Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Author's note
- Prologue – despotic Enlightenment
- Introduction – the critique of systematic reason
- Chapter 1 “Système” – origins and itineraries
- Chapter 2 The epistolary machine
- Chapter 3 Physics and figuration in Du Châtelet's Institutions de physique
- Chapter 4 Condillac and the identity of the other
- Chapter 5 Diderot – changing the system
- Conclusion – labyrinths of Enlightenment
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH
Prologue – despotic Enlightenment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Author's note
- Prologue – despotic Enlightenment
- Introduction – the critique of systematic reason
- Chapter 1 “Système” – origins and itineraries
- Chapter 2 The epistolary machine
- Chapter 3 Physics and figuration in Du Châtelet's Institutions de physique
- Chapter 4 Condillac and the identity of the other
- Chapter 5 Diderot – changing the system
- Conclusion – labyrinths of Enlightenment
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH
Summary
We are in the west of Ireland around the turn of the century. On his first day at school, a boy confronts a menacing schoolmaster.
After a while he directed a long yellow finger at me and said:
– Phwat is your name?
I did not understand what he said nor any other type of speech which is practised in foreign parts because I had only Gaelic as a mode of expression and as a protection against the difficulties of life … I heard a whisper at my back:
– Your name he wants!
My heart leaped with joy at this assistance and I was grateful to him who prompted me. I looked politely at the master and replied to him:
– Bonaparte, son of Michelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen, son of Thomas's Sarah, grand-daughter of John's Mary, grand-daughter of James, son of Dermot ….
The recital is interrupted when the master sends his student reeling across the room with a violent blow to the head.
… before I became totally unconscious I heard him scream:
– Yer nam, said he, is Jams O'Donnell!
The scene is repeated for each child in the school.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading the French EnlightenmentSystem and Subversion, pp. 1 - 2Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999