Dearest Professor Darcy, 

My heartiest thanks for responding to my call for philosophical discussion
of our objects as scholars of Renaissance literature. I'm *so* sorry I
shall have to cause you grief and have to correct you and say you are,
indeed, wrong. Wrong in a complex way which involves an apt, if perhaps
unconscious, detection of my recursive, concentric way of thinking. this
concentric thinking is simultaneous with the humanists' diapasonic schemes
of the cosmos as consisting of musical intervals and passion, and at
the same time with Deleuze's thinking of things as "succeeding each other
in diverse times, but also simultaneous at the same time," and with
Michele Montrelay's thinking of the archaic drives and of the floating
organziation of the unconscious as an organization composed not of points
outside and succeeding one another, but of points at once separate from
and containing one another.

 So I *do* think, along with Fludd,
Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Montrelay, that as one believes one is
progressing, one is always recursively heading toward an archaic origin
which cannot be lost. I do believe that recursion toward origin is a
movement toward truth, defined, as Lacan puts it, in the quest (erotematic
in the eroticized terms of Renaissance rhetoric) for it. In terms of
concentric thinking, this truth is structural, and as such, constitutive
(unlike the semantic differences between Hobbinol's gifts to Colin and
Daphnis's to Ganymede).

I do not, however, believe that the diapason recusrively deployed from the
thinking of Deleuze, Lacan, and Montrelay intersects with old
historicist interest in sources and new critical interest in aesthetic
unity, although I *do* very much admire the erudition, worthy of
the Renaissance humanists' whose texts we undertake to study, in literary
form and philology of our predecessors of a few decades ago, and their
very few current descendants, such as Professor Willet, as tools of
inquiry. One reason for this is historicist: the humanists whose texts we
profess to study were steeped in thinking about linguistic and musical
form. They were steeped in thinking about passion. This is what they write
about, in ways so complex we have only begun to figure them out. This
complex and sophisticated thinking, insisting on an engagement at once
passionate and precsie, manifests itself in philsophical, rhetorical, and
musical treatises of the time. Yet new historicist criticism, with
its focus on political and theological documents from which it refuses to
draw conceptual consluions in the name of relativism the "radical
alterity" of the Renaissance, ignores the early modern thinking of form in
musical and rhetorical texts -- far, far more detailed and ramified in 
its categories than that of any new critic -- and the deployment of this
thinking to poeticize forms of passion in pastoral texts. These were their
epistemologies, Professor Darcy, I would even say their
psychoanalysis. They did care and reflect about the interrelations between
form and affect in ways which to my mind exceed the complexity and
sophsitication of the thinking even of the brilliant structural
psychoanalysis of Lacan and Monterlay, and could help us refine and
precisify this psychoanalysis -- move it at once proleptically and
analeptically, toward origin.        

So I am suggesting we broaden our view of the "non-literary" texts we
study in relation to Renaissance poetic texts, broaden it to include the
non-literary texts which relate to the aesthetic and were such a crucial
component of humanism; and broaden it to include many of the literary
texts, not lesser than those of Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, or even
Barnfield, most of us continue to ignore. 

I am not at all honestly hopeful of discovering something new by turning
attention to the early modern thinking of poetic form in relation to
passion, of early modern rhetoric in relation to rhetoricity. The simple
reason for this is that I have already discovered something new and
original and illuminating and intellectually engaging and very complex an
sophisticated and published about it extensively, in book and article
form. That original something is of course at the same time original
in the sense of very old, ancient, archaic as far as the substance
of the human psyche is concerned. That is my point. As a recursive
thinker, I recall my mentioning these publications,       
but, repetition being a rhetorical form the early moderns associated with
sexual excess, will shamelessly, passionately, and indulgently encourage
you and others to, in the early modern musical-qua-sexual spirit,
"reede" them, especially my *Risks of Simile in Renaissance Rhetoric*. I
would have done so (reede) before I would have linearly rushed to
declare they do not make any new claims, or make Renaissance scholarship
more accesible to the general public, but then, I'm a
passionate diapasonist, or, in Monterlay's terms, concentrist,
fundamentally linked to the orificial drives keeping female sexuality
tied to the archaic. 

I assure you, in addition, that while passionately
engaging with Renaissance texts like "A Lover's Complaint" as I think they
insist we do, I delineate in detail the forms by means of which this text,
and others, speak passion. You may want to look at my article on the
transferential erotics of the simialic copula in "A Lover's Complaint." 

You are right on two other counts, though, so you perhaps needn't be that 
very sorry after all. I *do*, unfortunately -- not for myself, a born
rebel without a cause, but more for truth, posterity, and intellectual
interest, find myself on the "outside" of a field where most scholarship
seems to be determined to be locked within the imaginary, describing
semantic differences between garlands, kirtles, and caps, and anecdotally
paraphrasing legal documents. The second count on which you needn't be
sorry: Montrelay theorizes repression as a preservative function, what
organizes and structures the unconscious. Foreclosure is total
erasure. My motive is indeed to foreclose what is critically
underway. But not because of any threat, as I am afraid of nothing,
certainly not of my epistemology. But because besides and inseparably from
sensuality and passion, I am committed to truth, to intellectual
integrity, to original, creative, recursive thinking, and to our duty as
literary scholars to the past and to posterity. And as i foreeclose, i
would like to make the psychologcially and philosophically
complex fragments of the early mooern past, psychically
concentric with our subjectivities and sexualities, emerge from where what
is currently underway has repressed them. Such emergence of the repressed,
Monterlay says, is a fragment of jouissance.     

hopelessly yours, 

Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser 



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