Abstract

Although the French Enlightenment has long been viewed as establishing the very conditions that make modernity imaginable, criticism possible, and reason fundamental, I seek to understand this "Enlightenment project" as existing alongside other philosophical eventualities---other narratives and histories of reason. This dissertation is primarily concerned with that most maligned of materialisms---Epicureanism---and the means by which eighteenth-century French Epicurean writers sought to represent, in both literature and philosophy, a natural world and an intellectual project that existed in dramatic conflict with what came to be prevailing Enlightenment understandings of the aims of critical thinking. I demonstrate that an analysis of eighteenth-century Epicurean writing can be the basis for an attempt to consider the Enlightenment not only as imperative---necessary to a twentieth-century Western conception of what it means to think at all---but profoundly contingent. This thesis is thus ultimately the product of my on-going attempts to read Epicureanism---a system of thought that begins to fall out of vogue by the end of the eighteenth century in France---back into an intellectual framework whose very existence has depended on forgetting the fact of Epicurean doctrine as a source of critical possibility. In examining both the relationship of a twentieth-century philosophical context to the French Enlightenment and the influence of what has come to be seen as the Enlightenment moment on Epicurean literature and philosophy in France, this dissertation poses the questions---what does it mean to be an Epicurean materialist in the eighteenth century?---and how might we begin to think around what has long seemed to be the inevitability of the Enlightenment? Moreover, what are the costs of a refusal to resist the ubiquity of the Enlightenment project, however defined? ;This attempt to renegotiate the philosophical space carved out by the Enlightenment through a reconsideration of French Epicureanism takes as its primary focus the work of two eighteenth-century authors: Julien Offray de la Mettrie and the marquis de Sade. I use an investigation of their writings as the starting-point for a consideration of the conditions that render imaginable an Epicurean "outside" to an enlightened history of modernity