ABSTRACT
How does the swing from the scientific to the fantastic, from the language of reason to that of the imagination, come about? At the end of the eighteenth century in France a fundamental experiment is based precisely on that very change of course, the experiment of the corpse: contact with it, opening it up, its dissection by the medical establishments; its organization, its classification, its handling by the public health practices inherited from the century of the Enlightenment. Doctors, scholars, philosophers, artists, all have dealings with the corpse. By means of it they wish to understand, regulate, and purge human nature—not necessarily arrogantly to push back the limits of death, but, more humanly to grasp through reason its mechanisms, its organic functionings and malfunctionings. Yet in studying corpses too intimately, vision becomes clouded, imagination takes over, as if, in fine, only a semifictional shaping of the morbid were able to conjure up the terrible effects of the proximity of dead bodies, the dreaded putrefaction, that powerlessness before pain, those memories that escape. Madame Necker (Suzanne Curchod), newly arrived in Paris, “poor and beautiful,” in the beginning of 1764 from Lausanne, wife of a businessman and future minister; in September 1764 mother of Germaine, the future Madame de Staël; in April 1766 hostess of one of the main philosophical salons of the time; in May 1794 dead in Beaulieu, between Geneva and Lausanne—Madame Necker alone embodies this double concern, paradoxical and ambiguous, reasonable and obsessive, addressed to the corpse by the end of the Age of Enlightenment. 1
