ABSTRACT
The Restoration court projected a collective image of living in ironic and even defiant incompatibility with its inherited forms of public representation. The grotesque body of carnival was being re-territorialized, it was being appropriated, sublimated and individualized to code refined identity, to give the eighteenth-century nobility and the bourgeoisie masks and symbols to think with at the very moment when they were repudiating the social realm from which those masks and symbols came. It was always someone else who was possessed by the grotesque, never the self. The production and reproduction of a body of classical writing required a labour of suppression, a perpetual work of exclusion upon the grotesque body and it was that supplementary yet unavoidable labour which troubled the identity of the classical. By disowning the grotesque body the Enlightenment rendered itself peculiarly vulnerable to the shock of its continued presence or to its unexpected rediscovery.
