[PODCAST] Confluence of Research Worlds: Take a deep dive into the clandestine literature of the 18th century in France with Émilie du Châtelet and Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin

Music: The Return composed by Alexander Nakarada (CC BY 4.0)
A podcast series created and produced by Bérénice Gagne

Philosopher Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina, is a fellow at the Collegium - Lyon Institute for Advanced Studies for the year 2023-24. She is conducting research on the relationship between clandestine literature from the late 17th century to the early 18th century and the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, a French scientist and philosopher (a distinction that doesn't make much sense in that era) of the 18th century.

Émilie Du Châtelet herself is the only woman identified as the author of clandestine texts during that time.

She expresses very radical ideas: she advocates for women's access to education, not only as students – on equal terms with men – but also as producers of knowledge, as she herself is a prominent scientist of her time.

To analyze the texts of the Enlightenment period, Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin notably employs the concept of "gynodicy." This term is a neologism coined on the model of "theodicy" – the attempt to reconcile the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God with the existence of evil. Gynodicy is, therefore, an attempt to reconcile the recognition of equality of rights between men and women with the persistence of patriarchy, a system based on the domination of women by men.

In conducting this research, Natalia Zorrilla Sirlin collaborates with Susana Seguin at the Institute of History of Representations and Ideas in Modernities (IHRIM).