Аллегория между барокко, романтизмом и модернизмом: теоретические аспекты (на примере М.К. Сарбевского (1596–1645 гг.))

Struever describes the whole idea of the rhetoric of modalities as «the principle of plentitude», which seems to be comparable with Cave's interpretation of «the principle of cornucopia.» The early modern idea of text as the true plenty of «hidden possibilities», which «lurk waiting to be realized» [Struever 2009: 10-11] continues and enhances in Struever's conception Barthes' interpretation of the pleasure of the text as the truly deconstructive and revolutionary force. To develop this comparison further we should refer to Gilles Deleuze's dealing with the problem of possibility and event, which is interpreted as the crucial point in Baroque. Using the concept of allegory as Benjamin did for seizing the main crux of the Renaissance and Baroque logic, Deleuze describes the latter as the following:

Sometimes we isolate, purify, or concentrate the object […] Sometimes, on the contrary, the object itself is broadened according to a whole network of natural relations. […] First, basic images tend to break their frames, form a continuous fresco, and join broader cycles […] because the pictured form […] is never an essence or an attribute, as in symbol, but an event […]. The many inscriptions and propositions […] is related to an individual subject who envelops it, and who allows himself or herself to be determined as the owner: allegory offers us Virtues, but these are not virtues in general (my italics - N.K.). [Deleuze 1993: 125].

This broadening of the object contraposed to a «purifying» and «general» mode of thinking and speaking about the object seems to have a lot in common with misunderstanding as a «rhetorical», or «discursive», in the terms of Struever and McGowan, philosophy which is contraposed to «the philosophy of meaning», in the terms of Barthes [Ibid: 126]. According to Deleuze, this philosophy acquires the form of «concetto»:

The concept became a «concetto», or an apex, because it is folded in the individual subject just as in the personal unity […]. Although practicians and theorists of concettism had rarely been philosophers, they developed rich materials for a new theory of the concept reconciled with the individual […]. The Baroque introduces a new kind of story in which […] description replaces the object […] the subject becomes point of view or subject of expression. (my italics - N.K.). [Ibid].

The Baroque genre of concettism in comparison with contemporary philosophy is a large issue which requires another article. However, according to Renate Lachmann's definition, the most important feature of this genre is the idea of acumen and wit interpreted as crucial for poetry:

In the acumen treatises of the 17^th century the status of rules as a special form of rhetoric and poetics becomes problematical. In defining their conceptual and stylistic forms, the Concettists include instructions for generating such forms: they formulate rules for breaking rules. [Lachmann 1990: XXVII-III].

Alexander Parker's article continues Lachmann's logics: «Baroque Wit denotes the agility of the intellect, or liveliness of fancy, that could see remote relationships of ideas and objects, that could discern similarity in dissimilars, or unity in contradiction, or reality as paradoxical, and so on.» [Parker 1982: XXIII]. These two fragments seem to be sharing Deleuze's discourse on the Baroque fold in both broadening of the object and its conscious replacement with its description, because this object becomes too paradoxical to be seized in any consistent formula.

It is worth saying that Cave, describing the transgressive textual experience as crucial to the whole idea of the Renaissance cornucopian text, marks the fact that Montaigne turns out to be «a fold in his own text» as the main «transgressive» expression of The Essays [Cave 2002: 282]. This literal repetition of Deleuze's key term seems to be underscoring the logic common for all researchers who have been observed so far. This common logic consists of the transgression based on the play with misunderstanding, broadening, obscurity or with plenty of possibilities leading to a self-contradiction. Cave, McGowan, Kahn, and Struever consider, directly or indirectly, this transgression realized in the text as the most efficient alternative to both «morality of truth» and «philosophy of meaning», according to the Renaissance writers.

It is remarkable that one of the most important conditions for such a broadening of The Pleasure of the Text problematics is the coexistence of the term «text» with the term «rhetoric». The latter, despite its partly different context and strong association with the rules and with the classical canon becomes an independent branch of the question of misunderstanding as pleasure which consists in the transgression. The idea of early modern rhetoric as such a way of thinking which has a play with understanding and misunderstanding as its main tool underscores in The Pleasure of the Text the question of possibility and event, so to say, the most «revolutionary» aspect of Barthes' theory. Struever expresses it in her description of Benjamin's method (as the problem of rhetoric, not text), for whom the Renaissance and Baroque appear not only a source, but also a directly expropriated way of thinking: «Benjamin's work is the most subtly rhetorical of all; it performs in the domain of the marginal, fragile; it acts with the aim of continually stretching the competence of the reader to engage with others - other texts, images, readers. Benjamin cultivates our possibilitis.» (my italics. - N.K.). [Struever 2009: 87].

Struever determines as «humanistic anarchism» the whole Benjamin's method, based on the idea of text and rhetoric as the domain of liberating and revolutionary misunderstanding:

» Humanistic anarchism,» radical contestation of delusions of realism, […] belief in possibility as primary domain of operation generates particular habits of action in rhetorical inquiry […]. Benjamin's rhetorical capacities […] generate […] a taste for possibility works against hegemonous explanatory theories, excessive thematising […]. Benjamin […] is solely interested in literature and criticism as intervention, yet the modal status of the intervention is precisely what is at issue. [Ibid].

Therefore, the Renaissance and Baroque materials evince the link between the questions of text and rhetoric by dividing the problem of the pleasant misunderstanding as common for both of them. In addition, the conjunction of these two questions underscores the sense of hidden opportunities contraposed to the oneness of the real order of things, which the very crux of this pleasure and of its revolutionary force consists of. Consequently, the text and rhetoric couple interprets the pleasant misunderstanding as the «humanistic anarchism». It is not the text itself that becomes pivotal here, but the very political and revolutionary intention finds itself in the conscious misunderstanding of the border between language and reality. The Renaissance and Baroque in this logic are interpreted as cultures enormously aware of the possibilities this border has for the problems of power, order, and its contestation.

Another historiographical example which places misunderstanding in the center of the Renaissance culture is the problematics of Machiavellian virtщ. Described with a number of examples and certain advice to the prince, Machiavelli's conception keeps its evanescence because these examples and this advice frequently contradict each other. In this case, the problem of misunderstanding manifests itself in a way comparable to the abovementioned interpretation of Montaigne's The Essays as «the art of deceit and dissimulation». Indeed, Machiavellian politics as the art of deceit could be considered as a well-established common-place. However, for the problem of misunderstanding, the most important fact is that the interpretation of «Machiavellian deceit» as a «machiavellism» in its classical sense of cynicism and rejection of morality for pursuing political success coexists with the interpretation of «Machiavellian deceit» as a kind of political philosophy that turns out to be most topical for the postmodern culture, for instance, in Ankersmit's conception of the Aesthetic Politics [Ankersmit 1997].

Ankersmit describes Aesthetic Politics as contraposed to the political theory, to the essentialism of the everlasting political terms (as «State», «Society», «Community» etc.), and to the stoicism of the direct sticking to these terms in political practice. Considered as an example of the aesthetic politics, Machiavelli's The Prince becomes for Ankersmit the manifestation of the political action itself, deprived of the very idea of political theory and consisting of self-contradictive performativity. Consequently, the only theoretical approach possible in this case is the aesthetics which turns the art of politics into the problem of taste, determining a peculiar politician's reaction in a peculiar situation. Instead of theoretical complication leading to rigorousness, Machiavelli considered politics as a domain of the sublime experience. Although Ankersmit does not analyze his texts too scrupulously, there are several examples of research into Renaissance intellectual history which largely repeat the logic of Aesthetic Politics in the empirical materials.

The impact of the rhetorical and textual component on the whole political philosophy of Machiavelli was considered by Mauricio Viroli. He points out the interpenetration between political and literary action in the Renaissance, where the stylization was significant «because the material under discussion itself possessed magnificence and splendor» [Viroli 2013: 100] Interpreting Machiavelli's political method, Viroli concludes that, for the author of The Prince, political action was garbed in rhetorical and poetical expression. For Machiavelli, on the one hand, literary text and poetics were the key sources of inspiration, and, on the other hand, a tool for studying politics that avoids a loophole between political idealism and realism [Ibid: 42, 80, 88-89]. Consequently, virtщ as a concept becomes consciously self-contradictive and leading to misunderstanding, because in this concept the cognitive aim is not separated from the goal to «encourage man to act in such a way that they might […] attain an utmost divine status» [Ibid: 118]. It seems to be especially conspicuous in Viroli's conclusion about another kind of thematic interpenetration and interdependence among Machiavelli's texts. According to Viroli, the political discourse is densely dissipated among Machiavelli's private correspondence in which the reflection on what the politician's virtщ is becomes intermingled with the descriptions of Machiavelli's reading and erotic experience [Idem 2010: 65-70]. The poetical character of this intermingling reminds one of the term «sublime experience» crucial for Ankersmit. In accordance with this term, Machiavellian political activity and his private life becomes the single and inseparable field for the expression and elaboration of virtщ. It becomes especially remarkable when the erotic feeling is considered in his private letters as an ambiguous way for sublimity, because it affects as both encouraging and enfeebling. The reading of Titus Livy is also described by Machiavelli as a sublime experience, i.e. as his imaginative translocation in the ideal Republican Rome with its politics as the true expression of virtщ not restricted by tyranny or corrupt morals [Ibid]. In Viroli's interpretation, Machiavelli's life becomes a political experience because he fashioned himself as a politician, so that all his texts could be interpreted as broadened contemplation and rumination on political philosophy and on virtщ as its main element.

Following this logic, virtщ as a concept becomes very familiar with the abovementioned concetto, which dissipates the concept into certain examples and descriptions. Deleuze unfolds this familiarity in the example of Baroque allegory which «offers us Virtues, but these are not virtues in general». [Deleuze 1993: 125] According to Kahn, Machiavelli consciously embedded this kind of offering in The Prince, because in this text Machiavelli was pursuing the goal «.to dehypostatize virtщ, to empty it of any specific meaning. For virtщ is not a general rule of behavior that could be applied to a specific situation but rather, like prudence, a faculty of deliberation about particulars». [Kahn 1986: 63-83, 71]

The context Kahn refers to for the explanation of such a choice of rhetorical strategy in The Prince is the rhetorical culture of Early Modernity with its appreciation of the textual description as the most efficient cognitive tool. According to Kahn, this tool does not propose any certain affirmation in general, but includes the whole multiplicity of individualized variants and examples into a single narrative construction:

In a world where a flexible faculty of judgment is constitutive of virtщ, it is not surprising that Machiavelli should offer us no substantive definition of his terms. This is not simply a failing of analytical skill, as Sydney Anglo has complained, but a sophisticated rhetorical strategy, the aim of which is to destabilize or dehypostatize our conception of political virtue, for only a destabilized virtщ can be effective in the destabilized world of political reality. In this context, the most effective critique of an idealist or mimetic notion of truth and of representation will be one that stages or dramatizes this lack of conceptual stability, rather than simply stating it as a fact [Ibid].

Kahn also compares Machiavelli's rhetorical strategy with Giovanni Pontano's «rhetoric of prudence», in which «Pontano does not concede the truth of his opponents' arguments, but rather includes them within his own rhetorical practice. In so doing, he both exemplifies and vindicates the Claims of praxis over those scientific truth» (my italics. - N.K.). [Ibid: 30-31].

Similarly to Kahn, Laura Janara suggests a spiritual term «in-betweenness» which distinguishes virtщ as a concettistic kind of political philosophy [Janara 2006]. According to Janara, who scrutinizes not only texts by Machiavelli himself, but also the Elizabethan context of their reception and inclusion into political practices, this «in-betweenness» is the main principle of the Renaissance political philosophy inspired by The Prince. According to Janara, the virtщ-oriented kind of political philosophy engendered the true blossom of theatricality and wearing masks in politics. Consequently, the «identity» (as an entire, essential personality «in general») was superseded with the certain «action» and suspended «between» the very «actions» (expressed in writing, reading, letters, speeches, and dialogues interpreting politics and possible political roles). The term «in-betweenness» seems to be very important for all our juxtapositions between the intellectual history of Renaissance misunderstanding and the poststructuralist theoretical context because this term underscores both indeterminacy as the main intellectual skill which is provided through the textual practices and the latter's implications for political power consisting of the dramatization, performativity, and sublimity of these practices. In comparison with the tackled theoretical context, it is remarkable that, for Ankersmit, the aesthetic politics becomes the same empty conceptual space and the gap between the direct collision of different political interests and agendas. In addition, the «in-betweenness» as «a Politic of Action, Not Identity», in the terms of Janara, chimes with the dichotomy, suggested by Ankersmit, of political representation in which it becomes a synonym of the aesthetic representation contraposed to the mimetic representation [Ankersmit: 21-64].

A paper by Sven Thorsten Kilian, dedicated to the conjunction of Machiavelli's political texts and his plays, directly considers this gap in Machiavelli's texts. The scholar's conclusion seems to be intriguing and sheds new light on the whole method of analysis of Machiavelli's texts. In spite of pointing out the difference between Machiavelli as the author of The Prince and as the author of the plays Mandragola and Clizia, Kilian analyses the way these plays are included into political discourse. This way is outlined with the specificity of their plots based on intrigues and achieving success, and of the Renaissance Italy theater which should be interpreted as a kind of Public Sphere. Kilian writes:

Mandragola […] cannot be interpreted as a simрle mise-en-scиne of his [Machiavelli's - N.K.] political philosophy […]. [However,] these objections against an all-too-easy parallel between Machiavelli's political and dramatic production are not intended to invalidate every link between The Prince and Mandragola; they simply make things more complicated. An axiom that holds true in political philosophy might prove unlikely to apply in entertainment practices. This is precisely the case here. Whereas the political use of deception helps the ruler to achieve his goals under the condition that his subjects be deceived positively - that is, unconsciously - aesthetic […] pleasure to a conscious audience. Deception in theatre requires the willing suspension of disbelief […]. Mandragola, instead, is performed on everyday occasions. With its quasi-political subtext it informs a most uncommon space within the concerns of men and women, the powerful, and the subordinate. By transposing political practice from the polis onto the stage and into the play as text, Mandragola furthermore transforms such practice into an aesthetic rather than a political lesson (my italics - N.K.). [Kilian 2017: 32-34].

Considered as a specific part of the Renaissance theatrical practices, Machiavellian politics becomes literally aesthetic, so to say, performative, deceitful and self-contradictive. In fact, it coincides with a gap-like theatrical sublimation and the conscious pleasure of theatrical deceit and misunderstanding.

The logic of Kilian's research, consisting in hypothetical non-division between different genres of texts by Machiavelli, seems to be a remarkable tendency of Machiavellian studies in the last decade [Janara 2008; Patapan 2003]. One of the most distinctive approaches based on this non-division is the study by Diego Von Vacano [Von Vacano 2007]. The main peculiarity of this research is the author's methodology equally tackling Renaissance intellectual history, the history of ideas, and political philosophy. Von Vacano's work has a lot in common with Ankersmit's The Aesthetic Politics, which is specified by Von Vacano as his precursor [Ibid: 62, 148-149]. Simultaneously, Von Vacano completes this work with both theoretical argumentation and analysis of Machiavelli's legacy. Underscoring that «Ankersmit points to the thought of Carl Schmitt as the paradigm of the dangers of mimetic representation, when there is a desire to see an identity between the leader and the people, something that ends in tyranny,» [Ibid: 157] Von Vacano develops the concept of aesthetic representation in the light of its genealogy which he traces from Machiavelli's poems, letters, and plays to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The key argument for Von Vacano is that for Machiavelli the content of politics is inseparable from its form. This coalescence endorses political practices with the meaning of poetic expression of Machiavelli's (or of any particular politician's) feel of politics which was, according to Von Vacano, first and foremost, dramatic and tragic:

Form and content thus are synchronized in the work of the Florentine. Instead of an old quarrel, there is a happy marriage between poetry and philosophy. Reading the poetry, comedy, and «tragic» letters of Machiavelli before reading his better-known political works (The Prince and The Discourses on Livy) offers us a different light on his overall project. In place of the cynical self-interest that his name has become associated with, the aims of his enterprise show a desire to proffer his own knowledge about not only the true nature of political life, but of life in general. [Ibid: 3]

This coincidence between politics and life in general places desire in the center of Machiavellian political philosophy. Arguing for this interpretation, Von Vacano refers to Machiavelli's poem The Golden Ass, a paraphrase of Vergil's plot which Machiavelli uses to «sing about pain» [Ibid: 13] with some additions remarkable for Von Vacano. One of them is the poem's opening part including the story about a boy suffering from an unusual disease which made him run constantly, being unable to walk. Then, Machiavelli propones, this boy was cured by several bleedings which made him walk, not run. However, after the treatment, this boy occasionally appeared near Martelli road: «A vast open avenue beckoned and he could not repress his desire for his old predilection. Upon seeing the road, first his `mind' then his body began to flee. The instinct was irrepressible» [Ibid: 15]. Von Vacano interprets this introduction to the history of a man turned into a donkey by deceit as a poetical form expressing Machiavelli's own political experience. Machiavelli's experience of political desire and political incidence becomes equaled with his political philosophy. In the same logic, Von Vacano underscores the erotic (or sublime) connotations of the crucial Machiavellian image of the struggle against Fortuna, as well as the poetical content of the whole Machiavellian political philosophy in the dramatic mode: the pleasant attainment of the desirable or the humiliating defeat, bringing suffering. Von Vacano suggests the same interpretation for Machiavelli's play Clizia, which represented the characters' collisions of deceit, spying, and disguise (i.e. the crucial methods of politics as «the art of power») to realize a forbidden love desire which was not only a fornication, but also an incest [Ibid: 115-118].

The comparison between Machiavelli's private life and his political philosophy leads the abovementioned scholars to the conclusion that, for the Florentine, desire and its tragic incompleteness transform the political practice into the form of art and underscore the implications of the «sublime experience» in this practice. Simultaneously, Von Vacano's comparison of Machiavelli with Nietzsche expresses the genealogy of the 20^th-century theories considering the pleasant misunderstanding (in text, or poetry, or aesthetics) as the liberating power of desire, pointed against the established order of understanding, as well as against the essentialist logic of this order.

In the concluding part of this article I will consider the case of late Soviet historiography of the Renaissance. One of the most peculiar scholars of this topic and period was Leonid Batkin (1932-2016), who developed the problem of misunderstanding in his unusual approach to the problem of the Renaissance personality. Conceptualizing this phenomenon as a «dialogical self» (in a tight linkage with Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialog), Batkin finds a lot in common with Janara's «in-betweennness» in the Renaissance and with Steven Greenblatt's concept of the Renaissance self-fashioning. Meanwhile, Batkin adds to this problematic some new hues and specifics which help us to correct and develop our conclusions on the question of theoretical and methodological meaning of the misunderstanding as a crucial part of the Renaissance culture.

Most frequently, Batkin is considered as a participant of the informal and mostly conventionally-distinguished group called «unsoviet medievalists». This notion describes the late-Soviet scholars engaged by the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, who were members of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Science in 1970-1980, but simultaneously had an unstable, semi-clandestine, and daring position there because of their theoretical «deviance» from the official Soviet Marxist theory . The most important common trait of this group was their interest in the problem of culture. This interest is not surprising and could be explained by the opposite role to the official Marxist theory, which the problem of culture acquired. The way this opposition was embodied depended on the strong positivistic heredity of the official Marxist theory of the late Soviet humanities, when scholars were required to interpret their sources literally, in quest of certain examples of the class struggle and economic reasons for any historical event [Zenkin 2011: 355-376]. In the case of «unsoviet medievalists» the problem of culture and its protest role consisted in this group's interest in the sophistication, and paradoxicality in texts they were studying, the seeking for rhetoric, quibbles, and wordplay for the interpretation of these texts. The ambiguity and sophistication of the sense were the direct outcome of the historical diversity, when the culture of another historical epoch was believed to be requiring from a scholar refutation of the common sense suggested by his own epoch.

However, this trait was not equally shared by each participant of this informal group. This fact became obvious in theoretical debates among «unsoviet medievalists» in the 1990s. Batkin's position in these debates could be characterized by the most consistent and tenacious interest in the paradoxicality and balancing between understanding and misunderstanding as both the method of investigation and its object. The main content of this misunderstanding was the problem of the Renaissance self.

Discussing Jacob Burckhardt's conception of the Renaissance personality, Batkin proved that there was no Renaissance personality in the 15^th-16^th centuries (according to Batkin, the earliest period legitimate for the discussion about personality is the late 18^th century). However, Batkin proved that instead of personality we find the specificity consisting of the shaping of self-image via textual and rhetorical practices in the Renaissance culture. The main result of this shaping is a self-contradictoriness of the Renaissance self, its existence only in performative expressions, in their vulnerability and theatricality sewing different traits, manifestations, and roles together into a dialogical self-image.

Batkin's theory allows us to see a lot in common between the abovementioned concepts of European and American historiography of the 1970s-1990s, deeply influenced by the linguistic turn and poststructuralist problematics. However, this theory seems to be promising for our conclusions about the interconnection between the interpretation of misunderstanding in the Renaissance studies and in theory. The main reason for this deepening is the problem of «translatability» of the late-Soviet humanities' language. The latter turns out to be an isolated branch in juxtaposition with ramifications for the contemporary Western humanities because of the large gap and difference in contexts. Meanwhile, this gap and difference could provide us with an additional source for the intellectual genealogy of some problems and spotlight the links and lines of intellectual inheritance which could stay hidden without the attempt of «translation» and comparison.

The juxtaposition of misunderstanding in Batkin's concept of the Renaissance self with the same in Greenblatt's «Renaissance self-fashioning» seems to be the most appropriate way for this comparison to be made. The main reason for this choice is the similarity between the theoretical discussions and reflections which were crucial for both scholars. First of all, Greenblatt's New Historicism was primarily conceptualized as an opposition to Literary Criticism, when Greenblatt suggested a concept of history as a weapon against formal analysis of the literary style in its classical philological sense. To the contrary, Greenblatt was developing the idea of historicism as a problem of historical diversity and as a scholar's interest in the otherness of another culture. Simultaneously, history brought into the research a social sphere as a historical context shedding a new light on the Renaissance literature (the field of study crucial for the shaping of the New Historicism's method). The latter in this new light was considered not as a set of aloof masterpieces created by geniuses, but as a crucial part of the self-fashioning practices.

The similarity between this approach and the interest in the historical mentality of the Annales school is remarkable, and Greenblatt himself frequently applied to the latter's experience. However, it becomes impossible to distinguish the concept of the Renaissance mentality in Greeblatt's texts: Greenblatt uses neologisms «self-fashioning» and «circulation of social energies» [Greenblatt 1988: 1-20] which deliberately remain performative and literary, differing in these traits from the concept of mentality in its interest in the essential characteristics. It is remarkable, that the attitude to the Annales school's concept of mentality was one of the stumbling blocks in the latest discussions among «unsoviet medievalists», where Batkin's attitude to this concept was quite skeptical because of the same essentiality and the lack of interest in the bizarre exceptions. This coincidence allows us to guess that the culture of the past interpreted not as an entity or pattern, but as some set of bizarre and perplexing examples, or anecdotes, turns out to be the common trait for both Batkin and Greenblatt.

For example, according to Catherine Gallagher,

New Historicists deliberately departed from the literary-historical practice of creating embrasures for holding texts inside of established accounts of change and continuity; we used anecdotes instead to chip away at the familiar edifices and make plastered-over cracks appear […]. Or, adjusting our metaphor slightly, the anecdote could be conceived as a tool with which to rub literary texts against the grain of received notions about their determinants, revealing the fingerprints of the accidental, suppressed, defeated, uncanny, abject, or exotic - in short, the nonsurviving - even if only fleetingly. New historicist anecdotes might […] provoke new explanations, but these were not taken to be exclusive, uniform, or inevitable [Gallagher 2000: 52].

Gallagher unfolds New Historicism as a method basing on a suspended scholar's misunderstanding and on his lasting (or everlasting) refutation to restrain the frames and principles of his analysis via its reduction to some certain principles or subjects. The perplexing and paradoxical case of the anecdote, makes the scholar simultaneously unbridled with the ways of interpretation and obliged to presuppose the immanent sophistication of this investigated case. Consequently, this method interprets the historical case as the most prominent source for a theory. In addition, it produces a hardly dividable coalescence between the uniqueness of the anecdote and the similarity of the past and its culture with the contemporary theoretical performativity.

In his dealing with the problem of «The Renaissance man and his roles», Greenblatt considers «[Sir Walter. - N.K.] Raleigh self-assertive theatricality […] [which] has its intellectual origins in those Renaissance writers who saw in men's mimetic ability a token of his power to transform nature and fashion his own identity» (my italics - N.K.) [Greenblatt 1973: 31] Greenblatt's juxtaposition between the Renaissance self-assertive theatricality and the «performative» (or, actually, «misunderstanding») power to transform nature and entities via standing beyond their «essentiality» and interpreting them as fashioned, or artificial, seems to be comparable with Barthes' description of the interdependence between the pleasure as revolutionary misunderstanding and «delectation» (including delectation from the knowledge, or research):

An entire minor mythology would have us believe that pleasure (and singularly the pleasure of the text) is a rightist notion. On the right, with the same movement, everything abstract, boring, political, is shoved over to the left and pleasure is kept for oneself: welcome to our side, you who are finally coming to the pleasure of literature! And on the left, because of morality (forgetting Marx's and Brecht's cigars), one suspects and disdains any «residue of hedonism.» On the right, pleasure is championed against intellectuality, the clerisy: the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) «life» against (cold) «abstraction» […]. On the left, knowledge, method, commitment, combat, are drawn up against «mere delectation» (and yet: what if knowledge itself were delicious?). On both sides, this peculiar idea that pleasure is simple, which is why it is championed or disdained. Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it is not a naive residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any idiolect (my italics. - N.K.) [Barthes 1975: 21-22].

The New Historicism's approach to the Renaissance culture seems to be following this logic because of its provocative linkage between the principle of undermining and hedonistic misunderstanding, consisting of the scholar's self-liberation from both established theories and common sense, and of the idea of «counterhistory» with strong appellations to Marxist criticism. This linkage actualizes Barthes' dissolution of the left-right dichotomy. As Gallacher writes, «Counterhistory opposes itself not only to dominant narratives, but also to prevailing modes of historical thought and methods of research; hence, when successful, it ceases to be `counter'» (my italics. - N.K.) [Gallagher 2000: 52]. In other words, being «a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial» becomes crucial for the «counterness» of the New Historicism, as well as the pleasant misunderstanding in historical anecdote - for the sophistication as the main condition of this «counterness».

In addition to comparison with Barthes, this conclusion reveals yet another important similarity with Michael Foucault and his historical approach, characterized by Michael Dean as «the restive problematization» [Dean 1994: 55]. Frank Lentricchia juxtaposes this approach with the New Historicism's one through their common

…pathos of anecdotalism: the strong desire to preserve the energies of the anecdote by channeling them into historical explanation, which is followed by frustration and disappointment when the historical project […] stifles the very energies that provoked it. Foucault was not just doing counterhistory; he seemed to be living its paradoxes as ·an intense drama that all of us shared whenever we set out, as we constantly did, to capture the animation, the dynamism, of things that were bound to become inert and passive under our disciplinary gaze (my italics. - N.K.) [Lentricchia 1989: 68].

Lentricchia's juxtaposition is underscored by Paul Veyne who describes Foucault's attitude to historical method as the following: history requires your wonder and explanation much more frequently than it seems. But this explanation is available without a special theoretical terminology, only by improvised tools and almost commonplace or anecdotal language used by any historian [Veyne 1979]. For the additional characteristic of the misunderstanding as a method in humanities, we should mention Foucault's idea of the necessity to override a zeal to the verity. Turning back to the question of rhetoric contraposed to philosophy we dare to suggest a juxtaposition between Barthes's revolutionary text and Foucault's revolutionary speech, or parrhesia: «In parrhesia the speaker emphasizes the fact that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum - that he himself is the subject of the opinion to which he refers. The specific «speech activity» of the parrhesiastic enunciation thus takes the form: `I am the one who thinks this and that'» (my italics. - N.K.) [Foucault 2001].

Rhetoric as a self-confident statement is contraposed to a sense, or verity, transported through the statement, similarly with the contraposition of the text as a domain of misunderstanding pleasure to the «morality of truth». However, the inclusion in this contraposition of both approaches by Barthes and Foucault merges the pleasure of the text with «the order of knowledge». Both aspects spotlight political (or, in other words, anti-political, anarchistic, and revolutionary) implications of the misunderstanding as a method in humanities, comparable with the distinguished by Struever semi-utopian «humanistic anarchism» by Benjamin. However, in this m ltiple chain of linkages rhetoric does not constantly coincide with the text as a pleasant misunderstanding, and this fact could make the whole chain obscure and fragile. The reason to include in this chain Batkin's interpretation of rhetorical and textual culture of the Renaissance can be explained by additional aspects which enlighten some of this chain's elements.

The very context of Batkin's work plays its role in this enlightening. The fact that textual misunderstanding and rhetorical activity do both deconstruct the rigorousness and rationality in political theory and keep their own revolutionary intention becomes very important as a characteristic of the «unsoviet medievalists» and of their protest against obligatory official Marxist theory which required scholars to interpret their texts literally. The study of text and textual ambiguities was a predictable and logical way for the oppositional thinking because of the Soviet censorship and the Aesopian language as a phenomenon peculiar for the question of textual misunderstanding in humanities [Loseff 1984]. Batkin's method seems to be such a reflection on these circumstances which unpredictably continues and develops theories by Barthes and Foucault, as well as New Historicism's approach [Kukulin 2018].

The misunderstanding as anecdotal method is conjugated with misunderstanding as the pleasure of the text in Batkin's research dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci most impressively [Batkin 1990]. This work suggests the term varietа as the main trait of the Renaissance intellectual culture and considers both methodological reduction of this trait from the peculiar case of Leonardo's writing and the case-oriented methodology of Leonardo himself and of the Renaissance culture as a whole: «providing our understanding of Leonardo's creative personality and mode of thinking, the idea of varietа partly yields to the magnificence and uniqueness of this person, so that not just varietа is a key term for our understanding of Leonardo, but Leonardo himself is crucial for our understanding of varietа and of other traits of the Renaissance which could be considered through Leonardo's exclusiveness. Leonardo - because of, not contrary to his phenomenological certainty - turns out to be some kind of the Italian Renaissance «formula.» (my italics. - N.K.) [Ibid: 16].

In Batkin's approach we find an emphasized coincidence of the peculiarity-oriented researcher's method with the peculiarity-oriented method of the Renaissance intellectuals. The crucial part of both these methods is a «naпve empiricism» [Ibid: 214-215] - the empiricism of an anecdote, of discrepancy, or of the fold, returning to Deleuze's dealing with the Baroque. It leads to the fact that the researcher collides his method with his subject in the reciprocal development. The Renaissance culture introduced by the researcher's «dialog» with a particular Renaissance intellectual turns out to be an extra domain of paradox and misunderstanding. The central point for Batkin is Leonardo's miscellaneous occupations and projects which were mostly never fulfilled. This point, according to Batkin, proves that there was no idea of intellectual projects as something to be completed and fulfilled in the Renaissance culture:

Probably, Leonardo did not suffer from such an obvious discrepancy and even was not aware of this discrepancy. For him there were no principal difference between what was only capable to be realized in theory and what was actually realized […] For the Renaissance as a whole the brink between the imaginary and the existing is partly blurred (my italics. - N.K.) [Ibid: 222].

The fact of the permanent multiplicity of equally-possible variants which submerges the Renaissance intellectual's thought in some kind of rhetoric of modalities and play of opportunities (N. Struever) convincingly molds together misunderstanding as the pleasure of knowledge with the pleasure of the text. In Batkin's work this logic is expressed by the analysis of Leonardo's sketches which are «bizarrely non-finished, too sketchy even for sketching, so to speak, double-sketching!» [Ibid: 232]. In other words, in Leonardo's ambiguity - and peculiarity-oriented method, consciously following various opportunities without any idea to reduce them to the final singularity and completeness, these sketches become the same as Barthes's «sanctioned Babel» of the text's pleasant self-contradiction.

The most important trait of Batkin's approach to the Renaissance varietа for comparison with Barthes is Batkin's attention paid to Leonardo's catalogization of different conditions of water. The array of possibilities which Leonardo's research of water was embodied in, refers to Struever's rhetoric of modalities and Deleuze's Baroque intellectualism which follows the exceptions. Meanwhile, the common topic of drafts and self-contradictive incompleteness persistently reminds of the pleasant «sanctioned Babel» by Barthes. Batkin writes:

There is something completely unbelievable! Leonardo wanted to name different figures and motions of water. And he suddenly adumbrates - in a row - 64 notions: Boiling, turning […], revolution, rolling, dipping, floating, falling, uplifting, expiring, drying out, stressing, breaking, falling, sweeping, recoiling, collision, breaking, jets, effervescence, falling, slowing, twisting, steadiness, rumbles, drone, overflow, overlaps, rush, falls, shakes, whirlpools, coasts, tornadoes, abysses, floods, storms, confusions, stormy landslides, leveling, balance, dragging stones, jerks, foaming, surface waves, impulsiveness, violent, swiftness, merge, slide, stirring, coup, waterfall» [Ibid: 249]

Batkin's approach to the Renaissance connotations of misunderstanding seems to be suggesting another direction for comparison with Barthes and for juxtaposition with the genealogy of poststructuralist problematics. Besides Leonardo's catalog of water, there is Leon Alberti's catalog of gestures and facial expressions illustrating the Renaissance varietа. Batkin proves that the Renaissance painter should give the whole array of the body's movements absolutely occasionally, as a schedule, when his interest is aroused not by some certain person (Self), signified in the portrait, but by a peculiar gesture of this person [Ibid: 105-131]. Because of this fact, Batkin points at the remarkable «pre-psychologism» of the Renaissance culture [Ibid]. The substitution of the entity of Self with a peculiar detail of this Self keeps in touch with the «fold» and with «in-betweenness», as well as with Barthes's rhythm «repetitive excessively» which must be «formal, literal» and entering «into loss, into the zero of the signified» for being a kind of the pleasure of the text [Barthes 1975: 40-41].

This substitution also refers to Barthes's reflection on psychology and on its linkage with positivist, academic criticism. Psychologism, or «positivistic psychology», is considered by Barthes in the context of literary criticism's two paradigms as an «academic» criticism, which appeals to the idea of stability and permanence of writing process, as well as to the idea of author's biography and psychology as an explanation theory. The aim of this appeal, according to Barthes, is an attainment of the verified scale for knowledge attesting. Barthes collides this paradigm of criticism with the second one - «interpretive», when literary criticism stems not from the verification and positivistic idea of the interpretative law, but from the criticist's wonder evoked by the text. This wonder rises from the idea of historical difference and anecdotal (unreduced to any explanation theory) peculiarity of the studied text or subject [Barthes 1972]. In the interpretative criticism «a process of very different forms, functions, institutions, reasons, and projects whose relativity it is precisely the historian's responsibility to discern» [Ibid: 251] becomes the crux of the matter.

The comparison of Barthes's Two Criticisms with the Renaissance misunderstanding issue, as well as bundling the whole set of abovementioned approaches together, becomes more convincing in the light of more of Batkin's research, dedicated to Petrarch and to the Renaissance idea of authorship. Batkin affirms, that

The «real» («live») Self of Petrarch is totally sealed by his «writing». However, the very opposition - is an incomparably later phenomenon […]. It is incorrect, according to the 14^th century, to ask obtrusively where is the «real» Petrarch here… what was he like «in reality»? In these «psychological» and «practical» (in fact, anachronistic and elementary) motivations the very Self as a concept is omitted. It means, that the color of time is omitted […]. Consequently, there are just gossips about the author's genuine motives, which are still gossips in spite of being plausible. This gossip puts Petrarch on the philistine and naturalistic ground available for us.» (my italics. - N.K.) [Batkin 2000: 299-300].

This quotation seems to be showing how simultaneously the Renaissance culture in common and the problem of authorship in particular duplicate the scholar's reflection on his method in which the historical «different forms, functions, institutions, reasons, and projects» to be discerned deconstruct the «academic criticism», its naturalistic essentialism and explanative positivism. This reflectivity comparable with the same of the New Historicists is outlined in Batkin's following description:

Probably, the authorship will never be perceived with such a wonderful «defamiliarization» (the same term Viktor Shklovsky used - N.K.) - as a pure idea and a triumph of authorship - as it was in the case of Petrarch. Neither before him nor after this idea of authorship by itself will be evinced in such a grade. And the formalism of the authorship will never be so poignant and meaningful (my italics - N.K.) [Ibid: 363-363].

The role of formalism and of the defamiliarization in the poststructuralist idea of text as a source of revolutionary and liberating pleasure would lead us too far and require another article. However, the case of Batkin's theories of the Renaissance defamiliarization and misunderstanding seems to be an underrated and useful source for the history of misunderstanding and of its interpretation as a poetic in 20^th century humanities. Poetic in this case became a way of ambiguity pursuing the goal to complicate both the language of research and its conclusion, and this complication shatters and deconstructs the «philosophy of meaning» in its broad sense. Batkin's references to the misunderstanding in both historical material and research method express the same goal in the circumstances of semi-prohibition and oppressive disapproval of complication in humanities by the official theory aimed at oversimplification. It acuminates the misunderstanding problematics in an asynchronous way which simultaneously reveals a number of unpredictable aspects and juxtapositions.

The concepts of ambiguity in the Renaissance texts have tight links with the poststructuralist context not only because of the direct references, but also because of opportunities of a following development of this context with these links, revealing new similarities between different poststructuralist theorists, such as Frank Ankersmit, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, as well as between such problems and concepts, as taste, deceit, aesthetic, rhetoric of modalities, and «in-betweenness» in the Renaissance intellectual culture. However, the main issue is the proportion of theory and historical material in these concepts. Relationships between the scholars considered in this article and the problem of misunderstanding, which is admired for being daring and courageous by the authors themselves, and which touches the question of method, allow us to suppose that misunderstanding has finally become not only an object, but also a method which stands for a scholar's play with modalities and opportunities of his object. Meanwhile, our purpose here was not a criticism of this method, but, instead, an analysis of its intentions and impact. The coalescence of the pleasure of text as a process of misunderstanding seems to be a question of the future destiny of poststructuralist problematics.