ABSTRACT
Francis Barker begins his account of shifts in the constitution of subjectivity in the seventeenth century with the famous extract from Pepys’s Diary in which the latter records his reading, masturbating over and burning L’Escolle des Filles. For Barker, Pepys’s private consumption of a ‘lewd book’ marks a point at which the ‘spectacular corporeality of the Jacobean plenum’ can be seen to be giving way to a new regime in which the body is simultaneously reduced to a ‘private residuality’ and reproduced as a ‘positive object of knowledge’ in a process which displaces ‘the charge of the sexed body onto the sexed text’.1 This subject is gendered male, and women function in this order as the (necessary) object of a (frustrated) desire, as ‘spoken absence’ or ‘speechless presence’ but never as ‘the human subject which is to be the key organising figure of bourgeois culture…the woman is an objectified body at which speech is aimed,…but whose being is, so to speak, subdiscursive: dumb, reduced, corporeal matter.’2
