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Introduction [en français]

Marcie Frank, Heather Meek and Sandrine Roux

Introduction [in English]

Marcie Frank, Heather Meek and Sandrine Roux

Aute Life: Indigenous Living, Indigenous Dyeing

Alice Te Punga Somerville
How can, and do, Indigenous thinkers and artists reckon with the simultaneous horrors and vibrancy of the long eighteenth century? Aute is the NZ Māori name for a kind of cloth created from the paper mulberry plant across the Pacific region that is more widely known as tapa. Tracing the ends and new beginnings of aute production, paying attention to three different moments in which I have connected with eighteenth-century tapa, and reciting a multi-directional genealogy of Indigenous people who engage directly with tapa and/or the eighteenth century, I propose the concept of ‘Aute life.’ Ultimately, ‘Aute life’ is an orientation to the eighteenth century that centres Indigenous critical and creative engagements with that period; attending to dying and dyeing, it reframes absence or loss as presence or continuity, and pushes us to reconsider the limits and possibilities of who we think does work on, or with, the eighteenth century.

Un avant-goût du néant : Madame du Deffand et Voltaire, deux philosophes face à la mort

Joanna Stalnaker
This article concerns the philosophy of death elaborated by Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand, in her correspondence with Voltaire. This philosophy centers on the key concept of nothingness, and on the ennui Deffand experienced daily, understood as “a foretaste of nothingness.” The purpose of the article is to show that Deffand, as a salon hostess who never sought to have her writings published and who did not wish to be remembered after her death, took full stock of what it meant to die in a world that was made of nothing but matter. She, more than any of the male philosophers of her time, plumbed the depths of nothingness. What is more, her devastating vision of nothingness strongly influenced the way Voltaire conceived of death at the end of his life, as is movingly revealed in his very last poem, “Farewell to Life.”

« Sentir son existence » : ramifications matérialistes du Discours sur le bonheur d’Émilie du Châtelet

Alexis Tétreault
Over the course of the past 20 years, new approaches to the materialistic aspects of Émilie du Châtelet’s writings have emerged. While the works of Whitehead, Le Ru, and Kovács have focused, respectively, on how her thoughts on happiness are embodied in her reflections on gender norms and material conditions, on the similarities between her work and that of La Mettrie, and on her conception of human liberty, this article investigates the notion of “sentir son existence” (to feel one’s own existence) and how it informs her anthropological philosophy, especially her understanding of the notion of illusion. Through this process, I show that such an anthropological approach to the “sentiment d’existence” is not unique to her and seems common among other materialist philosophers, such as Helvetius and the Baron d’Holbach.

Comment vivre dans un monde d’idées ? L’objet comme construction de l’esprit chez Berkeley

Salim Haffas
We live in a world of objects and individuals that stabilize the flow of perceptions and sensations. Before Quine—drawing on pragmatist considerations—considered the object as a ‘posit’ made by the mind for practical purposes with the same epistemological status as a myth, we find in Berkeley’s philosophy the idea that the physical object as a unit made up of qualitatively different ideas is a construction of the mind for living. In this article I attempt to show that this classical reading of Berkeley is not erroneous, and I emphasize the role of language in this unification of ideas. The physical object is not a pure ‘myth,’ because it is based on real links between ideas and offers epistemic guarantees distinct from purely practical ones, but it is a human construction designed to accommodate practical endeavors.

Women Writers Constructing Foremothers

Isobel Grundy
How far were women writers of the long eighteenth century aware of literary foremothers, of a women’s tradition? Did they seek to build such a tradition and to claim its legacy? This paper begins and ends with two highly personal experiences of relating to literary grandmothers. In between, it looks at homage paid to Restoration writers seen as originators, like Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and others, at allusion and influence, at perceptions of relationship and declarations of alliance sometimes spanning several generations, at both the gradual consolidating and the eroding of knowledge about previous ages, and at attempts by Elizabeth Elstob, Mary Scott, and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger to order and disseminate this knowledge and to foster the idea of a female literary inheritance.

Anna Barbauld’s Critique of Class Structures in Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions

Natasha Lomonossoff
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, British intellectuals continued to grapple with the discussions of class inequality that had been made more relevant with the occurrence of the French Revolution. Some writers believed that the poor as a group needed to be contained, so that they would not disrupt the wider structures of society. This essay examines a contribution to thinking on this subject by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a pamphlet titled Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions (1800). I explore how she advocates a more humanitarian approach to the condition of the poor, emphasizing the need to address the root causes of poverty. In contrast to figures such as Patrick Colquhoun and Hannah More, Barbauld offers proposals which would help lead to meaningful enfranchisement in the period.

Parasites and Planetary Systems: Towards an Eighteenth-Century Ecology?

Charlee Bezilla
As eighteenth-century naturalists sought to determine the nature and origins of biological lifeforms, from polyps to primates to people, novelists extrapolated their ideas to other biospheres to imagine how life might develop under differing circumstances and propose their own “systems.” This paper examines two late-eighteenth-century texts that promote a hylozoic cosmogony, in which all matter is animate and life arises from celestial bodies, cycling down to animals, plants, and minerals. These two texts, Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s proto-science-fiction epistolary novel Les Posthumes (1796-1802) and François-Félix Nogaret’s dialogue La Terre est un animal (1795), both describe humans, and all other life, as “parasites.” By analyzing these texts through the lens of the philosopher Michel Serres’s concept of parasitism, this paper argues that conceiving of people as parasites can provoke an ecological orientation that decenters the human and brings into relief humans’ relationality with and dependency on other lifeforms.

Formes de vie animales et humaines en contrepoint dix-huitiémiste (Diderot, Condillac…)

Jean-Luc Guichet
As a result of advances in the life sciences, an intensification of travel and exploration, the loosening of Christian conceptions of the world, and the burgeoning of vitalist, materialist, and sensationist theories, eighteenth-century individuals unearthed an unprecedented diversity of life forms. Sensationist philosophers such as Condillac, and materialists such as Diderot, matched this diversity in their discussions of various modes of perception, corresponding to the phenomenological possibilities of incommensurable yet sometimes communicable worlds. For Diderot, human beings occupy a very special place in this ensemble, since they themselves are replete with this sensory and animal diversity, their reason having the difficult task of ensuring a balance that is always in question, especially in the case of genius. However, behind this diversity remains the problem of the unity to which it relates, particularly for understanding the living organism.

In the Woods and on the Waves: Attentive Acoustics and Active Instruments in The Mysteries of Udolpho

Joel Wheeler
The 21st century has brought new attention to the use of music in Ann Radcliffe’s novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). To date, much of this work focuses on how unknown music evokes the fearful elements of the Gothic. However, reducing key sonic scenes to a sense of fear neglects Emily’s often positive relationship to sound. A re-examination of this seemingly “haunted” music reveals it to be a more ambiguous vessel for the protagonist Emily’s creative projections. Current scholarship also omits full analysis of Emily’s lute, both in the setting of the novel and in Radcliffe’s era. Emily’s lute performances, considered in their historic context and read as an act of resistance, free her from a typical heroine’s depiction of inert interiority. In both cases, considering how Emily creatively listens to and actively performs music reveals productive new tones within the novel.

“Pretty Dope Way to Start a Story”: Fire Island (2022)’s Intertextual Dialogue with Jane Austen, Amy Heckerling, and Alice Munro

Kathryn Ready
Reviewers of the 2022 American film Fire Island, directed by Andrew Ahn and written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, have somewhat misleadingly characterized it as a straightforward transposition and modernization of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). Such characterizations ignore the film’s marked intertextuality, including notable references not only to Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless, itself an adaptation of Austen’s Emma (1815), but also to Alice Munro’s 2004 short story collection Runaway. Fire Island reveals a complex dialogue with Austen, Heckerling, and Munro, as Booster confronts the declining state of reading culture in his socio-historical moment. Against Austen and Munro and with Heckerling, Booster concludes that the progressive intertwining of high and low culture in our modern moment is finally more to be celebrated than denigrated.