D'ALEMBERT AND THE SMALLPOX

The order assumed in the construction of the Encyclopedie, , edited by Diderot and D'Alembert, supposes an epistemic and normative model that not only conditions the formation of the canon as a referential horizon, but simultaneously produces a template for the political administration of life, with significant consequences for the relationship between canonical discourse and biopolitics within Enlightenment. The article proposes an analysis of this double normative device, with its impasses and complex strategies of enunciation, through the investigation of the nexuses of continuity between the epistemology of mathematics developed by D'Alembert and his controversial position regarding inoculation, the preventive treatment against smallpox available in the eighteenth century.