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Alison Calhoun
Associate Professor of French/Francophone Studies and Theatre
Indiana University-Bloomington
Department of French and Italian
Description
To what extent are Cartesian active mechanism and what we will also study in terms of intelligibility perceptible in theatre productions after 1650? This talk proposes that Descartes’ physiology of the passions, disseminated by his followers and in posthumous publications, influenced stage artists and machinists in the fairground theatre, opera, and in Molière’s Dom Juan. Instead of hiding the mechanism to generate a feeling of awe and producing marvel, these staged robots suggest the role of mechanism in the theatre was often about revealing, explaining, and making human physiology intelligible. As part of an understudied art of mechanic vitality, this scientific role of theatre weakened the divide between human and machine, only for it to be reinstated in the late eighteenth century when the study of sentimentality required a stricter separation between the mechanical and the organic.
Bio
Alison Calhoun is Associate Professor of French/Francophone Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her work focuses on the intersection of early modern philosophy and literature, especially in Montaigne, and was the topic of her first book, Montaigne and the Lives of the Philosophers: Life Writing and Transversality in the Essais. Her studies in early modern philosophy as well as the history and practice of opera and ballet led her to explore the relationship between the history of the passions and the texts and artisanal practices of French baroque drama. Most recently, she is investigating how dramatic works and their artisans dialogue with scientific and philosophical networks about the mechanical passions, and how this dialogue takes a turn during the late eighteenth-century, the so-called “age of sensibility,” as scientists and artists alike develop a clearer case for human exceptionalism and stricter borders between the machinic and the organic. She is currently completing a book manuscript on this topic, tentatively titled Mechanics of the Passions on the French Baroque Stage.
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Tickets available for both online and in-person format
