- La bibliographie de l'auteur - Les protagonistes du dialogue de Diderot, A et B, discutent du Voyage autour du monde du navigateur français Louis Antoine de Bougainville récemment paru (en 1771). B propose de parcourir un prétendu Supplément qui en remet en question certaines soi-disant évidences énoncées par Bougainville. Deux passages de ce supplément sont enchâssés dans la discussion: Les adieux du vieillard, et le long Entretien de l'aumônier et d'Orou.

- La bibliographie de l'auteur - Les protagonistes du dialogue de Diderot, A et B, discutent du Voyage autour du monde du navigateur français Louis Antoine de Bougainville récemment paru (en 1771). B propose de parcourir un prétendu Supplément qui en remet en question certaines soi-disant évidences énoncées par Bougainville. Deux passages de ce supplément sont enchâssés dans la discussion: Les adieux du vieillard, et le long Entretien de l'aumônier et d'Orou.

Drawing insights from queer theory, this essay argues for making sex a more central category in political theorists’ interpretations of Diderot’s Supplement, and also of his contributions to History of the Two Indies. The Supplement has sometimes been considered a “libertine” text for depicting Tahiti as a society where sex is open, and indeed where foreign guests are treated to sexual hospitality. This essay reconstructs how and why Diderot’s Tahitians make promiscuity public policy and why Diderot makes miscegenation central to (...) his views on how to improve colonialism morally and politically. In the end, though, the Supplement is beset by asymmetric sexual logics that erode its apparent affirmation of egalitarianism, consent, hospitality, and non-egocentric interest. Although the presentation of sexual hospitality serves to critique French imperialism, its heterosexuality is compulsory and patriarchal. Nevertheless the text unwittingly offers a glimpse of a more radical, queer model of sociability. (shrink)

This paper examines the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law. It identifies a set of claims about women and peace that are typically made and considers these in light of women’s experience in the conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.

For the past three decades, notebooks and note?taking practices have elicited growing interest in various fields of research: anthropology, media and literature studies, history of the book, history of science. In this renewal, however, scientific travelers? notes have not received all the attention they deserve. To be sure, historians of discovery and exploration are used to considering travel diaries and field notes as a principal resource, on the basis of which they can assess a traveler?s accomplishment or document his itinerary. (...) From a different perspective, field journals offer rich material to literary scholars, critics, and specialists of travel writing. Notebooks of well?known travelers like Bougainville or Humboldt are thus scrutinized in their poetic and aesthetic dimensions, from the perspective of the genesis of travel writing. Still, few studies have taken up the task, a rather mundane and down?to?earth endeavor, to look at travel notebooks for their own sake, as material objects, made of paper and cardboard, and meant to store observational data and to insure their availability through time and space. The paper sets out to do just that: to take a set of manuscript notebooks written by eighteenth? and early nineteenth?century French, German, and Swiss naturalist travelers and scientists on the move together with the techniques at work in their writing, as the focus of a historical investigation. (shrink)

Alors que des voyageurs comme Cook et Bougainville avaient déjà fait le tour des océans et des terres, que pouvaient encore dire les Allemands sur le reste du monde? Comment Kant, auteur de l'Impératif catégorique qui n'a jamais quitté sa ville de Königsberg, a-t-il pu servir de référence pour étudier la construction de l'altérité d'un continent qui lui fut, comme du reste pour beaucoup de ses compatriotes, un continent inconnu? En s'appuyant sur l'exemplarité du mouvement circulatoire des idées des (...) Lumières, françaises et anglaises en particulier, et à travers des textes d'une très grande diversité, les anthropologues et philosophes de la «Aufklärung» résument un débat européen sur le continent africain. C'est en cela que le choix de ce pays est significatif pour la présente recherche qui veut interroger le sens de cette altérité, elle-même construite sur un projet d'universel fort discutable. Ce projet, qui a précédé et formaté celui de la Ruse de la raison de Hegel, a de particulier pour notre modernité en cours le fait qu'il est bien loin d'avoir épuisé la construction d'un autre universel possible. (shrink)

The article deals with a seldom exposed but ubiquitous method in the 18th century philosophy, named conjectural history by Dugald Stewart. Its characteristic feature is a peculiar combination of historically verified facts and speculations, which in some authors are even openly fictitious. The hypotheses about prehistory (always set forth in the form of temporal historical narrative) are meant to aid a certain classic philosophical topos of the 18th century: the quest for origins. The article first surveys and compares common points (...) as well as peculiarities of various “treatises on the origins” in the Scottish and French Enlightenment. In the second half it focuses on an implicit but clearly identifiable conjectural history in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, and on the application of conjectural history in the domain of the intellect and knowledge in the Encylopédie. It seems that the genealogy of knowledge in d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse most manifestly confirms the initial designation of conjectural history: that it is in fact another name for philosophy. If this holds true, than it might prove useful to search for its first seeds in Descartes’ Discourse on method, a work which places itself on the cross-section of history and fable. (shrink)

Vorrede Die Ethnologie ist in einer beneidenswerten und zugleich bedauernswerten Lage, weil sie im Grunde schon seit Jahrtausenden, nicht erst seit den einschlägigen Reisen und Erzählungen Bartolomé de Las Casas’, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Johann G. A. Forsters etc. ‒ aus einem riesigen Fundus von Berichten schöpfen kann und muss, die bezeugen, wie bemerkenswert, erstaunlich und ‚interessant‘, aber auch befremdlich, ja abstoßend und widerwärtig Menschen das Leben Anderer erschienen ist. Beneidenswert ist sie im Vergleich zu anderen Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften (...) in Anbetracht einer Materialfülle, die ihr zunächst scheinbar mühelos und ohne womöglich sachfremde methodologische Vorentscheidungen wie von selbst zugeflossen ist. (shrink)

Nolan, Malachy J When Japanese forces invaded New Guinea during the Second World War, there was a large missionary presence in the territory that had been built up in the preceding fifty years. The territory was previously a German possession but had been administered as a trust territory of Australia under a League of Nations mandate after the First World War. Geographically, it consisted of the northern part of the eastern half of the New Guinea mainland; the large islands of (...) New Britain and New Ireland, which lay to the north-east; and the Bougainville portion of the Solomon Islands, further to the east. There were missionaries from both Protestant and Catholic Churches and, because of history, many of these were of German background. (shrink)

La littérature utopique des Lumières explore volontiers les enjeux posés par la sexualité et les rapports de genre. De façon ludique, au théâtre ou dans les contes, ou plus sérieuse – avec notamment le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville de Diderot –, les écrivains du xviiie siècle réinventent l’organisation socio-érotique. Dans le cadre d’une île de fantaisie, ils imaginent tantôt un monde régi par les femmes, tantôt une communauté égalitariste débarrassée des tabous, et appellent parfois de leurs vœux une (...) refondation anthropologique radicale. Cet ailleurs rêvé – qui est aussi un nulle part – autorise, sous le couvert de la fiction, une réflexion originale sur le désir et le pouvoir. (shrink)

Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville has often been read as a Rousseauian condemnation of modern civilization judged against the standard of pure Nature. A cursory reading of the Supplement does appear to present Tahiti as a natural utopia and Europe as a civilized prison. This essay rejects such a reading by demonstrating that the Supplement actually undermines any clear opposition between virtuous nature, represented by Tahiti, and corrupt civilization, represented by Europe. Although Diderot truly does offer a (...) stinging critique of modern Europe, he refuses to offer "nature" as a redemptive alternative. Instead, the Supplement offers an implicit critique of the politics of moralism. (shrink)

O artigo pretende examinar o significado da expressão “a mais antiga das guerras”, empregada por Diderot no Suplemento à viagem de Bougainville para se referir ao conflito entre o homem e outros animais predadores, inserindo-a na tradição hobbesiana, na qual o estado de natureza é representado a partir de uma analogia entre os homens e esses mesmos animais. Pretende-se mostrar que, em ambas essas teorias, o móbile dessas guerras não é a necessidade, mas o desejo.

Ouvrages Le supplément au voyage de Bougainville et autres œuvres morales de Diderot, édition présentée et commentée, avec un dossier, Paris, Agora, Presses Pocket, 1992. Le trésor perdu. Hannah Arendt, l’intelligence de l’action politique, Paris, Payot, 1999. Un monde commun. Pour une cosmo-politique des conflits, Paris, Seuil, 2003. Le maléfice de la vie à plusieurs. La politique est-elle vouée à l’échec?, Paris, Bayard, 2012. Ouvrages collectifs Avec J. Message et J. Roman, À quoi p...

This volume presents a selection of the political writings of one of the most significant figures of the French enlightenment. It contains the most important articles that Diderot contributed to the Encyclope;die, of which he was principal editor, the complete texts of his Supple;ment au Voyage de Bougainville and Observations sur le Nakaz (translated into English here for the first time), and a substantial number of his contributions to Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. The editors' introduction puts these works (...) in context, showing their essential features and underlying coherence. (shrink)

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the (...) women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism. [Publisher's abstract]. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay I develop a feminist anti-colonial critique by reading two eighteenth-century literary texts that discuss Middle Eastern and Indigenous gender and sexual practices at length: Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772). While Montesquieu and Diderot are often heralded as anti-imperial European Enlightenment thinkers, the specific ways in which Montesquieu and Diderot use gender and non-European women's bodies to construct their political-theoretical arguments show us two distinct colonial logics, one imperial and (...) the other settler-colonial. I show that whereas Montesquieu uses Persian and Muslim sexual and gender practices to put forward an imperial vision premised on the superiority of French political order over a despotic ‘oriental’ order, Diderot uses Indigenous sexual practices to denote a settler-colonial logic premised on the erasure of conquest and pacification of Indigenous women's bodies. In doing so I build on existing feminist and post/anti-colonial scholarship to develop gender and sexuality as central analytics of imperial and settler-colonial politics. (shrink)

Le Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville est le point d’aboutissement d’une critique menée à l’encontre de toute absolutisation de la norme morale, au travers de la confrontation des « codes » civil, religieux et naturel. Les individus, comme les constellations de jugement qu’ils forment, sont passés au crible d’une écriture digressive qui démonte les mécanismes idéologiques de l’agir. Les institutions écclésiales sont mises à mal, cela va de soi, en raison des atteintes qu’elles portent à la liberté individuelle. Pourtant, (...) Diderot dépasse une visée polémique, par trop démonstrative, pour faire de l’écriture dialogique, construite sur deux niveaux, le lieu d’une exploration des conditions d’application de la « loi naturelle » dans le champ de la morale et, partant, du politique. (shrink)

A representative collection of this lively encyclopedist's writings, mainly fiction, selected and introduced by the translators. Included are D'Alembert's Dream and Supplement to Bougainville's "Voyage" in dialogue form, and an essay on "encyclopédie" from that monumental work. --E. T.

Dans une première partie, nous citerons les écrits qui racontent les « premiers contacts » entre Français et Polynésiens (1768, 1787). On y voit de fortes contradictions entre les conclusions généralisantes publiées, portant sur la liberté sexuelle pré maritale, dans un culte constant de l’amour pratiqué en public, et certains faits pourtant évoqués dans les journaux de bord : des présentations sexuelles forcées de très jeunes filles apeurées. Dans la deuxième partie, nous tenterons de comprendre cet aveuglement : il est (...) dû à la vision européenne masculine d’alors sur la nature des femmes, et à un schéma racial déjà installé qui octroya par avance aux Polynésiennes la beauté de femmes « presque blanches ». (shrink)