The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

love conversing with God keep a great silence with human beings.” His renunciation was categorical; “however regulated and innocent they can be, speech (la parole) and conversation open for us the portals for getting out of ourselves and fill us with phantoms and vain imaginings.”³⁶

      It was this animosity toward social speech, no less radical than Rancé’s, that informed Malebranche’s righteous disdain for the social aesthetic of the honnête femme and the honnête homme. In characterizing the aesthetic as effeminate, he made it the site of both weakness and tyrannical power. It not only betrayed, in a particularly pathological social form, the abject dependence of weakened reason on overweening imagination; in doing so, it provided a heightened example of the exercise of blind and arbitrary social power through speech.