"Surviving the Renaissance: La Boétie, Lyric, and the Life of Desire"
In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1549), Etienne de la Boétie asks, of the condition of servitude: ‘Is this life? Can we call this living?’ He despairs over those who seem more alive in body than in spirit, and those whose desire to live on is more powerful than their desire to be free. Desire is a critical theme for La Boétie, who was also a love poet and whose Discourse was influenced by Petrarchan themes. In his Sonets pour Helene (1578) Ronsard writes ‘I must hide myself / So as to not die and be reborn so many times’. Scholars have discussed the tension in Petrarchan lyric between life and death, with each sonnet a re-animation both of generic tropes and of the lyric voice that repeatedly expresses its conflicted desire for continued life. Why live on, why want to survive? This paper examines literary concern with this question in mid- sixteenth century France, taking La Boétie’s text and its poetic contexts as a case study. I argue that desire conditions the representation of life in these works with complex political implications, ask whether a survival motif inflects ‘renaissance’ writing within and beyond lyric, and consider the theoretical and historical stakes of approaching early modern texts from this perspective. This work is drawn from the first chapter of my current book project, titled Surviving the Renaissance.
