| Sumario: | This article analyzes how French Renaissance writers treat languishing, both as a physical and emotional condition, and in a more metaphorical register as a cultural, and political, phenomenon. Languishing became a prominent feature of the period partly as a corollary of attempts to enact the cultural flourishing more typically associated with the Renaissance, as well as in the context of renewed attention to the good life. There is a languishing poetics particular to French culture that in the first instance was influenced by Petrarch, but can be understood as a feature of imitative poetics in general. It then transferred into prose in a way that further draws out the politics of this affect of diminished life. This article analyzes Montaigne, Rabelais, and particularly La Boétie to trace the relation between poetic and prose languishing and its mixed or "alloyed" quality. In all these works, the languishing subject survives somewhat against the grain. Languishing can be understood as a less-than-good life defined by persistence and decline. I read this ambivalent orientation to the future with Lauren Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism" but suggest that early modern languishing is also a resource for optimism that is not entirely cruel.
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