Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity In Diderot's Universe

by Andrew S. Curran

This work places Diderot's fascination with anatomical anomalies or monsters within the context of the history of ideas, philosophy, and science. By chronicling the ideological component of the philosophe's presentation of monstrosity from the Lettre sur les aveugles to Le Neveu de Rameau, this book reveals Diderot's 'random and accidental' monsters to be, ironically, the most teleological of all beings: created and staged, as it were, for a particular textual world where materialist dogma is as important as disinterested anatomical study.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Andrew Curran is the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. Curran is also the author of The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment, which was A Choice Outstanding Academic Title and also received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French l’Académie des sciences d’outre-mer). He has also published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on a project on the birth of race that is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Curran lives in Connecticut where he is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French at Wesleyan University.