Scale, the Other, and Boundaries: Postcolonial Allegory and Posthuman Reflections in Voltaire’s Micromégas

Abstract

As a very tall figure in French literature, and a main speaker of the French Enlightenment movement, Voltaire got his biggest literary achievement through his short philosophical stories. In the year 1752, he completed the writing of the philosophical story Micromégas. Taking the interstellar journey as its frame, the narrative follows the giant Micromégas who comes from Sirius and a companion who comes from Saturn, in their activity of visiting Earth. By means of differences in dimension, scope, and cognition, the story tells mankind, forming a post-colonial fable which contains knowledge violence and a center-edge power structure. In the same time, the narration lowers mankind on the ontological stratification plane. Through the dissolving of existential limits and the ending with the paradox of a “blank philosophy book”, it therefore prefigures the core posthumanist principle of the “decentralization of the human being”. Based on the same origin between cosmic civilizations and species rank structures, this article hence will explain this Enlightenment text by the two perspectives of postcolonial theory and posthumanist theory, therefore exploring its across-era thought value.