4 - Authors and others

Summary

I have shotte at many abuses, over shotte myselfe in describing of some; where truth failed, my invention hath stood my friend.

Greene's Vision, 1592

The subject has occupied mostly a subjugated position in my discussions of Elizabethan torture and of Shakespeare's plays. The locus of powerful truth, the subject nevertheless emerges in my account as the object of the discovering operations of the Elizabethan or Viennese or Venetian states. What such a formulation tends to leave out, of course, is an account of the position of the discoverers themselves as subjects, of the way in which finding and claiming an external truth, as well as withholding or speaking an internal one, produces an authoritative subject. I have stressed the epistemic and political oppositions of discoverer and internalized subject up to this point in order to make clear the way in which discovery constructs truth as otherness, occluding the discoverer as an original site of truth, or possible object of knowledge. But we have also seen that the discovered and the discoverers show sometimes scandalous, sometimes uncanny affinities with one another. The torturers' secret iniquities become the object of Jesuitical discoveries; the Duke discloses in himself the vicious desires he has discovered in Angelo; the impenetrable Iago understands and controls Othello's and the Venetian state's appetite for discovery. Thus the discovering subject implicit in my discussion up to this point is characterized by an objectivity that folds ambiguously into subjecthood, a primary emptiness that with a shift of perspective becomes a rich secrecy.