Rétif de La Bretonne's <i>Lettre d’un singe</i> (1781): Challenging Slavery through Hybridity and ‘spéculation imaginative’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1781 Rétif de La Bretonne (1734–1806) published the unusual pamphlet Lettre d’un singe aux êtres de son espèce, bookending his work of proto-science fiction, La Découverte australe par un homme volant. Rétif decries the barbarous actions of humans through his hybridized protagonist César Singe, described as a ‘singe-Babouin-métis’. His letter takes up debates around the soulless animal and chattel slavery, but more largely lambasts enslavement by first overturning the nascent Enlightenment idea of humanity and secondly by questioning the primacy of scientific discourse over speculative imagination. Through the hybrid simian’s pen, Rétif mobilizes arguments against human destruction and enslavement, exposing essential questions surrounding power and ethics that remain relevant today, forecasting the future radical politics of antiracism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it