"In the moment before the explosion..."

Traditionally, the question of temporality is not posed in the same terms in literature and painting. Faced with the passage of time, classical painting is confronted with a virtually insurmountable obstacle. Limited on the painted surface to the representation of a single place, supposed to converge on a single action, the canvas can only fix a moment, which it delivers to the viewer's eye in one fell swoop: the object of the representation and the time of the spectacle are without duration. The idea of an unfolding of events, a succession of impressions, the illusion of the thickness of time are extremely delicate artifices to produce from a still image that shows itself all at once. Yet this artifice is necessary: in anticipation of the spectator who might pass by, the canvas must prepare something to hold him in front of it, something to install him in the illusion of a shared temporality, without which there can be no pictorial spectacle, without which the very idea of painting becomes vain. The temporality of painting is the necessary condition of the pictorial spectacle, by which the very existence of the painted work is legitimized ; but this temporality is a challenge and presupposes, in the construction of pictorial representation, the deployment of the most deft strategies.

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In literature, the situation is exactly reversed  indeed, what could be more natural, at least in appearance, than the unfolding of time in a verbal creation ? The very existence of a literary text is conditioned by the time it takes to say things, by the sequence of writing lines. A work of words is always based on the temporality of enunciation. But it is precisely this flux, this irremediable flow, that we need to ward off: the condition of possibility of a performance in a literary work is the illusion of erasing this flux, of abstracting ourselves from the fleeting mechanics of language, of entering a space of representation. The aim is the same as in painting: to stop the viewer, to fix him in front of the work. Canvas creates the illusion of duration; text, on the other hand, seeks to abolish its constitutive duration. But it's not the same duration  these two contradictory tendencies in fact derive from the same device  the spectator passes in front of the work, scrolling  the work seeks to stop him. The temporality of the parade (or, in other words, of enunciation, or even narration) is thus interrupted, while the temporality of the spectacle (of the stage, of fiction) is open.

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The duration of speech, the stopping of the spectacle, the temporality of fiction : the " bal de têtes "

However, once the spectator has been fixed in front of the text, whose flow the magic of art has made him forget, the ineluctable verbal unfolding that transports him towards its end, literature is in turn confronted with the demands and problems of the painted stage : it must give the illusion of time in a stopped space, re-establish a thickness of temporality at the moment when the unfolding of time has been abolished.

This is the Proustian " bal de têtes " : after a stay of several years in a nursing home, the narrator back in Paris is invited to a matinee at the Prince de Guermantes', where he struggles to recognize, in the old men he meets, the familiar heads he had once frequented and fixed in his memory. The passage of time on these heads appears to him as a grotesque disguise, and the space Proust then arranges before us is first the space of the costume ball, then, more essentially, that of the theater stage, a comparison that recurs insistently in the text ; but the narrator soon understands that, at the very moment when this grotesquely theatrical scene of the ball of heads becomes fixed and frozen for him in the verbal characterization to which he reduces it, the effort of deciphering to which he is then compelled opens up another temporality before him, unfolds /// another device. It's no longer a question of delineating a stage and its backstage areas, but of laminating shots through which to make a journey, a system of visual screens, an installation in which to wander one's eye : the temporality of literature reveals its montage, its artifices, only from the moment literature is understood as an installation.

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The characters who present themselves to the narrator's gaze in the bal de têtes certainly appear to him at first only as ridiculous dolls : the characters, figures, and more generally the signs of literature are deceptive signs. What gives value and makes the spectacle, what creates the illusion of temporality in the arrested space of literature, are not the dolls, but the deciphering in which the narrator engages by staring at them, or if we prefer the device in which literature will integrate these dolls,

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" ...dolls bathed in the immaterial colors of the years, dolls externalizing Time, Time that usually isn't visible, to become it seeks out bodies and, wherever it encounters them, seizes them to show its magic lantern on them. " (Le Temps retrouvé, GF, p. 323, Pléiade, p. 503.)

The doll, the character of the characters, the figures of the novel, the signs of the text, all that in itself, all that is rhetorically fixed, is nothing. The doll is no more, says Proust, than the doorknob on which the child narrator saw Golo's image projected from the magic lantern. The literary spectacle is a magic lantern spectacle, owing its entirety to the projection device, to the journey that the light of intellection makes before settling on the precarious and derisory support of the heads encountered during the morning at the Prince de Guermantes's.

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" An optical view of the years "

This path of the light beam is not only a path of intellection, of deciphering on the part of the spectator ; it is at the same time, and indissolubly, the very path of Time itself, which decomposes and recomposes all the figures, and with them, all the signs :

" In all these ways a morning like the one I found myself in was something far more precious than an image of the past, but offered me like all the successive images, and ones I'd never seen, that separated the past from the present, better still, the relationship there was between the present and the past it was like what used to be called an optical view, but an optical view of the years, the view not of a moment, but of a person situated in the distorting perspective of Time. " (GF, p. 325 ; Pléiade, p. 504.)

An optic is a box with an inclined mirror, which allows small illuminated prints to be viewed through a large lens. The optical view thus presupposes an initial concentration, or miniaturization : this is the fixation of the spectacle on the engraving. The engraving is then redeployed by the box, and the magnifying lens restores the illusion of depth. We thus find the three moments of literary temporality: first, the reduction of reality to " an image from the past ", to " a moment ", which fixes the spectacle and detaches the spectator from the duration of the spoken word  then the installation of " successive images ", the parade of years in the optical box, which orders a theatrical space of representation ; finally, the distorting visual effect created by the path of the eye, the transformation of a discontinuous succession of images into a continuous " vue ", which constitutes the very artifact of temporality.

As we can see, literature's relationship to temporality cannot be grasped in a single movement : what Proust teaches us is that we must first become aware of the way literature divests itself, detaches itself from time, converting /// We then reintroduce not time, but a temporality of literature, no longer seen as a system of signs, but as a magic lantern, an optical view, an installation of heterogeneous objects, not linguistic signs but objects of reality, unified and semantized by the eye. There is no direct access to this temporality : from the text, we must pass to the stage (or to the spectacle), from the stage to the installation.

From Proust to Diderot : the Lettre sur les sourds

Diderot, in his Enlightenment language, says nothing else. I started from Proust to introduce Diderot's reflection on the relationship between temporality, representation and thought, because the Proustian formulation, more exclusively aesthetic, seems less scandalous, and is also more familiar. Everything, in Diderot, begins with the Lettre sur les sourds.

I. The duration of language

The question confronting the Lettre sur les sourds is basically one of grammar and syntax. What is the natural order of words in a sentence ? And which language comes closest to this order ?

Diderot, just out of prison and having sworn, after Les Bijoux indiscrets and the Lettre sur les aveugles, not to publish anything subversive again, is thus apparently taking a completely conventional route to wisely reintegrate the most academic republic of letters.

However, through a series of surreptitious shifts, the announced subject is about to change. It will soon no longer be about the order of words or ideas, but about the very question of succession. The idea of a natural order of language presupposes that we think of thought as a succession of ideas, and then compare this supposedly universal succession with the succession of words in any given language. Yet Diderot comes, so to speak, to postulate the atemporality of thought : language translates into a duration, a succession, what has been thought simultaneously :

" Who even knows if the mind cannot have a certain number [of ideas] in the same instant ? Perhaps, Monsieur, you will cry paradox. " (Vers 26 ; DPV IV 157 ¹.)

This first formulation is still cautious. Subsequent ones will become increasingly incisive : " For although all these judgments [...] are each rendered by two or three expressions, they all presuppose only one view of the soul " (Verse 27 ; DPV IV 158) ; then " The fruit and the quality are perceived at the same time " ; and finally " sensation does not have in the soul this successive development of discourse ".

The ocular harpsichord, or language as an optical device

There is therefore no natural order of discourse, since the only order that could be natural would be the order of thought, and thought develops as " a single view of the soul " and " glimpses " mentally all at once. A tributary of Locke and the sensualists, Diderot uses the general term " sensation ". But all the metaphors bring us back to sight alone, and constitute thought as an optical device, as in Proust, even if the technical image is different : the ocular harpsichord, ribbons and fans of Father Castel (Vers 28  DPV IV 158), play the same technical modeling role as the optical view, with its engravings and lens, in Proust. It's a question of breaking out of the Aristotelian, syllogistic conception of thought as verbal succession, to think of thought as an optical device whose elements are laid together.

Thought and expression

Diderot warned us : here he develops a paradox ². It's important to understand what this approach involves /// intellectual : not to set one thesis against another, the iconic atemporality of thought against its syllogistic succession, but to superimpose two theses, to show, by example and in practice, how this duration of enunciation manifests itself and abolishes itself, how time occurs in language and how language always seeks to return to the out-of-time simultaneity of the thought that produced it. Everything here is a matter of expression:

" We must distinguish in all speech in general between thought and expression ; if thought is rendered with clarity, purity and precision, that's enough for colloquial conversation ; add to these qualities the choice of terms, with the number and harmony of the period, and you'll have the style that suits the pulpit ; but you'll still be a long way from poetry, especially the poetry that the ode and the epic poem deploy in their descriptions. " (Verse 34 ; DPV IV 169.)

From the ordinary, colloquial use of speech to the poetic spring of discourse, Diderot establishes a whole gradation that we'll gradually come to understand rests entirely on the transformation of speech's relationship to time.

The first impression is that we're moving from simple to elaborate speech, from a kind of degree zero of expression (clarity without style) to a sought-after artistic effect (the deployment of poetry). In colloquial conversation, i.e. between friends, " thought is rendered with clarity, purity and precision " : the logical sequence of terms and propositions is the essential concern. In the pulpit, i.e. in the sermon delivered in church, attention to how the thought is to be expressed shifts from this logical precision of the sequence to " the number and harmony of the period ", i.e. to the rhythm, cadence (numerus) and music of what is no longer a phrase in everyday language, but the large, emphatic structure of the period. From logic to music, we move away from the detail of thought content, from attention to meaning itself, towards a much more intuitive, global apprehension. But it is in poetry that this global intuition finds its most accomplished expression : the descriptions Diderot speaks of, which we can read in Pindar's odes or in the epics of Homer and Virgil, have nothing in common with what we mean today by description, as the examples that follow in the Lettre sur les sourds prove. They are in fact what we today call epic comparison, i.e. those brief tableaux which, in the noblest, highest poetic style, come as if in redundancy to the action, to characterize it metaphorically : for example, Euryale's mortally wounded body collapsing on the battlefield is similar to a poppy mown in a field, then to a whole field of poppies bent by the rain (Énéide, IX, 433-437). Or again, without comparant and compared belonging to two dissociated worlds, Zeus acquiesces to Thetis' request and the whole of Olympus shakes at the approving frown of his brow (Iliad, I, 528-530). Here expression stops thought, it " unfolds ". From the wound to the field of poppies, from the furrowed brow to the shaken Olympus, it extends speech to the vision of a whole world : the time of the succession of thoughts stops, a space unfolds, another regime of understanding is set in motion.

" There then passes into the poet's discourse a spirit that moves and enlivens all its syllables. What is this spirit ? I've sometimes felt its presence  but all I know is that it's what makes things both said and represented  that at the same time as the understanding grasps them, the soul is moved by them, the imagination sees them, and the ear hears them  and that the speech is no longer just a string of energetic terms that expound the thought with force and nobility, but that it's /// still a fabric of hieroglyphs piled on top of each other that paint it. In this sense, I could say that all poetry is emblematic." " (Continued from previous.)

The poetic word abolishes duration. From the colloquial expression of thoughts, we passed to the style of the pulpit, which set them to music  and now, from style, we come to the spirit of poetry, which represents things as well as saying them (" things are said and represented all at once "), which gives them to be seen (" the imagination sees them "), which paints them (" a fabric of hieroglyphics... that paint [thought] ").

Emotion and music were already part of pulpit eloquence. So it is indeed through vision that the synesthetic effect of thought culminates in poetic expression. Diderot describes a superposition, which is initially a superposition in the solicitation of the senses, but then becomes a semiotic superposition, a mode of simultaneous and superimposed expression of thought. We have moved from a discursive logic of concatenation (" a string of energetic terms ") to an iconic logic of unfolding (" a web of hieroglyphs piled one on top of the other ") : " all poetry is emblematic " i.e., the emblem, whose image redoubles the poem it overhangs, and at the same time synthetically fulfills its meaning, is the most accomplished model of expression.

II. Temporality of the hieroglyph

The epic description is here understood as the image of the emblem. It establishes a pause in the narrative and returns on the narration, which it redoubles at a higher level of expression. The duration of the narrative, based on succession and sequence, is transmuted into the temporality of hieroglyphs, which unfold like a "fabric", a heap for the eye, in a word, a textual device. In terms of expression, we are here at the height of elaboration, at the height of artifice, when the duration of speech gives the illusion of a pause in time, when the reduction of metaphor opens up the virtuality of a world. Yet this climax takes us back to the origin, back to the primordial workings of thought:

It's not the end of the story, it's the beginning.

" But the intelligence of the poetic emblem is not given to everyone ; you have to be almost in a state to create it to feel it strongly. The poet says :

And of the French rivers the bloody waters
Carried only the dead to the frightened seas.

But who sees in the first syllable of portaient, the waters swollen with corpses, and the course of the rivers as if suspended by this dam ? Who is it that sees the mass of waters and corpses subside and descend towards the seas at the second syllable of the same word ? The dread of the seas is shown to every reader in épouvantées ; but the emphatic pronunciation of its third syllable still discovers to me their vast expanse. " (Continued from previous.)

To understand the poetic emblem, " to feel it ³ strongly ", that is, in all its epic force , you have to be a poet yourself. This higher level of expression that poetry implements by functioning as a superimposition of images, as a hieroglyphic device, presupposes an entirely different posture on the part of the reader than that of the passive consumer of a finished product  the poetic experience annuls the difference between creator and reader It takes the reader back to that undifferentiated, timeless moment before expression, when thought emerges in its entirety, but has not yet been decomposed into the succession of language. To produce and then consume the poetic emblem is to return to that pre-language origin, of /// so that the most elaborate expression brings speech upstream of itself, below all expression.

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The poetic emblem makes a return, it points to an origin, and it is through and within this loop that it annuls the mechanical duration of speech and establishes the temporality of representation.

A Voltairian example : the corpses of St. Bartholomew's Day

This return is manifested in the first example given by Diderot by the horrification that seizes the entire landscape at the spectacle of the corpses of Saint-Barthélémy. Diderot cites the last two lines of Canto II of the Henriade. In this song, Voltaire imagines, on the Virgilian model of Aeneas' tale to Dido, Henri IV telling Queen Elizabeth of England the story of France's misfortunes, tracing them back to their origins, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacres that triggered the civil war. Carried to its climax, the horror of the tale suspends the narration and prepares the final deployment of the hieroglyphic game :

" You shudder, madam, at this awful tale :
So much horror surprises you ; but of their barbarity
I have told you only the least part of it." " (vv. 347-349.)

The litote in the order of discourse, the silence in the face of horror, command the opening up of an imaginary space, a silent stage on which to deploy the visual representation of the event. In this expansion, the point of view is reversed. The narration followed the events from the Louvre, from the instigator of the massacre, Catherine de Médicis:

Catherine de Médicis, who, in her own words, is the "instigator" of the massacre, is the "instigator" of the massacre.

" It seemed as if, from the top of the fatal Louvre,
Médicis to France had given the signal ; " (vv. 350-351).

Already, the metaphor is optical : a signal spreads its light over the map of France. However, as barbarity spreads and becomes generalized, the event escapes its instigator and horror blinds the whole of France :

" All imitated Paris : death, without resistance,
Covered in one moment the face of France ; " (vv. 352-353).

At the threshold of the final tableau, Voltaire installs a blindness, the stopping point of neantization, but also of scopic crystallization : the face of France is covered, the light is extinguished from all points of view. Voltaire comments, and in his commentary conjures up the final image :

" When a king wants crime, he is too obeyed :
By a hundred thousand assassins his wrath was served ;
And the bloody waters of French rivers
Carried only the dead to the frightened seas." " (vv. 354-357.)

The first two verses are in the order of discourse : the maxim, the motto of verse 354, is followed by the abstract statement of facts, in the elevated, periphrastic style of noble language. In this register, the real, the reality of the crime, the murderers' victims, are evacuated. They make a comeback in the last two lines, but with a shift: from historical narrative to landscape, and it's from the point of view of the "horrified seas" that the corpses are shown. To Elisabeth's horror at hearing Henri's account (" Vous frémissez madame... ", v. 347) is superimposed by the horror of the seas welcoming the corpses carried by the rivers : the image of the emblem returns on the already stated effect of the narration, and at the same time it reverses this effect, as the point of view is no longer that of the barbarism produced, but of the barbarism suffered, and the stakes are no longer symbolic (the king's policy), but real (the landscape of France).

L'œil révolté

The landscape revolts. In it and for it, the dead make tableau. After the scopic neantization (the face, the face of France covered by death), the eye triggers a reversal in the painting : it is now essentially the sea that looks ⁴. The reader identifies with the story's intended queen, who herself, seized by the horror of the massacre, has identified with the corpses. Through the magic of hieroglyphics, the frightened seas look back at me, the reader, petrifying me in my identification with the dead carried by the waters.

Evidently, Diderot's commentary seems much more allusive, and above all it is situated, apparently at least, at another level, which is not that of the device by which we pass, in Voltaire, from narration to the scopic effect and the tableau. Diderot's analysis of the sonorities of Voltairean verse is an analysis of language and its rustle. Yet this rustle is indeed given to see : " But who is it who sees [...] ? Who sees the mass of waters... ? " This vision that the reader is summoned to adopt is a vision without distance, powered by the indistinctness of the mass of water to which he finds himself somehow agglomerated. " L'effroi des mers est montré à tout lecteur " : Facing the sea, Diderot disposes the reader ; but what is facing the sea are the corpses ; implicitly, the reader is well in their place.

Finally, the play of sonorities allows us to speak of the establishment of the screen, another way of accounting for the scopic neantization-crystallization : While the sentence of the verse seems to run smoothly, Diderot perceives in the or of portaient " le cours des fleuves comme suspendu ", i.e. the stop, the barrage of corpses momentarily interrupting the flow of both water and speech. Then the taient of " portaient " marks the dissolution of this dam, the resumption of the flow of water, the flow of corpses. Finally, the adjective " épouvantées " at once broadens the perspective and turns it upside down : it's no longer exactly the reader's eye going down the rivers with the dead  it's from the open sea that the appalled sea sees him arriving with the corpses.

The three times of representation

Suspension, journey, reversal : these are the three times found in each of the hieroglyphic analyses given as examples by Diderot, who goes so far as to modify Homer's translations to fit this model. These three times are reminiscent of the Saussurean structure of the sign: the pause in duration, the inaugural screen, marks the passage from reality to representation, from referent to sign. Time, the pause, introduces the heterogeneity of something that becomes a tableau, a coalescence that doesn't pass: this is the irruption of the signifier. Then the path, the line of flow (particularly clear in Virgil's it cruor of Euryale's death, Vers 36  DPV IV 171) traces the cut, indicates the line in the manner of the semiotic cut. Finally, retrospection, the globalizing reversal (striking when Diderot evokes the Homeric ἐλέλιξεν, the shaking of Olympus as Zeus accedes to Thetis's prayer ; Vers 37 ; DPV IV 173), superimposes on the first precarious image the ordered totality of a spectacle, in the manner of a signified.

The hieroglyph thus abolishes the duration of reality, the homogeneous, linear unfolding of enunciation : or at least it gives the illusion of suspending this duration and, in so doing, brings the reader-spectator back from the mechanics of language to the original device of thought. In return for this abolition, this pause, the hieroglyph establishes the line, the artificial, spectacular path, the " pas-de-sens ⁵ " of representation. In retrospect, that is, through a reversion of the gaze, the thickness of a temporality that supplants the lost duration is opened up. Once again, this temporality of the hieroglyph is not the homogeneous unfolding of a duration, but the heterogeneous thickness of an arrangement of elements belonging to different times. /// different. If we go back to Diderot's analysis of Voltaire's verses, we find that he contrasts the restriction, the dike, through which the hieroglyph opens (it's the strangulation of " portaient ") with the opening of the sea (the an of " épouvantées ") through which it closes : " the emphatic pronunciation of its third syllable still discovers to me their vast expanse ".

Duration is thus represented linearly, while temporality is arranged as a system of spaces. Let's be even more precise: temporality is articulated around two spaces, the restricted space that opens the hieroglyph, barred by the screen of representation, and the vague space that closes it, freeing itself from this screen  temporality is not the succession of corpses thrown into the river, constituting a dike for a time, then pouring into the sea  it is the tableau of these elements there, juxtaposed, constituting a global arrangement.

Considered in terms of its relationship to time, representation is therefore the articulation of a fixed duration and a temporality that supplements this duration. On the line of the text, then, the space of representation is established, a space that is necessarily heterogeneous, for it is from this heterogeneity that it derives the illusion of temporal thickness.

III. The moment of the scene

It is from the hieroglyphic of the Lettre sur les sourds much more than from Shaftesbury that Diderot will draw his theory of the " moment " in the Salons. If we still rely on our distinction between duration and temporality, it's clear that the moment of representation doesn't confer duration on painting (it's the stop, the theatrical exclusion of duration, which on the contrary founds pictorial representation), but temporality. The moment of the canvas is the idea behind it, a moment in the atemporal life of the painter's mind. For Diderot, the moment is a moment of thought, prior to representation. To analyze a painting, to seek out its moment, is to go back from the material actualization that Diderot may have had before his eyes to the creative activity of which painting is but one possible implementation. Paradoxically, then, for Diderot, the moment is atemporal because it is intellectual. The moment is constituted first and foremost by a pause in duration, a caesura in time, and then by the additional temporality conferred by the arrangement of heterogeneous spaces: even in classical painting, there are several times in the space of the picture. The painted canvas is a hieroglyph, since it is never conceived as a positive, material museum object, but essentially as a virtual arrangement that can always be modified. Diderot thus became famous for his canvas reworkings, through which the opposition between literature and painting on which I opened my talk is nullified.

The Lépicié article from the Salon de 1765

Lépicié, La Descente de Guillaume le Conquérant en Angleterre, 1764, oil on canvas, 400x845 cm
Caen, Abbaye-aux-hommes (town hall)

Let's take as an example La Descente de Guillaume le Conquérant en Angleterre, a painting by Michel Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié exhibited at the Salon of 1765. This was the painter's "morceau d'agrément", i.e. the painting by which he had been approved as an academician in 1764 ⁶. It was bought by the history-loving Benedictines of Saint-Maur for the Abbaye-aux-hommes in Caen, founded by William the Conqueror and where he is buried. Originally rectangular, the painting was curved and can still be seen in its eighteenth-century location, the abbey's refectory, in the buildings of /// which, since 1961, has housed the town hall.

Diderot doesn't begin by describing the painting. We need to establish the duration of the narrative to be able to interrupt it; we need to enter into the linearity of speech to prepare the pause, the caesura constitutive of the moment. Lépicié is not favored by our critic : " A tale, my friend, and a pleasant remark are better than a hundred bad paintings and all the evil that could be said about them. " (Verse 416 ; DPV XIV 240.) Faced with the spectacle of painting, Diderot posits as equivalent the tale, i.e. vain speech (think of the expression ne pas s'en laisser conter), pure verbal flow. On the one hand, there's the duration of the tale, the pure enunciation that unwinds; on the other, there's the pause in the tableau, which may or may not make up for this lost duration. You don't just dare to take this time-out, which entails a risk of failure equal to the expected enjoyment. Hence the unpleasant opening of the article devoted to Lépicié, in the Salon de 1765 :

" Mon ami, si nous continuions à faire des contes ?... "

What are we here to represent ?

" A general could hardly have made his soldiers understand better that they had to win or die, than by burning the ships that had brought them. This is what William did. A fine line for the historian! A fine model for the Conqueror! A fine subject for the painter, provided that painter is not Lepicié ! " (Vers 416 ; DPV XIV 240.)

Diderot doesn't forget that the genre of the ἔκφρασις, on which his Salons depend, is an epidictic one. He therefore begins with praise, even if this praise is aimed not at the painting itself, but at the textual material he has tried so hard to illustrate. He defines this material as " trait " : it's not exactly duration  the trait cuts across duration, tilting the time of the story into the space of the theatrical gesture. This shift is mimicked by the parataxis of the three exclamations, which from the textual stroke to the theatrical model, from the theatrical model to the pictorial subject, establish the bridge of ut pictura poesis, the classical equivalence of media.

The choice of moment

Precisely, there can be no perfect equivalence, no exact superposition of means. Lépicié made a double mistake  firstly, he chose to represent the line literally, to depict a strong moment by a strong moment  secondly, he didn't implement the theatrical machinery implied by his choice.

" What moment do you think this one chose ? The moment when the flame consumes the ships, and the general announces the terrible alternative to his army. You believe that the canvas shows the ships in flames  William on his horse talking to his troops, and on this innumerable multitude of faces all the variety of impressions of worry, surprise, admiration, terror, despondency and joy  your head fills with groups, you look for William's real action, the characters of his principal officers, the silence or murmur, the rest or movement of his army. Take it easy, and don't go to the trouble the artist has spared himself. When you have genius, there are no ungrateful moments  genius makes everything fruitful. " (DPV XIV 241.)

The first picture Diderot proposes is, when faced with the subject Lépicié has given himself, the easiest solution, an oratorical solution to great effect. Think of the three levels of expression alluded to in Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds, colloquial, eloquent and poetic  here we're at the second level, which exploits the possibilities of discourse to the full. With one hand, William should show his Norman soldiers their fleet, to which he has just put /// fire to prevent them from escaping  they were now forced to win or die, as the inscription on the standard on the right indicates, " VINCERE AUT MORI ". (This would be the famous victory at Hastings, which gave William the throne of England). His other hand should support his words and lead the spectator's gaze towards the audience, which declines the whole range of the soul's passions, whose expressions classical painting and morality have put all their effort into classifying, into constituting a taxonomy. It is in this spirit that, further on, Diderot asks  " show me on the faces the passions with their expression heightened by the reddish glow of the vessels' flame ". In this first painting, William's eloquent speech is the central and major articulation of the device  it mediates between the real, the burning ships, and the representation, the effect produced on the officers and army of the Normans. The chosen moment is then the moment of crisis, when the event can tip over into victory or defeat: the representation abolishes duration, halts the unfolding of time, to deploy the taxonomic panoply, the groups, the characters of what we might be tempted to define as a Norman "ball of heads". Imaginary space, the space of the figures attending William's speech, replaces duration, the unfolding of History, suspended the time of the performance.

But Lépicié has not chosen this solution. On the canvas we see only " a faint glow, smoke indicating that the fire has fallen ⁷ ". The moment chosen is not one of crisis and highest dramatic tension, but the next moment, when with the ships pretty much reduced to ashes (and thus presumably William's speech completed) a bleak despondency spreads through the army ⁸. Lépicié's choice is more difficult, but not impossible : " il n'y a pas d'instants ingrats ". It echoes the fall of Canto II of La Henriade, analyzed by Diderot in his Lettre sur les sourds  there too, the hieroglyph emerges after the high point of the massacre, in the universal despondency that follows it. The spring of the representation is then no longer Guillaume's speech, which belongs to the eloquence of the pulpit, but the visual effect of silence and despondency, that is to say not only the failure of speech, but a veritable depression in the image :

" I only conceive that one must replace the interest of the moment which one neglects, by I don't know what is sublime which accords very well with apparent or real tranquility and which is infinitely above movement ; witness this Déluge universel of the Poussin, where there are only three or four figures. " (Vers 417 ; DPV XIV 243.)

The figures of the slaughtered Normans become the center and spring of a representation that no longer articulates any discourse. In the first virtual tableau constructed by Diderot according to the rules of classical representation, the soldiers were, via the speech of their general, spectators of the fire, and therefore, for us viewers of the canvas, visual clutches, subjects looking towards the focal object of the representation, leading our gaze to the restricted space of scenic ignition. Henceforth, the soldiers are the central object of the representation. Diderot had ordered it: " faites faire volte-face " (Vers 417  DPV XIV 242). The idea here was to represent the ebb and flow of the soldiers, first running towards the boats to escape, then turning around as the flames of the fire burst forth. In the end, another volte-face is achieved: instead of the soldiers looking at the fire, it is their English adversaries, in the lower left, who are watching the spectacle they form in the center of the canvas, like the seas. /// at Voltaire's house, watching the flow of corpses.

Poussin, L'Hiver, also known as Le Déluge, 1660-1664, oil on canvas, 118x160 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 7306

There's no simple substitution of objects here: from the object, we've moved on to the thing, " je ne sais quoi de sublime ". All around, it looks, and in the center, the figures form a tableau.

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This about-turn of the gaze corresponds to a reversal of meaning : by comparison with Poussin's painting, this picture of the Battle of Hastings, whose patriotic resonances are evident twenty years after the victory at Fontenoy ⁹, is now interpreted as a Deluge, the painter's technical fiasco superimposed on what becomes the rout of an army yet historically victorious.

As Lépicié's painting fails to achieve the scopic crystallization required to constitute the visual scene, it is in fact Diderot's text that provides the supplement, through a veritable virtual installation, where Lépicié's extinguished Guillaume, the flamboyant Guillaume as Le Brun would have painted it, and Poussin's sublimely extinguished Déluge ¹⁰ are superimposed. The text cobbles together a stage temporality from this superposition of heterogeneous representations.

It is from this bricolage that Diderot's first theoretical formulation of the "instant prégnant " emerges:

" But who finds these things ? and when the artist has found them, who feels them ? At the theater, it's not in violent scenes, where the multitude goes into raptures, that the great actor shows me his talent  nothing is so easy as to indulge in fury, insults, outbursts. It's, take a seat, Cinna; and not

A son all dripping with his father's murder,
And his head in his hand, demanding his wages,

that it's hard to say well. The author, who here makes the role of the moment in painting, is for half the effect of declamation. It's when passion is held back, covered up, concealed, secretly boiling in the depths of the heart, like fire in the underground cauldron of volcanoes, it's in the moment before the explosion, it's sometimes in the moment after it, that I see what a man knows how to do; and what would make me a little vain would be to be worth something when paintings are worth nothing. It's in the quiet scene that the actor shows me his intelligence, his judgment. It is when the painter has left aside all the advantage he could draw from a hot moment, that I expect from him great characters, rest, silence, and all the wonder of a rare ideal and a technique almost as rare. You'll find a hundred painters who'll pull themselves out of a battle that's been fought, you won't find one who pulls himself out of a battle won or lost. " (Continued from previous.)

The pregnant moment is not, as is often thought, the climax of dramatic suspense, the acme of the narrative, but rather a weak moment through which the viewer can restore the journey to the strong moment, i.e. not one, but two heterogeneous scenes, whose pictorial composition will give the contradictory illusion of simultaneity and heterogeneity, of the same time and two spaces. The pictorial moment, which is also the moment of thought, will therefore be in a privileged way " the moment that precedes the explosion ", an expression whose erotic resonances and /// which says a lot about what thought owes to jouissance. There is temporality when this weak time of representation is brought to the fore, in the same way that Proust suggested always identifying the passage of time with a loss of meaning : it is the weak time of the bal de têtes, with its derisory figures (here the moment following the explosion of the War), that alone allows the narrator to restore the temporality of the figures that the Recherche had fixed.

The double scene

Here, Diderot immediately puts his theoretical model into abyme : point of explosion at Lépicié, where a sublime subject is secretly, but unbeknownst to him, bubbling away. Diderot's commentary highlights the explosive potential of the subject, starting from Lépicié's weak scene : Diderot is thus only worth something when the paintings are worth nothing.

Finally, this practice of the double scene will have its repercussions in Diderot's theatrical theorizing. It is through the interplay between the salon and the stage, two heterogeneous spaces that he fuses together in the fiction that frames Le Fils naturel, that Diderot theorizes the device of scenic break-in. Then, in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, it's the interplay between " scène haute " and " scène basse " that enables him to overcome the opposition between sensitivity and cold-bloodedness through the theory of the ideal model. The very functioning of Diderotian thought proceeds from this double stage and the path it institutes, i.e. from a performance conceived, beyond even the devices it articulates, as an installation. It is this functioning that introduces temporality into representation, where the pure spatiality of the device merely abolished duration.

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Notes

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The patriotic coloring of the painting is underlined by the rider on the left dressed in a lion's skin in the manner of the Gallic Hercules, under the sign D.O.M., Dominus Optimus Maximus, which marks who fights for and with God.

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