French Graduate Seminars, Hilary 2025, Seminar 3

Holly Rowe (Lincoln) - Baron d’Holbach and the essai form as political satire

Abstract
Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) was a German-born, French-naturalised philosopher, salon host, and prolific writer of materialist, political, and antitheological treatises. The majority of his works were published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the limits of his vast literary output therefore remain indistinct.

D’Holbach is now recognised as the author of five facéties philosophiques, or short, comic anti-religious and polemical writings. These include the sardonic Essai sur l’art de ramper, à l’usage des courtisans (1790), which caricatures the figure of the courtier and satirises the moral and physical qualities required to advance at court. The Essai appeared posthumously in the Correspondance littéraire, a confidential manuscript newsletter circulated among secret subscribers who included European heads of state. However, there is no record of whether d’Holbach saw the Essai as a finished piece of writing or whether it was prepared – or even intended – for publication during his lifetime.

D'Holbach’s Essai criticises a self-serving system of court politics that lacks any regulatory influence on the exercise of monarchical power. Yet it was circulating among European royal courts at a divisive moment in French revolutionary politics. This paper considers the apparent disconnect between d’Holbach’s envisaged audience and the Essai’s actual readers. It examines what this suggests about the way the Essai was understood and organised for publication by d'Holbach’s editors, and considers how this can inform our understanding of the essai’s function as a form of writing in eighteenth-century France.

Biography
Holly Rowe is a second-year DPhil candidate in French at Lincoln College, Oxford. Her research explores the ways in which the essai as a category of writing was defined, used, and understood by Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century France. Holly holds a BA in Modern Languages and History from Durham University and worked in the charity sector for several years before completing an MSt in Modern Languages (European Enlightenment) at Oxford in 2023. Her DPhil is co-funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP, the Lincoln College Kingsgate Scholarship, and the Clarendon Fund.

Sasho Pshenko (Magdalen) - ‘Moving Constellations: Gilles Deleuze's Conceptual Transition’

Abstract
At the start of the 1970s, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze underwent a transition, under the influence of the social theorist and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. He substituted a more classical approach to writing with a more experimental one; he substituted a philosophy which seeks to combine immanence and transcendence with a purely immanent theory.

This transition, perhaps, is most clearly to be seen in the way in which Deleuze reshuffled a constellation of several conceptual components. At first, these components were organised into two distinct groups, two constellations: on the one hand, the binary pairing Sadistic institution-Masochistic contract, and on the other hand, the concept of the differenciator. After the transition, these two constellations were dissolved and regrouped into two new concepts: on the one hand, the concept of the signifying State, and on the other hand the concept of desire.

The new concept of the signifying State was comprised of several elements which previously were associated with the Sadistic institution, as well as others which were associated with the differenciator. The remaining elements of the differenciator went on to form the other new concept, that of desire. In my presentation, I aim to demonstrate, in detail, the particular ways in which this deconstruction and reconstruction of concepts occurred. Through this, I aim to show how exactly this transition signified the advent of a new direction in Deleuze's thought and why it was necessary to take place.

Biography
Sasho Pshenko is a 28-year-old DPhil researcher, currently in the second year of his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. Pshenko was born in Skopje, North Macedonia, where he completed his undergraduate education in General and Comparative Literature. In 2020 he obtained his master's degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford. Since then, Pshenko has published academic articles, and has held seminars and tutorials at the University of Oxford. His interests range across comparative literature, film studies and continental philosophy. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.