Serres’s reading of Tartuffe : hypocrisy and comic underdetermination

Abstract

In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imposture of the hypocrite and he shows, at the heart of comic pretence, what this essay describes as an underdetermination of identity and individuation. That is, where readers, theatregoers, and participants in public discourse would ground thought upon a principle of determinacy and individuation—for example determinations of the basic wickedness of hypocrites and parasites—philosophical considerations of these figures (and the phenomenon of comic action) explode this principle to suggest an ontological and discursive space of inconsistency and intermediacy. By examining Tartuffe’s ingratiating language of piety and the play’s surprising figures of grace, this essay shows how discursive systems and social systems are equally devoted to ideals of determinable identity that leave them vulnerable to operators who can discern and exploit the inevitable sites of latent incoherence and inconsistency. The essay concludes by developing Serres’s notions of comedy as a play between consistency and inconsistency, individuation and disindividuation, a sad and severed fragmentariness (as with Plato’s Aristophanes), but also the generative spawning of a supplemental comic critical consciousness.