Despite the vertiginous temporal and contextual expanse of its objects of study, Subjects of Affection argues for a discursive and gestural economy of dramatic resistance tightly tethered to the affective implications of Huguenot political treatises. Rosensweig surveys modes of counteraction to political tyranny in less canonical tragedies from diverse playwrights Garnier, Rotrou, Corneille, and Racine, covering the period from 1574 to 1691. With that capaciousness comes threats of theoretical dilution or desultory ambulation in overdetermined causation that accrues across the two centuries. However, the book is commendable for its efficiency and focus on the performative recurrence of theorized affectional endorsements imbricated in sixteenth-century droit de résistance works responding to or spawned by the French Wars of Religion (1562–98). By beginning her study in the sixteenth century, Rosensweig creates fissures in the narratives of neoclassical tragedy's complicity with absolutism and highlights its limitations in the face of residual communal structures of alliance against tyrannical lordship. The book argues for a migration of resistance theory to forms of tragedy under seventeenth-century absolutism, when the theory's textual formations were legally proscribed and annulled due to its more radical regicidal conclusions. It is in tragedy where the Edict of Nantes mandate of oubliance, or to forget the internecine religious violence, did not hold, for the genre retained in its poetic structures and corporeal configurations attitudes and repertoires of resistance that exceeded both decrees of toleration and subsequent absolutist political consolidation in the sovereign.
Rosensweig's argument is grounded in the ramifications of affective conduct and stakeholders in three sixteenth-century Huguenot political tracts—François Hotman's Francogallia (1573), Theodore de Bèze's Du droit des magistrats sur leurs subjets (1574), and the anti-Machiavellian Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579). Rosensweig concludes that these three texts use “affection as an index of political legitimacy” (22), specifically in methods of choosing and verifying public representatives. Conveyed in these texts is a bipartite schematic of sociopolitical makeup—particuliers, or private subjects who could recognize tyranny, and personnes publiques (nobles, legislators, magistrates), who could actively organize and militate against it. The treatises point to several approved, even if extreme, examples of public representatives such as the “extraordinary liberator or foreign prince” (40) who could act on the people's behalf. In the transition to absolutism, the sovereign encompassed all available forms of publique personnes, but tragedy, through its poiesis and performance, often elected radically alternative representative models.
These figural models—the mourner, the rebel, the hero, and the savior—fill chapters 2 through 5 in comparative examinations of contrasting but related plays. Chapter 2 places its attention on the female mourner in Robert Garnier's Cornélie (1574) and Pierre Corneille's La mort de Pompée (1644). Both tragedies delineate the crisis of Caesar's expropriation of Roman republican authority as inflected by the emotional resistance of Pompey's widow Cornelia. Rosensweig cites disruptive political potential in moments when Cornelia's contumacious grief is conjoined with the lamentations of the Roman public, but in disparate, historically contextualized ways as Cornelia must ultimately encapsulate and represent the chorus in Corneille's tragedy, with its enforced neoclassical expurgation of the choral body from the stage. Chapter 3 offers a substantial marriage of theory and historical praxis by wending its way marvelously through early modern and contemporary writings on Antigone, taking into consideration various depictions of the rebel figure in Garnier's tragic articulation of 1580, Rotrou's dramatic 1637 version, and conflictual testaments of the classical figure offered by Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig. Chapter 4 argues against the grain for a communal, rather than individual, constitution of the hero in Corneille's Nicomède (1651) and Suréna (1674), while chapter 5 uncovers political recalcitrance in Racine's biblical tragedies Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), in which communal desires coalesce around salvific individuals.
Although Rosensweig occasionally discusses production and reception, especially in her chapter on Racine's biblical plays, its absence is sometimes felt in relation to the attention given to close readings of the texts, but that absence is never a discouragement or detraction from the central argument. By placing continual stress on affective iterations of droit de résistance and its translation to tragic forms under absolutism, Subjects of Affection cogently argues for a persistent evaluation of the emotional apparatus of political theory and early modern drama as one of the most impactful, embodied conveyances of that theory under the constraints of absolutism.
