Caught Between Neologism and the Unmentionable: The Politics of Naming and Non-naming in 1790s France

This essay tests the assumption that Diderot was unmentionable during the 1790s because of his association with atheist materialism, and explores how philosophes close to him protected themselves and their work. It focuses predominantly on the Ideologues, Cabanis, and Destutt de Tracy, and also on the physician Bichat and the philosopher-zoologist Lamarck. It identifies certain textual strategies commonly deployed by these writers, including firstly, the curious practice of naming certain officially acceptable luminaries and using them to cover obscure references to other unnamed 'genies', secondly, the creation of neologisms for their work ('biologie', 'ideologie'), and thirdly, exaggerated claims of originality. It suggests that the break generally perceived by modern scholarship between the eighteenth-century experimental texts exploring consciousness and matter, particularly those of Diderot, and the post-revolutionary thinkers has been overstated, perhaps because of the very success of the trace-covering strategies examined here.