Aestheticizing the Laboratory: "Delirium," the Chemists, and the Boundaries of Language

This essay revisits Sir Humphry Davy's 1799-1800 nitrous oxide experiments. Situating these experiments between the emerging objective discourse of the "Chemical Revolution," initiated by Lavoisier, and the organic sensibilities of Davy's Romantic companions, this essay argues that Davy's psychopharmacological experiments give way to a new phenomenology of chemistry. Davy's and his subjects' accounts of these experiments, the essay argues, break free from the confines of Lavoisier's chemical nomenclature, and suggest a way to re-think language on the outside of language, one that is always in the process of becoming chemical.