The Materialist Tropes of La Mettrie

La Mettrie's machine-man, figure of determinist constraint, is in his own way curiously insubstantial. While the image of l'homme-machine evokes matter as a disciplinary instance—an operation upon the will that renders the latter docile and tactile all at once ¹ —his functioning is anything but regular. As La Mettrie writes toward the beginning of his treatise, "Man is a machine constructed in such a way that it is impossible first of all to have a clear idea of it and consequently to define it." ² If we would like to know exactly how the human mechanism operates, La Mettrie intimates, we are forced to look outside of treatises, and in so doing to "ignore the history of all the futile opinions of philosophers." ³ From La Mettrie's point of view, man-a-machine could just as well be man-a-mushroom ⁴ —"an image and not . . . an explanatory principle." ⁵ In other words, he is nothing but a trope. Unlike Condillac, whose statue-man takes shape incrementally within a diachronic textual order, built up from the outside in, La Mettrie gives machine-man neither point of origin nor internal organization per se. Instead, he offers him up to us as pure figure. At the origins of modernity as a regime of bodily control there appears to lie a peculiarly constraining formalism.

Scholars of machine-man, whether critical of or sympathetic to what they see as La Mettrie's larger project, have not yet fully accounted for the extraordinary tropiness of their object of study. Nor has it become clear what the relationship might be, in La Mettrie's writing, between this materialist figure of relative constraint (or, in Foucauldian terms, docility) and the rhetorical techniques of extreme liberty that characterize the Lamettrian oeuvre. ⁶ What could it mean, in the context of a seemingly dogmatic Enlightenment materialism, for a theory of physiological determinism to be founded in a trope? ⁷ More specifically, what does the figural status of machine-man suggest about the relationship between the automaton as an important crystallization of a radically embodied subject and materialist philosophy as intimately involved in forms of literary practice and, indeed, literary style? How can we conjugate La Mettrie's easy deployment of figure with the critical tendency to read into machine-man an enduring construction of the human subject as thoroughly constrained by its own substance? ⁸ For what, as readers, is machine-man meant to prepare us?

I will suggest here that, in order to understand what is at stake for La Mettrie in the particular materialization of the human subject that he develops, we must take La Mettrie's tropological science seriously as such. For La Mettrie, the mechanical body of machine-man concordantly functions as the tropic body par excellence: a style or mode of being fully realizable only through an investment in literary practice and, not coincidentally, literary pleasures. ⁹ Ultimately, I am proposing that, once we see machine-man as fundamentally and formally tropic in constitution, we must turn to the domain of literature to see how his substance comes into being—to realize, in effect, how he works. If we do this, we will discover the literary text as the site where Lamettrian machinic constraint dissolves reiteratively into a series of contingent pleasures, producing a subject that is at once textual, substantial, and autonomous. For La Mettrie, literature is both the space of an enactment of matter—since, as he explains, we first come to recognize the nature of our own physical substance through an encounter with tropes—and the arena where compulsion provokes dissolution, where the hard body of machine-man becomes the porous body of the voluptuous philosopher. In order to begin to understand all aspects of our experience as fully materializable, La Mettrie suggests, we must begin by thinking figurally.

1. Atomism and Figural Bodies: Machine-Man Works through Lucretius

La Mettrie's attention to the connections between matter and figure makes sense in the context of what seems to have been his consistent, sympathetic engagement with Epicurean materialism. Standing at the juncture of...