In exploring the histories of professors and their teaching at the Collège de France, I’ve often looked at correspondence between chairs, candidates and the administrator. Administrators are elected from within the professoriate and have quite a lot of power in elections. Edmond Faral and Marcel Bataillon were important, for example, in the stories of Émile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alexandre Koyré (on Koyré’s unsuccessful attempt, see here). The biologist Étienne Wolff (1904-96) held a chair in experimental embryology at the Collège from 1955 until his 1974 retirement, and was administrator from 1966 and 1974. (He is in the middle of the front row in this 1967 photograph of the professors.) His course summaries, biography and obituaries are on the Collège’s website. In 1972 he was elected to the Académie française. Earlier in his career he worked at the University of Strasbourg, joining there in 1931, completing his doctorate in 1936, and eventually becoming chair of zoology. Wolff is an interesting figure, whose work was read by philosophers, and who seemed comfortable in dialogue with them.

Wolff’s 1946 book La Science des monstres begins with a survey of different types of monsters in biology, ranging from humans to other mammals to birds. Monstrosity here seems to mean any kind of abnormality, generally in terms of a birth defect. Wolff’s own experimental work is only a part of what he discusses in the book, but he does devote a lot of attention to how monsters can be produced in the laboratory. (I am not sure how this could be reconciled with Wolff’s advocacy for animal rights.)

Some quotes from the book’s conclusion give a sense of his argument, and why his work was of interest to philosophers: “Teratology was at first regarded as a science ancillary to anatomy, of which it remained for a long time a poor relation, attractive for what it had of the mysterious, disconcerting for what it had of the inexplicable” (p. 236). It was historically “a dry science” confined to work with “the cadavers in jars in collections”, but is now seen, he suggests, as “a living branch of Embryology, more specifically of experimental Embryology” (p. 236). This means it is no longer seen as a distinct science, but linked to the more general laws of development. “There follows a formula that has been abused, but which in this case is not false: the monster is the exception that proves the rule” (p. 236).

La Science des monstres was published in 1948, but was completed in 1941 – the preface is dated to November of that year in Edelbach, Austria, while he was a prisoner of war (p. 10). An addenda to it, dated to Strasbourg on 24 December 1945, says that there was little he would now change, but that he was able to supplement the text with photographs and figures (pp. 10-11). Wolff had been an artillery officer and had been captured during the Battle of France in 1940. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner at Oflag XVII-A, a camp for officers. There he was a leading figure in the Université de Captivité, where he taught alongside the mathematics professor Jean Leray, the geologist François Ellenberger and the philosopher Raymond Ruyer. Wolff was Jewish, and Anna Maria Sigmund, Peter Michor, and Karl Sigmund suggest that he was “by all testimonies a driving force behind the university, but obliged, for racial reasons, to keep discreetly in the background” (“Leray in Edelbach”, p. 42; see Christophe Eckes, “Captivité et consécration scientifique”, p. 43; Sanchez-Palencia, “Recherche et enseignement en captivité”). The camp awarded diplomas which were officially ratified after the war. Wolff was moved to Oflag X-C in Lübeck, northern Germany in 1944. This was the second POW camp in which Fernand Braudel was imprisoned, and in which he wrote much of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Oflag X-C was liberated by the British Army in May 1945, after which prisoners were repatriated. Edelbach was, in contrast, liberated by the Red Army, though many of the prisoners had been relocated by that time.

It is surely in part due to the peculiar nature of teaching in a camp which led to the nature of the book Wolff wrote, not so much in terms of the content, but the form. The book has an introductory tone, although it gets quite specialised, and is not over-encumbered by references. Even without knowing its context of composition, it feels like it was written without access to libraries. “It was written far from all documentation” (p. 9). More than this, for an experimental scientist, it was in part a product of an enforced separation from the laboratory. A shorter guide on related material, and using many of the same examples and illustrations, is his “La genèse des monstres” for the Pléiade encyclopedia on biology in 1965. A good sense of his overall work in this area is in Fernand Lot, “Entretien avec Étienne Wolff”.

In his study of monstrosity, Figures de la tératologie scientifique, Pierre Ancet situates Wolff as the last figure in a distinguished lineage of Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Camille Dareste. Isabel Gabel argues that the philosopher Raymond Ruyer’s conversations with Wolff were fundamental to his philosophical research, and especially for the manuscript which became his Éléments de psycho-biologie, published after the war.

Wolff was also known for his 1946 book Les Changements de sexe, also written while in captivity. The preface is dated to 1 November 1943 in Edelbach (p. 11). Both this and La Science des monstres appeared in a Gallimard series directed by Jean Rostand, L’Avenir de la science. In his memoir, Trois pattes pour un canard, Wolff says that these two books were based on his teaching in the camp, and that without the enforced discipline they may not have been written (p. 119 n. 15). Once again, Wolff was writing without access to a laboratory. As he says in the preface to Les Changements de sexe: “Deprived of any original references and even the most current books, I had to rely mainly on my memory” (p. 11).

This book was reviewed by Georges Bataille in Critique in 1947 and was used by Michel Foucault in his 1964 Clermont-Ferrand course on sexuality (see the editor Claude-Olivier Doron’s notes to La Sexualité, p. 34 n. 16 and 36 n. 41-44; Sexuality, p. 47 n. 16; 50 n. 41-44). Wolff discusses the difference between genetic and genital sex, showing how experimentally the latter can be changed in embryos, and that until a certain stage of development is not determined, but that genetic sex is fixed at fertilization (p. 285). The discussion of hermaphroditism in Chapter XI of La Science des monstres would presumably also have interested Foucault, though I know of no references to this in his work. The topic is also discussed throughout Les Changements de sexe.

At Strasbourg Wolff was a colleague of Georges Canguilhem, though this must have been only after the war, since Canguilhem taught in Strasbourg from 1941, by which time Wolff was a prisoner of war. Canguilhem had initially quit teaching in a lycée under Vichy to work with the resistance instead, but joined the University of Strasbourg to replace Jean Cavaillès, who had moved to the Sorbonne. It was there that Canguilhem completed his doctorate in medicine, though during the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine the University was in exile in Clermont-Ferrand. Canguilhem’s doctorate in medicine was The Normal and the Pathological; his later doctorate in philosophy was La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles.Canguilhem taught at Strasbourg until 1948, when he was appointed Inspector General of Philosophy, a position he held until he succeeded Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne in 1955.

I never mentioned Wolff in my book Canguilhem in 2019, except as the editor of a book in which Canguilhem has an essay. But his work is discussed in several places by Canguilhem, including The Normal and the Pathological – both the original 1943 text and the 1966 ‘New Reflections’ – and Knowledge of Life, especially the essay on monstrosity. Canguilhem knew Wolff’s work well – he references the 1936 primary thesis Les bases de la tératogenèse expérimentale des vertébrés amniotes, through to the post-war books Les Changements de sexe, La science des monstres, and the 1963 collection Chemins de la vie. The indexes of the Œuvres complètes would reveal more references, many of which are explored in a 2018 article by Matteo Vagelli, who also gives some indications of where Canguilhem used Wolff’s work in his teaching, with references to the courses in his archives.

Canguilhem’s “Monstrosity and the Monstrous” lecture was delivered on 9 February 1962, to the Institut des hautes études in Belgium, before appearing in the journal Diogène at the end of that year (La Connaissance de la vie, p. 236 n. *; Knowledge of Life, 182 n. 31). Canguilhem’s first reference to Wolff in this piece is to a lecture Wolff gave at the Collège philosophique on 24 January 1962. I have been unable to find a published trace of this lecture. Canguilhem’s discussion of Wolff is part of the inspiration for his claim that “life is poor in monsters, while the fantastic is a world” (La Connaissance de la vie, p. 183, see 173; Knowledge of Life, p. 145, see p. 136).

Canguilhem and Wolff were both participants in a conference to celebrate the centenary of Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale held in Paris on 29 June-2 July 1965. Bernard had taught at the Collège de France, and the event was jointly organised by that institution and the Fondation Singer-Polignac. (There is a plaque marking the building where Bernard had his laboratory on the corner of Rue des Écoles and Rue Saint-Jacques; and a statue of him stands in front of the main entrance.) The first day was held at the Collège, and the subsequent days took place at the Fondation. Bernard Halpern, chair of experimental medicine at the Collège, led the event, but Wolff opened the proceedings, followed by the Minister for Education, Christian Fouchet. (Around this time, Foucault was part of the Fouchet Commission on education reform. See my The Archaeology of Foucault, pp. 91-93 and its references.) Two volumes of papers came from the event – Philosophie et méthodologie scientifiques de Claude Bernard and Les Concepts de Claude Bernard sur le milieu intérieur. Wolff and Fouchet’s opening speeches are included in the first of these two volumes (pp. 1-3, 4-6), as is Canguilhem’s contribution (pp. 23-32). Bernard was a frequent reference for Canguilhem in his work. The links between Wolff and Bernard on experimentation are briefly mentioned by Samuel Talcott in his Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error (p. 160).

On Saturday 26^th February 1966, Wolff presented “Le climat de la découverte en biologie” to the Société française de philosophie, invited by the society’s president Jean Wahl. Wahl was also the organiser of the Collège philosophique. The discussion which follows Wolff’s lecture had contributions by several people identified by surname alone, but they include Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, vice-president of the society, Canguilhem, the Hegel scholar Jean Hyppolite, the chemist and physicist Adrienne Weill (daughter of the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg) and, I think, the psychologist Eugène Minkowski. Canguilhem asks whether the idea of a “climate” in the idea of “climate of discovery” can be used in biology in the same way it is used in geography, as plural, encompassing regions of the world, of a city, or even of a “micro-climate”. He wonders if this could be analysed in terms of the “level of the laboratory… discipline… convergence of disciplines” (p. 133). He develops this idea in terms of discoveries in laboratories (p. 134). Wolff pushes back a bit, noting that it is not so much that the methods are distinct, but their objects, and that working hypotheses were often trading on previous approaches, even if they sometimes differed. He clarifies: “The climate is not only the methods which are used in laboratories, but the affective tonalities which are found there. The affective climates are very different from one laboratory to another” (p. 135).

In his inaugural lecture to the Collège, in 1970, Foucault describes how each discipline includes “true and false propositions”, but excludes “beyond its margins, a whole teratology of knowledge [savoir]”. Foucault uses this to discuss a familiar theme of the exterior of a science, of errors only happening in what Canguilhem’s calls “within the true”, and evokes “prowling monsters” outside (L’Ordre du discours, 25; “The Order of Discourse”, 153-54). I don’t think Foucault ever uses the evocative phrase “teratology of knowledge” elsewhere, though monstrosity was of course a major theme of his 1974-75 Collège course, The Abnormals. That course has no mention of Wolff, and its focus is much more human and historical than his work. But I wonder if the mention of teratology in the inaugural lecture was a nod to Wolff, the administrator at the time he was elected and began lecturing at the Collège.

Of course, Wolff’s primary work was with scientists, and his courses at the Collège were for a specialist audeince. Some of the lectures presented to his seminar there in 1965-66 were collected in a volume simultaneously published in French and English – De l’embryologie expérimentale à la biologie moléculaire;The Relationship Between Experimental Embryology and Molecular Biology. The tribute volume to Wolff, published the year after his retirement, Embryologie chimique et expérimentale, is filled with contributions on his more scientific aspects, from biology to chemistry and medicine. The interest in his work by philosophers is absent.

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A video of a lecture by Wolff, “La Genése des monstres”, is on the Canal website. (Content warning: some graphic images of birth defects in humans and other animals, and experimentation on embryos. The video is in French and does not have subtitles.)

A short film about him from INA is on Youtube, “Les dialoges d’Etienne Wolff“, which has quite a bit about his cat… French subtitles can be turned on for this.

Confusingly, in 2022 another Étienne Wolff edited a book of essays on monsters and monstrosities from antiquity until the present, but this is not the same person!

References

Embryologie chimique et expérimentale: résultats récents; livre jubilaire offert à É. Wolff, Paris: Masson et C^ie, 1975. 

Pierre Ancet, Figures de la tératologie scientifique: Étienne et Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Camille Dareste, Étienne Wolff, Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2022.

Georges Bataille, “Qu’est-ce que le sexe?” Critique 11, 1947, 363-72; reprinted in Œuvres completes XI, Articles 1, 1944-1949, eds. Francis Marmande with Sibylle Monod, Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 210-221; “What is Sex?” in Critical Essays 1: 1944-1948, trans. Chris Turner, eds. Alberto Toscano and Benjamin Noys, Seagull Books, 2023, 134-45.

Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 12th edn, 2015 [1943/1966]; reprinted in Œuvres complètes, Vol II; trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen as The Normal and the Pathological, New York: Zone, 1991 [1978].

Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie, Paris: Vrin, 1952, second edition, 1965; reprinted in Œuvres complètes, Vol II; Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

Georges Canguilhem, La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles, Paris: PUF, second edition, 1977 [1955]; reprinted in Œuvres complètes, Vol II.

Georges Canguilhem, “Théorie et technique de l’expérimentation chez Claude Bernard”, in Étienne Wolff, Christian Fouchet, Bernard A. Houssay et al. Philosophie et méthodologie scientifiques de Claude Bernard, Paris: Masson & Cie, 1967, 23-32; reprinted in Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Paris: 1983 [1968], 143-55 and Œuvres complètes, Vol III, 430-47.

Georges Canguilhem, Œuvres complètes, ed. Camille Limoges et. al., Paris: Vrin, six volumes, 2011-25.

Collège de France, “Étienne Wolff: Embryologie expérimentale”, https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/chaire/etienne-wolff-embryologie-experimentale-chaire-statutaire

Christophe Eckes, “Captivité et consécration scientifique: Reconsidérer la trajectoire académique du mathématicien prisonnier de guerre Jean Leray (1940-1947)”, Genèses 121, 2020, 31-51.

Stuart Elden, Canguilhem, Cambridge: Polity, 2019.

Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.

Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; “The Order of Discourse”, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton in Nancy Luxon (ed.), Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 141-73.

Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France (1974–1975), eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomani, Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999; Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Verso, 2003.

Michel Foucault, La Sexualité: Cours donné à l’université de Clermont- Ferrand (1964), suivi de Le Discours de la sexualité: Cours donné à l’université de Vincennes (1969), ed. Claude-Olivier Doron, Paris: EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil, 2018; Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

Isabel Gabel, “La biologie, la réflexivité et l’histoire: Réinscrire Canguilhem dans son milieu”, Revue d’histoire des sciences 71 (2), 2018, 155-78.

Roger Heim, Bernard Halpern, Yvon Bourges et. al. Les Concepts de Claude Bernard sur le milieu intérieur, Paris: Masson & Cie, 1967.

Fernand Lot, “L’homme qui crée des monstres. Entretien avec Étienne Wolff de l’Académie Française”, Science et recherche odontostomatologiques, 2 (1), 1972, 59-71.

Raymond Ruyer, Éléments de psycho-biologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946. 

Evariste Sanchez-Palencia, “Recherche et enseignement en captivité: Leray à Edelbach”, Histoire des sciences / Evolution des disciplines et histoire des découvertes, 2015, https://www.academie-sciences.fr/pdf/hse/evol_Sanchez3.pdf

Anna Maria Sigmund, Peter Michor, Karl Sigmund, “Leray in Edelbach”, The Mathematical Intelligencer 27 (2), 2005, 41-50.

Samuel Talcott, Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error, London: Palgrave, 2019. 

Matteo Vagelli, “De la science des monstres: Canguilhem et la tératologie expérimentale d’Étienne Wolff”, Revue d’histoire des sciences 71 (2), 2018, 243-70.

Étienne Wolff, Les bases de la tératogénèse expérimentale des Vertébrés amniotes d’après les résultats de méthodes directes and L’évolution après l’éclosion des Poulets males transformés en intersexués par l’hormone femelle injectée aux jeunes embryons, Strasbourg: Imprimerie Alsacienne, 1936.

Étienne Wolff, Les Changements de sexe, Paris: Gallimard, 1946.

Étienne Wolff, La science des monstres, Paris: Gallimard, 1948.

Étienne Wolff, Chemins de la vie, Paris: Hermann, 1963.

Étienne Wolff, “La genèse des monstres”, in Jean Rostand and Andrée Tétry eds., Biologie, Paris: Gallimard, 1965, 561-620.

Étienne Wolff, “Le climat de la découverte en biologie”, Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 60 (4), 1966, 119-49. Part of the discussion is reprinted in Canguilhem, Œuvres completes V, 83-87.

E. Wolff ed., De l’embryologie expérimentale à la biologie moléculaire, Paris: Dunod, 1967; The Relationship Between Experimental Embryology and Molecular Biology, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1967.

Étienne Wolff, Christian Fouchet, Bernard A. Houssay et al. Philosophie et méthodologie scientifiques de Claude Bernard, Paris: Masson & Cie, 1967.

Étienne Wolff, Trois pattes pour un canard: souvenirs d’un biologist, Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1990.

Étienne Wolff [not the same person] ed., Monstres et monstruosités de l’Antiquité à nos jours: En Occident et en Orient, Paris: Harmattan, 2022.

Videos

“La genèse des monstres”, https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/cerimes/la-genese-des-monstres

“Les dialoges d’Etienne Wolff”, INA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf3xrUKkfMU

“Etienne WOLFF sur l’utilisation des découvertes scientifiques”, INA, https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/i05210909/etienne-wolff-sur-l-utilisation-des-decouvertes-scientifiques

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This is the 38th post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few shorter pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.