The Return of Diderot

At the end of the last century, Enzensberger and Kundera made the announcement: Diderot’s moment was returning. That is to say, an era favourable to philosophical narrative, critical theatre, and unsystematic, dialogical thought. The great Enlightenment thinker teaches us to move gracefully from one discipline to another. His is the demon of analogy: the force that drives him to compare sight with touch, and to define the boundaries between creatures belonging to a single living matter. His prose is founded on digressions and diversions: he transcribes the captivating conversation that earned him admiration, but which also kept him on the fringes of the salons where the Encyclopaedia was, in fact, funded. The fact is, one never knew where Diderot might end up. It was impossible to impose limits a priori on a man who urged us to be wary of those who seek to impose order. His dialogue mimicked the constant metamorphoses of nature: too constrained by the strictly theatrical form, he broke free in indefinable, Socratic texts, akin to a kaleidoscope of ideas in constant motion. These are texts with an eventful publishing history: often published posthumously, first in German, or circulated in some provisional version in the handwritten monthly journal of his friend Grimm, a few copies of which found their way to the courts of Europe. Today, Dario Borso—a translator himself as digressive and unpredictable as Rameau’s nephew—presents some of these to us once more in a lovely little book published by ‘La Vita Felice’ and entitled ‘Due intrighi, una satira e un divertissement’. Here we find three very Diderot-esque themes: a text born of a prank, debates on the code of gallantry, and a focus on that branch of medicine which, for the author, is the true heir to metaphysics. “Mistificazione”, composed in 1769 but published two centuries later, is based on a humorous plot devised to get back at a former lover through her portraits, by exploiting her superstition. “Madame de La Pommeraye”, in which the protagonist takes revenge on the man who abandoned her with a Machiavellian scheme reminiscent of Dangerous Liaisons ante litteram, is, on the other hand, a scenario already familiar to Diderot’s readers through the version embedded in Jacques the Fatalist. As for the “First Satire”, it offers a lively demonstration of Diderot’s talent for analogy, putting it at the service of a science of the individual or the archetype. Like Balzac and Proust later on, Diderot’s alter ego explains the ways in which one can deduce the status of a stranger from the slightest clues: “I shall never be in a hurry to ask who the man is who enters a room. Such a question is often indiscreet, and almost always pointless. With a little patience and attention’, rather than bothering the guests, ‘one reserves the pleasure of guessing’. Finally, the ‘divertissement’ sketches out a play centred on a moral ambiguity and a woman. The female world, already pivotal in eighteenth-century France, is even more so in the encyclopaedist’s work: it is the source of the rhythm of his plot twists, his interplay of ideas, and his witticisms. In concluding the story of Pommeraye—who punishes her lover, who has grown tired of her, by making him fall in love with a society girl disguised as a devout woman—the writer defends her against the predictable outrage: no, she did not carry out her revenge with cold, perverse calculation, because women—whom it is so easy to torment—still feel the pain months and years later. There is little doubt that Diderot would offer a singularly irreverent and intellectually liberating perspective on gender and sex were he writing today. If contemporary readers sometimes appear pedantic and sour-faced, it is partly because, like the sophist Barthes, they grew up reading more of the seventeenth-century theologians than someone like him. To their teachers, he seemed too frivolous; in reality, he is simply harder to summarise.