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Annie Ibrahim
(Lycée Chaptal / Collège International de Philosophie, Paris)
Abstract
Diderot’s reflections on monsters – not so much the perception of monstrosity or the relativity of our judgments on monstrous and ‘normal’ form, but rather the occurrence of ‘sports’ or ‘freaks of nature’ as a part of biological functioning overall – are in good part a reflection of his ‘Lucretianism’, that is, his vision of a universe in constant transformation, in which non-viable forms are regularly produced but just as quickly, removed. Two paradoxes emerge as a result of this vision: first, that Diderot sees monsters everywhere but also strips the notion of its normative content; second, that we are tempted to understand it as a ‘proto-transformism’, or alternately, as a proto-teratology. I suggest that this approach is misguided, because Diderot’s materialism never departs from a fascination with fictions: his ‘proto-scientific’ ideas are inextricable from the ‘dream’ format in which they are presented.
Bio
Annie Ibrahim is Professeur agrégé de philosophie at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris as well as Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie. She published
Le vocabulaire de Diderot (Paris: Ellipses, 2002) as well as many essays in the field of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy of the life sciences and metaphysics, focusing primarily on Diderot, with more recent studies on Buffon, Maupertuis, Epicureanism, Leibniz, and Descartes. She recently edited the collection entitled
Diderot et la question de la forme (Paris: PUF, 1999) and Qu’est-ce qu’un monstre? (Paris: PUF, 2005).
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