"Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion" by Julie Candler Hayes

Julie Candler Hayes surveys the past fifty years of philosophical reflection on the Enlightenment, and takes issue both with traditional liberal and with contemporary critical accounts, arguing instead for a new understanding of "systematic reason" as complex, paradoxical, and ultimately liberating. Through close analysis of philosophical, scientific, and literary texts, she emphasizes the urgency of maintaining a dialogue between past and present, Enlightenment and modernity.



Hayes examines the tensions between freedom and constraint, abstraction and materialism, linear and synoptic order, that pervade not only philosophic and scientific discourse, but also epistolary writing, fiction, and criticism. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of theorists from Adorno, Habermas, and Foucault to Deleuze and Derrida, she offers a dialogue between the eighteenth century and our own, an ongoing exploration of the question, 'What is Enlightenment?'
Contents
Acknowledgments
Author's note
Prologue - despotic Enlightenment
Introduction - the critique of systematic reason
1 "Système" - origins and itineraries
2 The epistolary machine
3 Physics and figuration in Du Châtelet's Institutions de physique
4 Condillac and the identity of the other
5 Diderot - changing the system
Conclusion - labyrinths of Enlightenment
Notes
Bibliography
Index