Conspiracy : James Martel

3. Conspiring With (or by) the Public

If we read Machiavelli as advocating for conspiracy, the examples he offers are almost uniformly instances where a gang of conspirators plot to murder a prince for their own benefit. He often delights in tricks and lies, in deceit and killing. What guidance could Machiavelli then possibly have to offer for a leftist project, for the “immense rumor” Derrida discusses?

We get a better sense of how Machiavelli may offer us a useful model for left conspiracy in some of his plays, especially his well-known play Mandragola (“the Mandrake Root”). This sexual farce, which was wildly popular in Machiavelli’s lifetime, can be read as a model for a popular conspiracy that works differently than the examples of conspiracy that he supplies in the Discourses. Perhaps more accurately, this play brings out a radical potential in Machiavelli’s larger theory of conspiracy, one that may then be read back even into the Discourses.

Mandragola is a play about a rich and foolish old man, Nicia who has a beautiful young wife named Lucretia (Lucrezia in the original Italian). A young man named Callimaco hears about her beauty and is seized with the desire to meet and sleep with her. Through the intervention of a scheming figure called Ligurio (who can be read as a foil for Machiavelli himself), a plan is concocted to achieve this goal. Insofar as Lucretia has so far been unable to conceive a child—and the fault is clearly not hers but her ancient husband’s– Ligurio suggests that Callimaco disguise himself as a doctor and offer a “cure” for this infertility. In this disguise, Callimaco tells Nicia that Lucretia must consume some of the mandrake root. This will allow her to become fertile but it will also kill the first man she sleeps with. Then Callimaco takes on a second disguise as a pauper. Nicia eagerly helps the disguised Callimaco to undress and get in bed with his wife, assuming this man will draw off the poison, allowing Nicia himself to later impregnate Lucretia. It is a ridiculous and misogynist plot but Callimaco succeeds in the end. In the process, Lucretia is let in on the secret and she agrees to become Callimaco’s lover behind Nicia’s back.

If we read this play in a conspiratorial sense, we can see that Nicia is akin to the Medici, an autocratic ruler who controls Lucretia, who could herself be read as a stand-in for Florence, for the public community. Ligurio, like Machiavelli, does not directly confront this authority (not anymore anyway, not since his political career was ended by the return of the Medici whereupon he turned instead to writing). He seeks to influence others to get them to take up his resistance to what he sees as undeserved or illicit forms of rule (or marriage).

Most critically for my purposes here, although it appears that Callimaco (via Ligurio) is acting in ways that seem typically “Machiavellian,” i.e. lying, scheming and deceiving, this is not quite the case. In fact, in the end, the only one still being deceived in the play is Nicia. There is a quality of open secrets to Callimaco and Ligurio’s scheming, a way in which the general public (whether in the form of Lucretia, or the audience of the play) is, or soon becomes, completely in the know. A kind of double language is employed so that what is widely known and openly spoken in the public dimension becomes, at the very same time, a way of deceiving a private (and venal) audience: Nicia. An example of this double language can be seen in the following exchange at the end of the play. This comes after all the shenanigans described have taken place. Nicia still thinks Callimaco is a doctor.

NICIA: Doctor, let me present you to my wife.
CALLIMACO: With pleasure.
NICIA: Lucretia, this is the man who’ll cause us to have a staff to support our old age.
LUCRETIA: I’m delighted to meet him and want him to be our closest friend
NICIA: Now bless you. And I want him and Ligurio to come and have dinner with us this noon.
LUCRETIA: Yes, indeed.
NICIA: And I’m going to give them the key of the room on the ground floor in the loggia, so they can come there when it’s convenient, because they don’t have women at home and live like animals.
CALLIMACO: I accept it, to use it when I like.¹¹

Here, Callimaco and Lucretia are employing a double language. To Nicia, it sounds as if they are innocently responding to his comments. Yet to one another, and to the play’s audience, it is clear that something else is afoot. These two are, in fact, plotting right under Nicia’s nose. They are describing their plan to continue their affair in broad daylight in a way that deceives or excludes no one but Nicia. Thus, for example, when Lucretia says that Callimaco will be her “closest friend,” she is not lying exactly. To Nicia, she sounds like she is merely mouthing polite platitudes whereas in fact she is attesting to her newfound romantic relationship with Callimaco.

Rather than lying, Callimaco and Lucretia could be said to be practicing the trope of adianoeta (literally “not noticed”). Here, words have two sets of meanings, one that seems obvious on the face of it and another that is more subtle, that comes out of a particular context. Normally this trope is meant to be used by elites to control meaning, to foist one set of interpretations on the general public while appreciating the “true” and esoteric meaning of these terms only amongst themselves. But in Machiavelli’s hands it works the other way around: this use of adianoeta serves to disenfranchise the elite in favor of the general public.

If Nicia is indeed a stand-in for the Medici, a privately interested person who sets himself above and at odds with the crowds, he can only rely on his own judgment, or on the judgment of his paid advisors (in the play, a corrupt priest serves this purpose). The crowds, on the other hand, have a multivaried form of knowledge; collectively they know just about everything that there is to know. Having such shared knowledge, they can understand what Callimaco and Lucretia are saying through the lens of their own collective experience. This is literalized in the play in the sense that the viewing audience sees everything and therefore has access to the codes of meaning that Callimaco and Lucretia are employing when they talk before Nicia.

For this reason, we can see Machiavelli as demonstrating, if not openly advocating for, a methodology that serves a left conspiratorial agenda because they employ public knowledges that are subversive to private ones. They furthermore demonstrate how to conspire in plain view by employing a double language; the characters in this play employ the technique of adionoeta in a way that serves to undermine usurpers and private schemers.

^{11. Machiavelli, “Mandragola,” in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others Volume II, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 777-778: 820-1.↩}