Introduction: Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies

Abstract

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Habermas, Foucault, Said, and Derrida all lay special weight upon the period as one from which we must break away or make our peace. Latour joins this influential list of scholars for whom the Enlightenment remains key to understanding, and perhaps to overcoming, the modern terms of existence. The argument for which he is best known, that the distinction between subject and object is the lie on which modernity is based, traces that lie to the long eighteenth century. It was here, Latour notes, that distinctions between mind and matter, res cogitans and res extensa, were worked out in the first place. In this light, a special issue on Latour's relevance to eighteenthcentury literature follows a trajectory that Latour himself endorses.The eighteenth century has been seen by many as registering a break between, on the one hand, a confidence in the integrity of the modern subject, and, on the other, a serene satisfaction with the concreteness of the modern object. This is, in Latour's project, the place where modernity got off track. Latour's sense of the vibrant primacy of networks of persons and things, of the co-implication of humans and nonhumans in collectives, is designed to stitch up this gap. But it also reminds us that the image of the eighteenth century as a site of their separation is merely a caricature.Latour invites us to revisit the early decades of modernity as a period actively feeling its way through the manifold crossings between persons and things, sometimes attempting to disentangle them, but also often not. It is with this sense of productive

‘Eloquence and Oracle’: Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Life and Literature

“…Lupton et al use the example of 'the swimmer, who while wearing the goggles, embodies the ability to swim differently, and the goggles, who when wearing the swimmer, acquire the ability to move'. 3 We can think similarly about, and reflect on, the relationship between people and tobacco. For example, the person who inhales tobacco smoke embodies an altered state of consciousness, while tobacco, incinerated and penetrating the lungs on the breath of the smoker, acquires the ability to increase the spread and reach of its species.…”