, 408b.16. Aristotle, On the Soul, 403a.17. See Aristotle, Problems, The Complete Works o Aristotle, ed. Julian Barne (Princ-

eton, 1984), 1488. Aristotles authorship o the Problems has been disputed.18. For more on Stoic passion theory, including its relationship with Galenic thought,

see M. R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago, 2007).19. Knuuttila, 178.20. See Knuuttila, 243.

21. See Levi, 22. The vernacular development o the discourse on passion as psychicmotion beore the intervention o Ren Descartes can be traced across the cleric andstatesman Guillaume du Vairs Philosophie morale des Stoques (1585), the Bishop o Belley

Jean-Pierre Camuss Trait des Passions (1614), the Dominican bishop Nicolas CoeteausTableau des passions humaines, de leurs causes et de leurs eets (1620), and the Oratorian Jean-Franois Senaults de lusage des Passions (1641). The Trait de lamour de Dieu (1616) o SaintFranois de Sales, though thematically wide-ranging, also contains an account o thepassions. Major English-language works on the passions o this period include ThomasWrights The Passions o the Mind in General (1604), and Edward Reynoldss Treatise o thePassions and Faculties o the Soul o Man (1640).

22. See Descartes, Les passions de lAme (Paris, 1649), Article 1.

23. Even ater Descartess mechanization o passion theory, the Aristotelian-Thomisticparadigm continued to weigh heavily upon eighteenth-century theories o emotion.24. Descartes, Principles o Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings o Descartes. Vol-

ume I,trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stootho, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny(Cambridge, 1985), 232.

25. Descartes laid out his analysis o the nature o the soul-body interaction in a serieso treatises: the Discours de la mthode and the Dioptrique (1637), Les passions de lme (1649),and De lhomme (written in 1632 and published posthumously in 1662).

26. Koch, 3.27. Sergio Moravia, FromHomme Machine toHomme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-

Century Models o Mans Image,Journal o the History o Ideas 39, no. 1 (1978): 4560, 47.

28. Descartes, Passions, Article 27.29. Stoic philosophy attributed the mental and physical experience o passion to the

fows opneuma, a lie-giving, breath-like substance within the body. The Roman physi-cian and anatomist Galen (c.130c.200 BCE) regarded the vaporous pneuma as the pri-mary instrument o the soul, the medium or the transmission o sensation and other


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psychological aculties (Armelle Debru, Physiology, The Cambridge Companion toGalen, ed. R. J. Hankinson, [Cambridge, 2008], 272).

30. Descartes, Passions, Article 10.31. Like the celestial motions o the Cartesian cosmos, the movement o blood within

the Cartesian body requires the contact o particles upon particles and their sequential

displacement by la orce de les pousser (in Koch, 36).32. Descartes, Passions, Article 28.33. Descartes, Passions, Article 28.34. See Descartes, Passions, Articles 23, 36.35. See Descartes, Passions, Article 43.36. See Descartes, Passions, Articles 24, 25, 26, 38.37. Koch, 24.38. Koch, 12.39. Descartes, Passions, Article 26.40. Koch, 55.41. Nicolas Malebranche argued that God is the prime cause o all natural events

and human actions and that human beings can only comprehend objects o vision andthoughts by means o divine, eternal, archetypal ideas.

42. Malebranche, De la recherche de la verit, Oeuvres compltes: Malebranche, ed.Andr Robinet, vol. IIII (Paris, 1958), Livre V, Chapitre I:127.

43. See Malebranche, Recherche, V.III:155.44. See Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamps introduction to Malebranche, The

Search Ater Truth, trans. and ed. Lennon and Olscamp (Cambridge, 1997), xxxviii.45. Malebranches ideas would exert a powerul infuence on the sensationist current

o eighteenth-century philosophy and aesthetics, which held that higher modes o cogni-tion were based in the sensible authenticity o lived experience. See John C. ONeal, The

Authority o Experience, Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (University Park,Pa., 1996).46. See Malebranche, Recherche, V.I:348.47. Malebranche, Search, 118, 161.48. Malebranche, Search, 162.49. Malebranche, Recherche, Livre II, Partie I, Chapitre VII:236; Livre II, Partie III,

Chapitre I:321.50. Malebranche, Recherche, II.I.VII:23637.51. Malebranche, Recherche, II.I.VII:237.52. The prolic publications o neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese provide a philosophi-

cally oriented account o the implications o mirror neuron research. See especially: Gal-

lese, The Shared Maniold Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, Journal oConsciousness Studies 8, nos. 57 (2001): 3350, and Embodied simulation: rom neuronsto phenomenal experience, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 2348; andGallese, M. E. Eagle, and P. Migone, Intentional attunement: Mirror neurons and theneural underpinnings o interpersonal relations, Journal o the American Psychoanalytic

Association 55 (2007): 13176.53. Malebranche, Recherche, V.VII:191.54. Malebranche, Search, 163.55. Malebranche, Recherche, II.III.I:16162.56. Malebranche, Recherche, II.III.I:32829.57. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Rfexions critiques sur la posie et sur la peinture

(Paris, 1733), II.xxxiii, 461.58. Anne Becqs Gense de lesthtique ranaise moderne, 16801814 (Paris, 1994), makes

a orceul case that Duboss Rfexions introduce Malebranchian sentiment into French aes-thetic theory. See Becq, 17386.

59. Dubos, Rfexions, I:9, 5, 11.


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60. See Dubos, Rfexions, I.vi:55.61. Dubos, Rfexions, I:26.62. Dubos, Rfexions, I:24.63. Dubos, Rfexions, I.iv:34, 38, 39.64. Dubos, Rfexions, II.xxii:240.

65. Dubos, Rfexions, I.iv:3940.66. Dubos, Rfexions, I.v:44.67. Dubos, Rfexions, I.xliii:42930.68. Dubos, Rfexions, II.ii:32627.69. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transormative Power o Perormance: A New Aesthetics,

trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London, 2008),19293.70. Roach, 26.71. The Oratorian Bernard Lamys Lart de parler (1675) draws directly upon mechanis-

tic physiology. The Huguenot minister Michel le Faucheurs infuential Traitt de lactionde lorateur, ou de la prononciation et du geste (1657), Jean-Lonor Le Gallois GrimarestsTrait du rcitati: dans la lecture, dans laction publique, dans la declamation et dans le chant(1708), and the actor Poissons Rfexions sur lart de parler en public (1717) all employ atheory o passion as interior movement that relies more on a broadly Scholastic paradigmthan the specics o Cartesian physiology. Some mechanistic infuence, however, seemsmore than likely upon the doctrine o actorly spontaneity presented in Luigi RiccobonisPenses sur la Dclamation (1738), which inaugurates modern European acting theory as asustained conversation among practitioners and theorists with a shared set o concerns.

72. See Denis Diderot, The Paradox o Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock, TheParadox o Acting, and Masks or Faces? (New York, 1957), 58.

73. Pierre Rmond de Sainte-Albine reerences both Dubos and tienne Bonnot deCondillac, though only in connection with the question o whether the actor ought to

recite in keeping with a harmonically precise score (Le Comdien [Geneva, 1971], 15859).Condillacs Essai sur lorigine des connaissances humaines (1746) was published one yearprior to Le Comdiens appearance in print.

74. Sainte-Albine, 33, 39.75. Sainte-Albine, 99.76. Sainte-Albine, 30.77. Sainte-Albine, 32.78. Sainte-Albine, 91. Throughout the eighteenth century, entrailles could signiy, liter-

ally, the organs o the abdomen and thorax as well as, guratively, a capacity or aection(aection), or a very tender and sensible heart [un coeur trs-tendre & trs-sensible] (Dic-tionnaire de lAcadmie ranaise, 4th ed., [Paris, 1762].

79. Sainte-Albine, 57, 49.80. Sainte-Albine, 1415. Phantme, or, more oten,antme, was the French term o theperiod used to translate the Greek phantasma, designating an unreal or illusory appear-ance within Platos ontological hierarchy.

81. Sainte-Albine, 15.82. Sainte-Albine, 195.83. Sainte-Albine, 135.84. Sainte-Albine, 137.85. Sainte-Albine, 32, 36.86. As Marian Hobson has noted, or Sainte-Albine and other theatrical theorists o his

time the term illusion did not always categorize an ontological state but rather could des-

ignate a mode o communication between actors and audiences activity at a play,enabled by the transmission o states o soul rom identiying actor to identiying audi-ence (The Object o Art: The Theory o Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, [Cambridge,1982], 196).

87. Sainte-Albine, 9192.


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88. Sainte-Albine, 149.89. The radical impact o the Paradoxe on modern acting theorys development has

been exhaustively treated by scholarship. See Roach, 11659; and Worthen, 8893. Seealso Graham Ley, From Mimesis to Interculturalism: Readings o Theatrical Theory Beore and

Ater Modernism (Exeter, 1999): 74107.

90. Diderot, The Paradox o Acting, 15.91. Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comdien, Oeuvres Esthetiques, ed. P. Verniere (Paris,

1959), 376.92. Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comdien, 358.93. See Constant Coquelin, Art and the Actor, Papers on Acting, ed. Brander Mat-

thews (New York, 1958).94. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Actor, Sartre on Theatre, trans. Frank Jellinek, ed. Michel

Contat and Michel Rybalka (New York, 1976), 16365.95. Eli Rozik, Acting: The Quintessence o Theatricality, Substance 31, no. 2/3 (2002):

11024, 11112.96. Michael Goldman, The Actors Freedom: Toward a Theory o Drama (New York, 1975), 34.

The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre

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