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Andrew Billing, "Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing" (Routledge, 2023)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network French Studies Channel. I'm your host, Gina Stam, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and with me today is Dr. Andrew Billing, author of Animal Rhetoric and Natural science in 18th century Liberal political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment, published in 2023 by Rutledge. Dr. Billing is professor of French and Francophone Studies at Macalester College. He is also the author of numerous articles on Economy and the figure of the animal in the 18th century and the co editor of a special issue of Espritre on the topic of Paris Imagined Capital, Economic transition and modernity 17th to 19th century. Dr. Billing, thank you so much for being with us.
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B
Thank you so much, Gina, for inviting me onto the podcast.
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A
So to start off with, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to this?
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B
Sure, yeah. I became interested in this question when I was working on my Ph.D. my doctoral dissertation, which was on Rousseau and Rousseau's political writings, his political fictions, the way in which he uses fiction to develop his political ideas, both in his explicitly political writings and also in fictional texts like his novel Julie le Nouvelle. And one of the questions that I became particularly interested in, though it wasn't really a focus of my doctoral work, was the way in which Rousseau uses animal references, and particularly in his Second Discourses, Discoursio l'. Negarite. And at the same time as I was working on my doctorate, I was attending Jacques Derrida's class. His seminar at Irvine, on the Beast and the Sovereign, in which Derrida was investigating the use of animal references in political philosophy and theory. And so by putting those two things together, I became my first interest then was after I finished my PhD work was to investigate this question of Rousseau's use of animal references. And that led to this larger book project in which I extended that to include four other 18th century political authors.
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A
And how did you develop this corpus or when it went down because there may have been more authors than that that were this applied to.
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B
Yeah, so I began with Rousseau and then from Rousseau I extended to Diderot. And one of the things that became apparent to me when working on and Rousseau was the importance of Buffon and his Histoire Natural, his multi volume work of natural history that appears in the middle of the 18th century. And Rousseau refers to it in his Discourse on Inequality. But it also became an important reference point for many of the other authors in this study. So I could say that it is their shared interest in Buffon and Buffon's Natural History and his representation of animals in the natural History that connects these writers. Sort of following that thread of buffalo that led me to Diderot. Diderot has an article in his encyclopedie called Animal, in which he quotes at length from Buffon's Issois Naturelle, provides a commentary on it, and then Retief as well engages with Buffon. Perhaps Lamiscris and Quesnay are less directly engaged with Buffon, but nonetheless their political writings also seem to connect to the other writers in the study through this shared interest in the question of the animal, even if Buffon was less of a primary reference for them. And so moving from Rousseau to Diderot and Retief, and then La Mettrie and from La Mettrie with their shared interest in medicine to Cune, that I kind of developed this corpus and I also have identified, I argue that these writers can be grouped together as liberal political writers, which maybe is a slightly controversial claim insofar as when we think of modern liberalism, we tend to think of the English utilitarian writers. We might, well, Mill. We might think of Locke as well, Locke and Mill. But this notion that there is a distinct tradition of French liberalism is perhaps a bit more arguable. We have Benjamin Constant, who is an important Swiss and French liberal writer from the end of the 18th century, early 19th century, and Constantin was a great admirer of Rousseau and so forth. But the idea that you can group these writers together as liberals, it's sort of arguable. But my claim is that in all of their writings, fundamental to their political thought is a certain question of liberty, political liberty, what it means, and so forth. And so that's really another connection that links them, in addition to the shared interest in the animal and the way in which animal references or new ideas about animals could influence us in this period to rethink our political concepts.
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A
And you've already evoked what you mean by liberal political writing in Your title, but there's another term in there that maybe it would be good for us to get an idea of what you mean by that or what you want the reader to understand, and that's political zoology. What would you like the reader to understand by that here?
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B
Right. And so this concept of political zoology is one that I draw from Jacques Derrida. Derrida uses the term zool politics or political zoology so interchangeably. I prefer political zoology for various reasons. But Derrida uses this term in his runnings from the period that I mentioned, published and used his collection of seminars, the Beast and the Sovereign, as a way to reference, in the tradition of Western political theory, recurrent references to the animal, going back Aristotle's famous man as a political animal and his politics. And Derrida argues that zoo politics or political zoology, it's not something that appears in a particular moment in the history of Western political theory, but we can trace it right back to the beginnings of the Western political tradition. And so when I talk about political zoology, I'm not arguing that this is something that emerges in the 18th century. What I'm arguing is that a distinctive form of political zoology or zoo politics emerges in the middle of the 18th century in France in relationship to Buffon natural history and this empirical, or, if you like, scientific approach to the animal. And so this broader tradition of political zoology that Derrida is talking about, the animal goes through various phases or moments. At various points, the animal serves as a more figurative, metaphorical reference point. At other moments, we could argue that there's more emphasis on literal references to animals, empirical references, but through the modern period, Machiavelli and Hobbs and so forth, as Derrida, to which he draws our attention, we have these use of animal references, the fox, the wolf, the eagle, to make political claims. Right. And often quick references that serve to sort of buttress a normative claim or a political argument. Right. But what I see in the 18th century and the beginning in the middle of the 18th century with Rousseau and Lamenter, is an attempt to engage with this Buffon's natural history, or what actually becomes by the end of the century, zoology. And so when we talk about zoology and as anthropology, these are scientific disciplines that are conceptualized and emerge at the end of the 18th century, in large part in France. Right. So I prefer the term political zoology to also allude to the fact that this zoology as a distinctive scientific field is being conceptualized and emerging at the end of this period about which I'm writing.
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A
And so you've addressed the specificity of this rhetoric at this time, and in particular its roots in Buffon. But one thing that I'm curious about is how you address concerns about anthropomorphism in this rhetoric. Whether this way of talking about animals is just a way of talking about humans or whether this is actually taking the animal themselves into account.
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B
Yeah, well, so I would argue that one of the claims that Buffon makes in his Natural History is that the study of animals is a way for humans to understand themselves better. That knowledge about animals, empirical knowledge about animals, is a way to better understand the human. And so thinking about the animal, whether it's in Buffalo or going back to Aristotle, Aristotle himself was also a great early naturalist, wrote scientific texts in which he discusses animals and their varieties and so forth. I think that sort of Western thinking about animals is always being connected to questions about what makes humans perhaps distinct with respect to animals, but also what we share with animals. And so with the question of anthropomorphism, I think has to be seen in that framework, arguably with Buffon and in this moment in the 18th century, there's an attempt to, to counter an excessively anthropomorphic tradition. The kinds of animal references that you see in Machiavelli and the fox or the Hobbes, Leviathan, the great sea monster and so forth, these are sort of, we can say that they seem anthropomorphic references to us and they're just sort of ways to make political points that perhaps speaking too directly in a non metaphorical language could be, you know, considered to be maybe more shocking for harder for a reader to accept or whatever the particular reason for the uses of these references. But, you know, in the 18th century, in the period of Buffon, the Natural History, there's an attempt to really, to develop a scientific understanding of animals, to study them, to think about the relationship between their habitats, behaviors and so forth. And so it's with that particular tradition that I'm arguing that my right is engaged now. What happens when they take new ideas about animals and so try to think them in a political frame, is that often what might have originated as an empirical, repetitively empirical understanding of an animal becomes sort of transferred into sort of a figurative or a metaphorical language when it's used to make political arguments. But nonetheless, I think there is a sense in, you know, these writers think that the points that they're making are grounded in empirical science rather than sort of the tradition of animal fables or the literary uses of animals or to make claims about human nature. The way in which the anthropomorphism is evident and thinly veiled.
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A
Thank you. And to get right into the meat of your corpus. Now, some of our listeners may be aware of who de la Mettrie is, but if you could situate him briefly and then maybe talk about how figures of humanity and animality for de la matrie are triangulated through the figure of the machine.
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B
Right. Well, so Julien de la Mettrie, a very interesting figure. He begins his career as a medical doctor and then begins to write a number of philosophical writings which lead to his exiled from France. And he ends his life at the court of Frederick II of Prussia, where he dies at a very young age. We don't quite know under what circumstances perhaps poison. Right. And so his philosophical works and libertine works, which draw on the tradition of Epicurus and so forth, but they also engage with the tradition of Descartes. Now Buffon's Natural History, the kinds of writings on the animal that emerge around Buffalo, many of them engage with the Cartesian tradition and in particular with Descartes concept of the animal machine. Right. And so Descartes, animal machine. Descartes develops this idea as a way to think physiological movement in animal and human bodies, but then nonetheless preserves the distinction between the animal and the human, which is the dualist distinction underpinning the cogito and so forth. But Descartes idea of the animal machine or the physical body that we share with animals as being mechanistic, mechanical, this is something that many of these writers, they're required to engage with explicitly or implicitly in their own theories of animal behavior. But in the case of La Mettrie, La Mettrie, his approach to this question of what can be done with this Cartesian legacy is to actually, actually argue, not to reject it, but to kind of radicalize, at least explicitly. This is what he says in his most famous work, La Machine, that Descartes error was simply not to go far enough and that the machine hypothesis can be used not just to explain physiological movement in animal bodies, but it can also be used to explain the faculties of the human soul, memory, imagination, reason and so forth. That for a dualist, could not be explained in material terms. Nonetheless, there is a debate over La Metri's use of the machine figure. And a number of critics have argued that really it's sort of just sort of more like a dead metaphor in his philosophical writing. And that really we see the emergence and La Mettrie of an early vitalism, the idea that there are Physiological processes that can't be understood in mechanistic terms. They have to be understood in terms of the theory of life or whatever. But I actually argue against that. I argue that to some extent, I argue that at least the machine figure is doing important work in neometry as a way to understand physiology in animals and humans. I argue that it also is used by Nammetri to theorize some of the faculties of the so called the human soul, which for La Mettrie is a material soul. But I also argue that the machine image is a hinge between La Mettrie's physiological writing or the parts of his philosophical works that deal with physiology and medicine, and then the parts that deal with politics. And in particular, the machine image serves Le Mais as a way to underpin a deterministic conception of animal and human behavior. And it also serves him as a way to think about how determinism should shape the way in which we think about politics and questions of justice and criminal punishment and so forth. So just seeing, looking at Lameinsky's philosophical writings and his physiological writings separately from his political writings, I think if we do that, we fail to see the two different ways in which the machine image is serving him. And I argue that La Mettrie's medical, physiological and political writings, they form what Bruno Del Hoer has called a hybrid science. That it's through precisely through his thinking on physiology that he develops political ideas, just as through his thinking on politics that he extends his physiological thinking him. And that also that one of the important aspects of the machine image in La Mettrie is precisely it sort of leads to a number of contradictions, because on the one hand, it underpins his determinism and therefore conception of human behavior that is deterministic, including the areas that fall under the scope of criminal punishment and so forth. But at the same time, Lamentville uses it to justify what I can call a liberal conception of the state, in which rather the criminal whose behavior is determined, therefore, could be perhaps treated medically rather than simply incarcerated or executed. That criminal behavior could be understood is determined physiologically and so forth, and that could lead to a liberal reformist conception of the state. Nonetheless, there are a number of contradictions and paradoxes in Lamentry's liberalism that I explore in the book and go into further detail to try and to think through.
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A
Yeah, so in addition to the machine, through De La Mettrie, you introduced us to a number of Enlightenment concepts that will be key to our understanding of all of your authors here, such as Perfectibility and moral sentiments. And could you just briefly situate these concepts for us and explain their significance for your analysis?
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B
Yeah. So prefectability, we think of that as a faculty that Rousseau in his Second Discourse puts forth. And that is sort of a Rousseauistic concept. Right. But La Mettri also has a conception of perfectibility that appears in his philosophical writings and at various points. This is one of the things that I investigate in the book, and I can't perhaps go into too much detail about here, but at certain points in Lamituri philosophical writing things, he has a conception of the human as being distinct from the animal with respect to a concept of lack. Right. That animals have the instinct that determines their behavior, whereas humans lack a kind of instinct that could protect us if we were left to ourselves in a state of nature and so forth. But in spite of this lack, or perhaps because of it, we have this ability to transcend it through the development of faculties that are distinctive from those of other animals. And there's sort of something similar to Rousseau's perfectibility that at various moments, La Mettrie finds in human beings that would make them distinctive from other animals. It's like this sort of the idea of a propre dilemma, a distinctive quality or characteristic that humans possess and that are not possessed by other animals, which is ultimately sort of a metaphysical understanding of the human. At various times, in spite of his materialism and his determinism, I think that La Mettrie puts forward this kind of idea. But nonetheless, other times he really is a continuous who wants to try and find the basis for things like the moral sentiments, the sense of right or wrong on the basis of natural law in sentiments that we share with animals. And so in this case, rather than looking at the distinctions between humans and animals, it's the continuity and it's the presence of a sense of natural law in animal that, for La Metri, can underpin the concept of a natural law that would apply to humans. Except that in his later philosophical writings, lemitri seems to move away from this more traditional idea of natural law or natural rights, towards an Epicurean hedonistic theory of behavior, which would require that moral philosophy be rethought on different lines. And nonetheless, he still maintains that there become, instead of a sense of natural law or right or wrong that would be kind of inherent, grounded in the moral sentiments. The pleasure, pain, duality becomes the key to his thinking about ethics. But nonetheless, at that point, also the same duality, the same sentiment, is present in animals and humans. What I think that we See, in these writers is an attempt to pick up these concepts that have emerged from the tradition of Western political thinking, natural right, natural law, and in some cases to try and sort of rethink them with respect to these new conceptions of animals that are emerging in the 18th century, as I mentioned, but at other times to supplant them with new conceptions of morality or the basis from moral philosophy, which would emerge from this new thinking about animals. And that would be. Would have to be rethought on different terms, whether that be in vitalism or hedonistic pleasure playing duality and so forth.
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A
And to move us along a bit, your second writer is Francois Cunay, who is considered to be the father of the physiocrat school of economics. What is the physiocrat school of economics and how does it relate in your analysis to physiology?
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B
Yeah, so the physiocrat school of economics. Quesnay is often considered to be the first modern economist. Rousseau and the Encyclopedia writes the article on political economy and is often considered to be the philosopher who defines political economy for the modern age. But the economy had, Even through the 18th century in France, primarily domestic economy, the administration of a household. But for Quesnay, economy means the economy of a nation above all. And he tries to develop what we will call a scientific understanding of political economy, of national economy. So his conception is physiocratic in the sense that for Cunnay, the origin of economic surplus, the origin of wealth, is nature. Right. Phusis like the productive powers of nature. And so Cunnay famously makes a distinction between the surplus that originates in nature and then the sterility of the economic exchanges that occur in the domain of industry, commerce and so forth. So to increase the wealth of a nation, to increase surplus production, it's very important to maximize the productive powers of nature through agriculture and through certain techniques or approaches to agriculture. Capital intensity of farming, large concentration of farming amongst in the hands of wealthy farmers working in collaboration with large landowners, the marginalization of unproductive peasant labor, and also a certain kind of use of animals which I find to be distinctive to Quesnay. And often his emphasis on agriculture overshadows the way in which he actually also emphasizes the importance of animals in the production of economic surplus.
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A
And if you could talk a little bit more, because that's one place that animals have in his writing, if you could talk a little bit more about maybe other uses of the animal for Cunnae.
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B
Yeah, sure. And so the animal, just to step back a bit, I mean, part of Also, what I'm interested in, Cune is like lamentrie. He starts off as a medical doctor and then he writes physiological treatises. Just as lamentably, he had also written medical treatises on venereal disease and smallpox and so forth. Cunay also wrote medical treatises, a treatise on physiology called the Esse Physique sur l' Economie Animal. And so he tries to develop this physiological triass around this concept of the animal economy, which has a distinct sort of history than the concept of political economy that I mentioned earlier. But nonetheless, I argue that Quesnay's early writings on physiology, not just in terms of particular concepts that he develops, but in terms of his attempt to sort of map or represent the entirety of the animal economy, go on to shape his physiocratic approach to political economy, where again, he's concerned with this question of representation, mapping. How do you map, how do you represent the entirety of an articulated economic system and the various exchanges that occur within it? And so within that broader framework, the animal economy and his attempt to map the animal economy, I argue, go on to contribute to his attempts to map the economy of a nation and his famous tables, his tableau economic, which are very well known, but we could find precursors for them in his physiological writings. But there's also another sense, another way in which can is interested in the animal. And I mentioned he wants to maximize the productive powers of nature. And he has some articles on economics that appear in encyclopedia. And there he emphasizes the importance in using animals to maximize the agricultural harvests. And in particular, he studies the relative advantages of using horses, as opposed to bulls, to maximize production, to marginalize peasant labor, and so forth. So there's sort of an animal economy from the side of production that.
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A
He.
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B
Brings forth in these political writings, different animal economy than the economy anima, the physiological one that I mentioned earlier, but nonetheless interesting in its own right. And then also I think this is something that is perhaps less attention has been paid to in the criticism on Canadian physiocracy, is that central to Quesnay's idea of surplus value, of increasing surplus value through intensive capital, intensive agriculture, is the idea of not just economic production, but reproduction, right? So that an economy needs to be sustained from one year to the next. What is produced must be consumed in order for the capital to flow, to provide, to suckle back to the farmers that then can reinvest, and for the next year's harvest. For this capital to cycle back to its point of origin, what's produced needs to be Consumed. Quesnay, at various points talks about the importance, for example, of luxury consumption amongst or wealthy landowners. But he also talks about the importance of animal consumption, the animal herds that need to consume what is produced from the soil. But he also talks about the importance of the peasantry. And there's consumers, right? So. So they're marginalized with respect to production. Their labor is considered to be unproductive, but on the side of consumption, it's very important that they eat. And so we sort of have this quasi animalization, even of the peasantry there as part of another kind of animal economy that's occurring. So just sort of interested in thinking in the ways in which the animal appears in his political theory and in a particular economy with nature. Yeah, yeah.
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A
And just as Quesnay has multiple uses for the animal, so does one of your other authors, Diderot, and how does it help, or how does the figure of the animal in general help us, according to him, to understand humanity better, including the concept of natural rights?
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B
Yeah. So Diderot's writings. Well, first of all, his political writings, just to say a couple of words about them. He was famously incarcerated under l' etre de cachet after his Litvasili Zaverdo was published. And then after his release, he promised not to publish on political topics. And many of his political writings went unpublished during his lifetime. Many of them that he did publish or that even those who were unpublished tended to focus on particular topics. He never wrote a work of journalism, general work of political theory, even though he was a great admirer of Montesquieu, he had been a friend of Rousseau. He certainly perhaps ambitions to write such a treatise. But the question is why he didn't write this kind of treatise of political theory. Well, partly because he'd been dissuaded, perhaps, with his experiences with incarceration and so forth. But I think it was also, if we look at some of his later writings, we can see that he seemed to think that to write a general political treatise, he would need to have a general theory of moral philosophy. And to write such a treatise, Diderot seemed to think that it was important. To develop a more coherent conception of human nature that would have to be worked up in relationship to what. What was being learned about animals from Buffon and so forth. So just Diderot's failure to write this comprehensive political treatise reflects his interest in this question of morality and then animal human similarities and differences, and then also perhaps what we could learn about morality or the foundations of. Of morality from animals. And so he writes these articles in the encyclopedia of which he was an editor, along with Dalombe. I already mentioned Anima. He's a couple of other ones Bet Anima Boot and then the article on natural right, which is very well known. And what we see in those two texts is that the question of the animal for him raises questions, moral questions, whether it's in Beth Anima Brud. The way in which we can see a kind of moral behavior in animals, moral in the sense this can include in this period of the 19th century, not just what we think, ethical dilemmas, but the kinds of concern that parents might show for their children or sort of behavior that arguably has a moral character. Like Rousseau and like La Metrie to make claims about moral sentiments and humans. For Diderot, he seemed to think that we needed to be able to draw on animal examples as well to shore up what we could say about humans. He rejected a concept of moral philosophy that would be exclusively based on questions of the will, freedom of the will or reason, which is not just a human faculty for Diderot. And so the animal references seemed to be important to him to establish the these foundations of moral philosophy. But rather than someone who produces a coherent treatise on moral philosophy, I said he doesn't do that. And see, what we see in his later writings is an attempt to keep worrying at these questions most explicitly and one that you had. And then in later texts that he writes in the last decades of his life, he keeps returning to these questions of animal behavior and the animal human similarities and differences, what we could maybe deduce from them with respect to moral philosophy and also more narrowly, political questions. Just as La Mettrie kind of has a hybrid science in which medical, physiological, philosophical and political questions all seem to sort of overlap and reinforce each other in a certain way. I'll determine each other reciprocally, I think that we can say the same for Diderot, that his attempts to answer political questions in the last decades of his life and various occasional writings close are very informed by his thinking on physiology. He writes a work that is gaining increasing attention at the moment, Element de Physiologie, which, like Cunay's Sur les economie anima would sort of see as an unfinished, fragmentary treatise on. Well, not that Cunay's work was unfinished and fragmentary, but nonetheless an attempt to an investigation of physiological questions. And the questions that Dideroval was exploring in that text and the ways in which he frames James physiological concepts, we see clear echoes in his political writings of the same Period. So, I mean, I talk in my chapter on Diderot about the ways in which he uses. He has a tripartite conception of the animal. The animal can be understood as the whole animal. There's the animal with organs, there's the animal of the molecule. So these perspectives of the whole, the perspective of the organs, the molecule that he's investigating in his Edimond de Physiology, we see the same distinctions appear in his philosophical and political writings of the period, particularly the writings that he wrote based on the time that he spent with Catherine the Great in Russia, and then some writings that he wrote explicitly for her, others that he wrote after he had left Russia. And we see these, the organ, the molecule, they appear as political concepts in these writings of ways that echo his usage of the same concepts to talk about physiology and his animal physiology of the same period. So, again, this hybrid science is sort of reciprocal determination or exchange between physiology and politics. Time is valuable. That's why Lowe's blueprint takeoffs turn blueprints into quotes faster. Bring us your plans, and we'll generate itemized material lists to make quoting easier so you can get back to Building Plus. 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A
And could you go a little bit more into depth about what you mean by the politics of organs or molecules?
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B
Yeah, so the politics of. So the organic conception of the state, you know, Diderot doesn't invent that. There's a very old model for understanding the state that we can find in Plato and so forth. But the notion that the state or the nation can be understood along the lines of, in terms of analogy with perhaps a human or an animal body, that there's a head, there is a heart, there are limbs, and so forth. For Diderot, this conception of the. Well, this vantage point for thinking about the animal is one that then, and as political theory uses to think about the role of what Monte Stewart called intermediary bodies. Right, Bodies that can serve as intermediaries between the sovereign, the monarch and the people, and that can serve as a bulwark for individual liberties in a constitutional state. And so the organic perspective for Diderot, then, can be understood as connected with a certain conception of liberty is emerging in the way that Montesquieu had described it through this organic model with intermediary bodies that serve as a kind of a guarantor of freedom. But Then the molecular point of view is more radical. And that is one that he listeners that are familiar with his d' Alembert will know. His reflections will be familiar with his reflections on molecules in that text. And the most radical parts of his physiological thinking, his materialism that we see Lucretian, Epicurean influences and so forth here with respect to his political writings, I think that in these writings of the period we can see is he develops this metaphor of the balls, in which the balls are analias to the molecules and physiology. And thinking about political society in terms of organization of balls, whether it be a monarchy in which the balls are organized into a pyramid, but then in another organization you could have the balls that are organized horizontally. And then in that case, he talks about the way in which that metaphor could be used to describe despotism, but also democracy. And so the metaphor of the molecules or the balls, and as a way to think about politics there it seems to him to be a way to think about democracy. In the later periods of his life, he was enamored of the American Revolution and seems to have embraced more democratic, if not republican, political views. But in these writings, when he's referring to the molecules, he seems to be using the molecules to think about what is the configuration of power to democracy, how is it distinct from that in a monarchy, what could prevent a democracy from descending into despotism, as ancient political thinkers had always cautioned that democratic systems were their weakness, was that they were liable to should descend into tyranny or despotism, and so forth. And then ultimately, what is the justification for political society at all? In what way are the balls or molecules, what can keep them together within a state? To what extent do they have a natural inclination to want to aggregate, or do they need to be coerced? And some of Diderbola's political runnings of this period, and even in works that are quite well known, like the Suprema of Voyage de Bougainville, we can see him thinking from this molecular point of view in politics, raising doubts about the advantages of political society in general, and perhaps thinking of using these metaphors to think about a kind of an anarchistic model of political organization, which would be distinct even from democracy. And I mean, I know, so I don't say that Diderot was ultimately an anarchist and not in the sense that we understand it today, but nonetheless there was a sort of trying to think of on the limits of politics and using this molecular point of view to think on politics at their limits. Right?
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A
And so when you introduce Rousseau, who's your next author. You point out some of the difficulties of pinning down animality in his writing and the variety of interpretations this has given rise to. So how does this difficulty come about? And why, according to you, is it important to face it head on?
- [40:46]
B
Yeah, well, so there's been a lot of critical debate, Particularly with respect to Rousseau's Second Discourse of Discourse Sur l' ni guerite, which Rousseau had mentioned in his Confessions. He had said that it was the work that contained his most fundamental reflections. And so I kind of agree with that, and at least I find it a fascinating text and one that I feel like I've spent the most time thinking about and trying to work through. But one of the questions that the critics have raised is this question of what makes humans distinct from other animals. And if Rousseau identifies one principle, a popular distinctive quality or characteristic that humans would possess that animals would lack, and. And that ultimately could be viewed as a sort of a metaphysical understanding of human nature. Right. And I argue that Rousseau does not find in one particular quality. A radical difference or distinction between humans and other animals, at least in the Discosa negariti. First of all, his concept of perfectibility that he develops, which we discussed a little bit before, with respect to La Mettrie, well, he does argue that that is distinctive in humans, but I follow Elisabeth de Fontenay, who argues that rather than a distinctive faculty, we should see it more as an agglomeration of qualities that animals don't lack, but it's the particular balance or way in which they configure in humans that explains our obvious differences from other animal species which we are manifest. Right. But they can't be grounded in some metaphysical quality that we possess. The animals lack. It's more just this distinctive organization. But some critics have argued that Rousseau founds human distinctiveness not on perfectibility in any case, but he founds it on liberty. And so that it would be liberty, freedom, which is the human distinction, function. And I argue that that can't be sustained because if you read the discourse of Uni Geeti in that way, we can't make sense of his use of animal references, because Rousseau is using animal references precisely to argue that not just that we can find evidence of freedom in animals, but that freedom in animals, insofar as humans too, we share, share, at least in our origin, a common nature with other animals. The presence of freedom in animals is a guarantee for human freedom insofar as we can see that animals want to be free, that we can deduce or assume that humans want to be free and that our lot or want is not simply to live under despotism or servitude. Right. So that to read liberty as a purely human quality, really it doesn't work as a reading of the discourse of the negarita. So that's really what I guess my argument, my engagement with the critics there on the questions of perfectibility and liberty. But Egerite as well, Rousseau admits that there is there's inequality in all human societies, but the question is the degree of inequality that we should tolerate. Right. And that if you look at animals, there is some inequality in animal species, but it's relatively small in contrast with the extreme inequalities that we can see in many human societies. But again, the animal reference isn't just casual, but I think argue that it's normative and important and fundamental as as to underpin his argument. And Rousseau, he uses references to Buffon, also to a number of other sources in making these arguments. But we can say that Anna's use of Buffon, as I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, what and Buffon meant as scientific, empirical assessments of animals. Basirh Bakan they pass into a political rhetoric and into a different context where their truth value arguably is a little different. Different, but nonetheless, Rousseau wants to establish his text, wants to establish his arguments, I argue by drawing on the contemporary science of his period.
- [45:41]
A
So with your discussion there of liberty and inequality, that leads us right into your last chapter with Nicolas Admiretre de la Bretonne, who was, among other things, a utopian thinker. And in particular, you discuss his novel La decouverte australant ou le desdel francais. And this text is pretty idiosyncratic. Could you give listeners a brief overview and some of the ways in which animals appear in this text?
- [46:09]
B
Yeah, it's a fascinating novel and entirely, completely bizarre. It's a bizarre, fascinating, frustrating, important work. Retief wrote a lot, a lot. And I think that if you're not familiar with Retief, it's probably, probably a good place to start, as I argue in the chapter, not just because it is extremely bizarre and fantastical, but because it also is a text in which some of many, in fact, of Gaitif's other his political writings and his writings on natural history and so forth, they come together, but in the context of fiction that also makes political arguments. Right. And so just to summarize quickly, the novel, there are two main parts. In the first part, Victorin, who's the son of a provincial like Tax collector, tax prosecutor. He falls in love with the daughter of a noblewoman that we can't marry because of class prejudice. Prejudice is of rank. But then he develops these mechanical wings and transforms himself into kind of a predator figure. A great bird abducts this woman, Christine, and takes her to a more inaccessible. Like a mountain, an inaccessible kind of mountain valley where he establishes her and other people that he kidnaps in a kind of a quasi. Meant to be a quasi utopian society. And eventually reveals himself. Up to this point, she hasn't known his true identity, but eventually reveals himself to be Victor Ha. And then there's a moment of reconciliation and she's reunited with her family and now they come to accept Victor Ha as her husband and so forth. But this first. This first part of the novel is really an attempt. It's sort of a reflection on prejudices of rank and the aristocratic society of France and the last decades of the 18th century. It's also one that, just as it's criticizing these prejudices of rank and the very social inequalities, develops this rhetoric of predation to justify Victorhood attack on those prejudices. It's very ambivalent. But then, anyway, in the second part of the text, then Victora and his descendants used their mechanical wings to travel to the Antipodes, like the Pacific, the South Seas, right. Which in this period, the period in which the novel is writing, was an arena that was the object of various voyages from Bougainville. But also James Cook, who was explicitly referenced in the prefaces to Khetif's novel. So Khtif was obviously quite well informed about these voyages that were occurring in this period, the Antipodes, the Pacific was becoming an arena for imperial rivalry. And in the second part of the novel, where these characters travel to the South Seas, they encounter in these territories of the Antipodes a range of animal, human, hybrid peoples, so dog men, monkey men, snake men and so forth they're called. And then what they do is they set up an empire which is the Christinian Empire, named again after Christine, but Christinian Empire, which. Which tries to justify a kind of imperial rule over these hybrid peoples. And I think that this text is very interesting as a late 18th century reflection on empire and the kinds of justifications that could be made for empire in this period. And Khatif in the text alludes to the critiques of empire that had been made by people like the. In the period and in particular the cruelties of the conquistador, the Spanish and the Portuguese empires, but also the behavior of the Europeans more generally in the Americas, and in fact, the Indies, the Two Indies. But so the question is then, is it possible to create, to imagine a form of empire that could be progressive or liberal, as they call it? So what would it mean to think of a liberal empire? And so this is the paradox of liberalism that they argue that Khachivi is trying to think through. And in trying to think through the paradox of a liberal empire, I think we can see that Retief, he's anticipating arguments that will be made in the 19th century by Mill, who also argues and provides a justification for empire in terms of. Supposedly in terms of liberal principles, but where liberalism is connected to a certain conception of. Of otherness and racial differences. And the animal human hybrids that the victor and his sentence encounter are fairly transparent figures for the varieties of the human species, human racial difference, and so forth. And so all of the political content of this part of the novel is an attempt to sort of think through this paradox of a liberal empire. How can you justify a form of sovereignty that would not extend full political rights to these subject peoples, but at the same time would recognize in them a certain kind of humanity? And I argue that this occurs through an ideology of fraternity or confraternity, the fraternity of peoples which is used to justify, but also exclude these colonized peoples from. From full political rights and so forth.
- [52:20]
A
Well, that's certainly given us a lot to think about and a lot of reasons to go out and read your book. But as we come to the end of our time, do you have any other ongoing projects you would like to share with the listeners?
- [52:31]
B
Yeah, so thank you so much again for having me on the podcast. And yeah, so it's been a great pleasure to talk about my work. And at the moment I'm, you know, working on French speculative fiction from the 18th century. Mercier and also maybe, you know, Retief to some extent as well. And then I've been working on Diderot's physiological writings and then again their connection to his politics, trying to take that in some different angles. But I'm also interested in France and the Pacific and Both in the 18th century and today, so working on Tita Wapiu and other Francophone authors from Tahiti and the Pacific. So those are my current projects.
- [53:14]
A
Well, Mike, thank you again to Dr. Andrew Billing. And the book is Animal Rhetoric and Natural science an 18th century liberal political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment.