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Configurations 5.3 (1997) 369-424

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Enlightenment and the Dirty Philosopher Emily Jane Cohen Figures

Speed = Modernity, hygiene Slowness = Rancid romanticism of the wild, wandering poet and long-haired bespectacled dirty philosopher. F. T. Marinetti "I had recourse to several medicines, and was at last obliged to have recourse to the application of leeches to the anus." In 1799, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Christoph Friedrich Nicolai presented his Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms Occasioned by Disease to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Having experienced numerous unsettling visions of deceased persons during a period of about one year, Nicolai was happy to be able to share the secret of his purging with his fellow philosophers. He described in detail the final moments of his definitive cure of April 20, 1791, at the hands of a trusted surgeon. Whereas the room had swarmed with human forms at the beginning of the operation, as the afternoon waned and digestion commenced, the ghosts slowly faded before his eyes, first losing their color and then vanishing altogether. "At about eight o'clock there did not remain a vestige of any of them, and I have never since experienced any 1 appearance of the same kind," he concluded emphatically. [End Page 369] At pains to apologize for speaking of himself, Nicolai could justify this "impropriety" because he was the object of his own investigation. Moreover, though he wore a variety of hats, he was careful to speak as a philosopher, thus taking advantage of what can most aptly be called a certain immunity: "Philosophers divide the human being into body and mind, because the numerous and distinct observations we make on ourselves oblige us to 2 consider man particularly, as well in respect to his corporeal as his mental functions." Only momentarily terrified, Nicolai was able to serve as his own expert witness. The unglossed pairing of philosopher and surgeon in this personal anecdote hardly surprises. The Age of Lights might also be known as the Age of Hands. From the Encyclopdie's engravings of machines highlighting various types of labor, to the cult of sensibility, defined by the same source as the disposition of the soul to be easily touched, 3 there was a dizzying proliferation of reflections on the manual. The privileging of the oncerenegade sense of touch is so multifaceted and so widespread that the scholar is better off imitating those philosophers who eschewed seeking ultimate causes and restricted themselves to detailing effects. It is, at the very least, fair to say that one of the first signs of the new emphasis on hands was the rise to prominence of surgeons and the consequent renewal of the art of anatomy. The history of surgeons' political struggle against the

"thinking" physicians is well chronicled and can in part be summarized as a debate over the utility of their hands-on experience as opposed to the abstract reasoning and book-learning of a group unwilling to give up a long-entrenched educational monopoly and an officially sanctioned superiority. The progressive triumph of the surgeons took place first and foremost in France, where they formed their own institutions, including a Royal Academy and a school of dissection, and officially broke with the barbers. The lines between physicians and surgeons became increasingly blurry. Far outnumbering their competitors and, as general practitioners, far more of a visible presence in the private lives of individuals, surgeons came to have an impact on the way the Enlightenment reasoned and 4 philosophized. [End Page 370] Indeed, surgery and philosophy nourished one another. It was surgery that greatly furthered medical knowledge during the eighteenth century. Surgeons legitimized themselves by adapting the methods, arguments, and tactics of the philosophers; philosophers, meanwhile, in their attempts to grapple with the meaning, origins, and functioning of their universe, looked to surgeons or to doctors trained in anatomy as sources of new scientific data. Their encounter was fortuitous, for the philosophical interest in anatomy and dissection went well beyond the literal. Anatomizing, involving at once an unearthing of hidden mysteries or origins and a dividing into parts so as to reassemble a coherent whole, was the paradigm of all philosophical enterprises and was duly reflected in all branches of 5 knowledge and artistic activity. Nicolai's memoir hints at such anatomical gestures. The model philosopher is he who is capable of distinguishing the real from the illusory, of abstracting eternal mind from perishable body. The eighteenth century was heir to a dualism that posited the world as the product of a fall away from oneness, purity, and eternal bliss into mixture, contamination, 6 and the transitory. Though part of the traditional role of the philosopher was to restore knowledge to its prelapsarian state, hopes of such an enterprise began to erode. The Enlightenment's fascination with origins, its museums, its massive encyclopedias, and its archaeological resurrections of lost cities all attest to the feverishness with which it tried to overcome a growing sense of the abyss, "a yawning gulf stretching between absence and 7 presence." The Deists' God washed his hands, so to speak, of the hic et nunc. And worse yet was the creeping sense that there is no beyond at all, no difference between inside and outside, between self and other. In this essay, I will focus on some of the problems that the dualism of body and mind posed to Western epistemology in the eighteenth century, presuming that in any attempt to know or to represent reality, the status of the body must be negotiated. More specifically, I will reflect upon the hand of the philosopher in the [End Page 371] quest for and transmission of knowledge, particularly in scientific and artistic representations of the human body. (Nicolai's predicament, for instance, springs from what Edmund Husserl critically termed the "natural attitude," the attitude that there is some reality out there to be unproblematically captured--itself said by Norman Bryson to entail the suppression of all that is bodily in the 8 name of mimetic art.) As my comments have already begun to suggest, I use the term philosopher in the broad eighteenth-century sense of the educated individual, competent in a variety of domains. The eighteenth century did not divide disciplines as we do today, and arrogation of this title was one way to facilitate the ascendancy of one's opinions. The narrative I construct will be one of the progressive attempt to efface the presence of the hand or body of the experimenter and to finally turn hopefully toward the machine as the perfect, most hygienic way of generating scientific images and information. In so doing, my work contributes to the recent scholarly reflections on proof and evidence across various 9 disciplines, and to related attempts to contextualize and historicize notions of objectivity. While the anonymous surgeon in Nicolai's anecdote remains in the shadows, the surgeon will here emerge as a sort of doppelgnger, a figure whose acknowledgment turns out to be a harbinger of the philosopher's own potential demise. I begin my story in the spirit of the Enlightenment, by seeking out origins in order to examine a few ancient hand gestures that helped confer a special spiritual status on the hand of the experimenter or philosopher. Moving into the Middle Ages and beyond, I dwell

primarily on surgeons and anatomists from Vesalius to William Hunter, in whose palms I read a struggle for legitimacy. I then turn to manifestations of a breakdown of the notion of the authoritative hand in science as well as literature. My discussion includes a reexamination of the official French investigations of mesmerism's salutary hand motions, and an analysis of works by such authors as Diderot and the Marquis de Sade, whose materialism calls [End Page 372] into question the cognitive powers of a philosopher become all too corporeal. From masturbating hands to ghostly apparitions of unattached extremities, what will emerge is an increasing wariness of the tainted touch. Using the anatomist as a figure of the late-eighteenth-century philosopher and writer, and focusing particularly on his encounter with feminized or sexualized bodies, I conclude by pushing the origins of what has been called, perhaps too readily, a "new moral objectivity" of the end of the nineteenth century, back a hundred years to the Age of Enlightenment. Hand-Me-Downs "He's got the whole world in his hands," goes the refrain of a popular gospel song, chanting reassuringly of our security, and suggesting by extension that the withdrawal of God's hand would usher in a reign of catastrophe in the most literal sense: the world would turn upside10 down. This image of God's powerful hand is a legacy from antiquity and derives from the first of two ancient hand gestures, signs of power and of witnessing, that I discuss in this section of my argument. The outstretched "saving right hand" of the gods, and of the priests and kings who were their divine descendants, can be traced to remote Egyptian and 11 Babylonian civilizations as well as to the Old Testament. Underlying various rites of these cultures is the idea of a mysterious potency that may be communicated by contagion through divinely empowered hands. In late antiquity, when Eastern traditions moved west, this gesture of transmitted force and salvation thus became the particular province of divine patrons of healing and child-bearing, as well as that of Roman emperors. When Christianity became a state religion, it borrowed the imperial iconography of the outstretched hand to portray Christ as Cosmocrator. At the same time, it was heir to a related iconographical tradition, illustrated most clearly by the aniconic religion of the Jews. Until the middle of the third century, the Judaic prohibition against images forbade any figuration of sacred character, let alone of any living being. In the earliest Jewish images, if God is represented at all, it is only through his disembodied hand-reaching out, for instance, to resurrect the dead in the wall paintings of the synagogue of Dura Europos. The hand of God, far from symbolizing His body, indicates that He is all spirit. Early Christians began by representing [End Page 373] [Begin Page 375] God in identical fashion. In a later image from an Armenian gospel (Fig. 1), the iconography of resurrection meets the older gestures of the conferral of power and the anointment of kings in an illustration of the baptism of Christ: an invisible vertical line equates God's hand, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the hand of John the Baptist. The second meaning attributed to the raised right hand that I should like to discuss is the Eastern gesture of the oath, also found in the Old Testament and still practiced 12 today in our courts of law. The earliest Christians were martyrs, persecuted witnesses to their faith (as the etymology of "martyr" denotes). Some early images show the saints, one hand raised in oath, bearing witness or testifying next to Christ. The symbolic reward of martyrs was the palm branch, palma in Latin designating both the tree and the hand. Figure 2, an early-seventeenth-century image of Saint Cecilia commemorating the 1599 discovery of her sarcophagus and her miraculously intact body, demonstrates this enduring tradition: hands unify the picture, and are formally echoed by the cherub's conveying of the martyr's palm. These two hand gestures are not unrelated. A martyr's wholeness testifies to the authenticity of the Resurrection, an event guaranteed iconographically by the saving hand of God. The Resurrection narrative itself can be read as a founding moment in the history of touch. At Christ's insistence, the doubting Thomas thrusts his hand into Christ's open wound to assure himself that he is not experiencing a hallucination of the body of Christ made whole again. "Noli me tangere" was Christ's cautionary response to Mary Magdalene

before the Resurrection: his corporeal body is off limits, but not his spiritualized one. With the Resurrection, "the sense of touch, become[s] one with the opening of the body," writes 13 Sander Gilman. Since touch, from the early medieval period on, is one of the lower senses, and more specifically the sense of the libido, Thomas's touch is not only a way to establish the truth, it is also "the sign of entering the body . . . of the ultimate Other," 14 analogous to sexual penetration as well as to the task of the anatomist. Witnessing and wholeness thus contrast with fragmentation and pollution in issues ranging from the cult of the saints to legal and [End Page 375] [Begin Page 377] medical procedures. Debates about resurrection were less about the dichotomy of body and soul than about what has been termed "material continuity," the belief that the whole body is the 15 self. This material notion of personal integrity was a reflection of both popular and, as a result, learned cultures, and was expressed in concepts of health and cleanliness that taught that a protected body was a hermetically sealed one. Yet despite all kinds of taboos concerning bodily fragmentation, by the end of the thirteenth century the division of bodies was common for cultic, political, and scientific reasons: relics of saints turned up throughout Christendom, bodily torture and mutilation were judicial practice, and surgeons began to undertake the first autopsies. The medieval theater of torture served as the fictional setting for the martyrdom of saints, which in turn provided the iconography for the anatomical 16 theaters of the Renaissance. Such cross-fertilizations are a testament to the profound ambiguity toward the division of bodies, a practice as dangerous as it was didactic. Many popular medieval tales reflected these ambiguities, telling of the punishment inflicted 17 upon those whose disfiguring hands were not possessed of the power of God. A particular audacity was attributed to those who opened the female body, and throughout history, it would seem that the archetypal opening of the body is the opening of the mother. The first dissections were performed on female corpses, suggesting a parallel between illicit 18 knowledge and knowing the physical intricacies of women. Women were at once [End Page 377] those most associated with the flesh and those most likely to ground their 19 spirituality in bodily experiences. It is not surprising, then, that legends surrounding the Virgin Mary took up the theme of fragmentation and pollution. Mary's body represented a mysterious and perfect enclosure, for she conceived without penetration and gave birth without parturition. In a fifteenth-century mystery of the Nativity, the birth of Christ is followed by a dispute between a good and a bad midwife. The bad midwife, suspicious of the lack of blood and the ease of the birth, returns to examine Mary. No sooner has she inserted her hand and begun to probe than her hand withers and falls off. Instructed by an 20 angel as to what has happened, she proclaims her faith and her hand is restored. In various apocryphal stories of the Assumption of the Virgin, a doubting Jew touches Mary's coffin, interfering with her burial; an angel comes down to wither or smite his hands, which are then left floating, or clinging to the side of the bier, until he testifies to his belief in the 21 gospel and his body is made whole again. In all such tales it is not the palm leaf, that classical symbol of superiority and victory, but the palm that comes to stand for the Christian's triumph over death as well as for reliable witnessing. Tales of the amputated hands of evildoers are ironic in that what might have called for a curative laying on of hands becomes a literal reattachment of the same. The original spirit-infusing gesture evokes contagion. Images of profaned and profaning extremities are foils to the sacred hand of God. It is interesting to speculate on the concept of a disembodied gesture. Gesture in the Greco-Roman world was that part of the art of rhetoric that was most dangerously seductive: actio, or the eloquence of the body and voice. Classical writers and their medieval heirs continually preached a moderation of gesture, fearing that gesture might degenerate into its reprobate other, gesticulation. Gesture was really the province of histrions, criticized as mere imitators by philosophers, who thus opposed actores and auctores, pleasure-seekers from seekers of truth. Censorship or prescription of gestures generally focused on the most individualizing parts of the human body, the face and the 22 hands. Perhaps part of the classical contribution to [End Page 378] the iconography of the hand was that if a hand gesture there must be, better a disembodied one. Dualism may divide body and mind, but at various points in our history, the hand has occupied an uncertain space between the two.

As God Is My Witness Today, scientific knowledge is increasingly recognized as a product of the body as well as the mind. Scholars have begun to scrutinize practices rather than theories in an attempt to understand how science legitimates itself through forms of argument and codes of 23 behavior. Although the focus of such studies has been primarily on the spectacular courtly societies of the seventeenth century and beyond, it seems logical that some of these codes may have their origins in scientific endeavors where the body itself took center stage. The scientific domain concerned with the life and health of individuals was one of the first to allude to the saving hand of God. Ambroise Par (1509-1590), royal surgeon ministering frequently to the French armies, proudly traced the equivalency between God's hand and that of the doctor-philosopher to Herophilus, founder of the medical school of Alexandria: "Just as a man lends a hand to another who has fallen, so the learned and scholarly doctorsurgeon cures and rids the body of illness, returning it [ le relevant], in godlike fashion, to its 24 initial good health." Par came from a manual rather than a theoretical background. A transitional figure, a barber-surgeon writing in the vulgar tongue but displaying a certain familiarity with classical book-learning, he offers a glimpse of a horizon where the work of physicians and surgeons will merge as one. The physicians' use of anatomy was entirely different: when dissections became part of medical education, beginning in the early fourteenth century, their aim was to distance medicine from the lowly trade of the barbers by demonstrating it to be a branch of natural philosophy, a rational science whose roots in classical philosophy made it worthy of being taught in universities. The purpose of the public anatomy lesson was to provide a visual support for these old traditions, preferably before a large audience/ jury that included 25 a number of dignitaries. [End Page 379] The great sixteenth-century turning point from anatomical theory to practice was the 1543 publication of Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica. During the many centuries when humoral theories held sway, it was true that dissection was of little practical value to medicine. This lack of immediate usefulness propagated a continual distaste for what might be seen as a profanation of the dead. Vesalius took the first step toward anatomy as useful discovery when he entered a visual plea for the unification of the previously separate roles of demonstrator, reader, and dissector. While anatomists had long been performing dissections in private, contravening the statutes establishing it as a public ritual, the famous title-page depiction of Vesalius performing his own dissection in an anatomical theater inverted the relation between text and practice. From then on, dissection could be used to 26 correct the previously unquestioned authority of the ancients. Another image, the frontispiece to the Fabrica, suggests that such a transition marked a triumph of hand over mind. The word surgery stems from the Greek word for manual work, and Vesalius here holds a dissected hand and arm in his own hand, evoking his profession's etymological origins. The text on the table next to him is his own, a commentary on Galen, who until then had been held as the authority; Galen, Vesalius guessed, had dissected only animals, not humans, and as a result his information was greatly flawed. A visual equation between a pen and a nearby scalpel, the tool used by medieval scribes to erase and make corrections, underscores the way in which Vesalius's 27 activities have audaciously rewritten history. Such audacity, however, still had to confront the court of public opinion. By offering knowledge from a realm outside that of ancient textual authorities, Vesalius seemed to be questioning sacred textual traditions in general, and some read his stance as a presumptive 28 promotion of personal observation. But it was actually a different kind of dialectic between public and private that accounted for the slow acceptance of teaching reform. The anatomist, dealing as he did with dead bodies, had to maintain a quasi-sacred status of the kind that anthropologists accord liminal figures. Ever walking a fine line between the licit and the illicit, he framed his activities as forms of justice sanctioned by higher authorities. This necessity was in part [End Page 380] accomplished by the choice of corpses:

executed criminals, particularly those of the lower classes, were the victims of choice, for it could be said that their bodies endured earthly torments even as their souls were tortured in 29 hell. But, as in the fascinating case of the Fabrica's historiated initials, the anatomist 30 could also invent authoritative witnesses to his endeavors. In and around these letters, little putti, whose clean hands are guaranteed by their celestial origins, unearth fresh specimens, a dreaded task normally assigned to anatomy students. What should be their dark, secretive activities are additionally neutralized by the sanctioning presence of ecclesiastics and representatives of the earthly justices and police. The status of philosopher and gentleman must always be solicited by one who dirties his hands. The recent work on the mid-seventeenth century has emphasized courtliness rather than courts of law in the production of scientific knowledge, but the reliable witness figures no less prominently in these accounts. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have reconstructed a transitional period when an old, dogmatic style of natural philosophy ceded to an experimental philosophy that had to negotiate new, seemingly more democratic ways of generating so-called matters of fact. Thomas Hobbes, one of the principal parties to the dispute, conceived of the problem as a distinction between minds and bodies. He was a philosophical master by virtue of mind, not craft. His public was "not a witnessing and believing public, but an assenting and professing public: not a public of eyes and hands, but 31 one of minds and tongues." Robert Boyle and the experimental philosophers, on the other hand, used various means to convey the impression of reaching consensus within a public space. They emphasized the role of the witness, furnishing even their published works with illustrations that made the reader feel as though he were viewing the experiments himself. Thus, notwithstanding the "opacity" that Mario Biagioli finds essential to the functioning of this courtliness, being the right subject to conduct an experiment entailed a belief in a kind 32 of transparency. Boyle, writing to accumulate "virtual witnesses" for his experiments, 33 claimed to avail himself of a "naked" style, devoid of [End Page 381] rhetorical ornament. Ascetic rigor was of the essence, and the experimenter professed to speak a language without gesture. Experimental philosophy accused its opponents of working with mere hypotheses, fictions not bolstered by empirical evidence--yet, though Cartesians came to be its archenemies, accused of relying on innate ideas and systems rather than hands-on research, it was ironically the very sharply drawn Cartesian distinction between mind and body that long helped to bolster the belief that some subjects were better witnesses than others. Faith in scientific instruments was analogous to faith in Reason or Mind: both master and control the fallible human senses. The knowledge of the experimental philosopher could be close to God's. In many a scientific illustration of the seventeenth and eighteenth [End Page 382] centuries, the philosopher's hand is doubly coded as the hand of God. Experimenters were at pains to show experiments to be natural--that is, originating in the divine. According to a Baroque convention, cherubs may assure the viewer of God's presence by working the machines while the experimenter's hand merely gestures demonstratively (Fig. 3). Ultimately, the equation between philosophical and divine hand becomes quite explicit. Figure 4 shows Boyle testing for the spring of the air by pumping water from a barrel. To the left, a glass tube demonstrates the same law as the water experiment, surrounded by disembodied godlike hands. For a long time philosophers relied on the spirit implied by the hand of God. Feeling that the phenomena they studied were self-evident, experimenters were such reliable witnesses that they could be counted upon to objectively observe themselves. This "Cartesianism of the genteel," as Schaffer calls it, meant that during experiments, the philosopher's body facilitated rather than impeded the production of scientific knowledge--and, as often as not, 34 an authoritative hand motion was the focus of attention. Scientific illustrations that use disembodied hands to show the presence of the experimenter carrying out his experiment reflect this Cartesianism of the genteel. In Figure 4, the engraving of Boyle; in Figure 5, an illustration from William Harvey's book on the motion of the heart and the

blood; and in Figure 6, one of the Abb Nollet's electrical experiments, where floating hands help to complete the electrical circuit, the hands in question are dainty and aristocratic: their 35 linen cuffs discreetly announce their cleanliness and propriety. The hands are unquestioned symbols of authority and accuracy. Surely the anatomical atlases, for which Vesalius had set the standard, reflect this trend. One might read the nails pinning down the female reproductive organs in Govard Bidloo's engraving ( Fig. 7) as deliberate manifestations of the signs of his technique, the instruments masterfully manipulated by his specialized hands. That asomatous hands could appear elsewhere, as they did in medieval codifications of gesture or in the writing manuals of the Renaissance, does not alter their significance. Though writing, for instance, hardly constitutes an experiment, it was always an art of bodily 36 control. This concern was just as strong in the eighteenth [End Page 383] [Begin Page 386] century, as the various entries and illustrations concerning writing in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopdie reveal. The first essential steps toward "Writing" are trimming the quill, positioning the body, and mastering movement. The point of such mastery was to produce a handwriting so legible that it left no trace of the body. Accompanying [End Page 386] [Begin Page 388] the illustrations of "Writing" is an anatomical analysis of the circulation of fluid in the living hand: "If this fluid penetrates too abundantly, it softens and dilates the nerves, giving rise to shaking and weakness. If, however, it flows too slowly, which can happen as a result of age or of a hidden or known defect [vice], it dries out and 37 impoverishes the nerves." The "hidden vice" refers here to a bodily defect that might affect the ability to write, but the word is loaded: deformities in handwriting, including 38 ornaments and personal flourishes, detract from its duty to depict clear thoughts. Aristocratically, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, author of the entry "Writer," concludes that the 39 well-trained hand will ever surpass the printed impression. Yet what of the unaristocratic? Structurally implicit in all these spiritualized floating hands are their opposites, the severed limbs of the profaners of the Virgin's casket, the horrific bloodied hands of the bad midwife, those unreliable witnesses. Only the gentleman and scholar could aspire to unprejudiced contemplation. To many in the eighteenth century, narcissism--diagnosed as amour propre, or self-love--was a disease run rampant. A 40 disease of selfishness, it was necessarily linked to hypocrisy and the imitation of others. Through this ailment that opposes social imitators (or translators) and originals pierces the classical distinction between histrionic gesticulators and masters of moderated gesture. It was self-denial and suppression of the body that characterized any would-be philosopher and gentleman, and, given his profession, the surgeon had to be particularly cautious. The rise to fame and fortune of the Scottish medical man William Hunter (1718-1783) illustrates this point, nuancing Roy Porter's assertion that any entrepreneurial surgeon could 41 make a go of it. A marginal figure in all respects--professing the wrong religion, born in the wrong country, educated at the wrong school, and last, but not least, employed as a vulgar man-midwife--Hunter became a lecturer, dissector, and practical demonstrator through his thrift and frugality, through savvy self-restraint. After moving to London, he [End Page 388] quickly distanced himself from his Scottish associates. A reputed miser, a living example of ascetic and transparent prose, or of the plain handwriting that forgoes fashionable flourish, he dropped his accent and became noted for a simple rhetorical style, 42 devoid of Scottisms. He lived with and then inherited the business of an educated Anglican doctor before opening his own anatomy school and being admitted to the Royal Society. His biography thus uncannily parallels his own account of the history of his profession. Obliged, even as the first anatomists were, to distance himself from the barbers, Hunter presented the history of anatomy as inextricably linked to the civilized world of Greek philosophy. The point of comparison is not just the barbers, but the barbaric. Thus the Chinese lag behind and produce anatomical figures "as what we might suppose any 43 common butcher would express by drawing." Vaunting surgery's lettres de noblesse in his introductory lectures to his students, Hunter began with the confident proclamation that "it must be comfortable to all men of liberal minds, to think, that from the universality of the

present empire of science, we might even flatter ourselves with saying of English science, arts and language, hardly any event can now overturn it, till the final catastrophe comes 44 round." But behind the bravado is a history of anatomy as one of near catastrophes, culminating in the fall of Constantinople, from whose ruins the science barely escaped into the hands of the moderns. It is the history of Western civilization, where refined keepers of the flame, such as Alexander the Great, himself "of a courtly turn for elegance," are ever 45 just managing to preserve their art from uncouth Romans or Saracens. Throughout the eighteenth century, anatomy could still be accused of cruelty and transgression, but it was doubly difficult to be a man-midwife, open to insinuating remarks 46 about hypocritical "men of feeling." When William Hogarth satirized the anatomy lesson in the last of his Four Stages of Cruelty, he chose to name his criminal protagonist Tom Nero. The Reward of Cruelty (1750-1751) shows Tom serving as specimen in an anatomical theater after he has been [End Page 389] hanged. Despite the fact that a male body is on the dissecting table, Tom's name is symbolically charged: as Suetonius tells us, Nero not only had his mother killed, he went in to view her corpse, fondling it and appraising its 47 features. Medieval legends embellished the tale by adding that Nero dissected his own mother in order to see where he had come from and was also tricked into swallowing a frog to simulate the experience of the pain of childbirth; the ugly and bloodied frog he eventually 48 vomited up was an image of his own monstrosity. The medieval writer stressed Nero's perversion of nature. Vesalius had shown how to invert the Neronian subtext of anatomical theater scenes. Though the human bodies in his atlas are idealized, the frontispiece depicts the opening of a prostitute who had feigned pregnancy in an attempt to escape execution. It is this "falsifier of her own sexuality," this 49 "most degraded of women that permits insight into the hidden nature of all women." Deviance lies with the object of the lesson, not with the subject. This is in fact the unspoken justification of the male midwives who were trying to develop the new medical specialty of obstetrics, including a new discourse on the pathologies of female sexuality. William Hunter's 1774 atlas of the Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus was only one of a whole series of eighteenth-century midwifery handbooks. The interest was not necessarily primarily in the nature of women, but rather in human nature and nature itself, in the origin of mankind. This project of "Nature Unveiling Herself before 50 Science," however, was conceived of as a woman revealing her body. And since "nature" connoted the natural or normal, the deviant or monstrous revealed what Nature was not. 51 Hunter proclaims that monstrous productions "guide us through her labyrinth." He gives no hint that this labyrinth might not be fully illuminated. Expressing a faith that the Supreme Being, that anatomist on high, is responsible for a perfectly intelligible world, Hunter envisions an afterlife [End Page 390] much the same as his earthly existence, one where he will continue as good Christian witness, "seeing and comprehending the whole plan of 52 the Creator, in forming the universe, and in dissecting all its operations." Sense and Sensibility The metaphorical equivalency between anatomizing and thinking during the eighteenth century could only have been premised upon a rationalization of the sense of touch that itself owed a great deal to the work of doctor-surgeons. Early in the eighteenth century, Ren Croissant de Garengeot published his Treatise of Surgical Operations, a record, among other things, of his codification of surgical gestures. The illustrations of procedures accompanying the text focus on the interaction between patients' bodies and surgeons' hands, and the text details the placement of left versus right, as well as the various 53 manipulations--pinching, pressing, palpating--appropriate to each operation. Thanks to surgical practices, palpation was not merely performative but productive of knowledge. Indeed, the art of diagnosis made significant advancements during the century precisely because it became more acceptable to lay hands on one's patients, in the manner of surgeons. Known ancient techniques, such as auscultation, had been long abandoned by physicians concerned with maintaining a gentlemanly status and forgoing such 54 manipulations.

The primary diagnostic tool throughout most of the century was still the taking of the pulse, which in France was popularized and refined by the doctor-surgeon Thophile Bordeu's Research on the Pulse (1754). In the taking of the pulse, the hand that provides information is just as transparently knowable as the hand that interprets it is rational. Despite the claim that the pulse can be known only through touch (which is to say, experience), and "not by reasoning," the doctor's primary skill is a "tactile finesse" that can distinguish innumerable 55 pulses, the subtleties of which must have escaped even many a contemporary reader. Hard pulses, soft pulses, lively pulses, [End Page 391] supple ones--each taps into a specific part of the body or defines a specific pathological state. It is as if the mere holding of a patient's hand lays an entire body open to hair-splitting analysis. Bordeu's experiential method is an expression of the sensationalism that came to dominate eighteenth-century thought, for in their arguments with physicians, surgeons paralleled the empirical philosophers' attacks on metaphysicians. The same year that this vitalist of the Montpellier school published his work on the pulse, John Locke's French disciple, tienne Bonnot de Condillac, further refined and radicalized the notion that all knowledge comes to us through the senses in his Treatise on the Sensations. Condillac's text offers a perfect example of an "anatomical" way of laying out an argument. In adopting the whimsical device of the homme-statue, a tabula rasa who in acquiring one sense after another progressively comes to life as a fully functioning human being, Condillac was in fact performing a reverse dissection. It is no surprise, then, that his epistemology gives pride of place to the sense of touch. Even the joint efforts of the other four senses, as useful as they all are, cannot make it possible for the statue to distinguish between itself and the outside world. A new chapter in the life of the statue begins with the addition of touch, "the only 56 sense which of itself can judge of externality." Even reduced to touch alone, the statue can finally have a sense of the "I." Running its hands over its own body and reaching out to those that are foreign, finally grasping the notion of space and thus acceding to abstract reasoning, it is as if the statue awakens to life only to retort to the philosopher who first inspired its existence, "I feel, therefore I am." Waxing enthusiastic about this instructor of all the other senses, this teacher who refines the impressions they receive, Condillac is even moved to indulge in a three-page loge of the human hand, an example of a tool perfectly 57 formed to acquit its tasks. What to make of the originally nobler sense of sight was a touchy problem for philosophy, which became increasingly fascinated by the universe of the blind. The relations between seeing and feeling, often thought of as complementary activities, were an endless source of philosophical digressing, made topical by a contemporary sequence of successful cataract operations. Condillac's treatise was no exception to this trend, and a good deal of it was devoted to retracting and restating his earlier position on the famous question posed [End Page 392] to Locke by William Molyneux concerning the nature of the perceptions of a blind man suddenly endowed with the faculty of sight. A recurring eighteenth-century trope, exemplified above in the work William Hunter, was that of the philosopher lighting the labyrinth of Nature. That enlightenment comes only to those who grope their way through dark passages may account for the new fixation on the blind. Touch came to signify experience, and in the land of the sighted, the blind man was suddenly king. In 1747, inviting his readers to explore the labyrinthine intricacies of the human body-machine, Julien Offray de La Mettrie exhorted them as follows: "Let us take up the white cane [bton] of experience. . . . To be blind and to think that we can do without this cane is the height of 58 blindness." But it was Denis Diderot, with his Letter on the Blind (1749), who chose to revive the antique topos of the blind seer, rewriting the deathbed scene of a blind Cambridge mathematics professor, Nicholas Saunderson, and elevating him to the status of clairvoyant. The blind are deprived of but one sense. In what is a striking though not uncommon reversal, Diderot writes as if they basically have but one sense. Taking the position that everything we know and believe, including our metaphysics and our morals, is a result of our bodily organization and our senses, Diderot proceeds to show that in the case of the blind, all knowledge comes to them through their skin. Saunderson is proof that "touch can 59 become more refined than sight when perfected through exercise." Seemingly relying on his own hands for all he knows of the universe, Saunderson cautions against using the

hand of God to explain what mere mortals cannot grasp: "If Nature offers us a knotty problem to unravel, let us leave it as is rather than have recourse to the hand of a Being 60 who Himself poses even greater entanglements." But the steady hand of the blind philosopher hardly replaces that of God. As death approaches and this new Teiresias begins to prophesy, sensationalism is undone and we get a glimpse of a philosophical and scientific future. Saunderson is an exceptional individual in all senses of the word, and his aberrant condition, his sightlessness, makes him the exact opposite of Condillac's universal, abstracted man. Using the down-to-earth sense of touch to navigate the universe, the blind, says [End Page 393] Diderot, "view matter much more abstractly than we do" and "they are 61 more easily inclined to believe that it thinks." The proverbial wisdom of fools gushes out of the delirious man's mouth in the form of Lucretian materialism. Saunderson's physiological makeup tells us that the world is not organized according to any divinely fixed and determined plan. As the God-fearing had long suspected, withdrawal of the divine hand inaugurates a permanent reign of catastrophe. The world is just matter in flux, momentarily coming together to form beings of more or less perfection, "a composite, subject to 62 revolutions that all indicate a continual tendency toward destruction." The dreamlike trance in which Saunderson makes these pronouncements leads to the surprise answer to Molyneux's question: a blind philosopher, lucky enough to regain his sight, will indeed be prepared to distinguish a sphere from a cube. Skilled in the art of metaphor and comparison, he will be able to reason analogically. That is to say, his thoughts will be like the ravings of a feverish dreamer. Saunderson was indeed a prophet of sorts. As is commonly observed, his visionary experience foreshadows the most famous of a series of texts composed much later in Diderot's life: D'Alembert's Dream, an attempt to reshape and synthesize his philosophy in accordance with the latest scientific information, stages a variation on the theme of the intellectual wrestlings of the blind seer. In this text, a sleepy and then sleeping philosopher, Diderot's former encyclopedic collaborator, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, is the impetus for a series of dialogues between an all-star cast--including his mistress, Julie de Lespinasse, and Diderot himself. But the authorial alter ego and kingpin of the discussion is that unsurpassed pulse-taker, Dr. Thophile Bordeu. Physiology, a somewhat imprecise eighteenth-century term for a science of life with roots in surgery and anatomy, furnished Diderot with the scientific basis of his series of dialogues; since it was in Bordeu's work that he found the idea of a "sensibility of matter," the theoretical position announced in his preliminary fictional sparring match with d'Alembert, it was only natural that the surgeon 63 should serve as Diderot's mouthpiece. Diderot's sensibility of matter undergirds the monism he wishes to substitute for metaphysical speculations on "the two substances," [End Page 394] on the interactions 64 between body and soul. As good philosophers, Diderot and d'Alembert begin their dialogue by conducting an appropriate, though hypothetical, experiment, one that will be repeated at various levels throughout the text: gesturing to a sculpture he very much admires, tienne Maurice Falconet's Pygmalion at the Foot of his Statue, Diderot proposes to grind down and transform the marble from inert substance to thinking being (a lifeprocess that entails using a marble soil to farm vegetables intended for human ingestion). In Condillac's sensationalism, touch was the most crucial sense. Like all the other senses, it received impressions with a sharpness and clarity that precluded the clouding of judgment. By assuring the distinction between self and external world, it made observation possible and bolstered scientific inquiry. When sensibility replaces sensationalism and stone begins to think, the pulverization of both Pygmalion and his statue symbolically effaces the difference between sculptor and sculpted, between experimenter and experiment, between 65 observer and observed. Touch can hardly be said to be less central to the Dream than it was to Condillac's treatise-quite the contrary. Yet paradoxically, the more primacy is accorded to touch, the more it asserts its primitive nature. Condillac had said touch was the only way in which we could distinguish ourselves from external bodies. Now it becomes the way in which those bodies

are indistinguishable from us. In the Encyclopdie entry "Sensibility," the property of sensibility was restricted to living beings and "moral sensibility" had its own separate 66 heading; in the haptically contrived universe of D'Alembert's Dream, the blurring of the two results in a dreamlike world whose organization is effectuated solely through the principle of contact. Here sensibility functions at the level of both form and content, calling into question philosophy's ability to grapple with its objects of study. [End Page 395] Scholars have begun to remark that D'Alembert's Dream is in part a treatise on monsters. If monsters be hybrids, heterogeneous assemblages of body parts, then the phantasmal life forms that inhabit this fictional landscape might be said to be bizarre assemblages of hands. A series of images and ultimately a scientific explanation all conspire to create this impression. It is easiest to invert the order of Diderot's text and begin with the scientific explanation. He describes the nervous system as a bundle of fibers of touch that diversify into all the sensory organs. Since this primitive touch, this "pure sensibility," is the basis for the rest of the body, the other senses, by analogy, become modes of touch themselves; thus, for example, "a fiber [brin] forming an ear, gives birth to a variety of touch we call noise or sound," and "the rest of the fibers form as many other sorts of touch as there is 68 diversity amongst the organs and body parts." These various organs are as distinct as if they were separate animals, but a certain "law of continuity" makes them reach out to each 69 other in a kind of sympathetic union, thus providing a sense of identity. It is this singular notion, that adjacency may result in fusion, or that "contiguity leads to continuity," that 70 serves as Diderot's key explanatory mechanism.
67

The images used by Diderot to illustrate this theory all necessarily revolve around the notion of touch. The first is that of the "philosopher-instrument," the harpsichord whose construction and operation mirror the thinking process of man the machine: "Our senses are keys [touches], struck [pinces] by the nature that surrounds us and often striking each 71 other in turn." As impressions pluck the strings of the philosopher's body, their continuing vibrations carry over to other strings that resonate, forming memories, associations, and chains of ideas. Matter thinks, of course, in the same way as it is formed. The metaphors of touching, plucking, and pinching recur in the famous dream image of the swarm of bees who cluster together on the end of a branch holding each other, as it were, by the hands [pattes]. The verb pincer, used to indicate the playing of the harpsichord, here describes the activities of the bees as they relay sensations and vibrations throughout the clustered mass: "He who has never seen a comparable cluster of bees arrange themselves will be [End Page 396] tempted to take them for a five- or six-hundred-headed animal with ten or twelve hundred wings," rants d'Alembert, proposing that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse dissect the 72 cluster by taking scissors to the junctures of legs. Like the animal-organs of the human body, these insects temporarily come together to form a monstrous whole. Condillac's statue was able to run its hands continuously over its own body and realize its own integrity. Diderot's characters are less sure. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse at first claims that her sense of self is self-evident: "It seems to me that contact alone suffices. . . . When I place my hand on my thigh, I feel first that my hand is not my thigh, but sometime later . . . I no longer make those distinctions; the limits of the two parts blur and end by joining as 73 one." If this dissolving into unity be the sense of self, what happens to those who observe others? What is the identity of a temporary assemblage of parts that mere proximity may absorb into something else? Tossing and turning in his bedclothes, the dreaming d'Alembert represents the new predicament of the philosopher as he gropes at himself in an attempt to get a sense of his "I." Diderot is said to have hidden behind a dreamer in order to safely utter what could pass in his day for obscene monstrosities. (To avoid encounters with the law, he even left the work unpublished, and when he sent off a copy of the manuscript to Catherine the Great, he indulged in a further obfuscation, giving his characters pseudonyms so their utterances 74 would sound less offensive and be less easily attributable to himself.) What are dreams, after all, if not thoughts liberated from the logical constraints of the waking world? Images, words, and ideas touch off unusual associations and form marvels that may strike the waking world as impossible contradictions, mere phantoms of an overzealous imagination.

The text written as dream plays with this notion at multiple levels, undoing the very philosophy it exposes, revealing its own hybridity, contingency, and relativity. Strikingly, it unmasks the authority of the philosopher himself by repeatedly asking the reader who is speaking. "There's no difference between an alert doctor and a dreaming philosopher," quips Mlle de Lespinasse, as Bordeu systematically proves that d'Alembert's digressions are far from the 75 ravings of a lunatic. Because the surgeon and the philosopher see eye-to-eye, she [End Page 397] begins to confuse the two of them: "After your ramblings or his . . . ," she 76 continues at one point, momentarily unsure of who is dissecting the thoughts of whom. Bordeu had hesitated in a similar fashion when she first began to quote him the dream, wondering whether she were speaking for herself or reporting the mutterings of d'Alembert. 77 Elsewhere, she believes that the dreaming philosopher is apostrophizing himself when, in 78 actuality, he is merely prolonging his conversation with a now-absent Diderot. The reader's task may be just as onerous. The use of suspension points in the dream text alternately indicates a pause or a change of speaker, and only a good deal of concentration 79 reveals the difference between the two. Mirroring the philosophy they espouse, the dialogues show us that by merely being in the same room, by participating in the same conversation, the various persons may fuse together into an indistinguishable mass. Monstrosity and self-loss are thus in part a kind of contagion effectuated through communication. The philosopher's status is threatened by excessive sensibility, and any 80 word is potentially a "touching word." As in the hypothetical case of the genius Newton, a mere surgical experiment, a slight juggling around of the organizing fibers, may reduce him 81 to the status of an "unformed mass of the most profound stupidity." And what is excessive sensibility if not the province of vaporous women, in whom "all the fibers of the bundle" are in constant agitation, forever rearranging themselves, as it were, and impeding 82 the activities of judgment and reason? Vapors present an image of anarchy that Bordeu goes on to define as comparable to the state of sleep. As the doctor expands upon the character of the excessively sensible, a portrait in which Mlle de Lespinasse recognizes herself, it becomes clear that Diderot's dream text, based entirely on analogies and comparisons "that constitute almost all of the reason available to women and poets," is 83 written under the sign of a feminine monstrosity. [End Page 398] The Feminine Touch The question of excessive sensibility thus brings us back to William Hunter and other anatomizers of the female body. It is an in utero failure of the so-called fibers of touch to diversify, after all, that produces what Diderot calls monsters. Only more dissections will 84 shed light on how such agitations and entanglements occur. As though it were easily lost or distracted along its way, the uterus itself is a kind of monster: "Woman carries within her an organ subject to terrible spasms, an organ that governs her behavior and conjures up 85 phantoms of all sorts in her imagination," Diderot notes elsewhere. Marie-Hlne Huet believes that the Dream's foregrounding of dedifferentiation belies this obsession with the womb, the sign of both female and monstrous specificity; women merely assume their 86 traditional role as imaginers of monstrosities. But what if it is a dreaded similarity that accounts for the womb's haunting presence? Mlle de Lespinasse's "crazy" insight that "man 87 is perhaps just the monster of woman" would have to be taken quite seriously. In this section, I propose that the drive to dissect the uterus speaks less of irreducible difference than of what the philosopher fears he has been reduced to. In their calls for enlightened regimes, philosophers necessarily had to support a certain leveling of bodies. Every body deserved fair treatment. Studies on the rise of pornography and the role of eroticism in the eighteenth century show that while philosophical materialism was stripping bodies of their individuating characteristics and promiscuously mixing up parts, social life and the image of the body politic were changing as well. The bodies of women and aristocrats, themselves seen as debauched and effeminate, posed a threat to the hygiene and transparency that were steadily becoming metaphors of public life. With the democratization of culture and the overturning of old hierarchies came a wariness that

culture itself might be dangerously weakened or feminized. Nowhere was this more striking than in scrutiny of the ultimate "bad mother," Marie-Antoinette. [End Page 399] Her lustful 88 uterine convulsions made for many a pornographic satire during the French Revolution. The increasing investigations of conventual life suggest a need to either exorcise or come to terms with a society imagined as consisting solely of women. Given his interests in the origins of the human monster, it is not surprising that Diderot was among those who took up the theme of motherhood in his works of fiction. Although he intended to steer clear of anticlericalism in D'Alembert's Dream, he could not resist a passing materialist reflection on the teratogenic "monastic spirit," said to perpetuate itself in the manner of the cluster of bees, seizing upon each novice and forcing it to think and feel as the others until its 89 absorption into the convent was complete. The Nun, written in 1760 (though not published until 1796) fleshed out these concerns. The novel is as much about nature gone awry as it is a seething depiction of the evils of Catholicism. From the misguided mother who rejects her enfant naturel (the expression means illegitimate child in French, this being part of the irony) to the various wicked Mother Superiors--including the dangerous, if pitiful, lesbian seductress of the bordello-like Saint Mary's Convent--sister Saint-Suzanne falls prey to a series of unnatural mothers. The convents themselves become the labyrinthine bodies of the potential mothers who inhabit them, and Diderot calls for a plugging of these 90 abysses "which will engulf so many future races." The nun's vows "can be properly observed only by a few, unnatural creatures, in whom all seeds of passion have withered. We would rightly call such creatures monsters, if our sciences made it possible for us to 91 know the inner workings of man, as well as his outward form." Diderot's doubts are purely rhetorical. It is hardly a question of not knowing the internal structure of these enclosed and unnatural women whose mere existence is a threat to future species. By dissecting the 92 convent, the philosopher reveals the "disorder" of the "animal economy" within. [End Page 400] The female body had long been the especial locus of rationality's struggle with the sexual and other forms of the irrational. In particular, the organs of reproduction came to stand for the asymmetrical chaos that lurked beneath the symmetrical body, shaped in the image of God. When we look for signs of manual mastery in anatomical atlases of the period, we must think not only of professional competency but of domination. The pins fastening the organs into an appropriate display in Bidloo's atlas already mark the attempt of anatomy to fix and control (Fig. 7). Hunter, known for his anatomical preservations and wax models, classified the pregnant uterus, alongside diseases and deformities, among the "uncommon things" his pedagogical tools displayed. 93 There is a certain butchery and violation in the images of the anatomical atlases of the 94 eighteenth century, particularly in those of the gravid uterus he oversaw (Fig. 17). That disease of the wandering or convulsive womb, hysteria, could occasion some rather brutal treatments of living wombs as well. Experimental philosophy's taste for military jargon resounds in Dr. Philippe Hecquet's polemical account of a regimen used by young Convulsionaries, where getting at the womb is like breaching the wall of a fortification: "The women lie on the floor, dressed only in loose-fitting gowns, so that men can walk barefoot on their stomachs . . . Alternatively, the creatures line up against a wall and have a group of men butt heads one after another against their stomachs, in order to master and subdue 95 the swellings of the entire belly." The analogy of the body as dwelling was already common in the Middle Ages, when any orifice was a dangerous space inviting enemy invasion or the leakage of the soul. 96 It was the body of the Virgin that most often symbolized the fortress. Upstaging Diderot, the Marquis de Sade regularly set his phantasmic scenes behind the massive walls of fortresses, castles, and convents. In Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791), the heroine's euphemizing of her unpleasant sexual encounters results in many an "attacked fortress" and "violated temple." At the same time, the various prison-edifices are bodies, [End Page 401] and the winding corridor running through another Convent of Saint Mary is its "intestine." At one point during her stay at the surgeon-schoolmaster Rodin's, Justine, together with Rodin's daughter, peeks through the opening in a closet to watch him debauch his young victims--their gaze evocative of the anatomist's when he peeks through 97 the walls of the body (Fig. 8). The climax of the Rodin episode is reworked in The New

Justine, during which Rodin, in the name of science, dissects his own daughter so as to make an anatomical engraving of the vaginal canal of a prepubescent virgin: "The lower stomach is opened. Rodin, fucking all the while, cuts, tears, detaches, and arranges on a 98 plate . . . both the womb and the hymen and all that follows." The anatomist is the perfect figure for the Sadian philosopher, for no one is at once more inside and outside ( Fig. 9). The juxtaposition of Diderot and Sade may strike some as unfair. Diderot's mission is ostensibly to enlighten. His work is in part a plea for the education of young women, at the very least for their sexual schooling, and he certainly does not have in mind the kind of antieducation of Sade's Justine or of Eugnie in Philosophy in the Bedroom. In fact, the very title of that work, the very idea that Dolmanc, 99 like all Sadian philosophers, is in the boudoir, is the beginning of Sade's difference. By shutting philosophers inside the same obscure fortresses they were meant to break down, Sade blurs the distinction between subject and object of study and calls into question the entire philosophical enterprise of his century. Yet bringing Sade and Diderot together demonstrates that Sade did not arise ex nihilo and shows the anatomist to be an appropriate figure for many a late-eighteenth-century philosopher who no longer gets the upper hand of the common man. The tension between inside and outside, or private and public, and the issue of wandering hands and wandering wombs, all come [End Page 402] [Begin Page 405] together in the story of mesmerism, itself a phenomenon thought to break down differences between bodies, both in heaven and on earth, by positing the existence of a universal magnetic fluid. We have seen how those who claim the special status accorded philosophers but whose bodies actually participate in experiments or observed activities must maintain a quasisacred status. Yet the accusations of groping, of the philosopher's not maintaining an appropriate distance or relying on an irrational touch, seem to reach new heights by the end of the eighteenth century, a time beset by epidemics of the imagination. Caricatures regularly depict physiognomists or cranioscopists groping the heads of their patients, 100 mesmerists feeling up their clients, and patients groping each other. As the Enlightenment dissects, it discovers its own dark underbelly in practices such as magnetism, and things cease to be self-evidently real or illusory. This is one of the primary implications of Schaffer's previously cited article on the French commissions of inquiry into the activities of the animal magnetists. In the course of their investigations, the royally appointed body of philosophers tried as usual to make themselves "subjects, witnesses, and experimenters," but difficulties arose that would not 101 have proved a problem earlier in the century. By taking a fresh look at the documentation of this series of episodes, I hope to tease out what is not explicitly stated in Schaffer's argument: that the breakdown of the authoritative, witnessing hand necessarily has to do with what might be called the feminine touch. The descent of the king's commissioners into the apartments of Mesmer's disciple Deslon is a variation on the theme of the philosopher in the boudoir. The majority of those in convulsive crisis are women, and it is invariably a diffuse feminine sensibility, the fact that touching the women anywhere is like touching them everywhere, that acts as contagion, provoking the generalized salutary crises satirized by magnetism's opponents. The official report indicates that the magnetizer's interactions with his patients resemble all too clearly a sexual coupling. As witnesses to such titillating scenes, the king's commissioners repeatedly find themselves in a quandary. How are they to remain untouched by what they observe? Are they old-style philosophers relying purely on the power of their minds, or are their bodies the only sources of trustworthy information? [End Page 405] To conduct their verifications, the first skill they must acquire is that of touch, for the magnetizer's art is the inducement of convulsions through so-called manual "passes" and pressure applied to the lower abdomen. At the same time, there is general agreement that 102 the fluid they are looking for "eludes all sensory perception." This would suggest that the group, determined as it is to unmask mesmerism's charlatanry, must rely solely on the powers of mind or Reason. Those whom they successfully test, including themselves, must

remain insensibles: they must "feel nothing." Paradoxically, the only way to authenticate magnetism is to feel it. The mind is in fact an impediment to discovery, and, as subjects of their own experiments, the philosophers must deliberately not think, lest they inadvertently simulate a response. Indeed, when "distinguished" individuals in their test groups produce 104 undesired results, they are accused, in essence, of thinking too hard! The philosophers seem unaware of the impossibility of operating according to two different paradigms: one where they might be all mind, the other where mind and body are but one. As Schaffer notes, the stumbling block of the investigations is the role attributed to the imagination. The philosophers contradictorily claimed "their invulnerability to [this] power they reckoned was omnipotent," a power they located specifically in the eye and the womb. 105 The eye, once seat of man's highest sense, finds itself reduced to the womb, locus of the irrational. The problem with thinking too hard is that thinking with the womb is merely imagining in the way that pregnant or excessively sensitive women imagine defective monsters. And imagination, according to the commission's own interchangeable Holy Trinity of the causes of magnetism ("touching, imagination, imitation") is once again of the same substance as touch, operating when the "various strings" of the human instrument are 106 plucked simultaneously. The inquiry into mesmerism takes on the familiar appearance of the opening up of the convents. The chain of predominantly feminine hands united in universal harmony around the mesmeric baquet [End Page 406] of electricity is yet another cluster of bees, ready to seize onto all newcomers and incorporate them into a new and distorted whole: "This Art, which disturbs the functions of the animal economy and drives Nature off course, is nefarious." A festering open womb, animal magnetism will spread by infecting future imaginations. "Because the evils and habits of parents are transmitted to their posterity," it 107 will give birth to generations of monsters. Unable to escape the all-powerful effects of this revolutionary plague that repeatedly rattles their moral and physical fibers, the commissioners try to suppress as many of their senses as possible. Beating a retreat from the tradition of public experiments, they retire, so to speak, to their own boudoirs to produce the results they seek in private. The philosopher-instrument appears to have become less harpsichord than vibrator. Wet Dreams The story of the antimagnetists reveals just how much mesmerism, with its attempt to blur the boundaries between conscious and unconscious faculties, between body and soul, had in common with some of the discoveries made by "rational" science itself. The much ballyhooed rehabilitation of the imagination in the eighteenth century did not necessarily 108 represent a tranquil shift in values. Though the principal formulations of materialism might substitute an external source of inspiration and energy with inherent creative and motive bodily forces, their accounts of psychic events as inevitably resulting from organic causes tended to emphasize seemingly irrational human behavior. According new powers to the imagination did not efface centuries-old anxieties about madness, involuntary acts, and the fertile, distorting minds of women. The commissioners who equated mind and womb might have recognized their own concerns about the body's relation to social depravity in La Mettrie's L'Homme machine: "Pregnancy . . . has at times made the soul weave the most atrocious plots, the effects of a sudden mania, that stifle even Natural Law. It is thus that the brain, that [End Page 407] womb of the mind, is perverted in its own 109 fashion, along with the womb of the body." By the century's end, many a philosopher illuminated the hidden labyrinths of man only to arrive at the following philosophical conclusion: if womb = monster and womb = mind, then mind = monster. The work of La Mettrie was an unavowed subtext of many of Diderot's later scientific and medical writings (though the philosopher did decide to substitute the physician's name for Bordeu's in one of the manuscripts of D'Alembert's Dream), but while materialism was proving that man was nothing but matter, other philosophical approaches, by increasingly dwelling on the role of the imagination, were implying that man had no body at all, no stable or solid core. These seemingly contradictory views were eminently reconcilable. From

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Locke to Berkeley to Hume to Kant, philosophy calls into question the continuity of the psyche, the adequacy of sensory information to provide ultimate knowledge. The mind becomes a kind of author, organizing its fleeting bits of information into what can be seen as an acceptable narrative. Ideas themselves may be mere ghosts or monstrous distortions, phantasmagoric projections of a magic lantern-mind, a trope first used by La 110 Mettrie when he reduced all of the soul's faculties to the Imagination. "The boundary 111 between ghost-seeing and ordinary thought" blurs. Specters originate in the mind. We can now better understand the philosopher Nicolai, whose treatment at the hands of a trusted surgeon introduced this essay. He relies on medicine to combat the enemy philosophers who have given a bad name to the "empirick," but the enemy's position uncannily converges with his own: Our modern German philosophers, will not allow that observation ought to be admitted in theoretical philosophy. Hence arose Kant's Transcendental Idealism, which at last degenerated into the gross enthusiastic idealism [End Page 408] which is found in Fichte's writings. This philosopher considers all external objects as our own productions. "What we consider as things independent of us are," according to him, "no more than our own 112 creatures, which we fear, admire and desire". . . . These are Mr. Fichte's own words. The very same year as Nicolai's address, Francisco Goya produced his celebrated Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, an etching of a man surrounded by spirits and grotesques, ready to take over as soon as his attention drifts. Nicolai resembles Goya's dreamer, but he desperately wishes to prove that his reason is on the alert. He insists that "something . . . also exists without my mind; . . . something which we formerly used to call the thing itself, 113 before the critical philosophy so unjustly reprobated this unexceptionable term." The dramatic account of his cure ends in fairy-tale fashion, stating unconditionally that he lived happily ever after. In the very next line, we realize that Nicolai is playing with the truth. In actuality, philosophers have visions all the time. Some visited Nicolai as he exercised his memory in composing the very speech he delivers. Others haunt his friends, including a "respectable member" of the body he addresses, Berlin's Royal Society, who was visited by an apparition of the society's late president, Maupertuis! Once imagination is the equivalent of thought, the philosopher and man of letters turns out 114 to be more vulnerable than everyone else, prone to "thinking too hard." Above all, the writer of novels is apt to see phantoms. Nicolai confesses he has always had a yearning to write works of fiction. In solitude, as he outlines his projects in his mind, his imagination plays tricks on him: "Constantly and even now do the different persons whom I imagine in the formation of such a plot, present themselves to me in the most lively and distinct manner; their figure, their features, their manner, their dress, and their complexion, are all 115 visible to my fancy." The medical man Samuel-Auguste-Andr-David Tissot dealt with the frenetic and enfeebled feminine state that ever menaced "the man who thinks too much" in his On the Health of 116 Men of Letters (1768). The sedentary lifestyle threatens virility by causing the build-up of a kind of internal pollution, "excremental humors" that block proper circulation and the excretion of bodily fluids. This diagnosis [End Page 409] of the man of letters may be one of the keys to understanding why the physical act of writing was long seen as a threat to bodily health, still thematized in the Encyclopdie's handwriting lessons that aimed to protect budding writers against bodily deformities. By way of explanation, we must remember that the writing pen could always be a figure for 117 the ejaculating penis. It is consequently no surprise to find that the very same physician who preaches caution to men of letters includes an extended analogy between the masturbator and the writer in another tractate on Onanism, where masturbation is an obsessive habit that precipitates its practitioners into the "horrors of the abyss": "Nothing weakens as much as this continual tension of the mind, always preoccupied with the same object. The masturbator, wholly given over to his smutty meditations, is subject to the same ills as the man of letters who contemplates a single question; and it is rare that this excess

does no harm."

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The first known treatise on masturbation, the anonymous English Onania, or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, appeared in 1700. Tissot produced his Latin improvement upon this work in 1758, and it was later translated into French. By the end of the century, onanism was the emblematic disease of the Enlightenment. "Le moi est hassable" had been the motto of the descendants of Pascal. The man of letters was unsullied by accusations of falsity and amour-propre. After all, the philosopher loves wisdom, not himself. But the Socratic injunction to "know thyself" takes on a new twist during this period when the individual's unique organic constitution makes perception and communication at once dubious and dangerous. "Doctor, do we understand one another? Can we be understood?" 119 anguishes Mlle de Lespinasse. "What I have just said proves that the best company for a man of wit is his own, if he does not encounter his like," is the response of a La Mettrie. 120 As d'Alembert masturbates in despair over the vanity of all philosophical thoughts and projects, it becomes clear that D'Alembert's Dream is a wet dream. His subsequent comparison of the semen in his hand to the microcosm of the universe created in experiments with spontaneous generation is a blasphemous [End Page 410] send-up of 121 Christ as Cosmocrator, of God with "the whole world in his hands." Nicolai must apologize profusely for speaking of his own person at a gathering of the Berlin Academy in 1799. By that time, coincident with the upheaval of the hierarchy that had separated "rational" mind from "irrational" touch (and the First from the Third Estate), the artisanal "man of feeling," the groping physiognomist, and the philosopher had become one. Would there no longer be any difference between bodies? No superiority of expert over layman? Touch will always be different from the other senses in that "although we can 'see' ourselves or 'hear' ourselves, such an act is purely an act of reception, but when we 122 touch ourselves, we respond both as the object 'touched' and the subject 'touching.' " Touch is the sense that most menaces the subject/object paradigm. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists had made a point of opening up the laboratory, going public with experiments. Now the philosopher is caught with his pants down in the privacy of the boudoir, pushing rational discourse to the limits of irrationality as he tries to remain all mind. Philosophy, physiology, and anatomy all lead the Enlightenment to the same dark conclusion. Whether it be as haunting specter-imagination or as chaotic mind-womb, man discovers the monster within. Few were as well positioned to see this as the Marquis de Sade. If in Philosophy in the Bedroom it is the pupil Eugnie who manually "pollutes" the philosopher, Sade had more than thirty years in prison to love no one but himself, leaving 123 the releases of his imagination for posterity. For Diderot, convent life was most unnatural. Inside Sade's Saint Mary's, with its series of concentric walls that describe a medieval womb as much as they do a fortress, the libertines of Justine are at once Nature's 124 greatest profaners and her purest examples. They would be true to the materialists' nature in their fantasies, the nature that continually produces and destroys itself, [End Page 411] where "all the decomposed parts of any body whatsoever merely await dissolution to 125 reappear immediately under new forms." Sade's libertines are all "amphibious 126 creatures": they all desire to "combine every species." Is not every new Sadian scene an engendering? If the weakened, masturbating man of letters is like a woman, then he must likewise [End Page 412] be subject to the "uterine furors" that plague the 127 disturbed imagination of the female masturbator. He likewise conceives nothing but monsters. As the actors in Philosophy in the Bedroom assume posture after improbable posture, they seem to bring together the heterodox jumble of limbs that characterizes the monster, as a comparison of pornographic engravings with images of monstrous children confirms (Figs. 10, 11, 12, 13). Just as each pose must quickly be abandoned, each creation must be immediately destroyed. In The New Justine, one libertine reenacts ad infinitum his fantasy of impregnating women, subjecting them to painful deliveries, and instantly killing the result. In this context of Sadian masturbatory fantasies, it is worth noting the etymology of the verb masturbate, which comes from the Latin manus, "hand," and stuprare, meaning not only "to [End Page 413] defile" but "to

deflower." If Sade's virgins must be savagely branded and ripped asunder, the unmarked child must immediately be polluted. The profanation of the womb itself is also a common occurrence. How often libertines wish "to pierce the entrails" of those they rape and sodomize! Rodin is not content to dissect his own daughter, he inserts his penis in the wound he has created. At Saint Mary's, a priest injects a quart of boiling water deep into Justine's womb. Another libertine, who operates his own personal chamber of horrors, takes pleasure in reaching inside and scratching it with his long nails. An eighteenth-century 128 commonplace is that of the deep [End Page 414] abyss that is the libertine's soul. Like mother, like child. In a move reminiscent of the emperor Nero's discovery that he too was a monster at birth, the libertine posits the female sexual organs, site of his own origin, as the 129 site of the void. [End Page 415] The Sadian nightmare of self-sufficiency and self-engenderment may be further illuminated by a twentieth-century reading of one of Sade's fellow masturbators. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida considers the significance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's habitual 130 masturbation, the vice the philosopher avers in the Confessions. Derrida's analysis of the dangers that both writing and masturbation pose to Rousseau provides yet another perspective on the late-Enlightenment threat to the "natural attitude." In Rousseau's work, the metaphorical equivalents of writing and masturbation are linked to that most illusory Derridean quest, the attempt to recover a "presence" to oneself. This elusive ultimate reality or identity is thought of as Nature, a maternal figure who theoretically represents a state of perfect self-sufficiency. mile, the eponymous hero of Rousseau's work on education, is accordingly motherless. His cultivation will be entirely Nature's doing. But the dream of self-sufficiency turns out to be unrealizable, for the natural state of the 131 child is paradoxically a helpless one that forces him to "act through the hands of others." For Rousseau, this acting through the hands of others is a pollution, an indication of man's alienation or absence from himself. The manipulation of others is like the manipulation of tools that makes possible the division of land into property in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality--but whereas the latter event inaugurates civilization, bringing an end to the original golden age, the former comes close to implying the impossibility that a golden age ever existed. This provokes what Derrida calls "the catastrophe of the catastrophe." Man returns to Nature only because civilization has failed him. Nature is no longer appreciated in and of herself. She, too, becomes a tool. The "barbarians" of civilization gaze upon nature and can only exclaim that it would make a magnificent apothecary's garden. In his own efforts to circumvent this inevitable process, Rousseau characterizes himself as the Last Philosopher. "I have never found true charm in the pleasures of my mind except when concern for my body was completely lost from sight," he says, criticizing those who study nature and human nature for profit or to instruct others, rather than to truly know 133 themselves. The false philosophers [End Page 416] of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker appear in the guise of experimental scientists, be they chemists, anatomists, or 134 physicians, mining nature for "profit" or "remedies." The implication is that this mining of nature is a violation of the Mother's womb: "In itself, the mineral realm has nothing lovely or attractive. Its riches, sealed up within the bosom [ sein] of the earth, seem to have been removed from the sight of man so as not to tempt his 135 cupidity." Man nonetheless greedily plunges into this womb in his drive to find "supplements." Like the Sadian libertine, "he searches the entrails of the earth." This impious excavation is a descent into hellish obscurity. He "buries himself alive." He finds himself surrounded by "quarries, pits, forges, a battery of anvils, hammers, smoke and fire," 136 a spectacle of "black forgemen" and "hideous cyclops" breathing "poisonous vapors." Studying the animal kingdom is no different, for it involves the dread task of the anatomist: "What a frightful apparatus is an anatomical amphitheater: stinking corpses, slavering and livid flesh, blood, disgusting intestines, dreadful skeletons, pestilential fumes! Upon my 137 word, that is not where Jean-Jacques will go looking for his fun." According to Derrida, Rousseau applies the same type of analysis to the vice of masturbation, an act through
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which one "makes oneself other" while attempting to summon up images of absent 138 women/mothers. In the attempt to recover a natural immediacy, man's relation to nature is ever more mediated. Experimental science, the act of writing, and the vice of masturbation all partake of the same danger. All cheat nature and the would-be natural man of nature's own vital essence. All establish an infinite chain of hands between man and the ungraspable golden age of his natural origins. Like the philosophers whom Christoph Friedrich Nicolai reproves, Rousseau cannot know "the thing itself." Masturbation is the disease of solitude in an era that esteems the universal and the public sphere. A violation of Mother Nature, it is cast as the equivalent of incest, a sin committed 139 in the privacy of the maternal boudoir. Rousseau's true philosopher scorns the authority [End Page 417] of others and retires in private to know (for) himself. Sade was forced to do the same. His answer to mile is Eugnie, etymologically "she who is well-born." The pupil of the Sadian anti-bildungsroman seems to systematically do the opposite of the child of nature. The grand finale of Philosophy in the Bedroom is the violation of a mother by her own child: Eugnie and her instructors, after infecting Madame de Mistival with syphilis, take up needle and thread and meticulously sew up the mother's anus and vagina to provoke a virulent infection. But what if this most unnatural of acts were in fact quite natural, or at least as natural as the "natural impulsion" that turns Justine into an unwitting infanticide during the fire at an inn, 140 causing her to innocently yet instinctively drop her precious charge into the flames? Why is it that when Diderot speaks of opening up and liberating the convents, in the passage cited earlier, he chooses a verb that connotes the opposite? Wanting to put an end to what he sees as a monstrous genealogy, he proposes sewing up the womb that produced it: "Will we never feel the necessity to narrow [rtrcir] the opening of the abyss which will 141 engulf so many future races?" When Justine undergoes the same stitching treatment as Eugnie's mother, her torturers use Diderot's vocabulary: "Very well, La Rose," says one, 142 "take the bitch; we'll tighten her up [rtrcis-la-moi]: it's time for the stricturing." Justine, however, is sewn up only to be violated anew. It is often noted, including by those who would harm her, that no matter how battered this heroine is, she begins each encounter as if a virgin. Her body follows the rhythms of Sade's cyclical narratives, the rhythm of the creation and destruction of nature itself. "In the eighteenth century," writes Barbara Stafford, "the belief finally foundered that things 143 could still be sewn up tightly, imitating nature's unity." Sade offers a ferocious retort, voicing what Rousseau cannot allow himself to admit. It is not merely that things can no longer imitate nature's unity, it is that nature itself is neither [End Page 418] seamless nor unified. Modern knowledge is splintered and discontinuous--providing a worldview utterly at odds with the medieval universe of concentric circles, within which nestled the human microcosm. The sealed womb of the Mother of God was an image of this former world, a place of mystery and shelter. Our myths do not vanish just because notions of closure give way to notions of open-ended development. In mourning their loss, we may defend them all the more, even as Nicolai defended his reliability, in the face of his own rather blatant evidence to the contrary. With this in mind, I would like to take a final look at one of William Hunter's images and another from the work of one of his first mentors, bearing the unfortunate name of William Smellie (Figs. 14, 17). I compare them here with Flix Vicq d'Azyr's illustrations of the dissected human brain (Figs. 15, 16). The similarities are an uncanny actualization of how the mind, as womb, disclosed the monster within. Could they have been noticed in the eighteenth century, or do we only notice them based on our own position and way of seeing? In a recent article, Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston review major anatomical atlases so as to account for the "moralization of objectivity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," when scientists looked to the photograph or the machine as the means of completely removing all possibility of a personal mediation 144 between object and subject. While I agree that objectivity has meant different things at different times, I would add that it has long involved moralization, and that, in fact, it may be

less easy to distinguish different types of objectivity than these authors imply. As their own story reveals, scientists might express wariness of a person's judgment or character, but that character would in turn influence bodily movements, including how fast one might push 145 a button to record information. That the scientist had to morally resemble the selfdisciplined saint and that the photograph was a way of conquering temptation were the 146 logical culmination of eighteenth-century experimental science. While moral concerns might appear to be more overtly thematized in the late nineteenth century, as early as the Romantic period old materialist fears were simply converted into idealist speculations on man's transcending the material. The stakes were the same. That the bodily machine ceded to a [End Page 419] cleaner, more reliable machine that registered the body, just as the anatomist gave way to the clinician and psychiatrist, was but an exponential step in the attempted disembodiment of the human subject, that machine clibataire, forever tripping over itself and jerking off. William Hunter contributed to this development--he whose job it was to attend to the literal birth of new minds, who was so fond of using birthing metaphors for his success story, who perpetually spoke of breeding his followers, and who had suppressed his own origins in order to succeed. His images oddly foreshadow the photograph in their detail. Though they are drawn from wax models, this could only contribute to their purity, for wax is not only three-dimensional and more "real," it frees the anatomist from his "Smellie" surroundings. It provides "a world without horror, without the stimulation of any of the senses except the 147 [traditionally] rational sense of sight." The images of the atlas of the Gravid Uterus may reflect not merely aesthetic choices, but rather a certain farsightedness. At once evoking and distancing us from the permanent cycle of nature, of rebirth and decay, the engravings strive to depict eternal verities. Suspending body parts in decontexualized space, Hunter 148 foreshadows the nineteenth-century desire "to let nature speak for itself." [End Page 420] The hand of the experimenter will disappear more and more from scientific illustrations as time progresses. Self-consciousness thereafter interferes with performance, and the scientific and artistic observer, aware that his own body has become a blind spot, will be 149 able to do no more than observe himself observing. Beginning with the eighteenthcentury gothic novel, where characters grope their way through dark, winding corridors and mysterious hands appear as if out of nowhere, the hand becomes a figure of the 150 unconscious as much as of terrifying forces from without. In the nineteenth century, the disembodied hand becomes an amputated one, still bearing the trace of the fragmented body it leaves behind. Far from [End Page 421] suggesting the divine, its presence is diabolical. Fantastic accounts of cut-off or mysterious hands abound, and by 1833, Vesalius himself is a subject for tales of the macabre, an impotent old crone, dissecting his own wife 151 and her putative lovers in Ptrus Borel's Don Andra Vsalius, the Anatomist. Though Michel Foucault said that the satanic anatomist unearthing graves by moonlight was a nineteenth-century caricature, he neglected to consult those tireless explorers of the 152 urban inferno, Louis-Sbastien Mercier or Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne. Preaching reform and public hygiene even as they wallow in the Parisian dirt, [End Page 422] the authors of the Tableau of Paris and Parisian Nights, writing in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, may occasionally have a kind word for physicians, but never for anatomists. Mercier's anatomists are not his intrepid government employees who have the high moral duty of ridding the streets of all types of filth and excrement; they are the enemy 153 leaders of wild, polluting nighttime orgies. Foucault was momentarily blinded by his own argument. What these authors are reacting to, which I have been calling the discovery of the monster within, partakes of one of the major transitions Foucault outlines in The Birth of the Clinic, when death, previously seen as counter to nature, and everything that life was 154 not, [End Page 423] became "embodied in the living bodies of individuals" --when death was no longer on the other side of life, but rather a monstrous part of life itself. This was just one more sign that previously fixed boundaries had been irrevocably blurred, yet another grotesque truth first laid bare by the hands of the anatomist. As Eugnie's mother exclaims, while she is brutally whipped back into consciousness toward the end of Philosophy in the Bedroom, "Oh heavens! why do you recall me from the depths [sein, womb] of the tomb? 155 Why plunge me anew into the horrors of life?"

Stanford University Emily Jane Cohen is completing a Ph.D. in French Literature at Stanford University. Her dissertation, "The Electric Fairy," examines the relations between gothic and fantastic fiction and the history of technology and medicine during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published on a variety of subjects, ranging from the gothic novel, to wax museums past and present, to Baudelaire and the role of the public hygienist in nineteenth-century Paris. Notes 1. An English translation of Christoph Friedrich Nicolai's address, "Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms Occasioned by Disease," can be found in William Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts 6 (1803): 170. 2. Ibid., p. 161. 3. The definition of "Sensibilit (morale)" comes from the Encylopdie, ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, vol. 3 (1751; rpt. Paris: Pergamon Press, 1985), p. 499. (In subsequent citations, the page and volume numbers refer to this modern reprint.) 4. See Marie Jos Imbault-Huart, "Les chirurgiens et l'esprit chirurgical en France au XVIIIme sicle," Clio Medica 15 (April 1981): 143-157; Ghislaine Lawrence, "Surgery (Traditional)," in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 961-983. Roger French, "The Anatomical Tradition," ibid., vol. 1, pp. 81-101, may also be of interest. For more on the doctor-surgeon polemic and on surgeons adopting the stances of philosophers, see Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 9-33. 5. As convincingly demonstrated by Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 47-129. 6. Ibid., p. 1. 7. Ibid. 8. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 112. I should really speak instead of Bryson's "natural attitude," for his comments inspired my reflections. Although Bryson limits himself to a discussion of the "Essential Copy" in painting, his ideas are derived from Stephen Heath's application of Husserl's phenomenology to the problem of literary realism (and not, it would seem, from Husserl's work itself). 9. See, for example, the collection of essays from Critical Inquiry, edited by James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Harry Harootunian as Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 81-128. 10. According to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), catastrophe comes from the Greek word for "overturning." 11. H. P. L'Orange, Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas, 1982), pp. 139-187.

12. When we raise our hand and vow to tell "nothing but the truth." On this gesture of acclamation or witnessing, see ibid., pp. 158, 194-195. 13. Sander Gilman, Sexuality, An Illustrated History: Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Age of AIDS (New York: Wiley, 1989), p. 42. 14. Ibid., p. 43. See also pp. 39-42. 15. Caroline Walker Bynum, "Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion," in idem, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 239297. 16. As demonstrated in regard to Jean Fouquet's Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia by Brigitte Cazelles in "Medieval Theatricality as Trial," paper presented at the Colloquium on "Medieval Theatricality," Stanford University, December 6, 1991. 17. The Old Testament, in which Yahweh withers the right hand of those who profane or strike out against him (e.g., 1 Kings 13:4-10), set the precedent. One tradition is that of the blacksmith whose hands are too ailing or deformed to forge nails for Christ's crucifixion. Elsewhere, a Jewish profaner of the host loses the hand that did the dirty deed until it is restored by Jesus himself. Consult Le mystre de la Passion Notre Seigneur, ed. Graham A. Runnalls (Geneva: Droz, 1974); La Passion de Semur, ed. P. T. Durbin and Lynette Muir, Leeds Medieval Studies 3 (1981); The Croxton Play of the Sacrament in The NonCycle Mystery Plays, together with The Croxton Play of the Sacrament and The Pride of Life, ed. Osborne Waterhouse (London: Early English Text Society, 1909), pp. 54-87. 18. Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), repeatedly draws attention to this point; see pp. 3, 82-86, 131-136, 191. 19. Caroline Walker Bynum, "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages," in Fragmentation and Redemption (above, n. 15), pp. 181-238. 20. La Nativit et le Geu des Trois Roys, ed. Ruth Whittredge (Richmond, Va.: Byrd, 1944). 21. The Narrative of Pseudo-Melito in The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. Montague Rhodes James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 208, 214. 22. Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), covers gesture in the Middle Ages. 23. For a recent summary of such endeavors and a further call to action, see Mario Biagioli, "Tacit Knowledge, Courtliness, and the Scientist's Body," in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 69-81. 24. Ambroise Par, Les oeuvres de . . ., conseiler et premier chirurgien du roy. Coriges et augmentes par luy-mesme peu au paravant son decs (Paris, 1614), preface. (All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.) 25. See French, "Anatomical Tradition," and Lawrence, "Surgery" (both above, n. 4). 26. On the changing relations between text and dissection see Andrea Carlino, La fabbrica del corpo: Libri et dissezione nel Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), pp. 15-68. 27. These reflections are partly inspired by Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 85-88.

28. According to French, "Anatomical Tradition" (above, n. 4), pp. 87-88. 29. Carlino, Fabbrica (above, n. 26), pp. 97-98, 128. Note especially his comment on the inevitable pairing of "dissezione/giustiziati" throughout the history of Western anatomy. 30. Ibid., pp. 258-259. 31. Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 334. See also, e.g., pp. 146, 338. 32. Biagioli, "Tacit Knowledge" (above, n. 23), p. 74. 33. Robert Boyle, "A Promial Essay," quoted in Schaffer and Shapin, Leviathan (above, n. 31), p. 66. 34. Simon Schaffer, "Self Evidence," Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 339. 35. Georges Vigarello shows how clean linen peeking out from under clothes was as much a sign of health as of aristocratic decorum, in Concepts of Cleanliness, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 274. 36. See, for instance, the citation of a manual in Goldberg, Writing Matter (above, n. 27), p. 94. 37. "critures" in Encylopdie, vol. 4, p. 159. 38. Stafford, Body Criticism (above, n. 5), p. 140. 39. "crivain" in Encylopdie, vol. 1, p. 1089. 40. Amour propre was a disease of the soul in Antoine-Joseph Pernety's Observations sur les maladies de l'me (Berlin, 1777); see Stafford, Body Criticism, pp. 88-89. 41. Roy Porter, "William Hunter: A Surgeon and a Gentleman," in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 7-34. 42. Ibid., p. 9. 43. William Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by Dr. William Hunter to His Last Course of Anatomical Lectures (London, 1784), p. 7. 44. Ibid., pp. 7-8. 45. Ibid., p. 15. 46. A common insult according to Porter, "William Hunter" (above, n. 41), p. 16, and Jane M. Oppenheimer, New Aspects of John and William Hunter (New York: H. Schuman, 1946), p. 112. 47. Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 199. 48. The most famous rendition of the Nero story can be found in James of Voragine's Golden Legend, trans. William Grange Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 347.

49. Gilman, Sexuality (above, n. 13), p. 71. 50. This is the title of a chapter in Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 87-110. 51. Hunter, Lectures (above, n. 43), p. 4. 52. Ibid., p. 64. 53. Ren Croissant de Garengeot, Trait des oprations de chirurgie (1720), 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1731). Imbault-Huart, "Les chirurgiens" (above, n. 4), discusses Garengeot's contributions, as does Stafford, Body Criticism (above, n. 5), pp. 51-53. 54. Malcolm Nicolson, "The Art of Diagnosis," in Bynum and Porter, Companion Encyclopedia (above, n. 4), vol. 2, pp. 801-825. Pulse-taking was ancient practice, but in the Middle Ages it was associated more specifically with the manual art of the surgeons. 55. Thophile Bordeu, Recherches sur le pouls, in Oeuvre compltes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1818), p. 261. This edition contains a biographical notice on Bordeu (1722-1776). 56. tienne Bonnot de Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (London: Favil, 1930), p. 73. 57. Ibid., pp. 130-132. 58. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L'homme-machine, in Aram Vartanian's critical edition, La Mettrie's L'Homme-Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 152. 59. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, in Oeuvre compltes, ed. Jean Varloot, et al., vol. 4 (Paris: ditions Hermann, 1978), p. 46. This edition will henceforth be abbreviated by the customary DPV. 60. Ibid., p. 49. 61. Ibid., p. 28. 62. Ibid., p. 52. 63. Denis Diderot, Le rve de d'Alembert, DPV, vol. 17, p. 102. See Jean Varloot, "Introduction gnrale," ibid., p. ix. 64. Diderot, Rve, p. 102. 65. Both tienne Falconet's statue (first displayed during the Salon of 1763) and Diderot's comments here took their inspiration from Rousseau's experimental Pygmalion, composed in 1762. When Galatea comes to life at the end of the short "scne lyrique," she recognizes herself through her own touch and pronounces, "C'est moi." Proceeding to lay her hands upon a block of marble, she then adds, "Ce n'est plus moi," but the fable of artistic production culminates in her final utterance, the result of her reaching out to meet her creator's embrace: "Ah! encore moi!" The artist has put himself into his own creation. Cited from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres compltes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de la Plade, 1975), pp. 1230-1231. 66. Encyclopdie, vol. 3, pp. 498-499; Diderot, Rve (above, n. 63), p. 45.

67. Marie-Hlne Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 84. 68. Diderot, Rve, p. 145. 69. Ibid., p. 122. 70. In the words of editor Jean Varloot, DPV, vol. 17, p. 41. 71. Diderot, Rve, p. 102. 72. Ibid., p. 121. Diderot lifted the image of the swarm of bees from Bordeu's Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes, in Oeuvres compltes (above, n. 55), vol. 1, p. 187. 73. Diderot, Rve, p. 134. 74. See ibid., pp. 63-64. 75. Ibid., p. 122. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., p. 117. 78. Ibid., pp. 118, 130. 79. As the editors themselves note: ibid., p. 120. 80. Ibid., p. 179. 81. Ibid., pp. 188-189. 82. Ibid., p. 179. Jocelyne Livi's Vapeurs de femmes (Paris: Navarin, 1984) is a serviceable introduction to this topic. 83. Diderot, Rve, p. 135. For the comments on bodily anarchy, see pp. 178-182. 84. Ibid., p. 150. 85. Denis Diderot, "Sur les femmes," in Oeuvres compltes, vol. 10 (Paris: Club Franais du Livre, 1971), p. 32. 86. Huet says this even while singling out Diderot as an instrumental formulator of what the nineteenth century will come to see as the male artist's imaginative role: Huet, Monstrous Imagination (above, n. 67), pp. 83-89. I am less inclined to disagree than to shift the focus. 87. Diderot, Rve, p. 152. 88. On these issues, consult Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and The Invention of Pornography (New York: Zone Books, 1993). In the latter, Margaret C. Jacob's article, "The Materialist World of Pornography," pp. 157-202 is an impressive reading of the materialist underpinnings of pornographic literature. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), deals with some of the same topics as her two editions.

89. Diderot, Rve, p. 165. 90. Denis Diderot, La religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 151. 91. Ibid.; Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. Marianne Sinclair (n.p.: New English Library, 1966), p. 101. 92. Diderot, The Nun, p. 101. The word disorder bore strong sexual connotations in the eighteenth century, and Diderot's interesting combination of teratology and pornography reminds us that both monstrosity and pornography always aim to unveil what is hidden. See Huet, Monstrous Imagination (above, n. 67), p. 16; Lynn Hunt, "Pornography and the French Revolution," in Invention (above, n. 88), p. 329. 93. Hunter, Lectures (above, n. 43), p. 89. 94. Ludmilla Jordanova, "Gender, Generation and Science: William Hunter's Obstetrical Atlas," in Bynum and Porter, William Hunter (above, n. 41), p. 388. Jordanova's Sexual Visions (above, n. 50), pp. 50-62, also deals with Hunter's atlas. 95. Philippe Hecquet, Le naturalisme des convulsions (n.p., 1733), pp. 17-18. 96. Pouchelle, Body and Surgery (above, n. 18), pp. 134-136. 97. Quite possibly, the artist of Fig. 8 had in mind Piero della Francesca's celebrated Madonna del parto (1450s), whose gesture, as she holds open a slit in her dress to hint at the mysteries of Christ's birth, is repeated by the two angels who open surrounding curtains to reveal the Virgin herself. Piero della Francesca's iconography was being used in the 1750s for pornographic works set in convents, as attested by the remarkable parodic illustrations of his Madonna in Jean-Joseph La Riche de La Poupelinire, Tableaux des moeurs du temps (Paris: La Bibliothque prive, 1969). 98. Sade, La nouvelle Justine, in Oeuvres compltes du Marquis de Sade, ed. Gilbert Lly, vols. 5-6 (Paris: Cercle du Livre Prcieux, 1966), p. 276. 99. The title may allude to the days when salons took place in the ruelles of les prcieuses. It is, of course, a convention of libertine literature to conduct philosophical lessons in the bedroom. 100. Consult the images assembled in Stafford, Body Criticism (above, n. 5), pp. 116-117. 101. Schaffer, "Self Evidence" (above, n. 34), pp. 355-356. A classic work on magnetism and political bodies is Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 102. Jean-Sylvain Bailly et al., Rapport des Commissaires chargs par le Roi de l'examen du magntisme animal (Paris, 1784), p. 9. 103. Ibid., pp. 19, 21, 25. 104. "Si le magntisme est une cause relle et puissante, elle n'a pas besoin qu'ils y pensent pour agir et pour se manifester" (ibid., pp. 16-17). See also p. 24: "trop d'attention s'observer." 105. Schaffer, "Self Evidence" (above, n. 34), p. 357. 106. Rapport, pp. 41, 57. See also p. 52.

107. This is literally the message: "mme d'en affliger les gnrations venir" (ibid., pp. 6263). 108. Consult J. Marx, "Le concept d'imagination au XVIIIme sicle," in Thmes et figures des Lumires, Melanges Mortier (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Michel Delon, L'ide de l'nergie au tournant des Lumires (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), pp. 344-348. Huet, Monstrous Imagination (above, n. 67), pp. 56-102, seems to envision a rather anxiety-free transition from universalized imagination to the male takeover and modification of the passive female imagination in the nineteenth century. On the prominence of imagination in La Mettrie, alluded to below, see Vartanian, La Mettrie's L'homme machine (above, n. 58), pp. 27-28. 109. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L'homme machine (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1966), pp. 63-64. He reiterates the metaphor elsewhere in talking of the monstrous woman, deprived of both vagina and womb, who cannot conceive: "Mais quel seroit le fruit de la plus excellente cole, sans une matrice parfaitement ouverte l'entre ou la conception d'ides?" (L'homme machine, ed. Vartanian, p. 167). There was also a medieval tradition of comparing the eye of the mind to the womb: see figures 5 and 6 in Pouchelle, Body and Surgery (above, n. 18). 110. La Mettrie, L'homme machine, ed. Vartanian, p. 165. For substantial reflections on these problems, see Stafford, Body Criticism (above, n. 5), pp. 378-382, 437-463. 111. Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 26-61. Castle also discusses Nicolai's memoir. 112. Nicolai, "Memoir" (above, n. 1), p. 177. 113. Ibid., p. 178. 114. Castle, "Phantasmagoria" (above, n. 111), p. 58. 115. Nicolai, "Memoir," p. 175. 116. S. A. D. Tissot, De la sant des gens de lettres (Lausanne, 1768), p. 25. 117. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 311-326. 118. S. A. D. Tissot, L'onanisme, in Oeuvres de Monsieur Tissot (Lausanne, 1788), p. 106. 119. Diderot, Rve (above, n. 63), p. 192. 120. La Mettrie could, we will recall, be called upon to fill Bordeu's shoes: see La Mettrie, L'homme machine, ed. Vartanian (above, n. 58), pp. 157-158. 121. Diderot, Rve, pp. 129-132, for d'Alembert's pantomime of Needham's experiments, his masturbation, and the final analogy: "Quelle comparaison d'un petit nombre d'lments mis en fermentation dans le creux de ma main, et de ce rservoir immense d'lments divers pars dans les entrailles de la terre, sa surface, au sein des mers." 122. Gilman, Sexuality (above, n. 13), p. 222. 123. Polluer ("to pollute") is consistently used by Sade to refer to manual stimulation. In Tissot, pollution refers to nocturnal emissions.

124. See Pouchelle, Body and Surgery (above, n. 18), pp. 131-136. The architecture-womb metaphor is a constant from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. 125. Sade, Justine, in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1965), p. 554. 126. Sade, Philosophy, in ibid., p. 187. 127. Tissot, L'onanisme (above, n. 118), p. 60. 128. See the comments of Batrice Didier accompanying Sade, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu (Paris: Librairie Gnrale Franaise, 1973), p. 455. 129. The following conversation between two of Justine's torturers makes this point: "--Mais quel dommage que a soit vide l. --Oh! disait l'autre, il n'y a rien de plus infme que ce vide, je ne toucherais pas une femme quand il s'agirait de ma fortune" (ibid., p. 257). Sadian characters may at times directly allude to the infamous Nero's necrophilia. See, e.g., Sade, Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique, in Oeuvres compltes, ed. JeanJacques Pauvert and Annie Le Brun, vol. 5 (Paris: ditions Pauvert, 1986), pp. 388-389. 130. Jacques Derrida, "That Dangerous Supplement," in idem, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 141-164. 131. Ibid., p. 147. 132. Ibid., p. 148. 133. Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 94. See also p. 59. 134. Ibid., p. 94. 135. Ibid., p. 96. The French use the word sein to designate the womb. 136. All citations from ibid., p. 96. 137. Ibid., p. 97. 138. Derrida, Grammatology (above, n. 130), p. 53. 139. As was said to be the case in the accusations levied against Marie-Antoinette. The queen's ultimate downfall was the result of her enemies' testimony that they had found her son, the future king of France, engaging in self-pollution, an act understood to be proof he had shared his mother's bed. Lynn Hunt addresses the issue in "The Many Bodies of MarieAntoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution," in Eroticism (above, n. 88), pp. 113-114. For a Sadian reflection on the writer's obligatorily incestuous relations with Mother Nature see Sade, Ides sur le roman, in Oeuvres compltes (above, n. 129), pp. 74-75. 140. Sade, Justine (above, n. 128), p. 375. 141. Diderot, La religieuse (above, n. 90), p. 151. 142. Sade, Justine (above, n. 125), p. 730.

143. Stafford, Body Criticism (above, n. 5), p. 330. 144. Daston and Galison, "Image of Objectivity" (above, n. 9), p. 81. 145. Ibid., p. 104. 146. Schaffer implies as much by noting the conjunction of the Romantic cult of the disembodied genius and the rise of "self-registrative technology" in his "Self Evidence" (above, n. 34), p. 362. 147. Gilman, Sexuality (above, n. 13), p. 183. 148. Daston and Galison, "Image of Objectivity" (above, n. 9), p. 80. 149. I am thinking here of the last chapters of Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). An interesting case in point is Michael Fried's deduction that the awkward angle of the right hand of Gustave Courbet's Man with a Leather Belt is none other than that of the artist's hand as he was executing the work. If the scientist's hand affects the outcomes of experiments, the painter's hand has become part of his own picture. Indeed, in all Courbet's early self-portraits, the hands, far from suggesting any spirituality, translate the artist's experience of embodiment. See Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 53-84. 150. In fact, the very first gothic novel was the result of the incursion of "a gigantic hand in armour" into Horace Walpole's dream of an ancient castle: See W. S. Lewis's introduction to Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. ix. 151. Tales of horror or the supernatural involving hands are too numerous to list exhaustively, but a representative sampling would include Guy de Maupassant's La main (or La main de l'corch), Grard de Nerval's La main enchante, Wilkie Collins's The Dead Hand, and Thophile Gautier's poem, "Cauchemar." Often enough, the hand in question is that of an corch, a "flayed person," also the standard term for the most common type of anatomical model. "A hand cut off at the wrist," it is to be remembered, figured prominently on Freud's list of uncanny effects in his essay, "The 'Uncanny,' " in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 397. These disembodied hands may descend from those found in literary fairy tales of the 1690s, such as Madame d'Aulnoy's The White Cat, but fairy tale hands are of a different nature: like the spiritualized hands of scientific illustrations, they are enchanted and enabling rather than macabre. 152. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 124-125. 153. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, and Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne, Paris la nuit, in Paris le jour, Paris la nuit, ed. Michel Delon and Daniel Baruch (Paris: Laffont, 1990), pp. 71, 197, 199, 678-679. 154. Foucault, Birth, p. 196. 155. Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 281.