Rameau´s Nephew as an Essay-Form

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyse Diderot’s enigmatic dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew through a different ‘adornian’ lens. Against the canonical Hegelian reading of this dialogue as a symptom of the decadence of critical thinking in enlightenment philosophy, and the Frankfurt School emphasis on the systematic character of Enlightenment thought, I argue that the paradoxical and sometimes pessimistic nature of Rameau’s Nephew contains also some elements for an Enlightenment cure through its aesthetic form. By analysing the philosophical value of the pantomimes and musical performances by the character Rameau, I hope to unveil an aspect of the materialist aesthetics Diderot developed to oppose systematic thinking and the reification of thought at work in the Enlightenment movement of which he was a part.

KEYWORDS:

• Diderot
• materialism
• aesthetics
• Adorno
• radical enlightenment
• essay

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On experimental science in Diderot’s thought, see Pépin (2015). On Diderot’s grounding in chemistry, see Pépin (2010) and (Pépin 2012). On Diderot’s interest in physiology, see Quintili (2009). For an overall account of Diderot’s materialism, see Ibrahim (2010).

2. The materialist current of the Enlightenment has been recently mapped by historian Jonathan Israel in his monumental trilogy under the broad category of ‘radical enlightenment’, Israel (2001, 2006, 2011). While this broad mapping is of tremendous value, several philosophical problems arise from Israel’s work which attempts to offer a clearly split and polarized enlightenment public sphere, and a coherent radical or materialist current — the least not being his partisan interpretation of Spinoza as a rigid systematic monist ontology, which in fact was read by La Mettrie, Diderot and others in a more complicated way. For an alternative view of Spinozism in French Materialism, see Citton (2006), Vernière (1954) and Markovits (2011). If ‘materialism’ emerged as a category in the 18th century to identify and stigmatize a set of philosophical authors and productions, it was not, however, a common category to which the designated authors identified. I argue that we see in the 18th century the formation of two different materialist traditions, a Lockean and neo-Spinozist one, that will live on, at times intertwined, at times counter-posed in the Marxist and critical theory tradition.

3. In his critical 1931 lecture which later became the essay, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Adorno insisted on the key difference between scientific and philosophical practice. For while ‘the sciences accept their findings, at least their final and deepest findings, as indestructible and static’, philosophy, on the contrary perceives these first findings as something that needs interpretation and not explanation, as signs ‘that need unriddling’ (Adorno 1977, 126). Adorno states that the true idea of philosophy is — or should be — interpretation: ‘philosophy persistently and with the claim of truth, must process interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation’. Philosophy deals with ‘disappearing traces within the riddle figures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings’. For Adorno, Philosophy is concerned with the form of those traces as ‘the text which philosophy has to read is incomplete, contradictory and fragmentary’. (126) In fact, this particular kind of interpretation, the philosophical one, is more a generation of a meaning (a useful and joyful meaning) than a revelation: ‘the task of philosophy is not to search for concealed and manifest intentions of reality, but to interpret unintentional reality, and that by the power of constructing figures or images’ that negate and question ‘the exact articulation’ of things — an exact articulation which concerns science, an exactitude that should not be taken for granted (127).

4. For a general introduction to ‘The Essay as Form’, see Rose (1979, 11–26) and Jarvis (1998, 124–147). For critical readings of Adorno’s essay, see Hullot-Kentor (2006, 125–135), Martin (2006), Pourciau (2007) and Müller and Gillespie (2009).

5. Pierre Macherey (2011) has very convincingly explained the real meaning of Spinoza’s defence of a philosophy ‘more geométrico’, and its misinterpretation produced by Hegel and circulated by a significant part of his readers after him (including Adorno).

6. For the importance of dialogues and the dialogic nature of Diderot’s thinking, see Duflo (2000), Adams (1986), Sherman (1976), Mortier (1961) and Hartmann (1995).

7. For the context and genesis of Rameau’s Nephew, see Fabre (1950), May (1961), Pappas (1974), Ricken (1974) and Leutrat (1968). For an extensive historical and biographical research on Jean-François Rameau, see Magnan (1993a) and (Magnan 1993b).

8. On the anti-philosophe movement, see Masseau (2000).

9. See Simon (1995, 123–146), Lloyd (2013, 127–140), Von Held (2007) and Von Held (2017).

10. On the idea of ‘genius’ in Diderot, see Dieckmann (1941), Mall (1977) and Fabre (1980).

11. For a critical appraisal of the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, see the 2011 special issue of the Recherches sur Diderot et l’Encyclopédie. See in particular Chartier (2011), Leca-Tsiomis (2011) and Dubruque (2011).

12. ‘La pantomime est le tableau qui existait dans l’imagination du poète, lorsqu’il écrivait; et qu’il voudrait que la scène montrât à chaque instant lorsqu’on le joue.’ (Diderot 1994, 278, my translation).

13. Here, of course, Rameau’s remarks on value throughout the dialogue resonate with Marx’s critique of the exchange-value and the commodity form in the first volume of Capital. Before in the dialogue Rameau had stated: ‘There was a saying that “a fine reputation was worth more than a belt of gold”. However, a man with a fine reputation may not own a gold belt, whereas nowadays I see that someone who owns a gold belt seldom lacks a fine reputation. One should, as far as possible, possess both the reputation and the belt’ (Diderot 2006, 30).

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Blanca Missé

Blanca Missé is an Assistant Professor of French at the Modern Languages and Literatures Department of San Francisco State University. She received her Ph.D. in French and Critical Theory from UC Berkeley in 2014. She specializes in French early modern philosophy, Materialism and Marxist Thought.