Love of the Censor: Legendre, Censorship, and the Theater of the Basoche

Abstract

"How does one cleave to a text, how does adhesion to the truth of the text occur, and by what subtle artifice can one amorously enjoy a text?": so asks the jurist and psychoanalyst Pierre Legendre, enigmatically but not untypically, in one of his Lefons.' Legendre's work, which serves as the springboard for the issues to be raised here, concerns the law as an institution whose history is inseparable from its textual corpora, its projections, and its images. It also addresses the law in the more expansive psychoanalytical sense as that which possesses and binds the subject and as that of which no subject (as Lacan wrote, reworking the juridical maxim) can plead ignorance.2 The tacit project of Legendre's jurisprudence is to locate what, on the analogy of Freud's notion of the dream's navel, one might term the navel of the law: the tangle of thoughts and images which cannot be unravelled, the spot where the law reaches down into the unknown.3 What follows is an illustration of one aspect of Legendre's work his notion of the love of the censor as it played itself out in histrionic fashion in early modern French legal and literary history. It is at the same time a reflection on a single instance of what Peter Goodrich has identified as a series of "minor jurisprudences" punctuating the history of law in the western world. The comic spectacles composed and performed by the Basoche, that is, by the association of law clerks apprenticing with established lawyers at the Parlement of Paris and other major courts in France, constituted a theatrical genre of law or legal genre of theater which has been almost forgotten today but which occupied a pivotal position in the emergence of the legal and theatrical institutions in France at the end of the fifteenth century.4 How the Basoche farce came to be among the first targets of the censor in early modern France is the question to be posed here.