Cruel Delight
Cruel Delight enlightenment culture and the
inhum a n
James A. Steintrager
indiana university press bloomington & indianapolis
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[email protected] © 2004 by James A. Steintrager All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. manufactured in the united states of america
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steintrager, James A., 1965 Cruel delight : enlightenment culture and the inhuman / James A. Steintrager. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34367-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21649-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cruelty—History—18th century. 2. Enlightenment. I. Title. BJ1535.C7S84 2003 179′.09′034—dc21 2003010227 1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
Contents list of illustr ations v ii ack now ledgments i x introduction x i
part i The Inhuman 1. The Model of Moral Monstrosity 3 2. The Paradox of Inhumanity 18
part ii Curiosity Killed the Cat 3. Animals and the Mark of the Human 37 4. The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 60
part iii The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade 5. Science and Insensibility 87 6. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Human Vivisection 115 Epilogue 146
notes 151 select bibliogr aph y 193 index 203
Illustrations
Figure 1.1. Final engraving of William Hogarth’s series “A Rake’s Progress” (1735) Figure 3.1. William Hogarth, First Stage of Cruelty Figure 3.2. William Hogarth, Second Stage of Cruelty Figure 3.3. William Hogarth, Cruelty in Perfection Figure 3.4. William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty Figure 3.5. William Hogarth, drawing for the woodcut version of The Reward of Cruelty (detail) Figure 3.6. Tom Nero recoils in horror (detail of Hogarth’s Cruelty in Perfection) Figure 3.7. Charles Le Brun’s depiction of “horrour” from A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1734). Figure 4.1. First Stage of Cruelty (detail) Figure 4.2. The Reward of Cruelty (detail) Figure 4.3. Detail of cataract surgery from Diderot’s Encyclopedia Figure 4.4. Cataract surgery from Albert Haller’s Disputationes chirurgicae selectae (1755) Figure 4.5. William Hogarth, Pit Ticket: The Cockpit Figure 5.1. The monk Foutre-à-mort prepares to dissect his victim in Rétif de la Bretonne’s L’anti-Justine Figure 5.2. Rodin receives the scalpel in Sade’s La nouvelle Justine Figure 5.3. Anatomy plate illustrating the female genitalia and reproductive system from Diderot’s Encyclopedia Figure 5.4. Frontispiece from Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) Figure 5.5. Comparison of camera obscura and eyeballs from l’abbé Nollet’s Leçons de physique expérimentale (8th ed., 1775) Figure 5.6. Eyeball as part of the nervous system from Descartes’s La dioptrique (1637) Figure 5.7. Torture chamber of the Inquisition from Jean-Pierre Goujet’s Histoire des Inquisitions (1769) Figure 6.1. The surgeon boys in Rétif de la Bretonne’s Nights make a surprising discovery while the Hibou secretly looks on Figure 6.2. Guido Reni, La Maddalena Figure 6.3. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jeune ¤lle qui pleure son oiseau mort [Young Girl Crying over Her Dead Bird] Figure 6.4. Depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Agatha from Jacques Callot’s Les images de tous les saincts et saintes de l’année (1636) Figure 6.5. Illustration of mastectomy procedures and devices from Diderot’s Encyclopedia Figure 6.6. Illustration of mastectomy procedures and devices from Diderot’s Encyclopedia Figure 6.7. Mastectomy procedures from Scultetus’s Armamentarium chirurgicum Figure 6.8. Mastectomy procedures from Albert Haller’s Disputationes chirurgicae selectae (which faithfully reproduce the illustrations from Lorenz Heister)
7 39 40 41 42 52 54 55 81 81 81 81 83 92 93 99 100 101 102 113 127 134 135 139 140 141 142 143
Acknowledgments
Of the many people who helped guide this project on its way to fruition, I owe thanks foremost to Dorothea von Mücke. It was she who ¤rst saw its potential and has ever since been a constant source of intellectual insight and practical assistance. My colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where I arrived in 1997, have been on the whole both critically demanding and incredibly supportive. Above all, I should mention my colleagues in eighteenth-century studies, who have been models of scholarship and generosity: Robert Folken®ik, Richard Kroll and Ann Van Sant. Other colleagues who have been socially and intellectually invaluable are Elizabeth Allen, Laura O’Connor, Hugh Roberts, Vicki Silver, and Michael Szalay. I would also like to thank those who were particularly valuable to my training in the ¤eld. Crucial in this regard has been Michael Seidel, who almost single-handedly upheld eighteenth-century English studies when I was at Columbia University. His guidance and the critical outlook provided by the eighteenth-century discussion group that he, along with James Basker, ran were essential at the early stages of this project. Thanks too go to members of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia, where I found a base, encouragement, and erudition: Antoine Compagnon, Pierre Force, Gita May, and many others. Nor would I have survived the occasional inhumanity of graduate education without the warmth and support of my fellow students and friends, including Timothy Campbell, Trevor Pickering, Janet Rickershauser, and Chet Wiener (truly an abbreviated list). The roots of this book go back to my undergraduate studies in political philosophy and my discovery then of French literature, and I would be remiss if I did not mention those who particularly inspired me at Wake Forest University: the late Germaine Brée, the late Saguiv Hadari, Win-Chiat Lee, and Byron Wells. Scholarly books of this sort do not get written without libraries and librarians, and I would like to thank the helpful staffs at the Rare Books Collection at Columbia University, the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the New York Public Library and Special
Acknowledgments x
Collections at the University of California, Irvine. I gratefully acknowledge as well those journals in which portions of the material in this book appeared in earlier form: “Perfectly Inhuman: Moral Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Discourse,” in Eighteenth-Century Life 21, n.s. no. 2 (May 1997): 114–132; and “Monstrous Appearances: Hogarth’s ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ and the Paradox of Inhumanity,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42, no. 1 (spring 2001): 59–82. There are many others that I could and probably should mention, but I would be singularly ungrateful if I did not thank Rey Chow, who has mentored, coaxed, made connections, and provided sound advice and mental stimulation. Without the inspiration of my mother, Marianne Steintrager, and my sisters Kirsten, Rebecca, and Megan, this project would never have been begun. Without the support and companionship of Tanya Riedel, it would have never been completed. Finally, I dedicate this book simply and respectfully to the memory of my father, James A. Steintrager, senior.
Introduction
Although we might ¤nd it odd today, many eighteenth-century thinkers located the origins of moral monstrosity in the powers of imagination. David Hume in The Natural History of Religion (1757) thus writes concerning our propensity for belief, “The primary religion of mankind arises chie®y from anxious fear of future events; and what ideas will naturally be entertained of invisible, unknown powers, while men lie under dismal apprehensions of any kind, may easily be conceived. Every image of vengeance, severity, cruelty, and malice must occur and augment the ghastliness and horror, which oppresses the amazed religionist.”1 Hume here makes reference to one of the most repeated lines of his time, borrowed from the ¤rst-century Roman poet Statius: “Fear ¤rst begot the gods of this world.”2 Statius, however, only provided a useful slogan for what was once called, without much ado, the Enlightenment. Far more prominent in the pantheon of ancients called on to provide an intellectual genealogy of rationalist critique was the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who banished the gods to the so-called intermundia—empty spaces where the deities cogitate entirely detached from human affairs—and then ¤rmly linked superstition to ignorance.3 In the classical Enlightenment model, inhumanity springs spontaneously from this conjunction. The atheist philosophe Baron d’Holbach in The Holy Contagion (1768) surmises that, given its benighted state, we should not be surprised to see “the human race everywhere trembling under cruel Gods, shuddering at the idea of them, and in order to disarm them submitting itself to a thousand inventions that make good sense indignant.”4 Imagined cruelty brings forth real cruelties: animal and human sacri¤ces, crusades, and autos-da-fé. Given these parameters, ¤ghting barbarity entails replacing misguided belief with knowledge. To take an early example, Pierre Bayle in his in®uential Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695) consistently uses the study of the past as a tool to upset orthodoxy, clarify mystery, and instill a rational skepticism.5 And while the cruel practices of religion could be explained as purely involuntary productions, such explanations were usually
Introduction xii
supplemented by attempts to expose the cui bono of superstition. Often vehement attacks on priestcraft evoked visions of demonic pro¤teers of the sacred. Through his printer in Amsterdam, d’Holbach continually issued anti-clerical diatribes and free translations of like-minded works, with incisive titles such as On Religious Cruelty.6 Such output was part of a rapidly expanding print culture that helped spread the news that cruelty had had its day. Other media too, especially drama, were used as tools in the struggle. In France, Baculard d’Arnaud in his play Coligny (1740) would summon up the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the fruit of hatred directed against the Huguenots, to inculcate tolerance. In Germany, Gottsched would call on the same event in like manner in his drama Parisian Blood Wedding (1745).7 Voltaire’s critique of fanaticism in his play Mahomet (1741) riled many because its scenes of horror and its depiction of the hypocrisy of the founder of Islam could be easily read as thinly veiled attacks on the most basic beliefs of Christianity. Of a different temper, Lessing’s endearing Nathan the Wise (1779) provides perhaps the most lasting example of the staging of cosmopolitan acceptance as an epochal ideal. My aim is not to recapitulate some of the more salient features of what we can still, in spite of reservations, call the project of the Enlightenment. Intellectual historians have thoroughly and usefully covered the territory. Rather, what I wish to point out is that the philosophes, their fellow travelers, and many others at the time locate the origins of cruelty “out there.” Wicked priests and persistent ignorance are considered not so much problems internal to philosophical and literary production as external referents to be negated. The positive counterpart of the critique of credulity is what could best be described as philosophical anthropology. The accreted layers of history, marked as it is by religious enthusiasm and suchlike distortions, are peeled back in a search for the “human being.” Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) asks his readers to consider contemporary humanity to be like the statue of Glaucus, “which time, sea and storms had dis¤gured to such an extent that it looked less like a god than a wild beast.”8 Although Rousseau was considered an apostate by the Enlightenment elite, his trope is consonant with the general drift of philosophical thought. Accordingly, Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764) remarks that a logical analysis of original sin leads not to the conclusion that men are cruel because they are fallen, but rather to a very different supposition: that God is so cruel that he can only be considered insane—a sort of divine monstrosity.9 Exonerated and puri¤ed, human nature can now serve as an objective standard from which morality, without the aid of religion, might be derived. Above all, philosophers during the
Introduction xiii
eighteenth century emphasize pity, compassion, fellow feeling, and sympathy, broadly construed, as the steering mechanisms of individual interaction. Pity and its cognates hence constitute another outside, in this instance meant to serve as a solid foundation, rather than pernicious illusions destined soon to vanish. Such would be, in the words of Henry Home, Lord Kames, “the great cement of society.”10 As an affect, pity is natural and therefore juxtaposed to the contingencies of history, ignorance, and the machinations of the self-serving. At the same time, “pity” is but a word—keyed to deep-seated physiological responses, no doubt—that circulates, directs attention to suffering, and occupies a place in a network of signi¤cations.11 Crucially, the centrality of pity does not so much banish cruelty as determine its necessary place as an element of the communication system of eighteenth-century ethical discourse. After all, what pity presupposes is a certain relationship between a subject and a suffering other. The very possibility of this relationship is grounded in the almost inevitable presence of an unpleasant third party. While cruelty was abhorred, it had to be talked about, theorized, and even performed. Indeed, what the Enlightenment could ill afford to tolerate was a lack of cruelty. Far from being simply exterior, cruelty was also constructed and confronted immanently under the rubric of “inhumanity.” It has been the fashion for a while now for those of us who work in the humanities to take a position on humanism, and a couple of positions in particular stand out: dismissive, with an offhand insistence on the radicalness of this stance; and af¤rmative, with a sense of noble conservatism or embattled liberalism. A full examination of the origins and import of this divide is beyond the bounds of this study, but certain major ¤gures and schools of thought come quickly to mind. Dominant have been critical voices: Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche in the front guard; Heidegger and his existential analytic; structuralists and poststructuralists. In this context, the term “inhuman” has sometimes been invoked: the alien power of language for Paul de Man or the dimension of time for Jean-François Lyotard.12 Of late, there has been more and more talk of the posthuman, too.13 Related to these developments is the critique of the subject, construed as a self-present and self-conscious free agent. With Descartes, whose Meditations on First Philosophy appeared in 1641, and Kant, whose ¤rst critique dates from 1781, often placed as the most original and sophisticated formulators of the subject in this sense, we can easily see what has sometimes become of the eighteenth century or at least of the major ¤gures associated with the Enlightenment: a philosophical hiatus to be ignored, a source of
Introduction xiv
ongoing liberal inspiration, a distasteful humanist quagmire. My characterizations are no doubt caricatures, but certainly not without a grain of truth. Yet it is far from clear that we know what the subject was in the period during which it supposedly thrived or what was then meant by the term “human.” Certainly, we should not accept at face value and without careful consideration notions bequeathed to us by the very objects of our condemnation or of our approbation, as the case may be.14 One of my goals in this book is to spread a little light on these matters through an investigation of the inhuman. Both recognizably similar to us and uncannily different, the inhuman was a category produced from within philosophical discourse, one that had to be posited if humanity was to take shape at all. Furthermore, not only did the inhuman de¤ne humanity through a sort of negative anthropology, instantiations of moral monstrosity in art and literature also helped enact humanity as humaneness. The organization of this study is straightforward: three primary parts, each divided into two chapters, that outline respectively the rise of the inhuman in ethical thought at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the deployment of the concept in the visual arts and journalism at the middle, and the unraveling of the inhuman in literature and philosophy of the latter third. Each part takes off from a speci¤c instance: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury’s de¤nition of inhumanity, William Hogarth’s engravings combating cruelty to animals, and the Marquis de Sade’s ¤rst major legal contretemps. Around these instances are woven myriad other texts and references that provide explanatory context and show how the particular example ¤ts into a larger picture. Thus in the ¤rst part, I focus on selections from ethical philosophy, concentrating on the Scottish Enlightenment but including a wide range of English and continental thinkers as well. I detail exactly what moral monstrosity meant in the eighteenth century and how such a concept was constructed in the elaboration of an ethics based on sentiment. From its place in a general taxonomy of vices, cruelty became associated with a speci¤c type of human being—or “inhuman” being, as the texts examined put it. The inhuman perversely enjoys the spectacle of another’s suffering. The formulation of inhumanity in these terms was used to buttress the notion of benevolence as representative of the naturally constituted human psyche and to suggest that cruelty was an aberration. Moreover, when moral monstrosity was seen as akin to physical monstrosity, as was increasingly the case as the century unfolded, inhumanity became entwined with the formation of nascent sciences of normality and pathology.15 At the same time, the very positing of cruel enjoyment tended to expose problems of con-
Introduction xv
sistency. For example, if “inhuman” passions do exist, then what exactly distinguishes them from supposedly “human” ones? Or again, why do descriptions of human nature—the centrality of pity, to take the key case— not correspond to actual behaviors? And how can descriptions logically be converted into prescriptions? When sentimental ethics eventually collapsed under the weight of such problems, the former moral monster suddenly became a model of human freedom: the ability to choose cruelty and ignore pity proved that we are not irrevocably linked to or guided by natural responses. The second part concentrates on the effects of the model of moral monstrosity on depictions of children, scientists, and surgeons in England in particular. During the eighteenth century, the professional boundaries of scienti¤c and medical disciplines had begun to solidify at the same time that pity was deemed both the most human sentiment and the best way of regulating social intercourse. Under these circumstances, surgeons, who daily practiced necessary cruelties, were often suspected of hardening into inhuman beings. Scientists—or “natural philosophers,” to use a less anachronistic term—were likewise to ¤nd themselves placed in the category of moral monstrosity because of experimental practices such as vivisection. Finally, children, with their apparently innate curiosity and tendency to mistreat animals, suggested that pity might not be the most important or original passion after all. I look at treatises on education, journalistic interventions in the debate on cruelty to animals, and similar offerings from the press, but a large part of my analysis centers on the visual evocation of inhumanity in William Hogarth’s series of engravings “The Four Stages of Cruelty.” These engravings show that not only was the supposed embrace of scienti¤c curiosity in the eighteenth century considerably ambivalent, but also that the very construction of the sentimental campaign against cruelty to animals both was beset by and productively used unresolved logical paradoxes. In the third part, I pull together the various strands of the argument so far, with Sade as focus. Since at least Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis that Sade represents the moment in the dialectic of enlightenment in which reason repudiates nature and yet gives itself over to the rationalization of nature at its most horri¤c, the Marquis has found himself as the culmination and turning point of an epoch.16 I examine some of the concrete reasons that Sade is placed as both pivot and extreme by historians as diverse as Lester Crocker, who saw in Sade the “nihilist dissolution” of the Enlightenment, and Michel Foucault, for whom the Sadean text simultaneously epitomizes and ends the classical age.17 Starting with an
Introduction xvi
incident in which the young Marquis was accused of testing out a medicine on an unwilling subject, I show how this biographical kernel was transformed into a hyperbolic re®ection in literature of anxieties concerning the vivisector’s gaze and the con®ict between humane sympathy and human freedom. While drawing on work concerning the connections between science and the literature of sensibility, I demonstrate that Sade in fact undermines the very notion of sensibility by allowing second-order observation to short-circuit sympathetic response. For Sade, the gaze is unlinked from nature, on which it re®ects from a higher position. This development, which amounts to a transformation of inhumanity into humanity of a higher order, concludes my study. * * * In undertaking my research, I began very much with Foucault in mind, and I am still tempted to describe my method as “discourse analysis” in more or less the Foucauldian sense.18 I have, however, long since ceased to consider discourse a stable, hegemonic structure but see it rather as a tenuous web of frequently paradoxical communications. I have also discovered, somewhat belatedly at times, my indebtedness to the more traditional historiography of the Enlightenment as well as to excellent recent work on the subject.19 The ¤eld of eighteenth-century studies has seen a considerable broadening of interests in the past decades (a change spurred in part by the widespread acceptance of the notion of discourse as an underlying unity of thought that bypasses the distinction between major and minor authors). Feminist reevaluations, the rise of cultural studies, and the New Historicism have placed the formerly marginal at the center of inquiry and emphasized non-canonical ¤gures and previously marginalized aspects of the canonical. Each of these approaches has had an impact on my work, and certainly my interest in ¤gures such as Rousseau, Kant, and Hume has to do with seeing them anew through their embedding in larger cultural networks. In this regard, I should mention from the outset scholarship that has been particularly relevant to this project: David Marshall’s studies of sympathy, Barbara M. Benedict’s work on curiosity, and the analyses by Ann Van Sant and Anne Vila of sensibility (both of whom reference Sade in ways that directly impinge on my research topics).20 There have been times when I feared that historicism—my own included—was slipping toward an unre®ective positivism, encouraged by postmodern wariness about indulging in so-called grand narratives. There is a need for theoretical distance and re®ection, just as there is a need for thick description, and I have tried when possible to bring my issues with
Introduction xvii
the inhuman into dialogue with deconstruction, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. In many respects, this project might be seen as a way to revisit the debate between Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, most notably, on the meaning and ongoing value of the Enlightenment and its relation to modernity and critique.21 In this regard, when the reader of this book comes across the problem of self-reference in Enlightenment philosophy, for example, she should be reminded of the claim that Foucault tried to repress the aporias of self-reference only to have them seep back into his discourse (e.g., if power underlies knowledge, then genealogical history itself becomes a hidden expression of power).22 Or, when addressing the question of nature as the ground of normative behavior, he might consider the complaint that Habermas cannot legitimize his theory of rational communication without sneaking normative assumptions in through the back door.23 Although I have often preferred to allow such matters to enjoy a suggestive latency, what I nonetheless do consistently attempt to demonstrate are the ways that such paradoxes and problems, far from simply ending in interpretive impasses, tend to reveal discourse at its most intriguing and productive. I have tried, moreover, to restore to this conversation a ¤gure of central importance still little recognized in the United States, or in Europe outside of Germany, for that matter: sociologist Niklas Luhmann.24 Those who are familiar with Luhmann and his version of systems theory will readily notice my references to functional differentiation and problems of observation. For those who are not, I have tried to introduce such material in a user-friendly manner, eschewing the rebarbative jargon and relentless abstraction that has kept many an intelligent reader from seriously entertaining the intriguing hypotheses of systems-theoretical inquiry.25 Underlining the disciplinary grounds of sociological research in The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens has suggested that one of the de¤cits of many postmodern approaches has been a privileging of epistemological concerns over the study of institutions.26 Since Giddens himself frequently points out how institutional evolution conditions knowledge, a sharp dichotomy seems impossible. Foucault’s own work, of course, was always historical and moved increasingly toward analyses of concrete institutions—prisons, the confessional booth, the sexologist’s clinic—in which power and knowledge found themselves indissolubly conjoined. Similarly, Habermas’s historical study of the “public sphere” in the eighteenth century provided the groundwork for his elaboration of a theory of rational communication.27 In my approach to inhumanity, I too have sought to unravel some of the complex interplay between institutional
Introduction xviii
evolution and epistemology. Although I have generally cleaved to the historicist view of the Enlightenment as a period—in many ways over and done with—I have also tried to point out the lasting impress of certain attitudes and categories of thought.28 In this regard, I would situate our present epistemological condition in terms of changes in social organization, as well as a concomitant grasping for semantic holds, that took off in earnest in the eighteenth century (on this point, Foucault, Habermas, Luhmann, and Giddens have all expressed an uneasy accord29). Here we might recall that Lyotard, the name usually associated with postmodernism qua the end of grand narratives, actually located, examined, and declared henceforth inadequate two speci¤c, largely nineteenth-century narratives called on to legitimize knowledge and scienti¤c pursuit: the notion of “humanity as the hero of liberty” and that of “the autonomy of the will.”30 Regarding the desuetude of these narratives and the search for more useful models, it is worth noting that, in retrospect, Lyotard’s attempt to overcome the stale divide between a functionalist sociology of social unity and a Marxist dialectical and critical dualism by foregrounding language games, difference, and paradox appears to be much more in accord with than in opposition to recent systems-theoretical approaches, whose emphasis has shifted from action and cohesion to communication and difference.31 My interest, in any case, is certainly not in reinvigorating the defunct strategies that Lyotard pinpoints, but rather in exploring new ways to lay bare their vexed prehistory and, at times, their cryptic afterlife. To those working or reading in a historical ¤eld with which they are not fully familiar, basic research can appear as so much irrelevant minutiae. On the other hand, specialists are in a good position to accuse—usually rightly so—those who seek overarching theoretical explanations of historical ignorance. In trying to accommodate both approaches, I have run the risk of oversimplifying at some times and overcomplicating at others. By presenting my material in such a way that a general academic audience will, I hope, ¤nd it accessible, I have potentially alienated specialists in my ¤eld and not at all guaranteed that general readers will be interested. Aware of these risks, I have put my faith in an aspect of human nature that played a central role in eighteenth-century ethics and aesthetics: our fascination with cruelty, malice, suffering, and pain.
PART I
The Inhuman
1 The Model of Moral Monstrosity
What did it mean to call someone “inhuman” in the eighteenth century? How was moral monstrosity understood? Furthermore, why was it understood in a certain way? These are the questions that I will attempt to answer in this part of my argument, focusing on philosophical texts, primarily from the domain of ethics. Many of these texts come from the group of philosophers commonly placed under the rubric of the Scottish Enlightenment. Some of them—David Hume and Adam Smith, for example—are well known. Others, such as Adam Ferguson, James Beattie, and Thomas Reid, are less familiar. One facet of my argument is that knowing these philosophers individually is not important when it comes to inhumanity. On the contrary, what is crucial is that they share the same fundamental stance on the matter. It is not surprising that moral monstrosity should be an insistent theme within the Scottish Enlightenment, the members of which tend to share the heritage of Shaftesbury, the doyen of the Cambridge Platonists. Shaftesbury had claimed that all humans have innate feelings of an ethical nature. The faculty corresponding to these feelings would come to be called “moral sense,” and one who lacks such sense will obviously be an aberration of sorts. Nonetheless, the roots of moral monstrosity extend into the seminal texts of British empiricism as well: the works of Hobbes and Locke. In fact, we can grasp moral monstrosity only if we see it as a strange hybrid of the rationalist methodology of empiri-
The Inhuman 4
cism and the elaboration of the sentiments—an elaboration that did not lack cynicism at times—in the ethics of the moral-sense school. I should add as well that the notion of moral monstrosity examined in this chapter is not con¤ned to Britain. It is found in French and German philosophy as well, perhaps without the same sharpness of detail but with equal vigor. Its dissemination is not a particularly mysterious process, and one could recreate without much trouble its genealogical tree. Chronologically, for example, Francis Hutcheson was a follower of Shaftesbury; Adam Smith a pupil of Hutcheson; Thomas Reid succeeded Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. On the Continent, Diderot translated Shaftesbury’s work; Lessing read Diderot and incorporated many of the latter’s ideas into his own philosophy and dramaturgy. While I will address questions of in®uence occasionally, my primary aim at this point is simply to demonstrate that a speci¤c notion of moral monstrosity enjoyed a widespread and lengthy coherence. My approach to this coherence is not that of a philosopher trying to make sense of individual arguments or determine the truth or falsity of speci¤c claims—moral monstrosity hardly calls for analysis of this type.1 The moral monster is never a topic of explicit debate. There is no essay dedicated to it. It is not a central ¤gure in any of the texts in which it appears. The moral monster is in a sense marginal, yet it is also ubiquitous. It inhabits, one could say, the blind spot of the ethics of sentimentality. It is in many ways the product of what Enlightenment philosophers did not analyze with excessive care—often claiming in fact that the moral monster was in any case unthinkable. Nonetheless, they systematically produced and reproduced this creature, and we might wonder why this was so. Although it is not an absolute origin, Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699) provides all of the elements by which the ¤eld of moral monstrosity would be delimited in the decades to follow. Shaftesbury considers in the majority of his treatise those passions that predispose humankind either to benevolence (although they do not always lead to this) or to the pursuit of self-interest (which may unfortunately sometimes cause harm). He then turns to consider an odd group of emotions: “those which lead neither to a publick nor a private Good; and are neither of any advantage to the Species in general, or Creature in particular.”2 Shaftesbury must posit the existence of “unnatural affections” in order to explain certain distasteful aspects of human behavior. In their opposition to the “social and natural” passions—indeed by their very existence—these passions tend to undermine the primary claim that benevolence, combined with self-interest, forms the essence of our being. The ¤rst of such passions
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 5
embodies perfectly their paradoxical status: inhumanity. It is de¤ned as follows: Of this kind is that UNNATURAL and INHUMAN DELIGHT in beholding Torments, and in viewing Distress, Calamity, Blood, Massacre and Destruction, with a peculiar Joy and Pleasure. . . . To see the Sufferance of an Enemy with cruel Delight, may proceed from the height of Anger, Revenge, Fear, and other extended Self-Passions: But to delight in the Torture and Pain of other Creatures indifferently, Natives or Foreigners, of our own or of another Species, Kindred or no Kindred, known or unknown; to feed, as it were, on Death, and be entertain’d with dying Agonys; this has nothing in it accountable in the way of Self-Interest or private Good above-mention’d, but is wholly and absolutely unnatural, as it is horrid and miserable. (294)3
Later in the text, Shaftesbury speci¤es that these unnatural passions are in fact “monstrous” (360). From this quotation, we can derive several interrelated characteristics of inhumanity—characteristics that provide us with an outline of moral monstrosity. First and foremost, affect is central. Monstrosity resides not so much in the cruel act as in a certain type of emotional response. In this respect, moral monstrosity can be most easily grasped as the inversion of the deep value of the eighteenth century: it turns pity into the malicious enjoyment of another’s pain. Second, and intimately tied to the ¤rst element, is the singling out of vision as the portal of cruelty. For Shaftesbury, “viewing” and “beholding” indicate the channel through which the inhuman creature reaps its pleasure. If the broadsheets of the day used words such as “cruelty” and “inhumanity” as lurid headlines to entice readers to learn of infanticides and their ilk, these terms in philosophical and other intellectually inclined texts were increasingly linked to the visual. Simply put, the enjoyment of watching pain, whether or not one is the agent in®icting it, becomes embedded in the de¤nition of cruelty itself. This inclusion of the malevolent gaze within the de¤nition of cruelty occurs quite literally in the case of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (one of the ¤rst and most important French encyclopedias). From its ¤rst edition in 1704, the Trévoux had quoted in the entry for “cruelty” an observation of Saint-Evremond concerning theatrical tastes across the Channel: “The British, avid for the cruelty of spectacles, are desirous of seeing murders and bloody bodies on stage.” This quotation would remain in subsequent editions of the dictionary. The general de¤nition of cruelty in all editions up to the last, however, does not pinpoint the gaze. In the ¤rst edition we ¤nd that cruelty is “The charac-
The Inhuman 6
teristic of a barbarous, unpitying, inhuman man. One who enjoys doing harm to others, without the intention of making them better.” Certainly, the pleasure of cruelty is already apparent, but the ¤nal edition of the Trévoux, published in 1771, drives home the change that has taken place in the interim: “A ferocious passion that excludes all feeling of humanity [sentiment d’humanité], and that leads us to do harm to others, without the intention of making them better, out of pure insensibility or out of the pleasure of watching them suffer” (my emphasis).4 Although it did not necessarily re®ect the views of the Journal de Trévoux, which was decidedly Jesuit and anti-philosophe, neither did the Trévoux dictionary share the positions of the Enlightenment establishment. The philosophes themselves, moreover, had been eager to link the dictionary to the polemical journal in order to promote their rival project, the Encyclopedia, so one might reasonably expect to discover distinct formulations of inhumanity in these two reference works.5 And yet Jaucourt’s de¤nition of cruelty in the latter tome is remarkably similar to that of the Trévoux. In the Encyclopedia we ¤nd that cruelty is a “ferocious passion that contains within it rigor, hardness with respect to others, incommiseration, vengeance, the pleasure of doing harm out of insensibility of the heart or out of the pleasure of seeing suffering.”6 Both texts, then, insist not only on insensibility as the subversion of pity but also on the actual pleasure of watching pain. In fact, the constructions of inhumanity and cruelty in the eighteenth century extend beyond the explicit project of the Enlightenment and achieve a relatively general currency. We can see a graphic invocation of moral monstrosity as a type of inverted pity wherein pleasure is gained from others’ pain in the ¤nal engraving of William Hogarth’s series “A Rake’s Progress.” The rake himself has wound up in Bethlehem Hospital thanks to his debaucheries. The real monsters of the engraving are, however, the two noble-looking women with the twisted smiles who have come to enjoy the show (¤gure 1.1). The linking of insensibility and pleasure in the de¤nitions of the Trévoux dictionary and the Encyclopedia require more careful consideration if we are to grasp their paradoxical nature. Insensibility is not, after all, a logical reason to enjoy in®icting or watching pain. In truth, the notion that inhuman creatures might enjoy watching suffering would seem to contradict the claim that the cruel are unfeeling. In this respect, James Beattie in Elements of Moral Science (published from 1790 to 1793, but made up of lectures dating from 1760) remarks concerning the absence of pity, “Sympathy with distress is thought so essential to human nature, that the want of it has been called inhumanity.”7 Later, however, Beattie has
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 7
Figure 1.1. Final engraving of William Hogarth’s series “A Rake’s Progress” (1735). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
dif¤culty de¤ning malevolence because of its affective component: “To be indifferent to the welfare of those who are ¤t to receive good from us, would be to manifest a savage disposition which might be considered as the opposite of benevolence; but indifference is not a passion” (3.275).8 This conjunction of gaze and affect forms the kernel of eighteenth-century sensationism as it relates to ethics: the eyes are receptors that interface more or less directly with the emotions. Objectivity, that is, indifference to the spectacle of suffering rather than enjoyment or pity, is not an option. Or rather, it is an option that will be increasingly foreclosed as the century proceeds. As Henry Home, Lord Kames, puts it in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1758), “As we are placed in a great world, surrounded with beings and things, some bene¤cial, some hurtful; we are so constituted, that scarce any object is indifferent to us.”9 Upon closer examination, the “pure insensibility” posited by the Trévoux tends to prove illusory. The apparent contradiction between insensibility and pleasure is re-
The Inhuman 8
lated to the next two characteristics of the ocular feast of malevolence: it is both inexplicable—at least initially—and unnatural. Consequently, while Shaftesbury maintains that pleasure taken in revenge is reasonable because one might somehow logically enjoy retribution, seemingly unmotivated joy derived from another’s pain cannot be explained rationally nor does it cohere with his view of how humans are molded in advance by a creator. For philosophers of a more Lockean and empiricist bent, such as Hume, inhumanity will remain inexplicable and therefore unnatural, given the manner in which even blank slates receive the marks that eventually determine their behavioral, emotional, and moral comportment. From these observations, we may infer a brief de¤nition of the moral monster in eighteenth-century ethics as a creature that, in de¤ance of the natural order, enjoys the spectacle of another’s pain for no reason. In order to fully understand such monstrosity one ¤nal point must be added concerning the intertwined elements of affect, vision, inexplicability, and unnaturalness that de¤ne the model of malevolence: the overlapping of moral monstrosity and humanity is impossible. In the case of Shaftesbury, this is initially indicated in a purely nominal fashion. By putting moral monstrosity in the category of inhumanity, Shaftesbury guarantees by the principle of non-contradiction that humans cannot be placed under its rubric: X cannot also be not-X. For humans, moral monstrosity is not an aberration from a norm of behavior (“norm” taken in the sense of average); it is not an exaggeration of certain self-centered drives. On the contrary, it lies on the far side of an absolute divide: on the one side there is the human, on the other the inhuman. Shaftesbury’s disciple Francis Hutcheson makes this point explicit in A System of Moral Philosophy (1755). In his etiology of aberrant affects, Hutcheson entertains a possible teratology of certain passions: Some extraordinary and rare instances of most immoderate excesses of these sel¤sh passions are in common speech properly enough termed monstrous and unnatural, but seem to have these epithets given them by some authors, as if they were a distinct kind; such as when men seem to delight in torments, or to have an unprovoked desire of insulting, or petulancy, unnatural lusts, enormous pride, tyranny and misanthropy.10
Nominal monstrosity hides an essential continuity: self-regarding passions may appear to veer off into absolute difference, into disinterested malevolence, but they never really do.11 In ordinary language it is perfectly “proper” to label excesses monstrous. However, in the precise language of philosophy, one must be careful not to confuse exaggeration with differ-
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 9
ences of type. The inhuman does not exist. The natural can be distorted, but never abandoned: These [the so-called monstrous passions] are only excesses of some passions naturally implanted, but raised to a prodigious degree without just cause, upon some false opinions or confused imaginations, and by long indulgence and frequent irritation. Every one sees this to be the case in monstrous lusts, where the natural passion is grown ungovernable; and caprice and curiosity oft make men try all kinds of indulgences. (166)
Marking out the territory to be explored by Sade at the end of the century —caprice, curiosity, long indulgence, and frequent irritation are all marks of the Sadean libertine—Hutcheson refuses to acknowledge the emergence of novel passions. Further, he suggests that the true task of ethics is to lead people back to an original affective order. With Sade, it will be precisely the plasticity of the passions that will be emphasized rather than their primal form. Because inhumanity resists rational explanation, such monstrosity is thrust into a non-existence of a rather odd kind. It does appear, or at least seems to appear, but only instantly to recede. As Hutcheson writes in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), A sudden Passion may give us wrong Representations of our FellowCreatures, and for a little time represent them as absolutely Evil; and during this Imagination perhaps we may give some Evidences of disinterested Malice; but as soon as we re®ect upon human Nature, and form just Conceptions, this unnatural Passion is allay’d, and only Self-Love remains, which may make us, from Self-Interest, oppose our Adversaries.12
The text here slips back and forth between two equally excluded possibilities: the reality of absolute evil in other humans and our own disinterested malice in seeing them come to harm. Humanity is set off precisely by these two negated categories. Ego and alter are ultimately human, in spite of clashes that arise out of self-interest, because of an ineradicable nature that renders both incapable of getting true joy out of suffering. Thus, in his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728), Hutcheson transforms the inhuman into a momentary abstraction, a distortion that makes the beholder posit perfection where imperfection is far preferable: In considering more fully the Passions about the Fortunes of evil Characters, distinct from Anger, which arises upon a fresh Injury, we may ¤rst consider the evil Agents, such as a sudden View sometimes rep-
The Inhuman 10
resents them, directly evil and malicious; and then make proper Abatements for what the worst of Men come short of this compleatly evil Temper. As Mathematicians suppose perfect Hardness in some Bodies, and Elasticity in other, and then make Allowances for the imperfect Degrees in natural bodies.13
Hutcheson’s investigation of the inhuman resolves into the following question: given a mathematically perfect construction of evil (a model that would include unmotivated pleasure in cruelty), would humans qua humans be able to regard cruelties in®icted on such a construct as enjoyable? The answer to this theoretical question has to be af¤rmative, yet it quite clearly excludes humans from the pleasures of cruelty as either agents of evil or spectators of the torments of anyone but the absolutely vile. The only possible enjoyment derived from disinterested cruelty would be watching an inhuman creature itself in pain—an enjoyment abstracted to the point of impossibility. As to the existence of such turpitude, Hutcheson af¤rms that “perhaps no such Being occurs to us among the works of a good DEITY.”14 With the emphasis on the gaze and on pleasure, it is no surprise that moral monstrosity is denied not only on ethical grounds but also on aesthetic grounds. The spectacles that an inhuman creature would enjoy—as well as the spectacle of an inhuman creature’s enjoyment—are neither good nor can they be beautiful. In this respect, in the Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, Shaftesbury tends freely to interweave moral judgments and judgments of taste. Not only do all sensual objects present “Beauty or Deformity, according to the different Measure, Arrangement and Disposition of their several Parts,” but the same is true of actions and the “Affections of Pity, Kindness, Gratitude, and their Contrarys” (66). The laws that govern the beautiful are equally and necessarily applicable to human beings, their actions and emotions.15 In fact, the term “disinterested,” which appears with remarkable consistency in discussions of moral monstrosity, is also one of Shaftesbury’s contributions to the history of aesthetic discourse.16 It is precisely this term that conjoins the beautiful and the ethical. Accordingly, we ¤nd that the Heart cannot possibly remain neutral; but constantly takes part one way or other. However false or corrupt it be within it-self, it ¤nds the Difference, as to Beauty, and Comliness, between one Heart and another, one Turn of Affection, one Behaviour, one Sentiment and another; and accordingly, in all disinterested Cases, must approve in some measure of what is natural and honest, and disapprove what is dishonest and corrupt. (68)
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 11
That is, even when one is not distracted by any personal interests, indifference or neutrality is not a possibility. The beautiful concurs with the good to support this hypothesis, and this interplay would remain the case even as aesthetics gained increasing autonomy.17 For example, taking his cues from Shaftesbury’s notion of moral sense, Hutcheson would posit a distinct sense for judgments of taste as well. In terms of moral monstrosity and inhumanity, however, Hutcheson’s texts, like those of his predecessor, indicate that the specter of absolute evil is precisely cruelty’s transgression into the realm reserved for not just the moral but also the beautiful. Only if a “Character apprehended necessarily and unalterably Evil in a moral Sense” were posited could humans regard its suffering with the disinterested pleasure that straddles both ¤elds.18 The moral monster in its absolute difference is therefore more than simply a non-human. Rather, it ¤lls the spot of the anti-human. To this effect, Hume reproduces with compelling succinctness the model in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751): “A creature, absolutely malicious and spiteful, were there any such in nature, must be worse than indifferent to the images of vice and virtue. All his sentiments must be inverted, and directly opposed to those, which prevail in the human species.”19 The necessary characteristics of the moral monster, were it to exist, are de¤ned and comprehended as the point-for-point opposites of ours: “Whatever contributes to the good of mankind as it crosses the constant bent of his [the moral monster’s] wishes and desires, must produce uneasiness and disapprobation; and on the contrary, whatever is the source of disorder and misery in society, must, for the same reason, be regarded with pleasure and complacency” (226).20 It is this negativity that makes the model particularly instructive: it not only marks off the absolute limit of humanity but also suggests a number of positive statements. If Hume altogether dismisses the possibility of a creature in whom the relation between benevolence and rationality is completely inverted, he deems even apparently human monsters improbable at best. The cruelty of Nero, for example, is likely the product of “constant fear and resentment” rather than inhumanity (227). Indeed, the construct of moral monstrosity provides the means by which to stage the apotheosis of benevolent affect as the characteristic mark of all members of the species: “Absolute, unprovoked, disinterested malice has never perhaps place in any human breast; or, if it had, must there pervert all the sentiments of morals, as well as the feeling of humanity” (227). From this angle, humanity is seen as innocent and free of moral monstrosity in large measure because of the central tautology governing the system: inhuman humans cannot be human. The idea that it is impossible for a human to be monstrous and remain
The Inhuman 12
human poses an obvious problem: What is one to do with cases that seem to run counter to the model? Philosophical texts often confront this contradiction by suggesting that any appearance of inhumanity is simply that, an appearance. This strategy is supported by the inherent ambiguity of the terms employed. Thus, “humanity” refers to the species as well as to a set of sentimental values increasingly centered on pity; “inhumanity” refers to the absolute difference of the monster and to those instances of seemingly joyful maliciousness that now become cases to be solved.21 For example, Shaftesbury is quick to show how the inhuman pleasure of the impossible moral monster—that passion of “many Tyrants . . . and barbarous Nations”—is only apparently positive pleasure. In reality, like the other “unnatural” passions, inhumanity is a species of negative pleasure gained only through the work of comparison: IT may be objected here, that these Passions, unnatural as they are, carry still a sort of Pleasure with them; and that however barbarous a Pleasure it be, yet still it is a Pleasure and Satisfaction which is found in Pride, or Tyranny, Revenge, Malice, or Cruelty exerted. Now if it be possible in Nature, that any one can feel a barbarous or malicious Joy, otherwise than in consequence of mere Anguish and Torment, then may we perhaps allow this kind of Satisfaction to be call’d Pleasure or Delight. But the Case is evidently contrary. (300)
Pleasure can only stem—as if by ¤at—from affects that ultimately bene¤t others or at least do them no harm. Conversely, pain is ultimately the sensation felt by whoever might initiate actions deleterious to others. This means that even the apparently joyfully malicious gaze is an indication of a deeper torment that has been offset momentarily: “For as the cruellest bodily Pains do by Intervals of Assuagement, produce . . . the highest bodily Pleasure; so the ¤ercest and most raging Torments of the Mind, do, by certain moments of Relief, afford the greatest of mental Enjoyments, to those who know little of the truer kind” (300). Benevolence is an original and positive source of pleasure. Enjoyment of cruelty is derivative and comparative: it is only felt as pleasure when its position on a continuum of torments is closer to the zero degree of feeling in relation to another pain. If in®icting injury on another rates a negative one on the pain scale and the habitual psychic state of the in®icter is a negative two, then the pleasure of cruelty is merely the result of the positive change of state of one degree. As Shaftesbury’s revised text of 1711 elucidates, a negative passion must be conceived as “never producing any satisfaction” but rather as a “Torture and In®ammation” that “is as it were cool’d and respited by
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 13
something that looks like success in the ful¤lling of the horrid desire and monstrous Appetite attending this Affection” (301; my emphasis). In fact, “barbarous Delight” is only “improperly call’d Satisfaction or Pleasure; or if it must be called so, it is of the same nature in the Mind, as that Pleasure in the Body which . . . is owing to Racks, Wheels, and other engins of Torture” (301). That is, inhuman pleasure derives from pains that are so great that even the slightest assuagement is perceived as enjoyment.22 If one looks upon another’s suffering with a smile, this only signals the sad presence of inner agony in the observer. Shaftesbury is hardly alone in contending that passions that are not conducive to the welfare of others are actually painful. It is one of the commonplaces of sentimental ethics. Hence we ¤nd, in a passage remarkable for the blatancy of its tautological formulation, James Beattie claiming, “Some passions are called unnatural, as envy, malevolence, and pride. The reason is, because they are destructive of affections that are natural. . . . These unnatural passions are always evil; they make a man odious to his fellow-creatures, and unhappy in himself; and they tend to the utter depravation of the human soul.”23 The consequences of rendering the moral monster either impossible or pathological will be studied at greater length in the following chapters. For now, suf¤ce it to say that if the apparently moral monster is really a person in pain, he or she is not necessarily to be shunned but perhaps to be pitied, treated, and normalized. Inhumanity and the European Debate on Violent Spectacle The formulations I have studied thus far are not found only in a small number of texts. Beyond Shaftesbury, Hume, Hutcheson, and Beattie, a more comprehensive list of authors for Great Britain could include many others. For example, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith maintains that benevolence is universal and that humans “cannot form the idea of any innocent and sensible being whose happiness we should not desire, or to whose misery, when distinctly brought home to the imagination, we should not have some degree of aversion.”24 The natural but hypothetical hatred felt toward “the idea of a mischievous, though sensible being” is merely the effect of universal benevolence itself. Such aversion should not be a reason to doubt the existence of the inherent goodness of humanity: “It [the hatred felt] is the effect of the sympathy which we feel with the misery and resentment of those other innocent and sensible beings whose happiness is disturbed by its malice” (345). Similarly, in his 1726 sermon “Upon Human Nature” Joseph Butler entitles one subsec-
The Inhuman 14
tion “Malevolence is contrary to nature, like self-hatred.”25 Outside of the British Isles, this denial of the reality of inhumanity is also common. In France, the following cases take us beyond the already discussed de¤nition of cruelty in the Trévoux dictionary. Diderot, in his 1745 translation of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, comments with approbation on the non-existence of the inhuman gaze and remarks on the actual pain that must be hidden beneath the appearance of pleasure in the likes of a Nero or Caligula.26 The philosophically inclined Father André in A Treatise on Man claims that when we do battle with evil, it should be not with anger or indignation, but rather with “an attitude of compassion for the unhappy ones,” and that evil should in fact be treated as a disease: “if, because of the stubbornness of the evil or the patient [du mal ou du malade], a bit of indignation gains entry into our attacks, it is always a loving indignation, one that only bears a grudge against the disease [le mal] without attaining the patient we are trying to heal.”27 In Man a Machine (1749), La Mettrie similarly explains, in an early plea for the necessity of expert medical witnesses in the domain of law, that if a criminal act does indicate the existence of inhumanity, then the person who committed such an act is no longer human by reason of insanity (for example, the woman who killed her children, salted them, and proceeded to her meal).28 In fact, more materialist versions of the inhuman explain phenomena contrary to the model in terms of physical aberrations that temporarily or permanently override normal human programming. Accordingly, La Mettrie invokes “bulimia” or “canine hunger,” that is, “a mania of the stomach that one is forced to satisfy,” in his explanation of cannibalism (173). A similar situation holds for Germany, certain quali¤cations notwithstanding. For the ¤rst half of the century, the doctrine of the non-positivity of evil—that evil is caused by inherent limitations of created beings— inherited by Leibniz from Augustine and Plato holds sway.29 Although this doctrine is quite amenable to the notion of moral monstrosity, it is concerned with theodicy, not anthropology. Leibniz wants to redeem God, not to prove the inherent benevolence of man.30 Likewise, discussion of cruelty in the work of Christian Wolff, a follower of Leibniz and the major name in philosophy in German for the earlier part of the eighteenth century, is couched in terms that are foreign to the model of moral monstrosity studied so far. When Wolff explains the essence of malice in his Reasonable Thoughts of 1720, we learn that a cruel person is one who in®icts more pain than was received by an injuring party or in®icts more pain than is necessary to avert harm. Cruelty itself is an “insatiable drive for revenge” that is forbidden by natural law (“die Gesetz der Natur”).31 The semantics of
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 15
natural law and what it forbids that Wolff uses here are clearly different from a conception of nature as not admitting certain behaviors without consequences—although sentimental ethics does freely if illogically mix the teleological explanations of the natural law tradition with the notion that the laws of nature are observable scienti¤c facts.32 With the injection of English philosophy and English-inspired French philosophy into Germany by Lessing, Mendelssohn, Nicolai, and others, however, moral monstrosity takes on the same contours as in Britain and France.33 For example, Mendelssohn in his “Rhapsody or Addition to the Letters on Sentiments” (1761) ponders how “the most tenderhearted souls of children delight in the telling of tales of terrifying adventures.”34 Before ultimately explaining such pleasures as actually the joy of disapproving of evil, he pauses to assert that to “ascribe these innocent amusements to an innate maliciousness, a natural joy at others’ misfortune, would be to think of the nature of the human soul in a way that is more than misanthropic” (137). There is no doubt that “more than misanthropic” means simply “monstrous.” Mendelssohn’s concern about narrative pinpoints, moreover, how the problem of inhumanity was central to one of the most prominent and cosmopolitan debates in eighteenth-century aesthetics: the question of why certain presumably unpleasant spectacles such as executions, gladiatorial combat, animal baiting, and tragedies should be nonetheless attractive and even considered sources of pleasure. The imbrication of ethics and aesthetics in the formulation of moral monstrosity suggests that we should only view benevolence as simultaneously pleasurable and beautiful. The attractiveness of spectacles wherein pain—either real or represented—was a component had the potential to undercut such a sanguine assessment. Might it not even be possible that pity harbors a portion of supposedly non-existent inhumanity? Do we submit ourselves to such spectacles because we sympathize? Or perhaps because we enjoy watching others suffer? The topic itself is traceable to Aristotle’s contention in the Poetics that normally repulsive things such as corpses can please when imitated.35 Fontenelle appears to have been the ¤rst to seriously reconsider the question in his Re®ections on Poetics, written in the last decade of the seventeenth century but published only in 1742. Fontenelle claims that to comprehend the pleasures of tragedy, we must understand a basic principle: “The spirit loves to see or to move [L’esprit aime à voir ou à agir], which comes to the same thing for it, but it loves to see and to move without pain.”36 Recasting Aristotle in light of contemporary physiology, Fontenelle then suggests that the apparently inexplicable pleasures of tragedy are the effect of mediation. Just as tickling is a form of stimulation that would be felt as
The Inhuman 16
painful if it were increased, the fact that tragedies are represented rather than real lowers the intensity of stimulation to the point at which it crosses over from pain to pleasure. Pleasure and pain themselves are thus considered different levels on a continuum. The issue became a serious concern, however, with the publication of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’s Critical Re®ections on Poetry and Painting (1719), a work that, given the delayed publication of Fontenelle’s essay, was generally taken as the point of orientation of the eighteenth-century debate.37 Claiming that stimulation in and of itself is more pleasurable than the lack thereof, Du Bos hoped by this principle to explain the attraction of even real pain—the pain, for example, of a dying combatant in the Roman arena. The danger of inhuman pleasure obviously lurks in such a scenario, and the responses to Du Bos over time were numerous. For instance, Hume, in de¤ance of actual chronology as well as the logical problem involved, declares in his essay “Of Tragedy” (1741–42) that Fontenelle’s reference to the powers of imitation is an advance over Du Bos. He then adds other mediating factors, such as verse and rhetoric.38 For his part, Lord Kames in his essay “Of our Attachment to Objects of Distress” (1758) claims that the attraction of apparently painful spectacles should be attributed to innate sympathy alone, which pulls us in even as it causes us to suffer. Back in France, the narrator in Diderot’s novel Jacques the Fatalist puts forward the hypothesis that the narcissistic pleasures of being able to tell others about an important event explain why crowds form at the gibbet. The attribution of moral monstrosity to the lower orders is decisively and explicitly rejected: “What do you think is the reason that the populace is attracted to public executions? Inhumanity? Well you are wrong. The populace is not inhuman but if it could it would tear from the hands of justice the unfortunate man around whose gallows it gathers.” In fact, claims the narrator, the crowd of the poor, made more compassionate by its own condition, “turns its eyes away from the spectacle of horror which it has gone to see, is moved to pity and goes home crying.”39 But it was in Germany that response to Du Bos was the most emphatic and considered. With the enthusiastic adoption of pity and hopes that the tragic stage would be the prime locus for its stimulation, it was essential to differentiate drama from apparently inhuman spectacles such as the gladiatorial arena. Mendelssohn in On Sentiments (1755) attempts to demonstrate that Du Bos illegitimately confounded quantity and quality of movement. From a moral standpoint, pain can be viewed with a mixture of pleasure only because pity, which is good, is engaged. As to those “amusements of entire nations, in which cruelty appears to have had a far greater part than humanity has,” Mendelssohn claims that it is only “cus-
The Model of Moral Monstrosity 17
tom” that allows spectators to “abstract from the evil and direct attention to the little good that is attached” to these spectacles.40 Similarly for Lessing in Laocoön (1766) real spectacles of suffering are only pleasant if the spectators are able to block pity. Crucially, Lessing claims, gladiators are trained not to cry out, but rather to suffer with decorum (“mit Anstand”).41 If the spectators were, so to speak, distracted by another’s pain, then compassion would immediately put an end to a practice that gives all appearances of inhumanity: “No sound of complaint should be heard, no painful convulsion seen, for since his wounds and his death were intended to amuse the audience [seine Wunden, sein Tod die Zuschauer ergötzen sollten], it was part of his act to conceal all show of feeling [so mußte die Kunst alles Gefühl verbergen lehren].”42 On the tragic stage, however, the complicity of art leads us not to inhumanity but rather to the heart of nature, that is, to pity. Of course, in retrospect even Du Bos was attempting to explain away the problem of inhumanity through a reductionist argument. At this point, other cases of inhumanity and its denial could certainly be produced, but the point is not to accumulate examples. Rather, it should be clear that the moral monster, or lack thereof, becomes a generalized epistemological given in Enlightenment discourse. Its ubiquity transcends questions of attribution and in®uence. Although, from the point of view of the history of ideas, many of the thinkers mentioned above distinguish themselves for their original contributions to eighteenth-century ethical and aesthetic thought, the representations of moral monstrosity in their texts are distinguished precisely by a lack of originality. The elements associated with moral monstrosity are seemingly merely repeated, often with no other justi¤cation than that they have been said before. And yet, although the moral monster attains the status of textual commonplace, there are deeper reasons why it appears and reappears in approximately the same form: none of the texts say anything profoundly novel about moral monstrosity because none of them introduce a change in the rules by which statements concerning inhumanity are made. These rules have much to do with a speci¤c logic of explanation of behavior that I examine in the following chapter. Nonetheless, at the heart of the phenomenon of moral monstrosity also lies a simple, arbitrary, but explicable refusal in eighteenth-century moral treatises to countenance the possible pleasure of malevolence or, in the more problematic versions of moral monstrosity, to consider this pleasure as a greater determinant than benevolence. This refusal is arbitrary because other selections could be made from observations of human behavior. It is explicable because, at least in the absence of sovereign power, cruelty does not promise much in the way of steering for social interactions.
2 The Paradox of Inhumanity
In the previous chapter, some of the basic logical problems with the model of monstrosity were broached. The de¤nition of “inhumanity” in the Encyclopedia encapsulates these problems: “vice that places us outside of our species, that makes us cease to be men; hardness of heart concerning which nature seems to have made us incapable.”1 If the species is an inclusive set of characteristics, how could a particular trait cancel out the value of the whole? Could not such a trait only do so by being excluded from the set in the ¤rst place? The inhuman would thus be outside of the human, at least as nature intended it. But if humans are notwithstanding capable of this so-called vice, is not the inhuman within the human? How could nature be violated in such a way that resistance to inhumanity crumbles? When we pose such questions, some of the fundamental paradoxes of the Enlightenment mixture of ethics and anthropology become apparent. These paradoxes have possible solutions. The paradox of inhuman humanity could be solved by applying the theory of logical types: speci¤c and general can be de-linked in order to make it clear that two different senses of inhuman are meant where one is implied.2 To do so leaves one with only a stale tautology: humans are human. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how the campaign against cruelty to animals in England suggests that paradox can be much more productive than tautology. Before this, however, it is important to understand how the paradox of inhumanity was generated in the ¤rst place and why it was so tenacious.
The Paradox of Inhumanity 19
The core axioms by which Enlightenment philosophy produced moral monstrosity were already present in seventeenth-century texts. These axioms are by and large reducible to two mutually reinforcing principles of explanation: systematic egoism and the placement of sentiment at the basis of morality. Within these parameters, moral philosophy could only derive good and bad—and good and evil—from a subject’s own experience of pleasure and pain. As Hobbes puts it in Leviathan (1651), moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different; and divers men differ not only in their judgment on the senses (of what is pleasant and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight), but also of what is conformable or disagreeable to reason in the actions of common life.3
This mode of explanation becomes even clearer with Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690): Things then are good and evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain. That we call good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good or absence of any evil. And, on the contrary, we name that evil which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us; or else procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good.4
A century later, Adam Ferguson would reassert in his Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), a work summing up the philosopher’s lectures at Edinburgh, “The distinction of good and evil originates in the capacity of enjoyment and suffering. Insomuch that, without the intervention of mind, or some feeling nature, all the varieties of matter and form besides, would be indifferent.”5 As to the question of egoism, I would stress that this is not to be narrowly construed, but rather taken as a methodological tenet: all sensations are referred to an experiencing subject who becomes the ground of all subsequent deductions.6 Even when disparaged by supporters of moral sense (for example, Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson, and, with due consideration of the complexities involved, Rousseau), these axioms proved an ineluctable snare. Even if pity, to take the most obvious case, is innate, it is still my pain that is felt.7 That is, pity as a component of moral sense guarantees correct behavior only because it creates pain in the subject that witnesses the suffering of another. Combined with the
The Inhuman 20
emphasis on the gaze, the most basic ethical issue becomes: What does a given person feel upon seeing another person do, undergo, or experience something? Is it pleasure or is it pain? Or is there an absence of affective response, an indifference or neutrality? It is this approach to human experience via affect and egoism that makes it dif¤cult for eighteenth-century thinkers to separate philosophical anthropology, that is, descriptions of what people do and why they do it, from prescriptive morality. It is a problem, moreover, underlined rather than denied by Hume’s well-known reservations about deriving an “ought” from an “is.”8 Behavior is analyzed in terms of a moral calculus that would make sense of it while at the same time a set of comportments is suggested that would better maximize pleasures. At bottom, immorality is seen as a miscalculation or series of miscalculations that can, with proper guidance, be recti¤ed and, especially when the concept of association is included, as a disposition that is the end product of a series of more or less random experiences. Contemporary rational choice theory, with its methodological individualism, preference lists, and stratagems for uncovering the reasons behind even seemingly unreasonable decisions, has much in common with the foundation and elaboration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of social sciences wherein humans are treated as simultaneously calculating and calculable discrete and desiring entities.9 The historical emergence of such a methodology can and should be read in light of Albert O. Hirschman’s study of how during the early modern period certain “passions”—a negatively valued term—became converted into countervailing “interests”—a positively valued term. Crucially, however, pity acts as a governor limiting the potential excesses and cruelties of selfinterest as an organizing principle. It is a passion that combines interest for the other with self-interest. Inhumanity is all the more striking in light of Hirschman’s thesis because it appears precisely as a passion without an interest.10 In order to generate the various scenarios involving moral monstrosity, all one has to do is vary the way the basic axioms of the ethical system are combined. In its barest version, the governing rules simply do not allow the moral monster to be generated. To take an example that presents this impossibility in the simplest terms, consider Hobbes’s de¤nition of cruelty in Leviathan. Here, in one brief formulation, the linked characteristics of inexplicability and impossibility (with unnaturalness implied) are given: “Contempt, or little sense, of the calamity of others is that which men call Cruelty, proceeding from security of their own fortune. For, that any man should take pleasure in other men’s great harms without other end of his
The Paradox of Inhumanity 21
own I do not conceive it possible” (32). In this case, a given subject A considering the pain of subject B when there is a certain pro¤t X (revenge or food, for example) to be gained from B’s suffering feels pleasure as his or her affective response. However, if X, the pro¤t, is removed, then there is no reason for A to respond at all. Indifference is the non-response. If, on the other hand, without X, A’s response is joy, then A can properly be called monstrous. While Hobbes himself does not go so far as to invoke monstrosity—the possibility of such response is simply denied—in other texts this irrational position is the impossible locus from which the inhuman emerges. To this most stripped-down version of the system, the moral-sense school in its various incarnations adds the factor of “disinterested” affective response. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, for example, posit that given the scenario above in which pro¤t X is taken out of the equation, A would still respond positively or negatively to B’s gain or loss. This response is strictly along the lines of benevolence, something that has to be declared as part of a human’s congenital make-up in order to remain logical (otherwise, the response would remain the non-response of indifference). On the one hand, this adds a certain arbitrariness to the system: disinterested malevolence is ruled out by an anthropological observation that seems on shaky ground. On the other hand, the moral monster is now doubly impossible: neither does its pleasure “make sense” nor does it represent the way humans are “naturally” organized. This doubling of the argument (something already evident in Shaftesbury’s de¤nition of inhumanity) can be seen most clearly in Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, where we ¤nd that “Human Nature seems scarce capable of malicious disinterested Hatred, or sedate Delight in the Misery of others, when we imagine them no way pernicious to us, or opposite to our Interests: And for that Hatred which makes us oppose those whose Interests are opposite to ours, it is only the Effect of Self-Love, and not of disinterested Malice.”11 Here, the terms of moral sense and moral calculus are intertwined in such a manner as to render them practically inseparable. Similarly, Adam Ferguson, using the moral-sense notion that malice is painful, simultaneously declares in the manner of Hobbes that this passion must also be reducible to self-interest alone: Malice is known to be a state of extreme suffering or pain; it operates abroad in pernicious effects, and appears on the countenance in peculiar features of deformity and horror. It has perhaps no other source in the human mind, than this unhappy choice of an object, in which the pros-
The Inhuman 22
perity and success of one is disappointment and detriment to another. Or if this unhappy choice be suf¤cient to account for malice, we are forbidden by reason to look for any other cause. It is a maxim in reason, that no more causes are to be assigned, than exist in nature, and are suf¤cient to account for the phenomena.
Apparent inhumanity is thereby reduced via rational explanation to the product of vexed self-interest and simultaneously determined to be “no where instinctive.”12 The model of moral monstrosity explored so far has been given in its most stable avatar, with the rejection of so-called disinterested malevolence presented as a fact of human constitution and a principle of logic. But the model on the whole was more precarious. If the moral-sense school relied primarily on innate sentiments that steer us toward the good, this was not the sole trend either in Great Britain or on the Continent. In opposition to such a static model, a nexus of ideas had been developed allowing for an almost radical human variability. This variability was grounded in the combination of the concept of the human as tabula rasa and that of association. Both of these concepts have been most closely identi¤ed with Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, although their widespread usage both before and after this work should be noted. Moreover, while one might suppose that this epistemological arrangement would lead immediately to the positing of ethical individuality and relativism, rendering the moral monster simply one possibility for a heterogeneous humanity, this notion of variability does not yet imply a form of total freedom. Rather, it often tends to produce the conversion of chance into necessity: associationism, to a large degree, makes human variety into the causally determined product of a mass of experiential contingencies. In this respect, it is in association that the eighteenth century would ¤nd its chief means of exploring and explaining appearances of moral monstrosity—and “appearances” is stressed, because the original model will not be given up lightly. In fact, even given the thorny issue of determinism, frequent attempts are made by partisans of association and original human malleability to bolster a moral calculus aimed at benevolence. What the con®uence of these concepts entails is the emphatic rejection of neutrality or insensibility on the grounds of systemic consistency rather than on the grounds of an idealistic anthropology. Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739), in which the ethical conclusions of the moral-sense school are joined with many of the epistemological bases of Lockean empiricism, provides a good example of this more
The Paradox of Inhumanity 23
problematic but ultimately less arbitrary version of inhumanity. At the center of Hume’s system lies the work of associative comparison. Comparison guarantees that, even in the absence of any innate moral disposition, moral programming of some sort will necessarily take place; it underwrites as well the impossibility of the non-objective gaze. Comparisons guarantee that the subject of pleasure and pain, although considered as a selfenclosed sensitive system, cannot ignore, and must take into consideration, pain and pleasure felt by others. If you feel pain, then I feel either an associated pain or pleasure (or more likely both, Hume will consistently maintain), but I will not feel nothing. Indifference and insensibility stricto sensu are made impossible, even if the newly gained ®exibility invites the production of malicious pleasures that still must be warded off. Thus, for Hume, comparison of one subject’s situation with another’s generates a pro¤t X in the absence of any other pro¤t. If subject A watches total stranger B fall down a ®ight of stairs, for example, we might expect A’s response to either be neutral (what stake does he or she have in the affair?) or compassionate (human nature or the ties of association are such that we commiserate even with those whom we do not know). If subject A begins to laugh at B’s mishap, then Hume can posit that when A compares his situation to B’s situation, he is heartened at his relative fortune, and consequently responds with joy. This response is explicable and normal insofar as it simply includes by the mechanism of comparison a feedback loop in which fortune or misfortune relative to subject A becomes a pro¤t X. Yet, as the foregoing example makes clear, Hume’s exploration of the power of comparison raises new concerns regarding the potential reasonableness of the moral monster. Consider Hume on envy and malice: “The only difference betwixt these passions lies in this, that envy is excited by some present enjoyment of another, which by comparison diminishes our idea of our own: Whereas malice is the unprovok’d desire of producing evil to another, in order to reap a pleasure from the comparison.”13 Thus, in the case of malice, cruelty simply appears, in®icted for no particular reason or external cause, but rather to increase one’s own sense of wellbeing. Suddenly, the oppositions “reasonable” and “unreasonable,” “interested” and “disinterested” start to bleed into one another. Lack of neutrality obviously has its moral purpose when it is a question of pity. But if neutrality is not desirable with respect to this utile affect, its absence with respect to the generation of malice would seem to be equally unwanted. The problem for Hume becomes the nature of the interaction between pity and malice. Truly, if malice is “a kind of pity reverst”—that is, rather than an awakening of a like emotion in the sufferer and the spectator it is
The Inhuman 24
the awakening of an opposed one—the obvious moral dif¤culty is how to explain why pity is preferable and theoretically predominant (375). Hume continues, “But it must be confess’d, that this mixture seems at ¤rst sight to be contradictory to my system. For as pity is an uneasiness, and malice a joy, arising from the misery of others, pity shou’d naturally, as in all other cases, produce hatred; and malice, love” (381). This conclusion is unacceptable: that the other in pain might become an object of malicious love or pitiful hatred is once again barred from the realm of possibility. The logical impasse is ¤nally solved by positing an “original and primary” associative relation between “benevolence and love” on the one side and “anger and hatred” on the other, making it impossible for malice to engage love or benevolence to engage anger (382). Eventually, spontaneous malice is reduced to being a petty pleasure, a slight enjoyment in others’ little pains. However, when the pains of another are brought home vividly, then pity is engaged and malice falls away. Pity is normalized at the expense of any possible malignant enjoyment of suffering. The model then, although somewhat threatened, remains intact. Association and the Auto-conversion of the Moral Monster If moral-sense thinking in the vein of Shaftesbury emphasizes the original affective constitution of human beings, Hume and others place enough emphasis on the combinatory of associations to suggest that plasticity rather than stability should be considered the essence of humanity. Still, the collusion of systematic egoism and the selection of benevolence over malevolence continues to guarantee the impossibility of real moral monstrosity. On this point, David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1748) is particularly instructive, and it is worth carefully considering the perils this author encounters while exploring the genesis of various types of affective response. As with Hume, associations are the relays between human subjects and various contingencies. They are productive of the great range of behaviors and account for the ®uidity of the psyche. As their material counterpart, associations are keyed to the physiological principle of “vibrations.”14 But although Observations on Man is underpinned by materialism, it is also distinctly theological: the paths of association and vibration have their telos, and this end is universal benevolence. As did many of his contemporaries within the ¤eld of sentimental ethics, Hartley broadens the meaning of the term “sympathy” to cover all affects involved in intersubjective relations. Such affects are the product of
The Paradox of Inhumanity 25
association and can be broadly divided into two types, the benevolent and malevolent, and further into four classes. The ¤rst of these classes covers affects “by which we rejoice at the happiness of others”; the second, those “by which we grieve at their misery”; the third, those “by which we rejoice at their misery”; and ¤nally, those “by which we grieve for their happiness.”15 That we are all implicated in one another’s affective life produces a state of complex interdependence: It is easy to be conceived, that associations should produce affections of all these four kinds, since in the intercourses of life, the pleasures and pains of one are, in various ways, intermixed with, and dependent upon, those of others, so as to have clusters of their miniatures excited, in all the possible ways in which the happiness or misery of one can be combined with the happiness or misery of another. (295)
My pleasure and pain are tied to yours, and because the bonds of association are related to so many factors, sympathy can be both cruelty and compassion. Hartley clearly risks, in this broadening of sympathy, legitimating those affects that are the signs of moral monstrosity. He classi¤es, after all, “moroseness, anger, revenge, jealousy, cruelty, and malice” as forms of enjoyment (295). The danger to the goal of both proving and promoting universal benevolence is therefore explicit. This danger, however, does not stop Hartley from pushing his analyses beyond what he calls “dependent” benevolence in order to derive from such sympathetic response “disinterested” benevolence. Dependent benevolence —or malevolence, for that matter—is what Kant would later in the century call “heteronomous” with respect to morality. For Kant, such benevolence is not really moral at all because it is beholden to inclination and sentiment rather than freely chosen. Without launching such a radical critique, Hartley claims that associations can generate, albeit ideally, a type of subjectivity in which pain is a more valued form of pleasure for the self when it is a question of helping another. The road to such a situation is begun in childhood, when the majority of pains are self-in®icted and other people provide the majority of pleasures. This guarantees that the mere sight of others will become a pleasure by association. As elements such as religion and honor are added to the web, the end product is pleasures of benevolence that subvert any notion of an original moral calculus: It is easy therefore to see, how such associations may be formed in us, as to engage us to forego great pleasure, or endure great pain, for the sake
The Inhuman 26
of others; how these associations may be attended with so great a degree of pleasure as to overrule the positive pain endured, or the negative one from the foregoing of a pleasure. (297)
Association not only binds pleasures and pains, it creates new types of pleasure and pain, pitting original passions against emergent and highly valued new feelings. The culmination of the process is a rupture within the logic of eudemonism itself. Whence Hartley adds, “there may be no direct, explicit expectation of reward, either from God or man, by natural consequence, or express appointment, not even of the concomitant pleasure which engages the agent to undertake the benevolent or generous action” (297). In the end, Hartley considers that he has provided “a proof from the doctrine of association, that there is, and must be, such a thing as pure disinterested benevolence; also a just account of the origin and nature of it” (297). The supposed proof of pure disinterested benevolence of course elicits the question of whether its contrary exists as well. Hartley does not initially shrink from such a possibility, the product of associations linked to the malevolent sympathetic passions of anger and cruelty. The latter are the result of a child’s negative experiences, and they themselves derive from the production of fear. As to fear, Hartley comments, “The appearance, idea, approach, actual attack, &c. of any thing from which a child has received harm, must raise in his mind, by the law of association, a miniature trace of that harm” (300). This trace allows for the semiotic reactivation of apprehension even if subsequent injuries are only virtual ones. As the entire system becomes increasingly complex an abstract notion of “harm” and corresponding affective stasis result: The same harm often arises from different causes, and different harms from the same cause: these harms and causes have an af¤nity with each other: and thus they are variously mixed and connected together, so as that a general confused idea of harm, with the uneasy state of the nervous system, and the consequent activity of the parts, are raised up in young children upon certain appearances and circumstances. (300)
From here it is but a short step to anger: And thus it happens, that when any harm has been received, any grati¤cation denied, or other mental uneasiness occasioned, a long train of associated remainders of painful impressions enhance the displeasure, and continue it much beyond its natural period. This is the nascent state of the passion of anger, in which it is nearly allied to fear, being the
The Paradox of Inhumanity 27
continuance of the same internal feelings, quickened, on the one hand, by the actual, painful, or uneasy impression, but moderated on the other by the absence of the apprehension of future danger. (300)
The birth of anger turns fear against its object. From a state of passivity, the child learns to strike out against that which (apparently) threatens it. Once the child becomes reactive, unlimited semiosis threatens to throw the subject into a state of constant anger. The child “goes on multiplying perpetually, by farther and farther associations, both the occasions of anger, and the expressions of it; and particularly associates a desire of hurting another with the apprehension, or the actual receiving, of harm from that other” (300). Cruelty and malice are the result when anger congeals into a mindset. Nevertheless, the exact status of these malevolent products of association is somewhat uncertain: Cruelty and malice are considered, not as passions of the mind, but as habits, as the deliberate wishing of misery to others, delighting in the view and actual in®iction of it, and this without the consideration of injury received or intended. However, it will easily appear that they are the genuine and necessary offspring of anger indulged and grati¤ed. (301)
How are cruelty and malice not passions and yet nonetheless occasions of delight? The confusion results from their simultaneous dependence on and independence from anger and revenge. They are the results of the reaction to harm and its semiotic aftermath, and yet they are no longer dependent on real or virtual occasions for activation. If associations are not channeled properly pure disinterested malevolence will be the result. To the assertion that anger and revenge often indulged lead ineluctably to cruelty and malice, Hartley adds various other factors. For example, “proud, sel¤sh, and timorous persons” will be more likely to feel injustice against them and be readier to adopt an unpleasant state of being (301). Another possibility is the generation of cruelty through comparison alone: “The low and unhappy condition of those around a man gives a dignity to his own; and the in®iction of punishment, or mere suffering, strikes a terror, and so affords security and authority” (301). Other factors common in the ¤eld of cruelty ¤nd their place on Hartley’s register: “Add to these, the pleasures arising from gratifying the will . . . and perhaps some from mere curiosity, and the rousing an obdurate mind to a state of sensibility” (301). Association after association binds another’s pain to the self’s pleasure. The sources of these associations
The Inhuman 28
are diverse, but each one indicates an important aspect in the elaboration of moral monstrosity in the eighteenth century: the relation between cruelty and the will; the relation between cruelty and curiosity; the relation between cruelty and the pleasures of sensibility as mere mental motion. Through association we eventually arrive at the inhuman proper: “Thus we may perceive how nearly one ill passion is related to another; and that it is possible for men to arrive at last at some degree of pure disinterested cruelty and malice” (302). The reluctance with which the contrary to pure disinterested benevolence is granted existence—the “at last” and “some degree” that serve to distance and limit these undesirable products of association—indicate that we have reached the point at which the system of benevolent anthropology has glimpsed its own dissolution. As in the other cases studied, once this limit is approached, there follows a withdrawal into the realm of the pleasures of benevolence and benevolent sympathy. The disjunction between the ideal and the real, between behavior hoped for and that seen, is nowhere more apparent than at these moments: humans should be good because it is in their own best interests to be so, and all indications to the contrary are illusory. In Hartley, this moment reaches an apex of idealization. The “rule of life,” as the author calls it, is none other than a comportment in which the “pleasures of sympathy” become the subject’s “primary pursuit” (498). These pleasures unite with and further all other pleasures, be they those of, for example, self-interest or communion with the Godhead (for which Hartley coins the term “theopathy”). However, such goods are now limited to those that are benevolent—notwithstanding that Hartley had before posited malevolent sympathetic pleasures. The corollary to this assertion is as follows: “Since benevolence now appears to be a primary pursuit, it follows, that all the pleasures of malevolence are forbidden, as being so many direct hindrances and bars to our happiness” (501). Malevolence, it thereby appears, victimizes doubly: “malevolence is the bane of human happiness”; “it occasions misery to the doer as well as to the sufferer”; and “it is in¤nitely inconsistent with itself, and with the course of nature” (502). It is this internal inconsistency that guarantees that the ideal of benevolence will be gradually approached. To facilitate this process, the author lays out a thought experiment in which the model monster enters into intercourse with others of his type. The results of this scenario are as amusing as they are startling. The experiment is as follows: ¤rst, grant that beings A, B, C, and so forth exist (these letters are Hartley’s own, not mine), and that they are “purely malevolent” and ergo inimical to one another. Allowing nature to take its
The Paradox of Inhumanity 29
course, “they would ¤rst cease from their enmity on account of their mutual sufferings, and become purely sel¤sh, each being his own sole friend and protector; and afterwards, by mutual good of¤ces, endear themselves to each other; so that at last each would have an inde¤nite number of friends, i.e. be inde¤nitely happy” (502). That is, even if moral monsters could exist, such creatures would readily be converted by association to the ways of unlimited benevolence after passing through an intermediate stage in which the sel¤sh passions brie®y reign.16 The moral monster’s conversion points to the path of greatest human happiness: from being inhuman, he becomes all-too-human, and then reaches, for the good of all involved, the realm of the truly humane. On the one hand, the outcome of this scenario is presented as a speculative truth. On the other, it generates what could be called a rationalized ought: be benevolent for your own sake, if not for that of others. The End of the Inhuman Although the various scenarios of moral monstrosity just explored could be taken to indicate distinct positions of authors, I should insist that the same basic rules underwrite all of these versions. Further, each text tends to blend the three primary permutations (the bare self-interest model, the moral-sense model, and the association model). Hobbes, for example, suggests the power of comparison in his de¤nition of cruelty and makes it an explicit part of his explanation of the comic aspects of the misfortunes of others (for which Hutcheson takes him to task).17 Hume’s texts, to take another case, slide back and forth between moral-sense reasoning and associationism (with no respect for chronological development: the moralsense statements appear mostly in the Enquiry, a later text than the Treatise). The overarching conclusion is that eighteenth-century ethical discourse attempted to—and was to a large degree able to—organize itself so that benevolence accorded with rationality, while malevolence and irrationality went hand in glove. Given these parameters, the moral monster could only lead a quasi-existence in the impossible space where pleasure is sought in malevolence and rationality is found within the otherwise irrational. The system comes undone, however, when either the arbitrariness of the selection of benevolence as the core of anthropology is exposed or systematic egoism is disturbed by the introduction of second-order observation, placing a split in the previously uni¤ed subject of experience. Eventually, both of these potential levers of destruction would be actualized.
The Inhuman 30
What happened to the model of moral monstrosity? In many ways, it has never entirely faded. Contemporary news accounts of serial killers, infanticides, and animal torturers still tend to invoke monstrosity, inhumanity, and inexplicability. Be that as it may, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were clear signs that in philosophical discourse the model was losing its structure and elements of it were being dispersed or were simply disappearing. In part, we can see this breakup in terms of a general shift in ethics from the emphasis on sympathetic thralldom and subjectivity to freedom and the objectivity of moral duty. It should be noted that this shift did not come all at once. We are not speaking here of any dramatic and somewhat mysterious epistemological break such as Foucault in The Order of Things claims occurs at the close of the so-called classical age. Rather, this shift has more of a groping quality, as if it took a while to assimilate the information that communicating about human passions is already a process of re®ection—a process that highlights the difference between communication and sentiment at the same time that it introduces a gap between the observed sentimental subject and the philosophical observer.18 In fact, the ethical system that produced the moral monster carried the potential for its own dissolution within itself from the outset, and many of the same texts in which the moral monster appears also struggle to keep the system working.19 As early as mid-century, complications of this sort had clearly come to light. For example, Swiss jurist Jean Jacques Burlamaqui in The Principles of Right (1748), with explicit reference to Scottish moral-sense theories, admits that “moral monsters” may very rarely exist, their comportment rooted not in nature but rather in “re¤ned and inveterate depravity,” and then proceeds to show why reason and re®ection must supplement our sentimental instincts.20 Such internal problems within the system of ethics are nowhere clearer than in the work of Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments stands perhaps at the pinnacle of the theorization of pity and its relations. In this work, Smith emphasizes the universality and ef¤cacy of sympathy, but he also suggests that there are limitations on the immediacy of such a response.21 Notably, Smith displaces the centrality of vision, claiming that it is rather the situation of the sufferer rendered in one’s own imagination that is responsible for sympathy.22 Vision is still important, but the sight of another must be brought inside the individual and recon¤gured, creating a distance between self and counterpart. Moreover, Smith indicates “propriety” and “self command” as further mediating factors that can and should moderate affective response. In Smith’s later work, this shift in the direction of indifference becomes more emphatic
The Paradox of Inhumanity 31
still.23 Already in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, however, Smith’s comments caused consternation for others invested in the powers of compassion. For instance, Smith’s contention that representations of bodily pain in Greek tragedies were ill-considered “breaches of decorum” led Lessing to attempt a respectful refutation in Laocoön.24 Fearing that pity was under attack, Lessing evoked the specter of a return to a cold and dangerous Stoicism, and it was precisely Stoic detachment that was in general gaining ground.25 Making the sympathetic observer into the object of observation, Smith ¤nds that responses such as pity are not immediate but actually dependent on our distance from others as well from ourselves. That is, not only do we see ourselves in the other, we also see ourselves as the other. On the one hand, this creates a problem of identity. As David Marshall puts it in his apt redescription of Smith’s theorization of sympathy, “the actor and spectator into which one divides oneself can never completely identify with each other or be made identical. Identity is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the characters of both spectator and spectacle.”26 On the other hand, Marshall’s gloss accords strikingly well with Niklas Luhmann’s de¤nition of the subject as one whose self-conception is that of “an observer of his observing, which always operates with self-reference and reference to others” and who accordingly “understands himself as a secondorder observer.”27 Smith’s text in this respect also provides support for Luhmann’s historical thesis that “not until the eighteenth century was man understood to be a subject in the strict sense, and thereby unlinked from nature.”28 But while Smith’s intervention is in certain respects a marked departure from the general discourse that produced the inhuman, he nevertheless still clings tightly to the notion of moral monstrosity as the unmotivated enjoyment of another’s suffering, and continues to deny that such enjoyment is a real possibility. In fact, although the reliance on the ethics of sympathy may be traceable in part to the dissolution of the hierarchical organization of society and the quest to ¤nd a basis for social relations within the stability of the natural order, re®exivity is a recurring problem.29 This problem has a tendency, moreover, to intensify because of positive feedback: the more that re®exivity is re®ected upon, the more re®exivity is added to the system. It is this process that gives Rousseau’s considerations of pity and nature in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), Julie (1761), and other writings their speci¤c tone of obfuscation combined with duplicity. Once the historical position of these writings is taken into account, it becomes clear
The Inhuman 32
that at least one of the reasons that Rousseau has such an exemplary status for de Man’s allegories of reading or Derrida’s deconstruction of presence is this intensi¤cation of re®exivity within philosophical ethics.30 In this regard, we should not be surprised to see that in the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau singles out the philosopher—that paragon of rational distance— as the one most likely to plug his ears to suffering and to bypass through re®ection the cries of his fellow.31 Of course, this puts Rousseau, as a philosopher of pity, in a rather awkward position. Would he not be guilty of the same tendency to willful insensibility? Be that as it may, the essential point remains that Rousseau, along with others at the time, tends to consider the problem of re®exivity as external rather than recognizing it as internal. That is, Rousseau asks whether or not pity is a biological given and whether or not it is mediated by culture; he does not consider that sentimental ethics as re®exive communication already underline the difference between communicating and feeling. By the last third of the century, mixed recognition and denial of these problems has grown to the point that moral monstrosity is simultaneously af¤rmed as normal and negated as impossible and undesirable. For example, in On Man (1773)—a book that received much criticism from Diderot and others—Helvétius simply inverts the core statement of the system, declaring that “Natural man must be cruel.”32 To prove his point, the author provides ethnographic and anthropological evidence to counter Rousseau’s supposed af¤rmation of natural compassion. What is so interesting about this seeming moment of rupture is that this claim is formed from the same elements of rational calculation, association, and tabula rasa that Helvétius inherited from others who had vehemently denied the possibility of inhumanity. In reality, for Helvétius too it is not that man is naturally cruel. Rather, he is naturally nothing at all (“l’homme n’est rien au berceau” [476]). But the circumstances of living in the state of nature, the association of the kill with the pleasure of ¤lling one’s stomach, lead to a certain explicable form of cruelty. Moreover, Helvétius never doubts that benevolence is ultimately more rational than malevolence. Still, the extremity of Helvétius’s position, his refusal to countenance any possible preprogramming of man, does point to an important new moral freedom for the human race, a freedom outside of the chains of association that appear as destiny in Hume, Hartley, and others. Eventually we ¤nd statements that openly confound the logic that had produced the model of moral monstrosity. Thus Kant summons up inhumanity in order to undo the discourse from the inside out. In the
The Paradox of Inhumanity 33
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), a hypothetical being that does not feel pity is converted into a subject worthy of admiration: if nature has put little sympathy in this or that man’s heart, if (while being an honest man in other respects) he is cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others, perhaps because as regards his own sufferings he is endowed with the special gift of patience and fortitude and expects and even requires that others should have the same; if such a man (who would truly not be nature’s worst product) had not been exactly fashioned by her to be a philanthropist, would he not yet ¤nd in himself a source from which he might give himself a worth far higher than any that a good-natured temperament might have? By all means, because just here does the worth of a character come out; this worth is moral and incomparably the highest of all, viz., that he is bene¤cent, not from inclination, but from duty.33
With this, the old impossible moral monster starts to look like a creature that, if not real or worthy of unquali¤ed approval, is at least a symbol of the potential greatness of humanity rather than a negative reminder of its baseness. For Kant, to stop at sentiments is to submit to the necessary, foreclosing in the process morality itself. The phenomenal self may be part and parcel of the nexus of causes and effects, but the noumenal self, observer of the phenomenal self, is free—even if this freedom lies in its blind spot. Kant’s logic consequently involves the de¤nitive unlinking of humanity from nature. Human beings now observe their nature as from another point of view, and the marker of humanity itself moves from the side of sympathy to the side of second-order observation.34 It is worth noting that Kant was not alone in rejecting sympathy and related determinants as the basis of morality. In Scotland, three years after the publication of Kant’s Grounding, Thomas Reid would pithily voice his opposition to the reign of sentimental ethics with seemingly ironic understatement: “Before the modern system of Ideas and Impressions was introduced, nothing would have appeared more absurd than to say, that when I condemn a man for what he has done, I pass no judgment at all about the man, but only express some uneasy feeling in myself.”35 Yet Reid, however critical of Hume in particular, never gave up the notion that benevolence was beautiful and that malevolence was both deformity and its own punishment.36 At the same moment and locked away in the Bastille, Sade would have just begun to explore in earnest the monstrous face of the unlinking of humanity and compassion.
PART II
Curiosity Killed the Cat
3 Animals and the Mark of the Human
Let me open this next part of my case by risking a generalization: over the years and in different locations cats have had to endure various signi¤cations foisted on them by humans. More to the point, cats in the eighteenth century often had a speci¤c totemic function: they were the animal analogue of the moral monster. If it has recently been claimed that dogs may help make us human, then there was once a fear (not entirely vanquished) that cats might make us inhuman.1 Although cat-fancy was to grow during the period, cats on the whole stood for wanton cruelty and unmitigated carnivorousness.2 Their totemic function even interfered with supposedly objective descriptions of the felines. In his History of the Earth, Oliver Goldsmith, closely following the French naturalist Buffon, describes cats as “a bloody and unrelenting tribe, that disdain to [man’s] own power, and carry on unceasing hostilities against him.”3 Unlike all other animals, cats represent the asocial—even the antisocial—unless sex impels them together: They lead a solitary ravenous life, neither uniting for their mutual defense, like vegetable feeders, nor for their mutual support, like those of the dog kind. The whole of this cruel and ferocious tribe seek their food alone; and, except at certain seasons, are even enemies to each other. The dog, the wolf, and the bear, are sometimes known to live upon vegetable
Curiosity Killed the Cat 38
or farinaceous food; but all of the cat kind, such as the lion, the tiger, the leopard, and the ounce, devour nothing but ®esh, and starve upon other provision. (3.198)
Not simply inimical to human interests, cats are the specter of society’s dissolution. As opposed to Rousseau’s gentle and solitary savages, cats are vicious monads: “They are, in general, ¤erce, rapacious, subtle, and cruel, un¤t for society among each other, and incapable of adding to human happiness” (3.198–199). Reluctantly and with many quali¤cations, Goldsmith mentions the role of the so-called domesticated cat as mouser. Yet worst of all, cats, like little humans, appear to enjoy cruelty. Unlike that of humans, their enjoyment is real: “young kittens are very playful and amusing; but their sport soon turns into malice, and they, from the beginning shew a disposition to cruelty” (3.204). Goldsmith adds, “Of all the marks by which the cat discovers its natural malignity, that of playing and sporting with its captive, before killing it outright, is the most ®agrant” (3.205). Because the semiotic existence of cats straddles scienti¤c observation and symbolic representation, perhaps “myth” (in the sense put forward by Roland Barthes) is a more apt term than “totem”: nature serves as a ground and a cover for the historically contingent and ideological.4 In the eighteenth century, this double status actually tends to excuse cats at the same moment they are demonized. The fact that cats are malice incarnate is no reason that we should take on their traits by torturing them. After all, their malice is not unnatural—ours would be. Cats feature prominently in the ¤rst engraving of Hogarth’s series “The Four Stages of Cruelty” from 1751 (¤gures 3.1–3.4). Sadly, in these depictions of monstrous behavior, felines do not bene¤t from the inference that compassionate humanity ought to commiserate even the naturally malicious. I will be calling on a wide array of other sources to show how inhumanity—the appearance of something that should be impossible— was rendered productive in the ¤ght against cruelty to animals in England. Hogarth’s images nonetheless will be a constant point of reference in the following pages. The story told in the series appears almost banal in its clarity: a poor boy, Tom Nero, begins by torturing animals, eventually moves on to killing a human, and ends up an unwilling participant in an anatomy lesson at the Royal College of Physicians.5 As if this narrative were not already easy enough to read, a visual prolepsis inscribes Tom’s destiny in the ¤rst engraving: a boy has drawn a stick ¤gure of the protagonist as a hanged man and turns his index ¤nger toward the future corpse. From the beginning, the reader of the engravings knows where the
Animals and the Mark of the Human 39
Figure 3.1. William Hogarth, First Stage of Cruelty. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
narrative is going and what message it proffers: cruelty to animals, which is to be shunned in any case, leads to cruelty to humans and thence to the application of justice to the wrongdoer. Various parallels from engraving to engraving reinforce this central irony of the victimizer becoming the victim: Tom tortures a dog in the ¤rst engraving and in the last a dog makes off with his heart; the down-plunging arrow in the ¤rst engraving has the same angle of attack as the chief physician’s demonstration rod in the last; the corpse of Tom’s lover in the third engraving lies in the same
Curiosity Killed the Cat 40
Figure 3.2. William Hogarth, Second Stage of Cruelty. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
position as the dissected body of her paramour and murderer in the ¤nal scene—beside her a note to “Dr. Tommy.”6 It seems improbable that any reader of the series could not make sense of it. The “Four Stages of Cruelty” thus conforms to the received idea of Hogarth’s usual practice. The artist is best known, after all, for serial engravings and paintings that tell relatively straightforward stories while their backgrounds are rich in details. Such details simply underline the principal point and provide copious local color. It is this Hogarth who is so useful when it comes to understanding eighteenth-century English cul-
Animals and the Mark of the Human 41
Figure 3.3. William Hogarth, Cruelty in Perfection. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
ture: the story gives a quick lesson regarding the middle-class mindset and the details present an often amusing snapshot of another era, due consideration being given to satirical exaggeration, of course. In the “Four Stages,” moreover, the narrative would have been made even simpler because of an assumed lack of sophistication in a segment of the target audience: the poor. In fact, Hogarth ensured that the prints from the engravings were relatively low-priced, and he had planned to have the series put out as inexpensive woodcuts in order to better reach the illiterate lower
Curiosity Killed the Cat 42
Figure 3.4. William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
classes (a project that fell through because of mounting costs, although two woodcuts from the series were made).7 Hogarth himself claimed that “the leading points. . . . were made as obvious as possible, in the hope that their tendency might be seen by men of the lowest rank.”8 But, in spite of the attempt to simplify—and at times because of it— the clarity and legibility of the “Four Stages” hide both the risk of nonsense and a remarkable and illuminating complexity. The risk of nonsense exists because it is not obvious how the series can communicate its mes-
Animals and the Mark of the Human 43
sage at all unless it ¤rst brings the lower classes into its system of values. That is, how can someone be made to understand that cruelty to animals is an evil, if he or she does not already hold this value and, in fact, likely considers the reverse to be true? The complexity comes about because the way in which the series of engravings attempts to bring the lower classes into its value system entails overcoming a fundamental logical paradox: pity can only appear as a universal characteristic of humanity if particular instances to the contrary are shown to be “inhuman.” In fact, if focus is shifted from the narrative to the supposed background, it becomes clear that Hogarth’s message is underwritten by an underlying structure and that this structure is not without problems. Simultaneously, this shift in focus reveals that reading the series merely in terms of class leads to a limited understanding of the logical and historical problems with which Hogarth is grappling. Rather, the engravings insistently single out for opprobrium various groups that cannot be de¤ned in terms of class alone. The two most salient of these groups are surgeons and children. These groups stand out because they combine cruelty and curiosity in such a way as to create the appearance of moral monstrosity: the enjoyment of another’s suffering. In the ¤nal analysis, the series turns out to be less concerned with the poor and more concerned with the way children and scientists threaten to expose the arbitrariness of the elevation of pity to the status of a characteristic mark and fundamental value of humanity. Reason and Compassion Hogarth’s engravings of “The Four Stages of Cruelty” are elements in an unfolding process. To understand them, we must consider how they relate the non-human or animal to the boundaries of humanity and inhumanity. They are part, moreover, of a transition in this relation: the movement of the mark of humanity from reason to pity. Yet if we see this transition as simple—from point A we go to point B—we misconstrue the nature and complexity of the process at hand. The values of reason and pity are determined by their place within a system in evolution, and in Hogarth’s engravings we catch this system at a moment of instability. Outgoing is reason as the characteristic that distinguishes humans from animals. This conception is inseparable from the notion that political and in fact all relations are organized hierarchically. Accompanying hierarchy we ¤nd the use of teleological explanations and justi¤cations: higher creatures have more exalted ends and may freely dispose of lower ones.9 When pity displaces reason as a value, we should see this as part of a general realignment
Curiosity Killed the Cat 44
of terms and a reconceptualization of the world. Pity undermines hierarchy by singling out the ability to feel as an equalizer. Although references to the “great chain of being” continue into the eighteenth century and the concept in certain respects ®ourishes, its argumentative value is increasingly diminished.10 Teleology is not so much toppled in this move as it is doubled with arguments based on the observation of facts. That pity exists in nature motivates and hides the arbitrariness of its selection as a human value. The status of pity, like that of cats, is mythological. Crucially, if all creatures feel, this does not mean that they all feel pity. On the contrary, humans feel pity more than other creatures, and they do so because they are reasonable. Reason, that is, activates and enables compassion. As James Beattie, in a manner that resonates with Hogarth’s engravings, puts the negative hypothesis, “mere want of re®ection leads children into acts of cruelty.”11 Of course, it is also reason as re®ection that simultaneously threatens to undo the immediacy of pity as well. A passage woven into a discussion of consumption and compassion from Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714–24) illustrates the complexity involved in the transition from reason to pity, playing up the political valences of the shift. The passage tells the tale of a Roman merchant who, along with his slave, has been cast upon a shore in Africa. There they meet a lion that, having just ¤lled his belly, does not immediately attack. Instead, he is willing to debate the fate of the shipwrecked trader. (The slave, following the calls of self-interest and self-preservation, escapes up a tree and is not mentioned again.) The merchant is enjoined by the lion to give “tollerable Reasons” as to why the latter should not devour the former. Ignoring this stipulation, the merchant calls in vain on the power of rhetoric to “raise the Lyon’s Pity.”12 The beast remains unmoved—as we know, cats do not by nature commiserate. The trial then takes a logical and legalistic turn. As Mandeville puts it, the merchant “betook himself to Arguments of greater Solidity, and reasoning from the excellency of Man’s Nature and Abilities, remonstrated how improbable it was that the Gods should not have design’d him for a better use than to be eat by Savage Beasts” (194). Teleology is here coupled with hierarchy: man has a higher purpose. The lion objects that it is not clear that a “Vain and Covetous Animal” should be considered superior because, his “natural Wants” easily satis¤ed by the plenty of his native land, he has gone out in search of super®uity. The lion adds as a de facto proof that the supposed superiority of man over all animals is currently undercut by his groveling before an inferior. The merchant simply continues his recourse to the old model: “Our Superiority . . . consists not in bodily force but strength of
Animals and the Mark of the Human 45
Understanding; the Gods have endued us with a Rational Soul, which, tho’ invisible, is much the better part of us” (195). The unimpressed lion then suggests with calm irony that he is only interested in the corporeal aspects of his potential meal and not the invisible ort of reason. In the end, it turns out that reason is no longer the seat of human superiority. Rather, it is the ability to feel compassion. Unfortunately, humans constantly put this superiority in doubt through vicious behavior. The hierarchies of human society in particular prove that although man should be united in the horizontal space of compassion, everywhere vertical differentiation inculcates a hatred for those who are not the same. The erstwhile king of the jungle singles out monarchy based on divine right as particularly pernicious: “All degrees of Men despise those that are inferior to them, and if you could enter into the Hearts of Kings and Princes, you would hardly ¤nd any but what have less value for the greatest part of the Multitudes they rule over, than those have for the Cattle that belong to them” (196). Humans have somehow managed to jeopardize their very claim to greatness, distinguishing themselves from the animal world not by compassion but by inhumanity. Calling on the key terms associated with moral monstrosity, the lion admits to being non-human, but not to being cruel, the latter the exclusive territory of a degenerate human species: Savage I am, but no Creature can be call’d cruel but what either by Malice or Insensibility extinguishes his natural Pity: The Lyon was born without Compassion; we follow the instinct of our Nature; the Gods have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other Animals, and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the Living. ’Tis only Man, mischievous Man, that can make Death a sport, Nature taught your Stomach to crave nothing but Vegetables; but your violent fondness to change, and greater eagerness after Novelties, have prompted you to the Destruction of Animals without Justice or necessity, perverted your Nature and warp’d your Appetites which way soever your Pride or Luxury have call’d them. (196; my emphasis)
Embedded in the lion’s speech are several topics that will form the core of the burgeoning critique of cruelty to animals. For example, hunting for sport, primarily associated with the aristocracy, as well as more generalized pastimes such as cock¤ghting and bullbaiting, is monstrous in its joyfulness. We also ¤nd that man is not simply cruel because he kills in order to eat. Unlike those of true carnivores, his body is not even designed for such fare. With the notion that man can shun his own nature, we are faced
Curiosity Killed the Cat 46
once again with the paradox of inhumanity. In this regard, the reference to our apparently innate preference for novelties indicates one of the dangerous aspects of curiosity: the unregulated search for new experiences and knowledge may lead to the subversion of pity. The tale of the lion and the merchant ends with the evocation of two sets of images: those of power and those of compassion. As to power, the lion remarks that reason has never actually held pride of place for humans: “But if your Wit and Understanding exceeds ours, ought not the Lyon in deference to that Superiority to follow the Maxims of Men, with whom nothing is more sacred than the Reason of the strongest is ever the most prevalent?” (197). Regicide perpetrated by the multitude and the tyrant who sacri¤ces his own people provide evidence that reason has always been subordinate to force. The reasonable lion accordingly embodies a power that, when unmasked, appears in all its terror: “Where is there a Creature that has Teeth and Claws like mine; behold the thickness of these massy Jaw bones; consider the width of them, and feel the ¤rmness of this brawny Neck. The nimblest Deer, the wildest Boar, the stoutest Horse, and the strongest Bull are my Prey wherever I meet them. Thus spoke the Lyon, and the Merchant fainted away” (197–198). Reason thereby literally yields to the rhetorical evocation of power. The lion is not, however, given the ¤nal word. Instead, an authorial voice intervenes with images that attempt to cancel the lion’s contention with the force of compassion: The Lyon, in my Opinion, has stretch’d the Point too far; yet when to soften the Flesh of Male Animals, we have by Castration prevented the ¤rmness their Tendons and every Fibre would have come to without it, I confess I think it ought to move a human Creature when he re®ects upon the cruel care with which they are fatned for Destruction. When a large and gentle Bullock, after having resisted a ten times greater force of Blows than would have kill’d his Murderer, falls stun’d at last, and his arm’d Head is fasten’d to the Ground with Cords; as soon as the wide Wound is made and the Jugulars are cut asunder, what Mortal can without Compassion hear the painful Bellowings intercepted by his Blood, the bitter Sighs that speak the sharpness of his Anguish, and the deep sounding Groans with loud anxiety fetch’d from the bottom of his strong and palpitating Heart? Look on the trembling and violent Convulsions of his Limbs; see, whilst his reeking Gore streams from him, his Eyes become dim and languid, and behold his Struglings, Gasps and last efforts for Life, the certain Signs of his approaching Fate? When a Creature has given such convincing and undeniable Proofs of the Terrors upon him, and the Pains and Agonies he feels, is there a follower of
Animals and the Mark of the Human 47
Descartes so inur’d to Blood, as not to refute, by his Commiseration, the Philosophy of that vain Reasoner? (198)
The image of pain elicits pity and simultaneously submits power to a critique.13 Descartes’s mind/body dualism had led him to claim that animals are purely mechanical and therefore unsusceptible to suffering.14 In Mandeville’s text, we ¤nd the modern apotheosis of reason reduced to inanity at the very outset of the so-called century of Enlightenment. Although it may seem odd that reason should take on infernal qualities at this time, there was a strong current of skepticism in England that doubted the radical claims for rationality (Swift’s satire on the projectors of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels and Johnson’s Rasselas come to mind). Within sentimental discourse, however, reason appears truly diabolical only when it blocks compassion. A brief examination of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1744) suggests that the changes outlined above have a force and momentum that lie beyond conscious intention. Initially, the poem af¤rms the traditional rungs of the great chain of being, with its “gradations of sense, instinct, thought, re®ection, reason.”15 The latter alone rules the others. Pope does engineer his chain in such a manner that animals approach human reason. For example, the construction techniques of the ant, with their apparent design, threaten to dissolve the human claim to distinction.16 But in the end, the divide between the two realms remains unbridgeable, and it is this absolute difference that renders legitimate our use of even higher animals: How Instinct varies in the grov’ling swine, Compar’d, half-reas’ning elephant with thine: ’Twixt that, and Reason, what a nice barrier; For ever sep’rate, yet for ever near! .................................... Without this just gradation, could they be Subjected these to those, or all to thee?17
Nevertheless, the asymptotic approach of animals to our uniqueness enjoins our respect for them. Only misplaced pride enables some to make the erroneous judgment that the existence of human suffering subverts theodicy whereas agony visited on the lower orders by us requires no justi¤cation. On this point, the Essay sarcastically inveighs, “Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, / Yet cry, If Man’s unhappy, God’s unjust” (244). As an argument against cruelty, however, the recourse to reason and the chain
Curiosity Killed the Cat 48
of being was practically outmoded by the time Pope was writing. The terms of the argument appear to have survived largely through inertia. Indeed, in the third epistle of the Essay, the horizontal gradations of the great chain of being are canceled by the all-inclusive “chain of Love / Combining all below and all above” (259). Love ousts man from his position as rational ruler over beasts and shows that all things are joined. Pope’s poem is thus shot through with two different codings of the relation of humans to animals, and the bifurcation in the text embodies the shift in arguments and priorities. It is perhaps worth noting that Pope the man was quite sentimentally attached to animals, especially his dogs.18 Over the course of the eighteenth century, then, sympathy for animals markedly increases. The idea that such an attitude is commendable could be traced back further. For example, Thomas More in Utopia (1516) calls compassion “the ¤nest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.”19 Yet More only singles out a sentiment as noble; he does not promote sentiment per se. It is the latter valorization that takes place during the eighteenth century, when we ¤nd an article in the Guardian stating, “Let us consider, that ’tis in its own Nature Cruelty to put a living Creature to Death; we at least destroy a Soul that has Sense and Perception.”20 The “at least” of course refers to the somewhat doubtful idea that animals might have a share in rationality. This process seems capped by an observation at the end of the century by Jeremy Bentham that is frequently quoted in animal rights literature to this day. It is an observation made all the more striking by its comparison of the institution of slavery to the treatment of animals. In both cases feeling is the basis of critique, and division within humanity is erased simultaneously with difference from animals without: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animal are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, of the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insuf¤cient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that shall trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of
Animals and the Mark of the Human 49
discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?21
Bentham’s remarks appear to mark explicitly the endpoint of a process by which sentiment displaced reason. Although he still allows that we may kill animals for food, we should not prolong their deaths. Torment has become the crux of the matter. Still, two quali¤cations of this progressive and linear scenario need to be made. In the ¤rst place, Bentham’s argument, although it appears to share the logic of Hume’s recourse to utility, actually breaks quite profoundly with sentimental ethics. Bentham does not ask us whether or not we suffer when we see an animal in pain. Rather, he asks us to calculate objectively the suffering of others. In this respect, his ethical stance is much closer to Kant’s deontological position than is usually assumed. Secondly, when Bentham made these comments, it was far from the case that sympathy for animals was a widespread value. In fact, in many ways the ¤ght on the legal front in England had just begun. During the eighteenth century, journalistic interventions were at the forefront of the battle against cruelty, and we should, I think, count Hogarth’s engravings as of a piece with journalism. Before legal representation was sought for animals, the typical rhetorical strategy was to elicit pity by representing their suffering in the manner of Mandeville. At times, this representation took the form of personi¤cation: not simply speaking for the non-human but actually giving it voice, logos coming to the aid of mute creation. Although displaced, reason thus retained a crucial ancillary role: drawing pity out, stimulating it, widening its scope. An article from the Tatler (February 16, 1710) provides an apparently lighthearted yet serious example of the sort. The author of the article reports that, having gone to bed with thoughts of the transmigration of souls, he was roused by a rooster’s crowing. While the sleepy dreamer fantasized that the cock was endowed with “the Soul of some drowsy Bell-man, who used to sleep upon his Post, for which he was condemn’d to do Penance in Feathers,” there entered into his bedroom an “ancient Pythagorean.” Pythagoreans were widely known as strict vegetarians, and this one presents a petition from “Job Chanticleer” that is written “in behalf of himself, and many other poor Sufferers in the same Condition.” The harangue that follows appeals, of course, to the reader’s compassion:
Curiosity Killed the Cat 50
hearing by Chance of your Worship’s great Humanity towards RobinRedbreasts and Tom-Tits, he is embolden’d to beseech you to take his deplorable Condition into your tender Consideration, who otherwise must suffer (with many Thousands more as innocent as himself) that inhuman Barbarity of a Shrove-Tuesday Persecution. We humbly hope that our Courage and Vigilance may plead for us on this Occasion. Your poor Petitioner most earnestly implores your immediate Protection from the Insolence of the Rabble, the Batteries of Catsticks, and a painful lingering Death.22
As a point of clari¤cation, the rooster’s topic is the once popular sport of “throwing at cocks,” in which a bird was tied to a stake and assaulted with ®ying sticks until it succumbed. The pastime was particularly associated with Shrove Tuesday. Notable in the passage is how mention of the auditor’s reputation for humanity plays on the latter’s vanity. In telling fashion, we ¤nd juxtaposed to this humanity “inhuman Barbarity.” Hogarth plainly has recourse to the same strategy in the visual realm. And yet, although the journalistic campaign against cruelty might have laid the groundwork for the legal campaign of the nineteenth century, the battle waged for even a change in mentality was still far from won at that point.23 In 1803, over ¤fty years after Hogarth created the “Four Stages,” a bill to put an end to bullbaiting was thrown out of the House of Commons. Decrying the immorality of this decision, one activist wrote that a member of the legislative body had claimed that “such entertainments kept up the true ENGLISH Spirit” and that other members considered the matter tri®ing.24 The eighteenth century had seen the birth and growth of a movement against cruelty to animals, but, taking a broad view of English society, it was still very much an issue whether blood sports and their relations were the shame or the pride of the nation. If pity had ousted reason in certain arenas, compassion itself was still very much an unestablished value in others. If anything, in the past two hundred and ¤fty years, the artist’s intention in the “Four Stages” appears to have become much clearer. In actuality, the series projects a semblance of legibility for us to the extent that the values of sympathy and of non-cruelty to animals are shared (or at least acknowledged as prevalent) in many parts of the world. These values qua values, however, have never been particularly widespread. Hogarth’s engravings are consequently part of a growing but hardly hegemonic intervention of humans on behalf of animals. They constitute an attempt to communicate the importance of sympathy, but it
Animals and the Mark of the Human 51
was far from certain at the time that the circuit of communication would be completed—that they would be understood. Universal Benevolence and Particular Cruelties If one looks at Hogarth’s “Stages of Cruelty” series with statistics rather than ethics in mind, the problem created by taking sympathy and noncruelty as givens becomes obvious: what is clear from the “Four Stages” is that the supposedly cruel vastly outnumber the sympathetic. I say “supposedly,” because recognizing something as “cruel” already requires a good deal of understanding.25 Of course, a distinction must be drawn in order to make a point. Benevolence as a value can only appear against the background of malevolence. But what is it that allows such a distinction to be recognized correctly? In particular, how can benevolence appear as a universal of human nature given that it is the exception rather than the rule? In fact, the so-called “good man” who appears in the series in opposition to the overwhelming presence of cruelty is reduced to one ¤gure in each of the engravings: the teary boy in the ¤rst engraving; the sympathetic annotator in the second; the horror-stricken lantern bearer in the third; and the gesturing spectator in the back of the theater in the last.26 Given the numerical minority of the “good,” the obvious conclusion should be that the natural and universal state of humanity is enjoyment of cruelty rather than pity or horror, which appear as almost freak occurrences. Take away our prior orientation in favor of sympathy and non-cruelty, and it becomes more dif¤cult to read the series and less plausible that it contains a clear message. Without such an orientation, instead of concluding that the series opposes cruelty, a viewer might surmise that the “Four Stages” concerns the unjust persecution of a lad who enjoys sporting with animals. It seems likely that a lower-class boy in the eighteenth century would have selected this less sanguine message. The engravings bear witness to this problem of trying to communicate across incommensurable systems of value. The last engraving in particular, mockingly entitled The Reward of Cruelty, resorts to threat rather than to the more gentle appeal to the sweet indulgence of sympathy.27 In The Reward of Cruelty, the “good man” alone, while pointing at one of the skeletons of infamous highwaymen that decorate the anatomical theater of the Royal College, stares out at the beholder. On the one hand, his face indicates horror at the spectacle. On the other, the gesture is a clear warning to those who would transgress. Tom Nero has been, after all, reduced to a
Curiosity Killed the Cat 52
Figure 3.5. William Hogarth, drawing for the woodcut version of The Reward of Cruelty (detail). The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
dismantled and decomposing pile of ®esh because of his behavior. The lower classes, moreover, held out faith that those hanged might be resuscitated. Their mourning practices also demanded that the body of the deceased remain whole. For these reasons, the poor rioted in the eighteenth century against the use of criminal bodies by surgeons.28 Hogarth’s display of the violation of a corpse was therefore a direct affront to the group meant to be educated by the series. Interestingly, a sketch for the woodcut version of The Reward of Cruelty, drawn before the engraving, clearly depicts the “good man” not as horri¤ed but rather grinning (¤gure 3.5).29 Animus against the lower classes runs high in this ¤nale, and certainly the other “ironies” of the series are only ironic for those already convinced that in®icting pain on animals is unnatural and wrong. At times, the grim humor deployed tends to cancel out with a gloating smile the valorization of sympathy that precisely this humor is meant to support. This threatening mode of communication simply attempts to curtail cruelty without necessarily affecting core values or resolving con®icts. There is, however, a way in which the “Four Stages” attempts to universalize the discourse of sympathy and cruelty of which it is a moment. This is done by laying out positions that appear negative or positive in relation to certain affective responses that are triggered by the sight of particular acts. Rather than threatening a different lifeworld, this aspect of the series deploys an aesthetics that simultaneously makes cruelty recognizable as such and directs the beholder to the correct positions. For the remainder of this section, I will be unpacking the various elements of this system. To do this, I will focus on three related issues. First, what are these affective responses? Second, who holds the positions to which particular responses are annexed? And last, how are the various actions, positions, and responses linked to negative or positive valuations?
Animals and the Mark of the Human 53
The responses depicted in the series can be broadly categorized as follows: pity, horror, joy, and indifference. Together these reactions form a stylized taxonomy of the affects in the manner of Charles Le Brun’s in®uential lectures on the drawing of the passions, ¤rst published in the late seventeenth century.30 Pity is etched on the face of the boy who tries to rescue the dog in the ¤rst engraving; the lachrymose penman of the second engraving provides a perhaps less voluptuous but still strong version of this response. This affect focuses not so much on the behavior of the actor who in®icts pain as on the victim. Nevertheless, pity is here accompanied by the attempt to stop suffering by engaging the perpetrator either directly or indirectly. In the last two engravings, the position previously held by pity is ¤lled by horror: the man carrying the lantern in the third engraving is agape with this passion and his counterpart in the ¤nal engraving responds in a more subdued but similar manner. Like pity, horror appears primarily focused on the victim. Unlike pity, it does not intercede. Rather, it takes on the allure of dumbstruck desperation—the time for acting is past. It is noteworthy that Tom Nero himself shows signs of horror when confronted with his crime and the body of his victim in the third engraving (¤gures 3.6 and 3.7). As a result, he cannot be placed simply on the side of those with incorrect responses. Pity and horror are perhaps to be expected in depictions dealing with pain and cruelty. Not only is the purportedly natural goodness of these responses maintained by dominant contemporary values, they also do have a neurological basis.31 Yet the latter fact does not explain why pity and horror should be singled out and valorized as the most human forms of response. We should recall, for example, that in the seventeenth century thinkers such as Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld were deeply suspicious of the value of pity. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, entertaining such suspicions had itself become suspect in the eyes of ethical philosophers. The presence of joy at the sight of suffering is therefore all the more puzzling. Nevertheless, joy and related expressions of pleasure mark in particular the ¤rst and fourth engravings: the faces of the animaltorturing children and the thinly veiled smiles of two of the surgeons. As noted, moreover, the sketch for the woodcut of The Reward of Cruelty depicts the onlooker in the back of the theater broadly smiling. His look of horror in the engraved version still seems tinged with clandestine pleasure. In each instance, one of the principal questions that must be answered in order to make sense of the “Four Stages” is underlined: Why joy? Similarly, indifference calls out for explanation. Elsewhere in the series it is precisely some sort of affective response that is portrayed as natural.
Curiosity Killed the Cat 54
Figure 3.6. Tom Nero recoils in horror (detail of Hogarth’s Cruelty in Perfection).
Indifference is a response that is different in kind from the others: it is a non-response. It is the mark of one in whom passions should be generated by the sight of suffering or death, and yet they are not. It can be seen on the faces of some in the ¤rst engraving; it marks the attitude of the judges and Tom in the second engraving; and it clearly is the affect feigned by the surgeons in the last. Related to indifference is indignation—although it is certainly connected to horror and pity as well. It plays a relatively minor role in the series, but is present in the response of the farmers who apprehend Tom in the third engraving. Indignation appears suspiciously lacking in immediacy and heart-wrenching concern. Aimed at the perpetrator rather than the victim, it is once removed from the most valorized responses. One could say that, in the case of the farmers, it even seems that they are enjoying their indignation a little too much—that they are slipping toward an enjoyment of the suffering of the victimizer. Indignation, like indifference, would then also hide a certain inexplicable joy. From the foregoing analysis, we observe that the kernel schema of the series is triangular: the linkage of an action to a suffering object to what could be called an affective gaze. This insistence on the gaze must be underlined: everywhere it is a question of looking, even if looking away. The temporal logic of this schema places the action ¤rst, from which the other elements follow. The ethical logic, however, works in the reverse: it foregrounds the linkage of an affective response to a gaze to the suffering object to the initial action. This emphasis on the ethical logic at the expense of the temporal logic tends to obscure the following problem of causality: if pity and horror are natural, then what is the primum mobile of
Animals and the Mark of the Human 55
Figure 3.7. Charles Le Brun’s depiction of “horrour” from A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1734). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
cruelty? In most ethical treatises, explicit focus is on the pitying observer and the suffering object. In the “Four Stages,” the malefactor is in the foreground, and this leads to various attempts at coping with the obscured but nonetheless insistent question of causality. When we turn to consider the question of who exactly holds the various positions in the engravings, it begins to become clear how and why certain groups are singled out for opprobrium. If the reader of the “Four Stages” focuses on the narrative—and it is the narrative that gets the reader’s attention—the con¤guration formed by Tom’s repeated appearance in the position of actor, the “good man” in the position of the spectator, and the dog, the horse, and Anne Gill taking up consecutively the position of the object appears as the fundamental triangulation of the series. The position held by Tom is the only position that depends on a character, and it is this that guarantees narrative continuity when the ironic twist occurs in which Tom ¤nds himself rotated from the position of agent to that of victim and object. The “good man,” on the other hand, is not a character. Instead, he is de¤ned by the uniqueness of his response—a re-
Curiosity Killed the Cat 56
sponse made salient by virtue of its difference. Still, both the “good man” and Tom bear the marks of certain groups. Tom appears ¤rst as a poor boy. Next he is a coachman. That is, he has become a member of the lower working orders. In the ¤rst two engravings the “good man” is presented as middle class in part by his clothing. He is indeed the only properly dressed boy among the Saint Giles miscreants. This said, however, his status is signaled much more by what he does. In the ¤rst engraving, he is engaged in trade as he tries to exchange a tart for the cessation of the dog’s suffering. This scenario is echoed in an essay in the Tatler, in which a compassionate father bemoans the “unlucky Humour” of one of his children. The latter, simply put, enjoys torturing birds, even driving them “into the Jaws of a Blood-thirsty Cat.” On the other hand, the father is pleased to report that the younger brother of his depraved progeny shows the signs of a natural compassion that only needs a supplement of re®ection to become ef¤cacious. He was once caught, for example, “weeping over a beautiful Butter®y, which he chanced to kill as he was playing with it.” This sympathetic child simultaneously displays a predisposition for benevolent trade: “this Morning he has given his Brother Three Halfpence (which was his whole Estate) to spare the Life of a Tom-tit.”32 In the second engraving, moreover, the good man writes down the information needed to stop Tom’s behavior. Annotation and record keeping are other functions of the trading and merchant classes. The coupling of Tom and the “good man” correspondingly suggests a reading that foregrounds some notion of class as the most important organizing principle of the engravings. This could be linked to the apparent class con®ict embedded in the threat posed by the practices of the surgeons to the poor. If class appears prominent, it is not simply because this conceptual category has been anachronistically grafted onto the series. It is part of the signifying structure of the series, and is highlighted in the explicit narrative. Why not use a three-tiered model of class and class con®ict as the fundamental tool of analysis, assigning the other groups found in the series, such as farmers and judges, to appropriate strata in a social hierarchy? After all, aristocrats in particular were deemed by middle-class discourse to be just as inclined to cruelty as the poor—if not more so.33 There are two reasons why this approach is insuf¤cient. First, it leads to a dead end of functionalist explanation: the problematic notion that the movement to end cruelty to animals was simply a ruse of ideology to hide deeper concerns. In the “Four Stages,” these concerns would be the vili¤cation of so-called idleness and the promotion of the sanctity of private property.34 Indeed, although these concerns were at times openly addressed by the
Animals and the Mark of the Human 57
proponents of sympathy, they are more likely contiguous with the concern for animal welfare rather than its cause. Second and crucially, the classbased approach takes a decision made within the series at face value, ignoring evidence that concepts other than class are important motors of Hogarth’s production. In addition to poverty and relative af®uence, the series breaks its characters down into certain groups de¤ned by their speci¤c functions: judges, farmers, and surgeons, to name the key examples. In each case, indifference to suffering and even joy in the face of pain appear as occupational hazards. Seen in this light, the “Four Stages” would be part of a communication network that sought to cope with a society that was increasingly compartmentalized, professionalized, and organized along the lines of function rather than class hierarchy.35 This perspective does not relegate class analysis entirely to the dustbin of outmoded theories; it does mean that class by itself provides far too blunt an instrument to fully dissect Hogarth’s intervention. One could certainly claim that the attempt to deal with the functional differentiation of society in the eighteenth century by and large issued from the middle orders. That is, we might note that many of those who upheld sentimental ethics either were of the middling type or, even if not, often explicitly held out hope that the latter would guide society in the future. In the end, however, these approaches to understanding the situation—largely part of the self-understanding of those at the time— tend to be more blinding than revelatory. What is at stake here is the way that a group of loosely related, not-yet-professional social observers sought to universalize a speci¤c version of humanity in an attempt to provide a semantics for an emergent mode of social organization. Their discourse was in fact ideological in that it posited ahistorical universality where historical difference was apparent. Notwithstanding, such an ideology did not, for example, cover over the contradictions of capital, but rather simultaneously obscured and exploited paradoxes linked to functional differentiation. With this in mind, it would be not quite correct to say that moral monstrosity was simply perceived as a contradiction of the de¤nition of humanity in terms of sympathy. While this was certainly the case at one level, at another the paradox of moral monstrosity was harnessed in order to produce and extend the realm of compassion. I should underline that Tom and the “good man” are themselves recognizable by what they do, although, of course, Tom is initially part of that lowest of all groups: the idle or non-functional. In this regard, the presence of children in the series introduces an interesting complication. In Hogarth’s world we see childhood depicted in part as a period in which
Curiosity Killed the Cat 58
apparent non-functionality is actually a preparation for insertion into the social system.36 The “good man” in the ¤rst engraving is thus a good boy who prepares by his exchange for a future in business. The other children in the series, however, are portrayed as socially useless and wholeheartedly malicious. They are in fact what we might construe today as sociopathic. That they are poor certainly helps explain this. Nonetheless, that their behavior is a startling re®ection of that of the nefarious surgeons in the last engraving suggests that we are in need of an explanation that concretely links both these ante-functional and anti-functional states with the later adoption of social roles. What after all do the profession of surgery and the pastimes of impoverished children have in common? In the next chapter, I will show how curiosity helps clarify this conundrum. So far, I have examined several responses to cruelty and shown that these responses relate to speci¤c groups. The only responses that appear correct are those of the “good man,” who belongs to the group of merchants and traders. How is one to know, however, that pity and horror are correct and that the other responses are not? That is, how does the “Four Stages” attempt to persuade its viewers that cruelty to animals and related behaviors should be shunned? At one level, there is the rather crude tool of threat: cruelty is “rewarded” by punishment. This threat is supplemented by the pointed reference to the beliefs and burial practices of the lower classes. In this mode, the series deploys a form of power that simply informs the poor that certain selections of behavior will be met with reprisals. There is no question of bringing them or anyone else into a different discourse with a different set of values. By connecting cruelty to physical grotesqueness, however, the “Four Stages” also appeals to the narcissism of the beholder. For example, the denizens of St. Giles in the ¤rst engraving are unkempt and their clothing is tattered. Likewise, the judges are obese and have ridiculous expressions.37 In the ¤nal engraving, the haggard chief physician demonstrates before a crowd of twisted cretins. Still, this appeal to narcissism would remain at the level of the obvious and trite if it did not link physical traits to a conception of moral monstrosity. In so doing, it leads to the heart of the problematic of universalization that the series explores and inadvertently exposes. Tom Nero is the most obvious candidate for monstrosity. His name itself invokes the Roman emperor who is often mentioned as an example of moral monstrosity in the eighteenth century. His physiognomical deformations, too, lead one to infer a concomitant ugliness of spirit. Tom Nero is not so much a member of the lower class of humans as he is a different and inimical form of life. But Tom is not the only monster in the
Animals and the Mark of the Human 59
series. Most emphatically, the ¤nal engraving provides proof of the existence of monsters other than those that take the form of the poor. In The Reward of Cruelty, the anatomical chamber, while re®ecting to a large degree the actual amphitheater of the Royal College of Physicians, is semiotically marked with evidence that it is in reality a lair of monsters.38 On the one hand, the requisite signs of professional surgical training are present: the pompous expression of the head surgeon, the garb, the mimetic setting, and so forth. On the other hand, certain elements are clearly out of place: the smiles, the butcher-like quality of the principal operator and his knife, the bucket of entrails through which someone rummages— apparently looking for a choice morsel—and, last but not least, the cauldron of stewing skulls and bones. Monstrosity lurks in those areas that the surgeons have not been careful enough to hide. I would stress, however, that the obvious signs of monstrosity, such as the cauldron, are linked to the more subtle play of expressions on the surgeons’ faces: indifference as the masquerade of monstrous pleasure. The only other group that shows signs of such monstrous joy in the series is that of children—a brazen joy, not hidden by so-called professionalism.
4 The Monstrous Face of Curiosity
The historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that the formation of groups depends on the use of what he calls asymmetric counterconcepts. Pairings such as Greek/barbarian, Christian/heathen, and human/non-human or inhuman provide the semantic underpinnings of various, differently structured, inclusions and exclusions. Although he hints at the paradoxical nature of the pairing human/inhuman when applied to what appear to be humans, Koselleck does not fully explore the manifest absurdity of the claim to universality embedded in these particular counterconcepts.1 In his discussion of this pairing, Koselleck also focuses on how the philosophes and French revolutionaries deployed the term “inhuman” against the monarchy. This focus downplays, however, the extent to which the asymmetric counterconcept of inhumanity was used not only in relation to the traditionally de¤ned realm of politics but also as a way of getting a semantic grasp on a society organized by functional rather than hierarchical differentiation. This was especially the case in eighteenth-century England, where the issue of monarchy was less pressing than that of how social order would be maintained without hierarchy. One way that ethical discourse sought to cope with this situation was by converting pity from one facet of human response into a deep value and the signi¤er of universal humanity. Consider the odd case of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, the primary thesis of which is that private vices are public virtues. A particularly infamous illustration of this thesis is that the burglar gives work to the lock-
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 61
smith. The author’s positions on society and sociability were considered so suspect by his contemporaries that the moniker “Man-devil” was often applied to him. That he might also make a plea for compassion appears counterintuitive. And yet Mandeville’s theory of social organization is of a piece with his position on pity. If society is not organized by hierarchy but rather by the complex interlocking of different functions, then compassion alone can serve as a check on the system. Pity is not simply social cement. For Mandeville the affect has the precise function of a governor: it ensures that the self-organization of the social order does not spin into excess, cruelty, inhumanity, and dissolution. In Hogarth’s “Four Stages of Cruelty” it is also hierarchical organization that is missing in its chaotic scenes. What the viewer does see is the suggestion that sympathy may provide some grounds for order in the face of inhumanity. It is sympathy that will protect society from the marauding and unsupervised poor, the indifferent minions of the law, and, ¤nally, from professional surgeons. The appearance of monstrosity in the series indicates that the asymmetric counterconcepts of human/inhuman are being deployed in the visual realm. In the previous chapter, I suggested that this deployment encourages entry into the discourse of sympathy by pointing out to the viewer which responses are correct and which incorrect. I now turn to examine how the logical problems involved with positing universal sympathy are dealt with in Hogarth’s engravings. In the end, monstrosity not only encourages the adoption of the correct affective position. It also provides a way in which the fundamental logical paradox of the series can be resolved, at least in appearance. One aspect of this paradox is simply the etiology of cruelty given the supposed universality of pity. In the “Four Stages,” the narrative highlights habituation as the driving force of malevolent behavior. The narrative is about Tom getting used to cruelty by starting with animals for victims and winding up with humans. While habituation has long been an explanation for why certain aspects of “human nature” are overcome, during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries this explanation must be seen in relation to the speci¤c con¤guration of the anthropology of benevolence.2 For instance, in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), Locke brings the notion of inhumanity as mere appearance to bear on the question of our relation to animals: One thing I have frequently observed in children is that, when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill; they often torment and treat very roughly young birds and butter®ies, and such
Curiosity Killed the Cat 62
other poor creatures, which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure (my emphasis).3
Locke then goes on to suggest that the origin of such behavior must be habituation: This delight they take in doing mischief (whereby I mean spoiling any thing to no purpose, but more especially the pleasure they take to put any thing in pain that is capable of it) I cannot persuade myself to be any other than a foreign and introduced disposition, an habit borrowed from custom and conversation. (113)
Children, we are told, must be carefully monitored so that cruelty cannot grow in the space reserved for “the contrary and more natural temper of benignity and compassion” (114).4 The topos of habituation is present throughout the “Four Stages.” In addition to the children learning their ¤rst lessons in cruelty, we also see various professions in which the denaturing of compassion has already taken place. Farmers, who deal cruelly with animals on a daily basis, grow increasingly insensitive. In the second engraving, a laggard sheep is bludgeoned to death without a care. Other country folk in the same engraving beat and prod with a pitchfork a woefully overburdened mule. Judges, who spend their days listening to criminal histories and condemning their fellowmen to the gallows, are also obvious choices. In the eighteenth century, the emphasis on sympathy meant that those who practiced professions that opened them to indifference to suffering by the force of habituation were at a particular risk of being suspected of inhumanity. Butchers consequently often fell under such suspicion, and we ¤nd Locke in his discussion of education remarking, if [children] incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage; for the custom of killing beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very kind or compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this, in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.5
With considerably more emphasis on the value of pity in itself, Mandeville notes his astonishment that humans can kill animals and eat their ®esh without repugnance: “I have often thought, if it was not for this Tyranny which Custom usurps over us, that Men of any tollerable good Nature could never be reconcil’d to the killing of so many Animals for their daily
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 63
Food, as long as the bountiful Earth so plentifully provides them with varieties of vegetable Dainties.”6 The old teleological argument by which “there can be no Cruelty in putting Creatures to the use they were designed for” is contradicted by the internal voice of truth as sympathy. Mandeville suggests that no one “not brought up in a Slaughter-house” would choose to become a butcher (192). We further distance ourselves from the ®esh we eat by buying at the market rather than killing animals ourselves. By these signs, the author of The Fable of the Bees ¤nds evidence of guilt and crime in those that eat animal ®esh: “I can discover in it [the distance created by the marketing of meat] some strong remains of Primitive Pity and Innocence, which all the arbitrary Power of Custom, and the violence of Luxury, have not yet been able to conquer” (193). A particularly pertinent and symptomatic aspect of Mandeville’s argument is how he adds surgeons to Locke’s previous observation about butchers alone: Every body knows, that Surgeons in the Cure of dangerous Wounds and Fractures, the extirpation of Limbs, and other dreadful Operations, are often compell’d to put their Patients to extraordinary Torments, and that the more desperate and calamitous Cases occur to them, the more the outcries and bodily Sufferings of others must become familiar to them; for this Reason our English Law, out of a most affectionate Regard to the Lives of the Subject, allows them not to be of any Jury upon Life and Death, as supposing that their Practice it self is suf¤cient to harden and extinguish in them that Tenderness, without which no Man is capable of setting a true value upon the Lives of his fellow Creatures. Now if we ought to have Concern for what we do to Brute Beasts, and there was not imagin’d to be any cruelty in killing them, why should of all Callings Butchers, and only they jointly with Surgeons, be excluded from being Jury men by the same Law. (193)
Oddly, the law—the application of which by no means seems to indicate any need for compassion—is threatened with dysfunction if compassion is excluded from its operations.7 The only explanation for such concern is that butchers and surgeons might actually enjoy in®icting punishment on innocent parties. Mandeville’s assertion concerning the exclusion of surgeons from juries was, moreover, erroneous.8 Habituation does go a certain distance in explaining how a naturally sympathetic being grows cold to suffering. It reinscribes, however, the logical problem that it is meant to counter by failing to locate a ¤rst cause. In fact, Locke’s language suggests that he was not unaware of the paradoxical logic involved in making that which comes later ruin that which comes
Curiosity Killed the Cat 64
¤rst: “By these steps unnatural cruelty is planted in us; and what humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.”9 Habituation similarly fails to explain why anyone might enjoy cruelty. After all, if one is not already predisposed to such pleasures, then habituation should lead only to indifference. Locke even openly contradicts himself on this score when he declares that inhumanity by habituation both is and is not a form of enjoyment: “Thus, by fashion and opinion, that comes to be a pleasure, which in itself neither is, nor can be any” (113–114).10 Joined to this logical problem is the following commonplace of eighteenth-century philosophy: positing sensibility as the most basic category of experience means that indifference to any stimulus is considered highly unlikely at best. Habituation often appears as a reason for cruelty, but it never appears as reason enough. The surgeons in the last engraving of the “Four Stages” certainly con¤rm this ambivalence toward indifference. The head surgeon in particular looks dispassionately on a scene that would sadden and sicken “ordinary” human beings. It is this hyper-sociality that is particularly disturbing about those who must overcome “instinct” as part of their professional practice. In Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, Ruth Richardson points out that late in the eighteenth century William Hunter, a wellknown anatomist and surgeon, in his training lectures held that dissection prepares not only the mind and body of the surgeon but also “familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary Inhumanity”—a lack of affect that we might see as the precursor of “clinical detachment.”11 Hunter thereby reclaimed and valorized an abusive epithet. At the time that Hogarth put out his engravings and from the very different vantage point that they represent, indifference was not merely condemned, it was in addition considered unlikely. Here, we should recall that the indifference on the faces of the head surgeon and others in the theater also appears to hide a certain enjoyment of the undertaking. In particular, monstrous smiles break out on the faces of two of the surgeons watching the demonstration. If habituation cannot fully explain cruelty or inappropriate responses to it, then what in the engravings does? A preliminary answer to this question is curiosity. One reason why cruel experiments or lessons in human anatomy bring joy rather than tears of sympathy is that the thrill of curiosity indulged and satis¤ed is enough to override the benevolent passions. Moreover, unlike habituation, the concept of curiosity grounds enjoyment in supposed human nature itself. Hobbes in fact considered curiosity—the drive to know how and why—the other fundamental mark of humanity: “man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals.”12 In her study of inquiry in
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the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Barbara Benedict argues that “[early] modern literature depicts curiosity—the pursuit of information by empirical means—as cultural ambition that turns curious people into curiosities.”13 Indeed, during the eighteenth century, it was at the conjunction of Hobbes’s two markers of humanity—reason and curiosity—that not only ambition and freakishness were produced, but also moral monstrosity of the type studied here. It is curiosity that links the ¤rst and fourth engravings in telling ways: the children in the First Stage of Cruelty, if they have not yet adopted the mask of indifference, clearly show a sort of joyful curiosity. In fact, the First Stage of Cruelty, far from being a simple condemnation of the quotidian acts of cruelty witnessed on London streets, is also a scene of nascent science. Reading ¤rst from the top left-hand corner down, the following experiments are taking place: aeronautic principles are being studied by attaching balloons to a cat, which plummets from a window; animal behavior is explored by attaching two cats to a pole, the spectator arena in this experiment paralleling that of the surgeon’s auditorium; two more forms of animal behavior are explored below, where intraspeci¤c aggression among roosters and interspeci¤c aggression between dogs and cats are studied. From the bottom right-hand side of the engraving up, canine behavior is examined by attaching a bone to the animal’s tail; anatomy is brought into play with the probing of the dog’s anus with an arrow; and, ¤nally, vision is examined as two boys burn out a pigeon’s eye. As an adult, Tom has not entirely abandoned such experiments: in Cruelty in Perfection he has vivisected his lover Anne Gill, her body lying on the ground in the same manner as her killer’s cadaver in the Reward of Cruelty. If the narrative irony is that Tom switches from agent to object, from victimizer to victim, the structural irony is that he too was once a budding scientist and surgeon. Looked at closely, the cruelties represented in the ¤rst engraving are actually strikingly similar to the activities of the group that was probably most consistently portrayed as inhuman in eighteenth-century England: virtuosi. The name was applied to scienti¤c amateurs, more or less followers of Francis Bacon and his call to experimentation over abstraction in the quest for empirical knowledge. They were in particular associated with the Royal Philosophical Society and its publications, and had been the object of satire since at least the time of Pepys, who mentions them mockingly, and Shadwell’s comedy The Virtuoso (1676).14 At the outset of the eighteenth century, satires on the virtuosi focused on obsession, which was subdivided into two primary types: ¤rst, a preoccupation with collecting any- and everything; and second, a tendency to disregard proportion. As
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to the ¤rst aspect, an article from the Tatler paints Bacon’s heirs as harmless buffoons, claiming that the “Legacy of a certain Virtuoso” included dead insects, shells, leaves, and “a dried Cockatrice” as well as “My Rat’s Testicles, and Whale’s Pizzle.”15 Exploration and nascent colonial endeavor helped to fuel the spirit of collection, and vice versa. As to proportion, a look at the alienated inmates in the ¤nal engraving of Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress” reveals an astronomer and a cartographer who have lost all sense of it (see ¤gure 1.1). In this way, technological innovations in optics such as the telescope and the microscope were often implicated in the etiology of the aberration.16 A similar target is lack of perspective, and especially a propensity to make claims for experiments that supposedly expand knowledge or provide practical bene¤ts but appear to do neither from a disinterested point of view. Thus in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the narrator details experiments intended to cure such ailments as “a small Fit of Cholick” and carried out by a “great Physician” at the Academy of Lagado: He had a large Pair of Bellows, with a long slender Muzzle of Ivory. This he conveyed eight Inches up the Anus, and drawing in the Wind, he af¤rmed he could make the Guts as lank as a dried Bladder. But when the Disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the Muzzle while the Bellows was full of Wind, which he discharged into the Body of the Patient; then withdrew the Instrument to replenish it, clapping his Thumb strongly against the ori¤ce of the Fundament; and this being repeated three or four Times, the adventitious Wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it (like Water put into a Pump) and the Patient recovers.17
To this description is appended a concise account of the effects of the experiments on an animal subject: I saw him try both Experiments upon a Dog, but could not discern any Effect from the former. After the latter, the Animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a Discharge, as was very offensive to me and my Companions. The Dog died on the Spot, and we left the Doctor endeavoring to recover him by the same Operation. (155).
What Gulliver witnesses is actually the satiric inversion of a procedure to demonstrate properties of the lungs freely combined with the experimental apparatuses of hydraulics and pneumatics.18 The scientist Robert Hooke carried out the so-called “bellows dog” demonstration before the Royal Society of London in 1667. In it, he illuminated aspects of the respiratory system by opening up a dog, inserting bellows into the lungs, and
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 67
thence keeping the animal breathing and alive through arti¤cial means. One observer remarked that the demonstration was “of more cruelty than pleased me,” and Hooke himself found the procedure so cruel that he was unwilling to repeat it again himself in a scheduled public demonstration.19 Such ambivalence is not, however, noted in satires on virtuosi. Rather, alongside the neo-classical concern that the out-of-proportion be brought back into balance and perspective corrected—that Belinda might not worry about her lock of hair and that Gulliver might see Yahoos and Houyhnhnms for what they are—was a concomitant and growing horror. Seemingly innocuous obsession was woven with animal experimentation to yield a ¤gure of the virtuoso as inhuman monstrosity.20 In truth, if surgeons were often painted as inhuman by profession, the anxiety about virtuosi was even greater because they were not professional: they appear to lay claim to the category of humanity in general at the same time they act in such a way as to exclude themselves from it. If the lines dividing doctors, physicians, natural philosophers, and virtuosi were often blurred, this could only be felt as disturbance in the attempt to explain and categorize according to the criterion of sentiment. In the Critical Review, for example, Tobias Smollet often praises the progressive aspects of science, but he ¤nds reprehensible animal experiments that lack obvious bene¤t.21 Concerning a collection of essays in the June 1756 issue, Smollet remarks, “The twentieth article is ¤lled with the account of such barbarities, as must ¤ll every humane reader with horror. Such as opening animals alive, plucking out their hearts, pinching and burning their spinal marrow, poisoning them with glysters, injections, &c. in order to ascertain the modus operandi of opium.”22 After all, the effects of the drug were already well established; locating the cause of these effects lacks pragmatic value. Even if we were to learn something new from the experiments detailed—and the reviewer remains dubious—would it be “of consequence enough to justify such a series of cruel executions, as one would be apt to imagine, must destroy that humanity and tenderness of heart by which every physician ought to be distinguished” (415)? Just such an inhuman experimenter is portrayed in the Critical Review of August 1756, in which the respected physician Richard Brocklesby is accused of vivisecting only in order to gain esteem. Smollet contends that the doctor’s experiments on sensibility and irritability add nothing to Albert Haller’s already proven theories on the topic (although the distinction was actually a point of great contention in European science). To the charge of redundancy, he adds the remark that the experimenter might have “satis¤ed himself in private, without disgusting the public with a recapitulation
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of barbarous executions.”23 In fact, if the doctor were rational and in tune with the times, he would have used his real cruelty at least to appear humane: One would imagine that Dr. Brocklesby had directed and superintended those barbarities, on purpose to have an opportunity of promulgating his own aversion to cruelty, in the preamble of his letter: yet he makes but a sorry excuse for the tortures he in®icted, by giving us to understand, that ‘the pain and misery by him caused, even to the victims of this subject, were to be regarded much less than what happens every day in Smith¤eld to twenty oxen and sheep, by cutting off their tales, and other parts of the skin, and driving them miles afterwards.’ (33)
In the reference to Smith¤eld, the principal meat market of London, we are reminded of the farmers’ mistreatment of their animals in the second engraving of Hogarth’s series. But what we also see in the depiction of Dr. Brocklesby is the apparent irrationality of the rational scientist. After all, missing out on a cynical opportunity, the doctor is so out of touch with current sensibilities as not to realize the fallacious logic of his excuse: greater cruelties do not excuse lesser. This is especially the case when the lesser have no use. Smollet’s ¤nal comments indicate, indeed, something entirely inexplicable: “There is something very curious in this expedient of sheltering one’s reputation for humanity, under the shade of a butcher’s slaughterhouse” (33). Could it be that the doctor is simply inhuman? This is the conclusion implied in Smollet’s application of the adjective “curious”—in this case meaning “unnatural” and “inexplicable”—to the situation. I should note that Smollet was himself a physician and, as such, far from categorically charging experimentalists and surgeons with inhumanity. His concerns are therefore all the more telling. In repeating the horrors once again in the pages of the Critical Review, we must assume, Smollet did not miscalculate his own chance to capitalize on inhumanity in order to appear both reasonable and humane. In a similar vein, Samuel Johnson, writing in the Idler (August 5, 1758; no. 17) remarks concerning virtuosi, Among those whom I never could persuade to rank themselves with Idlers, and who speak with indignation of my morning sleeps and nocturnal rambles; one passes the day in catching spiders that he may count their eyes with a microscope; another erects his head, and exhibits the dust of a marigold separated from the ®ower with the dexterity of Leeuwenhoeck himself. Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 69
rings to a loadstone, and ¤nd what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some register changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable.24
Such types are worthy of mockery, but at least they are not monstrous: The Idlers that sport only with inanimate nature may claim some indulgence; if they are useless they are still innocent: but there are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins. (55)
The amusements of this “race of wretches” are clearly those of the inhuman, and they issue from the point where the eighteenth-century topos that the mind craves occupation and novelty veers into monstrosity. Rather than using medical and scienti¤c vocabulary, as he had previously done for comic effect, Johnson avoids words that could carry the force of legitimacy and relies instead on the vocabulary of the torture chamber, although pleasure rather than truth still seems the only goal: “What is alleged in defence of these hateful practices, every one knows; but the truth is, that by knives, ¤re, and poison, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained. The experiments that have been tried, are tried again; he that burned an animal with irons yesterday, will be willing to amuse himself with burning another to-morrow” (56). In the ¤nal analysis, even the successes of science are condemned: “And if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat encreased, he surely buys knowledge dear, who learns the use of the lacteals at the expence of his humanity. It is time that universal resentment should arise against these horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart, extinguish those sensations which give man con¤dence in man, and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or stone” (56). Similar remarks will be found in Johnson’s commentary on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, when the queen somewhat disingenuously suggests to the court physician Cornelius that she might expand her learning if she were to carry out experiments “on such creatures as / We count not worth the hanging—but none human” (I. v.19–20). To which Cornelius
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responds, “Your highness / Shall from this practice but make hard your heart” (I.v.24–25). Johnson’s comments engage openly the paradox of inhumanity: “There is in this passage nothing that much requires a note, yet I cannot forbear to push it forward into observation. The thought would probably have been more ampli¤ed, had our author lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been published in later times, by a race of men that have practised tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings.”25 If the pleasures of the virtuosi and other vivisectors are, as Smollet puts it, curious, then curiosity as the drive for knowledge is highly suspect when pity is at stake. Pope’s ambivalent relationship to Stephen Hales (preacher, experimental scientist, and the poet’s neighbor for many years) may provide a ¤nal illustration of how scienti¤c reason in its more unsentimental moments is posited as a danger to pity.26 Joseph Spence reports in his Observations that Pope replied in the following way to questions put to him about Hales: ‘I shall be very glad to see Dr. Hales; and always love to see him; he is so worthy and good a man’ [said Spence]. Yes he is a very good man, only—I’m sorry—he has his hands imbrued with blood [Pope replied]. ‘What, he cuts up rats?’ Aye, and dogs too! (and with what emphasis and concern he spoke it.) Indeed, he commits most of these barbarities with the thought of its being of use to man. But how do we know, that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above such as dogs, for our curiosity, or even for some use to us? ‘I used to carry it too far; I thought they had reason as well as we.’ So they have, to be sure. All our disputes about that, are only a dispute about words.—Man has reason enough only to know what is necessary for him to know, and dogs have just that too.27
Pope’s reaction again locates him in the somewhat odd position of arguing sensibility on the grounds of rationality: rats are one thing, but dogs, which approach us on the chain of being, have a greater claim to human “rights.”28 Pope’s own sensibility is in any case very much present as an illocutionary force. Suspicious, moreover, of the utilitarian goals of animal experimentation, he inserts a useless curiosity as the real drive of vivisection. In fact, while British vivisectionists had already in the seventeenth century begun to feel ambivalent about such practices, Isaac Barrow, a key ¤gure in the development of mathematical optics and teacher to Newton,
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could at the time nonetheless insouciantly suggest that the “sanguinary curiosity which has recently ended the life of many a dog or ¤sh or bird [is] a perfectly innocent cruelty and an easily excusable ferocity.”29 Such an assessment would be labeled clearly monstrous by the time Hogarth released his prints—at least by a certain audience. Not that curiosity was always maligned; it was a complex, polyvalent, and shifting signi¤er.30 The same Johnson who so deplored vivisection would also state, according to Boswell, “A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.”31 Curiosity thus could and often did ¤nd itself praised. It was this positive side that led Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, his magisterial account of the myth of historical progress, to propose that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bear witness to a thoroughgoing justi¤cation of institutionalized theoretical curiosity.32 In light of the problem of inhumanity, however, this thesis requires considerable adjustment. Within the enclosure of sentimental ethics, the Enlightenment quest for knowledge could appear only as monstrous, never as legitimate, when pity was at stake. The activities we see in both the ¤rst and the third engravings of Hogarth’s “Four Stages”—with intimations of vivisection in the third—indicate precisely the lack of legitimacy conferred on scienti¤c curiosity. Curiosity was therefore not merely a value, but a point of internal scission. Of course, the First Stage of Cruelty has as much to do with sport as it does with science, and occasionally above I have overstated my case concerning the experiments going on in the engravings.33 The important point is that science and sport are discursively coupled. They are coupled because they share—at least as far as the engravings are concerned—the practice of cruelty. Furthermore, they are both implicated in a sort of joyful cruelty. Notwithstanding Robert Darnton’s use of Hogarth’s First Stage of Cruelty to illustrate his claims in “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” the engravings do not emphasize the position of animals within pre-Enlightenment superstition. There is no indication, for example, that the tormented cats connote witchcraft.34 Crucially, the only sign of witchcraft in the series is found in the surgeons’ chamber: the boiling cauldron of human bones. While Darnton is no doubt partially correct in his argument that the otherwise inexplicable joys of animal abuse constitute a manipulation of symbolism, Hogarth is manipulating a completely different set of symbols: those which have to do with anxieties about the joyful cruelties of sport and science. This is why the surgeons appear satanic—and not the tortured animals.
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In addition, both “science” and “sport” require enclosure in quotation marks. Because they are linked to pleasure in cruelty, it is far from clear that either term is legitimate. This has partly to do with issues of authorization and professionalism: How can one be sure that science or sport is actually being practiced if no of¤cial boundary markers designate them as such? In the case at hand, surgeons had only relatively recently become differentiated from barbers, although we should recall that the anatomists in the last engraving do belong to a group with of¤cial sanction: the Royal College of Physicians.35 Ironically, this sanction issues from the otherwise absent monarchical power. Historically, animal baiting and the staging of animal ¤ghts were more securely established as sports than surgery was as either art or science (its adherents generally considered it a combination of the two).36 Cock¤ghting too, after all, had the monarchy’s imprimatur: it was known as the “royal sport.” But this security had been shaken by the time that Hogarth issued his engravings. During the eighteenth century and afterward in England, less and less would animal sports be considered sports at all; more and more would surgery, medicine, and anatomy be considered legitimate sciences. To a large extent, the legitimacy of these latter practices was based on the degree to which they could rid themselves of connotations of needless and perhaps pleasurable cruelty, with indifference being transmuted into detached but benevolent professionalism. On the other hand, because it is dif¤cult to deny that suffering is intimately joined to pleasure in blood sports, the legitimacy of these formerly very English practices has been all but entirely lost. It is the semantic coupling of humanity and inhumanity that also in®ects the peculiar variety of nationalism that is linked to the promotion of sympathy for animals. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, nationalism can only take hold when media and literacy are suf¤ciently developed to support it.37 The ®owering of journals in eighteenth-century England, an occurrence that depended on technological advances as well as increased literacy, was essential in the promulgation of a nationalist discourse of sympathy for animals. Yet this was a nationalism that took humanity as its standard and bemoaned the fact that the English were far from ideal when compared to other nations. Rather than jingoistic or rooted in the past and the “people,” such nationalism was critical, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking. Consequently, the Tatler exhorts the English to be ashamed that comparison with the “many wise Nations of the East” is highly un®attering. Shame should be especially great for a “Nation which pretends to be one of the most civilized in Europe.”38 Although the writer does not seriously entertain the idea that the English should behave
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 73
like the exaggeratedly protective “Dervees” who ransom captured birds and throw themselves between ¤ghting animals, negative comparisons with the French—close neighbors and frequent enemies—are more galling. After all, it is the French, according to the Tatler, who explain English diversions such as baiting animals with reference to a “natural Fierceness and Cruelty of Temper” (2.276). Certainly it was true that one well-known French observer, B. L. de Muralt, had commented speci¤cally on the barbarity of “throwing at cocks” as well as other “pleasures of the people [Plaisirs du Peuple]” in his travel journals to England.39 Usually, in fact, “the people” are tagged as a large part of the problem, as when the author of the Tatler article anticipated a possible excuse from his countrymen: “It will be said, That these are the Entertainments of common People. It is true; but they are the Entertainments of no other common People” (2.277). This assertion was, however, doubly untrue: not only had entertainments involving cruelty to animals never been restricted to the lower classes, they were far from being uniquely English. Most would have been aware at the very least of the Spanish relish for bull¤ghting, which was considerably more gory and less aestheticized at the time than it is now.40 In any case, what the shift from reason to compassion demanded was an effort to rid the nation of any reputation, either deserved or exaggerated, for inhumanity: I would not have it thought, that there is just Ground for those Consequences which our Enemies draw against us from these Practises; but methinks one would be sorry for any Manner of Occasion for such Misrepresentations of us. The Virtues of Tenderness, Compassion and Humanity, are those by which Men are distinguished from Brutes, as much as by Reason it self; and it would be the greatest Reproach to a Nation to distinguish it self from all others by any Defect in these particular Virtues. For which Reasons, I hope that my dear Countrymen will no longer expose themselves by an Effusion of Blood, whether it be of Theatrical Heroes, Cocks, or any other innocent Animals, which we are not obliged to slaughter for our Safety, Convenience, or Nourishment. Where any of these Ends are not served in the destruction of a living Creature, I cannot but pronounce it a great Piece of Cruelty, if not a kind of Murder. (2.277–278)
Once again, we see that “humanity” simultaneously signi¤es a characteristic of the species and the species as a whole. Once again, humans are distinguished from the non-human by compassion. If animals lack fellow feeling, this simply means that we must intervene on their behalf. Of
Curiosity Killed the Cat 74
course, this might entail little more than “humanizing” our treatment of them.41 The semantics of nationalism are in any case clearly subordinated to the semantics of humanity. Keeping these matters in mind, we can see that the shift in the Reward of Cruelty in which Tom is suddenly and ironically transferred from the position of victimizer to victimized—and the new holders of the position of victimizer are the members of the Royal College—reveals a different axis of uni¤cation than that suggested by the narrative. If the star of the show has been Tom Nero, monstrous member of the lower classes, the Reward of Cruelty, with only apparent abruptness, places the physicians in the position previously held by Tom. This abruptness is only apparent because in this narrative move curiosity is divulged as the common element linking what otherwise would seem the most disparate of groups: children and surgeons. Innocence and professionalization, the presocial and hyper-social, are hereby joined. The narrative trajectory, with its emphasis on class and habituation, begins to unravel and lose its dominance. Functional differentiation, rather than class, becomes a central tool of analysis for understanding the groupings in the series, while curiosity jostles habituation as the key to understanding cruelty by providing at least a partial explanation of the presence of joyful faces. I broached the importance of functional differentiation for understanding the “Four Stages” in the previous chapter. Now it should be clear why physicians—as well as judges—have such a prominent position in Hogarth’s work: this group throws into doubt pity as a universal value and linchpin of the social system. Apart from the narrative and seemingly in the background, the engravings accordingly focus attention on a problem area of the universalization of the value of non-cruelty: curiosity as a challenge to the primacy of pity and to the view of human nature as dominated by sympathetic bonds. This challenge is particularly pointed where children are concerned because it suggests that natural and original pity is perhaps neither so original nor so natural after all. In fact, although curiosity provides an explanation for joyful cruelty, and thereby to an extent saves the appearances, childhood curiosity is considered highly problematic from at least John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education onward. Thus Locke, having noted the link between cruelty to animals and childhood curiosity, insists that children are not naturally cruel and that curiosity is “but an appetite after knowledge.”42 The connection and the need to make a distinction between curiosity and cruelty become stronger as the eighteenth century proceeds. In 1725 Francis Hutcheson comments that the reason
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 75
that “Children do delight in some Actions which in fact are cruel and tormenting to Animals, which they have in their power, ®ows not from Malice or want of Compassion, but from their Ignorance of those signs of Pain which many Creatures make; together with a Curiosity to see the various Contortions of their Bodies.”43 In spite of such attempts to distinguish curiosity from cruelty, however, discomfort over their contiguity leads to what could be called the ®ight to monstrosity. Hence, the surgeons in Hogarth’s print are not simply curious nor are they simply habituated, they are quite clearly monstrous. Many of the children too, with their exaggerated smiles, strike the viewer as alien in their pleasures. They are just as much little monsters as they are little scientists, even if their joy, not hidden by socialization, is less eerie and less deceitful than that of their professional counterparts. As we have seen, the type of moral monstrosity that Hogarth depicts is common at the time. Whereas indifference to cruelty is certainly not portrayed in a positive light, joyfulness at the sight of suffering is presented as the sure sign of the perversion of humanity. Malice of this sort is strictly forbidden entry into the state of nature viewed in terms of a normative anthropology. The existence of such an affect is rather given the status of lusus naturae or the unfortunate by-product of the distortions of social in®uences such as poverty, surgical training, the butcher’s trade, and the judge’s profession. With this in mind, let us now return to the problem with which this chapter began. If pity is a universal component of human nature, then how can it be that some humans are pitiless? Or, turned around to reveal the deeper problem: if some are pitiless, why should pity be a value or be valorized as a more salient feature of human nature than cruelty? The discourse of pity begins with the tautology that all humans are human only to be led to the paradox that some humans are not human.44 The universal is infected by a particular that threatens to undo morality itself. Moral monstrosity represents an attempt to mediate between tautology and paradox by suggesting that some humans only appear to be human when they are in fact not human in important ways. It thus forms a liminal space in which the lower classes or surgeons, for example, can be seen to participate at the same time that it precludes humanity as a whole. I should underline that the concept of monstrosity only appears to undo the paradox. Indeed, in philosophical texts the very possibility of real moral monstrosity is usually denied in order to avoid these logical problems. But whereas philosophical texts incline toward a rejection of the reality of moral monstrosity, its evocation in Hogarth presents one with a considerably more crisp and yet much more fuzzy view of this odd crea-
Curiosity Killed the Cat 76
ture. It is more crisp in that moral monstrosity is graphically evoked and its conceptual coupling to habituation and, more importantly, to curiosity is tight. Nonetheless, the logical coupling of habituation, curiosity, and joyful cruelty is kept fuzzy. It is not the paradoxes and problems that are salient. Rather, what comes to the fore is the apparition of monstrosity in spite of these paradoxes and problems. Although it could be said that Hogarth’s engravings present themselves as a solution to the problem of cruelty, a more accurate assessment would be that they present a problem in search of a solution—and that this solution takes the form of a resolution on the plane of appearances rather than logic. The various ambiguities and complexities in the engravings also provide resolutions of this sort by mixing the messages they send. They are produced because, in order to get its point across, the series must simultaneously differentiate agents of cruelty from sympathetic spectators and show that sympathetic response is essential and universal. Consequently, the boy who burns out the bird’s eye shows signs of curiosity and remorse mixed with enjoyment (his gloating companion appears simply monstrous, however). The surgeons mix curiosity, indifference, and monstrosity in a similar fashion, with more emphasis on the signs of professional indifference and depravity. The shifting visage of the “good man” is an interesting case in point. According to sentimental ethics, the only suffering that should bring joy to humans is that of a creature who gets pleasure from the pain of others—the suffering of an inhuman. Hogarth nevertheless clearly felt that his initial depiction of the smiling “good man” moved this ¤gure perilously close to inhumanity. The engraved version resolves this problem by suggesting a mixture of horror at the surgeons’ activities along with the still threatening gesture toward the skeleton. Each of these ambiguities involves a double bind in which the same spectator has contradictory responses (either over time or somehow simultaneously conjoined).45 They indicate attempts to get around the paradox of the coexistence of particular cruelties and universal humanity. In this respect, it is Tom who, far from being a one-dimensional monster, is the most ambiguous and complex member of the series. At ¤rst, he is perhaps simply monstrous, determined to reap pleasure not only from the animal’s pain but also from that of the suffering sympathizer who tries to stop him. At this point, he does appear to be a human that is simply outside of humanity, a position that is already dif¤cult to explain. In the second stage, he has turned to stony indifference, although his grimace still seems to conceal a glimmer of joy. But in the third engraving, having committed his most heinous act and looking truly inhuman, Tom also
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 77
shows signs of a humanity that has perhaps been buried yet is still present even in the most degenerate. He tries to avert his eyes, unable to bear the sight of his deed. Tom suddenly occupies the position otherwise reserved for the “good man,” with the correct affective response (in this case horror) linked to his gaze. Finally, in the last print and now an object of horror, Tom is also the victim and consequently worthy of at least a portion of our sympathy. This ¤nal shift explains the third facet of the “good man”’s expression in the Reward of Cruelty: horror, joy, and sympathy. Tom is a synecdochical representative for the series in that he appears at ¤rst sight to provide an answer but stubbornly retains his status as a question mark. How does cruelty come about? Are certain humans monstrous? How is monstrosity generated? How is pity overridden? In spite of appearances to the contrary, these questions remain largely unresolved. Such ambiguity, nevertheless, provides the very basis for the way that the series is able to communicate at all. For although the engravings toy with logic, their message is ultimately based on fuzziness rather than clarity. It is the lack of resolution that makes the appearance of a resolution possible. Otherwise, the logical strands would lead to those dead ends that have already been pointed out. One could say that communicative logic is often merely partial. The “logic” of monstrosity, which relies on aesthetic supplementation, is a case in point. The ambiguities in the portrayal of Tom Nero—the ambiguities of the series as a whole—do not simply show that Hogarth failed to provide suf¤cient support for his message. They indicate rather the deeply embedded problems that Hogarth faced as well as an attempt to get around these problems. Monstrosity tries to master the problem of universalization by suggesting that certain persons are quite literally not human—that they do not share the same affective structure as truly human beings. Monstrosity is therefore the necessary supplement to habituation and curiosity insofar as neither of the latter can explain the enjoyment of cruelty per se. At the same time, monstrosity opens up the very possibility of communication with those who are not already within the value system promulgated by the engravings. By offering a point of entry into this system that is narcissistic rather than logical, monstrosity bypasses (or at least attempts to bypass) the concrete differences in values held by certain groups. Monstrosity does not threaten in the manner of the noose at Tyburn. Neither does it simply declare that cruelty is obviously—naturally—not something to be enjoyed. Rather, monstrosity graphically presents the viewer with a choice: Come into this system of values or else ¤nd yourself outside the boundaries of humanity. In so doing, the system simultane-
Curiosity Killed the Cat 78
ously de¤nes what the boundaries of the human are at a given point in time and space. In this marking of boundaries the existence of functionally differentiated groups that are linked to practices considered cruel appears as a problem that must be addressed. Can someone who digs about in corpses or vivisects animals really be human? How could such apparent inhumanity come about? Likewise, children, who should exemplify uncorrupted humanity, raise the specter of cruelty as simply an aspect of human nature. As a result, although the message of the “Four Stages” was in principle sent to the lower classes, class is not capable of explaining by itself the non-narrative foci of the series. Of course, grasping the historicity and local nature of humanity does not imply that cruelty ought to be condoned. It does remind us that cruelty was once considered by many to be perfectly human and that this situation was not overturned without struggle or paradox. Pity: An Optical Illusion? To conclude my analysis in this chapter, I will explore a concrete but seemingly strange aspect of Hogarth’s engravings: the series repeats three times a scene of violation of the eyes. In the ¤rst engraving, the young lad behind Tom burns out the eye of a pigeon; in the second engraving, Tom gouges out the eye of the horse he is beating; and in The Reward of Cruelty, one of the surgeons digs about in Tom’s orbital cavity with a scalpel. Given the insistence and repetition, we might say that this violation constitutes the primal scene of the series. But would it be a primal scene in the psychoanalytic sense? Freud hypothesized that if a male child surreptitiously watched his parents copulate a tergo, for example, the sight would trigger anxiety about castration (what was happening to the man’s genitalia and what had happened to those of the woman?).46 It was from the notion of castration anxiety that Freud further developed his much discussed theory of the “uncanny.” Based on a reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” Freud suggested that the mixed feeling of eerie familiarity elicited by the tale is actually castration anxiety disguised and displaced from the genitalia to the eyes. The mythical sandman, who comes to take away the eyes of disobedient children, would be the folkloric symptom of this displacement.47 The eyes are in a sense the metaphor (round and vulnerable) as well as the metonymy (another body part) of the testicles. When the violation of the eyes is compounded with the sadistic probing of the dog’s anus by Tom in the ¤rst engraving, a psychoanalytic approach
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 79
would therefore appear to ¤t the series. Although a reading of this type is feasible, it explains at best only part of an overdetermined situation. In particular, there are also compelling historical reasons why the repeated gesture of the violation of the eyes might be important in Hogarth’s work. Cataract operations were one of the great successes of eighteenthcentury surgery. The surgeons and Tom’s companions, strangely enough, are engaged in operations that look strikingly similar to such procedures (¤gures 4.1–4.4). But, if it were not quite clear that the boys in Hogarth’s print are engaged in a quasi-scienti¤c endeavor, one could easily argue that the relationship between recent surgical breakthroughs and the uglier side of childhood curiosity entails little more than a striking but uninformative isomorphism. Undeniably, of course, while Hogarth’s depiction refers the viewer to the ¤eld of experiment, the cataract operation is meant to restore sight whereas the boys’ probing activities take sight away. In the case of the horse, moreover, any virtuosic aspect appears wholly absent. In the last engraving too, in which the surgeon examines the sunken eyes of the cadaver, the scienti¤c content of the scene is exactly what is put into doubt by the activities occurring therein. Nevertheless, the unappealing character who probes Tom’s eyes has been recognized as a well-known ocular surgeon.48 The mixing of science and monstrousness—the visual confusion between giving sight and taking it away—points to a deep anxiety about the relations among ethics, science, and vision. The semiotic crisscrossings indeed place this anxiety in the foreground rather than denying it. This was because, even as it restored vision, the cataract operation threatened to expose pity as an optical illusion. The above claim, which may well seem counterintuitive, is demonstrated in a rather striking fashion in Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749). In this text, one of the author’s preoccupations is to determine whether, following an operation to remove cataracts, those born blind and suddenly given sight would be able immediately to distinguish between different shapes that they have previously known only by touch. Would they know, for example, the difference between a sphere and a cube?49 After lengthy consideration Diderot suspends judgment on this point. But his refusal to answer the question he himself has posed does not stop him from making some rather strong claims for the moral ef¤cacy of the visual. Sight is directly related to the ability to feel pity. Identi¤cation with the sufferer is predicated on the vividness of the impression made on the psyche by the spectacle of pain. The blind, unable to apprehend by sight the situation of the sufferer and forced to rely on the less effective channel of hear-
Curiosity Killed the Cat 80
ing, are constitutionally disposed to monstrosity: “Because of all the exterior demonstrations that awaken in us commiseration and ideas of pain the blind are only affected by protestations, I suspect them in general of inhumanity.”50 Furthermore, the transmission of sounds involves the risk that what are read by receiver as identical bits of information are actually encoded at the source as different messages: “What difference is there for a blind person between a man who urinates and a man who, without complaining, spills his blood?” (92–93). For the sighted, a similar problem occurs insofar as distance and diminutiveness (the two factors for all practical purposes the same in the realms of sight) can attenuate the vividness of an image. Such attenuation imposed by quantitative criteria actually undermines qualitative differences: Do we not ourselves cease to sympathize when distance or smallness of objects produces in us the same effect as the privation of sight in the blind? So much do our virtues depend on our way of feeling and on the degree to which exterior things affect us! Thus I do not doubt at all that, without the fear of punishment, many people would have less trouble killing a man at such a distance that they would see him as big as a swallow than slitting a bull’s throat with their own hands. If we have compassion for a suffering horse and yet crush an ant without scruple, isn’t this the same principle that determines us? (93)
One of the conundrums produced by the cataract operation is precisely how distinctions of quality are made in the visual realm. Is quality grounded in the immediacy of sight, or do certain aspects of sight itself have to be learnt? That is, should concepts of conventional coding and constructivism replace naïve objectivism? How does one know the difference between sphere and cube, urine and blood, man and animal? The consequences drawn from this line of questioning are remarkable: the behavior condoned by the morality of the senses is only a matter of perspective.51 It is easier to kill a human that looks to be about the same size as a bird than to put a knife to a bull.52 The ¤eld of optics was not only important to the sciences that sought to understand vision. It was not only important to the surgeons who tried to correct it. It was also an essential area of thought for an ethical discourse in which pity was to guarantee proper social interaction. If the lens of the microscope might broaden the ¤eld of sensibility to include creatures not otherwise visible, then it could also appear as the material manifestation of objectivity as a barrier to pity.53 A virtuoso portrayed in the Tatler has no doubt lost his sense of proportion when he enthuses about a demonstra-
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 81
Figure 4.1. First Stage of Cruelty (detail). Figure 4.2. The Reward of Cruelty (detail).
Figure 4.4. Cataract surgery from Albert Haller’s Disputationes chirurgicae selectae (1755). Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.
Figure 4.3. Detail of cataract surgery from Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.
tion in which “one of those Animals that we ¤nd in the Blue of a Plumb” was “ty’d down alive” so that a group of so-called scientists might observe “the Palpitations of the Heart, the Course of the Blood, the Working of the Muscles, and the Convulsions in the several Limbs, with great Accuracy and Improvement.” But in the leveling of the great chain of being,
Curiosity Killed the Cat 82
this virtuoso who can also blithely assert that we have “often seen a Dog opened, to observe the circulation of the Blood, or make other useful enquiry” has clearly lost a portion of his humanity.54 As Addison would similarly intimate in the Spectator, there is something macabre in the inhuman pleasure and insensitive detachment of the “innumerable Retainers to Physick, who, for want of other Patients, amuse themselves with the sti®ing of Cats in an Air Pump, cutting up Dogs alive, or impaling of Insects upon the point of a needle for Microscopical Observations.”55 The instability of the optics of pity is operative in Hogarth’s portrayal of the tormenting boys: what if cruelty is original, the fruit of curiosity, and only later, and by a certain group if at all, can identi¤cation be developed and referred to a sentimental ethical category? Why in fact value pity, even if it is natural? Hogarth’s conception of the world of cruelty, although it poses these questions, does so indirectly or unconsciously. And if there is something uncanny in the prints—something eerily familiar—it is that the frightening arbitrariness of the moral order lies hidden in full view. For Hogarth the inability to see, which includes the inability to see that the other suffers and so to take the place of the other, is directly related to the absence of pity. This is most literally illustrated in his 1759 print Pit Ticket: The Cockpit. In the dead center of this work stands an indifferent man, the Anti-Christ of this inverted Last Supper, taking bets on the savage spectacle.56 Two features distinguish him in this crowd of reprobates: on the one hand, he is a nobleman—Lord Albemarle Bertie, to be exact—amongst the generality of riff-raff; on the other hand, he is blind (¤gure 4.5). The obsessive violation of the eyes in the “Four Stages,” the singling out of the avenue of pity’s evocation, is related to this condemnation of the blind. Destroying the eye destroys the link with nature. In doing so it mimics a type of second-order observation that can afford to ask questions about the value of pity. The blindness that frees inquiry is that of the habituated scientist. It is also that of ethical discourse itself. In trying to deal with the problem of re®exivity, Hogarth’s “Four Stages” shares Rousseau’s strategy of repression. On the other hand, Diderot’s frank admission of the contingency of the morality of pity (as opposed to the feeling of pity) veers toward the dissolution of the discourse that produced the inhuman.57 As to this dissolution, Kant’s ethical position on animals is instructive. Kant clearly thought that cruelty to animals should not be encouraged, but he also maintained that animals did not bear the essential mark of humanity: freedom. If, therefore, animals cannot act morally, then neither can we have any moral duties toward them. Reviving the canard that in
The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 83
Figure 4.5. William Hogarth, Pit Ticket: The Cockpit. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
“England butchers and doctors do not sit on a jury because they are accustomed to the sight of death and hardened,” Kant goes on to state, “Vivisectionists, who use living animals for their experiments, certainly act cruelly, although their aim is praiseworthy, since animals must be regarded as man’s instruments; but any such cruelty for sport cannot be justi¤ed.”58 If cruelty is to be shunned, it is out of duty to ourselves, and, placing the value of sympathy in question, Kant taught that children “ought not to be full of feeling, but they should be full of the idea of duty.”59 Although Kant himself used the “Four Stages of Cruelty” to illustrate his point, one wonders if Hogarth would have agreed with his argument or even fully understood it.
PART III
The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade
5 Science and Insensibility
On April 3, 1768, Easter Sunday, the young count de Sade abused a Strasbourgeoise by the name of Rose Keller, some thirty-six years of age. Sade had found her begging on the Place des Victoires in Paris. She had apparently just left mass, but the area was known as a haunt for prostitutes. Sade brought Keller to his house in Arcueil, then a village on the outskirts of the city. According to the woman, Sade promised to employ her as a servant. He eventually whipped her furiously and at repeated intervals, shouting imprecations and emitting all variety of noises. After apparently climaxing, he stopped. The woman managed to escape and made her plight known to the authorities. Sade claimed that his victim was well aware of his sexual intentions. Even were this the case, we might question whether physical and psychological tortures were part of the bargain. There are other contradictions in the testimonies given by the two parties. Keller claimed that her tormentor had bound her, that he had used not only a whip but also a rod, and that he had made many incisions on her with a small knife and then dripped hot wax on the wounds. Sade maintained that he had not bound her, that only a whip had been used, and that he had neither made incisions nor dripped wax. As to the last point, he insisted that he had applied to her wounds a curative ointment.1 A surgeon, Le Comte, who examined Keller shortly after she had lodged her complaint, gave expert testimony. He declared that although the skin had cer-
The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade 88
tainly been removed by some means, it was probably by whip and not by knife. He found no evidence of burns. It is entirely possible that, given the difference in status between Sade and Keller, the surgeon could have been in®uenced.2 Yet in spite of these mitigating and biasing factors, Sade was to spend several months incarcerated for his misdeeds. The “affaire d’Arcueil,” as it came to be known, was the ¤rst major public exposure of Sade’s interest in algolagnia (the sexologist’s term for sexual pleasure in in®icting pain, eventually displaced by the epithet “sadism”). His punishment was the ¤rst of several increasingly prolonged imprisonments that were to mark indelibly his life and writings. As such, the affair has become one of the crucial points of reference for Sade’s biographers, supporters, and detractors.3 Tallying the author’s crimes, belletrist Jean Paulhan posed a rhetorical question concerning the “affaire d’Arcueil”: “It seems established that Sade gave a spanking to a whore in Paris: does that ¤t with a year in jail?”4 For Paulhan, the writings, not the man, offend, and both are thereby worthy of our cautious defense. For radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, Sade’s deeds and texts are parts of an inseparable nexus: misogynist to be sure, and indicative of the general structure of patriarchy. She dedicates Pornography: Men Possessing Women to the memory of Rose Keller.5 How then might we approach this biographical event and the textual treatments, written by Sade and others, to which it gave rise? We can hardly treat the event as an absolute origin; it was already embedded in the communication networks of the time. These networks surely shaped Sade’s behavior—although in ways to which we may never have access. They much more clearly shaped the reception of the occurrence. The “affaire d’Arcueil” propelled Sade—willing or not—into a very speci¤c subject position: the virtuoso or amateur scientist, the embodiment of the eighteenth-century schism between sentiment and science. Besides the predictable shock over Sade’s blasphemous choice of days for his activities, another aspect of the case was given particular emphasis: the possibility that the villain was carrying on some sort of medical and scienti¤c experiment. As the initial incident was just being reported, the claim that Sade had made numerous incisions was picked out as particularly reprehensible in the public outcry—an outcry that appears to be one of the factors that led to incarceration. Sade’s own testimony that he had applied an ointment rather than wax was given the twist that he was testing a medicine of his own invention. Thus the Marquise du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole in a letter dated April 12, 1768, concerning the affair,
Science and Insensibility 89
When she [Keller] was all bloodied, he pulled a jar of unguent from his pocket, bandaged the wounds, and left her. I don’t know whether he gave her anything to drink or eat, but he only came back to see her the next morning. He examined the wounds, and saw that the unguent had had the effect that he expected. Then he took a penknife and sliced up the body all over. Next he took the same unguent, spread it on all the wounds, and left. . . . It is said that the motive for this execrable action was to test experimentally his unguent.6
The following day Deffand added, “Sade . . . far from disavowing or blushing at his crime, claims to have done a very noble deed and to have rendered a great service to the public by the discovery of a balm that cures wounds on the spot. It is true that it had that effect on the woman. She has desisted in her pursuit of her assassin, apparently in exchange for a bit of money” (1.419). Sarcasm aside, the Marquise puts her ¤nger on the most prevalent defense of such experimentation: utility. The miracle-cure hypothesis was reported far and wide, appearing for example in Courrier du Bas Rhin and the Gazette d’Utrecht.7 Over the years, the initial incident and its reception became ever more distorted, and Sade eventually found himself suspected of human vivisection. Sade’s biographer Gilbert Lély notes a report from 1780 that Mirabeau, imprisoned like Sade at Vincennes, retorted when the latter demanded to know his identity, “My name is that of a man of honor who has never dissected nor poisoned women.”8 Similarly, shortly after the French Revolution had begun, we ¤nd a report that Sade had been locked away in the Bastille for “inhuman experiments that he was accused of having carried out on living individuals.”9 Eventually, the shocking speculation that Keller’s tormentor was mocking the ®agellation of Christ faded away and the theme of science became more insistent and mythologized. The ¤rst published literary treatment of the “affaire d’Arcueil” as an exercise in human vivisection is found in the pages of Rétif de la Bretonne’s Parisian Nights, or The Nocturnal Spectator. This sprawling, multi-volume work appeared primarily in 1788, with publication picking up again brie®y during the Revolution.10 Applying the adjective “literary” to it is somewhat inaccurate and anachronistic. Playing on Addison and Steele’s seminal journalistic enterprise, Rétif portrays himself as the “Hibou”—that is, the “Owl”—a ¤gure who wanders the streets of Paris after dark in search of adventure, crime, and tales to tell. The text is clearly part of the culture of sentiment: building up and relieving tension, engaging affective re-
The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade 90
sponse, and playing on sympathy. Its desired effects have a purportedly moral goal, but the work is pursued in an overtly sensationalist—in our current sense of the term—and often prurient manner. In the Nights, Sade as a character pops up in several places: ¤rst as the mysterious kidnapper of a woman of dubious reputation; next as the abductor of a newlywed couple (he forces the man to copulate with prostitutes as the wife, bound, looks on); then involved in a dangerous debauchery that recreates the infamous accusations of poisoning lodged against Sade in Marseilles (the poison turns out to have been cantharides bonbons that he gave prostitutes for lubricious reasons).11 All of this is only preparation for the culminating episode of the Sade trajectory in the Nights, a lurid trans¤guration of the “affaire d’Arcueil,” wherein Sade plays the role of malefactor and scientist. Although the episode, entitled “The Woman Dissected Alive,” is not particularly graphic—the dissection never gets underway in earnest—the mere possibility of cutting open a living human, exploring the sensitive body in pain, is portrayed as the acme of cruelty and on the far side of comprehension. As Rétif intones, “There are horrors that ferocious beings commit—horrors that are unbelievable. Such is this one” (2566). The intended victim, a “poor, old, ugly, badly dressed woman,” encounters the Hibou as she ®ees Sade’s house (2566). He manages to get her to a hospice supported by a benevolent aristocrat: “There, she told us that she had been dissected. I thought her mad” (2567). Once again, inhumanity appears impossible; the supposed victim must instead be insane. But as the story unfolds, it is the crime that is proven real, and its perpetrator a monster. Sade, we are told, approached the woman as she was begging, and he feigned the emotion that would be appropriate under the circumstances: She was thin, almost dying. He gave to her. “You’re quite unfortunate!” “Oh, yes, monsieur!” “What are you doing here on earth?” “You’re right, but I haven’t the strength to die!” “Could you be a concierge in a little country home?” “Yes, yes, my good monsieur!” He brought her there, but with what a plan! (2569)
The plan is then carried out as follows: Once she had rested, she was brought into a large room where there was an anatomy table. She was seized. The count and his companions said, “What is this unfortunate woman doing on earth? She’s good for nothing here. She must help us to penetrate all the mysteries of the human structure!” She was bound as they spoke thus. She screamed horribly. Everyone exited so they might send the domestics away, as had been
Science and Insensibility 91
ordered, for the time that the screams of the dissected woman might be heard. (2569–2570)
The ostensible quest for knowledge overrides the value of pity. The libertine Sade is made to speak in the detached manner of the scientist. The use of the impersonal pronoun creates a pastiche of experimental style: “One had examined all the exterior parts of her body, whilst announcing the interior parts. One sounded all the viscera—the heart, liver, spleen, kidneys—because, said the demonstrator, it was certainly necessary to see the effect and the play of life in the exterior organs before exhibiting their secret springs” (2570). Foiling the scientists’ plans, the woman, left brie®y alone, is able to untie herself and escape. Others had not been so lucky: “She asserts that she saw three bodies in the room: one that was nothing but bones; another, opened up and conserved in a great jar; and an entirely fresh one of a man” (2570). The reader may be somewhat surprised to learn that alongside Sade, the face of pleasurable cruelty in the Nights, Rétif saw ¤t to elaborate a defense of human vivisection on the grounds of utility. In numerous other places in Rétif’s vast corpus, we also encounter medical practitioners and students who represent the humane face of science and the proper treatment of patients. But these supposedly positive counterexamples only underline the resonance that the linkage of science, cruelty, and Sade had for both Rétif and, presumably, his audience. As late as 1798, a full thirty years after the “affaire d’Arcueil,” Rétif would explain his purpose in writing Anti-Justine, or The Delights of Love: “One will adore women while reading it. One will cherish them while encunting them. But one will detest even more the vivodissector—the same one who, with a long white beard, was pulled from the Bastille on the fourteenth of July.”12 Sade had actually been transferred from the Bastille to a mental asylum at Charenton shortly before the storming of the prison (he had been inciting passersby with seditious comments screamed through a funnel meant for the disposal of excrement). Rétif never published the Anti-Justine, the contents of which rival Sade’s pornographic offerings.13 His avowed intention is to separate carnal pleasure from cruelty, and here Rétif is unrepentant in his praise for almost any type of sexual pleasure, including incest. Nonetheless, Rétif’s failure to eradicate scenes of seemingly concupiscent cruelty from his work may indicate a measure of mauvaise foi.14 Indeed, in the very book meant to vilify Sade, Rétif could not resist painting the portrait of a famously endowed monk named Foutre-à-mort or “Fuck-to-Death” who, after killing the object of his attentions thanks to the size of his member, whips
The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade 92
Figure 5.1. The monk Foutre-à-mort prepares to dissect his victim in Rétif de la Bretonne’s L’anti-Justine. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
out a scalpel, proclaims, “Let’s skin her!” and proceeds to cut off “the ®eshy part of her breasts, her entire pubic mound . . . the bladder, the womb,” and “the ®esh of her buttocks” in order to provide a regal meal for his brethren.15 With the open addition of sexuality to the mix, ambiguity and ambivalence only seem to strengthen fascination (¤gure 5.1). It appears, in fact, that the theme of human vivisection also fascinated Sade largely because he himself had been cast as a virtuoso. Sade had ¤rst treated the topic in the earliest version of Justine. Entitled The Misfortunes of Virtue, it was written in the Bastille in 1787, but only discovered and published in the twentieth century. The ill-starred heroine of this novella escapes from the clutches of a murderous sodomite only to stumble into the lair of a certain Rodin, an a¤cionado of surgery and anatomy. Justine is eventually able to ®ee, but not before overhearing Rodin and his accomplice Rombeau discussing their decision to vivisect the former’s daughter, Rosalie. What was left suggested in Sade’s ¤rst attempt at the topic was more graphically rendered in the much longer Justine that was published in 1793. Then in 1799 Sade published The New Justine, adding still more
Science and Insensibility 93
Figure 5.2. Rodin receives the scalpel in Sade’s La nouvelle Justine. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
details and an illustration to the scenario (¤gure 5.2). Below I quote at length from the latter work. The discussion centers on the various arguments for and against vivisecting Rosalie. It concludes, I should note, with the two setting about their work with the utmost detached objectivity with respect to their victim and with utter subjectivity in terms of the experimenters’ own responses: — . . . Think of it, Rodin, think of how useful to anatomy such a subject could be. Never will it reach its ¤nal degree of perfection unless the examination of the vessels is undertaken on a child, fourteen or ¤fteen years of age, who has died a cruel death. It is only by this type of contraction that we can undertake the analysis of such an interesting part. The same goes for the membrane that insures virginity: one must have a young girl for that examination. What can one observe once the subject has reached puberty? Nothing. The menstrual ®ow tears the hymen, and all research becomes inexact. Your daughter is precisely the age that we need. She has yet to have her ¤rst period. We’ve only had her from be-
The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade 94
hind. Such attacks do no damage to the membrane in question. We can study her at our leisure. I hope that you’ll decide to do it. —Good lord! I’m already decided, replied Rodin. It is odious that such futile considerations should thus put a stop to the progress of the sciences. Have great men ever let themselves be captivated by such weak chains? All our masters in the Hippocratic arts carried out experiments in their hospitals. My surgery instructor every year dissected living creatures of both sexes, and the two of us have only set straight the errors of our predecessors by similar operations. For a dozen sacri¤ces, we’ve saved the life of more than two thousand individuals. And I ask: Should one ever waver in such a case? All artists have thought the same: when Michelangelo wanted to paint a natural-looking Christ, did he worry his conscience about crucifying a young man and copying him in anguish? The sublime Weeping Magdalene by Reni was modeled on a beautiful woman whom the students of this great man had whipped mercilessly: everyone knows that she died from this treatment. But when it’s a question of the progress of our art, with what necessity do these same means impose themselves! And how much less an evil it is to allow ourselves to go ahead! Are those murders carried out in the name of the law of another type? And the aim of these laws, which are considered so wise, is it not the sacri¤ce of one in order to save a thousand? On the contrary, we are owed rewards when we are courageous enough to conquer nature thus for the bene¤t of humanity. —Oh! The victory is not that great, said Rombeau. I don’t recommend that you make of it a merit in the eyes of those who know the excessive excitement [chatouillement] that these types of actions produce. —I won’t hide from you the fact they stimulate me in¤nitely. In general, every pain that I produce on others, either by surgery, or by whipping, or by dissecting live ®esh [disséquant sur le cru] puts my spermatic animals [animaux spermatiques] in such discordance that a manifest irritation and involuntary erection occurs, which, without touching myself, leads more or less quickly to ejaculation, in proportion to the degree of suffering imprinted on the subject. You remember having seen me discharge without anyone touching me the last time we operated on that young man, whose left side you had opened in order to observe the palpitations of the heart. . . . —I admit, said Rombeau, that I feel these same motions, and I cannot conceive by what inexplicable contradiction mysterious nature every day inspires in man the taste for the destruction of her own works. —I myself understand it perfectly, replied Rodin. These portions of matter, disorganized and thrown by us into the receptacle of her works, gives
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her the pleasure of recreating other forms. And, if nature’s pleasure [jouissance] is creation, then the pleasure of the man who destroys must in¤nitely ®atter nature. After all, she cannot succeed in her creations without destruction. Therefore, one must strikingly destroy people in order to give her the voluptuous pleasure of creating them. —Thus, murder is a pleasure. —I would say it is more than that: it is a duty. . . . 16
My analyses in the following pages will circle this quotation, unraveling its various arguments and situating it in relation to other engagements— Rétif’s not the least—with the theme of experimenting on humans. Rodin and Rombeau were not, after all, the product of some spurt of diabolical creativity on the part of Sade. The experimental scientist was a longstanding node of tension in the elaboration of sentimental ethics as it related to science and progress. And if the vivisector of animals was already “inhuman,” then so much more the vivisector of humans. Beyond biography, name-calling, and literary tit-for-tats, we are faced here with a complex meeting of structures of knowledge, discourses of sensibility and vision, the Enlightenment project, and the development of new institutions and social roles. Consequently, my reading will not attempt to unlock Sade’s system.17 Rather, I will try to show how the interest that Sade holds lies in the de-systemizing effects of his texts. In what has been seen as a culmination of the Enlightenment project or the divulging of its hidden dialectical movement, Sade’s philosophers uncover and freeze the aporias and paradoxes of the communications systems that they have inherited. In many respects, we might see Sade’s works as radicalizations of the already radical materialism of the likes of Helvétius and La Mettrie. And certainly Sade, much like Rétif in his darker moments, was able to open up topics that would have been closed to non-clandestine writings. Peripheral to the mainstream of Enlightenment output, matters approached more obliquely by writers such as Diderot come to the fore in Sade. By highlighting these margins, we can see why the supposed center was always unstable. And, as the submerged symptoms of eighteenth-century communication networks emerge, we can see more clearly how a certain freedom is located in the gaps of dissolution. Enlightenment Visuality and Its Other An educated and inquisitive man of his age, Sade kept himself informed of medical practices and progress. We know, for example, that the library
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at his Provençal chateau in La Coste included a surgical reference book.18 Sade was clearly also aware of scienti¤c research and in particular contemporary accounts of physiology. Truly, Haller’s discussion of the causes of male tumescence must have read like a how-to manual for the Marquis. Penile erection is produced, writes Haller, “by love, the desire of enjoyment, the friction of the glans, and various irritations of the bladder, testicles, seminal vessels, and urethra, from urine, from abundance of good semen, from the venereal poison, from cantharides, whipping with rods, or nervous convulsion.”19 And Haller’s casual remarks about “the dissection of animals killed in the act of venery” and accounts of the anatomy of the “virgin uterus” (408, 412) certainly inform Sade’s own take on vivisection. The role of vivisection in eighteenth-century science is thus an obvious topic with which to begin an analysis of the “affaire d’Arcueil” and its literary afterlife. In this regard, David B. Morris has suggested that “Sade’s novels in their treatment of pain and sexuality represent a pornographic extension of the new clinical gaze.”20 That is, we might consider the presence of scienti¤c and medical discourse—both explicit and latent—within The New Justine and other works as a re®ection, albeit transmogri¤ed, of the paradigm shift in the scienti¤c gaze that Michel Foucault elaborates in The Birth of the Clinic. Certainly, discussions of human vivisection in particular, prevalent throughout the second half of the century, appear to con¤rm this thesis. In the Encyclopedia, for example, the article “Anatomy” —to which Diderot made certain apposite contributions—opposes opaque, dead tissue to clear, living tissue. The terms of this opposition mark the locus that Xavier Bichat (certainly a body snatcher, though probably not a human vivisector) would produce for morbid anatomy at the end of the century: a place for the study of clear, dead tissue.21 In fact, insistence on the need for living human bodies indicates a perceived research problem. It was widely admitted that death so changed the state of the organs that learning from corpses was dubious science. The eventual abandonment of this urge toward very fresh organs thereby supports Foucault’s hypothesis that death had to become part of science in order for morbid anatomy to be considered truly valid. We might even see the elevation of the status of the latter as a make-do solution to the problem of getting live subjects.22 In the Encyclopedia this solution had not yet entered into the self-understanding of physiology, and we ¤nd instead quali¤ed recommendations that criminals be vivisected. Similar endorsements in both Rétif and Sade suggest that the notion that living bodies are necessary for the perfection of anatomical knowledge had yet to disappear by the end of the century. We should nonetheless be wary of treating
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such endorsements as re®ections or “pornographic extensions” pure and simple. After all, in the case of Sade in particular, we might deem the call for vivisection parodic.23 It certainly twists arguments found elsewhere in particularly wicked ways. Here we must draw a distinction that may initially seem trivial: Diderot, Rétif, and Sade were not doctors, surgeons, or in any profound sense members of what were well underway to becoming professional organizations of science and medicine. Diderot was an informed amateur, and Rétif’s and Sade’s claims to medical and scienti¤c knowledge tend to appear almost as mere pretext. The texts of such authors are often less interesting for the history of science or medicine than for the history of communications about science and medicine. Reading in terms of what Foucault in The Order of Things calls the “classical episteme” might appear less of a problem in this respect. The concept of episteme claims to designate underlying structures of signi¤cation and knowledge that cut across the boundaries of domains such as linguistics, political economy, and biology. Moreover, according to Foucault’s own argument, Sade’s texts indicate the extreme expression and limit of the classical episteme and its system of representation.24 Jonathan Crary, elaborating Foucault’s examination, sums up the construction of vision at this time as follows: “the eighteenth-century observer confronts a uni¤ed space of order, unmodi¤ed by his or her own sensory and physiological apparatus, on which the contents of the world can be studied and compared, known in a multitude of relationships.”25 The camera obscura, with its projection of a representation of the world onto a surface, is given as the technical apparatus that simultaneously mirrors and constructs such a notion of vision. An example of this is Descartes’s elucidation of the camera obscura by reference to an eyeball, preferably removed from a “freshly dead human” or, lacking that, from a bull or an animal of similar size, and through which light is allowed to pass, projecting an image onto a white sheet.26 Crary notes concerning this experiment, “By this radical disjunction of eye from observer and its installation in this formal apparatus of objective representation, the dead, perhaps even bovine eye, undergoes a kind of apotheosis and rises to an incorporeal status.”27 The vocabulary used when the operation on Rosalie is ¤rst suggested appears to correspond to such a construct: the observation and “examination of the vessels” will yield a complete “analysis” of the body, and the otherwise outrageous request is supported by the epistemological quest to represent every element of the world. This request is re®ected, moreover, in the anatomical texts of the day. Morgagni, the great mid-century anatomist, details a vast number of dissections of the genitalia of men and women in his writings.28
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The structure of the female genitalia in particular—e.g., the nature and even existence of the hymen—was a matter of technical debate.29 As for a broader readership, we only have to open up the Encyclopedia to ¤nd plates —presumably taken from dead bodies—detailing just those vessels and membranes in subjects the same tender age as Rosalie (¤gure 5.3). We might even go further and note that one of the foundational images of the Renaissance resurgence of anatomy already placed the female body in the position of object to be explored: the frontispiece of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543)—a clear inspiration for Hogarth’s Reward of Cruelty—depicts the author holding open the abdomen of a dissected woman (¤gure 5.4). In this regard, Jonathan Sawday has shown that while Anatomia may have been depicted with apparent unconcern as a woman in Renaissance iconography, the female body as anatomized and dissected was both anxiogenic and eroticized at the time. Of central concern was the mysterious productive power of the uterus or “matrix”—a concern that appears not to have faded by the time Sade singled out this site as the ¤nal frontier of the representing gaze.30 Yet without denying the importance of this construction of vision or dismissing the material apparatus on which it depends, I would like to question its hegemony. If nothing else, other apparatuses—microscopes and telescopes, to name salient examples—add relativity to the notion of representation as simple projection of the world. In addition, to assert representation alone would elide the fundamental tension within the eighteenth century between objective and apparently observerless observation and the claims of sensibility. The latter presents us with a radically different notion of observation: the eye as the extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to the body, to affectivity, and to the observer as spectator rather than knower. Sensibility too could be considered essentially observerless. In its realm, the eye becomes the conduit for action on the nervous system, bypassing the detached mental screen and directly affecting the body. To an extent, these two constructions of the gaze coexist and are even complementary: to the body is annexed sensibility and complete subjectivity; to the mind detachment and objectivity. Although effects of framing tend to obscure this, it is worth noting that this counterweight to the dominance of the gaze as representation issued by and large from within scienti¤c discourse itself. In an illustration that initially looks to be a clear case of the detached, representative gaze, we see three disembodied eyeballs and a camera obscura (¤gure 5.5). In front of these eyeballs and the camera stands an object; light passes through the lens or aperture, and an image is projected onto the inner wall. The
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Figure 5.3. Anatomy plate illustrating the female genitalia and reproductive system from Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.
overlapping of eyeball with arti¤cial apparatus—a graphic representation of the observerless gaze—appears complete. We should not ignore, however, another important feature of the illustration: attached to the back of each eyeball and rapidly disappearing from the frame is the optic nerve. In other illustrations from the period, the eyeball, far from being detached, appears as the most prominent protrusion of the brain and fully integrated with the nervous system (¤gure 5.6). Here then is the other construction of vision, in which the observer is not removed from physiology and in which the eye, no longer a transparent medium, is the almost obliterated interface between the spectacle of the world and the body as a network of sensitivities. Vivisection is curious in that it brings these two constructions face to face: the detached gaze of the examining scientist simultaneously feels the twinge of nervous interaction when it is confronted with the spectacle of pain. In this doubling of gazes we glimpse as well that notion of self-re®ective observation that has positioned Descartes as a key ¤gure in the elaboration of the subject: the “I” that, in observing itself thinking, posits that it also exists. But this self-re®ective moment actually helps separate and entrench the two gazes: the “cogito” safeguards the ®oat-
Figure 5.4. Frontispiece from Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543). Typ 565.43.868 F, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.
Figure 5.5. Comparison of camera obscura and eyeballs from l’abbé Nollet’s Leçons de physique expérimentale (8th ed., 1775). Typ 715.75.614, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.
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Figure 5.6. Eyeball as part of the nervous system from Descartes’s La dioptrique (1637). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
ing, objective vision of the scientist and ensures that the sensible vision of the body falls on the other side of an insuperable divide as object to be studied.31 The vivisector, on the other hand, was often portrayed as never quite capable of maintaining this divide. Consider, for example, Nicolas Malebranche’s Search after Truth from 1674. As a follower of Descartes, Malebranche had no ethical dif¤culties with vivisection. Scurrilous rumors even circulated suggesting that he was cruel to animals for no other reason than to prove his wholehearted support of Cartesian doctrine. In his elaboration of his teacher’s understanding of the passions in relation to the nervous system, Malebranche posits what he calls “sensible sight [la veue sensible],” by which the pain or pleasure of an observed subject impinges on the eye, which then transmits pleasure or pain to the nerves. In this context, Malebranche remarks, Finally, [compassion] checks our malice and cruelty. For the horror of blood, the fear of death—in a word the sensible impression of compassion —often prevents the massacre of animals, even by those most convinced that they are merely machines, because most men are unable to kill them
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without themselves being wounded by the counterblow of compassion (my emphasis).32
Malebranche’s principal concern is that compassion via “sensible sight” limits human cruelty to other humans. Nonetheless, his recognition of the impression that even illusory pain makes on the observer marks out the path that would be taken in subsequent arguments against vivisection. With respect to this matter, differences and convergences between the British and French cases are instructive. Whereas in Britain the practice of vivisection met early on with considerable resistance, particularly from journalists and philosophers who promulgated and subscribed to sentimental ethics, in France the tenacity of Descartes’s doctrine of the separation of mind and body, which entailed as a corollary that animals had no souls and were incapable of feeling pain, initially led many adherents to vivisect mercilessly. Nonetheless, objections to vivisection were raised soon enough in France as well, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Cartesian corollary was for all practical purposes dead.33 Of course, animal experimentation continued to be defended on the grounds of utility. Malebranche’s observations adumbrate the exact reasons why vivisection and objections to the practice go hand in hand. Far from supporting a view of nature as mechanical or clockwork, animal experimentation tended instead to support sensibility, elevating it to the rank of a key physiological conception of the eighteenth century. The historical irony is that the very notion of sensibility was a scienti¤c discovery based on such practices.34 In fact, when the word “vivisection” makes its earliest recorded entrance into English, it is directly tied to this concept—although the context is seasickness: Water in any open Vessel . . . will on alterations of the posture of the Ship over®ow; even so the Contents of the Stomach, if Liquid, may run impetuously several ways, touch or make an irritation on some parts of the Body or Stomach it did not touch before, and how sensible those nervous parts are, need not be told any who have seen Vivisections, where the least, but super¤cial easie touches, even when the Guts and Stomach are in some Animals out of the Abdomen, will cause a sensible and vigorous Peristaltick motion.35
This quotation is from an account of a voyage to Jamaica written by Sir Hans Sloane, who was to become president of the College of Physicians and then of the Royal Society. Sloane was no doubt in a good position to
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note that when the insides of a creature being vivisected are touched, the “sensibility” of the “nervous parts” becomes quite evident. On the other hand, the usual mode of description in scienti¤c texts dealing with vivisection is a gaze that represents the scene in entirely detached terms; nothing is made of the observer’s own sensibility in witnessing an animal’s suffering. Take, for example, Stephen Hales, the experimental scientist who had so disturbed Pope. Hales’s study of blood pressure, Haemastaticks (1733), details an animal experiment on almost every page. Here the “I” of the observer is a constant point of reference, but only as a locus from which certain techniques issue and by which data are registered. Hales describes a blood-pressure experiment thus: When I had seen to what Height the Blood would rise in Tubes ¤xed to the carotid Arteries of several Dogs . . . I immediately af¤xed to the Pipe that was inserted into the Artery another Tube that was four Feet and half high. . . . Then cutting open both the jugular Veins, blood warm Water was poured into the Tunnel, which ®owing down thence from a perpendicular Height equal to that of the arterial Blood in the former Tube, was by this means impell’d thro’ all the Arteries of the Body with a Force nearly equal to that with which the Blood was propelled by the Heart, and was thence carried with the venal Blood out at the Jugulars; where the ®owing Blood became more and more diluted with Water, till the Dog died.36
It would be hard to imagine a more incorporeal eyeball than that of Hales. I should add that in Haemastaticks the suffering of animals is not dismissed; rather, their reactions become incorporated into the narrative of scienti¤c representation. Before inducing conclusions from the fact, Hales, for instance, comments, “It was observable that the Dogs constantly expressed great Uneasiness instantly as soon as the blood warm Water entered the Arteries, and mixed with the Blood” (115). The effects of vivisection on the observer are, however, carefully excluded at this point. Only in the preface do we ¤nd Hales admitting and remarking his own sensibility: “The disagreeableness of the work did long discourage me from engaging in it; but I was spurred on by the hopes that we may thereby get some farther Insight into the Animal Oeconomy” (xviii). The splitting of the gaze into detached representation and involved affective response is turned against scienti¤c research and scientists like Hales when the very principle discovered by vivisection undermines objectivity and instead leads to imputations of inhumanity. As Samuel Johnson writes concerning animal experimentation,
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It is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practiced, it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence.37
Thus Johnson refers the “images” of vivisection directly to the “sensibility” of his readers—a sensibility that came into being and was circulated via the very same publications that are decried. Even within texts that support scienti¤c endeavor such portrayals will be found. In this respect, it is perhaps not surprising that the term “vivisection” is ¤rst recorded in the French language in the Encyclopedia in 1765 and in no other article than “Sensibilité,” at the heart of which we ¤nd this characterization of a famous experimentalist: Monsieur de Haller established his theory [of the distinction between sensibility and irritability] ¤rst of all on a terrifying apparatus of his own experiments and those of certain of his disciples. Led, as he himself announces, by the desire to contribute to the utility of humankind, there is no instrument of pain, no stimulus that he did not employ to vary the torment of an in¤nite number of animals that were submitted to his researches in order to rip out proof in favor of the truth.38
In a rhetorical move that should by now appear familiar, Haller’s twin goals of truth and usefulness are rendered suspect by a shift to the semantics of torture. The sensibility—or at least the compassionate sensibility— of the scientist is thrown into doubt by the very search for the proof of the principle. In fact, the article concludes not only by demonizing several scientists, but also by putting the value of vivisection itself under suspicion. The Sadean Gaze The casual reader of Sade might easily assume that in the Marquis’s lupine ¤ctions sensibility is abandoned in favor of detachment. Of course, detachment there is, and along with suggesting the ongoing effects of the episteme of representation, the vivisectors in The New Justine are a continuation of the portrayal of scientists as moral monsters, unconcerned and yet joyful, seen elsewhere in the eighteenth century. Rétif as well continues this thematic when he portrays Sade as an insanely insensitive scientist who simultaneously relishes cruelty. Nonetheless, it is precisely where
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they theorize pleasure that Sade’s texts are thoroughly engaged with the historical concept of sensibility.39 Moreover, if we might like to see pleasure in Sade as primarily sexual—turning Sade into a “sadist” of the variety studied by sexologists—then I would maintain that in historical terms pleasure in the Sadean text is nothing other than the transformation of the foremost eighteenth-century value: pity. In so transforming pity, Sade hearkens back to some of the earliest as well as to the most materialist versions of the passion. In point of fact, it is the most atavistic aspects of Sade’s œuvre that ultimately become the most crucial tools in the deconstruction of sentimental discourse. In a century in which pity was to become the criterion of humanity, cruelty could be seen only as a sort of monstrosity. This monster, however, bears a certain family resemblance to its more decorous sibling. This resemblance issues from the spectacle of pain that lies at the heart of both inhuman and pitiful responses. In this respect, Malebranche’s Search after Truth once again provides a compelling example. It paints a clear picture of the way compassion and cruelty would be thought of in the years to come, simultaneously evoking and excluding those apertures that Sade would use to collapse compassion and cruelty, subverting the logic of benevolent humanity. This is Malebranche’s explanation of the generation of monstrous children: About seven or eight years ago, I saw at the Incurables a young man who was born mad, and whose body was broken in the same places in which those of criminals are broken. He had remained nearly twenty years in this state. Many persons saw him, and the late queen mother, upon visiting this hospital, was curious to see and even touch the arms and legs of this young man where they were broken. According to the principles just established, the cause of this disastrous accident was that his mother, having known that a criminal was to be broken, went to see the execution. All the blows given to this miserable creature forcefully struck the imagination of this mother and, by a sort of counterblow, the tender and delicate brain of her child. The ¤bers of this woman’s brain were extremely shaken and perhaps broken in some places by the violent ®ow of the spirits produced at the sight of such a terrible occurrence, but they retained suf¤cient consistency to prevent their complete destruction. On the other hand, the child’s brain ¤bers, being unable to resist the torrent of these spirits, were entirely dissipated, and the destruction was great enough to make him lose his mind forever. That is the reason why he came into the world deprived of
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sense. Here is why he was broken at the same parts of his body as the criminal his mother had seen put to death. (115; F237–238)
In this teratogenesis, the vision of a man being broken directly impinges on the imagination of the witness: compassion is the forceful striking of the very ¤bers of the brain by the liquids (esprits animaux) set in motion by the sight of suffering; it is the painful reverberation of this assault in the parts of the body affected in the spectacle of pain; it is ¤nally the urge to stop the other’s pain as the means of putting an end to one’s own agony. The notion of the possible ravages of imagination, of the effects of this faculty in the mother on the fetus, certainly predates Malebranche.40 Links between spectacle, image, and corporeal effects were commonly assumed (and remain a part of folklore—maternal cravings inferred as the cause of birthmarks, for example). The belief was granted scienti¤c credibility well into the eighteenth century, ¤rst coming in for serious critique, as Dennis Todd has shown in detail, in the wake of the case of Mary Toft, the Englishwoman who claimed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits.41 In his essay “On the Power of the Imagination,” Montaigne, relying on reports from compilations such as Corneille Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, had enumerated cases similar to that of Malebranche. Montaigne introduces his meditation on the imagination with the remark that “The sight of another’s suffering makes me suffer materially [La veue des angoisses d’autruy m’angoisse materiellement].”42 Yet Montaigne, writing in the sixteenth century, invokes the often pernicious and painful effects of the imagination on the body in support of skepticism. The productive force of images provides evidence against what might otherwise appear as divinely inspired prodigies. For Malebranche, on the other hand, the birth of the monster of compassion is more miraculous than a material catastrophe, because it provides a freakish support for theodicy: “The invisible ties with which the Author of nature unites all his works are worthy of God’s wisdom and men’s admiration” (113; F236). One of the primary goals of the Search after Truth is to demonstrate in a Cartesian and Platonic vein that the senses, and vision in particular, are sources of error; only ideas seen via “vision in God” constitute incontrovertible evidence. The faculties and material effects of pity and imitation remain, however, beyond reproach. Through them, God binds society by the structure of the body. It was not without irony then that the more religion and theodicy were attacked during the eighteenth century—and the more imitation was implicated in the dangers of amour propre rather than the support of postlapsarian
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community—the more the luster of compassion increased. Even when philosophers eventually began to question seriously the relationship of pity to milieu and education, the moral function of sympathy and its exalted place in the constitution of humanity remained by and large undebated. Moreover, while physical monstrosities became increasingly integrated into sciences of normalcy and abnormalcy, the moral monster as the inversion of pitiful humankind held out longer against such supposed rationalization, notwithstanding the attempts of materialists such as La Mettrie.43 Although compassion and imitation are in Malebranche essentially related to sight, the dynamic connections between self and other are characterized as “invisible.” In fact, it is not the projection of an image that explains the power of imagination but rather the nerve ¤bers and the liquids within them: Thus, it is necessary to know that not only are the animal spirits borne naturally into the parts of our bodies in order to perform the same actions, and the same movements that we see others perform, but also for the purpose of suffering their injuries in some way and to share in their miseries. For experience teaches us that when we carefully attend to a man that has been rudely struck, or who has a serious wound, the spirits are forcefully borne into the parts of our bodies that correspond to those we see wounded in another. (114; F237)
As long as we do not turn away but rather ¤x our attention on the sight of violence or pain, then a symmetric movement of liquids will occur in us. Malebranche takes into account interference in the transmission of impressions. The ¤bers through which the nerve liquid ®ows vary in strength from person to person, hampering movement to a greater or lesser degree.44 Some are therefore constitutionally more susceptible to compassion: What must be especially noted here is that the sensible sight of the wound a person receives produces another wound in those who see it that is greater in proportion as they are weaker and more delicate. This is so because sensible sight, pushing the animal spirits powerfully into the parts of the body corresponding to those they see wounded, makes a greater impression in the ¤bers of a delicate body than in those of a strong and robust one. (114; F238)
Generally speaking, while compassion bridges the distance between self and other, impinging immediately and symmetrically, its action nevertheless varies in degree. In a fetus, weak and susceptible as it is, the spectacle
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of suffering witnessed by the mother may be enough to damage the nervous ¤bers irreparably. On the other hand, Malebranche admits that the sight of pain may not materially affect certain vigorously constituted men. Both foreshadowing Kantian ethics and underlining the extent to which pity had yet to assert itself fully, Malebranche suggests that for such “in®exible and inexorable” men, incorporeal reason must substitute for the material links to create their form of compassion (114; F238). It is also possible that the spirits might go astray, failing to produce nervous symmetry. Compassion therefore transmits a copy of suffering, provided that the ®ow of these spirits is not turned elsewhere, by deliberately stimulating [en se chatouillant volontairement] with some force, a part of the body other than that seen to be injured. Or that the natural ®ow of spirits toward the heart and viscera, which ordinarily takes place in sudden disturbances, does not lead away or change that of which we are speaking in any way. Or ¤nally that no extraordinary connection between the traces in the brain and the movements of the spirits produces the same effects. (114; F237)
Malebranche thus considers various “parasites,” to borrow a term from information theory, that might normally or extraordinarily jam, distort, or misdirect the god-willed message of pain. Acutely aware that the cybernetics of compassionate response might be thwarted, Malebranche leaves his thoughts hanging and returns quickly to the symmetrical model. In Sade, such parasites are called on to produce new orders of sensibility and subjectivity.45 Sade’s texts bear witness to a sort of nefarious bricolage: whatever elements of discourse that lie ready to hand are put to use in the multiple explanations of the whys and wherefores of cruelty. These elements are thereby isolated and exposed as contingent premises and hidden assumptions—ripped away from their positions within openly pursued arguments as well as from tacit structures of communication. Such is the case with Sade’s use of the physiology of the nerves, especially as it relates to sexual response. Take the case of the Duc de Blangis, libertine extraordinaire from The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), who discovers that mere self-interest is not the only reason to kill: From necessary murders he soon passed to those of pure pleasure; he was captivated by that regrettable folly which causes us to ¤nd delight in the suffering of others; he noticed that a violent commotion in®icted upon
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any kind of adversary is answered by a vibrant thrill in our own nervous system; the effect of this vibration, arousing the animal spirits which ®ow within these nerves’ concavities, obliges them to exert pressure on the erector nerves and to produce in accordance with this perturbations what is termed a lubricious sensation. Consequently, he set about committing thefts and murders in the name of debauchery and libertinage [par unique principe de débauche et de libertinage], just as someone else would be content, in order to in®ame these same passions, to chase a whore or two.46
Evoking habituation, the account of the Duc de Blangis subversively suggests that it is not so much a question of getting used to violence as of discovering its inherent pleasures. That is, sex and violence are naturally and fundamentally the same to the extent that they can be stripped of their qualities by reducing them to quantities of nervous stimulation. This stripping of qualities can take place if the nervous movement of sympathy is rendered asymmetric—if sympathy occurs without pity or identi¤cation. As another libertine, this one from The New Justine, declares, No pity, no commiseration, said Sylvestre. Humanity is the death of pleasure. It is so that they might suffer that those bitches are here, and their destiny must be ful¤lled to the extreme extent. If it is true that libertines such as we can only draw their principal pleasure [jouissance] from the excess of suffering in which they plunge the objects destined to their enjoyment, won’t you have to admit that to speak of commiseration is to miss the point completely? And so what if a whore suffers, when people like us get hard!47
The irony is that when Sade gets rid of pity, he does so entirely in keeping with the model of nervous compassion found in Malebranche and others. After all, what is the Sadean orgasm if not the same violent movement of the nervous juices, now detached from their previously benevolent telos? The orgasmic conversion of pity has a direct bearing on the place of science in Sade’s texts. From early in the century to late, experimenters were cast as insensitively and objectively watching the pain of sensible creatures. Yet portrayals of virtuosi and their ilk as inhuman always move from supposed detachment to intimations of enjoyment. This paradoxical imbrication of sensibility and insensibility is openly embraced in Sade’s texts. We witness this imbrication at perhaps its most horri¤c in the “Hell” scenario at the end of The 120 Days of Sodom. This, the ultimate tale of libertinage in the work, relates a hitherto unknown pleasure: “the ¤nal passion, which we shall designate with the name ‘hell’ [enfer]” (1.443).
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We are told that a powerful lord detains several young women, who are then systematically sodomized and de®owered. A colored ribbon, further ordering the activities, is placed around each woman’s neck before she is quite literally kicked into the basement. The ribbon will determine her fate below, where henchmen with demonic masks will carry out various tortures: The ¤rst torture engine is a wheel upon which the girl is strapped and which, rotating uninterruptedly, bears against an outer circle studded with razors which everywhere scratch and tear and slice the unfortunate victim, but as the blades do not bite deep, only super¤cially, she turns for at least two hours before dying. The second: the girl lies two inches above a red-hot iron plate which slowly melts her. Third: she is attached by the buttocks to a piece of burning iron, and all her limbs are twisted and frightfully dislocated. Fourth: the four limbs attached each to a spring which slowly moves away, gradually stretching her arms and legs until they are detached and the trunk falls into a brazier. Fifth: a red-hot cast-iron bell is placed over her head, but the bonnet is several sizes too large, the iron does not touch her, but her brain slowly melts, her head is slowly grilled. Sixth: she is chained inside an iron tub of boiling oil. Seventh: she is held standing before a machine which, six times a minute, shoots a small dart into her body, and each time into a different place; the machine does not stop until she is entirely feathered. Eighth: her feet anchored in a furnace, a mass of lead very gradually descends upon her head, thrusting her further into the oven. Ninth: her executioner continually pricks her with a red-hot iron goad; she is bound before him, he thus meticulously works over every inch of her body. Tenth: she is chained to a pillar underneath a large glass dome, twenty famished serpents devour her alive. Eleventh: a cannon ball attached to each foot, she is suspended by one hand, and if she falls, ’tis into a furnace. Twelfth: a hook is driven through her mouth; thus she hangs, a deluge of burning pitch is incessantly pouring over her body. Thirteenth: the nerves are pulled from her ®esh and tied to cords which draw them further, and meanwhile burning nails are driven into her body. Fourteenth: alternately torn with tongs and whipped upon her cunt and ass with martinets whose steel tips are heated red hot, and from time to time scratched with burning iron rakes.
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Fifteenth: she is poisoned by a drug which burns and rends her entrails, which hurls her into frightful convulsions, causes her to utter hideous screams, and insures her death; but it is slow, and she is the last to succumb. This is one of the most terrible of the ordeals. (1.445–446)48
Sade lifts this scenario in part from accounts of the Inquisition. The three principal techniques of the Inquisition in eliciting confession were the trials by water, ¤re, and strappado. Of these, only ¤re is well and aptly represented in “Hell.” There is no doubt, however, that the mise en scène owes much to contemporary illustrations of the torture chambers of this tribunal (¤gure 5.7). Sade also blends in some common methods of execution, although punishment and puri¤cation do not seem to be particularly relevant. Finally, along with some imaginative contributions, the tortures in “Hell” recall some of the most common animal experiments of the eighteenth century.49 Although it may strike us as strange today, torture number ten, in which the victim is attacked by snakes, has the closest counterpart in actual laboratory practice. The properties of venom were commonly tested on animals in similar fashion. The locus is therefore torture chamber, scaffold, and well-ordered laboratory. Torture thirteen is noteworthy in this respect: pulling out the nerves and applying direct stimulus to the material basis of sensibility. Still, the last torture, in which the body is attacked not from the outside but from within, appears perplexing. Why is it singled out as particularly horri¤c? Because it allows the most pain to be expressed—in screams and contortions—and thereby allows the most pain to be savored. It is the torture for a sensible spectator. Crucially, the lord who witnesses the carefully ordered proceedings in “Hell” does not involve himself directly. Rather, once all victims are in place, he descends and sets about to “examine” each spectacle for ¤fteen minutes. When he can retain himself no longer, “he throws himself in an armchair where he can observe all the tortures” (1.446). That is, he appears as a detached eyeball, re®ecting objectively and certainly without compassionate concern. Yet as a passion, “hell” describes the nervous impact of the spectacle on the observer, endowed with a version of Malebranche’s “sensible sight” that has been rendered asymmetric. In other words, this scenario sets elements of the model of the observer within the classical episteme against those of sensibility. Or, rather, it makes them gruesomely complementary. Fittingly, at the heart of this alignment is the specter of vivisection, where the two types of gaze had already confronted each other from the outset. In Enlightenment and Pathology, Anne Vila persuasively argues that the novels of Laclos and Sade take the notion of the gendered
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Figure 5.7. Torture chamber of the Inquisition from Jean-Pierre Goujet’s Histoire des Inquisitions (1769). Courtesy of Special Collections Department, Harvard Law School Library.
dimorphism of sensibility that had developed in the eighteenth century and combine them in ways that other writers had considered impossible. The case is particularly strong for the Marquise de Mertueil from Dangerous Liaisons (1782), insofar as she exhibits both the passive, sensual, and often debilitating feminine sensibility and complements it with the energetic “intellectual kind of sensibility that only men were supposed to have at the time.”50 In Vila’s description, Mertueil manages this hybrid sensibility through a “hygienic regimen” in which she “acquires her knowledge of the social world through careful, step-by-step observation and re®ection on the sensations to which she is progressively exposed” and the study and mastery of physiognomy, ¤rst and foremost learning to “control her gaze” (279–280). Vila then goes on to suggest that Sade’s frequent and apparently paradoxical invocation of “apathy” stems from the same sort of double deployment of sensibility that takes place through philosophical and physiological training. Certainly, “apathy” does not designate an absence of pathos or passion, but rather the enjoyment of sensibility that is nonetheless
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objective about the suffering of others.51 I would add that “apathy” cannot mean just a hybridized form of sensibility, and that even Vila’s language of a gaze that is detached, that observes carefully and with re®ection, points to a model of vision that invokes the classical episteme and the institutions and materialities in which it is embedded—and then moves beyond them. In both “Hell” and the vivisection scenario in The New Justine we can see “apathy” at work. As the debate between Rombeau and Rodin indicates, detachment is necessary and admirable from one point of view, yet the operators are highly sensitive and engaged from another. In fact, the pleasures of vivisection are clearly couched in terms of materialist conceptions of sensibility: “tickling” or “chatouillement” of the “spermatic animals” and so forth. Taken out of context, the descriptions of pleasure found in Sade might easily be mistaken for the words of Malebranche, Hartley, or a French materialist such as Charles Bonnet. In fact, no less an authority than Descartes had claimed that pain or “douleur,” which is the sensation of the nervous ¤bers being broken, is but one step removed from “chatouillement,” the effect of a forceful stimulation that causes the “soul to feel a certain bodily enjoyment” (“volupté corporelle”).52 What we have come to call sadism then arises from a minor difference of degree that itself is the function of distance. That is, historically speaking, sadism is akin to the aesthetics of tragedy and its relations. Whereas enjoyment of this sort is a problem for aesthetics, however, Sade’s descriptions underline the implications of mediation, forcefully wrenching nervous response from the immediacy that characterizes it in most discussions and highlighting what is obscured in more complex explications, such as those of Rousseau. Above all, although pity might be felt, it is overridden by an objectivity that is achieved by habituation. This objectivity is not exactly that of the classical episteme, with its exclusion of the representing subject. Sade’s libertine scientists, on the contrary, observe self-re®exively. Still able to feel the movements of compassion, they consider these movements from a distance. The voice of pity is no longer the sweet imperative of a Hume or Rousseau, but rather dismissed as “heteronomous” in the manner of Kant. Sade’s vivisectors and libertines are second-order observers. If there is something monstrous about these hybrid creations, it is a monstrosity that has come to designate humans in their freedom from the bonds of nature as well as society.53
6 The Ethics and Aesthetics of Human Vivisection
The Sadean gaze looks at sensibility from the point of view of objectivity without abandoning sensibility, and it thus introduces a fundamental change into what Foucault described as the classical episteme. On the one hand, the sensible spectator no longer lies in the blind spot of scienti¤c observation. That is, representation without a representer is deemed impossible. In Sade, the scientist as spectator, always suspect of being monstrously feeling behind a mask of equally inhuman indifference, moves from the margins of ethical discourse to the center. On the other hand, sensibility itself is robbed of immediacy. The natural order—the human body and its nervous response—can no longer serve as an anchoring point for morality or as an adequate steering mechanism for social interaction. In this ¤nal chapter, I will consider more carefully the repercussions on ethics and aesthetics that this shift entails. Furthermore, although both ethics and aesthetics must deal with an in®ux of re®exivity, these two ¤elds, which had previously substantially overlapped, now begin to separate decisively. To demonstrate how these shifts take shape, I will begin with the issue of ethics. After all, the justi¤cation of human vivisection is central to the passage with which we are concerned. In this regard, far from sparking a debate on experimentation, the “affaire d’Arcueil” and its
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literary aftermath ¤ts in nicely with an extant discussion on the place of living humans in the study of anatomy. The central argument in favor of human vivisection weighed utility against the subjective morality of feeling. This posed delicate questions of balance: If such experiments may well bene¤t humanity as a whole, how is one to guarantee that this gain does not undermine the moral claims of sentiment? How are we to overcome our natural aversion to spectacles of the sort? And should we risk becoming inhuman in the process? In the Encyclopedia, Diderot defended the need to dissect corpses. Without the knowledge gained through anatomy, medical advances would stall. To this effect, Diderot lauded the “dogmatics,” the traditional supporters of anatomy: “We must,” they say, “open up cadavers, examine the viscera, search through the entrails, study even the most insensible parts of the animal.” And one cannot too highly praise the courage of Herophilus and Erasistratus, who received criminals and dissected them alive, as well as the wisdom of the princes who handed them over and who sacri¤ced a small number of wicked men for the preservation of a multitude of innocents of every station, every age, and for all the centuries to come.1
Herophilus and Erasistratus were renowned Alexandrian practitioners of anatomy and surgery, and their supposed acts of human vivisection were widely reported. A French history of these arts from 1770, for example, claims that the latter obtained criminals from the rulers and “dissected them while completely alive, hoping to discover thereby things that he could not see otherwise.”2 Both men’s putative inhumanity is reported to be useful and simultaneously dismissed as likely fabulous, and their zealous dedication and innovation are in any case praised (1.45–46 and 1.50–51).3 Similarly in the Encyclopedia, far from being depicted as cruel, vivisectors of criminals are shown to be brave protectors of human life. Furthermore, the rulers who support them are portrayed as enlightened. Countering the “dogmatics,” however, are the “empirics,” who claim that only the whole and healthy body is the proper object of medical study.4 The bodies of the dead, the diseased, and even the living can bring no knowledge. Anatomy for the “empirics” runs counter to the spirit of rational inquiry and representation. By violating the opaque solidity of tissue, anatomy creates a “shadow of verisimilitude.” Moreover, they argue, “it is ridiculous to give oneself over to an occupation that is disagreeable and painful, which leads only to darkness, by seeking in the dissection of bodies the enlightenment that one will never extract from them.”5 If putting “the scalpel to a coun-
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terpart [semblable]” transgresses the fundamental law of humanity and yields nothing in the way of knowledge, it is hard not to suspect those who attempt to penetrate the body with “a curious eye” of inhumanity. The position of the “empirics” is set up as a straw man. The Encyclopedia is certainly pro-anatomy. Nonetheless, whereas the drive to vivisect may well have been underwritten by the then current construction of the clinical gaze, the suggestion that criminals undergo something tantamount to torture at a time when penal reform was the order of the day remains surprising. With almost eerie predictability, the solution to the ethical problem of human vivisection in the Encyclopedia follows the logic of humanity and inhumanity. But, instead of repressing moral monstrosity, just this possibility is allowed so that living humans (at least as far as their bodies are concerned) may be provided for science. Diderot originally posits a middle course, allowing the dissection of the dead but shunning the living on moral grounds. The philosophe then makes a rhetorically pregnant pause to consider semantics: “Might I be permitted to divulge what I think concerning the use of the term ‘humanity’?” (1.409). He continues, What is “humanity,” if not a habitual disposition of the heart to use our faculties for the bene¤t of humankind? This premise granted, what could be inhuman about the dissection of a wicked person? Since you give the name “inhuman” to the wicked one that you dissect because he has turned against his counterparts the faculties he should have used for their bene¤t, what would you call Erasistratus, who, surmounting his repugnance for the good of humankind, sought useful enlightenment in the entrails of the criminal? (1.409–410)
If the project of the Enlightenment is here aligned with the practice of human vivisection, then it is only because the inhuman, excluded from humanity and its laws, is allowed to exist so that utility and benevolence do not ¤nd themselves in contradiction. The arguments in the Encyclopedia echo those made by Maupertuis in his Letter on the Progress of the Sciences (1752). Maupertuis, then head of the Berlin Academy, had suggested that condemned criminals would be ¤tting subjects for a variety of experiments, including the testing of the venoms of noxious animals and of plant poisons. He remarks that the purpose of experiments carried out on condemned criminals, who themselves would have to prefer this fate—and the possibility of survival—to execution, ful¤lls the general goal of punishment: “the Good of Society.”6 Although he comes perilously close to a utilitarianism that would sacri¤ce the one to the many, his aim is clearly to dismiss the inhumanity of such
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experiments as illusory: “Let us not be moved by the apparent cruelty that we might believe to exist in this case. A man is nothing compared to the human race; a criminal is less than nothing” (163; my emphasis). Earlier, I questioned whether Hans Blumenberg’s thesis in the Legitimacy of the Modern Age takes into account the precariousness of the legitimation of theoretical curiosity when sentiment is added to the equation. In Maupertuis’s defense of human vivisection and experimentation Blumenberg locates a particularly disturbing facet of the general Enlightenment support of all manner of inquiry. But even in this apparently extreme and egregious case, curiosity could only be justi¤ed by the invocation of a paradox that is otherwise shunned in philosophical discourse. That is to say, the argument is built on enthymeme and appearance. Neither Maupertuis nor Diderot marks “a clear break with the traditional ethos of medicine” or a complete eschewing of limits and inhibitions.7 On the contrary, they attempt to reconcile science and sentiment under the general category of humanity. These sorts of justi¤cations of human vivisection continue into the end of the eighteenth century. Rétif in the Nights, no doubt inspired in part by the pronouncements of the Encyclopedia, accordingly balances the vili¤cation of Sade with the recommendation that human vivisection be carried out by proper parties and within speci¤c guidelines. After seeing some young people ®eeing into the night, the Hibou makes the horri¤c discovery that they had abandoned the body parts of an anatomized infant. When he later returns to the scene to try to make sense of the mystery, the gravity of the situation soon evaporates with a laugh, an explanation, and a plea: The next morning, I went to the local apothecary to inform him of what I had found beneath his windows. He began to laugh: “Those are anatomy leftovers. Cadavers are refused to the young surgeons, and they are obliged to steal or buy them. Once they’ve dissected them, they don’t know what to do with what’s left. So, four carry the partitioned body; two more take the lookout in front and two in the rear. They’re careful to always keep a few alleyways, of which they know the secret, open along the route, and they escape down them in case of danger. Finally, they arrive here, toss the remainders, and take ®ight.” “But,” I asked, “why not legally give bodies to the surgeons?” “That’s the question that all people with good sense ask. The cadavers of criminals should be handed over to them, and the bodies of those convicted who die in prison, as well as those from the hospitals who have died of unusual diseases. I had even proposed, in a little memorandum, giving over to the public amphitheater certain living villains so that experiments
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might be carried out on them. This would render their deaths doubly useful to the nation whose scourge they had been. But I was led away with horror—treated like an anthropophagus.” Satis¤ed with this explanation, I left the apothecary, assuring him that I agreed with him.8
The apothecary’s attitude injects levity and reason into a situation that had all the potential for horror and unreason of the “woman dissected alive” scenario. The explanation, detailing the methods used by the surgeons-intraining to avoid detection, indicates two intertwined problems. First, the surgeons are not allowed legal access to cadavers. In fact, it was not until after the Revolution that anatomists in France were legally granted bodies of the destitute.9 Second, this situation forces them into the night, the dark recesses of the city, and their private quarters. The plea, including the suggestion of vivisecting criminals, addresses these problems. Instead of working obscurely and illegally, the surgeons will receive sanction to carry out “doubly useful” executions, according to Rétif’s utilitarian logic, in a public amphitheater. Moreover, the ethical justi¤cation of human vivisection playfully makes reference to several Enlightenment topoi: savagery and civility, bias and knowledge, tolerance and misunderstanding. Thus the apothecary is deemed a cannibal, outside of human society and civilized behavior, whereas the opposite is actually the case. That is, only prejudice and ignorance misread the apothecary’s humanitarian impulse as inhumanity. Within the Nights, the legal question of human vivisection and its ethical justi¤cation are addressed at greater length in a utopian tale in which a certain Monsieur De Fontlèthe dreams that he has become the king of Ireland and has drawn up “codes of civil and criminal law that are so wise and so just that they attract to his new states the most upright people of the British Isles” (1371).10 Penalties for murder are harsh, but, eschewing capital punishment on the whole, tend to consist of dangerous yet necessary tasks. For example, thieving murders must clean the latrines of the hospitals. For one category of killer, however, the penalty is rather more unpleasant: The cruel assassin, who will have tormented, will be given to the anatomy schools, either in order to be dissected alive, or to undergo the amputation of a limb, or any other surgical operation, or to be poisoned, given rabies, infected by such or such disease and then submitted to medical and surgical operations. He may even be simply killed on the spot [tué à-l’improviste] so that we might know the natural state of the viscera. All of this is meant to provide practice for students either for
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repairing a limb or carrying out a cure. No pity will be had for such a being, who nonetheless will only be made to suffer with a view to utility. (1550–1551)
It is important to note that in these useful executions, essential for medical training and the extension of knowledge, the vivisectors are speci¤cally enjoined not to feel for “such a being,” that is, for an inhuman. Detached from the “counterblow” of automatic sympathy, habituation, objectivity, and absence of affect are transformed into positive values under these very speci¤c circumstances. Yet the in®iction of pain can still only be justi¤ed by the good thereby procured. If humanity cannot be extended to the subject of vivisection, neither should it be negated in the experimenter. On the one hand, then, Rétif upholds the value of pity. On the other, by allowing compassion to be overridden in cases where the affect would be inappropriate, he opens up a gap in the circuit of nervous response. This gap is that of self-re®ection, and it is similar to Diderot’s observation that human vivisectors have had to overcome their habitual distress to carry out their operations. At this point, we might recall the deconstructionist thesis that the structure of pity always includes a distance that undermines the immediacy of its claims.11 In the case of materialist thinkers, spectatorship excludes such a distance: action on the nerves is direct, although liable to malfunction and varying according to constitution. Nonetheless, it is precisely self-re®ection and distance—observing that one is using language to observe natural response from afar—that eventually explodes the grounding of morality in human nature. Certainly, the perceived problems of self-re®ection increase the use of what Derrida has called the “logic of the supplement.”12 Whether this increase has to do with the history of the metaphysics of presence is another matter. We might best see the latter grand narrative and its deconstruction as adjuncts to a discourse that is keyed primarily to social evolution. Moreover, in the passage from Sade’s New Justine, the logic of the supplement becomes a case of Freud’s “kettle logic”: various and contradictory justi¤cations are given for the same conclusion. These justi¤cations are produced successively and are based on the following principles: pro¤t, pleasure, and obligation. That is, we recognize in the discussion between Rodin and Rombeau three different types of ethical argument: utilitarian, hedonic, and deontological. Granted that many ethical thinkers during the eighteenth century collapse utility and pleasure. This is the case with Hume, for example. Sade introduces a distinction between these motives, however, that is similar to—perhaps the reductio ad absurdum of—Bentham’s
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particular utilitarian stance: ethics should be guided by objective computation of utilities and not by subjective impulses. The ¤rst ethical argument is thus as follows: vivisection will be “useful for anatomy”; further, it will advance “the progress of the sciences” and will redound to the “bene¤t of humanity.” Such is the argument found in Diderot and Rétif as well, although they attempt to reconcile utility and sentiment while Sade’s protagonists do not. Rather, the latter insist that we must “conquer nature” in order to perform a globally useful service. Pity is hereby discarded at the exact point that it is essential according to an ethics that would ground its claims in the “natural,” subjective approval of bene¤cial actions. The ¤ssure that is barely visible in Diderot and Rétif is split wide open, and self-re®ection in the guise of detachment, objectivity, and the notion that observers must override nature allows the introduction of a utility value no longer bound by the chains of sympathy. As soon as the argument on the grounds of general utility appears concluded, the hedonic argument begins: the pleasure derived from such operations is a valid argument, on the basis of methodological egoism, for justifying them. According to an ethics based on subjective goods, this is entirely legitimate: my pains and pleasures are the ultimate basis of morality. Whereas for Hume, Hartley, and others the pleasures and pains of the self are tied to the pleasures and pains of others through a largely symmetrical sympathy and positive associations and vibrations, here such factors no longer act as a curb to the potential cruelty of self-interest. Rather, using the conclusion from the previous argument as a premise of this one (i.e., nature must be conquered), we are told to be objective about the pains of others if such pain leads to our subjective happiness. At ¤rst, subjective ethics and objective ethics appear combined in a manner that de¤es logical analysis. On closer inspection, we see that self-re®ection allows the vivisector to select the pleasures and pains that will be either overridden or indulged. Nonetheless, rather than carefully drawing out a conclusion and constructing a cohesive ethical system, the text abruptly breaks off the second argument, and we are led to the ¤nal statement: that the wishes of Nature, a personi¤ed force that gets creative pleasure from our acts of destruction, oblige us to vivisect. It is at such moments that the comparisons of Kant with Sade ¤nd textual purchase. Jacques Lacan has suggested that Kant’s deontology shares more with Sade’s teratoid creations than we might expect.13 Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer ¤nd more than an echo of Kantian rigor in the pages of the Marquis.14 The unity of these eighteenthcentury thinkers’ arguments is not to be found, however, at the level of
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conclusions. Indicating once more that the topic was in the air, Kant speci¤cally condemns the vivisection of criminals in both The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and The Con®ict of the Faculties (1798). Treating others as ends-in-themselves enjoins us to respect humanity even in the most depraved. Punishment must be in®icted because a crime has been committed and never for any other end, no matter how useful; to release a criminal for submitting to dangerous experiments would likewise subvert the very grounds of justice.15 The premises of the arguments found in Sade and Kant respectively for and against vivisection are, however, remarkably similar. Speci¤cally, both view sentiment and sensibility as heteronomous; natural responses cannot be used to determine correct courses of action. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, both ethicists distinguish “‘moral apathy’ from insensibility in the shape of indifference to sensory stimuli.”16 Kant’s ethical position, based on abstracting from the self, its position, and its interests in order to arrive at rules that are free of all phenomenal contamination, is thereby horri¤cally crystallized in Sade, who achieves a considerably less sanguine ethical purity. Further, both Kant and Sade replace sentiment with the notion of objectively grasped duty. The moral obligation to be cruel is quite clearly stated in Sade’s vivisection passage. To the assertion “murder is a pleasure,” Rodin adds, “I would say it is more than that: it is a duty.” This duty comes from respect for Nature’s creative will and “jouissance.” Turning Kant’s formal ethical logic against itself, Sade posits a categorical imperative that Lacan states thus: “I have the right to enjoy your body, no matter what anybody says, and I will exercise this right without any limit to stop me from exacting any whim I have a taste to gratify.”17 According to Lacan, this is less an inversion of Kant than an excruciating exposure of the cruelty that the phenomenal self undergoes if we submit ourselves to the rigid demands of deontological ethics.18 Sade’s supposed imperative, moving beyond Kant’s clinging insistence on a bland mixture of Christian ethics and Stoic ataraxia, is certainly in perfect and disconcerting consonance with the Critique of Practical Reason, “that radical rejection of the pathological, of any consideration of a good, a passion, or even a compassion—the rejection, that is, by which Kant liberates the ¤eld of moral law” (2.125). Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer saw the matter in their dialectical terms: Kant af¤rms reason’s freedom from nature; Sade uses this freedom to hand reason back over to nature in its most horri¤c manifestations. The liberation of morality for one is thus the liberation from morality for the other. Crucially, in both cases the notion of humanity has undergone a shift in meaning that underwrites these claims. To use Kantian terminology, it desig-
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nates our noumenal essence and precisely not phenomenal features such as pity. Kant and Sade are not alone in their willingness to countenance “inhumanity” as an innately human quality. Rétif too reduces primary animal drives to two: Eros and cruelty.19 Or so the Hibou expresses himself in the Nights: There is no being in nature that is not wicked. Every individual loves to do evil, to destroy his fellow creatures [son Semblable], as well as other beings. Even herbivores are not innocent. They strike; they bite; they crush. Man loves to destroy for the sake of destruction. A thousand times I have felt the cruel desire to kill a big and beautiful black honeybee or bumblebee that came to sip nectar from the bell®owers at my window, and I needed re®ection to stop myself. What is the cause of this destructive sentiment, which is natural to all beings? Is it personal conservation upheld at the expense of other living creatures? Is it an impulsion of Nature, which, at the same time it gives life to everything, also grants as many means of destruction as of production? This must be believed. (1075–1076; my emphasis)
The drive to destroy is clearly the negation of pity. The counterpart, or “semblable,” with whom sympathetic identi¤cation would previously have been the strongest, is now the target of pleasurable cruelty as an end in itself. Moreover, the classic Enlightenment account of the origins of violence (i.e., misguided self-interest) is displaced in favor of a natural impulsion to destroy. Inhumanity is naturalized, and Nature herself is portrayed as less a mechanism than the apotheosis of the will. To make the negation of the old order of discourse complete, even herbivores, previously used as models of gentleness and as such called upon to prove that carnivorousness leads humans to habits of cruelty, are declared malign. And beauty too, far from acting as a restraint, spurs us on to destruction. Pity, I should note, is neither denied nor unimportant in the Nights. It does begin to lose its place as the cornerstone of ethics, to be replaced by re®ective moral choice. As Rétif puts it in a formula that Kant would have found hopelessly confused in its mixture of terms and systems, “What is virtue in social man? It is the effect of a moral and arti¤cial sentiment, based on reciprocity, that makes us continually surmount nature in order to do good for others.”20 The confusion is instructive because it points out a communicative negotiation in which the semantics of sentimental humanity are being pushed aside by new terms: “social man,” “arti¤cial,” and the need to “surmount nature.” By positing natural cruelty, Rétif and others emphasize re®ection
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as distancing from nature and the importance of second-order observation in moral judgment. In the seventeenth century, a writer such as La Rochefoucauld could wittily express his suspicions of the underlying, self-interested motivations of pity. During the better part of the eighteenth century, such a possibility was ejected from the anthropology of benevolence that I laid out in the ¤rst part of my argument. By the end of the century, however, many writers would have begun to sense that the paradox of moral monstrosity (some humans are inhuman) covered over a tautology (all humans are human) that was insuf¤cient to reduce the complexity of social organization or provide for social steering. From the point of view of the history of constructions of the subject, we might see duty as the anchoring point of a morality that can no longer repress this tautology or, more importantly, render it usefully paradoxical. On the other hand, new productive paradoxes immediately take the place of the old: inhumanity is human; humans are free and determined; morality is a matter of choice and of duty. In each case, these paradoxes are a product of juxtaposing ¤rst-order observation to second-order observation, and re®ecting on the difference. Ethics and Institutional Evolution I began my analysis of the “affaire d’Arcueil” and its sequellae by questioning the extent to which reference to the “clinical gaze” might help us understand the relationship between Sade and science. This is not to say, however, that the shifts in ethics outlined above are not related to social organization and, in particular, to the evolution of increasingly differentiated and professionalized systems of scienti¤c and medical practice. The heart of the matter is the growth of institutions that thwart observation. There are three primary ways that the texts concerned with human vivisection in the eighteenth century deal with this problem of opacity. First, they evoke the possibility of outside controls. Above all, laws should be formulated to bring medical and scienti¤c research into line with dominant values. If the functioning of research and training organizations currently demands a disregard for legality—if bodysnatching, to take the case at hand, has become a quasi-legitimate practice within the schools of anatomy—then the law ought to mediate between the demands of science, of medicine, and of the citizens at large. Second, the texts are concerned with roles and professionalization. For example, scientists and doctors are shown to be—and then expected to be—both detached and benevolent. This doubled observer position makes doctors and scientists something
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other and something more than the average “human.” Third, recognizing that professionalization still does not guarantee ethical behavior, the texts call for certain institutional practices to be carried out in public. Legality tends to be the ¤rst issue brought up with respect to human vivisection. Diderot construes the matter in terms of hierarchical ordering: he praises enlightened rulers for their perspicacity in allowing scientists access to criminal bodies. Likewise Rétif imagines a benevolent despot who formulates laws that will allow the bene¤ts of vivisection while insuring that the practice remains within ethical parameters. We also see the law invoked in Sade, where the same logic that sanctions executions should also sanction vivisection. Rejected in this case, however, is recourse to natural law or sentiment; any individual may be vivisected solely on the ground that it bene¤ts others. For Rodin and Rombeau, law has become positive. That is to say, it is grounded in neither a natural or transcendent order, but rather by general approbation of principles and consequences.21 In this regard, as hierarchical organization yields to functional differentiation, increasing anxiety is expressed over whether or not the law can justify its controls or even carry them out at all. What becomes apparent in the case of human vivisection is both the need to watch over such practices and the dif¤culty of doing so. The law should be able to keep ethics aligned with science and medicine, but ¤nds itself troublingly exterior to the institutions that it sets out to regulate. If the law tends to be the ¤rst line of defense, more emphasis is given to professionalization as a guarantor of correct behavior. Whereas earlier attacks on vivisection cast surgeons and virtuosi as inhuman, now a category for benevolent detachment is constructed. When Diderot questions the ethics of vivisection, he separates surgeons and anatomists from the rest of humanity in a positive sense. Hence the vivisector Erasistratus is said to have overcome “his repugnance for the bene¤t of humankind.” Furthermore, Diderot, as a non-professional, explains his own reluctance to undertake anatomy as an inability to rise above nature in order to do good: “I would not like to be either a surgeon or an anatomist. But in my case it is a matter of pusillanimity, and I wish that it was our practice to hand over to those in the profession criminals to dissect, and that they would have the courage to do so.”22 Similar concerns are apparent in Rétif, where the experimenters, overcoming sympathetic response, observe both with detachment and with an eye to the greater good. The notion of the professional gaze is emphasized in a narrative strand of the Nights in which the Sade scenario is stood on its head. After his initial discovery of the practices of the surgeons-in-training, the Hibou continues to investigate
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their nocturnal forays. He witnesses four young men leaving a locked cemetery with an enshrouded cadaver. The group then enters into an “outof-the-way private house” or “petite maison obscure,” spiriting away the corpse just as, in both Rétif’s and Sade’s versions of the “affaire d’Arcueil,” living bodies are secreted in hideaways. The term “petite maison,” usually used to designate a locus of illicit sexual encounter, underlines the sexual aspect of this episode. Later in the evening, the Hibou decides to track down the perpetrators: I got the idea to go to the house of the surgeon boys in order to see what they were doing with the body that they had just stolen. Having arrived at the alleyway entrance to their amphitheater, I pushed the door. It opened, and I climbed up to the fourth ®oor, where I had seen a light. I approached the door softly, and I saw . . . on a large table, the body . . . of a young woman of eighteen, who had been buried the day before. They had already opened the chest. . . . I knew her parents. I left the scene, pierced with grief. But I kept silent. Why won’t they give criminals to students?! (371–372)
From the jocosity of the apothecary concerning the cadaver parts, the mood again switches to horror. After penetrating the private space of the students, the light reveals a body that is no longer unproblematic. That the young woman’s fresh corpse has been opened at the chest and the family of the deceased is known underlines the sense of violation. These factors bar levity, but they do not negate the need for bodies for science. The Hibou’s decision to keep silent is ambiguous, apparently meant to protect both the parents of the woman and the students. Nonetheless, the previous praise for anatomy has been complicated: not only does the lack of a legal supply of cadavers force the students into privacy and crime, there are also sexual overtones to the episode. A later episode entitled “The Living Dead Woman [La morte vivante]” brings these problems to a head. There was in the eighteenth century both scienti¤c and popular uncertainty about the reliability of signs of death and a concomitant anxiety about the possibility of live burial.23 Rétif’s tale, while calling on these concerns, appears more interested in the lubricious possibilities suggested by a woman returned to the realm of the living as a body but socially still deceased: It was only midnight when I found myself before a cemetery that will remain unnamed. I saw the surgeon boys loitering by the gate. I learned from a man from the neighborhood who was on his way home that a
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Figure 6.1. The surgeon boys in Rétif de la Bretonne’s Nights make a surprising discovery while the Hibou secretly looks on. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
young woman of eighteen had been buried that very evening. The surgeons entered as soon as I retired—but I watched them. They carried the cof¤n, after having pulled off the top board to make sure they had the right body. I saw them enter into a dirty, narrow little road, where they had an amphitheater. This bit seems quite a lot like the other that I’ve already reported but the details are different, to be sure! The coolness of the earth having reanimated the young woman, she sighed as soon as the board was removed. The surgeon boys were only all the more in a hurry to carry her off. (1721)
The scene of discovery is illustrated in the Nights. Holding the cof¤n, the students gaze in shock upon the body of a comely young woman. But are they simply shocked? Or also admiring? Both text and image foreground this double response (¤gure 6.1). The possibility that young men with a semiconscious young woman in their hidden space might take advantage of the situation is not shunned. On the contrary, untoward temptation is highlighted. The anatomical chamber is portrayed as a boudoir, and the students lay their quarry down
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and caress her. Nevertheless, what under normal circumstances would be regarded with suspicion is instead portrayed as ethical medical practice: Having arrived at their secret amphitheater, in which there was a bed, they laid her in it and used, in order to complete her reanimation, the gentlest caresses. She came to. They gave her a cordial, and in very little time she recovered consciousness entirely. She was very surprised to see herself in such company! They reassured her by showing the utmost respect. They hid from her the situation from which they had rescued her for fear of causing a seizure. They led her to believe that she had been in a desperate condition, which had obliged her parents to entrust her to them. (1721–1722)
Those actions that would normally appear ethically compromised, from touching the body to lying, are legitimate under the circumstances and given the proper attitude. This professional and institutional contextualization is made even more clear when a sudden relapse calls for intervention that cannot be described for reasons of propriety: “They calmed her in a manner that would not have taken place under her parents’ roof, but which was far from criminal or even lacking in that respect that is owed to virgins” (1722). Of course, the reader is left to imagine actions that may well be titillating to the unprofessional viewer. Yet the students are portrayed as already professional, and the young woman is returned to her parents as soon as she is somewhat recovered. Clearly, the episode of the “Living Dead Woman” parallels and inverts that of the “Woman Dissected Alive.” At a super¤cial level, the students revive a person thought dead, while Sade attempts to do in a living subject. More importantly, in the Sade scenario the victim is completely lacking in voluptuous appeal. In this regard, where one would expect sexual violation, pleasure is gained from cruelty alone (although knowledge and research are used as thinly disguised excuses therefor). This much is in keeping with Rétif’s stated position in his Anti-Justine: violent pleasure should be strictly separated from sexual pleasure, and the former should be overcome. The surgeons-in-training have made an arousing discovery, yet neither cruelty nor Eros wins out. Rather than violating the space of domesticity and probing with lascivious intent, these trainees, the face of humane medical practice, are an essential relay in the circuit that has led out of the home, to the grave, and against all hope, back again. They stand outside of natural drives and ¤nd themselves in a special category set aside for caring objectivity. Similarly, we can read Sade’s own take on human vivisection in the context of professionalization and institutionalization.
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In this case, of course, we move much closer to outright parody; gone is Rétif’s peculiar brand of genuine disingenuousness. For example, Rodin insists that a respected instructor has trained him in the art of experimenting on humans. Far from being presented as the solution to the problematic opacity of research, professionalism here simply ensures that surgeons and scientists will not feel supposedly human responses. Moreover, Rodin’s echo of the Encyclopedia’s suggestion that vivisectors be rewarded for being courageous enough to “conquer nature for the bene¤t of humanity” is horri¤cally humorous in context. Finally, if the mode of spectatorship involved in human vivisection is a potential problem, then the easiest solution is to observe the observers. In this respect, it is worth noting that while anatomical amphitheaters were traditionally public venues, there was clearly a growing concern that private institutions and especially clandestine training were drawing a curtain around such demonstrations. Of course, many of these issues are still very much with us. Here, I refer primarily to the opacity of medical and scienti¤c research institutions and not human vivisection in particular (although the latter has certainly been practiced during the twentieth century, often during wars and on populations declared less than human).24 What Samuel Johnson and others considered shocking about reports detailing vivisection in the transactions of the Royal Society and like annals of natural philosophy was the public ostentation of inhumanity: who would be so depraved as to in®ict pain and let everyone know about it? By the end of the century, concern has shifted to the lack of public accountability with respect to science and medicine. Consequently, while Rétif suggests that criminals be given to the public amphitheater, the various cases of medical and scienti¤c practice in the Nights are precisely not carried out in broad daylight. The locus of anxiety—of horror or pleasure—is the institution as well as the professionals that inhabit it. Sade also approaches issues of publicity and privacy in a manner that ®uctuates between relish and insight. Taking these matters into account, the psychoanalytic explanation of sadism could be reformulated as follows: when faced with institutions that make demands that often seem insane, cruel, and against one’s self-interest, identi¤cation is always a possibility.25 Insofar as violence in Sade’s texts is carried out in the name of the opaque organizations to which the protagonists belong—and Sade’s texts include thieves, monks, and bankers as well as surgeons and scientists—it is not simply a matter of becoming the tool of some generalized symbolic order but of often very particular social spheres. Here a remark about the narrative structure of both The New Justine
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and the Nights is in order. In both cases, spaces usually off limits are penetrated by a narrator who observes from a position simultaneously inside and outside. The Hibou enters into the tenebrous domains of the surgeon boys and of the ¤ctionalized Sade, and he illuminates them from within. In like fashion, the discussion between Rodin and Rombeau is overheard by the character Justine. The primary distinction in content is that the Hibou does not get caught up and tormented by the institutions and practices on which he spies; Sade’s heroine is not so lucky. Yet the formal structure—reporting what has been seen—is the same, and it highlights issues of representation that the epistolary narratives that dominate the eighteenth century tend to obscure by always presenting ¤rst-person accounts. That is, the texts of Sade and Rétif ®aunt a preoccupation with second-order observation (of course, writers such as Fielding and Laclos also tend to undermine the possibility of naïve epistolarity, converting point of view into dramatic irony). This much is in keeping with both the dissolution of the classical episteme and notions of unmediated sensibility. I would suggest that this dissolution is conditioned by the evolution of social systems and institutions. Rather than seeing the classical episteme as some sort of free-®oating and unthought structuring of knowledge, we might instead look at it as a system of observation that is related strategically, although largely latently, to a social environment. The detached and representing gaze speci¤cally bypasses problems of self-reference—the representer, as we know from Foucault, lies in its blind spot—and projects a situation in which complexity can be laid out and accessed. To take the paradigmatic case, the Encyclopedia gathers knowledge into one, albeit multi-volume, work that individual and non-expert readers can peruse at will.26 Granted the Encyclopedia already strikes one as presenting a complexity that is well beyond the grasp of any one observer. It is thus more than the expression of the Enlightenment ethos; it is also both a symptom of and a contribution to the complexity brought about by functional differentiation. Similarly, sentimental ethics tries to simplify the complex orderings of social systems by keying social organization to nature in the guise of theoretically ¤rst-order affective responses. As philosophers at the time consistently discovered and suppressed, the extent to which this strategy could work was always in doubt. A thorough systems-theoretical analysis of various historical semantics of the gaze has yet to appear. In fact, while the terms “observation” and “observer” are key concepts in the ¤eld, they are not necessarily or even usually tied to the visual.27 For example, referring primarily to philosophical texts that would be categorized as epistemological, Luhmann has
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claimed that different types of observers correlate to different types of social organization. First and foremost, the appearance of the “subject” as second-order observer is keyed to societies that organize complexity through functional differentiation.28 Kant is once again instructive in this regard, and adds historical concreteness to this rather abstract claim. For example, in the essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant positions private observers within a functional subsystem such as the army simultaneously as public observers outside of any institutional role or allegiance.29 Kant’s Con®ict of the Faculties likewise calls for the doubling of observer positions. In this case, the “lower” faculty of philosophy is understood as a second-order discipline with respect to the “higher,” ¤rst-order disciplines of science, theology, and law. Philosophy should have free reign to ask questions about these other disciplines—questions that are not and cannot be addressed internally by these faculties themselves—and to mediate between them.30 Whence for Kant, generally speaking, re®exive entities and practices such as the free moral subject, open debate, and philosophy departments (!) are set up as ways of ordering, guiding, and centralizing observation in the face of complexity. We might here remark the extent to which functional differentiation has actually rendered such solutions unworkable or, at least, highly improbable. Nonetheless, insofar as Sade’s texts not only pinpoint various constructions of the gaze but also refer the reader to ethics, institutional evolution, and epistemology, they too, like Kant’s, imply a general coordination of such matters. On the other hand, in their peculiarly aesthetic mode, they also suggest that any attempt at a totalizing uni¤cation must remain a dubious enterprise. Disinterested Interest in Cruelty While the texts of Sade and Rétif do indicate what certain issues of the time were, it is often dif¤cult to draw ultimate conclusions from them, let alone tie down their authors’ intentions. In large part, this has to do with their uncertain generic status. Are we dealing with critical philosophy, stimulating erotica, social satire, some combination of the foregoing, or all of them, or more? While we might now be tempted to categorize a work such as The New Justine as pornography pure and simple, in the eighteenth century depictions of graphic sexuality usually commingle with philosophical treatises, especially of the materialist variety, and political polemic.31 In the passage from Sade at the heart of my analyses here, we have seen that ethical and institutional questions loom large. My mention of narrative above, moreover, should have suggested that matters of a more
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literary and aesthetic nature are also in play. In this respect, we might recall that Sade explicitly compares vivisection and artistic endeavor. Concerning the necessary sacri¤ces to science, Rodin remarks that all “artists” have been of the same mind. Neither did Michelangelo “worry his conscience about crucifying a young man and copying him in anguish,” nor did Guido Reni hesitate to have his students whip to death a comely woman in order to have a model for his painting of the Magdalene in tears. Such observations ®y in the face of assertions earlier in the century that moral monstrosity has no place in the enjoyment of cruel spectacles. In Sade, we see the inhuman deliberately and perversely yoked to the ¤ne arts and to great artists. In the process, the previous alignment of aesthetics and ethics is sundered. In this respect, the generic fuzziness of Sade’s texts —a fuzziness that we might expect given the incompleteness of functional differentiation—can actually be seen from a different vantage point as an attempt to emancipate aesthetic production from not only the claims of morality but systematic rationality tout court. As works such as Hogarth’s “Four Stages of Cruelty” suggest, and as recent critics have de¤nitively demonstrated, sentiment and sensibility are crucial elements of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Many are the narratives, paintings, poems, and dramas whose principal aim and criterion of success is the elicitation of affective response—tears, by preference. In France, the capacity of an artwork to move is often designated “intérêt” or “interest.” And while many con¤ned themselves to pity, Sade broadens the ¤eld of “intérêt” to cover overt titillation, horror, and disgust.32 Still, Sade’s extension of passionate aesthetic engagement is not sui generis. In combining sexual response with sympathetic and sensible response—associating the one with the other in good Hartleian fashion—Sade’s texts appear to be typical, if extreme, expressions of eighteenth-century practices. The mention of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Guido Reni in the vivisection passage provides a useful entrée into these practices, for in the century following his death, this artist had become particularly admired thanks to his depictions of a certain type of woman. This woman combines innocence and sexuality along with pain and submission, and during the heyday of sentimental and sensible response, she was no better represented than in the form of Reni’s penitent Magdalenes (¤gure 6.2).33 Diderot, for example, had in his collection a Reni-inspired Magdalene by Lagrenée the elder.34 When this painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1765, its eventual owner gave the following description: She is portrayed from the front. Her eyes are turned toward the heavens; tears run down her cheeks. It is not from her eyes alone that she
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cries, but from her mouth and from every part of her face. Her arms are crossed over her chest; her long hair coils down, hiding her breasts. The only parts that we see nude are her arms and the upper part of her shoulders. Because in her sorrow her arms tighten about her chest and her hands about her arms, the tips of her ¤ngers penetrate lightly into her ®esh. It is impossible to imagine more beautiful hands, more beautiful arms or shoulders. . . . Behind the holy penitent, who, as Panurge says, is still worth the commission of a sin or two, there is a rock upon which sits a perfume bottle, the attribute of the saint. If the woman who anointed the feet of the thirty-three-year-old Christ and who dried them with her hair was as beautiful as this one, and if Christ felt no carnal emotion, then he was not a man.35
The mixture of sacred and profane is insistent. More importantly, Diderot’s sexually charged description idealizes the body and face of suffering, making tears an invitation to transgression. The sympathetically interesting attracts more than pity. The Reni woman in the visual arts provides a snapshot of what was often unfolded into a narrative. This process, hinted at in Diderot’s synopsis of Lagrenée’s painting, is in full swing in the former’s ekphrasis of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s “Young Girl Crying over Her Dead Bird” (¤gure 6.3). Diderot had singled out this painting as perhaps the very best offering of the 1765 exhibition: “A delicious tableau, the most enjoyable and perhaps the most interesting of the Salon” (179).36 With downcast eyes, the sorrowful youth holds out an attraction similar to that of the Magdalene: “One would approach that hand to give it a kiss, if one did not respect the child and her sorrow” (180). The narrator is soon propelled into a fantastic, one-sided conversation with the painting’s subject. This conversation incessantly plays out the chiasm of sexuality and suffering. The male interlocutor, both in spite of and because of his pity, insists on provoking more tears by prying out the girl’s secret: But, little one, your sorrow is so profound, so considered! What does that melancholy and dreamy air signify? All this for a bird! You’re not crying, you’re af®icted—and thought accompanies your af®iction. There, there, little one, open your heart to me, speak truly: Is it the death of this bird which draws you so forcefully and so sadly into yourself? . . . You lower your eyes and do not answer. Your tears are ready to ®ow. I’m not a father. I’m neither indiscreet nor severe. (180)
Unable to get the girl to speak, the interrogator pieces together a likely story. Before continuing, however, I should point out that the narrator
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Figure 6.2. Guido Reni, La Maddalena. Private collection. Reproduced by permission.
Diderot underlines his status as non-father. He does not represent the familial law and the patriarchal insistence on chastity. Rather than threatening, he sympathetically and cruelly regulates pain and pleasure: All right, I see the situation: He loved you—he swore it again and again for such a long time! And he was suffering so much! How can one watch a loved one suffer?! . . . And, let me continue, why cover my
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Figure 6.3. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jeune ¤lle qui pleure son oiseau mort [Young Girl Crying over Her Dead Bird], also known as A Girl with a Dead Canary. Reproduced by permission of the National Galleries of Scotland.
mouth with your hand? That morning your mother was unfortunately absent. He came. You were alone. He was so passionate, so handsome, so tender and charming. He had such love in his eyes, such truth in his expressions! He said those words that go straight to the heart! And when he said them, he was at your knees. I see more. He held one of your hands, and from time to time you felt the warmth of tears that fell from his eyes and ran down the length of your arm. Your mother had still not
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returned. It’s not your fault. It’s the fault of your mother. . . . But isn’t this why you are crying? (180–181)
Diderot here renders symbolic the image of the bird, making explicit the sexual content of Greuze’s painting. In the process, he indulges in a commonplace in the depiction of male sexuality: it is actually the boy who suffers from his sexual drive, which moves him to tears and then on to cruelty. The girl, constructed as naturally compassionate, cannot permit the male to suffer so. Finally, reassuring the girl of the boy’s good intentions, Diderot divulges the crossing of sympathy and sexuality: . . . but what I am saying is not meant to make you cry. And why cry? He promised you, and he won’t fail to do what he promised. When one has been fortunate enough to meet a charming infant like you, to become attached to her, to please her, it’s for an entire life. . . . What is it, my bird? . . . You’re smiling. . . . (Oh, my friend, she was so beautiful! If you had seen her smiling and crying!) (181)
The female is sexually attractive insofar as she is both sympathetic and an object of sympathy. Diderot, in other words, elaborates an erotics of pity. In this account, moreover, we see the clash of two elements of ethical discourse: self-interest, the pleasure attached to the sexual drive and which cannot be denied a utility value, comes into con®ict with pity. Much more dangerously, the eroticization of pity provokes male sexual aggression rather than curbing it. The only way out of the ensuing vicious circle is the promise of marriage and domesticity. The commentary on Greuze’s painting brings up what was a signi¤cant aesthetic issue for Diderot: What is the place of the ¤gurative in the visual arts? In the Essays on Painting, which he began composing shortly after the Salon of 1765, Diderot attacks the use of allegorical ¤gures that must be read as if they were text. Certainly the best paintings suggest and produce narrative, but the artist should strive for depictions that allow the spectator to interpret “naturally,” thereby eliciting response that is not infected with cold textuality.37 In his reading of Greuze’s painting, Diderot attempts to overcome any possible dif¤culties of reading the bird as a simple allegory of lost virginity. For if the bird ¤gures such a loss, unleashing sexual reverie, it does so with all appearances of naturalness intact. Having determined the real reason for the girl’s melancholy, the narrator continues to spin out the story of the painting that returns the bird to the non¤gurative: the girl was so distraught by her own suffering that she did not heed the desperate calls and ®utterings of her pet, allowing it to die of ne-
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glect. There is no doubt irony in this formulation, which turns a victim into an unwitting agent of cruelty. But the problem of indifference, neglect, and unintentioned malice does not end here. Diderot closes his narrative with the possibility that domesticity will not be the destination, but rather death: “your eyes ¤x themselves on me and are af®icted. What else is there? Speak, I cannot guess what you’re thinking . . . —And what if the death of this bird was but a presage . . . what would I do? What would become of me? What if he were ungrateful?—What madness! Fear not, that will not be—that cannot be . . . ” (182). With reassurance breaking off into ellipses of doubt, the fantasy comes to an end. Diderot terminates his commentary with a Sadean remark in which compassion sparks and then yields to Eros: But, my friend, don’t you laugh to hear a serious character amusing himself by consoling a painted child over the loss of her bird—over the loss of whatever you may think [de la perte de tout ce qu’il vous plaira]? But don’t you see that she is beautiful!? That she is interesting?! I don’t like to hurt but in spite of that, I wouldn’t be too displeased to be the cause of her suffering. (182)
Sexual aggression, in®ected by the “interesting,” threatens the natural basis of human community. If the domestic realm holds out the promise of resolution, cruelty awaits outside the hearth. In Sade’s writings, the domestic, rather than providing a belated and perhaps unconvincing resolution, becomes the exact space marked for transgression. In part a parody of sentimental literature—much in the way that Henry Fielding’s Shamela reveals all that might be sanitized yet suspect in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela—Sade’s depictions make manifest what otherwise remains largely latent. Suffering women are of course rife in Sade’s œuvre, but it is remarkable how closely Diderot’s commentaries on the visual arts are followed. The following example from the short story “Eugénie de Franval” thus paints a familiar picture of the eponymous heroine’s victimized mother: Mme. de Franval, thirty-one years old at the time, was in the bloom of her greatest beauty. An impress of sadness, inevitable considering the worries that consumed her, made her even more interesting. Dripping with tears, in the depths of melancholy . . . her beautiful hair negligently draped upon her alabaster chest . . . her lips lovingly pressed to the cherished portrait of her unfaithful tyrant, she resembled one of those beautiful virgins that Michelangelo painted in the bosom of sorrow.38
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We see the repetition of every element in Diderot’s linkage of sexuality and cruelty, but the description is inserted in a narrative that openly attacks the pretended resolution of domesticity through the subversion of its chief regulatory agent. The cause of Madame de Franval’s suffering is her husband’s consistent “denaturing” of their daughter. Having trained his child and enthusiastic pupil in the ways of libertinage, the father “¤nished his per¤dious conquest, and he himself with impunity became the destroyer of a virginity that nature and his titles had entrusted him with the defense of” (10.493). In the end, Eugénie even follows her father’s directive to kill her mother. “Eugénie de Franval” was part of a non-clandestine collection of stories, and Sade could not have concluded with an openly antinomian moral. In the ¤nal moments of the sordidly amusing tale, both father and daughter make an abrupt return to nature and pity. By this point, however, the extended commentary on the conventionality of both af¤nal and consanguine relations has cast doubt on the ability of nature to regulate cruelty and intercourse (social, sexual, and familial). As the writings of Sade and Rétif make clear, while domestic space was heavily charged with sexual and sympathetic energy, so too were the decidedly undomestic arenas of anatomical research, surgery, and medicine. In fact, well before Sade’s mention of the “Weeping Magdalene,” the Renitype woman shows up in a surprising venue. In the plates from the Encyclopedia designed to elucidate surgery, there are several illustrations of mastectomy procedures in which the patients bear an uncanny resemblance to depictions of suffering saints and in particular Saint Agatha (¤gures 6.4– 6.6).39 Obviously not intended to be arousing, these illustrations nevertheless contain highly questionable elements. They were more or less copied from plates in Laurence Heister’s in®uential Institutiones chirurgicae of 1739, which themselves were based on a text published a century prior, Johannes Scultetus’s manual Armamentarium chirurgicum of 1653 (¤gures 6.7 and 6.8). In Scultetus, an affectless and nondescript woman stares to the side, apparently just avoiding the viewer’s own gaze. We ¤nd a similarly oblique gaze and impassiveness in Heister. Yet in the Encyclopedia not only are the patients rendered more attractive, they now divulge their suffering with tilted heads, expressive lips, and eyes either turned upward in supplication or downward in apparent shame. That is, those women who have not been decorously decapitated have gazes distinctly in keeping with the Reni model. Moreover, if this striking departure from the source engravings suggests more commonality with depictions of martyrdom than with actual surgical practices, it is worth noting that Heister himself dismissed the shears as an innovation devoid of practical value.40 In reality,
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Figure 6.4. Depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Agatha from Jacques Callot’s Les images de tous les saincts et saintes de l’année (1636). Typ 615.36.258 F, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.
radical procedures such as those suggested by the shears had been increasingly questioned as both ineffectual and unnecessarily cruel, and treatment shifted toward targeted, local extirpation of breast, testicular, and other similar tumors.41 The illustrations from the Encyclopedia are therefore symptomatic. The anachronistic insertion of martyrdom combined with a type of gaze linked to the erotics of pity and suffering divulge the potential violence of such a scenario. In her study Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, Ann Van Sant compares the invocation of vivisection in Sade to the techniques of painfully revealing character deployed by Richardson in Clarissa (1747–48). Sade uncovers, as it were, the literary unconscious of the earlier sentimental novel.42 Yet while Richardson was no doubt unaware of the submerged content of his method, Sade, as we have seen, was not in the least. Indeed, slyly recalling the aesthetics of sentimental engagement, he has Rombeau call the uterus to be dissected “such an interesting part.” In Sade and to an extent Rétif, earlier symptoms have lost their latency and become painfully manifest. If the late-eighteenth-century texts that I have been considering in this chapter are both a continuation of and a reaction to sentimentality, especially in the guise of sensibility, then this open problematizing also points to a change in aesthetic models. The evocation of the eroticized suffering female is certainly in keep-
Figures 6.5. Illustration of mastectomy procedures and devices from Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.
Figure 6.6. Illustration of mastectomy procedures and devices from Diderot’s Encyclopedia. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Figure 6.7. Mastectomy procedures from Scultetus’s Armamentarium chirurgicum. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.
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Figure 6.8. Mastectomy procedures from Albert Haller’s Disputationes chirurgicae selectae (which faithfully reproduce the illustrations from Laurence Heister). Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries.
ing with a mode of aesthetics that had developed in the eighteenth century. The argument that models be made to suffer is also consonant with Diderot’s demand that art imitate nature faithfully and in its multitudinous guises in order to have the greatest effect. Along with emphasizing models that bespeak sentiment, such as the Magdalene, Sade also calls up the notion of art as non-¤gurative representation with expressions such as “according to nature” and “to copy.” But in keeping with Sade’s Kantian turn, the possible complementarity of these models is transformed into a problematic juxtaposition. Where Diderot sought to bring together sensibility and representation without emphasizing the possible tension between them, Sade thrusts such tension into the light. In effect, with regard to judgments of taste, Sade takes up the notion of disinterest, so central to the moral and aesthetic theories of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and combines it with engagement in the manner witnessed in “Hell.” Indeed, to reverse Kant’s dictum concerning the beautiful—that is, the beautiful creates in us a disinterested interest in it—Sade produces an aesthetics of interested disinterest. Moreover, in the midst of the discussion of Reni’s and Michelangelo’s practices, we also see a shift in aesthetic concerns. What suddenly appears important is neither the passive, dissecting gaze
The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade 144
of the scientist nor the production of sentiment. Rather, we see the artist as a hero who dares to emulate nature’s creative cruelty by reproducing its effects. In the human vivisection passage is thus evidence in support of those voices within Sade criticism that ¤nd in him an early Romantic.43 Certainly, by identifying with nature as creative and destructive force, Sade’s protagonists take on the personae of artistic geniuses. Furthermore, “nature” in its dynamism is very different from the well-ordered nature represented by the classical episteme. In the history of ideas, these shifts have their intellectual roots: Shaftesbury had a century prior talked of genius and elaborated an aesthetics of the creator; nature as active force rather than passive clockwork was quite present in the Lucretian strand of materialist thought (and the mention of the “creuset” or “receptacle” of nature’s production bears this out in the vivisection passage). Notwithstanding, in Sade it is the case that these ideas are implicated in the turn toward the second order—toward a vision of the artist who rises above nature and mere humanity to compete with the former and extend the boundaries of the latter. In conclusion, I hope to have shown just how overdetermined one short passage on human vivisection from Sade is. Through it crisscross elements from different, often disparate, communication networks. While the passage indicates evolution and change, there is plenty about it that remains tied to the history of those communication networks in which it takes part, often to the point of atavism. Moreover, even if we read Sade as part of the shift from one episteme to another, the crossing from one discourse to the next, there remains something irremediably dissolute about his texts: they resist organization and ¤nalization. As Philippe Roger has aptly put the problem of Sade interpretation, Paradox is not an excess—even a pedagogical one—in the case of Sade. It is the mode of rupture with the materialist discourse that preceded it, expressed with the former’s still quite proximate vocabulary. And the tension which traverses the writing is born of the non-dialecticizable con®ict between the temptation to think the totality as a system and the desire—present enjoyment [la jouissance actuelle]—that engenders fragmentation, destruction without exception, of all systematic discourse.44
We might see in Sadean paradox the limits of both hermeneutics and discourse analysis: neither can some underlying unity be recovered nor can the various elements be de¤nitively placed, although they remain recognizable fragments of ethics, aesthetics, politics, and institutional history. Sade here presents us only with an extreme case, and the reason why these
Human Vivisection 145
limits must always exist has been addressed in various ways. Deconstruction would answer différance or the irreducibility of the rhetorical nature of language.45 Lacan would speak of das Ding: the irrepressible residue of the world that is not language, symbol, or image—the residue in which Sade’s protagonists wallow.46 Systems theory would similarly note that whenever a distinction is made, an operation that makes observations and systems possible, the unobservable and unsystematizable is simultaneously produced.47 It is odd, perhaps, to speak of this aspect of Sade’s work in terms of enjoyment, given the atrocities depicted therein. I would venture, however, that anyone steeped in eighteenth-century philosophy and literature cannot suppress a frequent smile when reading Sade’s writings.48 At times, this is because they so openly and brutally parody their predecessors and ®ay commonplaces. But sometimes the smile has more to do with a profound sense of Sadean irony as the contingent and fragile network of discourse is exposed.49 This is not a reason to give up reading Sade in terms of the evolution of institutions and social organization. On the contrary, Sade’s irony—so much like Romantic irony—calls for modes of explanation that do not see paradox and history as irreconcilable.
Epilogue
An important aspect of my argument has been that apparently disparate realms such as ethical philosophy, aesthetics, journalism, the visual arts, and libertine ¤ction have much in common when it comes to the question of inhumanity. The construction of moral monstrosity in the works of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, for example, is put to work in the engravings of Hogarth against cruelty to animals. The concern over scienti¤c curiosity found in Hogarth is both taken up and turned upside down in the pornographic pages of Sade. Yet, in the discussion of Sade’s relation to the aesthetics of sentiment and sensibility, I also suggested that we here witness a forceful wrenching apart of realms previously aligned. Sade hardly stands alone in this regard, and although an epilogue can only sum up and brie®y outline further implications and avenues of inquiry, I would nonetheless like to provide a couple of salient examples that may clarify the nature of this development and the role of the inhuman within it. William Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786) provides both a succinct recapitulation of the shape of moral monstrosity in the eighteenth century and an indication of how its literary representation was eventually used not to inculcate sympathetic ethics, which are simply assumed as a given within the text, but to mark the freedom of aesthetics from ethics. The eponymous protagonist of this novel, the ninth Caliph of Samarah, is avid for sensual pleasure, driven by unappeasable curiosity, and guided by lusts for lucre and power, and he plunges ever deeper into crime.1 Vathek’s mo-
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tives are not dif¤cult to comprehend, even if the means used in their pursuit are often ghastly. The character may be an exotic “other,” but he is still recognizably human.2 The same cannot be said for the loathsome entity that becomes Vathek’s guide and nemesis: an impossibly ugly ¤end dubbed the Giaour (based on the Turkish for “in¤del”). Concerning the latter, Beckford underlines his status as ambiguous: he is a “man, or rather monster.”3 His appearance and appetites are somewhat human, but markedly inhuman in their repulsiveness and excess. Even the Giaour’s provenance is slightly beyond sublunary comprehension: “I am an Indian; but, from a region of India, which is wholly unknown” (89). His putative nationality thus only serves to emphasize that the Giaour stands beyond the threshold of eighteenth-century philosophical anthropology. While Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) might enumerate the geographical, climatic, and other differences that produce the panoply of human mores, the Giaour de¤es this vast range. As the novel progresses, the reader begins to realize that this mysterious locus is nothing other than hell. Two fundamental lacks most clearly indicate the Giaour’s infernal nature: he feels neither shame nor pity.4 These lacks come to the fore when, having piqued Vathek’s curiosity to see the Palace of Subterranean Fire, the Giaour requires the sacri¤ce of ¤fty children. Vathek cannot resist the temptation, and arranges a feast so that the most beautiful offspring of his “viziers and great men” will frolic into the waiting maw of the ¤end, secreted in a chasm: The Caliph, availing himself of the ¤rst moment to retire from the crowd, advanced towards the chasm; and there heard, yet not without shuddering, the voice of the Indian; who, gnashing his teeth, eagerly demanded, ‘Where are they?—Where are they?—perceivest thou not how my mouth waters?’—‘Relentless Giaour!’ answered Vathek, with emotion; ‘can nothing content thee but the massacre of these lovely victims? Ah! wert thou to behold their beauty, it must certainly move thy compassion.’—‘Perdition on thy compassion, babbler!’ cried the Indian: give them me; give them instantly, or, my portal shall be closed against thee for ever!’—“Not so loudly,’ replied the caliph, blushing.—‘I understand thee,’ returned the Giaour with the grin of an Ogre; ‘thou wantest no presence of mind: I will, for a moment, forbear.’ (97)
By underlining confusion and absolute difference, this dialogue exempli¤es the negative relationship of humanity to the inhuman. Although the Giaour eventually comprehends Vathek’s pathos and reservations, the latter simply cannot understand one who is sundered from the gaze and suffering
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of others. Nor can Vathek countenance what seems most inexplicable of all: the Giaour’s appetite for massacre is nothing other than what it is— the destruction of beauty simply adding spice to malicious delectation. A being without compassion and who enjoys the sight of pain, Beckford’s creation is the image of cruelty in perfection at a certain historical juncture. But can this instantiation of the inhuman be labeled ethical? And in what sense is it exemplary? Clearly, the novel is neither realistic nor meant to discourage Giaour-like behavior or attitudes. The atrocities depicted are destined for the reader’s enjoyment, even if such enjoyment is accompanied by a frisson of horror. It would seem that Beckford, well aware of the extremity of his representations, thought that they needed ¤ltering. The text was originally composed in French, an alienation from the author’s mother tongue that probably both encouraged license and served as a sort of distancing mechanism.5 The exoticism of the tale would also provide distance, and the characters and situations are so outlandish that they often verge on the comic. What is certain in any case is that Beckford was manipulating for aesthetic purposes what were by his time well-worn ethical conventions. In Vathek, then, what we see is a speci¤cally literary evocation of inhumanity: one that does not necessarily negate the ethics of inhumanity, but that does mark the difference between ethics and aesthetics. It is highly instructive that Beckford, while he might create ¤ctive inhuman beings, was in other respects thoroughly steeped in the culture of sympathy, writing for example in his travel journals of the Spanish love of bull¤ghting, “It requires little courage to attack such patient animals. I was highly disgusted with the spectacle. It set my nerves on edge, and I seemed to feel cuts and slashes the rest of the evening.”6 Re®ecting on the terrors of revolutionary France and comparing them to experimental science, he would likewise lament, “how often have I thought myself, that these experiments upon the human mind . . . are as abhorrent to the men of pure and kindly feeling, as those of the hellish Majendie upon the unoffending animals he submits to the most horrible and lingering torture, and for purposes equally problematical.”7 Inhumanity can be entertaining—as long as it is not real. The rift we witness in Beckford’s writings between an ingrained compassion for living creatures and the literary exploitation of malice is a rather late development in the eighteenth century. Examples similar to the one provided in Vathek are most prevalent in Gothic novels, but are by no means limited to them. Consider this early case from Diderot’s art criticism: “I hate all those petty, contemptible actions that only show us an abject soul, but I do not hate great crimes: ¤rst, because one makes of
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them beautiful paintings and beautiful tragedies; second, because grand crimes and great actions carry the same mark of energy.”8 Although Diderot speaks of beauty, his insistence on “energy,” one of the most important semes in the rhetorical de¤nition of the sublime, functions not only to equate bene¤cent and criminal actions, but also to bind such actions to aesthetics, making them productive of art.9 We might in fact see in such cases simply the effect of the steady elevation of the value of the sublime during the course of the century—except that we would then also have to explain the rise of the sublime. The latter issue is actually a clue: part of the value of the sublime seems to lie in the fact that it is not the beautiful and therefore not implicated in the longstanding overlay of aesthetics with the good and true.10 The sublime indicates the emergence of a differentiated sphere for aesthetics in much the same way that the depiction of inhumanity in Gothic ¤ction asserts the difference of literature from sentimental moral philosophy by violent negation as well as by irony, which loosens the hold of sympathy. (We are here reminded as well of the prominent Gothic aspect of Sade’s writings.) In this respect, one ¤nal example is particularly ¤tting. At the outset of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a devastating shipwreck takes place. Concerning such spectacles, Lucretius had reasoned, “What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring! Not that anyone’s af®ictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realize from what troubles you yourself are free is joy indeed.”11 Whereas the philosophes might easily embrace Lucretius’s debunking of superstition and those inclined to materialism ¤nd a forerunner in his atomism, thinkers and writers during the period had to spend a good deal of effort both explaining and repressing the words quoted above. On the one hand, the notion that watching suffering might somehow bring pleasure was central to the debate about the attractions of tragedies, executions, and the like. Although many solutions were offered to make sense of this conundrum—and to banish the appearance of inhumanity that such enjoyment seemed to entail—pity as a simultaneously sweet and painful affect provided the most satisfying answer. What was blocked out, on the other hand, was Lucretius’s insistence on the separation of spectator and spectacle.12 In Maturin’s return to the Lucretian scene, an onlooker notes that the actions of the rescuers, while in vain, indicate how “much good there is in man.”13 Carefully analyzed, this good may turn out to be a compound made up of familiar and less noble elements: “curiosity, strong excitement, the pride of physical strength, or the comparative consciousness of safety”
Epilogue 150
(65). Such an analysis still cannot make sense of the eerie presence of a ¤gure standing on a rock who “shewed neither sympathy or terror, —uttered no sound, —offered no help” (66). This ¤gure indeed de¤es anthropological explanation. As the onlooker exclaims: “Good God! Is it possible that any thing bearing the human form should stand there without making an effort, without expressing a feeling for those perishing wretches!” (66). To this question, the unmoved watcher, Melmoth, merely says, “Let them perish” and emits a diabolic laugh (66). As the narrative unfolds, however, the reader ¤nds that this apparently inhuman being is in many ways worthy of our admiration. Like his relations—Goethe’s Faust or Matthew Lewis’s monk Ambrosio—Melmoth’s unhallowed degeneracy is balanced by a sense of human greatness.14 He is indubitably monstrous in relation to the value of pity, but he simultaneously expresses a heroic break with nature as sentiment. Because of this, Melmoth is in certain respects very much a Kantian ethical subject: no slave to affect and above the heteronomous determinations of the sensible body. In other respects, he is an ethical anathema, and this once more marks the difference between the ethical and the literary. In the reverberating, inexplicable, ironic laughter of Melmoth, we glimpse the horror and promise of inhumanity transmuted into humanity of a higher order. While both aesthetics and ethics face this situation—not without often looking away—they must henceforth confront it in different ways. Philosophical ethics would discover in the paradoxical inhumanity of humans its very grounding and apparent necessity. With its ironic embrace of iniquity and its rejection of the good as a contingent imposition, aesthetics would mark the boundaries of its domain.
Notes
Introduction 1. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 81. 2. In the original (bk. 3, l. 661), “Primus in orbe timor fecit deos” (Thebiad, in Statius [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955], 1.500). Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are my own. The notion that fear produced the deities had long been a commonplace by the time Statius gave it this formulation. The same line, with slightly changed word order, will also be found in Petronius, fragment 27. A hundred years before Hume made his particular intervention, Thomas Hobbes, in his dissection of the religious impulse in Leviathan (1651), remarked, “This perpetual fear, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes (as it were in the dark), must needs have for object something. And therefore, when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good or evil fortune, but some power or agent invisible; in which sense, perhaps, it was some of the old poets said that the gods were at ¤rst created by human fear” ([Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994], 64). 3. Peter Gay examines the in®uence of Lucretius and other ancients at length in The Rise of Modern Paganism, vol. 1 of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). 4. Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, La contagion sacrée (London [i.e., Amsterdam]: M. M. Rey, 1768), 8. D’Holbach quotes Statius’s words on the title page. The text is itself a freely elaborated and much expanded translation of a diatribe against religion by John Trenchard entitled The Natural History of Superstition that was published anonymously in 1709 (London: A. Baldwin). Frank E. Manuel discusses the fear theory of religion, including Trenchard and d’Holbach, in The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Atheneum, 1967). See in particular pp. 70–81, 144–148, and 228–241. 5. On Bayle and the development of critique as a category of eighteenth-century thought, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 107–123. 6. Published anonymously as De la cruauté religieuse (London [i.e., Amsterdam], 1769). The English work on which d’Holbach based his is the likewise anonymous Considerations upon war, upon cruelty in general, and religious cruelty in particular. Also, an attempt to prove that everlasting punishments are inconsistent with divine attributes. In several letters and essays. To which are added, essays on divers other subjects, and An oration in praise of deceit and lying (London: T. Osborne, 1758). 7. Carsten Zelle examines Gottsched’s work as an instance of the use of the stage as a tool to deter violence in the early Enlightenment in “Angenehmes Grauen”: Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987), 29–56.
Notes to pages xii–xiv 152
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 33. 9. Voltaire, claiming simply to report the position of the Unitarians and Socinians, writes of original sin as follows: “It is to offend god, they say, it is to accuse him of the most absurd barbarity, to dare to say that he made all the generations of men in order to torment them by eternal sufferings on the pretext that their ¤rst father ate some fruit in a garden” (Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Theodore Besterman [London: Penguin, 1971], 331). Ernst Cassirer considered the rejection of the Fall and its consequences a fundamental point of unity for the period: “The concept of original sin is the common opponent against which all the different trends of the philosophy of the Enlightenment join forces” (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove [Boston: Beacon, 1955], 141). Carl Becker also noted in this regard, “What Locke aimed at, no doubt, what the eighteenth century acclaimed him for having demolished, was the Christian doctrine of total depravity, a black, spreading cloud which for centuries depressed the human spirit” (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers [1932; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959], 64–65). 10. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (2nd ed., 1758; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 11. The term “cement of society” will also be found under the rubric “sympathy” in the index to Kames’s Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), index unpaginated. The topic is considered at length in 2.142–148 of the latter work. 11. For a sociological account of the channeling of sympathy, see Candace Clark, Misery and Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 12. Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 95–99; Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Re®ections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 13. See Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy, eds., Virtual Futures: Cybernetics, Technology, and Posthuman Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1998). See also N. Katherine Hayles’s critical analysis of the concept in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 14. Felicity Nussbaum similarly points out the danger of oversimpli¤cation when postmodernism uses the Enlightenment as “a ground against which the difference of the present may be asserted” (Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 21); consider as well her epilogue “Whose Enlightenment Is It?” to the same (192–210). See also Daniel Brewer’s insightful comments in the introduction to his The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–12; and Julie Candler Hayes’s destabilizing historical account in Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–21 in particular. 15. On the emergence of the sciences of normality, a development that takes off in earnest in the nineteenth century, see Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone, 1989). The relationship between moral monstrosity and physical monstrosity is complex; if the eighteenth century witnessed the slow discarding of the notion of the physical monster as anti-nature and the integration of the “sport” into a natural science of norms, the moral monster followed this path only in part, retaining—as it does to this day—a shock value that might be termed theological. For a thorough recent account of these matters, see Andrew Curran, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s
Notes to pages xv–xvii 153
Universe, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2000:01 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001). I might note as well that Curran discusses the limits of Canguilhem’s account of nineteenth-century science when applied retroactively (15). Michel Foucault also brie®y discusses the equation of moral monstrosity and physical monstrosity in relation to criminality in Les anormaux: Cours au Collège de France, 1974– 1975 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999), 75–100. 16. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 81–119. The original German edition made its ¤rst public appearance in 1947. 17. Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 398–429 passim; and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 208–211. 18. The goals and methods of Foucauldian discourse analysis are most succinctly expressed in Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 215–237. 19. Since I have already mentioned classic works by Becker, Cassirer, Crocker, Gay, and Manuel, let me add a handful of recent titles of particular note: Richard van Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment: The Rise of the Middle Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Thomas P. Saine, The Problem of Being Modern, or, The German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997); and Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 20. David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ann Jessie Van Sant, EighteenthCentury Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 21. Central in this regard is Foucault’s widely disseminated and discussed essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (see The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984]), 32–50). Habermas takes up his differences with Foucault in succinct form in “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 173–179. These differences are greatly expanded in two chapters of Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 238–293. Much of the relevant material in this encounter, along with several topical essays by others, has been gathered in the useful volume Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 22. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 279–282. 23. See, for example, pp. 211–218 of Richard J. Bernstein’s essay “Foucault: Critique of Ethos,” in Kelly, Critique and Power, 211–241. 24. North American scholars have been slow to address Luhmann’s work, with the notable exception of Frederic Jameson. Among Jameson’s many mentions of Luhmann are his comments in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Notes to pages xvii–4 154
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 139–143. The scholarly exchange between Habermas and Luhmann goes back at the very least to their jointly written discussion of their positions, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971). Habermas critiques the later systems theory of Luhmann in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 368–385. 25. It is unfortunate that to date most of Luhmann’s less abstract analyses of historical semantics have yet to be translated. Of especial note with regard to my arguments in this book is the essay “Frühneuzeitliche Anthropologie: Theorietechnische Lösungen für ein Evolutionsproblem der Gesellschaft,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 1.162–234. 26. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 1–2. Concerning this new dichotomy, which in many ways recon¤gures the mind/body split of Descartes, one is reminded that Habermas found in Foucault an untenable dualism of detached, objective historical inquiry and passionate political subjectivism (see The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 270–276 in particular). 27. Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) was translated into English almost thirty years after its original publication as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). In the North American academy, the in®uence of the translation has led to an almost anachronistic interest in a topic—“the public sphere”—that had been debated much earlier in Germany. For a critical analysis of the concept, see the collection of essays Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 28. I take the distinction above from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s essay “Who Were the Philosophes?” in which the notion of the historically circumscribed role of the philosophe and of the institutionalization of philosophie is developed at length (in his Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], 133–136 in particular). 29. For Foucault’s position, see “What is Enlightenment?” Habermas addresses the legacy of the Enlightenment and discusses his objections to postmodernity as a useful distinction in “Modernity: An Un¤nished Project,” trans. Nicholas Walker, in Habermas and the Un¤nished Project of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 38–55. In a different vein, Luhmann expresses his reservations about postmodernity and his take on Enlightenment reason in “Modernity in Contemporary Society,” in Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–21. Giddens prefers to see the nineteenth-century and more recent critiques of Enlightenment rationality not as a break with the latter but rather as a radicalization thereof (see The Consequences of Modernity, 45–53). 30. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31 and 36. 31. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 11–17 in particular. Less generously, Lyotard’s representation of Systemtheorie in the 1970s appears little more than a strawman version of the earlier functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons and company. On the shift toward communication in recent systems-theoretical work, see Dirk Baecker’s introductory essay to Problems of Form, ed. Dirk Baecker and trans. Michael Irmschler and Leah Edwards (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–14. 1. The Model of Moral Monstrosity 1. For these reasons, I have not sought to provide comprehensive bibliographies of the various philosophers that I discuss—an approach that would be particularly
Notes to pages 4–10 155
hopeless in the case of major ¤gures such as Hume. Rather, I give bibliographical citations only when they are particularly relevant to a point being made. Having said this, I note that a focused discussion of sentimental ethics from the point of view of philosophical argumentation is found in Philip Mercer’s Sympathy and Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between Sympathy and Morality with Special Reference to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 2. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, vol. 2, part 2 of Shaftesbury: Standard Edition, ed. Gerd Hemmerich and Wolfram Benda (Stuttgart: Fromman-Holzboog, 1984), 292. All subsequent quotations from Shaftesbury come from this volume, which presents the text of An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699) on even-numbered pages and An Inquiry concerning Virtue (1711) on odd-numbered pages. These texts, although generally convergent, do differ in many ways. 3. This quotation is studied in the context of changes in mentality with respect to executions in V. A. C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 234. 4. The ¤rst edition of the Trévoux dictionary, from which the initial de¤nition of cruelty is taken, is unpaginated (Dictionnaire universel françois et latin [Trévoux, 1704]). The same de¤nition is maintained in all editions up to the ¤nal one, in which the revised de¤nition occurs (Dictionnaire universel françois et latin, vulgairement appelé Dictionnaire de Trévoux, 3 vols. [Paris: Compagnie des libraires associés, 1771], 3.43). The original of the Saint-Evremond quotation will be found in his essay “Sur les tragédies” (1677) in Œuvres mêlées de Saint-Evremond, 3 vols. (Paris: J. Léon Techener Fils, 1865), 2.368. The Trévoux quotation is slightly misleading, as the original states that the “eyes” are “avid for cruelty,” not the “British” (whose eyes, however, are implied). 5. John N. Pappas debates the widely assumed direct connection between the Journal de Trévoux and the Dictionnaire de Trévoux and addresses the philosophes’ concerns about competition from the Trévoux dictionary in his Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux and the Philosophes, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3 (Les Délices and Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1957), 167–170. 6. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1966–67 [facsimile printing of the ¤rst edition, 1751–80]), 4.517. 7. James Beattie, The Philosophical and Critical Works of James Beattie, 4 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974–75), 3.180. 8. On the negative connotations of “indifference” in the Scottish Enlightenment, see John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late EighteenthCentury Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 85–86 in particular. 9. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 29. However, Kames complicates this position later in the same text (see 60–61). 10. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, vols. 5–6 of Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag: 1990), 5.165–166. 11. On Hutcheson’s developing position on malevolence—he never abandoned the claim that evil is not a part of human nature—see Wolfgang Leidhold, Ethik und Politik bei Francis Hutcheson (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1985), 334–343. 12. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, vol. 1 of Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 132. 13. Francis Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, vol. 2 of Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 75–76. 14. Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 124. 15. Writes Ernest Tuveson concerning this aspect of the earl’s thought: “Shaftesbury’s conclusion, in effect, was that the human animal is to be de¤ned as a value-
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perceiver. Our reactions to objects, to situations, as beautiful or ugly, good or ‘ill’ in themselves—this, and not our capacity for ratiocination . . . makes us ‘human.’ As a species we may be de¤ned as those animals that possess sensibility. Hobbes (and, by implication, Locke), referring all basic motivations to self-interest, were shallow observers. Taste, disinterested taste, is a hard fact; it is ultimately the fact that makes man a moral being” (“Shaftesbury and the Age of Sensibility,” in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800, ed. Howard Anderson and John Shea [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967], 80). Consider, however, my stipulations in the following chapter concerning not just the differences but the similarities between Shaftesbury on one side and Hobbes, Locke, et al. on the other. On the overlap of moral and aesthetic categories with respect to monstrosity, with emphasis on Diderot’s translation of Shaftesbury’s ideas, see also Andrew Curran, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2001:01 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001), 49–52. 16. The term “indifferently” (which in this case indicates that there is no immediate pro¤t for the observer) in Shaftesbury’s de¤nition of inhumanity could just as well be replaced with the word “disinterestedly” used here. Note, however, that this “indifferently” should be distinguished from the “indifferently” that means without reacting sentimentally, encountered elsewhere. The exact place of disinterestedness in Shaftesbury’s work, in particular concerning his contribution to the ¤eld of aesthetics, has been hotly debated in the history of ideas. See the following: Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2 (winter 1961): 131–143, and the exchange that ensued in the pages of the same journal; Preben Mortensen, “Shaftesbury and the Morality of Art Appreciation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4 (October 1994): 631–650; and Dabney Townsend, “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (April 1987): 287–305. 17. The situation is somewhat different with regard to the rise of the sublime, a matter that I all too brie®y address in the epilogue. Although the logic is somewhat nominalist, one should recall that it was in 1750 that Baumgarten ¤rst used the term “aesthetics” to refer to a separate discipline within philosophy that would cover sensible experience. In the terms of systems theory, one might venture that aesthetics and morality are more or less undifferentiated in Shaftesbury. In Hutcheson, they are differentiated but interpenetrate in such a way that ethics determines what is beautiful or not. With Kant, this interpenetration was further attenuated, and we ¤nd instead that the conclusions of aesthetic theory may have consequences for ethics (but the ¤elds no longer determine one another). Eventually, the hierarchical superiority of morality over aesthetics would be subverted by the likes of Baudelaire in order to insist on the autonomy of the latter, with evil becoming beautiful. On differentiation of the system of art and autonomy, see Niklas Luhmann’s essay “The Work of Art and the Self-Reproduction of Art,” in Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 191–214. Many of the key points of this essay are developed, although not always clari¤ed, in Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 211–242 in particular. This insistence on differentiation runs counter to the Marxist critique that prefers to link both ethics and aesthetics to an underlying political unity and that casts both as ¤rst and foremost masks that hide political functions. On the overlap of aesthetics and ethics from a Marxist point of view, with a focus on Scottish Enlightenment ¤gures, see Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 31–69 in particular. The systems-theoretical view does not, in any case, deny the possible social function of aesthetics, but rather insists that a certain irreducibility of social subsystems has come about. On the division of ethics from aesthetics in the context of the horri¤c, see in
Notes to pages 11–14 157
particular Carsten Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen”: Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987), 295 ff. 18. Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 134. For a summation of Hutcheson’s aesthetic philosophy, with consideration of the independence of and overlap between the moral and the aesthetic, see Walter John Hipple, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), 25–36. See also Peter Kivy’s introduction to his edition of Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) and his study of Hutcheson’s roots and heritage, The Seventh Sense: A Study of Francis Hutcheson’s Aesthetics and Its In®uence in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: B. Franklin, 1976). 19. David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 226. 20. Compare Hume’s later evocation in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals of a “fancied monster,” who in this case is “a person originally framed so as to have no manner of concern for his fellow-creatures, but to regard the happiness and misery of all sensible beings with greater indifference than even two contiguous shades of the same colour” (235). This imagined freak of indifference, like his counterpart the monster of inverted sentimentality, is also negatively compared to “man” tout court, who must always make judgments that Hume considers “moral” (235). 21. Concerning “humanity” as ideal and passion, Lester Crocker felicitously remarks that by the second half of the eighteenth century “the spread of sentimentalism, sensibilité and enthusiasm for virtue gradually transforms the ideal of ‘humanity’ into an emotional war-cry” (Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963], 306). 22. Cf. John Andrew Bernstein, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant: An Introduction to the Con®ict between Aesthetic and Moral Values in Modern Thought (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 33–34. Bernstein argues that Shaftesbury’s position on the pain of immorality has its roots in Plato’s Philebus and the idea that the immoralist’s pleasure is not pure but rather mixed with pain. I would maintain that Shaftesbury’s text belongs more properly to the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury insistence on the affective productivity of comparison, a theme that links Hobbes, Hume, et al. The eighteenth-century conception of pity as a mixed pleasure is likewise rooted in the power of comparison. 23. Beattie, Philosophical and Critical Works, 3.249. 24. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969), 345. 25. For Joseph Butler’s observations see The Works of Joseph Butler, 2 vols., ed. W. E. Gladstone (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 2.45–46. 26. Denis Diderot, Le modèle anglais, vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 424–425. 27. Yves Marie André (le Père), Un traité de l’homme, selon les différentes merveilles qui le composent, vols. 1–2 of Œuvres du Feu P. André (Paris: Chez Ganeau, 1766), 2.33. 28. For the curious reader, I quote at length the original of La Mettrie’s rather amusing passage: On ne peut détruire la Loi Naturelle. L’Empreinte en est si forte dans tous les Animaux, que je ne doute nullement que les plus sauvages & les plus féroces n’aient quelques momens de repentir. Je crois que la Fille Sauvage de Châlons en Champage aura porté la peine de son crime, s’il est vrai qu’elle ait mangé sa sœur. Je pense la même chose de tous ceux qui commettent des
Notes to pages 14–15 158
crimes, même involontaires, ou de tempérament: de Gaston d’Orléans qui ne pouvait s’empêcher de voler; de certaine femme qui fut sujette au même vice dans la grossesse, & dont ses enfans héritèrent: de celle qui dans le même Etat, mangea son mari; de cette autre qui égorgeoit les enfans, saloit leurs corps, & en mangeoit tous les jours comme du petit salé; de cette ¤lle de Voleur Antropophage, qui la devint à 12 ans, quoiqu’aiant perdu Père et Mère à l’âge d’un an, elle eût été élevée par d’honnêtes gens. . . . Parmi les femmes dont je parle, l’une fut roüée, & brulée, l’autre enterrée vive. Je sens tout ce que demande l’intérêt de la société. Mais il seroit sans doute à souhaiter qu’il n’y eût pour Juges, que d’excellens Medecins. Eux seuls pourroient distinguer le criminel innocent, du coupable” ( Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine, edited and with an introductory monograph by Aram Vartanian [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960], 173–174). A similar, although less sympathetic, approach to moral monstrosity and insanity is expressed by d’Holbach: S’il se trouvait des hommes tellement conformés que les principes de la morale ne pussent leur convenir, cette morale n’en serait pas moins certaine; il faudrait en conclure simplement qu’elle n’est pas faite pour des êtres constitués différemment de tous les autres. Il n’existe point de morale pour les monstres ou pour les insensés; la morale universelle n’est faite que pour des êtres susceptibles de raison et bien organisés; dans ceux-ci la nature ne varie point” (Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, La morale universelle, ou Les devoirs de l’homme fondés sur sa nature, 3 vols. [Paris: Masson et ¤ls, 1820], 1.xv). On d’Holbach’s position in this quotation, see Robert Mauzi, L’idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960), 644. 29. See in particular Plato’s Protagoras and book 12, chapters 6 and 7, of The City of God. Augustine writes, “The truth is that one should not try to ¤nd an ef¤cient cause for a wrong choice. It is not a matter of ef¤ciency but de¤ciency; the evil will itself is not effective but defective. For to defect from him who is will itself is not effective but defective. For to defect from him who is the Supreme Existence, to something of less reality, this is to begin to have an evil will” (City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson [London: Penguin, 1982], 478–479). 30. For a concise account of Leibniz’s position, see his “On Freedom” (c. 1689) in Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson and trans. Mary Morris and G. H. R. Parkinson (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), 106–111. 31. From the subsection “Was Grausamkeit ist” of Christian Wolff’s Vernünfftige Gedanken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, zu Beförderung ihrer Glückseligkeit, in Gesammelte Werke, part 1, vol. 4 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 615. 32. On shifts in the natural law tradition in the eighteenth century, see Crocker, Nature and Culture, 3–74. 33. For a glimpse of the process by which pity was introduced into German philosophy, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, and Friedrich Nicolai’s Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1972). A portion of this exchange has been translated in Timothy J. Chamberlain, ed., Eighteenth Century German Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1992), 8–39. On the nature of pity as theorized therein, see Dorothea E. von Mücke’s Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 96–105.
Notes to pages 15–18 159
34. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137. 35. Aristotle writes, “Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute ¤delity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies” (Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher [London: Macmillan, 1920], 15). One could here compare J. P. de Crousaz’s remarks in the Traité du beau (1715): “Les representations des choses les plus hideuses & les plus haïssables ne laissent pas neanmoins d’avoir aussi leur beauté, comme la peinture, par exemple, d’une Araignée, d’un Monstre, d’un meurtre, d’une barbarie; parce que l’on trouve un rapport de ressemblance entre ces objects d’horreur & une peinture, qui ne contient pourtant rien de criminel, ni de dangereux. L’Esprit se plait à découvrir de l’uniformité dans cette grande diversité” ([Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970], 45). On the place of the repulsive in the aesthetic thought of the time, see Herbert Dieckmann’s “Das Abscheuliche und Schreckliche in der Kunsttheorie des 18. Jahrhundert,” in Die nicht mehr schönen Künste, Poetik und Hermeneutik 3, ed. Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968), 271–317. 36. Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Ré®exions sur la poètique, in Œuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 3.113. 37. For Du Bos, see the chapter entitled “De l’attrait des spectacles propres à exciter en nous une grande émotion. Des gladiateurs” in his Ré®exions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993), 5–9. The place of Du Bos in the aesthetics of horror in the eighteenth century has been studied at length by Carsten Zelle in “Angenehmes Grauen,” 139–157; Zelle also carefully contextualizes Du Bos, analyzing his precursors and later interlocutors (114–139 and 157–171). 38. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 221–230. 39. Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, trans. Michael Henry (London: Penguin, 1986), 164. Diderot worked on the novel from the late 1760s into the 1770s; it was ¤rst published in part and serially in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire from 1778 to 1780. 40. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 71–73. 41. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 37. Lessing’s comparison of the arena and the tragic stage will be found on pp. 29–30 of the English translation: Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). The discussion is a digression within the main topic, which concerns the relation between pain, semiotics, and the constraints of speci¤c media (namely painting and narrative). As to the overarching argument, see David Wellbery’s Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 42. Lessing, Laocoön, 29, and Laokoon, 37. 2. The Paradox of Inhumanity 1. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1966–67 [facsimile printing of the ¤rst edition, 1751–80]), 8.746. 2. See Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica to *56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 37–65. In reference to Russell’s theory of logical types, Wittgenstein remarks that contradictions or paradoxes are not obviously problems simply to be gotten rid of; rather, they may have a function within a language game of producing “astonishment and indecision” (Ludwig Wittgenstein,
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Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967], 130). It would appear that the paradox of inhumanity has precisely this function (“Can you believe that he is so cruel as to not even be human!” and “How could such a thing even be possible?!”). In part 2 of my argument, I explore at length such uses of paradox. 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 100. 4. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1958), 1.303. 5. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 2.3. 6. The nature of Hobbes’s egoism, and the thorny issues of reception related to it, are discussed at length in Tom Sorell’s Hobbes ([London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986], 96–110 in particular). What Adela Pinch has called, in the context of Hume’s investment in sympathy, the “transsubjectivity of feelings” is not in contradiction with the principle of egoism unless we take the former expression to mean a literal sharing of subjectivity (see her Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], 25). Rather, we might see the rhetoric of the “communication” of affect, which is so prevalent in the eighteenth century, as an attempt to overcome the problems of this methodological starting point. 7. If one were to object that Hutcheson and Shaftesbury tend to ground their claims most forcefully in a feeling of approbation or disapprobation rather than pleasure and pain, this hardly circumvents the nature of the problem; indeed, they both understand approbation and disapprobation in distinctly affective terms. On this point, Rousseau’s case is a little more tricky. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), for example, under the sway of Condillac’s introduction of associationist empiricism to France, the text wavers between pity as moral sense and the possibility of pity as pure potentiality—pity that is in any case continuously threatened by ominous incursions of inhuman behavior. The role of associationism in relation to moral monstrosity is addressed at greater length below. 8. On the issue of prescription versus description in Hume, see W. D. Hudson, ed., The Is-Ought Question: A Collection of Papers on the Central Problem in Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1969), which includes several famous contributions to the debate by Geoffrey Hunter, Philippa Foot, A. C. MacIntyre, and J. R. Searle et al. Cf. Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 62–67. 9. For a concise introduction to rational choice theory, see Jon Elster’s Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Elster gives a more thorough outline of his own use of methodological individualism in Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5–8. I might add that Friedrich Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals is one of the ¤rst to bemoan modern man’s having become calculable—a nostalgia shared by certain postmodern ¤gures, notably Foucault. 10. Hirschman does note that the rehabilitation of the passions (with Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hume as points of reference) from the late seventeenth century onward complicates his overarching thesis (The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, 20th anniversary edition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 46–48 and 63–65). 11. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, vol. 1 of Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 32. On the absence of “disinterestedness” with respect to malice in Hutcheson’s work, see Susan M. Purviance’s “Intersubjectivity and Sociable Relations in the Philosophy of Francis Hutcheson,” Eighteenth Century Life 15, nos. 1–2 (1991), 33. We might here compare
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the position of Alexander Forbes in his Essays Moral and Philosophical on Several Subjects (1734), in which he claims that anything of moral value derives from disinterest and that, contrariwise, “the Baseness of vicious actions must be from their Interestedness”; after all, “Contraries cannot come from the same Principle” ([New York: Garland, 1970], 261). Forbes continues in a familiar manner: “No Man, says Salust, is wicked for nothing. When we are unjust, it is still some way or other in our own favour” (262). 12. Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2.16. 13. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 377. On Hume’s logic of malice, see also Philip Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between Sympathy and Morality with Special Reference to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 38–42. 14. On the doctrine of the vibrations and other physiologies of the eighteenth century, see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). On the interplay between the physiological and the psychological in the discourse of sensibility, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9–12 in particular. 15. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1834), 295. 16. Hartley’s analysis of the impossibility of a community of moral monsters ¤nds its echo across the Channel in Montesquieu’s story of the Troglodytes in Les lettres persanes. Here, we ¤nd that these congenitally wicked people live in misery and eventually self-destruct, while a freakish family of benevolent Troglodytes ¤nds happiness in virtue (see Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1949], 146–153). On this episode in the novel and its relation to Montesquieu’s later political thought, see Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 353–355. The topic brie®y surfaces again in Crocker, Nature and Culture, 109. 17. Hobbes explains laughter with the following words: “Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER, and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison thereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (Leviathan, 32). For Hutcheson’s critique (which paints Hobbes as a moral monster of sorts), see Francis Hutcheson, “Re®ections upon Laughter and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees,” in Opera Minora, vol. 7 of Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), 102 ff. 18. We might say in systems-theoretical terms that the observed observer (the sentimental subject) is part of the environment of sentimental ethics as an observing system that also observes itself in the mode of self-reference. This observed observer, moreover, is only available to the communication system by being re®ected within communication. Luhmann expresses such a situation with an apparently paradoxical formula: “Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate” (“How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994], 371). 19. In the ¤nal part of my argument I will address at greater length the way in which this process has to do with re®ection and communication rather than some unfolding of a “dialectic” of reason. The dialectical view is most famously expressed in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993). In this regard, I should note what I take
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to be the overriding thesis of Daniel Brewer’s reading of Diderot’s œuvre: that selfre®exivity was an inevitable, if not always welcome, result of the more complex instances of Enlightenment writing (see The Discourse of Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]). Adela Pinch’s Strange Fits of Passion, which examines how the ontological status of feeling from the mid-eighteenth century onward was increasingly intertwined with epistemological problems, treats similar matters in a somewhat different vein. A case of particular interest is how passions in Hume give rise to a self that in turn examines passions as its ground—and thus ¤nds no self there in the ¤rst place (22–24)! 20. Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, Principes du droit naturel (Paris: Janet et Cotelle, 1821), 144. On Burlamaqui as a Continental representative of moral-sense theory, with brief mention of moral monstrosity, see Crocker, Nature and Culture, 82. 21. Adam Smith’s ambivalent relationship to sympathetic spectatorship is insightfully examined by David Marshall in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 167–192. Marshall notes that the immediacy that pity was granted by Du Bos and Lord Kames, for example, is rendered problematic in Smith’s treatise (169–173, 180–181). In this regard, I would point out that my reading of Smith accords with John Bender’s in Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Bender remarks that spectatorship is split in Smith between immediate and imaginative sympathy, and that the latter involves distance, interior recreation of the exterior world, and impartiality. According to Bender, Smith actually shifts from a theatrical model of the human subject to one modeled on indirect free discourse and narrative by interiorizing theatricality (218–228). 22. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969), 7. 23. This shift, while not formulated in exactly the same terms, is noted by John Dwyer in Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 183. 24. On this point, see Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 38. For Lessing’s refutation, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23–32. 25. See David Marshall’s comments on Smith and Stoicism (Figure of Theater, 183–185 and note 21). Stoicism enjoyed some fashion before, during, and after the heyday of sentimentality and sensibility—and these movements were not always considered inimical or contrary. For example, Shaftesbury considered himself a Stoic of sorts, and Smith was certainly not the only author of the Scottish Enlightenment to align himself with Stoics. Adam Ferguson, for example, did as well (see Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2.5). In France, Diderot made occasional remarks in favor of Stoicism. Outside of philosophy, one could consider the prominence of the theme of Stoicism in the face of tyranny in Addison’s drama Cato (1713). Continental versions of the same theme will be found in F.-M. Deschamps’s Caton d’Utique (1715) and Gottsched’s Sterbender Cato (1731). 26. Marshall, Figure of Theater, 176. 27. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xxxix. The call to second-order cybernetics and a focus on the observer was ¤rst made by Heinz von Foerster in “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” in Communication and Control in Society, ed. Klaus Krippendorff (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), 5–8.
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28. Luhmann, Social Systems, xxxviii–xxxix. I have maintained what looks like Luhmann’s gender-speci¤c formulation of the subject. Indeed, in terms of conceptualization, only men truly became subjects in this sense by the end of the eighteenth century, although Mary Wollstonecraft in particular attempts to extend the conception to women as well. On Smith’s complication of the sympathetic subject in relation to social evolution, see Luhmann, “Frühneuzeitliche Anthropologie: Theorietechnische Lösungen für ein Evolutionsproblem der Gesellschaft,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 1.229–230. 29. In this regard, Anthony Giddens notes that while re®exivity is in certain respects “a de¤ning characteristic of all human action,” as a fundamental aspect of historical modernity extensive awareness of re®exivity is self-reinforcing: “The point is not that there is no stable social world to know, but that knowledge of that world contributes to its unstable or mutable character” (The Consequences of Modernity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 36, 45). 30. Rousseau’s obscurities and logical involutions have, of course, been favorites of deconstructionist criticism. But, without denying the validity of Derrida’s hermeneutic critique of the metaphysics of presence and de Man’s analyses of language’s inherent instability with respect to the act of reading, it is important to note that Rousseau’s interpretation-resistant texts (or interpretation-inviting texts) contain elements and structures that themselves are easily recognizable parts of the eighteenthcentury discourse studied here. See the following: Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), part 2, 135–301; and Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–141. 31. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 54–55. On the eighteenth-century philosophe more generally as an embodiment of self-re®ection, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 140–141. 32. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’homme: De ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 1.473. 33. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 11–12. 34. While Terry Eagleton does an admirable job of pointing out the conditioning effect of varying political situations upon philosophy in Germany, France, and England, he seriously misreads the situation with regard to the different constructions of the subject outlined above. Indeed, forcing both into the framework of the general rise of the middle class, he con®ates the ethics of sympathy with those of the autonomous, self-legislating agent (see The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], 19– 28). While one can and should see these constructions as genealogically related and certainly keyed to shifts in social organization, the latter is best viewed as the negation of the former (a formulation which fans of dialectic logic should appreciate). 35. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, in Philosophical Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1967), 2.670. On af¤nities between Kant and Hume, see Bernard Peach, “Common Sense and Practical Reason in Reid and Kant,” Sophia 24 (1956): 66–71. For an overview and analysis of Reid’s arguments on freedom in relation to morality, see William L. Rowe, Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kant for his own part critiqued Reid’s theory
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of causality, to all appearances without having ever read it (see Manfred Kuehn, “The Early Reception of Reid, Oswald, and Beattie in Germany, 1768–1800,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 21, no. 4 [October 1983]: 479–496). 36. Reid, while highly critical of Hume, never gave up the idea of a moral faculty or moral sense. Rather, he considers that our feelings ought to work in conjunction with our judgments (see Keith Lehrer’s Thomas Reid [London: Routledge, 1989], 226). Other discussions of Reid’s relation to Hume include the following: Gavin Ardly, “Hume’s Common Sense Critics,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 30, nos. 115–116 (1976): 104–125; Nicholas Capaldi, “Reid’s Critique of Hume’s Moral Theory,” Philosophical Journal 5, no. 43 (1968): 43–46; G. E. Davie, “Hume and the Origins of the Common Sense School,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 6, nos. 5–6 (1952): 213– 221; Timothy Duggan, “Active Power and the Liberty of Moral Agents,” in Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations, ed. Stephen F. Barker and Tom L. Beauchamp (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 103–112; Keith Lehrer, “Beyond Impressions and Ideas: Hume vs. Reid,” Monist 61, no. 2 (April 1978): 184–191; Michael S. Pritchard, “Reason and Passion: Reid’s Reply to Hume,” Monist 61, no. 2 (April 1978): 283–298; Robert Stecker, “Thomas Reid on the Moral Sense,” Monist 70, no. 4 (October 1987): 453–464; Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Hume and Reid.” Monist 70, no. 4 (October 1987): 398–418; Henning Jensen, “Reid versus Hume: A Dilemma in the Theory of Moral Worth,” in The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, ed. Melvin Dalgarno and Eric Matthews (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 329–340. Dugald Stewart, I might note, closely and openly follows Reid, asserting that malevolent affections have no root in nature, with the exception of resentment, and that such malevolent affections as do exist are a source of pain (see The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, vols. 6–7 of Collected Works [Westmead, England: Gregg, 1971], 6.197–206). Although pity and sympathy are still of vital interest to Stewart, he remarks that those who treat the latter as the foundation of morality have “mistaken a very subordinate principle in our moral constitution (or rather a principle superadded to our moral constitution as an auxiliary to the sense of duty) for that faculty which distinguishes right from wrong” (329). First published in 1828, Stewart’s Philosophy is largely based on lectures dating from the last decade of the eighteenth century. A similarly hybrid version of sentimental ethics and deontology at the end of the century will be found in Bernadin de Saint Pierre’s “De la nature de la morale” of 1798 (see Crocker, Nature and Culture, 20–21). 3. Animals and the Mark of the Human 1. See Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 2. On the slow growth of cat-fancy in England, which began to take off in earnest in the eighteenth century, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 109–110. Throughout this chapter, I have relied on Thomas’s engaging histoire des mentalités. Chapter 4 (on “Compassion for Brute Creation”) and the fourth subsection of chapter 5 (entitled “Meat or Mercy”) have been particularly relevant and helpful. For an overview of changes in attitudes to animals in the Near East and Europe over a longer period of time, see John Passmore, “The Treatment of Animals,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (April–May 1975): 195–218. 3. Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, 8 vols. (London: J. Nourse, 1779), 3.198. Cats continued to be vili¤ed in similar terms into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, although lions were usually excepted from condemnation—often on spurious grounds—tigers were considered particularly odious (see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987], 21–23, 25–30).
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4. See Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Levers (New York: Noonday, 1972), 109–159. On the totemic function of animals, see for example Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1963). The distinction is no doubt one of degree, but “totem” would be more openly symbolic, whereas “myth” is cryptically symbolic. Although I would ideally be willing to posit an objective version of felinity—a sort of Katze an sich—communications about cats necessarily contain observer biases (my transparent communication with my cat notwithstanding). Crucially, however, there are different types and intensities of such bias. Cf. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 40, 61, 67–68. 5. In the secondary literature there is confusion concerning whether the anatomists are members of the Royal College of Physicians or the Company of Surgeons. Compare Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth (New York: Dover, 1973), plate 77. Ronald Paulson notes the amalgamation of the two groups in the engraving (Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed., revised, 2 vols. [London: The Print Room, 1989], 1.151). Since the emblem of the Royal College (a hand feeling the pulse of another hand) adorns the demonstrator’s chair, I opt for the former when mentioning the engravings. Both associations were of¤cially allotted a number of criminal corpses yearly. With respect to my argument concerning the engravings, Peter Wagner provides a different but complementary take on surgeons in Hogarth’s works in his essay “The Satire on Doctors in Hogarth’s Graphic Works,” in Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 200– 225. On the difference between the conceptions and projections of a hierarchy of medical faculties and on-the-ground realities, see Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 16–18 in particular. 6. Cf. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991–93), 3.28. Although I may occasionally disagree with him, I am indebted to Paulson’s careful readings of the “Four Stages” in the aforementioned work and in his earlier Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, abridged by Anne Wilde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Sean Shesgreen’s commentary in his edition of Hogarth’s engravings has also been helpful. See also Philip Hallie’s reading of the series in his Cruelty (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 9–33. 7. Paulson, Hogarth, 3.26. Paulson reproduces the announcement in the London Evening Post of the publication of the prints, which includes the following remark: “N.B. As the Subjects of these Prints are calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People, in hopes to render them of more extensive use, the Author has publish’d them in the cheapest Manner possible” (317). 8. Quoted in John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, 2 vols. ( J. & J. Boydell, Cheapside, and at the Shakespeare Gallery, Pall Mall, 1791), 2.355. 9. On the theological underpinnings of the teleological argument for anthropocentrism, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 17–25. Thomas discusses reason as the mark of human distinction on pp. 30–36 and the new emphasis on sensibility on pp. 173–181. 10. On this topic, see Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic account The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 183–207 ff. I might note that my readings do not, however, always accord with those of Lovejoy; in particular Lovejoy, working from the point of view of the history of ideas, sees the concept reaching an apex in the eighteenth century, while I counter that structural changes in discourse undermine its value. 11. James Beattie, Philosophical and Critical Works, 4 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1975), 3.181. 12. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London: Penguin, 1970), 194.
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13. On Mandeville’s rhetoric of compassion, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, EighteenthCentury Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 45–46. 14. The classic study on Descartes’s view that animals were insensible (and the effects of this doctrine) is Leonora Cohen Rosen¤eld’s From Beast-Machine to ManMachine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (1940; revised and enlarged, New York: Octagon, 1968). 15. Alexander Pope, Pope: Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 241. On this poem and the place of humans as a via media, see Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 196. 16. See Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, “This Long Disease, My Life”: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 100–104. On the growing tendency to attribute forms of reason to animals during the eighteenth century—thereby closing the gap between man and animal in the great chain of being—see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 124–126. 17. Pope, Poetical Works, 247. 18. See Norman Ault, “Pope and his Dogs,” in New Light on Pope: With Some Additions to His Poetry Hitherto Unknown (London: Methuen, 1949), 337–350. 19. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, translated by Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 46. 20. The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 235. 21. Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 143. Concerning recent animal rights literature, see for example Richard D. Ryder’s Victims of Science: The Use of Animals in Research, which uses Bentham’s conclusion as an introduction to the argument (2nd ed., London: National Anti-Vivisection Society, 1983, v). 22. The Tatler, 3 vols., ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), article 134, 2.274–275. This article could be compared with Spectator 343, in which Addison ruminates on the transmigration of human souls into animals with reference to Pythagoras and “well-disposed Mahometans” who purchase the freedom of captive birds, their brethren (The Spectator, 5 vols., ed. Donald Bond [London: Oxford University Press, 1965], 3.273). 23. Thus Harriet Ritvo in her study of attitudes to animals in Victorian England can write, “At the beginning of the nineteenth century the English would have been surprised to hear themselves praised for special kindness to animals. They were surrounded by evidence to the contrary in a society that exploited animals to provide not only food and clothing, but also transportation, the power to run machinery, and even entertainment” (The Animal Estate, 125). As Ritvo goes on to demonstrate, the battle waged by the RSPCA to make humane treatment of animals an “English” trait was far from over by the end of the nineteenth century (see pp. 125–166). 24. Percival Stockdale, A Remonstrance against Inhumanity to Animals and Particularly against the Savage Practice of Bull-Baiting (Alnwick: Printed by and for M. & J. Graham, 1802), 23. Even such an impassioned supporter of sympathy as Henry Home, Lord Kames could, at the mid-century, consider boxing a doubly positive spectacle of identi¤cation: “With respect to prize-¤ghting and gladitorian shews [presumably not of the Roman variety!], nothing animates and inspires us more than examples of courage and bravery. We catch the spirit of the actor, and turn bold and intrepid as he appears to be. On the other hand, we enter into the distress of the vanquished, and have a sympathy for them in proportion to the gallantry of their behaviour. No wonder, then, that such shews are frequented by persons of the best taste. We are led by
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the same principle, that makes us fond of perusing the lives of heroes and of conquerors. And it may be observed by and by, that such spectacles have an admirable good effect in training up the youth to boldness and resolution. In this, therefore, I see not that foreigners have reason to condemn the English tastes. Spectacles of this sort deserve encouragement from the state, and to be made an object of public policy” (Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion [2nd ed., 1758; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976], 20). 25. In this regard, I should mention that Keith Thomas in Man and the Natural World begs the question by suggesting that animals—and people—must be “dehumanized” if cruelty is to be justi¤ed or mentally tolerated (see pp. 34–35, 45, and 48). That is, Thomas assumes both what the “human” is and that a natural aversion to cruelty is part of “humanity.” Only thus can he speak of “dehumanization.” 26. “Good man” is a label that Paulson applies to this ¤gure (Hogarth, 3.280). Hallie refers to him as the “outsider” (Cruelty, 28). 27. For another take on the use of threat in the series, see Hallie, Cruelty, 29–33. 28. See Peter Linebaugh’s article on the lower classes’ struggle with the surgeons, magistrates, and others in the attempt to save their dead from the scalpel (“The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in EighteenthCentury England, by Douglas Hay et al. [New York: Pantheon, 1975]). Linebaugh considers the use of criminal corpses to be part of “the policy of class discipline” (117). Hogarth is apparently complicit with this policy. And yet the satire on the surgeons in the “Reward of Cruelty” clearly differentiates the compassionate middle class from the special interest group of unfeeling surgeons. Paulson has suggested that a more subtle side to this threatening mode of communication is Hogarth’s critique of the law (Hogarth, 3.30–32). This may well be the case, but it is again only one facet of the “Four Stages” and of The Reward of Cruelty in particular. On the place of the corpse in English popular culture as well as surgeons’ unpopular attempts to get hold of the deceased in the decades leading up to the Anatomy Act of 1832 (which made provisions for paupers rather than murderers to be legally delivered to the anatomy schools), see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 14–17 and 52–54 in particular. 29. This aspect of gleeful revenge was carried over to the woodcut itself, although the effect is somewhat attenuated by the coarseness of the medium. On the dating of the preparatory drawings for the woodcut and engraving of The Reward of Cruelty, see A. P. Oppé, The Drawings of William Hogarth (New York: Phaidon, 1948), 48. 30. See Charles Le Brun, L’expression des passions et autres conférences, ed. Julien Philipe (Maisonneuve et Larose: Éditions Dédale, 1994). 31. Eschewing on the whole the more reductionist aspects of sociobiology, Frans de Waal provides an insightful psychological and ethological analysis of sympathy in humans and related primates in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 40–88. 32. The Tatler, article 112, 2.173–174. 33. Boswell, himself not fond of the species, remarks on Johnson’s fear for his cat, Hodge, given the terrors visited upon local felines by a member of the idle gentry: “This [ Johnson’s love for his cat] reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Laughton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot’” ( James Boswell, Life of Johnson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980], 1217). In a similar vein, Samuel Richardson depicts the aristocratic Lovelace practicing animal cruelty as a child—an important precedent for his adult exploits (see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 151).
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34. On the question of class and animal cruelty, compare Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 159 and 181–191. At one point, the author concludes that the “S.P.C.A. can thus be seen as yet another middle-class campaign to civilize the lower orders” (186). Sean Shesgreen calls the “Four Stages” “a literal exemplum” meant to “propagandize the working classes, especially in their attitude to private property” (Engravings by Hogarth, unpaginated; plate 77). Emphasis on class has the odd consequence of raising the specter of a defense of cruelty to animals on behalf of a culturally disenfranchised proletariat (and aristocracy!). Any simplistic critique of “power” has this consequence. 35. Talcott Parsons ¤rst underlined the importance of functional differentiation in sociological analysis (see, for example, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory [New York: The Free Press, 1977], 177–203 in particular). In the work of Niklas Luhmann, it has become one of the fundamental concepts of a systems-theoretical understanding of history. For an overview of the topic, see Luhmann’s “The Differentiation of Society,” in The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 229–254. The thesis of functional differentiation in general, with emphasis on the differentiation of literature during the period in question here, is the overriding concern of Siegfried J. Schmidt’s Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989); see in particular the lucid explanations on pp. 65–76. 36. For the classic longue durée account of the emergence of childhood as a conceptual category, see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962). 37. Paulson remarks on “the very bulky presence of the lawyers whose weight is in fact responsible for the collapse of the horse Nero is beating” (Paulson, Hogarth, 3.27). 38. This depiction of anatomists as monsters is very much in opposition to the seventeenth-century fascination with viewing dissections, a fascination which included calls—admittedly by the elite—for more public demonstrations (see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture [London: Routledge, 1995], 41–43). 4. The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 1. See Reinhart Koselleck, “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 159–197. 2. Keith Thomas brie®y mentions the importance of the topos of habituation in relation to cruelty to animals in Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 150–151. The idea that cruelty can become habit or hexis in those that routinely witness violence and bloodshed goes back to antiquity. Indeed, the use of the Greek term for the transformation of habit into second nature indicates just how traditional this type of argument is. The locus classicus is Aristotle’s De memoria, in which by force of habit ethos displaces physis; the former becomes a sort of implanted way of being, although the context is not that of cruelty (see Aristotle, De memoria, 452a 24–30; translated in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, vol. 8 of Aristotle, trans. W. S. Hett [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975], 304–307; cf. Pierre Burgelin’s note in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. to date (Paris: Gallimard, 1969–), 4.1400. One of the earlier and more graphic examples of the dangers of habituation that I have found is Sallust’s description in the Catalinian War of the principal actor’s childhood practice of criminality and vice of all sorts (see Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, ed. J. T. Ramsey
Notes to page 62 169
[Atlanta: Scholar’s, 1984], 32). Habituation—often in relation to cruelty to animals— is still frequently cited when explaining the behavior of serial killers and the like. To unfold these notions in terms of the history of ideas, we could follow the arguments of the Stoics in which animals are excluded from sympatheia with the world logos insofar as they do not themselves have logos. Ironically, it is exactly pathos that is left out of this form of sympathy. Fundamentally different from man because of the absence of reason, animals are not worthy of human pity. Habituation to cruelty to animals, moreover, is only dangerous in that it opens the way to cruelty to man. (On man’s sympathetic relation to universal logos in Stoic thought, see Margaret E. Reesor, The Nature of Man in Early Stoic Thought [New York: St. Martin’s, 1989], 137–147). This line of argumentation links thought on animal cruelty from the Church Fathers to Descartes. In the words of Augustine, “We can perceive by their cries that animals die in pain, although we make little of this since the beast, lacking a rational soul, is not related to us by a common nature” (Augustine, The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, trans. Donald Gallagher and Idella Gallagher [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press], 105). Likewise, Aquinas, commenting on Proverbs 12.10 (“A righteous man has regard for the life of his beast, But the compassion of the wicked is cruel”), considers the passage to mean that, although those who have care and compassion for their animals are more likely to have the same feelings toward their fellowmen and vice versa, non-cruelty to animals by the wicked is not a virtue. Descartes’s conception of the animal as a non-sentient machine appears but a further re¤nement of this logic. However, as the eighteenth century advances, the Stoic position is eclipsed by a resurgence of Pythagoreanism: man and animal will ¤nd themselves tied by a fundamental similarity rather than divided by the impassible gulf of absolute difference. For these neo-Pythagoreans (a name that they did not apply to themselves but which seems ¤tting for those supporting and often explicitly referring to this ancient doctrine), habituation remains a threat, but for different reasons and in line with speci¤c modalities of discourse. While John Passmore does not examine the notion of hexis per se, my comments above owe much to his observations and remarks on Stoicism, animal cruelty, and the Church Fathers in his article “The Treatment of Animals” (Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 [April–May 1975]: 195–218). I would, however, suggest a small correction to Passmore’s assertion that the Church Fathers necessarily distance themselves from New and Old Testament models by following the Stoics. Passmore points out that in the Old Testament, man and animal are joined through the sharing of the life-principle, nebesh, and, in the New Testament, the same link is made through psyche. Granted, but these forms of sharing do not necessarily join men and animals in an important sense with respect to cruelty; here, it would appear that some notion of reason fundamentally differentiates man from beast. Thus we ¤nd, for example, in 2 Peter 2.12, “These people, however, are like irrational animals, mere creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed.” Likewise, the Stoics join man, animal, and plant in the sharing of pneuma but exclude the latter two from the realm of logos (cf. Ecclesiastes 3.19). For a less stolid approach to such matters than I have managed in this note, see Marc Shell’s genial observations on kinship, the human/animal distinction, and the eighteenth-century sentimentalist’s search for models of compassion in Judaic and Christian Scripture in Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 163–173. 3. John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, in The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1823), 9.112. 4. Harriet Ritvo points out that books aimed at children were a novelty in the eighteenth century and that educational texts aimed at inculcating compassion con-
Notes to pages 62–63 170
sidered animals “promising didactic instruments” (The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987], 131). 5. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 112–113. On the suspect status of butchers, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 294–295. Judging from Philip E. Jones’s study of butchers in London, most complaints about the trade prior to the eighteenth century centered on ¤lth and stench. This would continue into the eighteenth century, but a mid-century petition to con¤ne butchering to marketplaces also focuses on cattle being “driven through the streets with inhumanity and danger to pedestrians” (The Butchers of London [London: Secker and Warburg, 1976], 97). 6. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London: Penguin, 1970), 191. 7. A strangeness not lost on one contributor to The World, writing in 1756: I should have apprehensions of being laughed at, were I to complain of want of compassion in our law; the very word seeming contradictory to any idea of it; but I will venture to own that to me it appears strange, that the man against whom I should be enabled to bring an action for laying a little dirt at my door, may with impunity drive by it half a dozen calves, with their tails lopped close to their bodies, and their hinder parts covered with blood. He must have a passion for neatness not to be envied, who does not think this a greater nuisance than the sight of a few cinders. (Edward Moore et al., The World [London: Jones, 1830], 329) The offense in either case is to the sensibilities of the beholder. Moreover, what the contributor does not underline is the possibility that compassion can be the law without the law needing to be compassionate in the execution of its sentences. 8. It is worth insisting here that discourse is not in accord with the facts of the matter. Counting on Mandeville’s word, Rousseau in Emile comments on the good sense behind the English law of excluding butchers and surgeons from juries. Indeed, this practice redeems Albion a bit in his eyes, for he too had considered the British cruel in spite of their self-perpetuated reputation as being “good natured people” and because of their excessive fondness for meat (Œuvres complètes, 4.411). The editors comment that Rousseau’s anecdote about butchers and the law “semble être un souvenir inexact de Locke” (4.1403). The inexactitude comes not from the author’s poor memory, but rather from his reliance, here as elsewhere, on Mandeville. Rousseau was forced to recant on the evidence of the British translators of his book on education: “Un des Traducteurs Anglois de ce Livre a relevé ici ma méprise et tous deux l’ont corrigé. Les bouchers et les chirurgiens sont receus en témoignage, mais les premiers ne sont point admis comme Jurés ou Pairs au jugement des crimes, et les chirurgiens le sont” (4.1401). Yet this discovery had no effect on the perceived deeper truth of the matter, and Rousseau made no effort to emend the body of his text. The reference to Mandeville is followed by the observation that “les grands scélerats s’endurcissent au meurtre en buvant du sang” (4.412) and a lengthy, and doctored, quotation from Plutarch in which the doctrine of Pythagoras is justi¤ed (4.412). Rousseau notes that the appearance of the vegetarian diatribe is “étranger à mon sujet,” and yet ¤nds its place quite nicely in the text (4.414). Mandeville as well had announced that he would not go so far as to urge on his readers “what Pythagoras and many other Wise Men have said concerning this Barbarity of eating Flesh” (Fable of the Bees, 193). Already, from the original basis of his digression, the luxuries now available to the poor that were once not even within reach of the wealthy, he has traveled too far—or rather, just far enough to allow his readers to see the horrors of inhumanity. The same anecdote concerning English juries is mentioned in the article “Cruauté” in the Encyclopedia, but
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in this case, it is only butchers that are the supposed pariahs of the English legal system. This material affords a good opportunity to expand on a point made at the end of chapter 2 concerning the extent to which Helvétius marks a break with sentimental ethics. It was certainly with polemical and provocative intentions that Helvétius entitled the fourth chapter of the ¤fth book of his treatise on man “L’homme de la Nature doit être cruel.” Rousseau’s overt thesis in the Essai sur l’origine de l’inégalité of the natural non-aggressivity of hypothetical original man is here ®atly contradicted. Moreover, the empirical evidence adduced to prove the point in De l’homme attempts to debunk the notion of original human gentleness derived from our supposedly natural vegetarianism: “Que nous présente le spectacle de la Nature? une multitude d’êtres destinés à s’entre-dévorer. L’homme en particulier, disent les Anatomistes, a la dent de l’animal carnacier. Il doit être vorace et par conséquent cruel et sanguinaire” (ClaudeAdrien Helvétius, De l’homme: De ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation, 2 vols. [Paris: Fayard, 1989], 1.473). However, this proof of natural cruelty actually follows Rousseau closely: “L’Homme de la Nature est son boucher, son cuisinier. Ses mains sont toujours souillées de sang. Habitué au meurtre, il doit être sourd au cri de la pitié. Si le cerf aux abois m’émeut; si ses larmes font couler les miennes; ce spectacle si touchant par sa nouveauté, est agréable au sauvage que l’habitude y endurcit” (1.473). Perhaps more strongly than the object of his critique, whose work he labels contradictory because its principles do not correspond to reality, Helvétius places pity prior to cruelty—and this in a work that claims that every aspect of man is an acquisition. Rousseau himself, always the master of the paradoxical origin, had similarly declared, “Tous les sauvages sont cruels, et leurs mœurs ne les portent point à l’être, cette cruauté vient de leurs alimens” (Œuvres complètes, 4.411). 9. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 113. 10. Shaftesbury would make similar remarks concerning “petulancy” in his thoughts on the unnatural passions. Petulancy is de¤ned as “a gay and frolicksome Delight in what is injurious to others; a sort of WANTON MISHCHIEVOUSNESS, and a Pleasure in what is destructive” (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, vol. 2, part 2 of Shaftesbury: Standard Edition, ed. Gerd Hemmerich and Wolfram Benda (Stuttgart: Fromman-Holzboog, 1984), 294). This passion, “which instead of being restrain’d is incouraged in Children,” is the source of much misery. On the other hand, its roots have “not any foundation in Nature, as has been explained” (294). 11. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 31. As Keith Thomas does with regard to “dehumanization” and the treatment of animals, Richardson tends to ®uctuate between a cultural and historical approach to humanity and treating the term as an ahistorical ground (see 30– 31). While it seems reasonable to assume that almost any human being would initially react with distaste to the dissection of a corpse, we might just as well decide that the ability to overcome such a reaction is the mark of true humanity (a position we ¤nd, for example, in the works of Sade). 12. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 44. 13. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 23. 14. On the virtuosi and their critics in the latter half of the seventeenth century in particular, see Benedict, Curiosity, 40–70. Benedict also examines satires on the virtuosi in the ¤rst part of the eighteenth century, concentrating on the links between curiosity, consumption, and cultural identity (see 86–92 in particular). 15. The Tatler, 3 vols., ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), article 316, 3.134.
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16. Cf. Benedict, Curiosity, 66–68. The author also notes that the middle of the eighteenth century witnessed a rehabilitation of collecting (180–183 ff.). 17. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 154–155. 18. Cf. Macdonald Daly, “Quasi-anti-vivisection in the Eighteenth Century,” The Durham University Journal 82, no. 2 (new series 51, no. 2) ( July 1990): 189–190. 19. See Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, “This Long Disease, My Life”: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 96. 20. For an overview of attitudes to vivisection, see Andreas-Holger Maehle and Ulrich Tröhler’s “Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments” in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupke (London: Routledge, 1990), 14–47. See also Macdonald Daly’s “Vivisection in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 12, no. 1 (spring 1989): 57–67. 21. See James G. Basker, Tobias Smollet, Critic and Journalist (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 121. Basker also discusses Smollet’s general attitude to science as witnessed in his journalistic writings (118–125). 22. Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature, vol. 1 (London: R. Baldwin, 1756), 414. 23. Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature, vol. 2 (London: R. Baldwin, 1756), 32. 24. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 54. 25. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 8 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 65. For another—sometimes complementary—viewpoint on Johnson’s relation to vivisection see Daly, “Quasi-antivivisection,” 187–188. 26. The relationship of Pope and Hales, at least from the point of view of the former, is considered at length in the chapter entitled “Animalitarianism” of Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau’s study of the poet. I have found this work a useful source of citations and analyses, although, of course, my context and conclusions are not necessarily the same. Stephen Hales’s work as a vivisector is considered by Macdonald Daly in his “Vivisection in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Daly’s characterization of eighteenth-century vivisectors often mimics the terms used in the period under scrutiny: curiosity, idleness, excess. The results can be amusing. Daly remarks that an experiment in which snakes were allowed to envenom dogs and cats, which had been previously carried out in a different locale, cannot “be justi¤ed on the grounds of even idle curiosity” (60). Of course, idle curiosity seems to be exactly what is being satis¤ed. As to the surgeon John Hunter: “Historians of science have found none of this [his experiments] ethically questionable. Rather they celebrate Hunter’s demonstrably wide range of interests and insatiable curiosity” (63). The surgeon is thus rhetorically catapulted into the ranks of Sade’s supermen of virile aggression. Daly’s examination of several experiments involving the effect of snake venom on both human and animal subjects, however, helps add a touch of realism to the Marquis’s recurrence to serpentine torments in his œuvre (see below). As opposed to many of his brethren—at least as they are depicted—Hales made important contributions to the several ¤elds of scienti¤c inquiry to which he turned his interest. James Osborn writes, “Dr. Hales devoted his remarkable ingenuity and energies to scienti¤c experiments in anatomy, botany, and mechanics, making important contributions in all three ¤elds. His discoveries in animal physiology have placed him second to Harvey himself in that branch of science” ( Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, 2 vols., ed. James M. Osborn [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966], 1.118). For similar, if not more hagiographic, accounts of Hales see the biographies by A. E. Clark-Kennedy, Stephen Hales: An Eighteenth-
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Century Biography (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1965), and D. G. C. Allan and R. E. Scho¤eld, Stephen Hales: Scientist and Philanthropist (London: Scolar, 1980). Moreover, like many virtuosi and other practitioners of vivisection, Hales was concerned about the pain he in®icted. English experimenters, unlike convinced Cartesians, weighed— or at least thought or said they weighed—pain against utility. Hales did indeed have bloody hands, but, in spite of his many vivisections, he also showed a certain reluctance to perform these pain-in®icting operations. He himself reports having suspended his experiments for a time, due to their unpleasantness (see Nicolson and Rousseau, “This Long Disease, My Life,” 95–97, 106). 27. Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, 1.118–119. 28. Cf. Daly, “Quasi-anti-vivisection,” 189. 29. Percy H. Osmond, Isaac Barrow: His Life and Times (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1944), 40. See also Nicolson and Rousseau, “This Long Disease, My Life,” 95. On vivisection and ambivalence in the seventeenth century, see Anita Guerrini’s “The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 3 ( July–September 1989): 391–407. 30. A point amply demonstrated in Benedict, Curiosity. 31. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 64. Barbara M. Benedict notes Johnson’s interest in the social function of curiosity as well as his anxiety about private, unregulated instantiations of the same (Curiosity, 183–190). 32. Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age concludes with a study of what he terms “theoretical” curiosity (trans. Robert M. Wallace; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). For the period in question, Blumenberg concentrates on the split between curiosity as feeding an overarching progression toward the truth and curiosity as potentially leading the individual away from contentedness. Although vivisection —and speci¤cally human vivisection—is brie®y discussed, the ambiguous status of curiosity in relation to sympathy is not broached. With this omission, Blumenberg fails to grasp just how precarious the valorization of scienti¤c curiosity was, especially in England (see 433–435). Niklas Luhmann, in following Blumenberg, also overlooks the ambivalent status of this newly revalorized aspect of human nature (see “Frühneuzeitliche Anthropologie: Theorietechnische Lösungen für ein Evolutionsproblem der Gesellschaft,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, 2nd ed., 3 vols., [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998], 1.202–203). I address the topic of human vivisection at length in part 3. 33. E. S. Turner gives an account of the cruelties perpetrated on animals in eighteenth-century England (and elsewhere) in the chapter entitled “Tom Nero’s World” of his book All Heaven in a Rage (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 51–64. It is notable that cruelty to animals, if not related to culinary endeavor, was primarily considered a sport. This commonplace aspect of cruelty in Hogarth’s engravings makes the scienti¤c facet even more striking. 34. See Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 1984), 74–104. 35. The Royal College of Physicians was granted its charter by Henry VIII in 1518, making it the oldest of¤cial medical institution in England. It should be noted, however, that the Company of Surgeons only split with the Company of Barbers in 1745 (six years before Hogarth’s engravings). On medicine and professionalization, see Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter’s Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in EighteenthCentury England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 17–29 and 67–69 in particular. Porter and Porter contend, no doubt correctly, that treating eighteenthcentury medicine in terms of a modern sociology of profession courts anachronism.
Notes to pages 72–75 174
Having said that, roles, institutions, and perceptions thereof are clearly crucial to a reading of Hogarth’s engravings and of attitudes to surgeons and doctors. What we are dealing with is precisely a period of gradual transition and adjustment. 36. As Guy de Chauliac put it so well in the sixteenth century, “Chirurgia est duplex docens quae appropriatur nomine Scientiae, & utens quae nomine Artis [Surgery is double: as a teaching it appropriates the name ‘knowledge’ and as a practice that of ‘art’” (Guidonis de Cauliaco, Chirurgia [Venice: Juntas, 1566], 1; quoted in M. Morand, Opuscules de chirurgie, 2 vols. [Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1768], 1.119). That Morand feels compelled to quote his forbear in the mid-eighteenth century indicates that the issue was still quite alive; indeed, Morand is particularly concerned to show that it is necessary for surgeons to be “lettré” or educated and that they are not just handymen of sorts (1.114–140). 37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re®ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 24–46. 38. The Tatler, article 134, 2.276. 39. B. L. de Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglois et les François et sur les voiages (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1933), 129. On the British reputation for cruelty, followed by British disdain for cruelty in other countries, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 143–144. 40. See Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, 64. 41. In A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), Francis Hutcheson, whose sopori¤c style hides an admirably twisted logic, puts forth a similar argument. Hutcheson maintains that the “right of mankind to make the most copious use of inferior creatures” devolves from the otherwise unpleasant situation of tender-®eshed animals in the ecosystem (vol. 4 of Collected Works [Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990], 149). After asserting that man’s original vegetarian diet was abandoned out of necessity, not desire—mankind having multiplied to the point that the eating of ®esh was the only means to avoid famine—Hutcheson continues, Reason will suggest that these animals, slaughtered speedily by men for food, perish with less pain, than they must feel in what is called their natural death; and were they excluded from human protection they must generally perish earlier and in a worse manner by hunger, or winter-colds, or the fury of savage beasts. There’s nothing therefor of unjustice or cruelty, nay ’tis rather prudence and mercy, that men should take to their own use in a gentler way, those animals which would otherways fall a more miserable prey to lions, wolves, bears, dogs, or vultures. (148–149) The carnivorous behavior of humans is an intervention on the side of pity, not cruelty. It is a way to protect the innocent from the ravages of the unashamedly beastly. Furthermore, the breeding and shepherding of animals by humans ultimately increases the number of creatures that get to enjoy life (only to have it taken from them by their erstwhile protectors, of course). Hutcheson ends his re®ection on the right of humans to kill with an admonition: “And yet all useless cruelty toward the brute creation is highly blameable” (149). 42. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 98. 43. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, vol. 1 of Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), 219. 44. On the productivity of these logical problems in communication systems, see Niklas Luhmann’s “Tautology and Paradox in the Self-Descriptions of Modern Society,” in Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 123– 143. For an interesting application of Luhmann’s theory of tautology and paradox to
Notes to pages 76–80 175
eighteenth-century literature, see Jonathan Lamb’s The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 14–15 in particular. 45. Gregory Bateson coined the term “double bind” to explain the etiology of schizophrenia. In his communication-based theory of psychic breakdown, contradictory input from a parent is resolved by dividing the self. See Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), 201–227 passim). I would suggest that the term could also be used to describe how communication systems attempt to solve logical paradoxes in non-logical ways. 46. Freud ®eshes out what I can only sketch here in the case study of the so-called “Wolf Man” in particular (see An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17 of Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al. [London: Hogarth, 1955], pp. 29–47 and 84–88 in particular). 47. See Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny,” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 211–252. As interesting as it is, I have no desire to visit at length the topic of the uncanny as it relates to critical and literary theory. One question that might seem pertinent, however, is whether or not Lacan’s understanding of castration in terms of the “phallic signi¤er,” the “nom-de-père,” and the entry into the Symbolic would be useful here. Those left wondering should consult Jacques Lacan, “La signi¤cation du phallus,” in Écrits, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966–71), 2.103–115. Although this immediately raises the specter of longstanding accusations that Lacan “philosophizes” psychoanalytic concepts such as the castration complex, I think that Lacan has in this case made clear what he is trying to do and has insisted on making a distinction between the penis—an organ—and the phallus—a symbol of wholeness and a psychic function. My reading is more about disorder in the historical constitution of the Symbolic than about the psychic consequences of entry into the Symbolic ahistorically considered. 48. Speci¤cally Dr. John Freke. Freke has sometimes been identi¤ed with the chief surgeon, but Ronald Paulson surmises that, given Freke’s appearance and occupation, he is more likely to be the operator gauging the eye (Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed., revised, 2 vols. [London: The Print Room, 1989], 1.151). 49. An overview of the topic, including a chapter on Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, will be found in Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch, and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). William R. Paulson provides a careful reading of the Letter in Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 39–71. Paulson shows how Diderot’s intervention disrupts Foucault’s notion of the “classical episteme” (see 39–42 in particular), and this is relevant to my argument concerning Sade in part 3. Diderot’s relation to the Enlightenment valorization of vision, with emphasis on the Letter on the Blind, is discussed in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 97–103. Jay states that the Letter is an “implicit challenge to the primacy of vision” (100). Philosophical discussion of the cataract operation, with special emphasis on eighteenth-century aesthetics and semiotics, is studied in Dorothea von Mücke’s Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in EighteenthCentury Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 37–48. See also Jeffrey Mehlman’s Cataract: A Study in Diderot (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 7–32. 50. Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques (Paris: Garnier, 1964), 92. 51. Cf. von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, 45. On these questions in relation to the ethical tradition, see Carlo Ginzburg’s article “Killing a Chinese Mandarin: Some Moral Implications of Distance,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (autumn 1994): 6–60.
Notes to pages 80–87 176
52. When Mandeville remarks that it is easier to eat a live oyster than to kill a creature that more closely resembles a human, he makes the same point without drawing the same conclusion (see Fable of the Bees, 191–192). 53. On the role of the microscope in eighteenth-century science and art, see Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 341–398. 54. The Tatler, article 119, 2.208. 55. From number 21, March 24, 1711 (The Spectator, 5 vols., ed. Donald Bond [London: Oxford University Press, 1965], 1.91). 56. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, abridged by Anne Wilde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 366. 57. Writing of the blind in Diderot’s essay, Andrew Curran notes that they sometimes appear as “monsters of indifference” (Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2000:01 [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001], 70). Curran provides in his study a thorough accounting of the multivalent position of the blind—simultaneously normalized as physically disabled and yet linked to wonder and moral monstrosity—in Diderot’s work, focusing attention on the ¤gure of Nicholas Saunderson, the blind scientist who plays a central role in the Letter on the Blind (58–79 in particular). See also Jeffrey Mehlman, who writes of Diderot’s depiction, “Saunderson speaks from the discursive position in which the cosmological proof of God’s existence turns short. Eyeless, he is the missing link in the in¤nite chain of an allegedly ordered universe, the gentle Cambridge monster who can but smile in irony at every appeal to the self-evident splendor of the cosmos” (Cataract, 7–8). It is the ¤gure of blindness, in Mehlman’s reading, that turns Diderot from a mechanistic cosmology to a stochastic universe in the manner of Lucretius, Michel Serres, and modern chaos theory. In a similar vein, see Daniel Brewer’s analysis of how Saunderson’s “monstrosity” is transformed into a lever for philosophical inquiry (The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 98–107). See also Lester Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 128. Because of the radical implications of Diderot’s texts, he has often been likened to a (not quite self-conscious) Sade. See, for example, Jenny Batley and Otis Fellows, “Sade et Diderot: Af¤nités et divergences,” Esprit Créateur 15, no. 4 (winter 1975): 449–459. See also William Paulson’s examination of Diderot’s take on blindness and atheism in relation to Sade (Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France, 60). 58. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis In¤eld (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978), 240–241. Kant also speaks of the dangers of habituation, the need to kill animals without causing undue pain, and the immorality of “agonizing physical experiments for the sake of mere speculation” in The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 192–193. Avoiding cruelty to animals remains, however, classed as a duty to ourselves. 59. Immanuel Kant, On Education, trans. Annette Churton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 104. 5. Science and Insensibility 1. See the depositions of Keller and Sade in Alice M. Laborde, ed., L’affaire Kailair, vol. 4 of Correspondances du marquis de Sade et de ses proches, enrichies de documents, notes et commentaires (Paris: Champion and Geneva: Slatkine, 1991), 77–81 and 110– 112 respectively. Gilbert Lély provides an interesting comparative table of the declarations of Keller and the responses of the Marquis in Vie du marquis de Sade (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert aux Éditions Garnier Frères, 1982), 118.
Notes to pages 88–90 177
2. For Le Comte’s declarations see Laborde, Correspondances du marquis de Sade, 4.89–92. Maurice Lever for one speculates that Le Comte could have been bought off by the Montreuil clan (see Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade [Paris: Fayard, 1991], 171). 3. There have been various and varying accounts of this incident (including mention of Rétif’s version of the affair). See, for example, the following works: Lély, Vie du marquis de Sade, 105–135; Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Une innocence sauvage, 1740– 1777, vol. 1 of Sade vivant (Paris: Laffont, 1986), 182–201; Lever, Donatien Alphonse François, 161–181; and Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life (New York: Penguin, 1999), 93–109. The details of the proceedings against Sade were originally brought to light by Maurice Heine in the pages of the Annales de médecine légale, nos. 5–6 ( June–July 1933). They were republished in more accessible form in the ¤rst edition of Gilbert Lély’s Le marquis de Sade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 1.196–253. 4. Jean Paulhan, “The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice,” in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, by the Marquis de Sade, translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove, 1965), 7. 5. The dedication will be found in Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigree, 1981). Dworkin addresses Sade’s life and works on pp. 70–100. 6. In the original: “Quand elle [Keller] fut tout en sang, il tira un pot d’onguent de sa poche, en pansa ses plaies, et la laissa; je ne sais s’il la ¤t boire et manger, mais il ne la revit que le lendemain matin. Il examina ses plaies, et vit que l’onguent avait fait l’effet qu’il en attendait; alors, il prit un canif, et lui déchiqueta tout le corps: il prit ensuit le même onguent, en couvrit toutes les blessures, et s’en alla. . . . on dit que le motif de cette exécrable action était de faire l’expérience de son onguent” (Marquise du Deffand, Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand à Horace Walpole, 3 vols. [London: Methuen, 1912], 1.418). 7. On the reporting of the affair, see Lever, Donatien Alphonse François, 178 and accompanying note. See also Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 103–104 in particular. 8. “Mon nom est celui d’un homme d’honneur qui n’a jamais disséqué ni empoisonné de femmes” (Lély, Vie du marquis de Sade, 308; no citation given). The reference to poison refers to the later “affaire de Marseilles” (see below). 9. In 1791, some three years after the initial publication of Rétif de la Bretonne’s Parisian Nights, or The Nocturnal Spectator, J. A. Dulaure, in a pamphlet concerning the criminal family histories of aristocrats, mentions a report in Charpentier’s Bastille dévoilée (1789) that Sade found himself imprisoned for “des expériences inhumaines qu’on l’accuse d’avoir faites sur des individus vivans” ( Jacques Antoine Dulaure, Liste des noms de ci-devant nobles [Paris: Garnéry, 1791], 93). 10. Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, Les nuits de Paris, ou le Spectateur-nocturne, 8 vols. in 16 books (“London” [spurious], 1788–94). The ¤rst fourteen books of the Nuits appeared in 1788. Book 14 (printed late that year) was supposed to be the last, but two more books, together making up volume 8 and detailing events during the Revolution, were later added. The ¤rst of these was entitled La Semaine Nocturne: Sept Nuits de Paris, and appeared in 1790. The original title was reprised in book 16, which bears a publication date of 1794. 11. This incident, recreated with little historical accuracy in Rétif’s work, wound up with Sade escaping to Italy with his sister-in-law and being burnt in ef¤gy back home. In the Nights, the Hibou himself is ridiculously portrayed as the one who interrupts and ends this scandalous affair in a chapter entitled “Le Passe-Temps du ** de S**.”
Notes to pages 91–95 178
12. In the original: “On adorera les femmes en le lisant, on les chérira en les enconnant. Mais on abhorrera davantage le vivodisséqueur, le même qui fut tiré de la Bastille avec une longue barbe blanche le 14 juillet” (Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, L’anti-Justine, ou Les délices de l’amour, in Œuvres érotiques de Restif de la Bretonne [Paris: Fayard, 1985], 287). 13. Sade, for his part, openly attacked Rétif in the “Idée sur les romans,” characterizing the latter’s writings as follows: “un style bas et rampant, des aventures dégoûtantes, toujours puisées dans la plus mauvaise compagnie; nul autre mérite en¤n, que celui d’une prolixité . . . dont les seuls marchands de poivre le remercieront” (Sade, Œuvres complètes, 15 vols. [Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1986–91], 10.72). Given Sade’s own output, his criticisms may well come as surprising. 14. For Rétif’s ambiguous feelings on and in the Anti-Justine, see Catherine Lafarge, “‘Les délices de l’amour’ de Restif de la Bretonne: attaque ef¤cace contre Sade?” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 153 (1976): 1245–1253; see also Mark Poster, The Utopian Thought of Restif de la Bretonne (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 48. There are numerous studies of the similarities and differences between the two writers, all of which, for the most part, stick to personal animosity. See the following: “Paul Jacob” [Paul Lacroix], Bibliographie et iconographie de tous les ouvrages de Rétif de la Bretonne (Paris: Auguste Fontaine, 1875), 413–425; Gilbert Lély, “Le Marquis de Sade et Rétif de la Bretonne,” Mercure de France, no. 1130 (October 1957): 364–366; Pierre Testud, “Rétif et Sade,” Revue des sciences humaines 83, no. 212 (October–December 1988): 107–123; and David Coward, “Rétif, critique de Sade,” Etudes rétiviennes 10 (September 1989): 73–83. Consult as well Poster’s Utopian Thought of Restif de la Bretonne, 47–50. 15. Rétif de la Bretonne, L’anti-Justine, 343. 16. Sade, Œuvres complètes, 6.204–206. Sade glosses the meaning of “disséquant sur le cru” in a footnote: “A term speci¤c to the art, which these gentlemen use concerning operations on subjects full of life [Terme de l’art, que ces messieurs emploient pour exprimer leurs opérations sur les sujets pleins de vie]” (6.205). For those who may ¤nd it of interest, I provide the entire passage in the original French: Songe, Rodin, songe à quel point un pareil sujet peut-être utile à l’anatomie: jamais elle ne sera à son dernier degré de perfection, que l’examen des vaisseaux ne soit fait sur un enfant de quatorze ou quinze ans, expiré d’une mort cruelle. Ce n’est que de cette contraction que nous pourrons obtenir une analyse d’une partie aussi intéressante. Il en est de même de la membrane qui assure la virginité: il faut nécessairement une jeune ¤lle pour cet examen. Qu’observe-t-on dans l’âge de la puberté? Rien, les menstrues déchirent l’hymen; et toutes les recherches deviennent inexactes. L’âge de ta ¤lle est precisément celui qu’il nous faut; elle n’est pas réglée; nous ne l’avons eue que par-derrière; de telles attaques n’endommagent nullement cette membrane, et nous l’étudierons tout à l’aise. J’espère que tu te détermineras. —Sacredieu! je le suis, reprit Rodin. Il est odieux que de futiles considérations arrêtent ainsi le progrès des sciences. Les grands hommes se sont-ils laissé captivier par d’aussi méprisables liens? Tous nos maîtres en l’art d’Hippocrate ont fait des expériences dans les hôpitaux: mon instituteur en chirurgie disséquait tous les ans des créatures vivantes de l’un et l’autre sexe; et nous n’avons tous deux recti¤é les bévues de nos prédécesseurs que par de semblables opérations. Pour une douzaine de sacri¤ces, nous avons sauvé la vie à plus de deux mille individus; et je demande si l’on doit jamais balancer
Notes to pages 95–96 179
en tel cas. Tous les artistes ont pensé de même: quand Michel-Ange voulut rendre un Christ au naturel, se ¤t-il un cas de conscience de cruci¤er un jeune homme et de le copier dans les angoisses? La sublime Madeleine en pleurs, du Guide, fut prise sur une belle ¤lle que les élèves de ce grand homme ont ®agellées à outrance: tout le monde sait qu’elle en mourut. Mais quand il s’agit des progrès de notre art, de quelle néccessité ne doivent pas être ces mêmes moyens! et combien y a-t-il un moindre mal à se le permettre? Le meurtre opéré par les lois est-il d’une autre espèce? et l’objet des ces lois, qu’on trouve si sages, n’est-il pas le sacri¤ce d’un pour en sauver mille? On nous devrait, au contraire, des récompenses, quand nous sommes assez courageux pour vaincre ainsi la nautre au pro¤t de l’humanité. —Oh! la victoire n’est pas bien grand, dit Rombeau; je ne te conseille pas de t’en faire un mérite aux yeux de ceux qui connaissent le chatouillement excessif que produisent ces sortes d’action. —Je ne te cache pas qu’elles m’aiguillonnent in¤niment: en général, toutes les douleurs que je produis sur les autres, soit en opérant, soit en ®agellant, soit en disséquant sur le cru mettent les animaux spermatiques dans une telle discordance en moi, qu’il en résulte un prurit manifeste et une érection involontaire, laquelle, sans me toucher, me conduit plus ou moins vite à l’éjaculation, en raison du degrée de souffrance imprimé sur le sujet. Tu te rappelles m’avoir vu décharger sans que personne ne me touchât, la dernière fois que nous opérâmes ensemble sur ce jeune garçon dont j’ouvris le ®anc gauche pour observer les palpitations du cœur. . . . —Je l’avoue, dit Rombeau, j’éprouve les mêmes mouvements, et je ne conçois point par quelle inexplicable contradiction la mystérieuse nature inspire tous les jours à l’homme le goût de la destruction de ses œuvres. —Je l’entends parfaitement, moi, dit Rodin: ces portions de matière, désorganisées et jetées par nous dans le creuset de ses œuvres, lui donnent le plaisir de recréer sous d’autres formes; et si la jouissance de la nature est la création, celle de l’homme qui détruit doit in¤niment ®atter la nature. Or, elle ne réussit à ses créations que par des destructions. Il faut donc étonnamment détruire des hommes pour lui composer la voluptueuse jouissance d’en créer. —Aussi, le meurtre est un plaisir. —J’en dis plus, c’est un devoir. . . . 17. The temptation to ¤nd the key to Sade’s texts is great—and I have certainly succumbed to this temptation at times. The classic attempt to ¤nd an underlying systemic unity in the works of the Marquis is contained in the essays that make up Pierre Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991). For a more recent attempt see Philippe Mengue, L’ordre sadien (Paris: Éditions Kime, 1996). 18. This manual was either A.-F.-Thomas le Vacher de la Feutrie, François Moysant et la Marcellerie, Dictionnaire de chirurgie, 2 vols. (Paris: Lacombe, 1767), or Antoine Louis, Dictionnaire de chirurgie, extrait de l’Encyclopédie, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Paul, 1772). See Alice M. Laborde, La bibliothèque du marquis de Sade au château de La Coste (en 1776) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991), 86. 19. Albert von Haller, First Lines of Physiology, translated from the third Latin edition (Troy: Obadiah Penniman, 1803), 408. Haller’s assessment reminds us, moreover, of the role played by cantharides in the Marseilles affair (see above). 20. David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
Notes to pages 96–102 180
of California Press, 1991), 227. Morris deals suggestively but often reductively with Sade’s relation to science and medicine in the chapter of his book entitled “Sex, Pain and the Marquis de Sade” (224–243). 21. On the changing relation of organs to observation, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975). On Bichat and the origins of histology, see Russell C. Maulitz’s analysis of Bichat’s life and work in Morbid Appearances: The Anatomy of Pathology in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9–59. 22. One could here compare Georges Canguilhem’s remarks concerning the rise of pathology in the nineteenth century: “it is as a substitute for biological experimentation—often impracticable, particularly on man—that disease seems worthy of study” (The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen [New York: Zone, 1989], 43). On the dif¤culty of practicing on live bodies, see also Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 50–51. 23. On the major role of the parodic in Sade’s work, see Lucienne FrappierMazur’s Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). See also David Roberts, “Is de Sade funny? or The Prison of Parody,” in Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire, and Parody, ed. Pavel Petr, David Roberts, and Philip Thomson (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985), 227–237. 24. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 208–211. 25. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990), 55. On the camera obscura and the ongoing “ocularocentric bias” of representation in the eighteenth century in spite of the shift from strictly Cartesian to sensationist understandings of vision, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 84–85. 26. René Descartes, La dioptrique, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 6 (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1902), 115. For an overview of references to the camera obscura, especially during its heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its role in art, see John H. Hammond’s The Camera Obscura: A Chronicle (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1981). 27. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 48. 28. See John Baptist Morgagni, The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy, 3 vols., trans. Benjamin Alexander (New York: Published under the auspices of the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine by Hafner, 1960), 3.641–668. This is a facsimile edition of a 1769 translation of the original Latin text of 1761. 29. The in®uential anatomist Heister, for example, provided evidence of the hymen against those who asserted the contrary (see Laurence Heister, Medical, Chirurgical, and Anatomical Cases and Observations, trans. George Wirgman [London: J. Reeves, 1755], 448–449). 30. See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 159–170 and 183–229. Concerning Vesalius’s frontispiece, Sawday notes the “proprietal gesture” the anatomist makes to the female body, pointing out as well the interplay of discourses of knowledge and sexuality that converge in the image of anatomy (27). 31. On the multifarious nature of vision in Descartes, including the importance of self-re®ection and the classical episteme, see Jay, Downcast Eyes, 69–82. For a brief overview of re®exivity from Descartes to Kant from a deconstructionist perspective, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Re®ection
Notes to pages 103–107 181
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 13–22. On the separation of the thinking subject from the body as machine, see also Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 28–29 and 146–158. Sawday makes a persuasive case that anatomical dissection provided the material basis for Cartesian dualism (pre¤guring, indeed, the doctrine in Descartes’s own work). 32. For the English version, see Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114. For the French, see Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes de Malebranche (Paris: Boivin, 1938), 238. Subsequent quotations from Malebranche are cited in the text with the page numbers of the English and French editions, the latter preceded by “F.” 33. In France, the rejection of the notion that animals are insensible machines was strongest among materialists, whose position was an explicit rejection of Cartesian dualism. La Mettrie in his Traité de l’âme (1751) called the attempt to deny a material faculty of feeling part of an “absurde système” and the idea that animals are unfeeling an “opinion si risible” that it has only been entertained by philosophers as a silly thought game; anyone who witnesses the expressions of joy and pain that animals so clearly display will be more convinced by this “language affectif” than persuaded by “tous les Sophismes de Descartes” (Oeuvres philosophiques, 2 vols. [Paris: Fayard, 1987], 139–140). 34. A point noted by Barbara Stafford, who states, “It remains one of the dark paradoxes of the New Science and its aftermath, however, that in order to demonstrate physical perceptivity Haller dispassionately carried out barbaric operations on living dogs”; and further, “But it was the search for the origins of feeling amid obvious torment, that made Haller’s researches especially ironic” (Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991], 408– 409). It is worth noting that Stafford in her discussion of vivisection reactivates the rhetoric of sympathy that was called on in the ¤ght against such practices in England in particular. 35. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, 2 vols. (London: Printed by B. M. for the author, 1707), 1.2–3. 36. Stephen Hales, Statical Essays: Containing Haemastaticks (New York: Hafner, 1964), 114. 37. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 66. 38. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1966–67 [facsimile printing of the ¤rst edition, 1751–80]), 15.50. That the author of this article, Henri Fouquet, was polemically engaged with Haller’s research only makes the recourse to the rhetoric of inhumanity all the more striking. Haller would later defend himself against the charges leveled at him. On this exchange, see Anne C. Vila’s Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 49–50, 318 n. 18. 39. The importance of sensibility for understanding Sade was pointed out by G. S. Rousseau in “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards De¤ning the Origins of Sensibility,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century 3, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 107–123. Philippe Roger examines the role of sensibility in Sade in particular in Sade: La philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976), 53–56. An extended analysis of sensibility in relation to the novels of both Sade and Laclos will be found in Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 258–302. 40. On the history of these notions of the generation of monsters, including an examination of Malebranche, see Marie-Hélène Huet’s Monstrous Imagination (Cam-
Notes to pages 107–114 182
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 45–55 in particular. Martin Jay points out that Descartes in his Optics likewise held that images can be passed from the mother to make a sensible impression on the fetus in the form of birthmarks (Downcast Eyes, 76–77). 41. See Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in EighteenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). The imagination theory of teratogenesis in relation to the Toft case is discussed in particular on pp. 44–63. 42. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 1.100. 43. On the relationship between “force of imagination” explanations of physical aberration, the development of the notion of normalcy, and the somewhat ambiguous end of monstrosity as “wonder,” see the introductory essay in Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., Defects: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 6–7, 13–14, and 18. The authors draw on Georges Canguilhem’s seminal work in the history of science (see above). 44. These proto-neurological explanations remain common throughout the eighteenth century. See the aforementioned works by G. S. Rousseau and Anne C. Vila. For Britain in particular, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and G. J. Barker-Ben¤eld, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On Sade’s relation to the novel of sentiment and sensibility, see R. F. Brissenden’s Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974), 268–293. The relation between materialist philosophy and clandestine literature is analyzed by Margaret Jacob in her essay “The Materialist World of Pornography,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone, 1993), 157–202. 45. On the unexpectedly generative aspect of the “parasite,” usually considered a form of unwelcome noise, see Michel Serres, Le parasite (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1980), 10–20 in particular. 46. Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove, 1966), 200. For the original, see Sade, Œuvres complètes, 1.28. 47. Sade, Œuvres complètes, 7.277. 48. This text is a modi¤cation of the translation in Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, 667–668. 49. David Morris remarks, “Animal experiments common in Enlightenment medicine reappear in Sade’s work as a sexualized form of torture” (Culture of Pain, 229). 50. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 286. Vila also remarks that Valmont, on the contrary, lapses from libertine detachment into femininity as the novel proceeds. 51. On the importance and nature of “apathy” in Sade, see Roger, Sade, 49–66. Marcel Hénaff also considers the central role and nature of Sadean “apathy” in Sade, the Invention of the Libertine Body, trans. Xavier Callahan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 84–103. David Morris mentions apathy as the product of learning—habituation is the classic topos here—and as a paradox: “The libertine— like the Victorian hysteric—is paradoxically both hypersensitive and numb. Further, the apathy of Sadean eroticism differs signi¤cantly from the famous classical Stoic apathy, which expressed itself as a generalized rational indifference to all passion. Libertine apathy resembles a highly selective local anesthesia, which eliminates only a speci¤c band or zone of feeling, while thereby heightening the sensation that remains” (Culture of Pain, 242). 52. René Descartes, Traité de l’homme, in Œuvres de Descartes, 13 vols. (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1909), 11.143–144.
Notes to pages 114–119 183
53. As Philippe Roger remarks, “L’apathie est fondamentale puisqu’elle va édi¤er le libertinage sur le dépassement du donné culturel et de l’impulsion de la nature; prendre en compte toute l’oppression qui s’excerce sur l’individu pour l’en délivrer radicalement. . . . L’apathie intervient entre nature et culture; elle intervient aussi entre une tradition philosophique et les cassures que Sade y provoque” (Sade, 51). For an interesting deconstructive take on freedom and Sade, see Thomas Keenan’s Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 70–96. On Sadean emancipation in relation to physical monstrosity, see Jean-Marc Kehrès’s “Libertine Anatomies: Figures of Monstrosity in Sade’s Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu,” Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 2 (May 1997): 100–113. 6. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Human Vivisection 1. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1966–67 [facsimile printing of the ¤rst edition, 1751–80]), 1.409. 2. M. Portal, Histoire de l’anatomie et de la chirurgie, 6 vols. (Paris: Didot le jeune, 1770), 1.46. 3. For another contemporaneous report on Herophilus and Erasistratus, see Benjamin Gooch, A Practical Treatise on Wounds and Other Chirurgical Subjects (Norwich: W. Chase, 1767), 34–35. Similar charges were lodged against the ¤fteenth-century Bolognese anatomist Jacobus Carpus (52). On human vivisection in antiquity see Andreas-Holger Maehle and Ulrich Tröhler, “Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments,” in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (London: Routledge, 1990), 15. See also K. D. Keele, Anatomies of Pain (Oxford: Blackwell Scienti¤c Publications, 1957), 43. 4. The distinction between “dogmatic” and “empiric” approaches was common, tendentious, and part of a complex and evolving professional landscape. Consider, for example, the breakdown of surgeons into four types in L. Verduc’s question-andanswer examination manual Le maistre en chirurgie, ou L’abregé complet de la Chirurgie de Guy de Chauliac (Paris: La Veuve d’Houry, 1740). Empirical surgery is “une pratique apuyée sur l’expérience, qui ne consulte ni la cause, ni les signes des maladies, & qui n’a pour toutes régles que l’événement” (1). Dogmatic surgery “est celle qui s’appuye sur des préceptes & des maximes; elle considére la complication, les signes, & les accidens des maladies, sans en omettre la moindre circonstance & la moindre indication: elle est beaucoup plus théorique que pratique, & par conséquent plus utile pour le conseil que pour l’opérations” (2). There is also “rational surgery,” based on reason and considering experience to be uncertain and random (“hazardeuse”) (2). Finally, there is “methodical surgery,” based on reason and experience and thus uniting theory and practice. 5. Encyclopédie, 1.409. 6. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Vénus physique, suivi de la Lettre sur le progrès des sciences (Paris: Aubier, 1980), 162. 7. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 412. Blumenberg’s discussion of Maupertuis and experiments on humans will be found on pp. 411–414. 8. Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, Les nuits de Paris, ou le Spectateur-nocturne, 8 vols. in 16 books (“London” [spurious], 1788–94), 277–278. Subsequent quotations from the Nights are cited in the text; the ¤rst seven volumes (the only ones to which I refer) are continuously paginated. 9. See Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 102. I have found scant documentation of bodysnatching
Notes to page 119 184
practices in France—certainly nothing like what Death, Dissection, and the Destitute ¤nds in Great Britain. Toby Gelfand’s Professionalizing Modern Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980) gives a thorough analysis of the development of professional surgery in France during the eighteenth century. 10. Similar laws are formulated in Rétif’s utopian project for legal reform Le thesmographe, ou Idée d’un honnête homme sur un projet de règlement, proposé à toutes les nations de l’Europe, pour opérer une réforme générale des loix (La Haie [Paris]: Gosse junior et Changuion, 1789). The original imprint is anonymous. According to the copy I consulted in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, Rétif may have collaborated with ButelDumont, Ginguené, or Linguet. For stylistic reasons—not the least of which is Rétif’s idiosyncratic orthography—this strikes me as highly unlikely. In the criminal code, the family of a murder victim is given various options: “Ou elle le prendra chés elle, pour le reduire au plus dur esclavage: ou pour l’enchaîner, et le faire travailler à outrance, dans un endroit public ou particulier: Ou pour le faire mourir en public, ét solemnellement: Ou pour le vendre vivant aux Chirugiens, qui feront sur lui toutes experiences, vivant et mort, sans exception” (103). If the family opts to give the offender over to the justice system for sentencing, the scienti¤c and utile punishment becomes inescapable. Expressly excluding traditional forms of corporal and capital punishment, a new norm is established: justice will pronounce as a sentence “la peine ordinaire, qui sera, non la roue, mais toujours la dissection, ou l’empoisonnement, pour l’utilité des autres Hommes, en-donnant aux respectables Artistes qui s’occupent du soulagement de l’Humanité, des moyens de s’éclairer, ét de former leurs Elèves, en-fouillant dans toutes les parties du Corps-humain” (103). Thus, respectable— professional, objective—scienti¤c “artists,” as in the Encyclopedia, illuminate and aid mankind by delving into the recesses of the criminal body. In Fontlèthe’s dream in the Nights, punishments for rape are similarly graded, with violence entailing the suffering of dangerous but non-lethal experiments, and the death of the victim sending the offender to the table: Pour le viol, suivant les circonstances, ét ce qu’aura souffert la Personne violée: Le Coupable qui n’aura pas maltraité, sera vendu au-pro¤t de la Femme ou Fille; à-moins qu’étant libres tous 2, elle ne lui fasse grâce en l’épousant: S’il y a avait eu coups ét meurtrissures, le sort du Coupable dependra de la Violentée, qui pourra le faire-vendre comme esclave, ou aux Chirurgiens ét Medecins, pour des essais de castration, ou de si¤llis inoculée: Si la violence avait causé la mort, le Coupable sera livré à la dissection, ou à telle autre operation douleureuse, jugée necessaire. (1551–1552) It is hard to imagine what the medical need for castration experiments may be, but the target of the operations concerning “violent” rape is clear. As for deadly rape, it is the in®iction of pain in general, rather than a sexually speci¤c punishment, that becomes important (although even here the necessity of the experiment, i.e., its utility, is required). The Thesmographe follows the same basic pattern as the Nights as far as rape is concerned (see Thesmographe, 103–104). The possibility of marriage as a form of just restitution for certain cases of rape is countenanced in both works. Thus, although the penalties for rape are seen as belonging to different gradations of the same crime, it is not rape that is the primary factor in the sentence of dissection, but rather the violence perceived to accompany it. What is at stake is a notion of rape without violence and rape with violence—and violence alone warrants the entry of the vivisector.
Notes to pages 120–123 185
11. Rousseau’s attempts to shore up the non-immediacy of pity are a major part of Derrida’s critique of presence in Western metaphysics and in his elaboration of the concept of the “supplement” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; see in particular pp. 171–192). For Paul de Man, Rousseau’s strategies to ground pity in nature indicate the disruptive power of rhetoric (see Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], 135–159). 12. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 141–164. 13. See Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” in Écrits, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 2.119–148. Lacan brie®y and cogently addresses the complementarity of the moral philosophies of Kant and Sade in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Potter, vol. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 76–80. I have found Slavoj 2i3ek’s commentaries on Lacan’s take on Kant and Sade helpful. See 2i3ek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 160–168; and For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), 229–241. The psychoanalytic reading of the categorical imperative can be traced back to Freud, and to the text of The Ego and the Id in particular. Freud himself may have been in®uenced by Nietzsche, who writes concerning “good old Kant” that “the categorical imperative smells of cruelty” (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage, 1989], 65). 14. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 94–119. 15. See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 105; The Con®ict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 40–41. 16. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 96. Writes Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals, “The word ‘apathy’ has fallen into disrepute, as if it meant lack of feeling and so subjective indifference with respect to objects of choice; it is taken for weakness. This misunderstanding can be prevented by giving the name ‘moral apathy’ to that absence of affects which is to be distinguished from indifference because in cases of moral apathy feelings arising from sensible impressions lose their in®uence on moral feeling only because respect for the law is more powerful than all such feelings together. –Only the apparent strength of someone feverish lets a lively sympathy even for what is good rise into an affect, or rather degenerate into it. . . . An affect always belongs to sensibility, no matter by what kind of object it is aroused. The true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind with a considered and ¤rm resolution to put the law of virtue into practice” (166–167). I might note here as well that, though he is not as well known as Adorno or Lacan today, the intellectual historian Lester Crocker repeatedly pointed out various af¤nities between Kant and Sade. See his An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 372–376; Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 212 and 318. 17. In the original: “J’ai le droit de jouir de ton corps, peut me dire quiconque, et ce droit, je l’exercerai, sans qu’aucune limite m’arrête dans le caprice des exactions que j’aie le goût d’y assouvir” (Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” 2.123). 18. In Lacanian terms, the sadist takes the position of the “objet a” in relation to the victim, who is forced into the position of the split subject, suffering at the demands of the Symbolic. 19. On these drives in Rétif, see Mark Poster, The Utopian Thought of Restif de la
Notes to pages 123–131 186
Bretonne (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 84–87. This emphasis on cruelty as well as Eros becomes, well before Freud’s intervention, a key thematic in Romantic literature (see below). 20. The statement is worth quoting in the original: “Qu’est-ce donc que la vértu, dans l’Homme-social? C’est l’effet d’un sentiment moral ét factice, fondé sur la reciprocité, qui nous fait continuellement surmonter la nature, pour faire du bien aux Autres” (1076). 21. On the “positivization” of natural law in the eighteenth century, see Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 82–120 in particular. For a systems-theoretical view of this development, see Niklas Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of Law, trans. Elizabeth King and Martin Albrow (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). The topic is also usefully summarized in Siegfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 168–180. 22. Encyclopédie, 2.512. 23. In 1742, M. Bruhier, a medical doctor, published a treatise on cases in which those thought dead were not; in it, he outlined some methods for avoiding living burial. Some time later, M. Louis published a rebuttal entitled Lettres sur la certitude des signes de la mort, où l’on rassure les citoyens sur la crainte d’être enterrés vivans. This exchange is discussed in a review of the latter in M. Morand, Opuscules de chirurgie, 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1768), 1.12–21. While the reviewer concludes that Bruhier was an alarmist—there are clear signs that a person has truly passed on—the review nonetheless indicates an ongoing anxiety on the subject. A year after the review, for example, Christian Ehrenfried Eschenbach in his Observata anatomico-chirurgicomedica rariora discusses several cases of those thought dead and then later revived in a section entitled “Mortua putata reviviscens” (Rostock: Apud Ioannem Christianum Koppium, 1769), 172–180. 24. On experiments carried out during World War II in Germany see Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic, 1986). On human vivisection and experimentation carried out by Japanese doctors during the war, see Hal Gold’s Unit 731: Testimony (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1996). I might here mention similar cases in the United States, such as lobotomies and syphilis experiments (the latter carried out on African Americans). 25. Elaine Scarry notes the inevitable presence in the modern torture chamber of law and medicine, “the institutional elaborations of the body and state” respectively; the presence of both is used to deconstruct the world of the victim (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 42). I would simply insist on the historical dimension of this claim: Sade’s scenarios— here and elsewhere—mark an increasing linkage between modern institutional power and sadism. 26. For a discussion of the representation of knowledge in the Encyclopedia, including an account of how the very process of representing injects self-re®exivity into what is intended as mimesis, see Daniel Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13–55. 27. For various views on the “observer” in systems theory, see the essays in William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, eds., Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 28. See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baeker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xxxvii–xliv and 255–277. 29. See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlighten-
Notes to pages 131–137 187
ment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60. 30. See Kant, Con®ict of the Faculties, 26–29 and 42–47. Of course, Kant construed the faculty of philosophy much more broadly than we do today, including in it all of the humanities, history, the empirical natural sciences, “pure” mathematics and philosophy, and more (45). 31. On the generic status of pornography in the eighteenth century, see Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) and Lynn Hunt’s introductory essay to The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone, 1993), pp. 8–19 in particular. 32. Anne Vila notes Sade’s hijacking of Diderot’s aesthetics of “interest” in the service of a community based on sympathy for the purposes of vice (Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 266). As I will show, Diderot’s own deployment of “interest” is often less innocuous than that found in his more didactic and sentimental writings. 33. On Reni’s Mary Magdalene depictions as archetypical constructions of passive femininity, see Richard E. Spear, The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 163–180. While I largely agree with Spear’s reading, the thrust in the direction of a transhistorical “desire to desexualize woman” (180) downplays the very speci¤c linking of female sexuality and sensibility in the eighteenth century. 34. Concerning Diderot’s relation to Lagrenée, including discussion of the Renilike qualities of the latter, see Else Marie Bukdahl, Diderot, critique d’art, 2 vols., trans. Jean-Paul Faucher (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde et Bagger, 1980), 1.85–97. On Reni’s vogue in France, with detailed discussion of the in®uence of his Magdalene paintings, see Jean-Pierre Cuzin’s article “Guido Reni—Un’anima francese?” in Guido Reni e l’Europa: Famma e fortuna (Bologna and Frankfurt: Nuova Alfa Editoriale and Schirn Kunsthalle, 1988), 728–742. Cuzin also suggests a possible connection between Reni and Greuze (see below), interestingly raising the point that while both seek to express sentiment, the latter foregrounds sexuality: “Ameremmo suggerire, quasi altrettanto audacemente, una ¤liazione da Reni a Greuze: si è già osservato che le mezze ¤gure, con gli occhi alzati di Greuze, potevano essere ispirate alle Sibille, alle Cleopatre e alle Artemisie di Guido, in una comune ricerca di sentimento, pur essendo questo piú insistito, troppo sistematico e meno casto nel francese” (740). See also the brief mention of Sade in Spear, The “Divine” Guido, 63. 35. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1765 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 91–92. 36. On this painting and Diderot’s aesthetic theory, see Michael Fried’s analysis, which studies the gaze of the girl as conducive to the viewer’s undisturbed absorption (Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 57–59). Fried’s thesis is considerably complicated by Daniel Brewer’s demonstration of the ways in which narrative and desire disrupt mimesis as well as sentimental morality (Discourse of Enlightenment, 142–167). See also Norman Bryson’s comments in Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 190. 37. See Denis Diderot, Œuvres esthéthiques, Classiques Garnier (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 715–716. 38. Sade, Œuvres complètes, 15 vols. (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1986–91), 10.493–494. To this portrait could be added that of some young victims in the Histoire de Juliette: “Déjà déshabillées par les vieilles, leurs beaux cheveux noirs ®ottent en désordre sur leur sein d’albâtre, leurs larmes, inondant les pieds de ce bourreau, ren-
Notes to pages 138–144 188
dent d’un intérêt au-dessus de tout ce qu’on peut dire, le déchirant spectacle de leur douleur et de leur désespoir” (9.456). These comparisons within Sade’s work were suggested by a note in Michel Delon’s edition of Sade’s Les crimes de l’amour, Collection Folio (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). 39. As reported in the Roman Martyrology, Agatha’s fate certainly has a Sadean aspect to it: “St Agatha, Virgin and Martyr, who in the time of the Emperor Decius, under the judge Quinctian, after buffets and imprisonment, racking, the twisting of her limbs, the cutting off of her breasts, and torture by being rolled upon sherds and burning coals, at last died in prison while in prayer to God” (ed. Canon J. B. O’Connell [Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1962], 26). 40. Heister remarks, “The newest Method of performing this Operation, which was contrived a few Years ago by a Dutch Surgeon, but made public in a Dissertation, together with the Instrument by my Friend D. Tabor, a Physician, consists in placing the Breast between the two Arches of the Instrument Fig. 3. Marked AA BB” (A General System of Surgery, pt. 2 [London: W. Innys and J. Richardson, etc., 1753], 16). He then adds, “but though this is an ingenious Instrument, and worthy to be taken notice of, we cannot help thinking that the simple Method of operating . . . is much more preferable; yet we were unwilling to omit furnishing our Readers with this new Method and Instrument” (16). Concerning the “simple” approach, Heister notes that whereas Scultetus suggests a cord or ligature be used to hold the breast in place, Solingen and Bidlow use a fork, and Adrian Helvétius has—out of humane concern— developed a special type of pliers, he (Heister) quite reasonably thinks that “the best Way of operating, is, when the Surgeon uses no other Instrument but the Knife, whilst he elevates the disordered Breast with his other Hand” (15). For an overview of the history of breast cancer operations, see Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 214–229. See also Daniel de Moulin, A Short History of Breast Cancer (Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1983), as well as Leo M. Zimmerman and Ilza Veith, Great Ideas in the History of Surgery (New York: Dover, 1967), 253. In his compendium of historical illustrations of women’s bodies, Harold Speert brie®y notes the similar methods yet different goals of ritual mutilation, including that of Agatha, and surgical procedures such as those outlined in surgery manuals by Scultetus and Heister (Iconographia Gyniatrica: A Pictorial History of Gynecology and Obstetrics [Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1973], 29). I should take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of Michael Cartwright, professor emeritus of French at McGill University in Montréal, on the plates of the Encylopedia. It was a talk given by Cartwright that ¤rst drew my attention to these plates and their suspect nature. Cartwright, having tried to locate the shears in the historical collection of surgical implements at Edinburgh, surmised that they were imaginary (not at all far from the truth). 41. See, for example, the comments of the surgeon Cheselden, who had gained fame and a place in philosophical debate with his successful cataract operations, on the general adoption of more precise procedures to remove breast and other cancers in Henri François Le Dran’s The Operations in Surgery of Mons. Le Dran, translated by Mr. Gataker, with remarks, plates of the operations, and a sett of instruments, by Mr. Cheselden, 3rd edition (London: C. Hitch and L. Hawes in Paternoster-Row, and R. Dodsely in Pall-mall, 1757). 42. See Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74–82. Cf. Marilyn Yalom’s ahistorical assessment that “[p]ictorial narratives of female martyrdom, whatever their didactic intent, afforded some artists the opportunity to vent their sadistic impulses on women’s breasts” (A History of the Breast, 36). 43. The Romantic thesis, an important aspect of Sade’s nineteenth-century recep-
Notes to pages 144–148 189
tion, was ¤rst explicitly put forward as such by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (1933; reprint, Cleveland: Meridian, 1956). 44. Philippe Roger, Sade: La philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976), 52–53. 45. On différance, see Jacques Derrida’s essay of the same name in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–27. The disruptive force of rhetoric in relation to hermeneutics and poetics is a thread that unites the various essays of Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 46. See Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 43–70. 47. See, for example, Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29. 48. On humor in Sade’s texts, see Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), and David Roberts, “Is de Sade funny? or The Prison of Parody,” in Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire, and Parody, eds. Pavel Petr, David Roberts, and Philip Thomson (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985), 227–237. See also John Phillips’s insightful essay, which focuses on the self-re®exive aspect of Sade’s comedy, “‘Laugh? I Nearly Died’: Humor in Sade’s Fiction,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40, no. 1 (spring 1999): 46–67. 49. On Sade’s irony, compare Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 148–149. Andreas Pfersmann examines the Marquis’s rhetorical strategies and his af¤nities with Friedrich Schlegel in “L’ironie romantique chez Sade,” in Sade: Écrire la crise, ed. Michel Camus and Philippe Roger (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1983), 85–97. Epilogue 1. On Vathek’s drives, including the importance of curiosity, and his punishment, see Peter Hyland’s “Vathek, Heaven, and Hell” in Vathek and the Escape from Time, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 145–155. Barbara M. Benedict also notes the key role of excessive and perverse curiosity in the tale, and remarks that “[f]antasy literature . . . provided inexpensive and safe curiosity for a public educated to consider themselves experts who read for aesthetic, not social, rewards” (Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 177). This insight accords nicely with my comments below on the emergence of the split between aesthetic and ethical inhumanity, suggesting as well the increasing functional differentiation of literature as a social system, i.e., a “public” of experts (meaning no doubt private and informed amateur readers—certainly not academics) enjoying literature for itself. 2. On the novel in relation to an exoticized East, see J. E. Svilpis’s “Orientalism, Fantasy, and Vathek” in Graham, Vathek and the Escape from Time, 49–72. 3. William Beckford, Vathek, in Three Oriental Tales, ed. Alan Richardson (Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 2002), 84. Subsequent quotations are cited in the text. 4. Lack of pity is also a notable characteristic of Vathek’s mother, Carathis, and other women in the novel (see Svilpis, “Orientalism, Fantasy, and Vathek,” 62, and Hyland, “Vathek, Heaven, and Hell,” 152). In this manner, Beckford’s tale also inverts the notion, commonly held at the time, that women are more susceptible to sympathy than men. 5. Cf. Benedict on the function of French in the tale (Curiosity, 176). 6. The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain, 1787–1788, ed. Boyd Alexander (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 127. Compare the author’s equally
Notes to pages 148–149 190
disparaging descriptions of bull¤ghting on page 154 of the same volume. We are reminded by Beckford’s observations that sympathetic ethics continues to inform attitudes to suffering long after it ceases to be of crucial interest to moral philosophy. The exceptions, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, who makes much of sympathy, tend to prove the rule in this regard—although it is far from clear that even Schopenhauer’s interest in sympathy has much to do with the eighteenth-century engagement. Thus Schopenhauer insists on the primordial cruelty of humans, and the ground for ethics is cleared by the realization and rejection of this aspect of human nature and involves the objecti¤cation of sympathy (pace Nietzsche, who puts Rousseau and Schopenhauer in the same line via their connection in the history of ideas). 7. The Travel-Diaries of William Beckford of Fonthill, ed. Guy Chapman, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Constable, 1928), 2.352. François Magendie (1783–1855), whose name Beckford misspelled, was a French physiologist known for his seminal experimental work on the nervous system. 8. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1765 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 178. 9. The linking of crime and aesthetics is even more pronounced in a remark from the Salon of 1763: “C’est une belle chose que le crime, et dans l’histoire et dans la poésie, et sur la toile et sur le marbre” (Salon de 1765, 178 n.). Here crime per se is not praised, but certain forms of mediation, through the arts proper or through the distance and narrative of the historical, involve crime in aesthetics. Moreover, Diderot follows this praise with examples of great heroes and great criminals that serve to rehabilitate moral categories that have been threatened by the conversion into energy of good and evil, which equates them. See Michel Delon’s complementary approach to this apparent contradiction in Diderot’s œuvre: an esoteric experimentalism does not encroach on the moral grounds of Diderot’s exoteric and moralizing work. Delon also notes the possibility of a need for republican heroism that ¤nds itself akin to criminality given the laws of the Ancien Régime (see Michel Delon, “La beauté du crime,” Europe 661 [1984]: 73–83). On this topic, see also René Démoris, “Peinture et cruauté chez Diderot,” in Denis Diderot, 1713–1784: Colloque international, Paris—Sèvres— Reims—Langres (4–11 juillet 1984), ed. Anne-Marie Chouillet (Paris: Aux amateurs des livres, 1985), 299–307. 10. On the autonomy of art and the possibility of “beautiful evil” in a systemstheoretical perspective, see Harro Müller, “Luhmann’s Systems Theory as a Theory of Modernity,” New German Critique 61 (winter 1994): 39–54, esp. 47–51. Although he mentions neither the sublime nor the aesthetics of evil, Siegfried J. Schmidt’s analysis of the differentiation and autonomization of literature in the eighteenth century may help ¤ll in what I have sketched above. Speci¤cally, Schmidt remarks the shift from the “humanizing” function of bourgeois sentimental literature of the mid-century to the subsequent elaboration of humanity as free subjectivity and the systems-differentiating role of Romantic irony (see Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989], 413–418). 11. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin, 1951), 60. 12. See Hans Blumenberg’s reading of Lucretius’s lines in relation to Voltaire’s concern about the secret pleasures of—no surprise here—curiosity (Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997], 34–41). Blumenberg’s stance here, I should note, represents a nuanced departure from his earlier work on theoretical curiosity in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. On Lucretius’s dictum in relation to eighteenth-century aesthetics, see Carsten Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen”: Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987), 39–42 in particular.
Notes to pages 149–150 191
13. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65. 14. For example, when Ambrosio smothers his mother, we read that he “witnessed without mercy the convulsive trembling of her limbs beneath him, and sustained with inhuman ¤rmness the spectacle of her agonies” (Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance [London: Penguin, 1998], 263). By the end of the book, however, we sense that Ambrosio’s fall is the result of intelligence and aptitude running up against the stultifying effects of society (in the guise of Catholicism).
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Index
Addison, Joseph: on cruelty to animals, 82, 166n22; early journalism, 89; mentioned, 162n25 Adorno, Theodor, xv, 121–122, 161n19 Agatha, Saint, 138, 188nn39,40 Agrippa, Corneille, 107 Anatomy: of female body, 96, 97–98; status of, 72, 96–97, 116–117. See also Surgery; Vivisection Anderson, Benedict, 72 André, Father, on evil, 14 Animal spirits. See Nerves Animals: cruelty to, xv, 45–47, 56, 61– 63, 66–75 passim, 80–83, 104– 105; compassion for, 43–50 passim, 56, 72–74, 80, 104–105; insensibility of, 47, 102–103; sensibility of, 43–44, 48–49, 103– 105. See also Blood sports; Cats; Vivisection Apathy, 113–114, 122, 182n51, 185n16. See also Indifference Aquinas, Saint Thomas: on cruelty to animals, 169n2 Aristotle: on habit, 168n2; on repulsive objects, 15, 159n35 Association, 20, 22–29 passim, 32, 121, 132, 160n7 Augustine, Saint: on cruelty to animals, 169n2; on evil, 14, 158n29 Bacon, Francis, 65, 66 Baculard d’Arnaud, François-Thomas de, xii Barrow, Isaac, 70–71 Barthes, Roland, 38 Bateson, Gregory, 175n45 Bayle, Pierre, xi Beattie, James: on cruelty of children, 44; on inhuman passions, 6–7, 13; mentioned, 3
Beckford, William, 146–148 Benedict, Barbara M., xvi, 64–65, 173n31, 189n1 Bentham, Jeremy: on cruelty to animals, 48–49 Bichat, Xavier, 96 Blind, the, 79–80, 82, 176n57. See also Indifference Blood sports: attitudes toward, 45, 50, 71–74, 173n33; bullbaiting and bull¤ghting, 45, 50, 73, 148; cock¤ghting, 45, 72, 82; “throwing at cocks,” 49–50, 73 Blumenberg, Hans, 71, 118, 173n32, 190n12 Bonnet, Charles, 114 Brewer, Daniel, 152n14, 161n19, 186n26, 187n36 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc comte de, 37 Bullbaiting and bull¤ghting. See Blood sports Burlamaqui, Jean Jacques: on moral monsters, 30 Butchers: inhumanity of, 62–63, 68, 75, 83, 170n5, 170–171n8. See also Surgeons Butler, Joseph: on malevolence, 13–14; mentioned, 19, 160n10 Canguilhem, Georges, 152n15, 180n22 Cartwright, Michael, 188n40 Cats (including lions, etc.): agents of cruelty, 37–38, 44–47, 56, 164n3, 174n41; victims of cruelty, 38, 65, 71, 82, 167n33, 172n26 Children: affective education of, 25–28, 61–62, 83; apparent cruelty of, xv, 15, 38, 43, 44, 56, 57–58, 59, 61– 62, 74–75, 78, 171n10 Cock¤ghting. See Blood sports
Index 204
Comparison, 12–13, 23–24, 27, 29, 161n17. See also Association Compassion. See Pity Crary, Jonathan, 97 Crocker, Lester, xv, 157n21, 185n16 Crousaz, J. P. de, 159n35 Curiosity: childhood, xv, 65, 74–75, 79; as explanation of cruelty, 64– 65, 68–71, 74–75, 76, 77, 146, 147, 172n26; scienti¤c, xv, 65–66, 68–71, 74, 79, 172n26, 173n32; and unnatural passions, 9; as value, 65–66, 79–80, 173n32; mentioned 149, 189n1, 190n12. See also Children; Habituation Curran, Andrew, 152–153n15, 176n57 Darnton, Robert, 71 Deffand, Marquise du, on Sade and the “affaire d’Arcueil,” 88–89 De Man, Paul, xiii, 32, 163n30, 185n11, 189n45 Derrida, Jacques, 32, 120, 163n30, 185n11, 189n45 de Sade, Marquis. See Sade, Marquis de Descartes, René: on animals, 47, 103, 169n2, 181n33; dualism of, 47, 99–102, 103, 154n26, 181n31; on painful stimulation, 114; and the “subject,” xiii, 99–102; on vision, 97, 99–102, 182n40 Dictionnaire de Trévoux. See Trévoux dictionary Diderot, Denis: art criticism, 132– 137 passim, 143, 148–149, 187n36, 190n9; on the blind, 79–80, 175n49, 176n57; on human vivisection, 116–117, 118, 120, 121, 125; on inhumanity, 14; on pity, 16, 79–80, 82; translator of Shaftesbury, 4, 14; mentioned, 95, 97, 138, 156n15, 162n25 —Works: Jacques the Fatalist, 16; Letter on the Blind, 79–80; Salon of 1765, 132–136 Disinterest: as aesthetic principle, 10– 11, 143, 156–157nn15,16; benevolent, 25–26; malicious, 8, 9, 10– 11, 21–24, 26–28, 160–161n11. See also Indifference; Interest; Selfinterest
Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 16–17, 161n21 Dworkin, Andrea, 88 Eagleton, Terry, 156n17, 163n34 Egoism, 19–20, 24, 29, 121, 161n6. See also Disinterest; Self-interest Encyclopedia: on anatomy, 96, 98, 116– 117; on animal vivisection, 105; on cruelty, 6, 18, 170–171n8; depiction of mastectomy in, 138– 139; on human vivisection, 96, 116–117, 129; representation of knowledge in, 130, 186n26; on sensibility, 105, 181n38; mentioned, 118, 184n10 Erasistratus, 117, 125, 183n3 Evil: absolute, 9–11; as de¤ciency, 14, 158n29; derived from pain, 19; as disease, 14; as human trait, 123, 150; problem of, xii–xiii, 10, 14, 107 Experimentation. See Vivisection Ferguson, Adam: on good and evil, 19; on malice, 21–22; mentioned, 3, 162n25 Fielding, Henry, 130, 137 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bouvier de: on tragedy, 15–16 Foucault, Michel: on the “classical episteme,” 97, 130, 175n49; on the clinical gaze, 96; method of, xvi, xvii, 30, 154n26, 160n9; on modernity, xvii–xviii, 154n29; on Sade, xv; mentioned, 153nn15,21 Freedom: relation to ethics, xv, xvi, xvii, 22, 25, 30, 32–33, 82, 95, 114, 122–123, 124, 131, 146, 150, 163n35 Freud, Sigmund: on the “uncanny,” 78; mentioned, xiii, 120, 185n13 Functional differentiation of society, xvii, 57, 60–61, 74, 78, 125, 130, 131, 156n17, 168n35, 189n1, 190n10. See also Hierarchy Giddens, Anthony, xvii, xviii, 154n29, 163n29 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 150 Goldsmith, Oliver: on cats, 37–38 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, xii, 162n25
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Great chain of being, 44, 70, 81, 165n10. See also Animals Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 133, 136 Guardian: on cruelty to animals, 48 Habermas, Jürgen, xvii, xviii, 154nn26,27 Habituation: as explanation of cruelty, 16–17, 61–64, 74, 76, 77, 110, 168–169n2, 176n58, 182n51; as value, 110, 120. See also Curiosity; Indifference Hales, Stephen: cruelty of, 70, 172– 173n26; sensibility of, 104, 173n26 Haller, Albert: cruelty of, 105, 181nn34,38; on erection, 96; mentioned, 67 Hartley, David: on disinterested malice, 26–29; on sympathy, 24–29, 121, 161n16; mentioned, 32, 114, 121, 132 Heidegger, Martin, xiii Heister, Laurence: on female anatomy, 180n29; on mastectomy, 138, 188n40 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien: on cruelty, 32, 171n8; mentioned, 95 Herophilus, 116, 183n3 Heteronomy, 25, 114, 122, 150 Hierarchy, 31, 43–45, 56–57, 60–61, 125, 156n17. See also Functional differentiation of society Hirschman, Albert O., 20, 160n10 Hobbes, Thomas: on the comic, 29, 161n17; on cruelty, 20–21, 29; on curiosity as value, 64–65; on good and evil, 19; on religion, 151n2; mentioned, 3, 53, 156n15, 160n6 Hogarth, William: depiction of moral monstrosity, 6, 58–59, 71, 75–76; typology of response, 53–54, 76– 77; mentioned, xiv, 146 —Works: “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” xv, 38–44, 50–59 passim; 61, 62, 64–65, 68, 71–79 passim, 82, 83, 132; Pit Ticket: The Cockpit, 82; “A Rake’s Progress,” 6, 66 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’: on moral monstrosity, 158n28; on religion, xi, xii Hooke, Robert, 66–67 Horkheimer, Max, xv, 121–122, 161n19
Horror: as response, 21, 51, 53, 58, 67, 76, 77, 102, 119 Hume, David: ethics, 20, 22–24, 49, 120, 121; on moral monstrosity, 8, 11, 22–24, 29, 157n20; on religion, xi; on tragedy, 16; mentioned, xvi, 3, 13, 33, 114, 151n2, 155n1, 160n10, 163n35, 164n36 —Works: An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 11; The Natural History of Religion, xi; “Of Tragedy,” 16; Treatise of Human Nature, 22–24 Hunter, William, 64 Hutcheson, Francis: on cruelty to animals, 74–75, 174n41; on moral monstrosity, 8–10, 11, 21; mentioned, 4, 13, 19, 29, 143, 146, 156n17, 160n7, 161n17 —Works: Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, 9– 10; Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 9, 21; A System of Moral Philosophy, 8–9 Indifference: as response, 7, 11, 19– 20, 21, 23, 53–54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 72, 75, 76, 137, 156n16, 157n20, 176n57; as value, 30–31, 72, 122, 182n51, 185n16. See also Disinterest; Insensibility Inquisition: as model for Sade, 112 Insensibility: inexplicability of, 6–8, 23; relation to cruelty, 6, 32, 45; in Sade, 110–114, 122. See also Apathy; Indifference Interest: as aesthetic principle, 132– 133, 137, 139, 143, 187n32. See also Disinterest; Self-interest Jaucourt, Louis chevalier de: de¤nition of cruelty, 6 Johnson, Samuel: on animal vivisection, 68–70, 104–105, 129; concern for his cat, 167n33; on curiosity, 71, 173n31; mentioned, 47 Kames, Henry Home, Lord: on indifference, 7; on painful spectacles, 16, 166–167n24; on pity, xiii, 152n10, 162n21 —Works: Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, 7; “Of
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our Attachment to Objects of Distress,” 16 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics, 143, 156n17; on apathy, 122, 185n16; compared to Sade, 114, 121–123, 143; on cruelty to animals, 82– 83, 176n58; ethics, 25, 32–33, 49, 82–83, 109, 121–123, 150, 185nn13,16; on human vivisection, 122; on the “subject,” xiii, 131; mentioned, xvi, 163–164n35, 187n30 —Works: Con®ict of the Faculties, 122, 131; Critique of Practical Reason, 122–123; Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 33, 122 Keller, Rose (victim of Sade), 87–89 Koselleck, Reinhart, 60, 151n5 Lacan, Jacques, 121–122, 145, 175n47, 185n18 Laclos, Choderlos de, 112–113, 130 Lagrenée, Louis Jean François, 132–133 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de: on moral monstrosity, 14, 108, 157–158n28; sensibility of animals, 181n33; mentioned, 95 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de, 53, 124 Le Brun, Charles, 53 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 14 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: on pity, 17, 31; on tolerance, xii; mentioned, 4, 15 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk, 150, 191n14 Locke, John: and association, 22; on cruelty of children, 61–62, 74; on curiosity, 74; on good and evil, 19; on habituation, 61–62, 63–64; mentioned, 3, 63, 152n9, 156n15, 170n8 —Works: Essay concerning Human Understanding, 19, 22; Some Thoughts concerning Education, 61–64, 74 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 165n10 Lucretius, xi, 144, 149, 176n57 Luhmann, Niklas: on the “subject,” 31, 130–131, 163n28; systems theory of, xvii, 153–154n24, 161n18, 168n35; mentioned, xviii, 154nn25,29, 156n17, 173n32, 174–175n44
Lyotard, Jean-François, xiii, xviii, 154n31 Magdalene, Mary: depictions of, 94, 132–133, 138, 143, 187n33 Malebranche, Nicolas: comparison to Sade, 110, 112, 114; on compassion, 102–103, 106–109 Mandeville, Bernard: on cruelty to animals, 44–47, 62–63, 170n8, 176n52; on habituation, 62–63; on pity, 44–47, 60–61; mentioned, 49 Marshall, David, xvi, 31, 162nn21,25 Marx, Karl, xiii Maturin, Charles, Melmoth the Wanderer, 149–150 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de: defense of human vivisection, 117–118 Mendelssohn, Moses: on children’s delight in terror, 15; on painful spectacles, 16–17; mentioned, 158n33 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, comte de, 89 Monstrosity. See Moral Monstrosity Montaigne, Michel de, 107 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 147, 161n16 Moral Monstrosity: the blind and, 79– 80, 82, 176n57; cats and, 37–38, 45; curiosity and, 65–71 passim, 74–76; decline of concept of, xv, 29–33 passim, 149–150; de¤nition of, xiv, 3–8 passim, 11, 13–15, 18; graphically evoked, 6, 43, 76–77; impossibility of, 8–13 passim, 18, 20–24, 28–29, 31, 32, 33, 75, 161n16; origins of, xi, 19–28 passim; relation to aesthetics, 10–11, 15–17, 143, 146–150; relation to physical monstrosity, xiv, 14, 58, 106–109, 152–153n15, 157– 158n28; surgeons and scientists as examples of, 58–59, 67–71 passim, 76, 82, 104–106, 116–117; uses of, xiv, xv, 57, 75–78, 124, 146 Moral Sense, 3–4, 11, 19, 21, 22, 24, 29, 30, 164n36 More, Sir Thomas: on compassion, 48 Morgagni, Giovanni Battista, 97 Morris, David B., 96, 182nn49,51
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Muralt, B. L. de: on English cruelty to animals, 73 Nero (Claudius Caesar), 11, 14, 58 Nerves, and nervous response, 96, 98– 114 passim, 120, 148, 190n7. See also Sensibility Nicolai, Friedrich, 15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiii, 160n9, 185n13, 190n6 Orgasm: in Sade, 110. See also Pity; Sensibility Paradox: of inhuman humanity, 4–5, 18, 43, 45–46, 57, 60–61, 63–64, 70, 75–78, 117–118, 124, 150, 159–160n2, 171n8; of insensible enjoyment, 6, 64, 110, 113–114, 181n34, 182n51; and method, xvii, xviii, 95, 144–145, 159– 160n2, 175n45; use of, xv, 57, 75–78, 117–118, 124, 159– 160n2. See also Tautology Paulhan, Jean, 88 Pepys, Samuel, 65 Pity: attractions of, 15–17, 149; blockage of, 16–17, 32, 62–63, 79–82, 91, 109, 110, 114, 120, 133, 136; devaluation of, xv, 30–33, 82–83, 110, 114, 120–124 passim, 150, 164n36; erotics of, 110, 132–136, 139; as inverse of malice, 5, 6, 23– 24; as mark of humanity, xv, 6, 12, 43–49 passim, 53, 60, 73, 74, 75, 147–148; material basis of, 102– 104, 106–109; relation to curiosity, xv, 70–71, 74–75; relation to technical de¤nition of sympathy, 24– 25, 109–110; rhetoric of, 46–47, 49–50; social function of, xiii, xv, 20, 60–61, 74, 80, 102–103, 107–108, 124; as value, xiii, 5, 43–44, 48, 50, 53, 58, 60, 62–63, 75, 91, 120. See also Sensibility; Pity Plato, 14, 157n22 Pope, Alexander: on cruelty to animals, 47–48, 70; mentioned, 104 Pythagoras, and Pythagoreans, 49, 166n22, 169n2, 170n8
Re®exivity: historical dimension of, 99– 102, 120–121, 130–131, 161– 162n19, 163n29; as problem for ethics, 31–32, 82, 120–121; as value, 114, 115, 130–131. See also Second-order observation Reid, Thomas: critique of sentiment, 33, 164n36; mentioned, 3, 4, 163n35 Reni, Guido: depiction of suffering women, 94, 132–133, 138, 143, 187nn33,34 Rétif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme: comparison to Sade, 91–92, 95, 96–97, 121, 123–130 passim, 138– 139; on cruelty, 91–92, 123–124, 128; defense of human vivisection, 91, 96, 118–120, 121, 125, 129, 184n10; portrayal of Sade, 89–91, 105, 177n11; on professional surgery, 125–128, 129 —Works: Anti-Justine, 91–92; Parisian Nights, 89–91, 118–120, 123–130 Richardson, Ruth, 64, 171n11 Richardson, Samuel, 137, 139, 167n33 Roger, Philippe, 144, 183n53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: and deconstruction, 31–32, 163n30, 185n11; on habituation, 170–171n8; on humanity, xii, 171n8; on pity, 31–32, 82, 114, 160n7; mentioned, xvi, 19, 38, 190n6 Royal College of Physicians, 38, 51, 59, 72, 74, 103, 165n5, 173n35 Royal Philosophical Society, 65, 66, 103, 129 Russell, Bertrand, 169n2 Sade, Marquis de: aesthetic models in, 131–132, 137–144 passim, 187– 188n38; “affaire d’Arcueil,” 87–95 passim, 115–116, 124, 126; construction of vision in, 96–97, 105– 106, 112–114, 115, 130; historical position of, xv–xvi, 9, 33, 95–98, 105–106, 112–114, 115–116, 124–125, 129–131, 144–145, 146; on human vivisection, 120– 123, 128–129; as human vivisector, 89–91, 105, 128, 177n9; mentioned, xiv, 149, 171n11, 172n26, 176n57, 177n11, 178n13, 186n25
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—Works: “Eugénie de Franval,” 137– 138; Justine, 92, The Misfortunes of Virtue, 92, The New Justine, 92–95, 96, 114, 120–123, 125, 129–130, 143–144; The 120 Days of Sodom, 109–114 Saint-Evremond, Charles Marguetel de Saint Denis, seigneur de, 5 Sawday, Jonathan, 98, 180n30, 181n31 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 190n6 Scultetus, Johannes, 138, 188n40 Second-order observation, xvi, 29–31, 33, 82, 114, 123–124, 130–131. See also Re®exivity Self-interest: relation to cruelty, 4–5, 8–9, 20, 21–22, 28–29, 109, 121, 122, 123, 129, 136; mentioned, 44, 124, 156n15. See also Disinterest Sensibility: in Sade, xvi, 105–106, 109–114, 115, 122, 132, 139– 143, 146; relation to vivisection, 103–105; and vision, 98–109 passim; mentioned, 27–28, 64, 67, 80, 95, 130, 162n25, 185n16. See also Insensibility; Nerves Shadwell, Thomas, The Virtuoso, 65 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord: on aesthetics, 10–11, 144, 155–156n15, 156nn16,17; in®uence of, 3, 4, 14; on unnatural passions, 4–5, 8, 10–11, 12–13, 21, 171n10; mentioned, xiv, 19, 24, 143, 146, 157n22, 160nn7,10, 162n25 Sloane, Sir Hans, 103–104 Smith, Adam: on sympathy, 13, 30–31, 162nn21,25, 163n28; mentioned, 3, 4 Smollet, Tobias: on animal experiments, 67–68, 70 Spectator, 82, 166n22 Statius, xi Stewart, Dugald: on sympathy, 164n36 Stoicism, 31, 122, 162n25, 169n2, 182n51 Sublime, the, 149, 156n17
Surgeons: benevolent detachment of, 125–129; as indifferent, 54, 57, 58, 63–64; as inhuman, xv, 43, 53, 58, 61, 64, 67, 71, 74, 79, 125; riots against, 52, 167n28 Surgery: cataract, 79–80; mastectomy, 138–139, 188n40; as profession, 64, 72, 97, 118–119, 125–129, 173–174n35, 174n36, 183n4. See also Anatomy; Vivisection Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, 47, 66–67 Sympathy. See Pity Tatler: on cruelty to animals, 49–50, 56, 72–73, 80–82; on virtuosi, 66, 80–82 Tautology: of human humans, 11, 18, 75, 124; of natural nature, 13. See also Paradox Thomas, Keith, 162n2, 167n25 Todd, Denis, 107 Trévoux dictionary: de¤nition of cruelty, 5–7, 14, 155nn4,5 Utility, 89, 103, 105, 116–121, 136 Van Sant, Ann, xvi, 139 Vesalius, Andreas, 98, 180n30 Vibrations, 24, 110, 121. See also Association Vila, Anne, xvi, 112–114, 187n32 Virtuosi: inhumanity of, 67–71, 80–82, 110, 125; Sade as, 88, 92; satires on, 65–69, 80–82. See also Vivisection Vivisection: animal; xv, 66–71, 78, 83, 96, 172n26, 181n34; in general, 99, 103–104, 112; human: 92–97, 115–129 passim, 139, 173n32, 184n10 Voltaire, xii, 152n9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 159n2 Wolff, Christian, 14–15 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 163n28
James A. Steintrager received his M.A. in French and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published articles and essays on Enlightenment philosophy, poststructuralist theory, and libertine ¤ction, and is now writing a study on pleasure as a social system.
