Renaissance Machiavellism and the Subject of Psychoanalysis

Machiavellian political practice carries an exceptionally negative valence in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, in large part because of its divorce of the political from the theological and ethical spheres. But Machiavelli's texts not only secularize political power, they theatricalize it, by advocating the self-conscious performance of qualities such as honor or religious piety in order to maintain princely advantage or republican discipline. Such theatricality implies the reservation of a concealed but authentic subject beneath the practitioner's outwardly presented identity. Structurally isomorphic with the unconscious, this hidden subject has no phenomenal or empirical substantiality, and as such it is inherently intolerable, constituting an additional cause of the English dread of Machiavelli.

The veiled Machiavellian subject is rendered most clearly in English Renaissance drama, especially in Shakespeare's Othello. Iago is the most notorious example of the Renaissance “Machiavel”—a stock villain on the early modern stage—and he allows us to illustrate with unusual clarity the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject and its correlative, the unbearable objet petit a.