Which Iphigenia is Sacrificeable? Jean Racine and the Gendered Politics of Desire

While it has become both legitimate and commonplace for political theorists to examine plays as texts of political theory, as texts that offer theoretical reflections on political concepts and ideological frameworks in narrative and dramatic form, neoclassical French drama has received scant attention from political theorists. As the dominant and orthodox artistic genre in seventeenth-century France, many central political and theoretical concepts are shaped and refracted through neoclassical drama, and as such, merits close attention. In this essay I turn to one of the most successful plays in seventeen-century France, namely dramatist Jean Racine’s Iphigénie, to explore the relevance of desire to politics and political life. Racine dramatizes that the desire to die, or attachment to one’s own death, is a politically salient form of desire. Furthermore, I show that such desire is fundamentally gendered. I argue that in Racine’s narrative, desire marks sacrificeability, which is a particular kind of abjection that differs from disposability and killability. Sacrificeability is conferred by one’s passionate attachment to one’s own subjection to the extent that one consents to one’s own death. This is what I call a fantasy of consent, wherein consent is not a normative feminist ideal but a critical analytic that we can take up to dissect and discern the logic of subjection. By expounding and ultimately foreclosing the disruptive power of desire, Racine’s Iphigénie enriches our understanding of desire as salient to political life, and clarifies the relation between desire and sovereign-patriarchal power.