Serres’s reading of Tartuffe: hypocrisy and comic underdetermination

ABSTRACT

In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imposture of the hypocrite and he shows, at the heart of comic pretence, what this essay describes as an underdetermination of identity and individuation. That is, where readers, theatregoers, and participants in public discourse would ground thought upon a principle of determinacy and individuation—for example determinations of the basic wickedness of hypocrites and parasites—philosophical considerations of these figures (and the phenomenon of comic action) explode this principle to suggest an ontological and discursive space of inconsistency and intermediacy. By examining Tartuffe’s ingratiating language of piety and the play’s surprising figures of grace, this essay shows how discursive systems and social systems are equally devoted to ideals of determinable identity that leave them vulnerable to operators who can discern and exploit the inevitable sites of latent incoherence and inconsistency. The essay concludes by developing Serres’s notions of comedy as a play between consistency and inconsistency, individuation and disindividuation, a sad and severed fragmentariness (as with Plato’s Aristophanes), but also the generative spawning of a supplemental comic critical consciousness.

Résumé

Dans Le parasite (1980), le philosophe Michel Serres invite le lecteur à penser l’hypocrisie de manière non-morale. En méditant l’exemple du Tartuffe de Molière, Serres se saisit de l’imposture scandaleuse de l’hypocrite et révèle, au cœur de toute prétention comique, ce que cet essai décrit comme une sous-détermination de l’identité et de l’individuation. C’est-à-dire, là où le lecteur, spectateur et participant du discours public fonderaient la pensée sur un principe de détermination et d’individuation – par exemple la détermination de la méchanceté fondamentale de l’hypocrite et du parasite – les considérations philosophiques de ces figures (et le phénomène de l’action comique) font exploser ce principe au profit de la suggestion d’un espace discursif et ontologique incohérent et intermédiaire. En examinant le langage de piété de Tartuffe et la figure surprenante de la grâce, cet essai montre la manière dont les systèmes discursifs et sociaux sont autant l’un que l’autre dévoués aux idéaux d’identité déterminable qui les rend vulnérable aux opérateurs qui discernent et exploitent les points inévitables d’incohérence et de contradiction. L’essai se conclut par l’analyse de la notion de comédie que Serres définit comme un jeu entre la cohérence et l’incohérence, l’individuation et la désindividuation, un état fragmentaire triste et brisé, (comme dans l’Aristophane de Platon) mais aussi l’incarnation générative d’une conscience critique comique supplémentaire.

The special intensity of heat that accompanies accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ is a true curiosity of public discourse. Political partisans and religious rivals are the usual example: when characterising their opponents’ dastardly disparities of deed and discourse, they will, with all apparent sincerity, qualify it as ‘stunning’ or ‘shameless’—as if, with one explosive accusation, their opponents might finally be disgraced before the world as the perfidious pretenders to virtue that clear-sighted observers have always known them to be. The world somehow surprises us by yawning its indifference; life goes on and commentary is constrained to await some more powerful example of the same to bring the world to its eventual revelation. So far as sins go, hypocrisy may be pretty weak tea, as they say, but, however true this may be, claims of this sort do little to shake the sense of rankling offence that hypocrisy arouses in rivals and partisan opponents. Nietzsche, himself perhaps sensing a weakness in the word, sometimes uses a sharper one to denounce philosophical and clerical hypocrisy in Beyond Good and Evil (§24)—‘Tartuffery’, he calls it, but the meaning is more or less the same: not just any kind of lie or insincerity, but specifically an alluring public pretence to virtue, one catering to popular appetite for the simplified determinations of moral discourse (Nietzsche 1968, 225), even as it advances the base self-interest of the speaker.

By contrast, The Parasite (1980) by Michel Serres invites readers to think about hypocrisy from a perspective supplementary to its usual register of moral or religious denunciation. Given this ambition, it is somewhat surprising that Serres chooses to explore hypocrisy in a reading of Molière’s comedy Tartuffe, or the Imposter (1664, 1669), about a religious charlatan¹ who schemes to seduce the women and seize the fortune of a credulous man who is attracted to the title character’s extravagant displays of religious piety.² Serres, as we will see, is not trying to force a consideration of hypocrisy outside of all reference to the cant of prevailing orthodoxy. As in everyday accounts of the term, Serres schematises hypocrisy in relation to an ideal that society holds dear, or claims to hold dear, an ideal the accused is said to have traduced; but, where a typical account would then aim towards a determination, a judgement with reference to an ideal (as Molière’s comedy claims to urge a truer form of piety³), Serres aims to think more critically about the way a general theory of the parasite and a philosophical consideration of hypocrisy and pretence will point us to something like an ontology of the in-between and the underdetermined, as well as to a related set of elaborations of grace, role-playing, the principle of individuation, and comic theatre as such.

Thinking hypocrisy as pretence would make it perfectly ordinary—indeed ubiquitous in human life—as in fact it is, even as it remains oddly inadmissible in our account of human norms. This essay engages with Serres’s work to argue that this tension with regard to pretension suggests a split between what we are—namely: inconsistent—and one of the qualities we cherish most dearly about ourselves, about others, and about our communities—namely: consistency. In the ordinary course of events, we close our eyes to our own inconsistency, we minimise it or favourably re-contextualise it, even as we feel its offence when it is exposed in our imaginary others. So the heart of this essay about hypocrisy bears upon our attachment to consistency, oddly and unsettlingly coupled with our persistent failure to realise it—an existential problem, a subjective problem, but also a socio-political problem, a discursive problem, and, as will be seen, a problem of comic theatre.

The first section of this essay is about the nature of hypocrisy. It will consider the underdeterminations of the parasite in Serres’s book and in Molière’s Tartuffe and, in particular, it will show how parasites and hypocrites take advantage of a weakness in a system of social discourse. The second section of the essay will consider how Serres’s treatment brings together comedy and the critique of hypocrisy as promoting an ‘explosive’ critical perspective on the inconsistency at the heart of identitarian determinations. Serres’s work thus inspires the reflection that the special offence aroused by hypocrisy (as in its appearance in public discourse) derives from the exposure of this more existential dimension of an inconsistency where one had presumed upon a principle of determinacy and individuation.

Serres himself, of course, elaborates this in part by way of Molière’s Tartuffe.

The parasitical relations (and disgraceful ending) of Tartuffe

Tartuffe opens upon a family of large estate in the throes of a crisis, a set of crises really, that all arrive at their culminations in the opening acts of the play: (a) the daughter of the house finds her father intends to break her engagement to her beloved and marry her instead to his spiritual whisperer, for whom she feels no affinity; (b) the son of the household suspects—correctly—that his inheritance is in jeopardy due to the machinations of his father’s guest; (c) the recently ailing mother of the house feels the alienation of her husband’s trust and attention as he devotes his care and concern more exclusively to the household spiritual advisor, a man she knows first-hand to be as worldly as the next; (d) the clear-sighted, quick-witted maid sees that the house is about to be brought to ruin by the wiles of a low-born adventurer. In short, all these figures—mother, son, daughter, maid, collectively proxies for the perspective of the audience—feel antagonised by the presence of a parasitical houseguest. Tartuffe seems to them a fraud, indeed an obvious fraud, who has overtaxed the patience of the household by tirelessly carping on the supposed moral corruption rife within its walls and who, with hollow pretensions to piety, has commandeered the trust and affection of the father and the paternal grandmother.

Tartuffe’s threat to the financial well-being of the family has advanced farther and faster than they suspect, however. In the closing moments of Act IV, as the scales finally fall from the father’s eyes, the newly critical paterfamilias confesses that he has already been duped into ceding to Tartuffe all legal right to the household property. Tartuffe, his villainy complete and chafing from the family’s rude treatment, orders the family’s eviction and the father’s arrest for an otherwise unexplained plot element involving his custody of a dubious friend’s strongbox of secret papers. At the last moment, literally the last two pages of the text, this court order is countermanded by an unseen authority of superior wisdom and justice—the king himself, it is said—who intervenes to order the arrest of the notorious charlatan, to rescue the fortune of the father who had performed meritoriously in the late war, and to forgive the father’s unfortunate concealment of a document strongbox belonging to a known renegade. As the curtain closes on a family anticipating a happier wedding in its near future, audiences leave satisfied that a more moderate, more reasonable stance towards pious display has prevailed to make this possible.

Michel Serres thinks the emphasis long placed by audiences on the religious impiety of the imposture is somewhat misplaced. This point is surely arguable either way (one recalls Marx’s 1844 dictum that the critique of religion is the precondition for all critique (Marx 1981, 378)), but the Serres side of the argument is perhaps that, yes, Tartuffe takes advantage of the pious credulity of the father and grandmother, and, yes, this will inflame the antagonism of those like Nietzsche who have a special axe to grind against religious posturing, but a parasite like Tartuffe will insinuate itself into a system by adopting some kind of pretence of virtue or inoffensiveness. With a different host, in another context or another set of historical pieties, it’s easy to imagine that a Tartuffe would have adopted some different, non-religious imposture of social virtue to reap a very similar harvest. Moreover, probably for most viewers or readers of the play, the tension of the play and the pleasure of its denouement are only secondarily about the triumph of a more moderate religious tone. Genre expectations being what they are in this comedy, viewers are more likely engaged by the question of how cleverly the playwright will arrange for the parasitical Tartuffe, whatever the nature of his offence, to be ejected from his position of influence, opening the way for a happier wedding and the restoration of domestic order.

More germane for Serres’s purposes is to animate the figure of the parasite more generally: Tartuffe not as a religious imposter, but rather Tartuffe as an operator within a system of resource extraction, imposing some kind of an encumbrance on the circulation of goods in a host system and taking or skimming some share for himself—in kind not that different from more benign figures like the poet Simonides of Ceos, the beggar Odysseus in the house of Alkinoös, or any of the rest of us who sing for our suppers—which is to say, all of us, really.

And this is broadly how Serres wants to think about social parasitism: less as something brought to the system as an extraneous element, and more as a dynamic defining all systems of social relation. Reflecting on La Fontaine’s fable of the city rat and the country rat whose feast is interrupted by the man of the countryside, Serres poses a series of questions tending to conclude that parasitism is a more fundamental dynamic than is generally supposed:

the system of parasites in which parasitisms proliferate, branching one upon the other, is not very different from an ordinary system. Who will ever know if parasitism is an obstacle to its proper functioning or if it is its very dynamic? […] If we were to eliminate these encumbrances in actuality, would an organized system even remain? Is the system a set of constraints on our attempts at optimization, or do these latter, quite simply, produce the system itself? (Serres 2007, 27; 2014, 56; trans. modified here and throughout)

In the opening acts that establish our basic understanding of the play, Molière’s audience listens in sympathetically as the maid, the daughter, the son, and the mother deliver their expositions of Tartuffe’s noxious presence. From their perspective, it is easy to regard the situation as one in which a once-happy family has been disturbed by the arrival of a parasitical religious pretender. But the heart of the problem raised by Tartuffe’s redirection of resources consists in the fact that the mother, daughter, and son are themselves dependent upon the goodwill of the paterfamilias. Is it permissible to observe that, whatever their undoubted charms, children are themselves plainly parasitical in their first two decades of life, if not beyond? Isn’t this one of the first postulates of psychoanalysis? And don’t the first postulates of Marxism allow us to see the father in the play, a doofus who somehow holds title to a large estate, as a parasite upon the labour of others, a condition not exempting his more sympathetic spouse? The father himself might be brought to admit that he exploits his daughter’s marriageability precisely to ingratiate himself with Tartuffe, a holy man of otherworldly wealth, who seems to promise access to a happier fate in the hereafter. For the family, the maid, and the audience of the comedy, the basic fact is that the father has worldly goods to dispense; as the father and the grandmother see it, however, Tartuffe is the one who has access to some greater, otherworldly good and they seek to ingratiate themselves with him to access some of it for themselves.

So who is parasiting whom? The answer really depends on the frame one adopts—and as one adopts a multiplicity of frames, it emerges that parasitism is simply a figure that might be deployed to describe nearly every relation in the play. Hence Serres’s observation early in the book: ‘There is no system without parasites’ (Serres 2007, 12; 2014, 32). The conclusion is not hard to see: if parasitism is indeed a universal characteristic, if we are more thoroughly relational and less monadic than we suppose ourselves to be, then three positions are exposed as untenable: the supposition that parasitism is exceptional, the notion that ordinary relations are describable in terms of some fantastic purity of autonomous agency, and the expectation that expelling one parasite will restore a parasite-free status quo ante. Hence too, accusations of parasitism lose much of their philosophical force: parasitism looks less like a moral problem and more like unremarkable competition among rivals for access to limited resources.

So we have a discrepancy between (a) a locally interested view, for example the view of this or that character, in which a parasite has invaded a system, disrupted a prevailing equilibrium, and has provoked a reflexive expulsion, and (b) a philosophical view, here the view of Michel Serres, in which systems are regarded as always already rife with parasitical relationships, albeit sometimes in a state of equilibrial tension, and other times in a state of irritation and reaction. Philosophically, it is never a case of there being (or there having been) a parasite-free status for the system. The philosophical question rather begins with a question of how these inevitable and ineradicable parasitical relations operate within the system—and this is why Serres turns to Molière’s play.

Serres is especially interested in the play’s mimetic operations. He wants to think about hypocrisy as employing a tactic of ingratiation, through which a social parasite will insinuate itself into a system by camouflaging as an unobjectionable part of the system:

What is hypocrisy?

To avoid the unavoidable reactions of rejection and exclusion, a parasitical animal makes or secretes tissue identical to that of its host along their shared bodily points of contact. The parasited body – abused, duped – no longer reacts; it accepts; it acts as if the visitor were its own organ. It consents to maintain it; it bends to its demands. The parasite plays a game of mimicry. It does not play at being another; it plays at being the same. (Serres 2007, 202; 2014, 362)

The parasite deploys mimicry to narcotise the host and thus mitigate the expulsive or purgative reflex of the system. In the case of a social parasite, the points of contact are linguistic ones—ideational and ideological tactics of ingratiation: ‘the host speaks, […] the human parasite will speak like him or will be silent’ (Serres 2007, 203; 2014, 364). In the case of Tartuffe, the father ‘must be devout in order to be parasited by Tartuffe’ (Serres 2007, 230; 2014, 412), while, for his part, ‘the parasite hides behind the noise and the commotion of the devout’ (Serres 2007, 218; 2014, 390).

To put this all somewhat differently, there are already-existing points of potential incoherence in any language milieu, including the language of piety. Consider the problem of grace, a minor, almost invisible theme in The Parasite, which Serres develops in the context of the asymmetry of gratitude for the unexpected gift (Serres 2007, 90; 2014, 167) and our relation to the improbable and miraculous of the world we inhabit (Serres 2007, 46–47; 2014, 91–92). Grace is a complex problem in Christian theology, to put it mildly, but very broadly it suggests the unmerited favour of God, as manifest in the bestowal of blessings—and, most consequentially, in the granting of salvation to some part (but not every part) of sinful humanity. In the mid to late 1660s, in Molière’s France, Catholic controversies around divine grace concerned sometimes competing readings of the work of Augustine of Hippo, who held that grace was necessary for human salvation, since, on their merits alone, humans were too sinful to deserve the gift of salvation. We will not detain ourselves here with the furious disputes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, or the fundamental questions they posed: how much emphasis is one to place on the abject unworthiness of humanity? How is one, theologically, to figure a God whose granting of gifts plainly favour some more than others? But let us briefly consider the ultimate fate of Augustine himself.

In Canto 32 of his Paradiso (Alighieri 2019), Dante places Augustine, together with John the Baptist, Benedict of Nursia, and Francis of Assisi, in exalted vicinity to the Most High. Augustine, for his part, felt rather less assured with respect to his otherworldly destiny (Sloterdijk 2023, 134). In the discrepancy between the poet’s and the saint’s differing appraisals of his likely salvation, the discourse of Christian theology proposes a solution: maybe Augustine’s tremulous sense of his own unworthiness is, paradoxically, evidence of his own true worthiness, a symptom of the exquisitely exacting conscience of a true saint. In the rhetoric of fallen humanity’s failure to merit salvation, Augustine’s saintliness flips into inherent vice and then flips back over again to appear at the very summit of human virtue. Something doubtful is reframed as something assured, by virtue of its very doubtfulness. To those outside the discourse, it can look like casuistry, perhaps incoherence, whereas to those inside this system of discourse, such figures look like a bit of minor noise, a riddle for meditative thought, but hardly something to disturb the equilibrium of the system as such.

The question posed by the doctrine of grace is relevant, among other reasons, because it provides the linguistic milieu for the kind of casuistry that Tartuffe exploits—and that the father finds compelling—when the son first exposes the pretender’s attempted seduction of the mother. To exculpate himself in the eyes of the paterfamilias, Tartuffe immediately concedes the son’s accusations and then goes much further. Capitalising on his status as an axiomatically holy man, subject to the jealous resentment of an uncomprehending world, he hyperbolises the beratement in a perverse confession that, ironically, provokes the most charitable reading possible. Here is the start of Tartuffe’s confession to the father, in Richard Wilbur’s translation:

Yes, Brother, I’m a wicked man, I fear:

A wretched sinner, all depraved and twisted,

The greatest villain that has ever existed.

My life’s one heap of crimes, which grows each minute;

There’s naught but foulness and corruption in it;

And I perceive that Heaven, outraged by me,

Has chosen this occasion to mortify me.

Charge me with any deed you wish to name;

I’ll not defend myself, but take the blame.

Believe what you are told, and drive Tartuffe

Like some base criminal from beneath your roof;

Yes, drive me hence, and with a parting curse:

I shan’t protest, for I deserve far worse.

Tartuffe III.6 (Molière 2010, 288; 2022, 151)

In denouncing his own abject sinfulness, in protesting himself unworthy of heaven’s grace, Tartuffe accesses a linguistic context that the father—the one listener of immediate consequence—grasps right away. As Tartuffe calculates, his confession is understood in the opposite sense, as if he might claim Augustine-levels of moral rigour and true piety. His radical self-beratement operates not literally as a criminal confession, as it rightly should, but rather figuratively as a fraudulent testament to pious purity. Tartuffe is an operator who knows that he might shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, so to speak, and still, by working within the language of the system—and exploiting the points of incoherence within the system—he might avoid the purgative reflex that the system would deploy against a less successfully disguised parasite. And he does get away with it!

Or, rather, he gets away with it until suddenly, precipitously, inexplicably, he doesn’t. Having thoroughly outmanoeuvred the family and having cleared every obstacle to success and the seizure of the family’s estate, he gets his comeuppance only through the improbable and miraculous twist at the end of the play, something a critic might read as an ironic inversion and perversion of Augustinian grace: just as Tartuffe has assured himself of entry into a hereafter of worldly plenty, he is cast down into the pit through the scarcely rationalised judgement of a sovereign unseen and inscrutable. It’s like grace, only in reverse: the underdetermined perdition of one who had been practically assured of a greater reward. Serres acknowledges the classic slippage, between earthly sovereign and divine, through a simile associating the ‘absurd and arbitrary’ royal intervention of Tartuffe’s ending with the underdetermined resolutions that divine figures once brought to the impasses of the Athenian stage:

It is said that the end of Tartuffe is botched, awkward, and artificial, and the intervention of the king as absurd and arbitrary as that of any god or goddess descending upon the scene from the machinery above. (Serres 2007, 205; 2014, 368)

The whole action of the play—the resourcefulness of the maid, the manoeuvring of the mother, all those schemes filling the middle acts, striving to effectively expose the perfidy of Tartuffe—all this has been disposed of. Like the question of whether Tartuffe made an error of love, pursuing the mother even after his control of the estate has been secured, these have no material consequence in the end. As the ending of the play makes plain, destiny is not finally decided by the schemes of lovers, or the deeds of heroes or villains, saints or sinners. The disposition of fate reposes with the unseen sovereign alone, who makes his awards with scant regard for rational justification, rendering them ‘absurd and arbitrary’ to critical eyes, even as his apparent caprice makes all the difference between a comic and a tragic ending for the characters on the stage.

I don’t want to go too much further into Tartuffe, since this essay must return to Serres’s Parasite, but Molière’s charms are hardly to be resisted, so let us observe in passing that, in the next Act (IV.5), in order to entrap Tartuffe in the concealed presence of her husband, and by way of an imposture of her own devising, the mother likewise exploits her ability to mimic a language she knows Tartuffe knows well: the language of religious hypocrisy as such, which is to say, the language of finding resources within the language of virtue to finesse one’s access to vice. She prompts Tartuffe to make his argument that it doesn’t matter what deed one commits—granting adulterous favour to one’s spiritual advisor being the implicit example—just so long as one’s intentions are plausibly pure. It’s not long before we find her narcotising Tartuffe’s suspicions, exciting his animal interest, and dulling his wits, by protesting that, despite herself, and notwithstanding her purity of will, she finds she simply must yield to his desires—a transparent case, as she calculates, of protesting too much and being understood as protesting not at all. The mother enacts a sophisticated second-order hypocrisy—not so much pretending to be pious, as pretending to be pretending to be pious, in order to ingratiate herself with a pious fraud and expose him as such. If she has been a victim of religious hypocrisy up to this point, she shows here that she has learned the game well enough to play her cards like a sophisticated operator.

In short, there are existing sites of noise and inconsistency in the system of these languages, as there are with any system, noise these systems had already learned to manage, in the sense of minimising the disruptive potential of inconsistency. But because of the way that hypocrisy necessarily refers to a community’s shared affirmation of a system of values and ‘pieties’, the problem of hypocrisy points us in two directions at once. There are two systems running in parallel: (1) there is the system of the community itself, something larger than kinship or tribe, a system claiming some social and political coherence, binding people into a meaningful and more or less stable polity, but riven (like any system) with fault-lines, fractures, and points of noise and incoherence—and then (2), somewhat distinct from this, there is also a discursive system, claiming the coherence imputed to a true perspective, proposing to bind people within a shared worldview and a shared set of values, but riven (like any system) with fault-lines, fractures, and points of noise and incoherence. Serres’s philosophy does not aim to stage a declaration of the exceptional incoherence of this or that structure—the language of grace, say, or piety, or the social body of France in the 1660s, or the West over the course of Serres’s lifetime. For Serres, the potential for incoherence to express itself is the rule and not the exception. But insofar as political systems and discursive systems analogise each other—as incoherence in the one threatens to excite and expose latent incoherence in the other—we can see that there is some incentive to minimise the appearance of incoherence. This is the express purpose of dogma in a non-pejorative sense: dogma is a discursive structure instituted to secure a community against its fragmentisation (Sloterdijk 2023, 85). Socio-political systems willingly bear some degree of discursive illogic if this sufferance will spare them exposure to the fact that submission to a community’s prevailing orthodoxy will indeed enforce that community’s coherence, but it also gives refuge to scoundrels and thus makes the community vulnerable to the predations of knaves and charlatans and hypocrites—a political and discursive problem with no perfect solution. We might suspect that these larger dramas are played out in miniature in the local instance of any parasite. Tartuffe in Act III and the mother in Act IV are able to insinuate themselves into the host system at their noisy points of contact, mimicking known elements of the system in question and calculating that the host will be duped into accepting their parasitical interventions—calculating that there are anxious disincentives to a candid, critical perspective on the fault lines of a given system.

Since, as Serres postulates, there is no system without parasites, it is never the case that the system was in a prior state of absolute tranquillity. Systems will surely have moments of relative tranquillity, but because they have parasites, sites of noise and incoherence, even relatively tranquil systems also have sites of potential disruption. One can imagine that the family at the centre of Molière’s comedy might retrospectively represent their pre-Tartuffe state as having been more or less harmonious, but it seems far more likely that its domestic life was always a system like every other: with sites of tension, whether latent or active. Or to take a different example, one can imagine that the doctrine of grace was developed in a Christian context to manage internal incoherencies as Semitic inheritances were adopted and then rationalised according to the demands of Greek modes of systematic thought. In some times and places, grace itself will become a site of widespread personal and public contest; in other times and places, grace appears to function as it was intended, as a more or less adequate rationalisation of otherwise varied inheritances from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The critical point for Serres is to promote a certain scepticism with regard to claims for parasite-free systems. The challenge is to regard all systems, even those enjoying relative harmony, as riddled with sites of potential disruption, sites of incoherence, even if latent or slumbering in mere potentiality—in what I have tried to evoke with the phrase ‘equilibrial tension’.

Comedy and the critique of hypocrisy: exposing the inconsistency of identitarian determinations

Michel Serres’s implicit position here—that all systems are fundamentally riven with sites of incoherence and are thus vulnerable to a scandalous exposure of their inconsistency—opens up a new critical frame for understanding the critique of hypocrisy and, more speculatively, comedy itself. If incoherence and inconsistency are implicit in all systems, whether social or discursive, then the critical agenda shifts from one of judgement—perhaps of accusation, as in the typical complaint against hypocrisy—to the question of how systems manage (or fail to manage) the ineliminable inconsistency of their composition.

Consider, for example, the way comedy and critique can operate as tactics to force an accommodation in the inclusions of a system’s self-account. The comic or critical imputation of hypocrisy requires a perspective, indeed seeks to impose a perspective, heterogeneous to the way the system has hitherto accounted for itself. At the very least, Molière’s comedies of the 1660s encourage readers and theatre-goers to acknowledge, within the public sphere, the sometimes villainous fact that not everything that calls itself piety properly deserves the name.⁴ If the critique, or if the comedy, succeeds in establishing a place for its perspective, then we might say that the standards of that critique, something of its critical perspective, come to be accommodated even within the system’s own self-representation, such that the system comes to account for itself in terms of a wider, more capacious range of contending perspectives—indeed it becomes a system now more capable of managing contention as such, albeit at the price of a certain relaxation or resignation in its ideal of coherence. The system was always heterogeneous, always riven with inconsistencies, always susceptible to the unexpected eruption of noise and incoherence. But with the critique, or with the comedy, the system now represents itself, for a time at least, with a more sophisticated sense, a more explicit acknowledgement, of the tensions of its own internal composition.

In the specific context of his meditation on subjective and systemic ‘inconsistency’, Serres’s commitment to thinking ‘hypocrisy’ is alternately odd and apt. On the one hand, there is the popular tendency to resolve this word into a terminal complaint about the outrageous inconsistency of one’s rivals, as if a determination of inconsistency might authorise a satisfactory termination of thought, as if there were thenceforth nothing further to think or say about the matter. The Greek root of ‘hypocrisy’, like the root of ‘critique’, refers to krinein, which means to judge or decide or determine, except that the prefix hupo- suggests what lies underneath this, as if the ‘critical’ task in the critique of hypocrisy were to make determinations about some darkly malign subterranean element that has hitherto been operating below the threshold of determination. Serres’s often indeterminate writing on hypocrisy is much devoted, as we shall see, to thinking the underdetermined, but it is important to note that it makes no pretence to resolve the underdetermined into the realm of the determinable. Indeed the comedic context suggests a different etymological support for Serres’s persistence with his key term: whatever its deep roots, in Greek, hupokrisis is the acting of a part—pretending, yes, but especially playing a part in a theatrical context. And Serres makes it clear in The Parasite that he wishes to keep the comic theatre at the heart of his deliberations on social and discursive inconsistency.

When Serres reframes our understanding of the critique of hypocrisy—and the work of the comic theatre as such—he finds, at the heart of both, a flickering instability in the presumption of stable and discrete identity that operates as a fundamental category grounding human thought. Here Serres describes Tartuffe’s mimetic manoeuvrings and poses a rather explosive extrapolation about hypocrisy more generally:

Tartuffe is everyone in each of their places. He is the brother of the father; he is his heir; he is the husband of the wife and the lover of the daughter; he is the owner of the estate. Name all of the characters – Tartuffe has substituted himself for every one. […] His mimicry is more than just hypocrisy: it is nothing at all to say that he counterfeits pious devotion, since he also feigns the role of the father, the brother, the son, and the lover. He is the wild card placed everywhere all at once […]. Who is Tartuffe, black truffle, black box? Does he even have an identity? Can it be said that it is a matter here of the explosion of the principle of individuation? Who is Tartuffe, this character who, at one and the same time, is so many metamorphoses? […]

Hypocrisy signifies underdetermination: that which lies underneath decision. (Serres 2007, 206–207; 2014, 371)

There is much to unpack here. We take Serres’s point, of course, that Tartuffe contains multitudes, like Joseph in Egypt, and like any of us, but Serres is also claiming that the comedy invites us to meditate on the possibility that these multitudes do not resolve themselves into some harmonious chord or composition, some determinate identity we might attribute to a monadically conceived individual, nor to ‘a well-defined simple unit—me, me alone’, as Serres glosses the self’s reflexive self-definition (Serres 2007, 117; 2014, 213).

We have seen Serres occasionally struggle against the human tendency whereby thought slides into a moral determination with respect to a given identity and comes to a halt: such and such a figure is a hypocrite and is thus ‘bad’. Some other figure, or perhaps the same figure, is a parasite and is thus ‘bad’. Thought having terminated at such a determination, we find we can only marinate in the appalling spectacle of other people’s shamelessness. This is a common experience, I think, especially for those of us too much given to the jouissance of a certain mode of political commentary. But Serres’s critical reflections here on identity, especially in the context of his philosophy more generally, suggest a new thought. Perhaps we come to a halt in such moralising determinations because our stopping place in a state of offence gives our affect and our animation refuge from a more unsettling vision: that the true cause of offence in hypocrisy and the parasite is the way they open up a vision of the prevailing underdetermination and essential inconsistency of being and becoming—a completely different challenge for life and thought and existence than whatever is offered by the familiar comforts of hating on the hypocrite. What we before called an equilibrial tension now appears as an existential figure, stretching between the underdetermination and inconsistency of being and the very human flight into specious determinations that promise to shelter the subject within a more stable set of understandings.

In this way, hypocrisy comes to be offered to us by Serres as the very name of an underdetermination of identity as such. The underdetermination of Serres’s own phrasing—‘Can it be said that it is a matter of the explosion of the principle of individuation?’—leaves one wondering how radically he intends this. Is he saying that, at the heart of Tartuffe, maybe as at the heart of any of us, there is just clamour and noise, a condensation of heterogeneous voices operating within and across heterogeneous systemic milieux which defeat our pretence to self-containment? Serres poses the possibility but leaves its determination—and leaves his reader—in suspense.

The larger concluding section of The Parasite, which starts with Serres’s reading of Tartuffe, suggests in its opening programme a somewhat more restrained position: ‘Comic interlude amidst the works’ (Serres 2007, 201; 2014, 361). Serres seems to be aiming in this book at something fundamentally intermedial, something that operates precisely amidst or between. What we might call ‘betweenitude’ now appears as a secret theme in Serres’s book. Consider three examples: grace, ingratiation, and the role-playing of hypocrisy and hupokrisis. Here is one of Serres’s descriptions of grace: ‘Grace passes in the fuzzy area between words and things, […] an intermediate space, […] an unstable distance of ecstasy and existence, of incarnation and ascension, of bread and birds’ (Serres 2007, 47; 2014, 92–93). Grace, like love, performs its work in a space that is fuzzy and unstable, in some respects a black box impenetrable by human understanding, but mediating between entities and making relationality possible—for example between the worldly human and the otherworldly divine, at least as Plato’s Diotima thinks about love (Plato 1963, 202d) and as a Platonist like Augustine thinks about divine dispensation. To bridge the two incommensurables requires some kind of mystical operator and Serres wants to think of grace as one word for this function. The present essay has written of the social parasite—in the example of Tartuffe—ingratiating himself with his host. Ingratiation, like grace—they share the same root, of course—also has this same medial character, as we have seen: a figure situated at point X, the site of a worldly adventurer, let us say, departs point X to make a near approach to point Y, the milieu of the host, perhaps the site of those who place their confidence in the language of piety. Ingratiation is the approach from the in-between. Tartuffe, the comedy, a play about parasites, is a play about people playing roles.⁵ However one might characterise their ontological status before the imposture, regardless of any supposition of substantial consistency or inconsistency, the action of the play throws them into the middle: they’ve left something behind without having altogether arrived at some new state of identity. Tartuffe cannot altogether leave behind his elements of adventurism, even as he makes a credibly pious self-presentation and gives evidence of plausible passion for the mother in the play; the mother, played originally by Molière’s own flirtatious wife, still cannot altogether adopt the identity of an adulteress, even as the relaxed ingenuity of her pretence might inspire questions about the purity of her commitment to marital fidelity.

We have seen, in the quotation above, that Serres slides from the specific question of Tartuffe’s underdetermined character—the roles he adopts and plays and discards over the course of the comedy—to something rather more profound: the suggestion of an ‘explosion of the principle of individuation’ as such. The text stages the image of an explosion—a sudden and dramatic loss of cohesion—that is particularly apt as an image for the fragmenting of the subjective ideal of individuation, a rupture in the figure of cohesion as such. But ‘explosion’ is dramatic in another sense too: in Latin, explodere was to drive out by clapping (ex + plaudere), as one might do with an unwelcome animal intrusion in one’s house, but it was also, in the Roman theatre, precisely to hiss a figure off the stage. It was the deployment of disconcerting noise to pester the pest from the theatrical scene, so to speak. ‘Can it be said’, to borrow Serres’s own locution, that this explosive reading of Tartuffe works to agitate and explode the existing tensions within our fantasies of individuation, of coherent and continuous identity, by drawing out of Molière’s comedy the disconcerting spectacle of our true multiplicity and noisy incoherence? Serres’s own restrained style in The Parasite obliges us to leave the matter unresolved, taking us to the threshold of its possibility, but not berthing us in a determination, as if there were some virtue to be found in underdetermination as such.

If there were such a virtue to underdetermination, Serres seems to imagine it as central to the operation of the comic theatre—perhaps, one might speculate, as a comic analogue to the Aristotelian theory of tragedy’s salutary purgation of pity and fear. The very staginess of the key terms in Serres’s discussion of hypocrisy—hupokrisis, ex-plaudere—together with the general context of a reading of Molière’s Tartuffe that is followed in the same section by discussion of the comic figure of Aristophanes—all this points us back to the theatre in a larger sense than just this play by Molière, and to comedy as a specific theatrical mode.

This essay has already alluded to a gracious figure in Plato’s Symposium, offered by Socrates’s Diotima when she explicates love as the intermedial figure between the human and the divine, the worldly and the ideal. In the same work, Plato has Aristophanes give a discourse on the origin of love, which Serres glosses with a peculiar emphasis on its essential comedy:

We are not individuals. We have already been divided and we are always menaced anew. Zeus, unhappy with our insolence, […] split us in two – and he could do it again; in which case we would have to hop about. […] As soon as the punishment of Zeus had been accomplished, the sad, severed halves ran to one another to intertwine, to unite, and to find their fullness once more. […] Thus spoke Aristophanes, the comedian at the table of tragedy. (Serres 2007, 232; 2014, 416–417)

In describing the split of subjectivity, Serres concludes by underscoring Aristophanes’s role as ‘the comedian at the table of tragedy’, one who offers up the image of split beings ‘hopping about’ after some hypothetical future après coup, but Serres couples this comic image with the unmistakably tragic figuration of ‘sad, severed halves’ in the here and now. Aristophanes’s parable offers the thought that we have always already been divided and split and that we can be split yet again (Plato 1963, 193a); yet he also introduces a comic, critical, secondary consciousness to the thinking of this sad existential condition. As if to say: yes we are sad and severed now, but it’s funny to think how much worse things could be if the future found us hopping about after a second such mishap. And this is the word of the comedian at the table of tragedy. What, then, is comedy? Is it the spawning of a supplementary frame of critical reflection? There is an old saw declaring that comedy is ‘tragedy plus time’. Might we more precisely think of comedy as catastrophe plus critical distance? A split and a supplementation that allows the comic subject to be at once presenced and distanced with respect to our sad and severed state, even as it underscores our vulnerability to further fragmentation?

This is a larger question than this essay, or Serres’s commitments in The Parasite, will allow us to decide. But comedy, as the theatrical scene of hupokrisis, played in the public space, now appears as a drama of identification and disidentification. Actors will play characters—sometimes, as in Molière’s Tartuffe, Don Juan, and Amphitryon, actors play characters who themselves pretend or play roles for other characters. Audiences and readers themselves will share sympathetically in the plights of the characters, but this is also supplemented by some comic critical perspective. Successful comedy and the critique of hypocrisy thus stage an occasion for a double-tracked critical consciousness: seeing the pretence imposed upon dupes, marking its separation from a truer perspective, and enjoying the privilege of striking a contestatory stance under the aegis of a superior—if less socially consistent—truth. Part of the enjoyment of this accession to a critical perspective will be the pleasure of making a determination one can both claim as one’s own and also identify as a truer and less blinkered view than the common perspective of dupes—and, because true means true for everyone, one finds oneself in the happy position of having one’s own view promise a potential point of consensus and consistency for everyone in the community.

Serres himself, however, locates his drama elsewhere, in the movements between: between comedy and catastrophe, between participating sympathetically in the world of the characters and striking an exterior stance of some degree of critical thought, between the habitation of character worldviews variously duped and discerning. In its critically distanced way, comedy plays with the tragic dimension of our fixation with true essence and identity, commitments that expose us to the predations of parasites like Tartuffe, even as we are already vulnerable to inscrutable powers that might cripple us or cast us down. Serres’s text is too restrained to state it so boldly, but his text implies that we live and think and exist not fixed in identity, but in the movement between identity and disindividuation, order and disorder, system and noise, comedy and catastrophe, the determined and the underdetermined, the immediate and the critical. As subjects and as members of a social body, we will have our interests and commitments and so we will have our pieties and our figures of hygiene with respect to parasites and other ills. This is how we hope to thrive. But insofar as we radicalise these figures into fantasies of the purity and stability of identity, we take them too far. Life itself, like grace, like love, is mobile and fluid and we must give ourselves over to its underdetermined and interminable dialectic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some readers will wonder whether a charlatan is precisely a ‘hypocrite’, in the received English understanding of the term. In his preface to the revised version of Tartuffe in 1669 (Molière 2010, 93–96) and in his first two petitions to the king (Molière 2010, 191–194), Molière frames his play as addressing hypocrisy. Other critics—notably the philosopher Judith Shklar—have also found ‘hypocrisy’ a useful term in meditating upon Tartuffe and Molière’s plays of the 1660s (Shklar 1979, 1-9). Given this background, and given especially Serres’s use of the term, readers may have to accept for present purposes a somewhat broader understanding of the term than they might ordinarily prefer.

2. Molière's 1665 comedy Don Juan, composed in the wake of Tartuffe’s initial suppression by religious authorities, is likewise preoccupied with the theme of hypocrisy. Readers and theatregoers will recall the title character, whose boundless enthusiasm for romantic conquest relies for its serial successes upon insincere pledges of lasting affection; the play’s other characters, however, who judge his mania in the harshest terms, are exposed for the hypocritical inconstancy of their own supposed commitments to virtue. In the context of this reading of Tartuffe, it also bears noting that, in Act V.2, as Don Juan finds it expedient to adopt the mien of moral reform, he also delivers a lengthy monologue to his servant on society’s special weakness with regard to religious hypocrisy, observing that society lacks any reliable resource to resist the predations of religious charlatans and other impostures of false piety. Individuals and partisans may feel the affront of hypocrisy, but society generally permits it so long as it falls short of criminal fraud—society’s interest in ideals of virtue, it seems, are largely satisfied by the mere proclamation of one’s adherence to the recognised values of the polis. Molière’s devotion to these themes in the mid-1660s is further attested by The Misanthrope (1666), which treats a range of everyday deceptions supported by social convention—again self-interested postures of piety, but also excessive forms of politeness and the social lubricants of insincere praise—even as it also considers the special vanity and perverse pleasures of the title character, who puts himself forth as the ‘misanthropic’ exception to these conventional insincerities.

3. Molière’s own preface of 1669 observes that some will condemn comedy out of hand, confusing it with the turpitudinous ‘spectacles of shame and licentious folly’ (Molière 2010, 94) that Augustine censured as a moral pestilence in his City of God (I.32) (Augustine 2012, 34), but the very publication of this preface (and this play) under the authority of the king suggests that Molière was able to successfully mount a conservative defence of the comedy against the Augustinians, sustaining a distinction between true piety and false and establishing comedy as one way to correct the vicious confusion of the two. As the 1669 preface presents it, the problem is that Tartuffe is not genuinely pious and that other key figures in the play suffer from a pious zeal that is unbalanced by reason. In short, a great effort is expended simply to allow for public airing of a distinction between piety and its counterfeit. We might observe that for Nietzsche and others, in a rather different historical moment, the complaint aims towards a new and insurgent ideal: for them, the problem exposed by Molière’s play is that public pieties suffer internal rhetorical and socio-political impediments that render them almost incapable of checking obvious villainies so long as these conform superficially to accepted discourse. Serres takes no side in this contest of competing ideals; instead, his work invites us to articulate a philosophical description of how these systems operate, irrespective of which historical pieties constrain them.

4. In The Decameron (1353), Giovanni Boccaccio’s wry tales of clerical cupidity and his comically candid treatment of corruption in the church hierarchy enculturated readers into acknowledging a distinction between the account that a system will give of itself (e.g. the church representing itself as God’s instrument on earth) and resonant insurgent accounts that contest the self-flattering account of the system. For surfacing a hitherto repressed folk tradition about earthly interests rife within the church—and thereby cultivating readers’ critical perspective on the self-account of systems—the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is moved to describe The Decameron as the ‘de facto beginning of the European Enlightenment’ (Sloterdijk 2023, 61).

5. The comedy of Molière’s Amphitryon (1668) turns on the confusions arising from a pair of perfect impostures: Jupiter in the guise of Amphitryon and Mercury in the guise of Amphitryon’s servant, the two of them working to advance Jupiter’s amours with the real Amphitryon’s virtuous wife, who herself is fated to become the mother of semi-divine Hercules. In a sense, this play presents little problem: only the human characters on stage suffer any confusion—the audience is in no doubt that Jupiter is really Jupiter and Amphitryon is really Amphitryon. But the confusions of the real Amphitryon and the real servant, as they contend with their divine Doppelgängers, remain at the heart of the comedic action and it is easy to see that, on another level, the comedy’s three acts are an occasion for audiences to play, in imagination, with scenarios in which identity (and the relationships it makes possible) might be unmoored from the uniqueness we feel to be one of identity’s grounding principles.