Diderot’s Monsters, between Physiology and Politics

As a point of departure, I think of that scene from D'Alembert's Dream when Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is mixing up the threads on her skein winder. By removing threads from the bundle or by adding others, she can form now a noseless animal, now an earless one and others still without heads, feet or hands. Theirs will be a short lifespan, but they will have lived. Talking about the forming of a Cyclops, the character of Bordeu then adds: In your mind do what nature sometimes does-cut through one of the sections of the bundle; for instance the part which forms the eyes and what do you think will happen? [Faites par la pensee ce que nature fait quelquefois; mutilez le faisceau d'un de ses brins; par exemple du brin qui formera les yeux; que croyez-vous qu'il en arrive?1]If philosophising definitely requires some transcendental notion, metamorphosis is the one transcendental idea Diderot's thought can resort to. Indeed, in the article on Animal in the first volume of the 1751 Encyclopaedia, the text from Chapters One and Two in Volume One of Buffon's Natural History is employed and distorted in some asides by Diderot: Instead of a metaphysical degree of beings, the living and the animate constitute a physical property of matter (Le vivant et l'anime, au lieu d'etre un degre metaphysique des etres est une propriete physique de la matiere);2 and earlier in the text:It is well understood that all those truths grow dim on the frontiers of realms and that it would be a painstaking enterprise to make them out distinctly when passing from the mineral to the vegetal and from the vegetal to the animal. . . . The observer is forced to pass from one individual to the other; but the historian of nature has to embrace it in great masses and divide those masses in places of the chain where nuances look the most contrasted while being careful not to attribute those divisions to the work of nature. (On concoit bien que toutes ces verites s'obscurcissent sur les limites des regnes et qu'on aurait bien de la peine a les apercevoir distinctement sur le passage du mineral au vegetal et du vegetal a l'animal. . . . L'observateur est force de passer d'un individu a un autre; mais l'historien de la nature est contraint de l'embrasser par grandes masses; et ces masses, il les coupe dans les endroits de la chaIne ou les nuances lui paraissent trancher le plus vivement; et il se garde bien d'imaginer que ces divisions soient l'ouvrage de la nature.)3In the article Mineral of the Encyclopaedia, d'Holbach writes:It is very difficult to fix the precise boundary lines nature has set between the different realms; everything conspires to show the greatest analogy between mineral, vegetable and animal forms. Indeed, the mineral realm supplies vegetables with the earth and juices their growth requires; vegetables supply animals with food and consequently go, along with what parts they drew from the earth, into the very substance of those animals which ultimately restore to the earth what they received from it. (Il est tres difficile de fixer les bornes precises que la nature a mises entre les differents regnes; tout nous demontre qu'il y a la plus grande analogie entre les mineraux, les vegetaux et les animaux. En effet, le regne mineral fournit aux vegetaux la terre et les sucs necessaires pour leur accroissement; les vegetaux fournissent aux animaux leur nourriture, et passent ainsi avec les parties qu'ils ont tirees de la terre dans la substance de ces animaux qui eux-memes rendent a la fin a la terre ce qu'ils en ont recu.)4Even before the apparition of the monstrous bestiary properly speaking, this blurring of boundaries between species already suggests something actually monstrous, some forerunner of our contemporary anti-speciesism. And this can also be said to herald the first of the three dialogues composing D'Alembert's Dream, in which the statue of the sculptor Falconet, after being crushed to powder, becomes the base of the transformation of marble into flesh through the mediation of humus, a latus, or union of two substances, that is, a plant that decays and feeds, which is in itself enough to show how marble can be turned into flesh

Political science · Politics · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Law · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought

• The French Enlightenment attempts to create a philosophy without reason

  Henry Martyn Lloyd•Intellectual History Review•2017

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