A Proof of Pleasure: Renaissance in Rancière, Auerbach, Marlowe

What might a turn to Erich Auerbach and his great contemporary interpreter Jacques Rancière have to offer the study of Renaissance literature today? For nearly forty years of professional scholarship, “Renaissance” has typically meant either the inauguration of, or a premodern alternative to, a catastrophic modernity. “Renaissance” has been, in this sense, part of that regime of historicity that François Hartog terms “presentism.” Auerbach and Rancière, I suggest, offer a way out of the unending treadmill of presentism in Renaissance scholarship and beyond. Throughout Auerbach’s work, and particular in Mimesis, Renaissance meant the historical diversity that emerges when you decide human life is subject to no absolute manner of judging. Rancière picks up on this diversity and calls it “aisthesis,” the dissensus that unravels all absolute distributions of sensibility. I offer Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd” as a test case for some of the possibilities Auerbach’s Renaissance might make available. The invitation of Marlowe’s poem is not simply an invitation to love; it is an invitation to the possibilities of an aesthetic life lived in history. [C.W.]