“flowers Strewn on the Way to Volupté ”: La Mettrie and the Tropic Body of the Epicurean Philosopher

Abstract

“Man is a machine constructed in such a way that is impossible first of all to have a clear of it and consequently to define it.” If we would like to know exactly how the human mechanism operates, La Mettrie intimates, we must look outside of treatises, and in so doing “ignore the history of all the futile opinions of philosophers.” From La Mettrie's point of view, man-a-machine could just as well be man-a-mushroom. This eighteenth-century protocyborg turns out to be “an image and not an explanatory principle.” In other words, he is nothing but a trope.