Finitude Before Finitude: The case of Rousseau-Bougainville-Diderot

Tahiti is synonymous with a long history of exoticism in French thought. Soon after the publication of Bougainville’s travel accounts, it quickly became rightly or wrongly the epitome of Rousseau’s state of nature, and also led to the development of anthropology before anthropology. In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct the discussion between Rousseau, Bougainville and Diderot about exoticism and otherness, and examine the consequences of the 'discovery' of Tahiti for French thought at the time.