Sublime Disorder

This work places Diderots fascination with anatomical anomalies or monsters within the context of the history of ideas, philosophy, and science. By chronicling the ideological component of the philosophes presentation of monstrosity from the Lettre sur les aveugles to Le Neveu de Rameau, this book reveals Diderots random and accidental monsters to be, ironically, the most teleological of all beings: created and staged, as it were, for a particular textual world where materialist dogma is as important as disinterested anatomical study.