| In Enlightenment-era France, theologians, philosophers, and politicians contested the nature and prerogatives of human personhood with particular vehemence. Yet historians have tended to reduce these struggles to a narrative of ascendant individualism. My principal aim in this dissertation is to recover non-individualist formulations of the self in eighteenth-century France, and, in doing so, to offer a more nuanced account of subjectivity during the period. The argument follows from a fundamental premise: the modern self did not emerge without contest, but rather unfolded in the opposition of competing discourses. More specifically, there emerged from debates over Christian mysticism and radical philosophy two distinct and conflicting modes of formulating the self's relationship to existential goods. The proponents of self-ownership, who included orthodox theologians as well as certain mainstream philosophes, maintained that the human subject possessed itself and stood in unique relation to actions and ideas of its own making. Their opponents, in contrast, effectively reversed this grammatical order, so that the human person was rendered an object on the basis of its resignation to, and ultimate identification with, a totalizing force outside the self---situated in God, or alternatively, in resacralized conceptions of nature or the body politic. The discourses of self-ownership and dispossession structured claims about the human subject in a wide range of polemical contexts. During the Quietist Affair of the 1690s, Bossuet and Fenelon clashed over the role of self-interest in the love of God and the extent to which the soul might surrender its mental and physical faculties to divine will. The discursive framework of arguments for and against mystic abandon extended equally to controversies surrounding the impoverishment of personhood in Spinozism and materialism. Likewise, enlightened theologians and moderate philosophes denounced altered states of consciousness, typified by dreaming, as an abdication of self-governance. At the same time, Diderot speculated on the value of losing oneself during aesthetic experience, while Rousseau advocated the "total alienation" of ideal citizens to the general will. Finally, during the French Revolution, the discourse of dispossession entered the sphere of public administration, as the classical republican ideal of self-sacrifice become the watchword of political morality. |
