History, procedure, vicissitudes

No doubt Diderot¹ has long been noted for a narrative practice and a form of thought based on a very particular relationship to time, a discontinuous time, heterogeneous, marked by astonishing leaps², abrupt condensations, bold superimpositions³. The singularity of this practice of time is reflected in his theory of theater and his relationship to painting, and leads him to propose a revolutionary dramaturgy of the painting⁴, and a paradoxical aesthetic of the moment⁵. But had we ever thought of articulating Diderot's own poetic temporality to a proper thought of time, to a philosophy of time? From the moment we look at Diderot's work from this perspective, a veritable red thread emerges, allowing us to reformulate both its singularity and its modernity.

The time of History: origin and chronology

If we set aside an obscure Épître à Baculard d'Arnaud, the first work Diderot published was, in 1743, a translation of Temple Stanyan's Histoire de Grèce (1707)⁶. And if we disregard the texts circulated confidentially by the Correspondance littéraire⁷, last published writings are the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1778-1780) and the contribution to the Histoire des deux Indes (1770-1780). The time of History thus constitutes both the entry and exit point of his work⁸. Of course the Histoire de Grèce is only a translation, which Diderot worked on primarily out of necessity. Nevertheless, we can already discern some of the essential features of what was to become Diderot's relationship with time. Firstly, the question of origin:

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Some maintain that there is no history of Greece before Phoroneus⁹ son of Inachus ; others fix the Athenian era at the flood of Ogyges¹⁰, which occurred around the same time Plutarch goes all the way back to Theseus, but not without asking for grace¹¹ ; Denis of Halicarnase considers uncertain everything that precedes the Trojan War¹² ; Ephorus of Cumae¹³, Theopompus¹⁴, and Calisthenes¹⁵ date¹⁶ from the return of the Heraclides, eighty years after this war Varron makes historical times begin with the Olympiads, and Pliny says that nothing can be ascertained before the reign of Cyrus, and Cyrus reigned at the beginning of the fifty-fifth¹⁷  others, finally, place the earliest histories only shortly before the descent of the Persians. (DPV, I, p. 63-64)

Under cover of secular ancient references, Stanyan starts from Christian chronologists and their effort to reconcile the time of Greek and Roman history with the time of the biblical narrative  it's in this literature that the flood of Ogyges and the fifty-fifth Olympiad suddenly take on an inordinate importance. From a Christian perspective, the question of the temporal origin of History is a necessary aporia, from which to posit the miracle of Creation and Revelation. The time of profane History is lost in the inextricable confusion of sources : the uncertainty, the evanescence of texts confirm the solidity of the Text alone.

But, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the relationship to History is profoundly transformed : from the verticality of the Roman narrative of origins, we move to the horizontality of Greek historiography, with its alliances, its confederations, its circulations of identity¹⁸. It's no longer a question of the confusion of original time, for which the text, the source, the annal were the marks of historical time. The text itself slips away and vanishes  Stanyan depicts a system of traces¹⁹ :

It is hard to imagine that so many ages have passed without any trace of them being recognizable among the Greeks  the point is to know when these vestiges of time were clear enough to be distinguished without difficulty and followed without error : going back to the origins of history in general, we find that a natural desire for glory had occupied men in seeking ways to transmit their names to their descendants, long before the invention of alphabetical characters  part of the inheritance of sons was the images of their fathers the walls of the most remarkable buildings were covered with painted or engraved hieroglyphs  songs, however crude and crude they were, consecrated the memory of great captains, and served posterity as an ever-new spur : Eusebius tells us that Hermes Trismegistus engraved his doctrine on pillars, lest it be lost in the floods of the Nile²⁰. (DPV, I, p. 64)

Hermes engraving his doctrine on pillars is a composite figure inherited from medieval historiography and combining Greek and para-biblical traditions. Behind the floods of the Nile lurks the Deluge, against which History inscribed in stone fights. History conjures up vicissitudes. For all that, history is not the text. It manifests itself as traces and vestiges - the beginning of archaeology. But Stanyan is not just referring to the historian's method. It is the very relationship of the Greeks to their own History that ceases to be textual (unlike that assumed by the Romans). From the desire for glory and the passing on of names, which are part and parcel of the epic and to which the Homeric poems constantly refer, Stanyan moves on to images of ancestors, i.e. statuettes to which they devoted a domestic cult. From images, we move on to temple walls covered in hieroglyphics: the archaeological space summoned here to mark time is no longer Greek, but Egyptian. And indeed  Greek historiography, from Herodotus onwards, begins in Egypt²¹.

From archaeology to paintings: the space of time

Stanyan operates a curious shift here : starting from the flaw /// Greek archives, he paints a picture of a saturation of Egyptian inscriptions. The origin of time is a writing both displaced and imaged²². It's not embodied in a story of origins, but in found images, buildings covered in hieroglyphics, columns laden with hermetic doctrines: let's not forget that no one knew how to decipher the writing at the time. The illegible textuality of the origins is diffused in a space ruined by time, threatened by the floods of the Nile, relegated to the periphery of the world. This space of the original aporia of time is visual  it baffles the narrative and offers itself to the historian as material to dispose of :

After talking about the materials I have gathered, it is appropriate to show how I have arranged them²³. I have not found a clearer method than that which prevails in our Roman history  I have followed it in the division of books, chapters and everywhere else where it could lend itself to my subject  but as the affairs of Greece and Rome are not quite the same, it has been necessary to treat them in a slightly different order. At a glance, we can see the birth, progress and greatness of Rome  all these colonies, of which it grew over time, subject to the same laws as soon as they were conquered, were so many branches that sprang from the same trunk, with which they formed a single whole  hence this continuous thread in the conduct of events in Rome, and which is broken at every moment in the history of Greece. (DPV, I, p. 71-72)

We have shown how Stanyan, starting from the Christian chronographical model, had departed from it  in the same way here, he first evokes Roman historiography and the progressive, linear, narrative model of " conduct of events " that underpins it, to contrast it with Greek history. Diderot's translation accentuates this epistemological break. Stanyan evoked the documentation that made up his history (" the chief Materials of which this History is compos'd ") ; it becomes the " matériaux que j'ai amassés " : the textual order of the composition is replaced by the volume effect of the amassés materials. Stanyan wrote that he had summarized, compiled these documents : " I have digested them ". For Diderot, he has arranged them. From the rhetorical architecture of historical discourse, we have moved on to a device administering coexistence and circulation between discontinuous wholes.

The Greeks had to deal with most known peoples ; they were divided into different republics, entirely independent of each other ; all jealous of superiority and consequently divided by interest, so long as need did not unite them against a common enemy so what Florus says of the Romans is no less true of the Greeks, than their history is that of the human race²⁴. Freedom was a goal they all had in view ; but each tended towards it and kept to it in its own way : hence this variety of events, this confusion of affairs difficult to handle, and yet which it would be necessary to subject to the order of time and place to compose a body of history well linked in all its parts. (ibid.)

The interplay of commerce, union, commonality, on the one hand, and difference, independence, division, on the other, replaces the linear conduct of events and emancipates itself from an " order of times " to compose " a body of history ", i.e. a device. This " quantity of objects presented at once ", this archipellization of historical time from a Greece " gathered by platoons into different republican states²⁵ " is indeed ordered, even if its order is no longer discursive : the fight against the common enemy, which is not only the opposition to the Persia of the Median Wars²⁶, or Philip's Macedonia²⁷, but the awareness of a universal struggle for freedom, transforms the local history of events into the general history of the human race. The body of history manifests, in the very confusion of events, this emergence and this idea. Historical time, with its ruptures, folds, superimpositions and circulations, is the device of this freedom.

It's not about anything else in the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron. From the outset, Diderot superimposes the times and the " dispositions " : dispositions of the writer meditating in the countryside and aspiring " only to the approval of my conscience and the suffrage of a few friends " (DPV, XXV, p. 35)  reader's dispositions welcoming the portrait of the slandered philosopher and echoing Diderot's goal of revenge  time of youth, which " loves events " and time of old age, which prefers " reflections "  juxtaposition of Seneca's speech and Diderot's word :

If one hears only me, one will reproach me for being disjointed, perhaps even obscure, especially in the places where I examine the works of Seneca ; and one will read me, I say not with as much pleasure, as one reads the Maximes of La Rochefoucault, and a chapter of La Bruyère ; but if one casts one's eyes alternately on the page of Séneque and on mine, one will notice in the latter more order, more clarity, depending on whether one puts oneself more faithfully in my place, whether one has more or less analogy with the philosopher and with me  and one will not be slow to realize that it is as much my soul that I am painting as that of the various characters who offer themselves to my narrative. (DPV, XXV, p. 36)

We see here how the question of Diderot's style, his predilection for the brief form, the fragment, the parataxis articulates with what we've called a horizontal conception of historical time, which juxtaposes or even superimposes temporalities, making analogy prevail over diachrony. We can't help but think here of the double-column device that, in Derrida's Glas, sets off on the same page a text on Hegel and the family and another on Genet :

A first reading might make it seem as if two texts set up, one against the other or one without the other, against each other were not communicating. And in a certain deliberate way, this remains true, as to pretext, object, language, style, rhythm, law. A dialectic on the one hand, a galactic on the other, heterogeneous yet indistinguishable in their effects, sometimes to the point of hallucination. Between the two, the beating of another text, one would say of another " logic "²⁸.

The time of History is the time of the heterogeneity of times. Derrida slips, between Hegel's dialectic and Genet's " galactique ", the corner of deconstruction " le battant d'un autre texte "It's already the Shakespearean metaphor of time off its hinges, from which to turn the end of History against itself²⁹. But Diderot also proceeds with three terms : inviting us to place side by side " Seneca's page and [...] mine ", i.e. the order and clarity of the ancient Stoic on the one hand, the rambling and obscurity of the modern moralist on the other, he opens the /// third author and a third text, of which La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère are the reversed figures : it's Rousseau and it's Les Confessions, which the Essai both mimics and refutes, in the revolting movement of the essay's very form³⁰.

Horizontality of time: circulation, trade

In fact, it's essentially not a question of juxtaposing texts or superimposing times, but rather, through the game of writing with several hands (of which the double column is the premise), of deconstructing the system of causalities and ends on which the very idea of a time of History rests. Witness Diderot's first insertion in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes ³¹. Raynal had written :

Europe has founded colonies everywhere : but does it know the principles on which they should be founded ? It has a trade, an economy, an industry. This trade passes from one people to another. Can't we discover by what means and under what circumstances? Since the discovery of America and the cape route, nations that were nothing have become powerful; others that made Europe tremble have weakened. How did these discoveries influence the state of these peoples? And why aren't the most prosperous nations always those to whom nature has given the most? To shed light on these important questions, we need to take a look at the state Europe was in before the discoveries we've been talking about  follow in detail the events they caused, & end by considering the state of Europe as it is today³².

The specifications here laid down for a Histoire des deux Indes scrupulously respond to the Greek ἱστορία, which means inquiry : Raynal proposes to investigate the principles of a foundation. To the ethical and political questioning of principles, he adds the investigation of means and circumstances, i.e. the analysis of the event as a disturbance of an environment. Finally comes the description of the consequences of the disruption, which forms the very fabric of the historical narrative (" to follow in detail the events of which [these discoveries] were the cause "). This narrative takes us from " the state Europe was in before the discoveries " to " the state Europe is in today " in other words, from one picture to another. The narrative, presented as equivalent to historical time, is the conjunction of divergent states in time. It embraces the movement of discoveries and the trade routes they induced. Evolution in time, the system of causes presiding over this evolution, the trajectory of discoveries and the narrative of the passage from one state to another all correspond. Diderot is about to shatter this conjunction of paradigms and means:

Diderot is about to shatter this conjunction of paradigms and means.

This is the frightening task I have set myself to fulfill. I have devoted my life to it. I have called to my aid the learned men of all nations. I have questioned the living and the dead: the living, whose voices are heard at my side; the dead, who have passed on to us their opinions and knowledge, in whatever language they may have written. I have weighed their authority  I have opposed their testimonies  I have clarified the facts. If someone had been named below the line or below the pole to enlighten me on some important point, I would have gone below the pole or below the line, to ask him to open up to me. The august image of truth has always been present to me. O holy truth, it is you alone that I have respected. If my work still finds some readers in the centuries to come, I want it to be read by /// seeing how free from passions and prejudices I have been, they are unaware of the country where I was born  under which government I lived  what functions I perform in my country  what cult I profess : I want them all to believe me their fellow citizen & their friend. (Continuation of the preceding, noted by Mme de Vandeul as by Diderot)

In place of research, of the description of a historical sequence, Diderot substitutes the constitution of a network of information on the model of the encyclopedic network³³. More generally, we recognize the dialogic device that is his trademark: this trade in voices that creates a tableau is not simply a dramatic pause that dresses up the discourse with a scenography. Not only is the network the very aim of the historian's discourse, as he seeks to demonstrate the congruence between the densification of commercial circulation and the process of civilization, but, by bringing the living and the dead into dialogue, it also institutes the depth of time, even in opposition to this congruence : for it will be necessary in one and the same movement to describe colonial expansion and denounce its evils, to follow a development of civilization and turn this development against itself³⁴. Modeling time as a network implies switching from the textual model of discursive continuity to the visual paradigm of face-to-face: living and dead, near and far, the historian's interlocutors open up to him in the presence of the image of truth. Their concert has value only because it respects the holy truth, that is, it places itself under its gaze and orders the voices, the testimonies, under its auspices. Respect for truth itself prepares the gaze of posterity, figured by the readers of centuries to come reading the Histoire des deux Indes. Culture of the past, inquiry of the present, reading to come : Diderot does indeed deploy the depth of time here ; but it is to reduce it immediately, in the name of the sensitive immediacy of the historian network placed under the sign of the love of truth and the virtual community, trans-secular and transcontinental, of its followers. Space and time are then replaced by the dimension of elevation :

The first care, the first duty, when dealing with matters important to the happiness of men, must be to purge one's soul of all fear, of all hope. Elevated above all human considerations, it is then that one hovers above the atmosphere, & that one sees the globe below oneself³⁵. It's here that we shed tears over the persecuted genius, the forgotten talent, the unfortunate virtue. It is here that imprecation and ignominy are poured on those who deceive men, on those who oppress them. It is here that the proud head of the tyrant is lowered and covered with mire, while the modest forehead of the just man touches the vault of heaven. That's when I could truly exclaim: I'm free, and feel at one with my subject. That's when, seeing at my feet these beautiful lands where science and art flourish, which the darkness of barbarism had so long occupied, I asked myself: who dug these canals? who dried up these plains? who founded these cities? who gathered, clothed and civilized these peoples? & that then all the voices of enlightened men among them answered me : it's trade, it's trade. (ibid.)

The elevation puts the global picture of inequities and the historical engine of causalities in tension. They are visibly contradictory : on the one hand " the persecuted genius, [...] the forgotten talent, [...] the unfortunate virtue " can only arouse revolt ; of /// the other, " these beautiful lands where science and the arts flourish " are credited to commerce, in praise of which Diderot concludes. Does this mean that persecution takes place in " the darkness of barbarism " to which the luminous causality of commerce is opposed ? It's doubtful  between the two lies a logical disjunction that is the disjunction of thing and cause, of the revolted temporality of the present and the process of civilization, which obliterates this revolt, but whose arrangement of images in this Diderotian invocation suggests that, perhaps, it founds it. Raynal takes the floor again here, there is obviously no longer any question of genius or persecuted innocence, still less of a tyrant covered by the mire of opprobrium and the debasement of revolution :

In fact, the peoples who polished all the others, were traders. The Phoenicians³⁶ were but a nation very-born in its territory & in its power ; & it is the first in the history of nations. There is not one that does not speak of this people. It was known everywhere; it lives on through its fame: it was a navigator.

The general design of the Histoire des deux Indes  the movement of History is driven by trade, whose primary vector is navigation  movement in space forms the basis of evolution in time  the historical process of civilization involves geographical circulation. The evocation of all subsequent peoples is caught up in this tension  on the one hand, an original frontier, a natural limit, a separation  on the other, travel, navigation, trade to ward it off. History sets the map in motion, converting topography into chronography. And reciprocally, this discourse of history relies on the effects of mass and color of the territories that install the device of the archipelago³⁷, on the cut-out of the coastlines that indicates the limits to be crossed, on the grid of the compass rose that will host the itineraries.

Metaphysical time, historical time

This articulation of a horizontal time with an archipelagic space took on a very material form in the publication of the Histoire des deux Indes with the addition of a portable atlas to the nineteen books of text³⁸ as early as 1773. Linked to the nineteen books, the atlas materializes the device anticipated by Diderot in his first insertion to l'Histoire des deux Indes : it opens up to the experience of time as elevation, which is at once a distancing from the globe from which to grasp the worldliness of the world³⁹ (" It is delà that we let tears fall on the persecuted genius.... It is delà that imprecation is poured... It is delà that one sees the proud head of the tyrant... ") and engagement in a being-in-the-world⁴⁰ that removes this distance in the immediate production of a being-there (" It was there that I could truly cry out : I am free, & to feel myself at the level of my subject. It was then that... I asked myself : who dug these canals ? ... then all the voices... /// replied : it's business, it's business. "). Elevation and being-there, or being-there and being-beyond, are then jointly experienced as the experience of worry⁴¹, prefigured by the face-to-face encounter with the image of truth : " Le premier soin, le premier devoir, quand on traite des matieres importantes au bonheur des hommes, ce doit être de purger son âme de toute crainte, de toute espérance " wrote Diderot.

We can thus follow, in Diderot's discourse on history, the Heideggerian constitution of time, from the worldliness of the world to concern, whose temporal constitution is experienced both intimately as temporellité⁴² (which in Diderot's case involves identification with Seneca and the Stoic Stoic seizure of being towards death) and politically as historiality⁴³ of an inheritance and a destiny (in the History of the Two Indies, the original future of a frontier and the retrospective becoming of a freedom). Not that Diderot thus prefigures anything of Heideggerian metaphysics, nor does he reveal, through these homologies, any ideological proximity. In these respects, of course, they are in stark contrast: but Heidegger, so to speak, formulates the Diderotian time device. In a way, and no doubt in spite of himself, he inherits it  perhaps he simply encounters it, accidentally. In any case, what he lays out and states in Être et temps enables us, by transposition, to grasp Diderotian time in its radical difference from the time of classical philosophy, whose understanding Ricoeur orders from the double aporia of Aristotelian time-movement and Augustinian time-intentio⁴⁴.

Ricœur reflects in this the classical understanding of the notion of duration, as formulated for example in the article Temps in Trévoux's dictionnaire des Jésuites (ed. 1721⁴⁵), which repeats Furetière's article (1701⁴⁶) almost word for word. The article begins as follows:

Time. s. m. Discrete quantity⁴⁷ & successive ; which serves as a measure of the duration of beings. <Tempus, ætas⁴⁸.> Men have chosen the revolutions of the sun, & of the moon as the cleanest measure of the tems, because they can be seen by everything. The tems is the duration of the chôses measured by the movement of the sun. Regis⁴⁹. Let's not waste the tems we have left regretting the one we've already lost. La Font⁵⁰. Watches, clocks, clepsydra, quadrans are used to measure, to mark the tems. The Payans painted Saturn with a scythe, & they pretended that he devoured his own children, to figure that the tems consumes everything. The most superb garments repair only weakly the ravages of time. S. Évr⁵¹. The best use of tems, is to spend it pleasantly. Nic⁵². I count for pèrdu all the tems I go without seeing you. Vill. The temsfuture is not in the hands of Fortune, it is in those of God ; but he has given us the temspresent as a talent of which he will require us to give an account. Nic⁵³. The /// tems has no hold on the merit of the spirit. S. Évr⁵⁴. It belongs only to tems to console great sorrows. Mr. Scud⁵⁵. Let us not wait to know the price of tems that it is useless to know it. Nic⁵⁶. Our eagerness to make good use of tems must equal the velocity with which it flows. Id⁵⁷. (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, ed. 1721, t. V, p. 95).

If we remove the very light worldly dressing of this introduction (a few gallant verses by La Fontaine put into prose, a stanza by Corneille turned upside down and attributed to Saint Evremond, a quotation from the Clélie taken out of context), the doctrinal background is in fact taken from scholasticism, in particular Suárez and his reduction of time to duration⁵⁸. Duration is the core of the thought of time, which constitutes only its measure, only its phenomenal expression. But the Dictionary does not take up the distinction Descartes introduces between duration, conceived as a property, mode or attribute of things, and time, which is the way we think about duration, a modus cogitandi that can be unstuck from the very notion of motion, inherent in duration⁵⁹. Since the form of time, irreducible to its duration, is not taken into account, time remains inscribed in the polarity of the measurable and the non-measurable, the determined and the indeterminate, existence and eternity, as is even more clearly marked in the article Durée, for which Trévoux again follows Furetière :

Durée. s. f. Pèrseverance des chôses dans leur être  tems mesururé par la subsistance de quelque chôse. Spatium. <Long duration. Diuturnitas⁶⁰.> Tems is defined by the Philosophers, the duration of a movement. God has promised his elect a glory of eternal duration. This ardor is too violent, it will not be of duration. We enjoy life only as much as we lose it : each moment shortens its duration⁶¹. One judges the duration of time according to the disposition in which one finds oneself : he who is overwhelmed with sadness is bored with the duration of time, because it is painful to him, & that he pays more attention to it. Maleb⁶². The duration of hours, in terms of boredom & grief, is felt more than that of years. Bouh⁶³. The Gods are immortal only in the duration of their pleasures. Dac⁶⁴. Passions want to be artfully conducted, to extend their duration, so that they don't run out too soon⁶⁵. The duration of our passions depends no more on us, than the duration of our lives. Rochef⁶⁶. I don't measure my life by the duration of time ; but by the duration of glory. Bouh⁶⁷. Ladies for the ordinary find their husbands of long duration. Ch de Mer⁶⁸. This woman set out to match the duration of /// its mourning to that of its life ; & chose this sad & tiring voye to acquire reputation. Mr. Esp.

There is nothing here below of eternal duration. Mach⁶⁹.
This tender friendship by so many times sworn,
Which was to surpass centuries in duration,
In the end died out. Voit⁷⁰.

Behind those whom the dictionary designates as the Philosophers, we recognize Aristotle, and his definition, in the Physics, of time as something of movement, which makes it possible, through the notion of duration, to release time from the perimeter of ontology, and to apprehend it (if not reduce it) through a phenomenology of measurement. The " philosophers " definition is, however, preceded by a Spinozist formula which, through the scholastic tradition⁷¹, brings time back to the existential, incommensurable experience formulated by Saint Augustine. The examples that follow are part of this polarity: the eternity of the glory of the Christian elect, the pleasure of the Epicurean gods, endless mourning on the one hand, exhibiting the pure enjoyment of being outside time, and the variability of psychic time on the other, measured by the yardstick of passionate violence, the anguish of death and boredom. History is absent from this time.

Time in the Encyclopedia: grammar and procedure

The Encyclopédie breaks with this apprehension of time, between measurement and disproportion of duration. But this break is not immediately perceptible. As in the Dictionaries, we find a Durée article and a Tems article, even if, contrary to a frequent usage in the Encyclopédie for lexical articles⁷², neither of which picks up a single word from Furetière and Trévoux⁷³. The first article is entitled Durée, Tems, and presents these two terms as synonyms, which seems to extend the scholastic model of understanding established by Suárez, and ignores Descartes, who is not mentioned in either article. Yet D'Alembert, who signs the first article, introduces a radical difference from the outset by presenting Durée, Tems as a grammar article :

Durée, Tems, synon. (Gram.) these words differ in that the durée refers to things, & the tems to persons. We say the duration of an action, & the tems we put into doing it. The duration also relates to the beginning & end of something, & designates the space elapsed between this beginning & this end; & the tems designates only some part of this space, or designates this space in a vague manner. Thus we say, speaking of a prince, that the duration of his reign was so many years, & that such and such an event happened during the tems of his reign  that the duration of his reign was short, & that the tems of it were happy for his subjects. (O)

Synonyms, the words yet differ. The relationship to persons is a veiled reference to the Cartesian modus cogitandi. But it's the examples that vividly consecrate the break. Time of the prince, of his political action, of the events of his reign  under the guise of grammar, D'Alembert's time is first and foremost political, something not found in the Dictionaries. He also deconstructs the polarity of the measurable and the non-measurable  his time is a time placed, as it were, at the limit of duration, a time that includes, in terms of its duration, something vague  between a beginning and an end, time " designates this space d'une maniere vague ". Through this vagueness of time, central political time /// is linked to the grammatical network of time categories. For it is undoubtedly to this first article Durée, Tems that, when we read " See Temps " or " voir article Temps⁷⁴ ", the articles Grec, Hypallage, Imparfait, Impératif, Impersonnel, Indéfini, Inflexion, Irrégulier, Paradigme, Parfait, and Supin, all grammar articles and almost all signed by Beauzée. The grammar of the tense or tenses structures language according to the aspectual opposition⁷⁵ of the perfective and the imperfective, the determinate and the indeterminate, of that which is inscribed in an epoch⁷⁶ and of that which, abstracting from all of them, governs them and orders their relationships : but the indefinite is no longer what takes us out of time  it becomes, grammatically, a positive category of time. From what resists delimitation in time (duration), to delimitation as time (epoch), grammar deploys the variety of Greek tenses, the irreducibility of the impersonal to the notion of time, the inflection that marks time but blurs etymology, the supine as preterite and as noun. At every turn, when it comes to time in Grammar, something is blurred  time manifests the crisis of the taxonomies of classical thought  it is a sign of recognition, of distinction, an element of characterization, but at the same time this sign refers to an outside of classification that overhangs it.

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But perhaps these grammar articles already refer to the second Tems article, which runs to nearly thirty pages in Volume XVI of the Encyclopédie, constitutes thereby a veritable little treatise, and declines rubrics of metaphysics, grammar⁷⁷, sacred criticism and mythology⁷⁸, a section signed by D'Alembert and dealing with climate, one for " Effets du temps sur les plantes ", one for philosophy and morals, followed by marine, jurisprudence, music, painting, riding, fencing, venery....

In this typical mass of encyclopedic plethora, the primary balance however has hardly changed : the metaphysics section, starting with the catalog of " different opinions of philosophers on the tems " (Locke first, then Aristotle and the Peripateticians, the Epicureans and the Corpuscularists, finally Formey⁷⁹), continues to oppose time and duration, while the grammar section, with its tables and tense systems, by its very length, forms the backbone of the entire article. Not even the dance articles, Contre-tems, Contre-tems de gavotte, Contre-tems de chaconne, Contre-tems balonné, which, defining dance rhythm by the manner of jumping, before, during or after the step, do not musically echo the political play of action and epoch, the grammatical difference of definite and indefinite, the metaphysical gap between movement and period, between revolution and marked duration, between flux and succession of parts.

" contre-tems " systematizes this polarity in procedure : it no longer opposes two exclusive categories of time (inscribed in duration, fixing it, determining it) and out-of-time (which spares the vague and disregards measurement), but links them together /// one after the other, as a succession of a first, then a second time :

Contre-tems balonné or a deux mouvements ; il se fait en avant, en arriere, & de côté, l'un comme les autres. The first is done from the right pié [...].The second, which is done backwards, is executed observing the same rules [...].The third & that which is done sideways, is usually taken after a pas de bourrée dessus & dessous [...]. (Enc., IV, p. 143)

Facing the systems of metaphysics and grammar and the tension they create between duration and time, definite and indefinite, preterite and its indistinction from the present, we see emerging, with the dance step, another relationship to time, procedural and directly linked to technique : from " Contre-tems ", there is only one step to the time of making. For example, in the explanation of the Silk plates, we find, in the caption to plate XCVI, " Maniere d'entaquer⁸⁰ le velours & les différens temps de cette opération. ", and for plates CXXVII and CXXVIII, which describe how to chine fabrics, " Lisse à crochets, premier & second temps de la formation de la maille. ", then " Lisse à nœuds, premier & second temps de la formation de la maille. ", finally " Lisse à nœuds, troisieme & quatrieme temps de la formation de la maille. ". In each case, the plate describes the mechanical knotting of the mesh, which is broken down into  stages: on plate 127, the bobbin is first thrown into the upper loop on the left, from which it falls back - first knot, first beat  it then turns, in the middle section, around the thread it has just lifted - second knot, second beat, this is the right section of the plate ; on plate 128, the bobbin is then slid into the lower part of the heddle, the thread passes through the lower loop formed by the new row created on the previous plate, bringing the second knot up just below the median stem - third knot, third time  finally, the median knot is brought back below the heddle, where it forms an additional mesh. In the drawing on the left a knot is made around the bottom rod, there will in fact be two before the coil is re-launched to the next upper loop - fourth and fifth knots, fourth time in the formation of the mesh.

.

Of course, the shuttle yarn describes a movement. Of course, this motion can be broken down into discrete, successive quantities. Of course, these quantities can be related to durations. But that's not what time means here. Weaving times determine method and procedure, not duration. They structure the production process in the same way that verb tenses structure not the duration of an action, but its modalities: the procedure is a succession of modalities, integrating and declining the system of modalities of a given action. The procedural time of encyclopedic industry thus dialectically overcomes the grammatical polarity of time, which has itself replaced the vague, indeterminate core of duration. Industrial time paves the way for the abolition of duration (which ceases to be a value, and should ideally be reduced to a point) and horizontalizes procedures. The CXXVII and CXXVIII plates present us with two simultaneously, allowing us to grasp the entire procedure synoptically: the plate becomes double-columned, its temporal succession becoming /// analog juxtaposition.

The flip side of procedure: nothingness and vicissitude

Does this mean that metaphysical time has disappeared from the encyclopedic field and counts for nothing for Diderot ? Certainly, Diderot begins by distrusting apologetic time : " The time of revelations, prodigies and extraordinary missions is over. Christianity no longer needs this scaffolding ", he writes in Pensées philosophiques (§41, DPV, II, p. 37). And in La Promenade du sceptique, the mosaic narrative of origins becomes a tissue of grandfatherly tales :

His story is all based on the tales grandfathers told their children under the fireplace, based on their grandfathers' verbal narrations, and so on down to the first. An infallible secret for not altering the truth of events! (DPV, II, p. 100)

History lies elsewhere, and it's neither Aristotle's Physics, nor Augustine's Confessions, nor Suárez's De rerum duratione , nor even Descartes's Principles of Philosophy that Diderot confronts. Rather, from the Lettre sur les aveugles to the Rêve de D'Alembert, he targets Cartesian optics and dualism, La Mettrie's mechanism, Condillac's sensualism, which he contests, refutes... or extends. As for the divine timelessness of eternity, it rarely manifests itself, more out of derision or defiance than as an object of thought and representation, even though the subject occupies whole swathes of apologetic literature and its flip side, clandestine literature : just think of Nicolas Fréret's Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe⁸¹ or the anonymous treatise Jordanus Brunus redivivus, which substitutes the act of divine creation with an order of nature acting by chronological gradation⁸². In the article Néant in the Encyclopédie, which we know about Diderot from Naigeon, we read, however :

Nothing, Nothing, or Negation, (Metaphys.) according to scholastic philosophers, is a thing which has no real being⁸³, & which can only be conceived & named by a negation⁸⁴.

We see people complaining that after all imaginable efforts to conceive of nothingness, they can't come to terms with it. What preceded the creation of the world ? what held its place ?Nothing. But the way to represent this nothing ? It's easier to imagine eternal matter. They want to form some idea that represents the nothing to them; but as every idea is real, what it represents to them is also real. When we speak of the nothing, in order that our thoughts may dispose themselves in accordance with our language, & that they may respond to it, we must refrain from representing anything. Before creation God existed; but what existed, what held the place of the world ? Rien ; point de place ; la place a été faite avec l'univers qui est sa propre place, car il est en soi-même, & non hors de soi-même. There was therefore nothing ; but how to conceive it ? One must not conceive. Whoever says nothing declares by his language that he distances all reality  it is therefore necessary for thought to respond to this language to dismiss all ideas, & not to focus its attention on anything representative, in truth one does not abstain from all thought, one always thinks ; but in this case thinking is simply feeling oneself, it is feeling that one abstains from forming representations. " /// (Enc., XI, p. 66-67)

From the scholastic non ens, turning the subtle Suárez against himself, Diderot revokes in doubt a time that would have preceded a Creation, recovers on behalf of materialism the Jesuit, even mystical, practice of spiritual exercise, and substitutes for the order of language, precipitated in the face of nothingness, a global disposition of thought, capable of welcoming it. This thought experience imposes the existence of " an eternal matter " which is so simple to represent, as an immediate sensitive evidence, starting from the sensation of oneself (" simply feeling oneself "). Absence of representation and total representation merge in an oceanic experience that is also an experience of immersion in the horizontality of time.

The article Néant already anticipates Le Rêve de D'Alembert⁸⁵, when, not without provocation, Diderot describes to D'Alembert the process of his own conception :

Diderot. - Before we take a step forward, let me give you the story of one of Europe's greatest geometers. First of all, what was this marvelous being ? Nothing. D'Alembert. - Nothing! Nothing is made of nothing. Diderot. - You take words too literally (DPV, XVII, p. 95)

Nothing is the point of detachment from language to thought experience, of tilting from Christian time, which stumbles at the origin of Creation, to the time of matter and its vicissitudes. Diderot then describes stages, a succession of " voilà ", a procedure⁸⁶, just as there is a procedure for weaving silk velvet. At the beginning of this procedure, he places a nothing that is not an origin, that defies the categories of scholastic ontology, a nothing made of molecules " éparses " in the bodies of " la belle et scélérate chanoinesse Tencin " and of " militaire La Touche... adolescent ". Here, physics joins the novel to implement a category of the vague, the indeterminate, which it borrows from grammatical time.

As can be seen, Diderotian thinking on time dissolves into broader landscapes of knowledge. The thesis that " sentience is a universal property of matter⁸⁷ "This is a central question in the sensualist debate raised by Locke's Essai on Human Understanding ⁸⁸. Yet it is from Locke that the Encyclopédie opens the article Tems :

M. Locke observes that the idea of tems in general is acquired by considering some part of an infinite duration, divided by periodic measures ; & the idea of some particular tems or length of duration, as is a day, an hour, &c. is first acquired by noticing certain bodies which move according to regular periods, &, as it seems, equally distant from each other. (Enc, XVI, p. 93)

Shifting from duration to interval (or period), from morality to measurement, Locke establishes an observational procedure on the model of stages, times of production. Diderot used this model of regularity as a basis for thinking about deviation and irregularity: thinking about time as a vicissitude, and in particular as a physiological vicissitude, was born of the critical reversal of mechanized production models. As Jaucourt indicates, and against all odds, thinking about vicissitude is linked to the very project of the Encyclopédie, placed under the aegis of Chancellor Bacon :

Vicissitudes, (Physiq. & Morale.) it is not possible to write this word without attaching to it /// chancellor Bacon's beautiful reflections on the vicissitudes celestial & sublunary. 
Matter, says this great man, is in perpetual motion, & never stops. It produces vicissitudes or mutations in the celestial globes ; but it is not for our feeble eyes to see so high. [...] This is how everything is born, grows, changes and withers, only to begin again and end again, losing itself and renewing itself unceasingly in the immense spaces of eternity. But we must not contemplate the vicissitude of things any longer, lest we make ourselves dizzy⁸⁹. It is enough to remember that time, deluges & earthquakes are the great veils of death that bury everything in oblivion. (D. J.) (Enc., XVII, p. 237-238)

Bacon had written in his Essais de morale et de politique an essay on the vicissitude of things⁹⁰ : relating Solomon's proverb, " Nothing new under the sun⁹¹ "With the Platonic theory of reminiscence⁹², Bacon began, as it were, by cancelling time: vicissitude is the representation of a globally immobile universe, in which all movements cancel each other out and all progress is destined to be forgotten. But this universal periodic obliteration was only a preliminary epistemological framework, whose scope Bacon would later endeavor to limit: " The great winding-sheets, that bury all things in oblivion, are two ; deluges and earthquakes. " The winding-sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two, there are only two, deluges and earthquakes : in other words, they're rare, they don't happen every day. The following enumeration of natural disasters goes some way towards warding off the periodic oblivion on which the principle of vicissitude rests  " they neither absorb nor destroy a people from top to bottom "  Phaëton's conflagration " only lasted the space of a day " : it could not destroy everything in one day  the drought of Elijah's time " did not sweep away everyone "  the plague " did not ravish everything "⁹³. As for those who escape the two great liminal calamities, they " are unable to give a tradition of the tems " : this does not mean that this tradition is annulled, but that the progress of knowledge will require an effort of recollection, the very effort that Plato identifies with the progress of knowledge⁹⁴.

The demonstration thus turns against itself in a process characteristic of pre-modern humanism : Bacon claims both a conservative religious thought entrenched behind Solomon's proverbs and a secular philosophical tradition relying on Plato to promote science, progress and the advancement of knowledge⁹⁵. Viciousness is fatalism  limiting its scope seems good policy and good form. It is thus surreptitiously that, from this moderation, this reasonable suspension, escapes the possibility of a progress of civilization, of a development of time, sketched out in the second part of the Essay on the vicissitude of things, devoted to History⁹⁶. Bacon continually oscillated between an evolutionary representation of the march of time, with its religious, military and political changes, and a cyclical representation bringing all progress to the threshold of decadence, in the /// motionless movement of vicissitude. The Baconian deconstruction of vicissitude cancels the annulment of time without, however, giving rise to a thought of time of its own.

.

Jaucourt proceeds in the same indirect way in Vicissitudes. But relying on Bacon, he can forget Ecclesiastes and go further than he did : without needing to add anything, the simple reference to Bacon in the context of the Encyclopédie immediately places les vicissitudes in the epistemological framework of a science in progress. Didn't Diderot, in the Prospectus, stage Bacon throwing out " the plan of a universal dictionary of the sciences & arts, in a time when there were, so to speak, neither sciences nor arts. This extraordinary genius, unable to write the history of what was known, wrote the history of what had to be learned" (DPV, V, p.91). D'Alembert outbid him in the Preliminary Discourse, presenting him as the one who " made the immense catalog of what remained to be discovered [...] & made known the necessity of experimental Physics, which was not yet thought of " (Enc., I, p. xxiv).

Jaucourt nevertheless doesn't deviate much from the chapter " De la vicissitude des choses " which hardly seems compatible, on first reading, with this portrait. The conclusion of the article Vicissitudes quotes almost literally from Bacon's French translation in the 1734 edition :

Bacon, 1625 : Certain it is, that the matter is in a perpetual flux, and never at a stay. The great winding-sheets, that bury all things in oblivion, are two ; deluges and earthquakes. 
French translation from 1734 : Il est certain que la matière est dans un mouvement perpétuel, & qu'elle ne s'arrête jamais ; mais les déluges & les tremblemens de terre, sont les grands veils de la mort qui ensevelissent tout dans l'oubli⁹⁷. 
Jaucourt, 1766 : Il suffit de se rappeler que le tems, les déluges & les tremblemens de terre sont les grands voiles de la mort qui ensevelissent tout dans l'oubli.

The 1734 translation creates an attribute (" sont les grands voiles de la mort ") in place of the subject (" the great winding-sheets... are "). But above all, by deleting are two, it does away with the critical work of limiting vicissitude and obscures the demonstrative logic of the essay. The concrete metaphor of the shroud, enunciated in Bacon with a certain distance and no doubt a touch of irony, becomes in the translation the abstract (and serious) epic metaphor of the veil of death that falls over the eyes of the pierced hero as he succumbs⁹⁸. Jaucourt further accentuates its power by moving the phrase, liminal in Bacon, to the end of the article, making it the final image of the vicissitudes.

But he adds a word : time. With this addition, vicissitudes cease to designate the cancellation of historical time with regard to eternity, and become the tipping point from the vertical time of historical continuities (subject to la vicissitude) to the horizontal time of flows and networks of entangled temporalities (manifesting themselves as les vicissitudes) : " everything is born, grows, changes & withers, to begin again & end again, losing itself & renewing itself ceaselessly in the immense spaces of eternity. " This phrase from Jaucourt, which helps define time as an active vicissitude⁹⁹, doesn't come from Bacon. Moreover, it irresistibly evokes the picture of nature that preceded Bacon's evocation in Prospectus :

Nature offers us nothing but particular things, infinite in number & without any fixed & determined division. Everything follows one another in insensible nuances. And on /// this sea of objects which surrounds us, if some appear, like the points of rocks, which seem to pierce the surface & to dominate the others, they owe this advantage only to particular systems, only to vague conventions, & only to certain events foreign to the physical arrangement of beings, & to the true institutions of philosophy. (DPV, V, p. 91.)

It is this layered arrangement, with its peaks of heterogeneous temporalities¹⁰⁰, that prevents the establishment of a history of nature subject to a general taxonomy and necessitates the encyclopedic project. Bacon provides the fragile epistemological underpinning for this project, which presupposes not only a new relationship to knowledge, but also a new experience of time, whose emergence is marked by the shift from a principle of vicissitude to a table of vicissitudes.

Vicissitudes are first summoned, or rather revoked as a relic of obsolete Christian thought, which Diderot discards in the first interview of the Rêve de D'Alembert :

I confess that a being that exists somewhere and does not correspond to any point of space ; a being that is inetended and occupies expanse ; that is whole under every part of this expanse ; which differs essentially from matter and which is united to it  which follows it and which moves it without moving  which acts on it and which undergoes all its vicissitudes  a being of which I have not the slightest idea, a being of such a contradictory nature is difficult to admit. (DPV, XVII, p.89.)

This being is not only the God of theologians¹⁰¹ ; it is also nature subject to vicissitudes, which now appears as a screen of vague causality preventing the network of causalities from being thought of scientifically.

D'Alembert. - Is the connection of phenomena less necessary in one case than in another ?
Diderot. - No. But the cause undergoes too many particular vicissitudes that escape us for us to be able to count infallibly on the effect that will follow. (DPV, XVII, p. 110.)

The linkage of phenomena, the interplay of their co-presence, takes the place here of the chain of causes, struck with obscurity by the excess of vicissitudes.

But in the dream itself, vicissitudes return as a positive affirmation of this new horizontal temporality : " And if everything is in general flux, as the spectacle of the universe shows me everywhere, what will not produce here and elsewhere the duration and vicissitudes of a few million centuries ? ", whispers delirious D'Alembert to himself (DPV, XVII, p. 136).

Vicissitudes then call into question the vertical time of the unity of the self :

D'Alembert. - Doctor, one more word, and I'll send you to your patient. Through all the vicissitudes I undergo in the course of my duration, perhaps not now having one of the molecules I brought with me when I was born, how have I remained me for others and for myself ? (DPV, XVII, p.163.)

The phenomenological experience of flipping through layers of present subject to vicissitude dissolves the ontological unity of a self meant to traverse them. But vicissitudes are at the same time constitutive of this transversal self whose history they form :

D'Alembert. - And the animal, what did he say ?
Bordeu. - That it was through memory that he was him for others and for himself ; and I would add through the slowness of vicissitudes. If you had passed in the blink of an eye from youth to decrepitude, you would have been thrown into this world as at the first moment of your birth  you would no longer have been you either for others or for yourself, for others who /// would not have been them for you. All relationships would have been destroyed, all the history of your life for me, all the history of mine for you, blurred. (DPV, XVII, p.164.)

Vicissitude proclaimed the oblivion to which all things are doomed, and the impossibility, the vanity, through this oblivion, of thinking time. Turning this oblivion into a concern for memory, Diderot opens up here, through the pantomimic unfolding of " la lenteur des vicissitudes ", to a materialist phenomenology of time.

 

Notes

The metaphor of the veil of death is found again in Euripides, for example when the chorus of Les Troyennes comments on Hecuba's mournful lamentations over the slaughtered corpse of Priam : " Μέλας γὰρ ὄσσε κατεκάλυψε | θάνατος ὅσιος ἀνοσίαις σφαγαῖσιν " (literally : For black she covered [Priam's] eyes with a veil, the pious death [from] an unholy slaughter ; Euripides, Troyennes, 1315-1316). See also the nurse's response to Phaedra's request to veil her : " Κρύπτω- τὸ δ' ἐμὸν πότε δὴ θάνατος σῶμα καλύψει; " (litt. : I hide [your face] ; when then will death cover my own body with its veil ; Hippolytus, 250-251).

///

1

This chapter, which complements the papers collected below and in a way constitutes the Preface-Annex, owes much to Adrien Paschoud and the research project he is developing at the University of Basel under the aegis of the Swiss National Research Fund. It was he who came up with the original idea of approaching Diderot from the angle of time, and who drew our attention to the pervasiveness of a theological time at the very heart of Diderot's thought, and to the strategic position, in this respect, of the article Néant in the Encyclopédie. The theme of vicissitude, on the other hand, was the subject of a paper by François Pépin, which stimulated much discussion at the colloquium. We would like to thank both of them for their contribution to our common reflection.

2

" ...which sometimes made me compare the fibers of our organs to sensitive vibrating strings. [...] This instrument has astonishing leaps, and an awakened idea will sometimes make a harmonic quiver which is at an incomprehensible interval. " (Le Rêve de D'Alembert, DPV, XVII, p. 101).

3

Georges Daniel, Le Style de Diderot. Légende et structure, Genève, Droz, 1986, chap. V.

4

Pierre Frantz, L'Esthétique du tableau dans e théâtre du XVIII^e siècle, Paris, PUF, 1998, chap. V (" Le tableau, un concept de poésie dramatique ") and VI (" L'espace et le temps ").

5

Stéphane Lojkine, " In the moment before the explosion... - Temporalité, représentation et pensée chez Diderot ", in Zeitlichkeit in Text und Bild, Franzeska Sick, Christian Schöch (eds.), Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007, pp. 41-57.

6

Roland Desné, " Introduction " to the History of Greece, DPV, I, p. 43-60.

7

Notably Jacques le Fataliste (1778-1780) and the Pensées détachées sur la peinture(1777-1781). In July 1780, Diderot simultaneously completed La Religieuse, the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, and worked on the Éléments de physiologie.

8

Historical time is neither the time of physics, which holds of movement (Aristotle, Physics, 219a34-35), nor the psychological time of the intentio animi and the impression that passing things leave in the memory (Saint Augustine, Confessions, XI, 27, 35-36), but a time " between lived time and universal time " (Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, Paris, Seuil, 1985, t.III, " Le temps raconté ").

9

Pausanias, in the Description of Greece, mentions Phoroneus in connection with Argos, which paid him a funerary cult. Phoroneus is said to be one of /// first men of the golden age, inventor of the first market, founder of Argos, creator of civilization (II, 15, 5 and II, 22, 5).

10

The flood of Ogyges, or Ogygos, is said to have preceded the flood of Deucalion. Ogygos in Pausanias is just a name (I, 38, 7; IX, 5, 1; 19, 6 and 33, 5) : no flood. Nowhere is there an account of this first flood, which is a late chronographic marker. See Censorinus, De die natali, chap. XXI, reporting the tripartition of time according to Varron : obscure epoch (adèlon) up to the flood of Ogyges, then mythical epoch up to the first Olympiad, finally historical epoch (Stanyan alludes to this below). Varron's De Gente Populi Romani, to which Censorinus refers, is lost. Augustine also reports that his first book began with the flood of Ogyges (Cité de Dieu, XVIII, 8, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1960, t. III, p. 505).

11

Allusion to the life of Theseus, the first of the Parallel Lives. In the preamble, Plutarch compares the uncertainty of original times to the uncertainty of map edges : " Ainsi comme les historiens qui descrivent la terre en figure, amy Socius Senecion, ont accoustumé de supprimer aux extremitez de leurs cartes les regions dont ilz n'ont point de cognoissance, et en cotter quelques telles raisons par endroicts de la marge : Oultre ces pays icy n'y a plus que profondes sablonnieres sans eaue, pleines de bees venimeuses, ou de la vase que on ne peut naviger, ou la Scythie deserte pour le froid, ou bien la mer glacée. Also in this my history, in which I have compared the Lives of some illustrious men, [...] I can well say of the more ancient and more distant times of the present: What was before is no more than strange fiction, and finds lon no more than monstrous fables that the poets have controuvé, where there is no certainty nor any appearance of truth. " If he resorts to fables, Plutarch asks to be excused: " but if in some places they go a little too boldly out of the bounds of verisimilitude, and have no conformity with what is believable, it is necessary that the readers excuse me graciously, receiving in gratitude what one can write and tell of things so old and so ancient. " (Plutarch, Vies des hommes illustres, trans. Amyot, Club français du livre, 1967, I, 1-2.)

12

More to the point, in the first book of the Roman Antiquities, Denys d'Halicarnasse sets out to refute all accounts of the founding of Rome that would contradict the Virgilian fable of a foundation by survivors of the Trojan War : " Indeed, almost all Greeks today are still unaware of the ancient history of the city of Rome. Deceived for the most part by false opinions which owe their origin only to vague and popular rumours, they imagine that its founders were Barbarians, vagabonds, people without fire or place, who were not even of free condition  & that it is not by her piety, her love of justice, nor by any other virtue that she has finally come to dominate the whole earth, but only by pure chance & by an unjust caprice of fortune, which indiscriminately gives the greatest goods to those who deserve them least.(Trad. François Bellenger, Paris, Ph.-N. Lottin, 1723, t. I, Préface, §7, p. 7-8 ; modern ref. I, 4, 2.) In particular, the account of Titus Live is referred to.

13

The Hellenics of Ephorus of Cyme, known as Ephorus of Cumae, historian of the 4th century BC, are known only indirectly. According to Diodorus, " it was at the siege of Perinth [i. e. under under Philip II of Macedon] that Ephorus of Cumae /// concludes his History. Elle comprend celle des Grecs & celle des Barbares depuis le retour des Héraclides, dans une suite de sept cens cinquante ans, & de trente Livres " (Diodore de Sicile, Histoire universelle, livre XVI, chap.  XXII, an 468, éd. de l'abbé Terrasson, Paris, De Bure, 1741, t. IV, p. 592-593).

14

The historian Theopompus of Chio was, like Ephorus of Cumae, a pupil of the orator Isocrates (Cicero, De oratore, III, 9, 36). Also under the title of Hellenics, then Philippics, Theopompus had composed a sequel to Thucydides' History of Peloponnesus. Apart from an allusion in Aulu-Gelle and one by Apollodorus, we have preserved nothing by him.

15

Historian of the IV^th century BC like his predecessors, Callisthenes composed a Greek History and a History of Sacred War, of which nothing remains except a few quotations in Book XXXIII of Polybius' Histories. The DPV edition, from which we quote Diderot, retains the original spelling of proper names.

16

The verb is taken absolutely. Date from the return = establish their dates from the return.

17

The reference to Pliny is a mistake. Nor can Stanyan be thinking of Plutarch, who, at the beginning of the Life of Cyrus, questions the verisimilitude of Cyrus' own story. In the Éléments d'histoire générale by Millot, a Jesuit-trained historian, on the other hand, we read the vulgate to which Stanyan refers : " Ancient fabulous stories before Cyrus. [...] All is obscurity and uncertainty before this prince. " (Millot, Éléments d'histoire générale, Paris, Prault, 1772, t. I, " Mèdes et Perses ", chap. I, p. 131). The source of this vulgate is the Gospel Preparation by Eusebius of Caesarea, which is an attempt to reconcile secular ancient history with biblical chronology. In Book X, Eusebius seeks to make Varron's three epochs coincide with the passage from the time of the prophets to historical time in the Bible. Chapter 10 is taken from the 3rd^e book of the Chronographies of Africanus : " Until the Olympiads, nothing very certain can be found in Greek history  all the facts are confused there, and the most complete disagreement reigns in everything that preceded them. The Olympiads, on the other hand, have been treated with accuracy by many historians, because the short interval that divides them, being only four years, enabled the Greeks to write annals. [...] Ogyges, who gave his name to the first flood, having been saved among a great number of victims, lived at the time when the Hebrew people led by Moses were making their exit from Egypt. I will show that 1020 years elapsed from Ogyges to the first Olympiad  now, from the first Olympiad to the first year of the 55th, i.e. under King Cyrus, which is also the end of the captivity, we count 217 years  therefore, from Ogyges, we find 1237 years. [...] From Ogyges, therefore, to Cyrus, we find the same number of 1237, as from Moses. " (Eusebius of Caesarea, Préparation évangélique, X, 10, trans. Séguier de Saint-Brisson, t. II, Paris, Gaume frères, 1846). Stanyan further quotes John Marsham, whose Canon chronicus (1672), proceeds from the same logic of reconciling chronologies (DPV, I, p. 71).

18

Roland Desné, " Introduction " to the History of Greece, DPV, I, p. 47 and p. 52-53.

19

On the original trace, see Jacques Derrida, la Voix et le phénomène, Paris, PUF, 1977, p. 75, and P. Ricœur's synthesis in Temps et récit, t. III, p. 55.

20

Eusebius writes nothing of the sort. At most, paraphrasing Philo of Byblos (1st century), he makes Sanchoniathon the first of the historians, who learned for " the history of all nations since the origin of the world " everything about Thoth, confused with the Phoenician Taut and identified by Eusebius with Hermes. Sanchoniathon is said to have written " from the memoirs he had collected partly from the archives of the cities, and partly from those preserved in the temples " (Gospel Preparation, I, 9-10). Meanwhile, in the Judaic Antiquities, Flavius Josephus (a contemporary of Philo) reports that the sons of Seth (Adam and Eve's third child) are said to have engraved their knowledge so that it would escape oblivion (and, concretely, the Flood) : "Fearing that their inventions would not reach men and be lost before they were known - Adam had predicted a universal cataclysm caused, on the one hand, by a violent fire and, on the other, by a deluge of water -In the event of the brick stele disappearing in the flood, the stone one would be there to teach mankind what they had recorded on it, and bear witness to the fact that they had also built a brick stele. It still exists today in the land of Siria" (I, 2, 3.) Lactantius (3rd century) reports that Evhemere " wrote the history of Jupiter and the other gods, and composed it from the inscriptions and other sacred monuments, which were seen in his time in old temples, and particularly in that of Jupiter Triphyllian, where on a column were read the glorious exploits of this king of heaven " (Lactantius, Institutions divines, I, 11). Lactantius is a contemporary of Eusebius, and Jupiter Triphyllian may have been confused with Hermes Trismegistus. In the letter of the Pseudo-Manethon quoted by George the Syncelle (9th century), we learn that Thoth, the first Hermes, is said to have engraved his doctrine on stelae in the sacred language and in hieroglyphics (στηλῶν ἱερᾷ διαλέκτῳ καὶ ἱερογραφικοῖς γράμμασι κεχαρακτηρισμένων), which after the Deluge were transcribed into Greek by his grandsonson, Hermes son of Agathodemon, and deposited in Egyptian temples (Georges le Syncelle, Ecloga chronographica, I, 72-73). On this teeming motif at the intersection of biblical chronography and secular history, see Jean-Marie Fritz, " Translatio studii et déluge. La légende des colonnes de marbre et de brique ", Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 2004, vol. 47, n°186, p. 127-151, and in particular p. 132-133.

21

Even if Psammetik's experiment claims to demonstrate the anteriority of the Phrygians (and therefore Troy) over the Egyptians, Herodotus praises both the superiority of the Egyptian calendar and the solidity of the historical and geographical information he gathered in Egypt (Herodotus, L'Enquête, II, 2-4, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, pp.141-143). For Stanyan, " their own historians agree that [the Greeks] were instructed and civilized by colonies that descended from Egypt and Phoenicia " (DPV, I, p. 87).

22

With the shift from textual paradigm to tableau and device, we leave the epistemological framework in which Derrida and, even more so, Ricoeur are inscribed.

23

In English :" Having mention'd the chief Materials of which this History is compos'd, it may be necessary to shew in what manner I have digested them. "

24

" Ita late per orbem terrarum arma circumtulit, ut qui res illius legunt, non unius populi, sed generis humani fata discant. ", And he carried his weapons so far over the face of the earth that whoever reads his History does not read the destiny of a people but of the human race. (L. Annæi Flori Epitome rerum romanorum, book I, Proœmium.)

25

Book I " Of the kingdoms of Greece " presents parallel histories.

26

This is the subject of Book II, which runs from the Battle of Marathon to the end of the Peloponnesian War.

27

Book III, which is the last book, goes from the battle of Leuctres, where Thebes triumphs over Sparta, to Chaeronea, where Philip of Macedonia prevails over the coalition Greek cities.

28

Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris, Galilée, 1974, " Prière d'insérer ".

29

J. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris, Galilée, 1993, p. 19 and 43sq. See also the development on F. Fukuyama's La Fin de l'histoire and Le Dernier Homme, p. 98sq. Derrida proposes a reading of the Essai sur la vie de Sénèque (the first title, in 1778, of what becomes in 1780 the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron) in Apories, Paris, Galilée, 1996, centered instead on the limit, the frontier, the line.

30

Stéphane Lojkine, "Du détachement à la révolte : philosophie et politique dans l'Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron", Lieux littéraires / La Revue 3, 2001, pp. 95-127.

31

The exact delimitation of Diderot's insertions in the Histoire des deux Indes is now accurately known, if we rely on the passages underlined in the margin by Mme de Vandeul in the copy of the 1780 edition of l'Histoire des deux Indesissued from the library of Alexandre Marie Dompierre d'Hornoy and acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France at the public sale of March 17, 2015. Cote Bnf RES 4-NFG-81 (1).

32

Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des Établissemens et du Commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Genève, Jean-Léonard Pellet, 1781, t. I, p. 2-3.

33

See in particular the Prospectus, DPV, V, p. 92 (" ...to support a weight as great as the one we had to carry, it was necessary to share it... "), p.98 (" les secours obligants que nous avons reçu de tous côtés... "), 99 (" On s'est adressé aux plus habiles de Paris & du royaume... ") and the Encyclopédie article, DPV, VII, p.180 (" ouvrage qui ne s'exécutera que par une société de gens de lettres & d'artistes, épars... ").

34

" When these colonies have arrived at the degree of culture, light & population that suits them, won't they detach themselves from a homeland that had founded its splendor on their prosperity ? /// What will be the time of this revolution ? We don't know : but it must happen. " (Histoire des deux Indes, book XIX, ed. cited 1781, p. 294).

35

Compare with Ovid's Amphitrite embracing the two hemispheres evoked in the Salon de 1767, DPV, XVI, p. 520sq., image repeated in Le Rêve de D'Alembert, DPV, XVII, p. 157-158.

36

The Phoenicians are, in classical secular historiography, the original people, not only because of the experience of the Pharaoh Psammeticus reported by Herodotus, but also because Sanchoniathon, a Phoenician contemporary of Semiramis, was reputed to be the first historian of mankind.

37

See the works of Frank Lestringant, notably Le Livre des îles : Atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne, Genève, Droz, 2002.

38

The first edition of the Histoire des deux Indes in 1770 included neither illustrations nor maps. As early as 1773, two printers added a few maps, while a portable Atlas pour servir à l'intelligence de l'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes was published in Amsterdam without the author's approval. The second version of the text, published by Raynal in 1774, included four maps  a Liège edition in 1776 contains seven. The Atlas prepared by Bonne for the Geneva edition (Pellet, 1780) contains 50 maps and 23 tables of statistics. These maps were originally intended to be bound within the various volumes: but the in-4° printing of the maps was not compatible with the format of the in-8 volumes of the Pellet edition, and the Atlas was sold and bound separately. In the introductory warning to the 1780 edition, we read: " The reading of my book required a convenient Atlas which was adapted to it : the one I had drawn up for this new edition, will leave nothing to be desired. Moreover, I refer the Reader to the analysis printed at the head of this Atlas. " (Histoire des deux Indes, op. cit., p. viii-ix.)

39

Martin Heidegger, Être et temps, trans. F. Vezin, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, Première section, chap. III, p. 98sq.

40

Ibid., First section, chap. IV and V.

41

Ibid., 1st section, chap. VI.

42

Ibid., 2^e section, chap I.

43

Ibid., 2^e section, chap. V.

44

Ricœur devotes a long development to Heidegger in Temps and Narrative (t. 3, Le temps raconté, I. L'aporetique de la temporalité, chap. 3, Temporalité, historialité, intra-temporalité. Heidegger and the " vulgar " concept of time). In Être et temps, he notes the overcoming of the debate between Augustine and Aristotle (op. cit., p. 157), but this is to throw in the towel, as it were, in the face of what he calls his " polemic against the vulgar concept of time " (p.158) and take Aristotle's side against him (p.163sq.), or at least return to the Aristotelian aporia of the autonomy of time from time. /// Ultimately, Ricoeur concedes the originality and strategic function of the concept of historiality (p. 175). But he reduces it to the pure mechanics of phenomenological demonstration, without linking it to Heidegger's later developments on the historical destiny of peoples (Ricoeur explains this methodologically, p.110-112). Heidegger's logical construction, thus emptied of its content (and of its dubious ideological tropisms), effectively loses its essential interest, which is to articulate the intimate experience of time with a community's heritage and destiny. In the second section of " Temps raconté ", Ricoeur proposes a poetic articulation of this, well below Heideggerian ontology, of which Diderotian observation and experience constitute the reversed figure.

45

Dictionnaire universel françois et latin : contenant la signification et la définition [...] des mots de l'une et de l'autre langue [...] la description de toutes les choses naturelles.. l'explication de tout ce que renferment les sciences et les arts, t. 2, Imprimé à Trévoux, & se vend à Paris, 1721, p. 981.

46

Dictionnaire universel, contenant tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, & les Termes des sciences et des arts [...] Recueilli & compilé par feu Antoine Furetière, La Haye et Rotterdam, chez Arnoud et Reinier Leers, 1701, t.I. This edition is unpaginated.

47

On the opposition between continuous and discrete quantities, see F. Suárez, Disputatio XLI De quantitate discreta, in Opera omnia, vol. 26, Paris, L. Vivès, 1861, p. 587sq.

48

Between <>, Trévoux's addition compared to Furetière's article.

49

The same can be read in Abbé Para : " Le Temps, l'Éternité. 58. Time is the duration of things, measured by actual or possible movement. To estimate the duration of things, men have mainly taken as their fixed and common measure the movement of the sun around the earth, which makes a day, and the movement of the sun around the zodiac, which makes a year. These movements, added & divided, are the various fixed measures of time, by which we appreciate the greater or lesser duration of things. " (François Para du Phanjas, Éléments de métaphysique sacrée et profane : ou, Théorie des êtres insensibles, Besançon, Paris, Lyon, 1767, p. 30.) The common source is scholastic: F. Suárez distinguishes between intrinsic time and external time, identified with the measure of duration borrowed from the movement of celestial bodies. See F. Suárez, Disputatio L De rerum duratione, section XI Quas res mensuret cœlestis motus duratio (" What the duration of celestial motion measures "), §8 An successio discreta possit tempore mensurari (" whether a discrete succession, i.e. a discrete and successive quantity, can be measured by time ").

50

Condensed rewrite of the beginning of the Discours à Mme de La Sablière : " Henceforth that my Muse, as well as my days, | Touches of its decline the inevitable course, | And that of my reason the torch is going to extinguish, | Will I go to consume the remainders to complain, | And, prodigal of a time by the Parque awaited, | To waste it to regret that which I lost ? " (La Fontaine, Œuvres complètes, ed. P. Clarac, Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1943, t. II, p. 644.)

51

Au /// Instead of S. Evr. (Saint Evremond), Furetière carries Ob. M. (Observations morales ?). In the article Éclat, a nearby quotation is attributed to Corneille : " Des plus riches habits les apprêts éclatans, | Réparent foiblement les ravages du tems. " A stanza from Stances à Marquise... says the opposite : " Cependant j'ai quelques charmes | Qui sont assez éclatants | Pour n'avoir pas trop d'alarmes | De ces ravages du temps. " Compare Jezebel's blush in Athalie's dream : " Même elle avait encore cet éclat emprunté | Dont elle eut soin de peindre et d'ornerer son visage, | Pour réparer des ans l'irréparable outrage. " (Racine, Athalie, II, 5.)

52

Rewriting a thought by Nicole : " We must not imagine that it takes so many things to fill both our time and our mind. It feeds and entertains itself with everything when it has to. Il n'y a que l'esperance de jouïr de quelque chose de plus agréable que le dégoût de ce qu'il trouve en sa puissance. " (Pierre Nicole, " Lettre CIII à Madame de Saint-Loup ", in Lettres choisies écrites par Feu M. Nicole, Lille, J.-B. Brovellio, 1718, t. VIII, p. 557.)

53

" Future time is not in the hands of fortune, it is in those of God who has not yet given it to us ; but he gives us present time as a talent of which he will ask us an account. " (Pierre Nicole, " Réflexion sur Seneque de la Breveté de la vie ", Essais de morale contenus en divers traitez, t. 2nd, 3^e ed., Paris, G. Desprez, 1681, p.396. Nicole paraphrases Seneca here)

54

Instead of S. Evr, Furetière again carries Ob. M.

55

Plotine's reply to Amilcar in Madeleine de Scudéry's Clélie. Amilcar asked her to teach him how to write letters of consolation: " Je voudrois pourtant bien, adjous-telle, qu'on se persuadast une fois pour toutes qu'il n'appartient qu'au temps de consoler de semblables douleurs, & que ce n'est pas à l'éloquence à s'en mesler. Et puis à vous dire la verité, combien veut-on consoler de personnes qui ne sont pas trop affligées ? " (Clélie, Histoire romaine, by Mr de Scudéry, Paris, Augustin Courbé, 1656, p. 1130). So this is only about feigned pain. On real ones, we read, for example, in Almahide, ou l'esclave reine : " eh Dieu ! Un mal si cruel doit-il encores long-temps durer ? Après ce que j'ai veû, après ce que j'ai entendu, puis-je encore avoir de l'esperance ? Non, non, pensers flateurs, vous me voulez encore abuser : la glace & la flame ne peuvent compatir ensemble sans changer de nature : elles ne sçauroient changer : & je n'ay point de consolation à attendre que de la vangeance. " (3^e partie, Paris, L. Billaine, 1663, p. 746-7.) Similarly in the correspondence (unpublished, it is true, at the time of writing the Furetière) : " il y a des maux que l'habit amoindrit, mais il y en a d'autres qui deviennent plus insupportables par la suite du temps. The most violent pains, when they are of little duration, can be suffered without murmuring, and the smallest, when they are continuous, cannot be endured without complaining. " (Mademoiselle de Scudéry, sa vie et sa correspondance, " Lettre à Mlle Paulet ", Marseille, December 10, 1645, p. 203)

56

" Let us not therefore expect to know the price of time, that it is useless for us to know it. Let us not despise this time, while we have it, to regret it eternally, when we no longer have it. Let us prevent thoughts /// & sentimens que nous aurons nécessairement alors. " (Traité des quatre dernières fins de l'homme, livre I, De la Mort, chap. X, in Essais de morale, Paris, Desprez, 1687, t. IV, p. 68)

57

Nicole's translation of a sentence from Seneca's De Brevitate vitæ : " Cum celeritate temporis utendi velocitate certandum est, tanquam ex torrente rapido nec semper casuro, citò hauriendum est. Our eagerness to make good use of time must equal the velocity with which it flows ; we must hasten to draw from it what we need, as from a swift torrent that must soon dry up. " (" Réflexion sur Seneque de la Breveté de la vie ", p. 357-8.)

58

Jean-Luc Solère, " Descartes et les discussions médiévales sur le temps ", in Descartes et le moyen âge, Joël Biard and Roshdi Rashed (dir.), Paris, Vrin, 1997, p. 330sq.

59

" Ita, cùm tempus à duratione generaliter sumptâ distinguimus, dicimusque esse numerum motûs, est tantùm modus cogitandi ; neque enim profectô intelligimus in motu aliam durationem quàm in rébus non motis " (" Thus time, for example, which we distinguish from duration taken in general, and which we say is the number of motion, is nothing but a certain way in which we think of this duration, in that we do not conceive that the duration of things that are moved is other than that of things that are not ", Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, ed. Guy Durandin, Vrin, 1984, Première partie, §57, p. 94).

60

Trévoux's only addition to Furetière is placed here between <>.

61

Furetière adds here : Morale de P.

62

Approximate quotation from Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, I, 8, 2, " Que la durée, qui est nécessaire pour connaître le mouvement, ne nous est pas connue " (ed. J. C. Bardout, Vrin, 2006, p. 177).

63

" It seems to me," replied Philanthe, "that an appearance of falsity sometimes makes for fine thinking. Someone has said that hours are longer than years : this is true in a sense, for the duration of hours, with regard to boredom & sorrow, is felt more than that of years which are not measured like hours ; but it appears false at first, & it is this apparent falsity which puts finesse into it. " (Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit. Dialogues, Paris, Guillaume Desprez, 1768 [1687], p. 200)

64

Mme Dacier. This is actually a line from Pamphile in Terence's L'Andrienne (V, 5). See Les Comédies de Térence, avec la traduction et les remarques de Mme Dacier, Rotterdam, 1717, t. I, p. 247. Mme Dacier comments on this passage, attempting to disassociate Terence, and Pamphile, from the doctrine of Epicurus.

65

Furetière adds here : Le Ch. d'H.

66

La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, Paris, Garnier, 1967, p. 8.

67

Bouhours compares a sentence from Alexander quoted by Quinte-Curce, with a line from /// César (Pensées ingénieuses des anciens et des modernes recueillies par le P. Bouhours, Paris, Vve Mabre -Cramoisy, 1693, p. 139). And he quotes in the margin (truncating) :" Ego me metior non ætatis spatio, sed gloriæ [...] non annos meos, sed victorias numero. Si munera Fortunæ bene computo, diu vixi. " (Quinte Curce, De la vie d'Alexandre, livre IX, Paris, Imprimerie de Monsieur, 1781, t. II, p. 405)

68

" For it is impossible that a person as delicate, as you in lover, should not be even more so in husband. This is an affair of greater consequence, because a Lady disposes of her gallant, when she wishes, but she must keep her husband as long as he lasts, & Dames pour l'ordinaire, trouvent leurs maris de longue durée . " (Les Œuvres de Monsieur le Chevalier de Méré, Amsterdam, Pierre Mortier, 1692, t. II, letter CXX to Madame la Marquise de L. F.)

69

Furetière writes Malh., which identifies Malherbe. " Il n'est rien ici-bas d'éternelle durée : | Une chose qui plaît n'est jamais assurée : | L'épine suit la rose, et ceux qui sont contents | Ne le sont pas pour longtemps. " (Malherbe, Poésies, " Victoire de la constance. Stances ", ed. Antoine Adam, Paris, Gallimard, 1982, p. 44)

70

Approximate quotation from a poem by Voiture : " The one you had sworn to me so many times, | Which should surpass centuries in duration, | And only fade with the firmament, | So beautiful, and so perfect in its beginning, | And whose beautiful flame icy low without a second, | Should last even after that of the world, | At the end was extinguished " (Élégies, " Belise, je sais bien que le Ciel favorable ... ").

71

See Yannis Prelorentzos, Temps, durée et éternité dans les Principes de la philosophie de Descartes de Spinoza, Paris, PUPS, 1996, p. 113.

72

See Marie Leca-Tsiomis, Écrire l'Encyclopédie. Diderot : de l'usage des dictionnaires à la grammaire philosophique, Oxford, SVEC, 1999.

73

The very long article Temps du Trévoux devotes, at the end, a small section to grammar : " Temps, en tèrmes de Grammaire, se dit des divèrses manières de conjuguer un vèrbe en châque mode. Tempora. There are the tems present, imperfect, absolute perfect, indefinite perfect, more than perfect, & future. Præsens, imperfectum, perfectum, plusquamperfectum, futurum. Il faut que les vèrbes s'accordent avec les noms en tems, nombres & personnes. " (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, ed. 1721, op. cit., t. V, p. 97)

74

L'Encyclopédie orthographie tantôt Temps avec un P, tantôt sans.

75

Just as historical time is constructed from an uncertain chronography of origins, grammatical time emerges from aspect. In both cases, what precedes and founds time is not the aporia of time, but the apprehension, then the management of the vagueness of duration.

76

Article Parfait, Enc., XI, p. 940. See also D'Alembert's Epoque article, which itself refers, in astronomy, to " Temps moyen " one of the headings of the second Tems article.

77

Signed by Beauzée (Enc., XVI, p. 96).

78

Signed by Jaucourt (Enc., XVI, p. 117).

79

" Here's what M. Formey thinks about the notion of tems in the article he shared with us on the subject. " (Enc., XVI, p. 94.) Should we deduce from this that the article had first to be written by Formey, or that Formey spontaneously sent an article that had not been expressly commissioned from him ? Was it Diderot who merged Formey's article into the larger whole in the form in which it appears today ?

80

Entaquer : to fix the beginning of the warp, or the start of the fabric, which allows weaving to begin.

81

" M. Fréret " appears around a hundred times in the Encyclopédie ; historian and linguist (he was interested in Chinese writing), he is notably cited thirteen times by D'Alembert in the Chronology article, notably against Newton. See his Défense de la chronologie fondée sur les monuments de l'histoire ancienne, contre le système chronologique de M. Newton, Paris, Durand, 1758. Fréret's dual specialty lies exactly at the articulation of the Enlightenment's dual understanding of time, historical time and grammatical time.

82

Anonymous, Jordanus Brunus redivivus, in Philosophes without God. Textes athées clandestins du XVIII^e siècle, ed. Alain Mothu and Antony McKenna, Paris, Champion, 2010, in particular chapter III : " De l'existence de Dieu ". In the Encyclopédie, in the article Nole, Giordano Bruno's birthplace, we read this unattractive biographical note by Jaucourt : " Bruno (Giordano) in Latin Brunus (Jordanus), was a man of much wit, but which he employed very ill, in attacking the most important truths of the faith. His work de causâ, principio, & uno, appeared in Venice, in the year 1584, in-12. In this treatise, he establishes a hypothesis very similar in substance to Spinosism. In his dialogues, Del infinito universo, è mundo, printed in Venice in the same year, he maintains with reason, or at least very truthfully, that the universe is infinite, that there are several worlds, & that Copernicus' system is the only admissible one. He has strangely lost his way in his spaccio de la Bestia trionfante [...]. It's a treatise of very poor morals, & moreover very-ridiculously digested [...]. His dialogues in prose & verse, entitled, li heroici furori, offer the reader nothing but pure cabalistic imaginations, refined on those of Raimond Lulle. Jordanus Brunus was burned in Rome, in the year 1600, by judgment of the inquisition. " (Enc., XI, p. 195)

83

See, for example, Francisco Suárez, La Distinction de l'étant fini et de son être, " Dispute métaphysique XXXI ", ed. J.-P. Coujou, Paris, Vrin, 1999, section IV, §6, p. 76. Diderot does not mention Suárez in the article Scholastiques, of which he is the author according to Naigeon. But Suárez is mentioned twelve times in the Encyclopédie, several times with praise (Aristotélisme, Yvon, I, p. 644 and 665 ; Essence, Formey, V, p. 996 ; Grenade, Jaucourt, VII, p. 933 ; Westmorland, Jaucourt, XVII, p. 600).

84

Suárez, op. cit., section VI, §20, p. 107-108.

85

It is difficult to determine by how many years the article Néant predates the Rêve. Volumes VIII to XVII of the Encyclopédie were prepared from 1758 but did not appear until 1766. Diderot necessarily continued to work grosso modoin alphabetical order, so that, at the rate of just over a volume a year, Néant, in volume XI, must have been prepared around 1760-1761. The first sketches ofD'Alembert's Dream can be found in the Salon of 1767 ; but the bulk was not completed until 1769.

86

On the epistemological issues linked to the temporality of the experimental protocol, see Fumie Kawamura, Diderot and Chemistry. Science, pensée et écriture, L'Europe des Lumières, n°27, Classiques Garnier, 2014, and François Pépin, La Philosophie expérimentale de Diderot et la chimie. Philosophie, sciences et arts, Paris, Garnier, 2012, in particular p. 566-578.

87

Letter to Duclos, October 10, 1765, CFL, V, p. 951. This is then the postulate of D'Alembert's Dream : see in particular DPV, XVII, p. 90 and p. 105.

88

" For it is as impossible to conceive that mere non-thinking Matter should ever produce a thinking intelligent Being, as it is impossible to conceive that Nothingness could of itself produce Matter.(John Locke, Essai on Human Understanding, 1689, trans. Pierre Coste, Amsterdam and Leipzig, Schreuder et Mortier le Jeune, 1755, book IV, chap. X, §10, p. 517).

89

" But we must not contemplate so long the vicissitude of things, lest we make ourselves dizzy. " (Essais du chevalier Bacon, chancelier d'Angleterre, sur divers sujets de Politique et de Morale, Paris, Emery, 1734, " De la vicissitude des choses ", p. 178.)

90

Bacon's Essays are his first published work (1597). The chapter " Of Vicissitude of Things " is among the last added, for the 1625 edition : The Essayes or counsels, civil and moral [...], London, John Haviland for Hanna Barrett, 1625.

91

Ecclesiastes, I, 9. Bacon then alludes to Qo, I, 10-11.

92

See in particular the Phedo, 72e-73a. But if Bacon evokes Plato, it is probably also because of the Platonic representation of the flood, found notably at the beginning of the Lois (677a).

93

Essais du chevalier Bacon, op. cit., p. 161.

94

It is for this reason that the medieval tradition of the translatio studii, which Stanyan evokes with the pillars engraved with hieroglyphics by Hermes Trismegistus (see note 20), is important : it provides a bias, a remnant, against the pure negation of time by vicissitude.

95

It is in this sense that we must understand Jaucourt's formula on the " vicissitudes celestial & sublunary [=terrestrial] " of which Bacon would have spoken. Bacon didn't talk about the movement of the stars, but he did consider vicissitude from Solomon's celestial point of view and Plato's sublunary point of view.

96

" But let us leave these observations of nature, to come to what concerns men. " (Bacon, op. cit., p. 166.)

97

Essais du chevalier Bacon, op. cit., p. 160.

98

Thus, for the death of Adamas, " τὸν δὲ σκότος ὄσσε κάλυψε ", and the shadow covered his eyes with its veil (Iliad, XIII, 575). The formula is repeated identically in XIV, 519 for the death of Hyperenor. See also, for the death of Déipyre, " τὸν δὲ κατ᾽ὀφθαλμῶν ἐρεβεννη νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν ", and falling upon his eyes a dark night covered him with his veil (Iliad, XIII, 580).

99

Lucretius wrote : " Et rerum primordia pandam, | unde omnis natura creet res auctet alatque, | quove eadem rursum natura perempta resolvat ", " je prétens vous faire voir, d'où la Nature tire ses productions, de quelle manière elle les augmente & les nourrit, & enfin où cette même Nature les resoût par la dissolution des principes " (Lucrèce, De la nature des choses, t.I, Pari, Michel David, 1708, I, 55-57, p. 7-9). The principle of rational exposition of causes becomes, in Yvon's article Atomisme from Formey, a global picture of vicissitudes, presented as an abomination : " Le tout s'est fait par hasard, le tout se continue, & les especes se perpétuent les mêmes par hasard : le tout se dissoudra un jour par hasard : tout le système se réduit là. " (Enc., I, p. 822). Formey paraphrases Cardinal de Polignac's Anti-Lucrèce : " Atoms, by continuous metamorphoses, successively meet in a thousand different forms. They are the materials of which the Hazard has composed the universe & all the bodies that the universe gathers. A blind but all-powerful principle, it ceaselessly builds countless worlds. The one we inhabit began  it must end : & as it is formed from the debris of another world, another will be born from its ruins " (L'Anti-Lucrèce, trans. M. de Bougainville, t. I, Paris, Coignard, Boudet & Lermercier, 1749, p. xi).

100

Gilles Deleuze, L'Image-temps, Minuit, 1985, chap. 5, " Pointes de présent et nappes de passé ", p. 129sq. See Antoinette Nort's contribution below.

101

Bordeu similarly mocks a God who would be " subject to vicissitudes ", DPV, XVII, p. 143.