16~17 Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque: Călin Mihăilescu

16~17 Renaştere, manierism, baroc / 16~17 Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

Multiple, this volume grew in time as a rhizome in which mysticism, subjectivity, utopia, disillusionment, corporality reversals, taste and kitsch answer each other as thematic, structural and stylistic echoes. Chronologically, the volume deals with 16-17th- century western literary phenomena, from the magi of Italian Renaissance and Thomas More to the Spanish mystics, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Angelus Silesius, Gracián and Pascal. Yet, as chronology is time’s blackmailing of history, and history’s blackmailing of people, from the space circumscribed by these two centuries one is often invited to evade, sometimes to a labyrinthine past, some other times to the twentieth century, and most often than not in both directions. In the pages of this book, as if in a seraglio of inter-disciplines, literature and philosophy, painting and theology, political and scientific thought, and magic and mysticism cross each other’s paths. These crossings are devoid of jealousy or pity.

Book jacket

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu transforms the crumbling of utopia into an object of active reflection. Utopia is not treated metaphorically, as an item which, once included in the bibliography, would highlight the author’s intellectual trajectory. On the contrary, utopia is considered in its first codification – in the vicissitudes with which met Thomas More’s famous book. Its discussion needs to be taken as the starting point of the essays reunited here. On this grounds we will follow the logic of the rhizome that forms the whole of 16~17. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. This rhizome, which is not growing randomly but whose function is that of a true trompe l’œil, denounces and fights against the rhizome of modernity. Privileging instrumental reason, modernity threatens to abolish the meaning of anything that is not subjected to economic planning. This threat is more imminent if one conceived of the world as a global market. From here – the frequency with which the topos of the world upside-down, variously modulated, comes to configure thematic worlds which escape voracious pragmatism; from here – the intense dialogue which Mihăilescu’s texts establish with Heidegger’s thought. To sum up: the de-construction of modernity is the transversal line which links the various themes of this book: the emergence of the subject, mysticism, the body (corpus epochalis), magic, and kitsch.

His close model although certainly the author did not think of it Friedrich Schlegel’s two series of fragments, Die Lyceums-Fragmente (1797) and Die Athenäum-Fragmente (1798). The absence of a historical approach does not mean that Mihăilescu is a practitioner of detemporalization as E.R. Curtius in Toposforschung, but rather that he rejects the domestication of phenomena, so frequent in historical approaches.

We could take the chapter “Eye – I – Aye. The Birth of Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry” as a previously unpublished fragment by Nietzsche: as Nietzsche’s fragments, it generates nothing less than an earthquake in our understanding of the emergence of the subject.

To better understand the result of the identification of troubadour poetry with the moment zero of the emergence of the subject, it seems sufficient to compare Mihăilescu’s interpretation with that offered by Leo Spitzer. The German critic rejected the positivist, banal interpretation of Rudel, in favor of a compromise: in this poetry, it is not ideal and distant love that is sublimated by a ‚little relationship,’ a closer and sensual one, but love itself has split itself into two – the carnal instinct and an idealism of distance. The awareness of cupidity, omnipresent in any amorous relationship is what pushed the troubadour to conceive the motif of the distant land, the purifying nostalgia of the far away” (Spitzer 1944, 371).

Such a solution does not satisfy Mihăilescu, especially given Spitzer’s agreement with Casella, for whom “the Christian a priori […] represents the ground of troubadour poetry in general, and Jaufré Rudel’s in special (idem, 399–401). Spitzer doubted the propriety of Christian allegoresis, yet did not renounce it in his interpretation; on the contrary, Mihăilescu reactivates Rudel’s tensioned and rebellious gesture. As is the case with More’s Utopia, decontamination of the emergence of subjectivity is more urgent here than its historicization. Mihăilescu’s task is both that of the specialist and of the political thinker: „History is a triadic affair, rather than a dialectical one: the present is not a synthesis of past theses and antitheses. It is, if you will, a love triangle, a ménage à trois which disregards the linear models of history that go hand in hand with monotheism, monogamy, money and guilt” (11). The humor which exhales from this fragment does not hide its virulence.

As the humanists won and the magi, their adversaries, were – like Giordano Bruno – literally exterminated, Mihăilescu’s reflection focuses on magic as a current that went off the map of western thought. To this fading there corresponded the disappearance of Neoplatonic and Christian love, which explains why the dominance of linear historiography presupposed the annihilation of passions.

Luiz Costa Lima, from his afterword, „Thinking as Abyss”

Călin Andrei Mihăilescu is a Beatle whose interpretation has the virtuosity of a Scarlatti; he’s a Glen Gould who makes the well-tempered harpsichord sound like the organ from the Fugues, and the organ itself like a jazz piano handled by the dexterity and genius of a Keith Jarrett… A Rousseau le Douanier who trains his hand at Leonardo’s drawings and who, bored by perfection, throws in the middle of the canvass Dalí’s iconoclastic moustache.

Dumitru Radu Popa, “The rebel without a(n apparent) cause,”

Lumea liberă (New York) no. 708, Apr. 26, 2002