A figure at once transparent and enigmatic, qualities we should imagine to be shared by what the figure names.
Montesquieu says,
“From my fatherland, I ask neither a pension nor honors nor distinctions; I find myself compensated amply enough by the air that I breathe. I would only desire that it does not become corrupted.”
Corrupt air is air that’s “gone bad,” in the sense that a fruit can go bad, not because its goodness has been decreased but because this goodness has undergone an absolute inversion of polarity. Corrupt air is bad air, no longer fit for giving or maintaining life.
We can distinguish it from the rather less enigmatic notion of “polluted air” in the following way. First, “polluted air” is usually understood as a mixture resulting from the intrusion of noxious elements into the aerobic space of humans, animals, or plants. Second, we conceive of it as a deviation from a norm – let’s call this “clean air,” which stands in a different relation to “polluted air” than the one that holds between “corrupted air” and its opposite, “pure air.” Finally, and in consequence of these other judgments, which enter into the sphere of ecology from atomistic physics and medicine respectively, “polluted air” comes to us as a problem that asks for a technological solution, as a threatening mixture that we should, and can, undo.
“Corrupted air,” to the contrary, results not from the mixture of an outside element into the atmosphere but rather from processes internal to the air itself. Here, too, there is a medical metaphor at work: corruption is what Latin speakers from the third century onward called the decomposition of a human corpse after death. Without the soul to act as its preservative, the body became subject to certain internal processes that marked its movement away from life, and the progress of death within it, according to a progression that we would recognize as decay.
Before the nineteenth century, death stood in relation to life not as a deviation, but as an inversion. In a similar way, “corrupted air” opposes all the values one might attach to “pure air.” Rather that fostering life, it opposes life. The miasma that brings disease, for instance, is a form of corrupted air. So is a nauseating stench. “Corrupted air” is an air that undermines and vitiates the living; and yet it remains air, which is to say, according to the criterion par excellence of pre-modern thought, it remains invisible.
An air not narrowly defined according to an enumeration of elements (elements that a properly-qualified expert might, by use of a condenser, for instance, bring to visibility) but rather embracing the whole realm of invisible things is perhaps now unthinkable. We will, however, not be able to understand the political force of the figure as Montesquieu (and many others before him) employ it unless we can think exactly this kind of total air: an air composed not only of things, but also of motions, intelligences, and thought itself.
Enlightenment thrives in “pure air” – and even in “polluted air.” “Corrupted air” only supports various forms of half-life and semi-conscious life. Montesquieu himself thrived in a pure air which his opponents and persecutors, prigs and churchmen all, strove to corrupt. The Revolution issued in a great purification of the air; in the last years of the Ancien Regime, France’s greatest thinkers were automata.