This essay demonstrates how the early Enlightenmentsalonnièremadame de Lambert advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's taste and cognition, which hybridized Cartesian (specifically Malebranchian) andhonnêtethought. Disputing recent interpretations of Enlightenmentsalonnièresthat emphasize the constraints ofhonnêtetéon their thought, and those that see Lambert's feminism as misguided in emphasizing gendered sensibility, I analyze Lambert's approach as best serving her needs as an aristocratic woman within elite salon society, and show through contextualized analysis how she deployedhonnêtetétowards feminist ends. Additionally, the analysis of Malebranche's, Poulain de la Barre's, and Lambert's arguments about the female mind's gendered embodiment illustrates that misrepresenting Cartesianism as necessarily liberatory for women, by reducing it to a rigid substance dualism, erases from view its more complex implications for gender politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in thehonnêteenvironment of the salons.
This essay argues that Malebranche originated the model of sensitive taste in French thought, several decades before Du Bos. It examines the highly gendered, negative physiological model of taste and of the female mind which Malebranche developed within the Cartesian framework and as a witness to Parisian salon society in which women’s taste had great cultural influence, and strongly questions the common assumption that Cartesian substance dualism necessarily contained feminist potential. The essay argues for Malebranche’s great influence in this regard, connecting him to later Enlightenment critics of women’s taste such as Rousseau, and to Vitalist physicians like Le Camus.
This article explores Nicolas Malebranche's approach to fashion: an inescapable postlapsarian consequence of God's sociable design of the human mind and body as manifested in the imagination. A problematic side effect of the general laws established by God governing the soul-body relationship, fashion wreaked havoc on individuals' thinking and potential for redemption yet pointed to a larger providential plan for social benefit. These ideas led Malebranche to a distinctive nonpolitical approach to fashion—both “Enlightenment project” and theodicy—in which he sought to promote, toward human liberation and salvation, an enlightened understanding of the processes that created fashion and a charitable approach to managing it. Ultimately, however, his brain-based analysis ended up limiting individual freedoms (imaginative, cognitive, and behavioral), notably for those endowed with certain kinds of minds, in ways that had long-lasting effect. It also helped lay foundations for the Enlightenment's conflicted views about fashion as individual folly and beneficial social phenomenon. Cet article montre que, pour Nicolas Malebranche, la mode constitua une conséquence inévitable de la Chute et du dessin sociable et providentiel de l'esprit et du corps, manifesté dans l'imagination. Effet secondaire et problématique des lois générales établies par Dieu pour gouverner les relations entre l'esprit et le corps, la mode entrave la réflexion et l'accès au salut tout en dessinant un plan providentiel, au bénéfice de tous. A la fois projet des Lumières et théodicée, cette approche apolitique s'efforce, dans une visée mêlant libération, salut et charité, de saisir les processus qui créent la mode afin de s'en accommoder. Parce qu'elle met l'accent sur le cerveau, cette approche tend pourtant à restreindre, de manière durable, les libertés individuelles (imagination, cognition, comportement), surtout pour certains types d'esprit. Et elle montre comment, pour les Lumières, la mode peut être à la fois une folie individuelle et un phénomène à multiples vertus sociales.
toted its own brand of long-standing anti-Semitism too. It should not therefore be so surprising that after 1943 in order for the trains to depart Italy for Auschwitz, Italian cooperation had been necessary and forthcoming. Just as importantly, the vast majority of the brava gente stood by, off to church or the football match, clinging to life as normal, while a community that had been embedded in the peninsula since before Christ was destroyed.Levis Sullam describes his book as an 'ethical and political gesture' and asserts that Italy's, or more precisely Italians' real and disturbing role in the Holocaust has hitherto been concealed in the broader failure of the nation to 'fully come to terms with its complex political and moral responsibilities in regard to Fascism' (143). The book indeed demonstrates validly that no, it was not possible or necessary for the Germans to 'move against Jews on their own'. Italians were there to help, some enthusiastically. To be sure Sullam does not thereby deny or discount that other Italians did indeed help Jews escape the Holocaust and that the rate of survival for Jews found in Italy during the Second World War was considerably higher than in many other areas of Europe. But he considers that exclusively concentrating on the positives has occluded the negatives, and there were many. The emphasis needs to be changed, or at least re-balanced. Italy having chosen not to do so hitherto, Levis Sullam contends, has had serious consequences. The myth of Italians as brava gente left the guilty free to pursue lives and careers (some very successfully indeed) into the post-Fascist Republic, but more significantly shielded Fascism -and Sullam reminds us that the label 'Fascism' covers broad swathes of Italians, not a tiny minority -from shouldering some responsibility for what the consensus regards as the ultimate and most deplorable of all crimes against humanity. Levis Sullam's 'ethical and political gesture' is therefore aimed at today's Italians, who in voting for the far right, populist or otherwise, do not realize or have been prevented from understanding what such a choice actually implies. The settling in Italy for a bland relativism that remembers Italian Fascism as, all things considered, not really that bad, is what Levis Sullam wants his book to push back at.To write a history for such reasons may well be a commendable and virtuous undertaking, but the use of terms such as 'executioners' or 'genocide' would perhaps require more than the short study we have on offer here. Nevertheless the book is warranted and revealing, even if it is doubtful that, as Levis Sullam hopes in his acknowledgements, Italy by being 'more aware of [its] past' is somehow going to be 'more free' (144).
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