Charlatan philosopher and wise enchantress: Seduction and authority in eighteenth-century French discourses on happiness

In late 1757 Rousseau wrote a series of moral letters on happiness to Mme Sophie d'Houdetot. He distinguished himself and his teaching from the empty babble and hypocrisy prevalent in 'the century of philosophy and reason'. Philosophers were charlatans peddling happiness. This paper shows how Rousseau's critique of philosophy reworks the standard image of charlatans in the public square. It highlights a questioning and a gendering of reason implicit in the issue of credentials for teaching happiness. Against the dubious authority of the philosopher, Rousseau casts Sophie as the wise enchantress whose gentle influence inspires her tutor. He places moral authority outside the public square in a private, feminine domain. Rousseau's ideal woman cannot be a tainted charlatan like him. Yet the very opposition puts her in her place. (Author abstract)

The open secret: Hiding and revealing sexuality in the roman de moeurs (1880-1905)

Beginning with the sole literary text that does figure at any length in the first volume of Foucault's history--Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets, which dates from 1748--Cryle examines some semiotic routines involved in that telling of secrets, and to understand more about scientia sexualis through its literary development. He tries to show that narratives of the time tended to gather the mysterious, the unknown, and the generally inscrutable in the same functional place, holding them close to a thematics of the sexual. And returns to eighteenth-century texts from time to time in order to mark this as a fundamental shift in the literary constitution of sexual knowledge.

The difference between science and philosophy: The Spinoza-Boyle controversy revisited

This article examines the seventeenth-century debate between the Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza and the British scientist Robert Boyle, with a view to explicating what the twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze considers to be the difference between science and philosophy. The two main themes that are usually drawn from the correspondence of Boyle and Spinoza, and used to polarize the exchange, are the different views on scientific methodology and on the nature of matter that are attributed to each correspondent. Commentators have tended to focus on one or the other of these themes in order to champion either Boyle or Spinoza in their assessment of the exchange. This paper draws upon the resources made available by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their major work What is Philosophy?, in order to offer a more balanced account of the exchange, which in its turn contributes to our understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the difference between science and philosophy.

La Mettrie and charlatanism: The dynamics of recognition and denunciation

This paper contributes to a genealogy of charlatanism by tracing two figures which eventually come to overlap: the street charlatan or operator, known for his eloquence and deceptive skill, and the comically incompetent doctor, represented classically in France in the theatre of Molière. The paper argues that eighteenth-century France gives the term 'charlatan' new moral weight while extending it to fields outside medicine, most notably to philosophy. Some examples of the denunciation of charlatans are examined, and it is suggested that denunciation was usually both extensible and reversible. La Mettrie appears in this regard as the very type of the denouncer denounced. He was a doctor-philosopher who vigorously decried the Paris Faculty of Medicine as a group of charlatans, even though his own medical qualifications were anything but impressive, and he was in turn reviled by Diderot as the most charlatanic and unworthy of philosophers.

Beauty and the market: Actress postcards and their senders in early twentieth century Australia

A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).