Death and Enlightenment: An Interview with Joanna Stalnaker

by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa Modern philosophy, wrote Michel Foucault, can be understood as an ongoing attempt to confront a question raised two centuries ago: what is Enlightenment? In The Rest Is Silence, Columbia Professor of French Joanna Stalnaker reverses the vantage point to ask how Enlightenment philosophers confronted death. She traces how six individuals—David Hume, the Comte de Buffon, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Madame du Deffand—faced the ending of their lives, and with it, the ending of their intellectual movement. From their last writings, she draws out something extraordinary: not the forward march of progress, a trope so often identified with Enlightenment philosophy, but new literary forms invented to capture the fragility of knowledge, the finitude of human life, and the possibility that these writers’ lives, and their movement, might dissolve into nothingness. What, then, was the Enlightenment? How did a range of sources—from mystical discourses about the annihilation of the self to ephemeral conversations in salons—inflect these writers’ confrontation with death? What ethical and political imperatives remain, once one has embraced silence and nothingness? Stalnaker discusses these questions, among others, in conversation with one of the Blog’s Primary Editors. Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa (MSW): In the spirit of your book, I wonder if we might begin with the ending. You turn to Madame Roland, a member of the Girondin political faction who was executed in the Terror. Roland received her formation from the Enlightenment writers discussed in your preceding chapters. While these writers, all of whom died before 1789, embraced silence, fragility, and nothingness in their last writings, she wrote for posterity, confident that it would vindicate her (p. 208–13). I’m struck by the implications of this contrast. Enlightenment, as you observe, has long been identified with an orientation towards the future (p. 9). For postwar critics like Reinhart Koselleck, every political crisis of modernity from the Terror to the two World Wars could be traced to this orientation—a “utopian,” progressive philosophy of history that justified endless violence in the name of future progress. Your book decouples Enlightenment writers from this philosophy of history, so that when we do encounter it, it is in the epilogue, after their generation has died out. If the French Revolution and Terror were not a culmination of an Enlightenment philosophy of history, can we understand them, instead, as a rupture in historical consciousness? What does the contrast between Roland and the Enlightenment writers reveal about how their movement came to an end? Joanna Stalnaker (JS): I think it’s a very astute question, because the premise of the book is to start with these last works and look back over the Enlightenment through the eyes of these figures as they were facing their ends—so you’re asking me to start with the end of my book and look back over what I was actually trying to say through this lens. It’s also a very difficult question for me, because I would say that the epilogue is something I have some hesitations about myself. It came fairly late in the writing of the book. As you know, I wanted to bracket the French Revolution. The last figure to die among those I consider is the naturalist Buffon. His son Buffonet would die under the guillotine, but he himself died just short of the Revolution, in 1788. That was very important to me—to recover these figures’ own sense of an ending, not a reaction to the dramatic political and social changes of 1789. At the same time, by choosing to write an epilogue on Roland, I’ve clearly invited questions about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and I had not fully elucidated in my mind what my argument about that relationship was. The figures I look at do have a philosophy of history, but I question this idea of a utopian, progressive philosophy of history coming out of the Enlightenment. In those terms, I would take issue with the overall tenor of Dan Edelstein’s recent book on revolution. To me, Rousseau’s philosophy of history is not a progressive philosophy of history—it’s a more tragic philosophy of history. I take very seriously that moment in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (Discourse on the Origins of Inequality) where he apostrophizes man and says, if you look back over your history, perhaps you’re going to find a moment when you would have wanted progress to stop. Similarly, Diderot was extremely aware of the fragility of any kind of philosophical or encyclopedic enterprise or progress. In his late preface to the eighth volume of the Encyclopédie (Encyclopedia), published in 1765, he described how the value of this work would come in the wake of “a revolution of which the germ is perhaps forming in some unknown corner of the earth, or brooding secretly in the very center of civilized countries, breaking out in time, overturning cities, dispersing peoples once again and bringing back ignorance and shadows” (trans. mine). There’s a distinct awareness among these writers of the possibility of the destruction of knowledge in addition to its building or edification. I do think it’s possible for people to have a sense that change is in the air—elsewhere, I have written about Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who claimed to have predicted the Revolution. But when historical events such as the Revolution come, they do mark a rupture with what came before. I wanted to restore an awareness of these Enlightenment writers not knowing what was around the corner. In terms of Roland, she really has the sense of herself as belonging to a party and being on the right side of history—she’s very sure about that. Her wish to be vindicated in the eyes of posterity has to do with this certitude. There’s a political consciousness there that is very different from the figures I’m focusing on in the book, and it’s reflected in a different way of thinking about her own death: she’s already imagining herself as a political martyr. MSW: Right—these earlier figures are thinking historically, but it’s not the linear march of progress or sense of being on the right side of history. But what was this movement that was ending? Scholars have argued for the Enlightenment as a coherent political and philosophical project, a constellation of regional and religious Enlightenments, a global Enlightenment, Enlightenment as immanent critique, or perhaps relinquishing the term altogether. As you observe, these approaches remain preoccupied with the relationship between Enlightenment and what came after—modernity—rather than the possibility of an ending. When you reverse the vantage point, what do you see? Is there something to the idea of a deathbed confession: that a confrontation with mortality both offers more clarity and prompts one to depart from earlier views? JS: I do think it’s important to acknowledge that thinkers and writers can change their views in reaction to events in their lives. In the eighteenth century, there was a lot of public interest in the deaths of Hume and Voltaire: would they recant their infidel beliefs on their deathbeds? They did not. Tom Laqueur has devoted some wonderful pages to this in his book, The Work of the Dead (2016). But Diderot and Voltaire are two good examples of people who changed their views at the end of their lives. Diderot had affirmed his faith in posterity in his correspondence with the sculptor Falconet, but in his last published work, the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero), he envisaged the erasure of his name from history; Voltaire had offered some of these reassurances to Deffand in response to her fear of death, but his last poems became so much more reflective of her view of nothingness. He embraced not only the possibility that her name would not survive—she neither expected nor wished it to—but even more surprisingly, that his own name would not survive in the future. I’ve used the term Enlightenment in both of my books, and it’s important to me not to do away with it altogether or to let it splinter into a myriad of enlightenments. Something happened during this period that was very significant, and the writers, at least those I work on, had a self-consciousness about the specificity of their period and their movement. I can see how the Enlightenment has been misinterpreted and distorted retrospectively, but I don’t think its very existence as a movement is an invention of the nineteenth century; it’s being defined at the time, when these writers identify themselves as a société de gens de lettres (society of men of letters), or, in Dan Edelstein’s account, when they develop a narrative about philosophy’s role in changing the world. I find Foucault’s essay, Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (What is Enlightenment, 1984) tremendously astute in terms of analyzing the conditions of possibility for change in the future, and I appreciate Antoine Lilti’s resurrection of Foucault’s definition of Enlightenment as critique in L’Héritage des Lumières (The Legacy of the Enlightenment, 2019; trans. 2025). But I’m not sure critique is quite enough of a definition. With critique, there’s a corrosive sense, that you’re trying to dismantle things. But there was also an attempt to construct something. It’s partly what I was saying about Rousseau—I think of his corpus as having both a destructive phase, in the Discours sur l’inégalité, and a constructive phase, in Émile, ou De l’éducation (Émile, or On Education) and Du contrat social (On the Social Contract). The two were related—as Rousseau writes in the Discours, you need to properly judge how things are to say how they should be—but I don’t think critique fully captures this. Critique, moreover, was intimately tied to self-knowledge. Rousseau emphasizes self-knowledge in the beginning of the Discours, referencing Socrates’ statement, “know thyself,” and Buffon’s writings about the outside world, from which he paradoxically takes the idea that we need to look within to know the limits of our knowledge, understanding, and capacity. This is a real emphasis among the figures I look at—what I would define as Enlightenment self-critique marked by an awareness of one’s limits, self-knowledge tied to epistemological modesty. This may be the contrast to Roland that I was drawing earlier: the political certainty she expresses at the end of her life, for me, is a little bit antithetical to this spirit of modesty. It’s not to say that she’s not modest—I feel like I’m not being fair to her—but that self-critique was crucial for the Enlightenment philosophers. I would refer to Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), which is such an important text for understanding the late Diderot, in which he confronts himself with this radical critique of his own moral position through a dialogue between moi (me, the self), the philosopher, and lui (he), the nephew. On these grounds, I do not share Jonathan Israel’s view of the Enlightenment as “an abstract package of basic values” (Enlightenment Contested, p. 11). It cannot be an abstract package precisely because of the necessity of dialogue, self-critique, and self-doubt, but also because this philosophy was never wholly abstract. It was embodied—in literary forms, new forms of sociability, and perhaps also a philosophy of history. It is because of its embodiment that eighteenth-century philosophy has been excised, at least most of it, from the analytical tradition as not really philosophy. These features of the Enlightenment need to be interpreted through the lens of practice. MSW: Indeed, you develop your historical argument about Enlightenment through a literary argument about form: that “Enlightenment writers invented at the end of their lives new forms of writing to embody the fragility of the human body and its eventual dissolution” (p. 10). The Rest Is Silence draws insight from last writings that have been excluded from most intellectual histories of Enlightenment, whether for their seeming unoriginality, as with Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie (Elements of Physiology, p. 61–78), or their seeming mundanity, as with Deffand’s diary of petits riens (small nothings, p. 195–97). This approach strikes me as different, in scale, from the recent work on endings and Enlightenment by Richard Whatmore that traces how Enlightenment writers responded to late eighteenth-century crises of war, empire, and revolution. What do we see—or see differently—by moving between the endings of individual lives and of intellectual movements, between literary criticism and intellectual history? JS: I appreciated the way Whatmore organized his chapters around individual thinkers and acknowledged that their views on the Enlightenment changed over time, that for example there’s an initial optimism in the early Hume, who believed fanaticism was on the downswing, but a pessimism by the end of his life, when he believed he had already seen the end of Enlightenment. Hume is really the anchoring figure for that book, so it was very interesting for me to think about my Hume in relation to Whatmore’s. I revisit Hume’s last autobiographical self-portrait, My Own Life, which has often been read in terms of the equanimity with which Hume faced death. I was trying to emphasize Hume’s awareness that his legacy was not assured, but I still think he accepted it with this kind of equanimity, consistent with his overall philosophical orientation, whereas for Whatmore it’s more of a tragic awareness that marks the late Hume. You mentioned scale as the contrast between our approaches, and I think that is right. I want to zero in, to select a work and grapple with it. It’s important to me to focus in on one work because I want to get a sense of its form. We can think of a literary text as a body, in a certain sense: on the micro level, you can look at the embodiment of one sentence in its particular style, syntax, and vocabulary, and on the macro level, you can see the work’s shape. When Diderot writes his Éléments de physiologie, which Kurt Ballstadt called his second encyclopedia, the fact that it’s a fragmentary work was generally understood as a sign of its unfinished quality. But the fragmentary form also has meaning. It corresponds to Diderot’s conception of nature as a set of living molecules that are being reconfigured in new forms, so that death is just a change in form. If I take a more synthetic approach to Diderot’s writings, I can’t get at that. I think this is part of my approach as a literary scholar working on philosophical ideas and, to some extent, intellectual history, but keeping the literary front and center. Sometimes, as we adopt more historical methods in literary studies, we can tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and forget the specificity of our style of reading. Of course, there are many different approaches to reading in literary studies, but I do think there’s overall a difference in how historians and literary critics read. And there should be—both are useful—but I do see my method as slightly different in that respect. In terms of endings, this means I was interested in how these figures conceived of writing in relation to the experience of death. The classic trope would be that writing is a way of surviving after your death. This was Carl Becker’s argument in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932); he quotes Diderot’s letter to Falconet to argue that “posterity for the philosopher is the afterworld of the religious man.” But what my book shows is that at the end of their lives, these philosophes were experimenting with how writing could be a means of grappling with the finitude of human existence and the corporeality of the human body. I was interested in this particular period because these writers, even those like Voltaire, whom we regard as theistic, no longer had religious structures to rely on in the face of death. There’s a lot of important work recently—by my colleague Charly Coleman, Tili Boon Cuillé, and many others—that emphasizes the persistence of spiritual traditions, motifs, and language in the Enlightenment. I would say that despite this persistence, the move towards the human realm is still tremendously important, and that it entailed a major shift in how people faced death. It also raises certain ethical and political imperatives. If you think that human enterprises are very fragile, and you also think that your life is not oriented towards the spiritual realm—then what does this demand of you and what do you leave behind? MSW: I want to pick up on this question—what you call “the quintessentially Enlightenment question of how to die a nonbeliever” (p. 164). If your writers eschewed traditional Christian understandings of an afterlife, their turn to silence, nothingness (néant), and the self’s annihilation (anéantissement) evokes another set of spiritual discourses: those of mysticism, which authors such as Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire encountered in the fallout of the Quietist Affair, the late seventeenth-century controversy over the mysticism of Madame Guyon, and the letters of Jesuit missionaries in Asia describing forms of native spirituality. In one of the most moving letters you discuss (p. 13, 137), Deffand praises Voltaire’s parable of a Brahmin, where a learned Brahmin is anguished by his reflections on death, while his neighbor, an elderly woman, is blissful in her ignorance. If the Brahmin echoes Deffand’s philosophy, wishing to have never been born, he also describes himself as “composed of matter” and caught at “the point between two eternities,” allusions to materialist philosophy and the spirituality of Blaise Pascal. How are we to understand such encounters with mysticism, in both Christian and non-Christian variants? Might they offer another genealogy for nothingness? JS: I love this question—at my book launch at Columbia, Charly Coleman gave a wonderful response to the book in which he raised the question of the Quietist Affair, and then an audience member asked about Buddhist ideas of nirvana and the no-self. What I would want to do is to figure out, to the extent we can, what these philosophers were reading, how these ideas were coming to them, and in what form they were being transmitted to them. You mentioned the Jesuit missionaries—Tom Laqueur recently recommended to me a fascinating article by Alison Gopnik about the possibility that Hume encountered Charles François Dolu, a Jesuit returning from India and Siam who had a deep knowledge of Buddhist doctrines, during his stay at La Flèche in the 1730s. In terms of alternative genealogies for Deffand’s views on nothingness—she has a wonderful correspondence with one of her closest female friends, the duchesse de Choiseul. I didn’t work on it for the book, which instead drew on her correspondence with Horace Walpole and Voltaire, but I’ve since returned to Deffand’s archive at the Walpole Library at Yale and delved into a broader corpus of her writings. I’ve been struck by the fact that different things come out in her letters to Choiseul, and I have come across exchanges on annihilation and nothingness that might point in the direction of some Eastern influences. With respect to Voltaire’s parable of the Brahmin, I can’t remember whether Deffand had already expressed her idea that it would be better not to have been born before Voltaire wrote that, that is, whether it’s her influence on him rather than the other way around. I don’t think she took it from him, because it’s so embedded in her way of thinking, but I want to go through her entire correspondence again to see if there’s more there. The other possibility is the classical tradition. Someone pointed me to Seneca’s De Consolatione ad Marciam (Consolation to Marcia), in which he’s writing to console a woman after the death of her son. You find there the same idea that it would be better not to be born than to live at all. I know that Deffand read fairly widely—she was especially fond of Cicero, for example—and so I want to figure out the extent to which these various influences are playing into her philosophy. I do wish I had integrated the mysticism of Guyon more into my discussion—that’s a regret, and maybe something to come back to in the future. I find Charly’s book, The Virtues of Abandon (2014), extremely compelling in terms of linking these mystical discourses to Enlightenment materialism through the idea of the dispossession of the self. Now, how is that influencing someone like Deffand? I haven’t worked on Guyon at all, but my sense is that in her orientation towards God, there’s still something positive—some kind of love there, in the same way you could also say that the Buddhist no-self and nirvana are not nothingness in a nihilistic sense. Deffand does not have that saving grace of some sort of orientation towards the divine, and that makes a difference. I’ve been really thrilled to see how interested readers of my book have been in Deffand, but I’ve also gotten questions along the lines of, this is so bleak—what can we take away from it? That’s what I referred to in my book as the radical nature of her position. She challenges us—I wouldn’t say she completely goes in the direction of nihilism, but she comes pretty close. At the same time, she continues writing, she pursues these acts of sociability in her salon, and she expresses love and friendship in her last letter to Walpole. It’s not that there’s nothing to life, but what there is remains very, very fragile. Towards the end of her life, she wanted some sort of divinity to turn to, but she was unable to find it. MSW: Deffand’s is one of the “lost voices of women writers who were admired in their own time but have largely been forgotten in ours” (p. 7), barely mentioned in Dena Goodman’s landmark study of Enlightenment salon hostesses and cited by Lilti to question the salons’ intellectual seriousness. You draw out a tension between the universality of death—as your writers dissolve the boundaries of gender and species to discuss fossils, plants, and animals—and the particularity of Deffand’s experience—the ephemeral conversations of salons, the feminine handicrafts of knotting and effilage (unweaving threads), the blindness and insomnia (p. 170–71). How did Deffand arrive at what you call the most “radical” encounter with nothingness? And how do you understand her in relation to your other authors? JS: I think the question is really interesting with respect to the supposed universality of death. Death could be considered the great leveler—the experience we all share—but there are a lot of things that temper that universality. Whether because of poverty, the brutal violence of chattel slavery, or other factors, people in the eighteenth century did not face death in the same way, which is something my book doesn’t address at all. I focus exclusively on philosophers and on people who died of what was considered old age. Dying of disease or violence at a much younger point in one’s life is entirely different—it’s one of the reasons that the contrast to Roland, who was executed before the age of forty, is not entirely fair. There is also a way in which women in this period were always going to be different from men in terms of their relationship to the body and to death. Pregnancy and childbirth made a huge difference—not just the possibility of dying in childbirth, but also these women’s proximity to all the children they bore and cared for, many of whom died. For instance, Susannah Gibson’s book, The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement (2024), offers a wonderful portrait of Hester Thrale, who had a salon and was close to Samuel Johnson; she was pregnant nearly every year of her childbearing years, and the children just kept on dying. It’s not that men didn’t have any contact with childbearing or infant mortality, or that all women had this experience, but I think their proximity to it created a divide. There isn’t a total universality there. Now, Deffand did not have children—I think that’s an important aspect of her sense of nothingness, since children would be one way of leaving something to posterity. There’s also her experience as a salon hostess. Sociability was central to how Enlightenment writers conceived of their philosophical mission and practiced it, which is what makes salons so crucial to understanding Enlightenment philosophy. But as a hostess—Deffand writes a lot about this—the day-to-day exchanges just went up in smoke. She was, here, a bit nihilistic about the lack of meaning in her day-to-day activities. Her blindness also contributed to this, even if she didn’t make the connection explicit. It prevented her from doing certain things—reading and writing without the aid of her secretary, and other kinds of activities, like looking at paintings. She complained about the limitations that her blindness imposed on her existence, describing how it led to ennui (boredom)—which, for her, was an avant-goût du néant (a foretaste of nothingness). All of these factors—specific, local, almost intimate—combine to give her this singular view of nothingness. But then you see it embraced by Voltaire. Voltaire scholars have commented on how different his last two poems are from his previous writings, but no one has been able to explain that difference. People are always looking for the sources—classical antiquity, Alexander Pope—but nobody referred to Deffand, even though they know about her correspondence with Voltaire. One striking moment in my reading of the criticism was when a scholar referred to Voltaire responding to Deffand on the question of nothingness, but never quoted her, nor acknowledged the centrality of this idea to her philosophy of life. For me, one of the real contributions of this book is demonstrating how Deffand’s encounter with Voltaire transformed his thinking. That was so important for the philosophy of this period: the confrontation with people who are different from you, whether Rameau’s nephew and the moi philosophe, or Deffand and Voltaire. He was living such a different existence from hers, and yet they had this meeting of minds, and both emerged from the encounter transformed. MSW: To return to this embodiment of Enlightenment philosophy in literary form—would you recommend some of these last writings to readers as an entry point? JS: I wrote my first book on endless, truly endless, multivolume descriptive projects of the Enlightenment. Luckily, for this project, there are some very short works one can dip into. One is Hume’s My Own Life. He frames it as a history of his writings, but it’s really a reflection on his life, on what it means to have ever owned a life, or a self, if you don’t hold on to it after your death. There’s a remarkable sentence at the end where he writes himself into the past tense: “I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself…).” Another is Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which is the most well-known of the works I look at. I zero in on the last reverie, just half a page long, which was left unfinished. He’s reflecting on a past moment of happiness that he shared with a lover who has now died, Madame de Warens, whom he also writes about in the Confessions. I see it as a way of reaching across the barrier between life and death: he evokes the moment when he’s about to go to Paris to become a writer and leave her behind, but he doesn’t go over into that next part of the story. So, although the text is unfinished, there is a poignant design to the silence at the ending. As for Deffand, she’s very hard to translate because of the beauty of her style, but some of her letters to Voltaire—like the letter in response to the parable of the Brahmin—are incredibly moving. There are some short editions of her letters in French, but nothing comparable in English translation. Maybe that would be something to publish. MSW: When I first read your book, it was for your literary-historical argument about endings; when I re-read it this spring, it struck me that this argument also carried an ethical dimension. I was reflecting on how language can seem to lose meaning, in the face of loss, so that we are left to speak in tropes, clichés, and abstractions. Your Enlightenment writers had their own tropes for a philosophical death, drawn from authors such as Socrates and Montaigne (p. 12–20). Yet they repeatedly found that such tropes fell short. Describing Roland’s return to “a shared language of convention” in the epilogue, you remark, “while Deffand might well have admired Roland’s last words, she would not have been satisfied with them” (p. 218–19). Death, the Enlightenment, the lost woman writer—these are subjects we can scarcely discuss without shared, conventional language, language that Hannah Arendt criticized for preventing us from thinking by protecting us from reality. Does your writers’ refusal of such language in their historical moment offer us a means of confronting our own? To revisit a problem that you raise in the preface (p. xi): what is left to recover from the lives of those who embraced nothingness? JS: The problem you evoke resonates for me, because in one sense, a shared language is something we need in order to be together in the face of our mortality and grief. When you say, I’m sorry for your loss, or May she rest in peace, these are not meaningless sentences. They’re very deeply important. At the same time, they can easily be used or perceived as clichés. When I said Deffand wouldn’t have been satisfied with this conventional language, I was thinking of the contrast between Roland, who looks ahead to a reassuring afterlife, and these earlier writers who confront nothingness head on. But it’s almost like a Deffandian pique, a mean remark, on my part. Roland was dying under the guillotine and leaving a child, a lover, and a husband behind—who am I to say anything about her use of language at that point? Arendt’s view of shared, conventional language is one way of thinking about it, but perhaps we need both: to invent language in new ways and to have shared phrases and rituals, which, in a sense, is also one of the functions of religion. It’s interesting that you refer to my preface, because one could question a certain degree of sentimentality in my own writing. I chose to address Deffand directly, saying, May you now rest in the peace of your nothingness. This is a cliché, isn’t it? At the same time, there was a sort of intimacy to my encounter with these thinkers, particularly Deffand. I came to feel a certain awareness of what she suffered. She seemed to be someone whose life was marked by restlessness. It’s something I really admired about her—that restlessness—but it’s also very painful. I got a question about this when I was a guest speaker in a wonderful class at Columbia, “Living, Dying, and the Meaning of Life”: I was asked whether I was holding Deffand up as an ethical model by saying she had this radical dimension to her thinking. I didn’t know how to answer that question at the time. What I admire is her dedication to what she saw as the truth and her unwillingness to succumb to illusions: she wanted to believe, she wanted reassurance, but if she didn’t find it, she wasn’t going to pretend to have it or invent it for herself. In saying that her approach is the most radical, I don’t think it’s exactly a model to emulate, because she was so unhappy, but I find something admirable in it. This is not explicit in the book, but one of the things it’s about is an acceptance of our mortality. I feel there’s a real denial of mortality right now—in my current teaching, I’ve been thinking about transhumanism and these efforts to find immortality by uploading one’s brain or freezing one’s body. Obviously, humans need to strive, and striving for immortality is part of human accomplishment; but that has to be tempered by an awareness of limits. My book’s real intervention is to say that within the Enlightenment, ostensibly a key moment in human striving for greatness, immortality, and infinitude, these philosophers cultivated an acute awareness of their own mortality. Their awareness, combined with their orientation towards the human realm, leaves us with certain ethical and political imperatives. These aren’t just on the individual level: if you’re aware of your own mortality, you can be more sensitive to the mortality of others and the impact of your actions. We’re all mortal, and if we were truly aware of that, we would live in the world in a different way. Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia University specializing in Enlightenment literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. She is the author of The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell, 2010), which received the Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale, 2025). Her writings have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Representations, A Cultural History of Death, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, among other publications. Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa is a Fellow by Examination and Rhodes Scholar at All Souls College, Oxford, where her doctoral project traces the construction of India as mystical and spiritual between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Her article, “Indian Feminists and Orientalist Fantasies,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Featured Image: Detail of a portrait of Madame du Deffand. Print by Samuel Freeman, after Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, July 1810. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. In Stalnaker’s words, Deffand appears to be “contemplating nothingness… by holding it in her hands” (p. 167).