Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment

Introduction

Introduction Formal innovation (of the sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experimentation . To respond to the demand of the literary work as the demand of the other is to attend to it as a unique event whose happening is a call, a challenge, an obligation: understand how little you understand me, translate my untranslatability, learn me by heart and thus learn the otherness that inhabits the heart. —Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature The benefits of other pursuits come to those who have reached the end of a difficult course, but in the study of philosophy pleasure keeps pace with growing knowledge; for pleasure does not follow learning; rather, learning and pleasure advance side by side. —Epicurus, The Vatican Sayings Immanuel Kant’s famous essay ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment ?’’ () ends with an oblique reference to the enduringly scandalous materialism of Julien Offray de la Mettrie, author of the treatise Machine Man (). Kant writes: ‘‘When nature has . . . developed the seed for which she cares most tenderly—namely, the inclination and vocation for free thinking—this works back upon the character of the people (who thereby become more and more capable of acting freely) and finally even on the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.’’1 ‘‘Man,’’ in Kant’s formulation, accedes to enlightened freedom—of thought, act, and polity—in the process of casting off the trammels of a radically determinist mechanism (for which La Mettrie’s automaton serves as the porte-parole). Yet a material residue lingers on as part of the autonomous Kantian subject, if only in the obligation to disavow, in the name of dignity, a persistent entanglement with the figure of the man who is also a machine. Kantian enlightenment —that philosophical revolution against which the work of the   Voluptuous Philosophy French philosophes has sometimes been seen as little more than an interlude or a preparation2 —carries within it the memory of materialism as a troubling philosophical inheritance. This legacy is nonetheless a constituent part of the movement into maturity that Kant imagines. In other words, for man to leave behind his status as machine, he first had to become one. This book returns to the scene of French Enlightenment materialism as a crucial staging ground for the modern construction of human beings as objects of knowledge. In the broadest sense, it contributes to an articulation of the ways in which eighteenth-century authors participate in what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘‘the elementary exertions of the modern age: the mathematizing and the materializing of nature.’’3 Whether the material subjects of the French Enlightenment are ultimately renounced or embraced by those who follow in their wake, this period’s intense preoccupation with the objectification and rationalization of matter—in forms ranging from human anatomies to atomic particles—remains fundamental to an understanding of the positioning of the age within the various critical genealogies that have taken the Enlightenment (and the French Enlightenment in particular ) as a point of origin for modernity.4 The eighteenth-century fascination with the perceptible substance of experience—as available to experiment, narratable in literary texts, malleable through education, manipulable through time, and regularizable in space—reaches across what later become profound disciplinary and methodological differences to inform the molding of the secular body into a particularly rich source of meaning for post-Enlightenment European cultures.5 Debates over the epistemological status and knowability of ‘‘brute’’ matter not only shape the emergence of discourses of disciplinary specialization, but regulate the way in which connections among domains of knowledge—from literary criticism to scientific research—continue to be understood today. The study of matter as an object in itself has remained basic to the practice of scientific inquiry, but has also deeply marked the evolution of the novel as a genre that, according to the marquis de Sade, derives from ‘‘that burning need to portray everything’’ and to penetrate ‘‘into the bosom of Nature.’’6 This book has thus developed out of a desire to consider eighteenthcentury French materialism seriously in its central position as a site of ongoing and high-stakes struggles over the role of material bodies in shaping the nature of apprehension, defining the limits of the human, and structuring a project of enlightenment that links knowledge to forms...