L’organe du toucher et la neurologie du racisme : l’origine tactile de la couleur de la peau chez Claude-Nicolas Le Cat

Abstract

The Organ of Touch and the Neurology of Racism: Claude-Nicolas Le Cat and the Tactile Origin of Skin Color This article aims to explore the way in which the sense of touch is analysed by the physician Claude-Nicolas Le Cat (1700-1768) in his Treatise on the color of human skin (1765), a work which testifies to the fruitful synergy between medicine and philosophy in eighteenth-century France. By the convergence of two canonical questions of early-modern biological thought - the epistemological value of touch and the question of skin colour - Le Cat’s work succeeds in drawing original conclusions both from a strictly physiological perspective and from a wider anthropological and philosophical perspective. Concerning the first aspect, Le Cat introduces a « neurological » explanation of the colour of the skin (which allows him to solve even the enigma of albinism) which opposes the most established pathological paradigm. Concerning the second aspect, the « normalisation » of the explanation of blackness, makes possible by Le Cat’s theory of touch, fits into a complex phenomenon, typical of the eighteenth century, namely the questioning of European society through the moral designation of the Other.