Abstract

This chapter considers the failure of communication dramatized in Supplément au voyage de Bougainville which exists in tension with Diderot's empirical efforts at detailed description in the Histoire des deux Indes and the Encyclopédie. In one the effort to gather knowledge with infinite aspiration is asserted, while in another the emphasis is on the incommensurability of one culture with another. There is a double movement in the French Enlightenment: an encyclopedic impulse aiming to incorporate and comprehend alongside a sometimes contrary impulse emphasizing cultural and ethical singularity/uniqueness. Based on these antislavery/anticolonial works, this chapter examines how Diderot argued against empire. Yet, tacking in the other direction, it argues that Diderot's radicalism placed him in a bind that could be resolved only by turning to political fantasy: unwilling to fully accept the legitimacy of colonial dominance, he imagines a "consensual colonialism," a soft colonization, in which the interests of settler and native are unified and the dominance of the settler is established with the voluntary consent of the colonized. Diderot speculates on how biologically breeding a docile subject has enabled the successful settling and peopling of colonial spaces.

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