Dramatic Experiments

Life according to Diderot

Eyal Peretz

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438448022, 9781438448039
• eBook ISBN: 9781438448046
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: European Drama

Dramatic Experiments offers a comprehensive study of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of European modernity. Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, art critic, and editor of the first major modern encyclopedia. He is known for having made lasting contributions to a number of fields, but his body of work is considered too dispersed and multiform to be unified. Eyal Peretz locates the unity of Diderot's thinking in his complication of two concepts in modern philosophy: drama and the image. Diderot's philosophical theater challenged the work of Plato and Aristotle, inaugurating a line of drama theorists that culminated in the twentieth century with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. His interest in the artistic image turned him into the first great modern theorist of painting and perhaps the most influential art critic of modernity. With these innovations, Diderot provokes a rethinking of major philosophical problems relating to life, the senses, history, and appearance and reality, and more broadly a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and the arts. Peretz shows Diderot to be a radical thinker well ahead of his time, whose philosophical effort bears comparison to projects such as Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis.

PART I

DIDEROT AND THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS—D’ALEMBERT’S DREAM

ONE

LIFE’S DRAMA

D’ALEMBERT: J’avoue qu’un être qui existe quelque part et qui ne correspond à aucun point de l’espace; un Être qui est inétendu et qui occupe de l’étendue; qui est tout entier sous chaque partie de cette étendue; qui diffère essentiellement de la matière et qui lui est uni; qui la suit et qui la meut sans se mouvoir; qui agit sur elle et qui en subit toutes les vicissitudes; un Être dont je n’ai pas la moindre idée; un Être d’une nature aussi contradictoire est difficile à admettre. Mais d’autres obscurités attendent celui qui le rejette; car enfin cette sensibilité que vous lui substituez, si c’est une qualité générale et essentielle de la matière, il faut que la pierre sente.

DIDEROT: Pourquoi non?

D’ALEMBERT: Cela est dur à croire.

DIDEROT: Oui, pour celui qui la coupe, la taille, la broie et qui ne l’entend pas crier.

D’ALEMBERT: Je voudrais bien que vous me dissiez quelle différence vous mettez entre l’homme et la statue, entre le marbre et la chair.

DIDEROT: Assez peu. On fait du marbre avec de la chair, et de la chair avec du marbre.¹

Thus opens Diderot’s enigmatic text of 1769, D’Alembert’s Dream. Written as a series of dramatic conversations, the text is composed of three parts: “A Conversation between Diderot and D’Alembert,” “D’Alembert’s Dream,” and “Sequel to the Conversation,” all unified by convention as D’Alembert’s Dream. To quickly rehearse the basics, in the first part Diderot and his friend D’Alembert enter into a debate about the question of sensibility and its relation to the general questions of the nature of life and matter. Can we account for both life and matter with a single principle, or do we need an additional, extra worldly element? The second part, presented as having occurred on the night of the conversation, and in which the day’s residues form the conversation are transformed into an enigmatic dream, marks the disappearance of Diderot as a speaker and the introduction of two new characters, Mlle de L’Espinasse, D’Alembert’s companion, and one doctor Bourdeu, who both try to respond to D’Alembert’s dreaming hallucinations regarding the essence of life. In the third part, taking place the following afternoon, D’Alembert himself disappears, leaving the doctor and the Mlle to discuss briefly some issues regarding “unnatural sexuality” that are unfit to discuss in company.

It is around the question of the essence of life, then, in its relation to the phenomenon of dreaming, that D’Alembert’s Dream will develop that fundamental insight of Diderot’s regarding a positive alienation which marks the self and the world with an originary intimate/external disaster, and which we are tracking through several of Diderot’s fundamental texts.

As with all Diderot’s major works, one asks upon a first reading, “What the hell is this thing?” “What just happened?” “Is it some bizarre three-organed monster, a three-headed creature perhaps, an unrecognizable fabulous animal that just crossed our path on its way to the mysterious cave that is its hidden dwelling?” “Or perhaps it is not one creature, or text, at all, but three smaller creatures somehow artificially joined together for a moment before parting company, each going its separate way?” “Were we dreaming or awake?” “Did we just see what we thought we saw or was it our imagination?”

This text is so strange and enigmatic partly due to the relations established between its dramatic form, its content—having to do with the development of a general materialism and a theory of life—and its characters: a philosopher, a doctor, a geometrician, and a woman. It is not exactly clear what kind of text it is. Is it a metaphysical treatise on the nature of that which is? Is it a scientific treatise in natural zoology, describing the history of the development of animal life? Is it a theatrical play? A love story? The delirious hallucination of a mad dreamer? A pedagogical text written by a man and intended for the education of women, or perhaps for the education of men by women? Is it perhaps all of these at once? We are left wondering how we might account for such an unholy concoction. What would account for the text’s unity—if, in fact, it has a unity at all?

Traditionally, with few exceptions, the text has been read mainly from the point of view of its themes, by those examining its role in eighteenth-century materialism, its proto-Darwinian character, or its significance in the late-eighteenth-century rise of the life sciences and biology. Yet we miss the essence of this text if we ignore its literary form, which is obviously not external to the concepts invoked but is immanent to them and transforms their very understanding.² That is, one can understand the text’s major concepts—life, materialism, sensibility, organism, etc.—and Diderot’s essential contribution in relation to them only by accounting for their precise relations to the text’s “literary” form, the ways they are permeated by the question of dramatic conversation.

The following discussion aims to lay out the foundations for a real engagement with D’Alembert’s Dream by examining the basic relations between its staging—that is, its dramatic form and the characters who populate it—and some of its major thematic concerns.

THE INFINITE CONVERSATION AND THE THINKING OF THE OUTSIDE

Let us, then, approach this strange and unrecognizable thing that we have bumped into along our way.³ Where better to start than at the text’s beginning, with the opening lines of D’Alembert’s Dream that opened our discussion?

But as with all of Diderot’s texts, we soon discover that there is no such thing as beginning, if we understand beginning in the strong sense of the term as a meaningful point of origin that orients everything that follows it. We always find ourselves in medias res and, more precisely for Diderot, in the middle of a conversation. We do not know when Diderot and D’Alembert started to talk, nor what they have been talking about before we began eavesdropping, nor what exactly brought them to say what they now say or adopt the positions they seem to endorse. All we know is that they are already in the middle of conversing. What is the significance of this starting in the middle? It means, to begin with, that we are presented with a text that is not the whole thing. It is not complete, having a beginning and an end. Rather, the text seems to be a fragment of something larger that we are not wholly given. Thus, it has an outside. But what would this outside be? We can of course say that the outside is simply further conversation. The two men’s prior conversation has been omitted because the moment of conversation with which it opens is what is important to the text. The conversation itself was larger than the text, as we get a view of only its important part.

Yet, from another, more essential point of view, what is outside the given conversation has a completely different nature than the conversation itself. Any conversation, it tells us, can always only start in the middle (or is the very activation of being in the middle, finding oneself in the midst of things), and in this sense no conversation can be complete, or whole. There are only “fragments” of conversation; there is no such thing as the beginning of a conversation as a meaningful point of origin to orient and make intelligible everything that follows it. The conversation emerges in medias res out of something, an outside, that can itself never become an actual part of the conversation. This is an outside that the conversation therefore cannot say, but is nevertheless that which gets it going, serves as the constant resource from which it draws its movement as it progresses, and somehow is shown by the conversation.⁴ Starting thus in medias res, eliminating the possibility of being present to a meaningful origin-point of orientation, Diderot makes us open to this outside that, while never becoming part of the conversation, is nevertheless fully immanent to it and constantly haunting it as that which, were it available, would finally give us the whole of the conversation. A haunting, immanent outside is thus that which is “viewed” when the text begins in medias res, in the middle of a conversation. And what is this outside? Nothing, but (to begin with, defined negatively) the very disappearance of the possibility of an origin-point that would intelligibly orient the whole.

Crucially, this disappearance of an absolute point of origin and orientation, the discovery of a haunting by an immanent outside, implies for Diderot that things always begin as a conversation or as drama, that is, as the interaction of at least two voices, or more precisely two speakers (there must be more than one speaker once there is no origin).⁵ If there were only a single voice, a monologue, this voice could say it all, say the whole, since it would have no exteriority, no outside. Once the possibility of having a meaningful whole disappears, so does the single voice. Thus in the beginning—a beginning always in medias res—there was drama: the interaction of at least two voices haunted by an outside that marks their lack of meaningful origin.

If the conversation is that which lacks an orienting origin, there can be no external point of view to either bring it to an end or explain its movement. As such, the conversation is that which can be approached only out of itself, without relation to any externality and thus completely immanently. The haunting by the outside thus paradoxically implies a principle of absolute immanence. One cannot resort to anything outside the conversation to get hold of it and exhaust its movement. The conversation, whose “originating” resource is the outside, is thus simultaneously that which only happens out of itself.

Let us move on to the content of the conversation between Diderot and D’Alembert. What do the two conversers or dramatic characters talk about? Strikingly, they talk about how it is impossible to accept the existence of a certain outside to the so-called material world, an outside, call it God or soul, whose nature would be completely different from that of this world, yet nevertheless could be established as something in relation to which this world operates: a transcendent thing, exterior to the world, which functions as a principle of intelligibility and causality of this world.

The discovery of an immanent outside, through the dramatic form of a conversation that begins in the middle, as if results, from the point of view of the content, with the dissolution of what Diderot, among others, calls metaphysics. The content becomes the reflection of the form, and metaphysics is replaced by drama.

We might thus begin to sketch a series of differences between metaphysical thinking, a thinking organized around the positing of a transcendent object, and the thinking with which Diderot attempts to replace it, call it dramatic thinking. If, in its basic operation, the metaphysical tradition’s transcendent outside called for a contemplation of an externality that one dreams of merging with, then the basic operation of Diderotian dramatic thinking, a thinking guided by the discovery of the immanent outside, is a reflection and a showing of its own form, or of the medium that animates it, rather than the reaching to an object external to it. The contemplation of transcendence is replaced by a “showing” of an outside, an outside activated via a conversation that reflects itself.

Sensibility and Materialism

Let us, then, continue looking at the text’s opening conversation, and the enormous implications borne by this elimination of the metaphysical, transcendent outside and its replacement by a haunting immanent outside that implies an originary drama. We encounter here a demand for a new conceptual and terminological framework, a new way of writing, and the introduction of new dramatic personae onto the philosophical stage. The first term enabling this dramatic revolution, the term that allows Diderot to spearhead the attempt to dissolve metaphysical thinking, is sensibility,⁶ now understood by Diderot as the general quality of “matter.”⁷ Yet what is sensibility? This is one of the central enigmas that this text poses for us. To some extent all the conceptual and literary moves made by the text hinge on, or are made possible by, its attempt to explore this concept’s implications. Materialism is a new thinking of sensibility.

It is well known that the vocabulary of sensibility, sensation, sentiment, etc., became all-pervasive in eighteenth-century writing, but did so without, perhaps, achieving a particularly clear definition.⁸ But my aim in exploring Diderot’s understanding of this vocabulary is not historical; I am not interested here in deciding whether his use of this vocabulary is original or how it stands in relation to the uses made by other thinkers, such as Condillac in his Traité des sensations, La Mettrie, etc. However important these questions, they are not mine. All that interests me in this context is to try to follow how this vocabulary functions within the realm of Diderot’s text, and what thinking it makes possible.⁹

The Stone’s Cry

D’ALEMBERT: […] Mais d’autres obscurités attendent celui qui le rejette; car enfin cette sensibilité que vous lui substituez, si c’est une qualité générale et essentielle de la matière, il faut que la pierre sente.

DIDEROT: Pourquoi non ?

D’ALEMBERT: Cela est dur à croire.

DIDEROT: Oui, pour celui qui la coupe, la taille, la broie et qui ne l’entend pas crier.

D’ALEMBERT: Je voudrais bien que vous me disiez quelle différence vous mettez entre l’homme et la statue, entre le marbre et la chair.

DIDEROT: Assez peu. On fait du marbre avec de la chair, et de la chair avec du marbre.¹⁰

What, then, is sensibility? In its most basic and essential determination, from which all other determinations must follow, sensibility is simply the possibility anything possesses to suffer an event where it is taken outside itself, and involuntarily so, where its identity is exceeded by something not in its control. As Diderot says in his Encyclopédie entry on sensation: “Les sensations font sortir l’âme hors d’elle meme.”¹¹ Or, as he says in another context, listing specific cases of events associated with sensibility that mark instances of a self losing itself and its identity: “Sensibility, according to the only accepted usage of that word up until now, is, it seems to me, that disposition in beings, always accompanied by a weakness of the organs—a consequence of excessive mobility of the diaphragm, liveliness of the imagination, or irritability of nerves—that causes them to sympathize, to shudder, to admire, to fear, to be disturbed, to weep to faint, to help others, to run away, to cry out, to lose their reason, to exaggerate, to despise, to disdain, to have no precise idea whatever of the truth, goodness, or beauty, to run mad.”¹² Sensibility thus both marks an outside and a possible experience of madness. The outside in question here is, again, not a simple externality, but, as in the case of the conversation, something internal to the soul, part of its very constitution: the soul as ex-posed or ecstatic, “containing” as what is what is most internal to it, a fundamental ex-cess. Diderot names this excess madness, the madness of the outside.

In the cases mentioned above the vocabulary of sensibility and sensation, and the madness of the outside implied by it, is used in relation to the human realm. But this vocabulary is not limited to this realm, and marks for Diderot the basic “determination” of anything that is. Anything whatsoever has to be understood according to the logic of sensibility; that is, anything whatsoever exists in relation to the possibility that it suffer not being itself, or suffer being taken outside itself or its identity, understood as that which makes it what it is. In this sense, nothing exists that is only itself; every entity is always also not itself, “containing” an outside that somehow haunts its identity. In the words of the delirious, dreaming D’Alembert: “All creatures intermingle with each other, consequently all the species … everything is in a perpetual flux. Every animal is more or less man; every mineral is more or less plant; every plant is more or less animal.”¹³

The activation of sensibility means a passage through an outside, which for Diderot is a passage through madness, in its being completely undetermined by any identity or preexisting condition; that is, it is completely non-teleological and, in a way, is nothing but the very fact of activating that which has neither beginning nor end: the activation of the in medias res.

In the beginning was sensibility, the being outside itself.

Let us, then, go back to the text and examine Diderot’s engagement with this notion of sensibility.

D’Alembert grasped the consequences of Diderot’s argument for a general sensibility of matter, thus of everything that is (which we can now understand as the inscription at the heart of everything there is—“matter” in the sense of a realm without transcendence—of an unfulfillable outside). He raised, as we saw, the objection that a stone itself should be seen as something that can sense. “And why not?” Diderot asks.

First, it is important to pay attention to this question, which is in fact the very first thing uttered by Diderot in the text. “Why not?” encapsulates the whole of Diderot’s philosophical method: it is itself the activation in the mode of questioning of the being of the outside, or the activation of the outside as a question proper to it, a question that is thus to some extent mad.

Seeing a madman arguing intensely with a streetlamp, a bystander comments that this is not a person with whom you can argue. “And why not?” asks the madman. For what type of utterance is this question? It neither affirms nor denies the proposition to which it responds; it neither agrees nor disagrees with it but first of all suspends it, paralyzing the person who made the proposition, preventing him/her from acting until he takes account of that which s/he thought was obvious. If the classical-philosophical Socratic question, “What is … ?” (What is beauty?, What is the good?, etc.), paralyzes its listener, showing that s/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the “Age of Diderot”
• Part I Diderot and the Problem of Metaphysics—D’Alembert’s Dream
• Part II Three Short Experiments
• Conclusion: Diderot, Rousseau—The Self-Portrait of Modernity
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover