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Joanna Stalnaker, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Morteza Rajizad
Edu Sci welcome to the New Books Network hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Rajizad. Today I'm honored to be speaking with a very special guest about her most recent book. The book we're going to discuss is called the Rest Is Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death which was published by Yale University Press. With me to discuss the book is Dr. Joanna Stalaker, who is a professor of French at Columbia University and she's also the author of a prize winning first book called the Unfinished Description in the Age of Encyclopedia Joanna. Welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Thank you so much Morteza. Thank you for having me. I'm really glad to be here.
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Morteza Rajizad
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us about a little bit about your background and more importantly how the idea of this book came about? And what does the title refer to? The Rest is Silence. It's about Enlightenment philosophers and death would be great if you could tell us the idea of the inception of the book.
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, thank you. So, as you mentioned, I teach at Columbia University. I teach in the French department, but I also have always had an interest in philosophy. And I've also directed the first year course of Columbia's core curriculum. So we teach literature from Homer to Toni Morrison. So I'm not just interested in the 18th century, but literature and philosophy more broadly conceived. And this book, so the title, the rest is Silence are Hamlet's Last words. And the title refers to the overall argument of the book, which is that these philosophers in a period of atheist materialism, actually embraced death and the idea that nothing would survive of them after their deaths, or at least that possibility. And the way I came to the book, I would say two things. One is that I myself grew up in a family of atheist philosophers and I didn't have a religious framework for thinking about death in my own family. And the period that I'm looking at was a period of a real sea change in terms of religious belief, a questioning of the belief in God, the belief in the afterlife among the philosophers that I'm looking at, and a sort of change in the way that death was perceived. And so in a way, the question that I took on was a kind of one of those questions that's kind of hiding in plain sight. It seems like it should have been asked before, but. And in some ways it has been. But the most obvious sort of aspect of it, it seemed to me, had not been asked, which was how did these philosophers face death, given that they had no belief in the afterlife? Many of them, at least the ones that I look at in this book. And so that was kind of one starting point for the book. The other was that you mentioned my first book, which is called the Unfinished Description in the Age of Encyclopedia. And in that book I was looking at these sort of large scale attempts to describe the entire world or some aspect of the world, whether it be the city of Paris or All Quadrupeds in the World in Natural History, a lot of these different kinds of projects that are characteristic of the Enlightenment. And one work that I thought about looking at but didn't end up looking at in that book was Jean Jacques Rousseau's last work, which is called the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which he wrote in the two years before he died in 1776-1778. And at this time Rousseau was a botanist, and he surrounded himself with plants and flowers at the end of his life in this sort of solitary existence that he set out for himself. And he was also making albums of pressed flowers, herbaria at this time. And I became very interested in. He sort of describes this descriptive project where he's going to set out to describe every single plant on this island that he's on. And he never realized that project. So it's a sort of virtual descriptive project. And so I didn't write about him in my first book, but I became interested in the way that he was using plants and flowers as a means of preparing for his death. So I think that's really sort of the. The seed, as it were, for the project as a whole.
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Morteza Rajizad
And he's one of the authors also discussing the book. And I was going to ask you about that metaphor, but I'll come to that as we go ahead further. To me, one of the most interesting part of the book was how you kind of show us gently, but also very radically, you unsettle the idea that a lot of us might have about the Enlightenment, because we tend to think of Enlightenment as a forward moving force. It's about progress, reason and future. But it seems that looking at Enlightenment from a different perspective, which is philosophers facing death, is that you're asking us to sit with a more fragile, even uncertain version of this Enlightenment. So I'm curious, how does your book reshape the way we understand Enlightenment as a whole?
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah. So I start the book with two famous definitions of Enlightenment by Emmanuel Kant and Michel Foucault, 200 Years Apart, 1784 and 1984, in essays entitled what is Enlightenment? And both of them define Enlightenment in a progressive, forward looking way. And I think these definitions are tremendously important, and I'm not trying to discount them, but I think that we get a very different vantage point on the Enlightenment if we look at it looking backwards rather than looking forwards, not defining the Enlightenment in terms of what it led to in our modern world, which is what we tend to do, whether we see that in a positive light or a negative light. That is the tendency to define Enlightenment in that way. And I wanted to really turn that question on it, on its head and say, what does the Enlightenment look like when we look from the vantage point of these philosophers as they were facing death at the end of their lives, and they look back over the Enlightenment rather than looking forward, because they don't know what's coming after them. And in particular, all of the figures I looked at died in the last decade before the French Revolution. So they don't know that that Revolution is right around the corner. And I was Also interested in. So I'm interested in their personal experience and their appraisal of their own lives and their own life's works as they're coming to their ends. But I'm also interested in the generational phenomenon. So they dies. David Hume, who I begin, dies in 1776. Buffon, the famous naturalist, dies in 1788, just before the French Revolution. And so this is a decade in which they're all pretty much of the same generation. They were all participating in, in a certain sense, a collective project. They considered themselves to belong to this republic of letters, as they referred to it. And so as they start to see that their generation is drawing to a close, how are they thinking about that collectively as well? So it was the sort of confluence between the individual and the collect was one of the things I was interested in there.
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Morteza Rajizad
And another really fascinating part of the book to me was your choice of texts. So you don't. You do not focus so much on major canonical texts, but you. You're really particular about the text you choose, and you call them end of life writings, which are more overlooked texts that feel sometimes, you know, quieter, feel fragmentary, and they give you an uneasy feeling when you're reading some of those major texts. So I'm keen to know what drew you to those last works and what do they let us see? That they're more famous texts, maybe do not.
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah. So I would say that the only text that I look at that is really a canonical work is the one I mentioned earlier, Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which is considered a literary masterpiece. So I did sort of begin with that. But even in that work, there's a fragmentary quality. It's a very unusual literary form that he invents. It's very different from all of his other writing. So it shares some of the features that the other less canonical works that I look at exhibit. So, yes, I would say that I think at the end of one's life, you know, sometimes one is still doing great works that are going to be remembered, but a lot of times there's a kind of change in style or change in approach, as you. As you alluded to. And so I was interested in looking at these more experimental works. And one of the things that I'm interested in in the book is the way that these authors are seeking to invent new forms of writing in order to convey the frag of their bodies and in order to convey the silence that will follow their deaths. So that's a different approach to writing than Some of the ways that they would be approaching it in the past. And what does that reveal? I mean, I think that that reveals a different. It gives us a different perspective on that sort of confident, forward looking enlightenment that we generally think about. And it's catches these writers at moments of fragility and doubt where they're really questioning their legacy and they're questioning what will survive of their legacy after their deaths. And I was very, I mean, we may get into this later, but I was very interested in that because I think that we are at a moment today when we can see that the legacy of the Enlightenment is very fragile. And so these writers, awareness of that fragility is something that is valuable for us to think about and look at in order to understand our own moments.
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Morteza Rajizad
Yeah. And I'm really interested to know more about the importance of this work for contemporary times. But that's something we'll come back maybe later on. It's something that, in your book, something that keeps coming across the book is that these texts don't just talk about death, but in a way they also embodied in their form, fragmentation, incompleteness. And they look back, it's in retrospect, could you say something about how literary form itself becomes a way of thinking through mortality?
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah. So there's a couple of different examples that I could look to. But I think I'll talk a little bit about Denis Diderot, who was the head of the big encyclopedic project that is very characteristic of the Enlightenment's belief in progress, because that work was sort of trying to change the common way of thinking. It was considered a sort of machine of war to try to attack superstition, superstition and prejudice. And so Diderot is certainly, for much of his career, someone who is focused on the future and who's focused on the possibility that philosophy can actually change the world and also have a political role to play in that way. But at the end of his life, Diderot is working on two different works. One which is more political and one which is more scientific. So I'll just zero in on the more scientific one, which is his Elements of Physiology. He was interested in the medical sciences throughout his life. And this is a work where he's sort of reading all kinds of other thinkers, writings about physiology, human physiology, how does the body work, how does the brain work? And one of the things that I became interested in is that there are, there's a real focus on the brain and there's a focus on death and what happens to the brain at the. In the moment of death, or rather in the gradual process of death. Because one of the things that he, along with the naturalist Buffon, theorized, is that death is not a single moment. It's a gradual process that takes place over time. And so overall, one of the reasons that the book is called Diderot's book is called the Elements, is that he's interested in the body as a sort of assemblage of vital molecules and also an assemblage of organs. And he posits that death sort of takes place gradually in the body, that different organs might die off at different times until the final moment of death. And the form of his work, which is. You're getting back to your question, is fragmentary. And so for a long time, critics would just treat it as if it's fragmentary because it was left unfinished. He didn't have time to complete it. But my sense from through my reading of the work is that he was interested in that form and that he wanted to sort of convey through the form of the work that this was collective project, that it was made up of different pieces and that it wasn't, in a certain sense, a coherent whole. And through that, he's thinking about the question of the body as an assemblage that is going to change form in death, and that he's going to, as he would put it, sort of give the elements of his body back to the dust. And that idea plays out on the level of form. So he's also incorporating other writers, voices into his own work. He's quoting a lot of other works, writers, and there's a sort of back and forth between his own voice and the voices of others. This is characteristic also of his interest in dialogue throughout his life. So in other philosophical works and some of his more famous works, he always emphasizes dialogue and the sort of confrontation between two or more voices. And I think that's a very valuable aspect of the Enlightenment that we would do well to sort of pay attention to, given our own difficulty, I would say, in this day and age with dialogue and with confrontation, with people whose ideas are different from our own. But, yeah, so that takes on. We see that on the level of form in that work. And then also the other work that he was working on at the end of his life is called the Essay on the Reins of Claudius and Nero, where he's writing about Seneca, and there he's interested in Stoicist philosophy, and he's thinking about the question of his own political responsibility. He had A relationship with the empress of Russia, Catherine ii. And he was a sort of advisor to her, political advisor to her in some ways. And he was questioning, through the figure of Seneca, in his relationship to Nero. He was questioning his own culpability, possibly in having remained sort of close to Catherine despite her despotism. And so that's a very different aspect of his work, but the Stoicist aspect aspect of his thought sort of plays into this idea of the elements, because Seneca would write that, you know, our bodies are just on loan to us during our lives, and then we need to give them back at the end. And so this sort of rejoins the idea of the elements, that we're giving back our body to the dust and that new bodies will be formed after our deaths. And Diderot was sort of interested in a kind of idea of reincarnation in a way, through that, giving back to the. To the elements.
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Morteza Rajizad
And let's talk about another philosopher. One of the most famous philosophers you discuss in the book is David Hume, and he's. His text, I think it's got my own life, and I'm not a philosopher, but I've heard of most of Hume's books, except for this one. But naturally you go to the ones, as we discussed earlier, that. That are lesser known. But in your discussion, you begin with Hume's One Life, which, you know, on the surface feels kind of composed even. It's composed, even serene. But when you unpack, it becomes much more unstable. The text. What made Hume the right place to begin this larger story of Enlightenment philosophers facing death? And why do you see his. This work, My Own Life, as a perfect entry into this argument you have throughout the book?
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, I would say that I love this text, My Own life. And I would say to your listeners, if there's one thing that you want to read from the period that's very short, you know, it's less than 10 pages. And it's a beautiful summation of Hume's life. So he knew that he was dying of intestinal cancer. He describes his symptoms in the. In the work, and what he sets out to do is what he calls a funeral oration of myself. So he's trying to sort of think through his death before the letter and what he manages to do. It's a stylistically beautiful text. He writes himself into the past tense at the end. So he's sort of writing about himself as if he already. He says, now I need to write about myself in the past tense. But it's a beautiful sentence in which which he does this and what he's reflecting on in the text is the history of his writings. And so he gives us a sort of little life history, but not about all the events of his life, but about the reception of his works. And when you say that, on the one hand, Hume's contemporaries were very struck by his equanimity in the face of death. They wanted to know whether he was going to greet death with serenity, given his atheist beliefs. And he did. And so he writes in this very serene way, he describes his symptoms. He says, I'm facing death. I, you know, I, I don't think that this is really a problem. I'm cutting off, you know, infirmity and years of. And also I think that my literary fame is going to increase after my death. Death. So the text has generally been interpreted as a kind of classic statement of literary immortality. I'm going to die, I'm fine with that, and my text will survive after me, so I will be remembered by posterity. But as I, during my reading of the text or through my reading, I tried to show that in fact there is this instability or skepticism that is very symptomatic of Hume's philosophy more broadly, where he shows that he was never a good predictor of how his works were going to be received by the public. And so he shows, you know, he describes one of his works as falling, quote, falling deadborn from the press. So the works that he thinks are the most important or that he thinks are the best, his best works of philosophy were not received as such by the public. And so we come to understand that he knows that his long term legacy is also not assured. And so I sort of try to show that on the one hand he's sketching out the possibility that he could have a long legacy, but he's also sketching out the possibility that he might not. And he kind of leaves that in the hands of the public. And it's very interesting because his friend Adam Smith also, he gave permission to Adam Smith to write the continuation of this portrait after he stopped writing the last month of his life and how he actually did face death and Adam Smith did that, and the two texts were published together. So in a very literal sense, he is giving his posterity to, or his legacy to his friend and no longer holding onto it himself. And that's symptomatic of his willingness to sort of say, okay, myself is ended. And so now it's in the hands of others to sort of trace out what is going to become of me. In the future. I think Hume's Another thing that's very interesting about my own life is how it dovetails with Hume's theory or philosophy of personal identity. So even in his very earliest works, in A Treatise of Human Nature, he's writing about the discontinuity of identity, or the fact that identity may be, in a certain sense, an illusion. The coherence of our identity may be, in a certain sense, an illusion. And one thing he emphasizes is sleep. In sleep, our sensations are interrupted. And he says, I could even be said not to exist during sleep. And that is, of course, a way of thinking through the question of death. Because if we're just a bundle of discontinuous sensations, and if those are interrupted and we do not exist in sleep, then what does that mean for the annihilation, the ultimate annihilation of our identity in death? So in a way, Hume is already sort of thinking through the question of death in his early philosophy, and then he comes back to it in. Through this retrospective perspective. In my own life, I just, I love Hume. And he works really well in the book also because he did spend time in France and was really fetid by these women hostesses of the salons. He was a very popular philosopher and figure and so he knew. And then he had a friendship with Rousseau and they had this terrible quarrel when Rousseau was over in England. And so he's really. Most of the figures I look at are French, but he really works with the other figures because he was very much part of that milieu.
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
So good, so good, so good.
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Morteza Rajizad
Another part of the book that I introd, another philosopher you discussed that I enjoyed, was Buffon. And I find it fascinating because he again tries to demystify death completely, turning it into something gradual. It's a gradual physical process rather than a dramatic event or end. And it seems that he's trying to find a way to reasonably put fear away. Fear of death. To what extent do you think this actually works? Does it work or do you think it creates maybe a new kind of unease?
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So one of the ways that. So Buffon is the author of this best selling work of natural history, one of the most widely read works in the period. It's a multi volume work, 39 volumes. He's describing quadrupeds, he's describing the history of the earth, he's describing varieties of the human species or racial diversity, although he called it variety rather than race. And he has a theory of the earth as well. And then he's writing about minerals and fossils at the end of his life, which is the work that I focus on. And he considered death to be the fear of death to be. He called it a prejudice that he wanted to sort of eradicate. And so if we approach it rationally, we're not going to fear death. And in that way he's setting himself up in opposition to religious authorities who in a certain sense in, in his eyes, would manipulate people through the fear of death. And he wanted to free his readers from that fear and therefore free them from religious superstition. He was also, although he didn't state it open, he was also an atheist. And so one of the ways he has different ways that he's seeking in his bestselling work to free his readers from the fear of death. And one of them is through these statistical tables. So he's giving statistical tables about the likelihood of dying in any given year of your life. And it's a kind of paradoxical reasoning, but he reasons on the basis of these tables that after the age of 80, your likelihood of dying in the next. I know how much time becomes more stable, it's not increasing. So once you've lived this long, you're sort of not as much chance that you're going to die, which kind of he manages to make this argument on the basis of these tables. And, you know, it's somewhat ironic because he himself died at this age. But so this is one way. So it's a kind of strange, you know, use of these new statistics that are emerging in order to try to reason with his readers. And then the other way technique I would say that. That he uses or that he puts forward is that we should become. He has a theory of death as the gradual hardening of the fibers and bones in the body. And he believes that this starts as soon as we reach maturity, as soon as we stop growing. And so that's very early in life, sort of at the end of adolescence. And he writes about, you know, that if we are aware of these changes in our bodies, we will start to become aware of death moments much earlier in our lives. And that can seem sort of devastating in some ways, I suppose, from our cultural perspective. But for him this is a way of sort of being more realistic and being more aware and death being less frightening because we've always sort of had it in our minds and in our bodies in a certain sense.
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Morteza Rajizad
And he also provides a description. I mean, there is an account of his actual death. And that account, it feels like there's an uneasy feel like. It feels like philosophy is colliding with reality in an uncomfortable way. How do you see that tension between that abstract year and lived experience? In this case, abstract year of death and lips playing out in his case?
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, so. So one of the things that I found interesting about his death is that he develops a very close friendship with a woman named Suzanne Necker, who was one of these salon hostesses. And she herself was a Protestant and she believed in the afterlife. And they had, there's, I think, about a 20 year age gap between the two of them. It was not exactly a romantic relationship, but a sort of friendship with perhaps a romantic element. And she was a great admirer of his work. And they had a lot of philosophical conversations and she was trying to convince him to believe. And he, you know, sort of wanted in a certain sense to believe in the afterlife and to believe in God for her because of their friendship. And so on his deathbed, she is by his side. And she. It's a paradox in a certain sense because he's reading a work by her husband, the Finance Minister Jacques Necker, on the importance of religious opinions. And in a certain sense, one could say he's trying to sort of come to her side. And she, on the other hand, takes on the role of the Naturalist. And she is describing, she keeps a written account of his four or five days of agony. And she records exactly all of his physical symptoms as he's declining and really sort of reflects on what it means to see this great man suffering and then eventually dying. And she writes about it as what she calls a spectacle of nothingness. And I found this very interesting because she's a believer, so it should not be. If she does believe in the afterlife, this should not really be a spectacle of nothingness. This should be, you know, her firm belief that he will live on in the afterlife. So there's a kind of switching of the roles. It's not that she ever literally questioned her religious beliefs, but or at least she didn't change, she didn't convert after this experience, but nonetheless there's a sort of confrontation between their opposing beliefs. Now she doesn't write about his emotions, whether he was afraid. We only see the physical symptoms and the sort of her reaction to that spectacle. So we don't really know how he experienced that moment himself. But I was interested in this question of documenting someone's death in that way because another very important figure in the book is the Renaissance essayist, Michel de Montaigne. And he was interested in. He wrote quite a bit about death in his essays and he was interested in the possibility of documenting his own death through the essay form on his way out. So Buffon didn't do that. He had Suzanne Necker who was doing it for him. But the question of whether one could in a certain sense write one's own death, I think that's what Hume does in my own life, is to sort of write himself into the past tense. So kind of perform his death through the literary, through the writing of it.
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Morteza Rajizad
Let's go to Rousseau. I think you did speak about Rousseau at the beginning of the interview. And he's a philosopher I'm interested in. I think he's one of the most well known philosophers you write, write about. And I did my PhD thesis long time ago on eco critical theory and literature, so I had to read a little bit about his work as well. And I find it interesting that with Rousseau everything feels a bit different from previous philosophers that you discuss. It's much more quieter, it's much more inward looking. He's. He's no longer, let's say, writing for the public in the same way, but it's almost for himself. I'm keen to know how does that turn towards solitude, change the way he writes about life and especially life and death?
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah. So I was just mentioning Michel de Montaigne, the essayist. And Rousseau actually writes in the first of these chapters in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which is his last work, he writes that he has the same project as Montaigne, which is a project of self portraiture, depicting the self, depicting the mind especially, and the movement of the mind. Except that, unlike Montaigne, he is writing for himself alone. And this is a very paradoxical claim. I find that when I teach this text, my students are very suspicious of that claim. Because, well, if you're writing, you're necessarily writing for someone else. And didn't he actually hope that it would be published? And it was published. But I think that we need to take this claim seriously. It's not that this text is a journal or a diary. I don't think that that is what it is. I don't think it is a purely private text. But at the same time, he didn't seek to have it published. So he's writing this in the last two years of his life. He did convey some of his other manuscripts at this time to his publisher. And he did not give the reveries to someone in order to ensure its publication. He did copy out very neatly. There's 10 walks or reveries in the work. And the first seven, we have this notebook in which he neatly copied them out. The last ones are left in a more fragmentary state. And especially the 10th, which is one that I write about, about in my chapter. So there is certainly the possibility that the work is interrupted by his death. But what I show in my chapter is that the last walk or Reverie, the 10th, which focuses on happiness and brief moments of happiness that he experienced with his lover, Madame de Valence, much earlier in his life, that this. It's a fragment. It sort of breaks off in the middle of telling a story about Madame de Halls. But it breaks off at a very particular moment that fits with. It has something to do with a certain moment in his life when he's about to go to Paris and he's about to become an author. And for him, this is the moment when everything changes. And he becomes unhappy in a certain way because of his relationship to the public, because of his celebrity. And so the fact that he breaks it off at that particular moment seems to me a kind of design. And so it is fragmentary, but at the same time, I see a kind of choice in the very particular moment where he breaks it off. This work is, as you say, there's a sense of solitude, there's a sense of calm. Rousseau was someone who suffered from bouts of paranoia at various different times in his life, and he is still suffering. So he believed that his enemies were plotting against him. He was subject to persecution. So this is not entirely paranoia, but certainly he had periods of extreme anguish. And certain of his autobiographical works, notably a lesser known work called the Dialogues or Rousseau, Judge of Jean Jacques, exhibit a real mental illness at this period when he's writing the reveries, there's a script of calm that suffuses the work, but then there are moments of sort of anguish, and we still see the idea of the plot or the enemies that comes back. I think one of the things that really struck me about this work is the beauty of its style, but also the difference of its style. It's very different from any of Rousseau's other works in terms of the language, the style, the form, and also the peacefulness that emanates from it. And so. So how does someone, in the very last two years of their life, suddenly kind of invent an entire new way of writing? And that work would have such influence for the Romantic poets, for example. So it's really a work that has a future and that has a legacy in a very different way than some of Rousseau's earlier works did.
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Morteza Rajizad
And the metaphor you also mentioned at the beginning of the interview, the metaphor of FL flower. I think the way he discussed it was you compress the flowers, they're dead, but at the same time. But this in an herbarium, I mean, you preserve them, repress them, you preserve them, but you know that they're already dead. Dead, or they're fading. So what does that metaphor capture about his understanding of both writing and mortality?
- [38:26]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, so he was actually an avid botanist, and he was making these albums of pressed flowers at the end of his life. And one of the very moving things is that we have them and they've been digitized and you can see them online, and they're just beautiful. And so there's a paradox there because today, you know, with the Internet, and I can, you know, download these gorgeous images of these pressed flowers, but that does not take away from the fact that they are material objects, that they are flowers, that they are fragile and that they are dead, as you say. And so he was someone who loved nature, who loved being in nature. And the reveries is about. About walking outside and being part of nature and sort of. You mentioned your own interest in echo critical work. He was a really a sort of early adopter of a sort of echo critical perspective in the sense that he had this awareness of himself as a part of nature, not separate and not dominating nature. And he sort of rejects the scientific attitude of domination of nature through. Through dissecting of animals. And, you know. But at the same time, as he was well aware, when he's picking the plants, the flowers that he's going to press in his herbarium, he's killing them in order to do that, and he's preserving them in a certain sense, but they're also dead, as you said. So I think that that becomes a kind of metaphor for the work that he's writing, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, because he is himself. On the one hand, he says, when he reads the reveries that he has written, he is going to be able to remember and relive those moments in nature. And so in a certain sense, the work is going to recreate the natural landscape for him, but at the same time, he's very aware that it's only a fragment of it and that it's enclosed within the pages of the book, as opposed to being out in nature. So. So he draws an analogy between his own body, which is declining, his senses are declining. He's no longer able to really fully engage in reverie in the way that he was earlier in his life. And that seems analogous, in a certain sense, to the way that these plants are now in the pages of a book and no longer out in nature in this dynamic sort of living way. So in a way, he's kind of presenting. He writes about himself as if he were a plant and as if he were already dead in the work. And it's a bit like Hume writing himself into the past tense that he's kind of presenting us with this vision of himself enclosed within the pages of a book, rather than, you know, living out in the world. It's a very beautiful. It's a beautiful work. I'd say I've recommended My Own life. The Revri is also a relatively short work. It's 10 short texts, 10 short chapters, and they can also be read in isolation from each other. So the most famous is the Fifth Promenade, or Fifth Walk, where he is recounting a moment when he's in exile from earlier in his life in. In the 1760s, when he's on the island of St. Pierre, near Neuchatel, near Switzerland, and he is just in this moment of happiness where he's surrounded by water and he's engaging in reverie and he's engaging in botany. And it's a gorgeous reflection on human transience and on our experience of time and how through reverie we can sort of experience moments of eternity or something resembling eternity. And I'm actually sort of thinking about that reverie or that walk right now because I'm writing an essay on Virginia Woolf as a reader of Rousseau, and she actually into the Lighthouse, she writes a chapter where Mrs. Ramsey, the main character of that work, is engaged in a reverie. She's in solitude for one of the rare moments in the novel when she's alone and and it turns out that Woolf kind of borrowed the language of Rousseau's fifth Reverie. And there's a striking resemblance between the way that Mrs. Ramsay is thinking about solitude and reverie and the way that Rousseau writes about it in that text. So that's. Yeah, if your listeners haven't read this work yet and wanted to read one chapter, I would start with the fifth Marvel Television's Wonder man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney. Plus a superhero remake.
- [43:29]
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Morteza Rajizad
Action Simon Williams audition for one of Man.
- [43:35]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
I'm gonna need you to sign this,
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Morteza Rajizad
assuming you don't have superpowers. I'll never work again if anyone found
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Dr. Joanna Stalaker
out Monolips are sealed. Marvel Television's Wonder man, all eight episodes
- [43:49]
Morteza Rajizad
now streaming only on Disney.
- [43:52]
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- [45:11]
Morteza Rajizad
Great. That's some good reading recommendations as well. Now let us talk about Voltaire again. He's someone we normally associate with confidence, with progress, intellectual authority. But again, in his late writing, there's real ambiguity, even doubt. And you discuss some of his final poems. How do you think his Poems sort of complicate that image that we have of Enlightenment optimism that we normally associate with Voltaire. And how does he, again, make us rethink this whole legacy of Enlightenment?
- [45:51]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, so Voltaire is certainly one of the most famous figures that I look at in the book. He was a celebrity in his own time, and he knew that in his own time he is already being consecrated with statues. At the very end of his life, he comes back from Paris, he's in exile outside of France, and he comes back to Paris in this sort of triumphant return. He produces his last tragedy called Irene at the Comedie Francaise, and he's crowned with laurels by an adoring public. And so it's a real moment of consecration. And so Voltaire is someone who had every reason to believe that he would be remembered. And he was someone who had every reason to believe that he had participated in a philosophical movement that had changed the world. And yet I look at these late poems where he seems to be considering the possibility that he would be forgotten and that in a certain sense, his enemies would win out, that there would just be a moment of satire after his death on the part of his enemies. And then once the laughter stops, that would be it. So this is. Critics of Voltaire have sort of wondered what is. There's a sort of sublime aspect to this last poem in particular, which is called Farewell to Life. And it's a beautiful, beautiful poem, and one that I didn't know until I started working on this book. And critics have noticed that it's very unusual in Volterra's corpus. And they've noticed that there's something sublime about this embrace of the idea of nothingness. The word nail or nothingness is used two times in the poem, but no one had been able to really figure out where this came from because it seems so different from the tone of Voltaire's writing. And so one of the discoveries of my book was that I started looking at the correspondence between Voltaire and another of these salon hostesses, whose name is Madame Dude. And they have this beautiful correspondence where she's kind of pushing him to confront the possibility that perhaps death is really the end and that perhaps we're not going to be remembered after our death. And she's a very anxious, kind of restless. She has these restless questions, and she keeps coming back to Voltaire and he keeps trying to reassure her. But what I discovered is that in his last poem, there's also a slightly earlier poem where we see the figure of nothingness as an allegorical figure. And then in his very last poem, he's really embracing the point of view that defends Puts Forward, which is quite a radical kind of point, point of view in terms of her embrace of nothingness. And so for me, that was kind of helped me to understand where that poem was coming from, but it also helped me to understand why it was so different from Voltaire's point of view earlier in his life.
- [49:14]
Morteza Rajizad
Is there any other, apart from his poems, is there any other work from Voltaire you might recommend from the perspective of reflecting on death from his late.
- [49:24]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
From his later? So there's a dialogue that's called Sophronim and Adelos. I actually don't know. I would need to look into whether it's translated because this is again, not a very well known work. But here again, Voltaire is influenced by Epictetus and the sort of Epicurean Stoicist philosophy that was very popular at the end of the Enlightenment. And he's got two figures. So again, it's a dialogue which is this form that is so characteristic of the enlightened Enlightenment. And he's got two figures, one of whom is very serene in the face of death, and the other, who is this sort of nervous, anxious questioner and who's saying, I want to, you know, sort of approach this with this equanimity, and I want to have a sage philosophy about death, but I can't seem to do so. And I'm not saying that these figures are exactly Madame du Deffand and Voltaire, but it seems that he may have been working, working through that dialogic relationship that they had in their exchange of letters. And. Yeah, so this kind of really is a document in a way that reflects on the question you were asking earlier about the emotional experience of death and whether that sort of. Whether there's a gap between that and the philosophy that some of these figures, like Buffon, the naturalist, are putting forward. And I would say that that dialogue of Voltaire's is actually a moment when he's recognizing that we may be afraid and that emotional aspect and how do we deal with that and how do we use philosophy in order to respond to that?
- [51:12]
Morteza Rajizad
And you mentioned Madame de Dauphin. She seems, from the authors that you discussed, she seems to be, in a way, let's say, the most uncompromising one. There's. There's no comfort in. She doesn't really see comfort in legacy. She's no interested in being remembered. Why do you think. Can you first talk about maybe some of her late Writings. And tell us, why do you think she rejects this idea of posterity completely? Maybe more completely than. Than other Enlightenment thinkers. And she also has a very interesting idea of. Of ennui, which is a powerful. It's not just boredom, I guess, it's experiencing emptiness in advance. Would be great if you could talk about that as well.
- [51:58]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, it's a super interesting concept. So remind me to come back to it. I'm just going to start with saying a little bit about her as a person. So she hosted. There was this. It's not an institution exactly, but this practice of women and sometimes men hosting people on regular days of the week where they would host philosophers, artists, diplomats, different kinds of people at their houses, provide them with dinner, they would play cards, they would share poetry, they would gamble, you know, they would do all kinds of different things. And Madame du Deffand was one of these hostesses and she hosted some of the more. Not the most famous figures necessarily, but d', Alembert, who was Diderot's co editor on the Encyclopedit, was a frequent attender of her salon in the early years. And she's a letter writer. She wrote also sort of portraits of salon portraits. So these would be sort of a literary sketch of a person's personality, which was a very. A kind of a game, but also a literary practice at the time. She wrote kind of occasional poetry, but many of her writings were kind of of ephemeral writings in this salon context, where people would write something as part of a game or they would exchange poems or send each other verses with a present or things like that. And she very explicitly said that she did not want to be remembered. So Voltaire thought that she was a great philosophical mind. And so he said to her, you know, please write down your philosophy, because I think it's going to be better than all of the philosophy of the. He doesn't say men, but the, you know, the. The reigning philosophers of the time. I want to hear your philosophy. I want to see it in writing. And so she sends him sort of her thoughts on philosophical thoughts. And they're extremely bleak. So her basic philosophy is that it would be better not to be born. That life is so full of suffering and that. That especially the. The fear of death is so great that it would be preferable not to be born at all. And that's it. That's basically her entire philosophy. But in their dialogue, she's a voracious reader and it comes out that she's really thinking in terms of a Lot of the philosophical ideas around her, she's an empiricist, she doesn't believe in God. And she thinks that one of the reasons she doesn't believe in God is that she believes that anything that she knows would need to come through the senses. And. And so given that God is not speaking to her and she can't see him, she doesn't understand how she's possibly going to believe in him. So why does she, you know, reject. Why does she have this sort of stark rejection of the idea of being remembered? I think part of it is her experience of ennui, which you mentioned. So this is. Yeah, I would see ennui not just as boredom, but as you say, the way you put it is very, very. Captures something really essential, this emptiness. So what she feared was an emptiness in the mind. And she describes ennui as this very striking phrase, as in French, it's an avant goutu neon. So it's a foretaste of nothingness. So what she feared was, you know, it might be something that we would characterize as depression today, but it's a sort of existential dread at the idea of experiencing that emptiness, which is actually a way of experiencing death before it actually happens. And so she is really an interesting figure, you know, in many ways very bleak, very pessimistic. But I became fascinated with her because of that existential aspect to her thinking. And so she says, you know, she has this correspondence with Voltaire, and after Voltaire's death, she gets a request to give her letters from him. And she says, I don't want them to be published because I don't want to give any occasion for myself to be remembered. So it's not just that she. She doesn't think she'll be remembered, it's that she's actively seeking not to be remembered. And so one of the paradoxes of her life and her legacy is that she. I look in one chapter at her correspondence with Voltaire, but she also had a very, very interesting correspondence with the English man of letters, Horace Walpole, who's much younger than her, comes to Paris, wants to meet all the famous personalities. And so people come tell him, go see Madame du Deffand, because she is going to be able to introduce you to everyone. And they develop this very intense friendship and have correspond until her death. And it's through their correspondence that we can really see those last months of her life and how she faced death through writing, because she composes a very beautiful last letter to Walpole where she knows she's dying and she is saying her final farewell to him. And so that's one of the letters that I look at in the book. But one of the paradoxes of Madame du Deffand is that she does bequeath her writings to him. So this includes her letters, and it also includes all of those salon portraits and occasional writings, even a journal that she kept in the last year of her life, which I look at also a little bit in the chapter, chapter. And she also bequeaths her dog to him. So she's sending a sort of living body that was the object of her affections. And Walpole promises to take care of the dog, and he does take care of the dog. So what does this gesture mean? Does it mean, in the end she did want to be remembered, that she was hoping that he would publish her letters? He does eventually ensure the publication of her letters, but I don't really see it that way. I take her at her word that she did not want to. To be remembered. And I see this more as a gesture of friendship, that this is. Her letters were about maintaining this bond with Voltaire, with first Voltaire and then Walpole. And the bequest is also about that bond. And there's not any effort on her part to dictate, you know, that he is going to eventually publish the letters. And I don't believe that he. That she thought that he would do so. Now he did, and so we can thank him for having. Having done that, because it's thanks to that that we have this beautiful corpus of letters. And, in fact, another sort of interesting thing about Madame du Deffand, of course, I haven't even mentioned the fact that she's a woman. And the fact that her letters survived was in part because of admiration. She was admired as one of the most beautiful letter writers of her time. But the letters with Walpole have been edited in a beautiful modern edition, but as part of Walpole's correspondence, not as her correspondence. And so, you know, there's a certain way in which it's thanks to Walpole as a literary figure who has been remembered, that she is remembered today.
- [59:35]
Morteza Rajizad
And again, she was one of the branches. I didn't know anything about that. Think I could be forgiven because I'm not a student of philosophy, but I came across her in your book. Let me bring it all to an end with a final question. So you talk about a lot of Enlightenment philosophers and their thoughts and writings about death. And one of the things that lingers after you read the book is how Aware these thinkers were about their ideas and about their names and the fact that their names were may not survive. And in our moment in 2026, where institutions, in most liberal democracies, institutions feel fragile, there is more skepticism about them. Even knowledge feels unstable at times with the rise of whatever we want to call it, misinformation, alternative truth, whatever it is, or even the attack against postmodernism. So everything feels kind of unstable at times. What do you think that there were awareness of the thinkers that you discussed there? Awareness of possible disappearance can teach us about how we think about truth, legacy, cultural memory, even today?
- [60:50]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Yeah, I think it's a really important and interesting question. There'd be so much to say about it. I think that the thinkers that I look at, and especially Denis Diderot in the encyclopedia, were aware that their moment was a moment of huge cultural change with respect to knowledge and the distribution of knowledge and print culture, the sort of massive expansion of print culture, pamphlets and more and more cheaper publications for people reading more and more. We are at obviously a moment of huge change with AI in terms of the way that knowledge is being. Texts are being distributed in terms of the production of knowledge, you know, through AI, as opposed to through human. Human production. And so I think it's very useful to look back to the Enlightenment and how they experience that moment of change. And Diderot in particular has this preface to one of the late volumes of the Encyclopedit where he's reflecting on the destruction of human civilization and the fragility of institutions and the fragility of human knowledge. And he sort of upholds the Encyclopedit as the kind of bulwark against the destruction. He's saying, if we just have one copy of this project, we will keep some record of human knowledge from our time. And I think that, you know, we are sort of, because of this moment of fragility of our institutions and the organization of knowledge, changing. We really need to look back to the past and see other moments in time. The Enlightenment is not the only time when this was happening, but when people have confronted those kinds of challenges and so that we cannot be naive about facing them ourselves. I also think that, you know, the. The American democracy and the idea of America were sort of forged in 18th century thinking and 18th century texts and debates. And so if we have an awareness that those things are fragile, we will sort of understand better some of the challenges that. That politically that we're facing today. So I think it's really a moment for looking back to the Enlightenment, not in order to. I think in the past, there has been an attempt, notably by Enlightenment historian Jonathan Israel, to say that Enlightenment is a sort of package of values that led to modern liberal democracy, feminism, you know, all kinds of kinds of positive values, and that we can just sort of go to the Enlightenment to find those values and reassert them today. But I think that, first of all, the Enlightenment is much more about dialogue and confronting some of the weaknesses of those values or some of the problems with those values. And also that they're not. That they're complicated to work out, that they're not just a package that we can kind of import and then apply, that they need to be debated, that they need to be thought about critically, and also that they're fragile. And so I think we need a kind of more dynamic understanding of the Enlightenment in order to think about how to face the challenges of today.
- [64:22]
Morteza Rajizad
Before we come to the end of the interview, is there any other project or book project you might be working on that might expect sometime soon? Soon.
- [64:32]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Not sometime soon, I would say, because I take a little while, as I took for my last book, to meditate on things and to come up with. So I'm thinking about a couple of different things. One is that I had. I write a little bit about this in the preface to the book, but I had a. A very interesting experience of. I had a brain tumor that kind of led to a real alteration in my personality for a number of years, and I didn't know that this was happening. And I'm interested in sort of. And I became. This is like, completely off the topic of the Enlightenment, but I'll come back around to it. I became obsessed with the English pop star Harry Styles during this time. And I'm interested in. And then I had brain surgery, and I kind of recovered my kind of awareness of what had been happening to me during those years, which was a very interesting existential experience. And I'm interested in sort of. I may write a memoir about that, but it would not just be about sort of, you know, those years and kind of the experience of living with a brain tumor and then coming out of it, but about the question of the loss of self and then the recovery of the self, which is actually a concept that the Enlightenment thinkers were very interested in. So Diderot kind of believed that in order to be an art critic or in order to be an actor, you needed to kind of lose yourself in order to kind of take on the form of other artists. And he himself saw you know, he was an art critic, among many other things that he wrote and he saw himself. And he wrote a theory of the actor, and he saw himself as someone who was a kind of shape shifter, who had this ability to sort of take on other voices, take on, you know, other styles in writing about each painter, for example. And yet he knew that there was a kind of danger in genius came from the loss of self, but there was also a kind of danger in the loss of self. And that I think it gets. You've used several times in this interview the phrase instability or fragility. And I think that there is a kind of instability in. In Diderot's Persona that is part of his real genius as a writer. And so I'm interested in kind of looking at that question of kind of the loss of self and the recovery of self and thinking about it in terms of some of the reflections on the medical sciences that Deiro was interested in. So, you know, that may be kind of. I may write a memoir that's just about my own experience, but it may be kind of informed. Informed by some of my thinking about those ideas more broadly in the Enlightenment. And then the other thing that I'm thinking about, I teach a seminar at Columbia called Rousseau's Woman Problem. And so Rousseau was very preoccupied with the question of women and their role in society, the question of childbearing and sort of women's education. And he's often been considered a misogynist. But I think that his ideas on women, women, are quite interesting, actually, and quite complex. And many women writers in the 18th century and then in the early 19th century were very engaged by his ideas. So sometimes they rejected them violently, as Mary Wollstonecraft did in sort of responding to Rousseau's ideas on women's education. And sometimes they embraced him and sort of emulated his autobiographical writings. And so I'm interested in this dialogue between Rousseau and women. And I may write a book about that. I'm thinking about that possibly. So that would be a very different project, but, yeah, it'll take a little while for these things to come to fruition.
- [68:20]
Morteza Rajizad
Yeah. And I hope to be able to speak to you about your future work sometime soon.
- [68:24]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Great, thank you.
- [68:25]
Morteza Rajizad
I'd like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us. The book we just discussed was the Rest is Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, published by Yale University Press. Thank you so much for your time.
- [68:37]
Dr. Joanna Stalaker
Thank you, Morteza. It was wonderful to speak with you.
- [68:39]
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