In December 2022, I visited the Institute of Cultural Research at the University of Tartu Estonia, where I had been invited to give a keynote lecture for the International Workshop, 'The Same Event? Morphologies, Reflections, Disseminations', an academic event of the project Baltic Peripeties: Narratives of Reformations, Revolutions and Catastrophes.  I therefore grasped this unique opportunity to share my thoughts around the event, which has emerged as a catalytic theoretical lens, through which I attempt to make meaning of the process of becoming a woman mathematician, natural philosopher and scientist in eighteenth-century Europe. But what is an event in the conceptual toolbox of my inquiries?

For philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, 'the world is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances' (Shaviro 2012, 17). This conceptualization of process and the event at the heart of reality, of the ‘cosmos’ goes back to the Stoics and their distinction between bodies and events — incorporeal  effects of the interrelation of bodies. Departing from good sense, the event sticks out from the ordinary, marks historical discontinuities and opens up the future to a series of differentiations. An event is a point at which existing laws change and new ones are created. In this light an event is an opening onto the possible and even if this possibility is not realized, it will nevertheless persist into the future, preserved in the unconscious of individuals and society, as Deleuze and Guattari (1984) have pointed out in thinking about May '68 as a paradigmatic event. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1984) has also written about 'untimely events', fleeting ruptures, unexpected rebellions and unforeseeable encounters that disrupt the present and offer glimpses to radical futures. 

In this backdrop, du Châtelet's - amongst other women's - engagement with science is not just an occurrence, or an exceptional happening. It is rather of the order of an 'untimely' or 'pure event', free of all normal, or normative causalities.  Its history is ‘a series of amplified instabilities and fluctuations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, 23): her marriage, the death of her second son, her encounter with Voltaire, the need to reside and literally hide in the Château de Cirey.  What counts in the process of her becoming a scientist is the moment of eruption, the moment when she suddenly felt what was intolerable in her life, but also saw the possibility for something else.  It is as if  du Châtelet had said to herself: ‘Give me the possible, or else I’ll suffocate…’ (23). 

By tracing du Châtelet's and other women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture, I therefore agree with Rebecca Messbarger's (2005) critique of the dangerous image of ‘the exceptional woman’ in science, a discourse that dominates the way women scientists were perceived in the past,  but which also reaches our days in new modalities and forms. Deconstructing the discourse of the exceptional woman  is an important step if we are to think differently about the problem that well into the twenty-first century women are still in the margins of mathematical sciences, either as students, teachers, researchers and academics, while their contribution in the history of philosophy and science is either erased and/or misrecognized (see Hagengruber 2022). Perceiving Du Châtelet's emergence as pure and untimely events in the history of gender and science thus becomes my counter argument, or rather my hypothesis, following du Châtelet's epistemological framework. (see Paganini 2022)

References

Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix . 1984. 'Mai 68 n'a pas eu lieu. Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari reprennent la parole ensemble pour analyser 1984 à la lumière de 1968'. Les Nouvelles Littéraires, reprinted in Chimères 2007/2 (N°64), p. 23-24, https://doi.org/10.3917/chime.064.0023 

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Hagengruber, Ruth, E. 2022. Ed., Époque Émilienne: Philosophy and Science in the Age of Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749), Springer Nature, Vol.11.

Messbarger, Rebecca. 2005. ‘The Italian Enlightenment Reform of the Querelle des Femmes’ in The Contest for Knowledge, edited and translated by Rebecca Messbarger and Paula Findlen, 1-22. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Paganini, Gianni. 2022. ‘Émilie Du Châtelet’s Epistemology of Hypotheses’ in Époque Émilienne: Philosophy and Science in the Age of Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749), edited by R. Hagengruber, 21-56. Springer Nature, Vol.11.

Shaviro, Steven. 2012. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.