ABSTRACT
The early modern emblem-that amalgam of text and image-produced a debate of perhaps surprising intensity and duration. Between 1550 and 1642 few topics energized rhetorical, literary, and pictorial theorists more than the questions about meaning and figuration that the emblem seemed to have evoked, questions connected to the paragone debate, but perhaps more culturally central, since what was debated was not just the superiority of one art over another, but the foundational question of how meaning is produced and where it lies. The stakes in this debate, in other words, are nothing less than establishing how figures signify. My interest here is in another perhaps surprising phenomenon: the extent to which postmodern theory, and in particular queer theory, continues to grapple with these same issues, and to do so in a way that is potentially illuminating for the early modern debate. Because that earlier conversation became so quickly and thoroughly entrammeled in a more specific and more virulent debate-between the Protestant insistence on the primacy of the word and the Catholic reliance (at least in the eyes of the reformers) on the image-arguments about the emblem might seem bound to a particular historical moment. What I argue here, however, is that there is a much longer arc to this discussion and that we are by no means finished with it. At its heart, the discussion takes on the theme of this volume: does the verbal power implicit in the etymology of historia have a peculiar claim to the truth, or does the “body” of the image have an immanent and empirical claim that supersedes it? Queer theory also enables us to ask if there is an inevitable contamination between the two modes of interpreting the world, a contamination that resides in the notion of figure itself.
