Letter on the deaf at the origins of thought

" Inversion. s. f. Action by which something is reversed, turned upside down. Inversio. Problems in Geometry and Arithmetic are often proved by inversion ¹.
Inversion. Inversion. Grammar term. A way of arranging words in a sentence in an order that is not the most natural & simple. ☞ Our language doesn't like inversions ; the march of each sentence is almost always uniform : it's a noun that leads its adjective as if by the hand  its verb marches behind, followed by an adverb that suffers nothing in between, & the regime immediately calls for an accusative that can't move. [...] The severity of our language against almost all sentence inversions increases the difficulty of French verse infinitely. Fénelon. " (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, article Inversion.)

"So what has just happened to me is not an indifferent thing, a pure effect of chance. It's time for me to die and for my work to cease. That's why the divine sign let me do it without any opposition. So I am only mildly indignant with those who have accused me, and others who have condemned me. [...] But the time has come for me to die and for you to live. Only God knows whether your fate is preferable to mine, or mine to yours. " (Plato, Apology of Socrates, translated by Diderot at the Vincennes dungeon. DPV IV 280.)

On July 24, 1749, Diderot was arrested at his home on rue de l'Estrapade and, under a lettre de cachet, imprisoned in the dungeon of the Vincennes fortress. The letter was signed by Count d'Argenson, director of the bookshop (and as such in charge of censorship), and its execution was entrusted to Lieutenant General Berryer. D'Argenson first reproached Diderot for his Lettre sur les aveugles (June 1749), in which the blind Saunderson made remarks contrary to religion, and his Bijoux indiscrets (January 1748), which offended public decency. But he also ordered searches, in search of possible unpublished sulphurous manuscripts.

This is the second time Diderot has been arrested : in December 1742, his father, furious to learn that he planned to marry Antoinette Champion and claimed his share of the inheritance, had him " locked up with monks who exercised against me what the most determined wickedness could imagine ² ". Diderot escaped through a window and lived in hiding in Paris for some time. His marriage was not celebrated until November 1743, i.e. after his thirtieth year had passed : married against his father before the age of thirty, Diderot risked disinheritance.

.

The political and intellectual persecution of 1749 thus in a way reissues on another level the intimate attack of 1742. The stance Diderot takes at Vincennes, translating the Apology of Socrates and the beginning of the Criton ³, theatricalizes and brings to the public stage the oedipal conflict : learning of his son's incarceration, Diderot's father doesn't make the trip from Langres to Paris  he contents himself, and still not immediately, with a letter to his son in which kind words rub shoulders with sardonic remarks.

Diderot in fact essentially owes his release to the booksellers with whom he is involved in the Encyclopédie  project: huge sums have been invested, D'Alembert is in Berlin and, without Diderot, everything is at a standstill. The economic stakes were too high: d'Argenson /// allows himself to be bent. In exchange for his release, Diderot promised " not to do anything in the future that might be contrary in the slightest to religion and good morals ". This promise was not in vain  in fact, the bulk of Diderot's work - his philosophical dialogues, his novels, his Salons - were not published during his lifetime, the philosopher contenting himself for the most part with private readings and a manuscript circulation in Grimm's Correspondance littéraire. Such an attitude, however, can be explained neither by a lack of courage, nor by fussy compliance with a promise that was, all in all, rather vaguely given : something much deeper was reached and broken.

.

It was against this backdrop of distrust of the public sphere, disappointment and fear of paternal authority, that Diderot submitted the manuscript of Lettre sur les sourds et muets à l'usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent to the censors at the end of 1750. Despite the favorable opinion of the censors, the new director of the bookshop, Malesherbes, refuses the " approbation et privilège du roi ", because of the Vincennes episode, and grants the work a " permission tacite ". The Lettre sur les sourds appeared in February 1751, three months after the Prospectus of the Encyclopédie ⁴. It had three editions in 1751, and would be republished in 1772 in Amsterdam by Rey in the Œuvres philosophique de M. D***, and in 1773, with the notation " Londres ", in the Collection complète des œuvres philosophiques, littéraires et dramatiques de M. Diderot.

The preface in the form of a letter to his bookseller

The book opens with, by way of preface, a letter to M. B[auche], the bookseller to whom Diderot had entrusted the printing of the work. In it, Diderot explains and justifies the strange title of the Lettre sur les sourds, which is not simply a nod to the Lettre sur les aveugles, by which he had been precipitated into prison, but above all reflects a desperate situation of enunciation : reduced to silence in the face of deaf people, Diderot this time personally experiences the consequences and effects of the symbolic ban he had evoked in the preamble to La Promenade du sceptique ⁵ :

" I agree that this title is indiscriminately applicable to the large number of those who speak without hearing ; to the small number of those who hear without speaking ; and to the very small number of those who know how to speak and hear ; although my Letter is hardly for the use of the latter only.
. I still agree that it is made in imitation of another which is not too good : but I am weary of looking for a better one. " (P. 11.)

There is therefore no question here, strictly speaking, of the sense of hearing, but rather of the intelligence of texts : unlike the Lettre sur les aveugles, the problem posed will be neither medical, nor physiological, nor even metaphysical  the title of the letter does not indicate its content but precisely the wound, the injury to which it responds. It refers to the wall against which Diderot's thinking has collided. The sphere of language, the order of speech, discourse in a word, is occupied by " those who speak without hearing " in the face of which those who are accessible to thought form only a " small number " who have no right to speak ; it will therefore be necessary, and this is the challenge of the Lettre, to develop a strategy of expression that replaces the practice of vain speech with a knowledge of diverted speech, reserved " for the very small number of those who know how to speak and hear ". Note how Diderot proceeds by shifts of meaning  from the intellectual meaning of hearing, which discreetly refers to the episode of /// Vincennes ; from the rhetorical signification of speaking, which disqualifies the order of instituted discourse, to a " savoir parler " which presupposes access to an envers, an ençà of language that the Lettre sur les sourds proposes to explore.

The central character of the Lettre will not be the deaf person to whom medicine would propose to restore hearing, but the mute, a " muet de convention " (p. 14) that refers both ironically and desperately to the mutism that Diderot has sworn to d'Argenson and Berryer. Diderot puts himself in abyme in the Lettre : the philosophical question (which is, as has sometimes been said, neither that of the origin of languages, nor that of aesthetic models of the sublime, but that, obsessive in Diderotian writing, of the process of thought) ultimately leads Diderot to envisage the word, the sentence as a mute image for the layman, addressed only from he who knows how to speak to he who knows how to hear. At a time when hieroglyphs remained undeciphered and known only through esoteric literature, the term "hieroglyph" was enough to designate the secrecy of a protected, sheltered space of communication, separated from the public space of representation where the discourse of those who speak without hearing unfolds. The enunciative framework of the Lettre is thus that of the hieroglyph, the muteness to which Diderot is reduced echoed in the mute image he offers, in the Lettre, to representation.

I. The question of inversions

Diderot presents this open letter to Abbé Batteux as a response to his Lettres sur la phrase française comparée avec la phrase latine, which appeared in 1747-1748 at the end of the Cours de belles-lettres distribué par exercices. Batteux had just been appointed to the chair of Greek and Latin philosophy at the Collège de France. Between Condillac, a Lockian sensualist, and the grammarians of Port-Royal, Batteux represented a middle ground, which the Lettre sur les sourds would seek to recuperate politically. Far from confronting a representative of authority and institution, Diderot instead seeks to conciliate an ally.

The point is to compare the order of words in language with what is initially summoned without discussion as the natural order of thought, identified with the unfolding of a discourse. The stakes are ideological: since the order of words in a sentence is inverted in Latin and French, by proving that Latin is a language of inversion, the grammarians of Port-Royal made French a natural language, and hence the universal language of reason. To overstate the case, mankind has always thought in French: French can now become the scientific language of Europe and the world.

Batteux suggests, on the contrary, that the natural order runs from sensation, objects expressed by nouns, to intellection, ideas expressed by verbs : this is the order of Latin, in relation to which French appears as the language par excellence with inversions.

Quintilian and hyperbate

The question of word order in the sentence had already been addressed by Quintilian in the Institution oratoire. In the rhetorical approach, however, it's not a question of reflecting on the notion of natural order, or opposing an order of ideas to the order of words. Rhetoric starts from an order of words in the sentence that it posits as normal order, ordinary order, statistically the most common, and then considers, when this order is exceptionally modified, the effect that this modification produces. Rhetoric always analyzes language in terms of ornamentation procedures, without asking what lies upstream of its object, upstream of language, thought on the one hand, reality on the other.

In Quintilian, the exceptional modification of word order is called hyperbate. The first remark on hyperbate can be found in chapter 2 of Book VIII, when the rhetor asks about the /// various causes of darkness :

" However obscurity is more often encountered in the context and continuation of a continuous utterance [in contextu et continuatione sermonis] and this can occur in several ways. Also, a sentence must not be so long that attention cannot follow its course, nor that a transposition by hyperbate differs its conclusion unduly. Worse still is the mixing of words, as in this verse :
saxa vocant Itali, mediis quæ in fluctibus, aras " (VIII, 2, 14 ⁶.)

Virgil's verse, quoted by Quintilian, is a parenthesis in the account of the storm, in the first book of the Eneid : the ships driven by the raging winds break on reefs : these rocks, saxa, which are in the midst of the waves, quæ in mediis fluctibus, the Italians, Itali, call them altars, vocant aras ;

Unsympathetic to the poetic effect of Virgilian verse, which clashes words in the image of the clashing ships he describes, Quintilian criticizes the syntactic obscurity of a verse where we can't follow the context of the sentence, the grammatical sequence of syntagms.

But the most important development on hyperbate is found in chapter 6 of the same Book VIII :

" Hyperbate too, i.e. the transposition of a word [verbi transgressionem], being often demanded by the organic structure and elegance of the sentence, is not wrongly ranked among the qualities [of speech] Very often, in fact, the style would be harsh and hard and loose and disjointed, if words were reduced to keeping their strict order, and if, as they occur, they were joined to the nearest, even when they cannot be linked. We must therefore postpose certain words, antepossess others and, as we do when building with uncut stones, put each one in its proper place.
We can neither cut them nor add them. For we can neither cut nor polish them, so that by interlocking they fit together better, but we must take them as they are and choose their place. " (VIII, 6, 62-63.)

The only justification for hyperbate is therefore euphonious : true to the rhetorical logic of ornamentation, Quintilian is not interested in the effects of meaning, in dialogism, in the polyphony that can be triggered by altering the common order of words, the rectum in relation to which hyperbate constitutes ordinis permutatio, or reversio quædam, a technical interversion and not a semantic intervention : at most, meaning risks being obscured. But essentially, nihil ex significatione mutatum est, nothing in the meaning is altered, et structura sola variatur,and the order alone is modified (VIII, 6, 67) : this is why Quintilian places hyperbate rather in the category of word figures (figura verborum) than in that of tropes, a distinction to which he nevertheless returns several times in Book IX.

The discussion in which La Lettre sur les sourds is embedded therefore doubly displaces this very old rhetorical question of hyperbate.

First of all, inversion is not considered in relation to a common, empirically given order of language. It is the whole of language, in its ordinary practice of succession, of the linking together of words, even before considering a particular effect, that is examined in relation to an order that this time would no longer be empirical, but rational and universal, the natural order of a perfect language identified with human thought itself. The unfolding of words in language is this time related to the unfolding of ideas in the mind. Diderot comes to the conclusion that there is no such thing, because thought is of a different nature to language, that it is iconic and simultaneous.

.

Diderot does, however, return to this rhetorical origin of the inversion problem in a second step, and the development on hieroglyphs is a way of dealing with the stylistic question of hyperbate, so to speak: Virgil's pitfalls, which Quintilian rejects, are typically what Diderot rehabilitates and analyzes as hieroglyphs. It's important to understand, then, that Diderot's hieroglyphs are not, despite appearances, a digression - however ingenious - from the problem originally posed, but rather a return to the rhetorical origin of the problem. This explains why these hieroglyphs will not recur in Diderot's work, even though they open up and underpin both his later poetic practice and theoretical reflection. Hieroglyphics are a compromise formation between the rhetorical approach with which Diderot was to break away, and the thinking through images to which he now turned. Hieroglyphics are still textual, linguistic models of the creative image. The experience of theater and then art criticism in the following decade would enable Diderot to find in painting and the stage other, more effective models for understanding and implementing an authentic pensée par l'image.

Apparent subject and real subject of the Letter

As one might expect, the rhetorical subject of the Lettre sur les sourds is not its real subject. The debate quickly fixes on what a natural order means and engages. And what kind of order are we talking about? Is it the natural order of an ideal, perfect language, or the natural order of ideas, which are not of the same nature as the words that translate them into language? Diderot then gradually advances a revolutionary idea : ideas have no order of succession in the mind, where they necessarily present themselves simultaneously, at least in pairs for judgment to articulate them, to bring them into harmony, agreement or discordance, for thought does not consist in aligning ideas successively but in exercising judgment on ideas.

It is the very idea of grammatical inversion, with its scholastic presuppositions, that is rejected by Diderot, the idea of absolute transparency between ideas and words, of linear and successive thought, of a possible equivalence between the movement of thought and the unfolding of the sentence.

However, Diderot doesn't abandon the idea of inversion. Rather, he changes the terms. It's no longer a question of inverting the ideal order of the natural sentence, but, by translating the association of ideas in thought into the sequence of words in the sentence, of practicing not systematically, but precisely exceptionally, artistically, an inversion likely to restore for the listener the impression of the ideal simultaneity of thought despite the constraints and distortions imposed by the order of succession inherent in all language.

In other words, the paradox is as follows  when the order of words chosen by the writer of genius seems aberrant, inverted grammarians would say, it is to force the listener to make an effort of memory and reversal that will trigger in him the effect of encounter, of concomitance of ideas, i.e. precisely the natural movement of thought. The inverted order of words restores the natural meeting of ideas. It is the inversion that is natural.

From thought to writing : image, emblem, hieroglyph

What exactly is this new inversion, no longer grammatical, but poetic ? We'll show that it involves both the reversal of an intimate experience into thought, and a certain interplay between the obverse and reverse of the image from which thought develops ; Some elements of this process are made explicit and even theorized by Diderot, others are not, either because they escape the range of action of a brief, incisive, unsystematic text, or because the philosopher is not fully aware of the implications, notably imaginary and /// of the process of thinking through the image he is in the process of highlighting.

The image at stake in inversion is twofold : first there is the ideal image, the Platonic spectacle that thought grasps before any conversion into the order of language, a fleeting image, elusive in its natural state ; then comes the image that Diderot designates as " emblematic " and names " hieroglyph " : the hieroglyph is a language construction which, through the use of inversion, gives the illusion, reproduces the effect, of mental images that offer themselves to the manipulations of thought. The hieroglyph is to thought what the garden is to nature, the theater to the world, the painting to the window  the emblematic image is a representation, a screen scene doubling the primitive scene where thought is woven. The hieroglyph recrystallizes after the fact the process of thinking through images.

To account for this secondary image, Diderot resorts to ancient semiology : speaking of " poésie [...] emblématique " (p. 34), " d'emblème poétique ", " d'emblème délié " (p. 36), it returns us to the world and references of figurative allegory that he practiced so much in La Promenade du sceptique and in Les Bijoux indiscrets. The hieroglyph in Lettre sur les sourds is again designated as an emblem, along with the robe and blindfold in Allee des épines. But whereas the blindfold is integrated, as a figure, into an allegorical construction, into a whole discourse that assigns it a historical origin, a spiritual function and an ideological stake, the hieroglyph deconstructs the discourse and restores below it the mental image from which it was derived.

This deconstructive dimension of an image that suddenly opens up to reverie and lends itself to a sensitive, intuitive, immediate approach to language no longer has anything to do with the rhetorical ordering of figurative allegory. From the ancient figure, the emblem, the hieroglyph retains the function of concentration and the enigmatic envelopment of meaning. But the relationship of image to language is completely turned upside down : instead of instituting discourse, the new emblem destitutes it, returning it to its constituent iconic elements.

Vision and intimate reach : the hieroglyphic impartable

Diderot here explores the most intimate springs of language, both in what determines formulation and in what is felt, visualized on reception. He is aware that he is exposing himself when he leaves behind a purely grammatical and technical model and calls upon his subjectivity as an artist:

Diderot explores the innermost workings of language, both in what determines its formulation and in what is felt and visualized upon reception.

" But the intelligence of the poetic emblem is not given to everyone ; you have to be almost in a state of creation to feel it strongly. " (P. 34.)

To feel the hieroglyph is both to understand it and to feel it, that is, to internalize it, to make it resonate with one's deepest self. To feel it strongly is to feel it quantitatively in all the power of its effect, but also qualitatively in all the epic grandeur and nobility of the great genre to which, implicitly, it will necessarily find itself attached. The hieroglyph is not a simple technical construction of language  it's not a matter of the mechanics of language : it's an artist's signature that only makes sense within the framework of a certain culture.

.

The decoding of hieroglyphics touches on the intimacy of the " me " and provokes the same kind of defense mechanism as recourse to psychoanalysis :

" ...I fully expect that those who did not grasp these hieroglyphs on their own while reading Despréaux's verse (and they will be in large numbers) will laugh at my comment, recall that of the Chef-d'oeuvre d'un inconnu, and call me a visionary. " (P. 35.)

We can /// or follow Diderot's example and, even if it means giving ourselves cause for laughter, try to decipher, through these readings that expose him, the specifically Diderotian workings of the image.

.

II. Gestes sublimes

" Shortly after the death of her friend and mine, I made a trip to the provinces. One day, I was leaving my house, and she was leaving hers. She invited me to accompany her to church. I gave her my arm. When we reached the cemetery, she turned her head away and pointed to the spot where the woman we had both loved was laid to rest. Judge the impression her silence and gesture made on me. " (Letter to Sophie Volland, August 3, 1759.)

There's a movement in the Lettre sur les sourds that takes us from the grammatical question of inversions, a screen question, to hieroglyphics and what they reveal about thought through images. It's a question of leaving the rhetorical order of discourse to enter the iconic order of speech and language. Thus abruptly formulated, the idea may come as a shock: how do speech and language relate to iconicity for Diderot? Yet this is what is at stake in the Lettre sur les sourds. In this thematic, ideological and semiological shift, theater plays a decisive role. In La Promenade du sceptique, we saw how the shift from figurative allegory to dialogue was achieved through the establishment of a stage device, with the narrator even brought in to re-enact the scene of the dialogue with Athéos before the assembled sceptics after the fact, playing the role of the blind man. In the Lettre sur les sourds, it's the reference to mute scenes and sublime theatrical gestures that, for the first time, derails the academic discussion of inversions.

The gestures of the mute

To ensure the natural order of words in the sentence, Diderot imagines having a conventional mute speak through gestures, who will be " without prejudice as to the manner of communicating thought " (p. 17). The order of the gestures will constitute the natural order of succession of ideas and will make it possible, by comparison with the order of the French sentence, to determine whether our language is a language of inversion.

.

But this virtual experiment immediately encounters a series of difficulties : first, we'll need to be able to translate the gestures, and translate them in the order in which the mute will have performed them. Then, the gesture would have to capture the exact idea, " meaning and thought " which is no longer simply a translation problem, but already a philosophical question. Here Diderot already glimpses what will become the issue of the Lettre, the question of the passage from ideas to thought, and then from thought to language. A hiatus opens up between the natural iconicity of gesture and the construction, the transposition of this natural image into language. It is not certain that " one would succeed in substituting gestures with more or less their equivalent in words " (p. 17).

Lady Macbeth's hands

Here, the progression in the argument is interrupted by what looks like a digression, but is in fact the decisive shift towards the question of direct thought and expression through image. Gesture is not always susceptible, even close, to being substituted by words :

" I say just about because there are sublime gestures that all oratorical eloquence will never render. Such is that of Macbeth in Shakespeare's tragedy. The sleepwalking Macbeth strides silently across the stage, eyes closed, imitating the action of a person washing his hands, as if his own had been stained with the blood of the king whose throat he had slit more than twenty years ago. I know of nothing so pathetic in speech as the silence and movement of this woman's hands. What an image of /// remorse ! " (P. 17.)

Here, the gesture points to a failure of language. It brutally exposes the primary iconicity of thought and reminds us that language is no more than a do-it-yourself instrument, invented and perfected piecemeal, to translate, when it can, its expression.

The sublime gesture is a theatrical gesture that immediately opens up the depth of one scene and the background of another : in front, in the spotlight, " the somnambulist Macbeth strides silently forward, eyes closed "  behind, invisible but suggested by her gesture, the murder of Duncan, the legitimate king whose crown Macbeth has usurped, is perpetuated, endlessly repeated in the nightmare that it is a question of both representing and conjuring. We can't help comparing Lady Macbeth's advance, eyes closed, to the wandering of the blind man with the blindfold that sets the scene with Athéos in La Promenade du sceptique. As for the absent image of the crime, it basically just displaces Athéos' essential crime, his meditation on the non-existence of Prince God, into the order of myth. In completely different contexts, with imaginary materials that bear no thematic relation, Diderot repeats the same device and images his own somnambulistic advance in the philosophical adventure ; his own crime, the very crime from which his advance proceeds.

Here again, the sublime gesture, which makes a tableau through the brutality of the nonsense it exhibits, does not itself constitute the image, but opens the frame of an empty image, which Duncan's murder comes to fill imaginatively. Behind the hands, it is this murder that is made visible: the scene only takes on its full force in the context of the post-classical rediscovery of Shakespeare; it is doubtful whether it was conceived as an autonomous scene of such hallucinatory power by the Elizabethan playwright, who was entirely devoted to the prestiges of the verb and the virtuoso deployments of beautiful language. Here, Diderot is the composer: his staging circumvents the visual ban imposed by classical decorum, which proscribes any representation of a crime on stage.

.

The sublime gesture literally respects the visual ban, but transgresses it de facto, triggering aesthetic enjoyment. Lady Macbeth closes her eyes to give to see, just as the spectator penetrates the visual ban to enjoy what he sees anyway through the evocative power of theater.

The sublime gesture literally respects the visual ban, but transgresses it de facto, triggering aesthetic enjoyment.

The sublime moment presupposes the temporary abolition of all distance between spectator and actor  we suggested how Diderot could more or less consciously identify Lady Macbeth's nightmare with his own intellectual process. The distance is immediately re-established at the fall of the paragraph : " Quelle image du remords " brings in extremis the sublime gesture back to the idea, indeed to the word " remords " ; the exclamation crushes scenic depth, reduces the scene to an allegorical figure.

" A handful of earth... on her son's body "

The next example of a sublime gesture is rather obscure :

" The way another woman announced death to her uncertain husband is yet another of those representations that the energy of oral language doesn't come close to. She took herself and her son between her arms to a spot in the countryside where her husband could see her from the tower where he was locked up; and after staring at her face for some time on the side of the tower, she took a handful of earth and spread it in a cross over the body of her son, which she had laid at her feet. Her husband understood the sign, and starved to death." " (Pp. 17-18.)

We don't understand whose death is being announced : if it's her husband's death the woman is announcing, how does the sign of the cross over the son's body signify it  and how does he have time to let himself starve to death if he's condemned to death anyway  what is /// the point of the maneuver ? The mother's gesture ⁷ seems rather to signify the son's death (but is he already dead or is he going to die ?) : we would then have to restore " another woman announced the death <of her son> to her husband ". The father, despairing of what will happen (or has happened) to his son, then lets himself starve to death. Diderot may have distorted the story by attraction to that of Macbeth, where the invisible scene, the scene signified by the gesture, is indeed that of a father's murder.

The parallel of the two gestures is suggested by the opening of the anecdote : " another woman " explicitly links the woman facing the father's tower and Lady Macbeth facing Duncan's crime ⁸, the gesture of washing her hands and the earthen cross on the son's body. The gesture, however, has changed its nature: the sign of the cross is an instituted sign, a figure. The sublime effect here is that the sign is at the same time earth on the son's body: the sign is the very material of the burial. The sublime gesture fuses sign and referent: the image is constituted as a sign, then disfigured in the action itself, as earth covers the son's body. At first, it gives itself to be read, then, by its very horror, makes itself unbearable to the eye.

The silence of Martian

The third example isn't silent ; it's a verse by Corneille :

" A great deal of fine verse has been greatly and justly admired in the magnificent scene in Herclius where Phocas does not know which of the two princes is his son. For me the place in this scene that I prefer to all the rest, is the one where the tyrant turns successively to the two princes calling them by the name of his son, and where the two princes remain cold and motionless.
Martian ! To this word no one wants to answer ⁹.
Here is what paper can never render ; here is where gesture triumphs over speech ! " (P. 18.)

The progression is clear from Lady Macbeth's gesture to the sign of the woman in the tower, then to the word, and even to Phocas's verse. The idea is gradually to come to the iconicity of language, to superimpose on the evocative power of gesture the unfolding of speech.

To the double scene (Duncan's murder and Lady Macbeth's nightmare, the son's death and the mother and father's face-off at the bottom and top of the tower, Leontine's substitution of Heraclius and Martian to save the legitimate little prince from the carnage ordered by the usurper, then the tyrant Phocas's recognition of his real son), Diderot associates the double economy of writing, iconic and discursive.

Thinking through images thus proceeds from a double superposition (just as there are in fact two substitutions and not just one in the story of Herclius, Léontine having brought her own son into the game of exchanges) : the superposition of the reach, of the intimate, invisible horror, and of the represented scene and the superposition of the scenic image and the discourse that covers it.

Epaminondas and Timagene

The last two examples derive all their sublime effect from the discrepancy between the words spoken and what makes a tableau on stage :

" Epaminondas at the battle of Mantinea is pierced by a fatal stroke ; the doctors declare that he will expire as soon as the stroke is torn from his body  he asks where his shield is, it was a disgrace to lose it in battle : it is brought to him, he tears out the stroke himself. In the sublime scene that ends the tragedy of Rodogune, the most theatrical moment is, without a doubt, when Antiochus raises the cup to his lips, and Timagène enters the stage shouting  "Ah ! Lord !"  what a host of ideas and feelings this gesture and word evoke! /// don't they make you feel at once ! But I always stand aside " (P. 18.)

Here, death constitutes the focal object of the visible scene. No other scene is in play. Epaminondas gloriously commits suicide by himself tearing off the tip of the blade that wounded him ¹⁰ ; Antiochus poisons himself by drinking the cup that was not intended for him. This time, the gesture comes as close as possible to the death it signifies: it causes it. The gesture itself carries the scenic discrepancy : the point removed and not pushed in kills, the poison doesn't reach the right person. It is no longer a sign, a figure, but triggers a " crowd of ideas and feelings ". Epaminondas's phrase asking for his shield is incomprehensible at the moment he utters it  Timagenes's, too late to suspend Antiochus's fatal gesture, remains suspended in ellipsis : the sublime word is a weak, insignificant, banal word.

Semiology of the sublime gesture

The scene thwarts discursive logic : signifiers are emptied of signified, and the sublime gesture that then becomes a tableau feeds on this confusion of meanings, the vagueness and playfulness then opened up by the image. The expressive gesture is not the gesture that takes the place of a sign, as Macbeth's gesture, " image of remorse " or even " the sign " of the earth spread in a cross by the mother over her son's body, might suggest. He goes back upstream of language in the thought process, restoring the primary, polysemous image that thought triggers in reaction to injury. Diderot's examples indirectly represent this injury: Duncan's murder, the death or disappearance of his son, the blow received in battle, the injury inflicted by Rodogune - these are the primal wounds whose sublime gesture is merely the aftermath, brought to light in a screen scene. Diderot proposes a whole range of possible injuries. We have suggested, in connection with Lady Macbeth's gesture, a possible relationship with the injury represented for him by imprisonment at Vincennes. We might add that, as this imprisonment redoubled the one his father had inflicted on him to punish him for the life he had chosen, the references to the father's death or guilt may not be without personal resonance either.

.

III. Diuturni silentii

But sublime gestures are still only a blip in the discussion of the grammatical question of inversions. Diderot, at this stage of the Lettre, is merely highlighting a kind of blind spot in the question, the moment when, all discourse being undone by the sublime gesture, the question of the order of succession of discourse and, hence, the question of inversions becomes obsolete.

Then come various remarks on the order in which the mute by convention would present his ideas, then on the respective place of noun and adjective, finally on verbs : the gestures of the mute cannot mark " the difference of tenses " (p. 23). Diderot then notes the oddity of the Greek, which blends aspectual and temporal values, rendering our present tense of general truth in an aorist. There are " like remains of the original imperfection of languages, traces of their infancy " (p. 24). The order of words is also necessarily dependent on the history of the language. It cannot be accounted for purely logically. This history plunges us into the unconscious of language. Generalizing from the confusion of tense and aspect in Greek, Diderot exclaims :

" But there is perhaps not a single Greek or Latin writer who noticed this defect : I say more, not one perhaps who did not imagine that his speech or the order of institution of his signs , followed exactly that of the views of his mind ; however it is evident that it was nothing of the kind. " (P. 25.)

The /// The speeches of a Greek or Latin orator follow an institutional order imposed by the history of the language, which is therefore not the natural order of thought, " that of the views of his mind ". But the speaker is unaware of the distortion between what his mind sees and what his tongue pronounces. He unconsciously performs transpositions and inversions.

This is where the example of the Ciceronian Diuturni silentii begins, a veritable textbook case since the construction of this first sentence of the Pro Marcello is completely reversed in relation to the French sentence order. The text thus constitutes a great classic of the Latin version and served as a leading example in the debate on inversions that preceded Diderot.

Cicero's situation and what's at stake in Pro Marcello

However, we can't help but notice at once the filiation for the meaning of the long silence from which Cicero emerges after his exile with the long silence to which Diderot, after the Vincennes episode, sees himself condemned. The Pro Marcello was delivered in the summer of ~46 in the senate by Cicero in thanks for the pardon and recall from exile that Caesar had just granted to Marcellus, a long-time opponent. Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in ~48, subdued Egypt in ~47, then crushed Pharnaceus at Zela. In early ~46, he landed in North Africa at Thapsus, where he routed the remnants of the Pompeian party coalitioned with Cato's Republican supporters. The Pro Marcello is set at a time when Caesar is at the height of his glory, just before the final uprising in Spain that will lead him to step up repression. It was therefore time for clemency. After Pharsalus, Cicero, who was on the losing side, was forced into voluntary exile for a short year in Brundus. When Caesar returned from the East in ~47, Cicero came to ask for and obtain his pardon, but maintained the cautious or ashamed silence of a newly rallied opponent. Unlike Cicero, Marcellus remained firm in his republican convictions. He had gone into exile in Mytilene and refused to ask for a pardon, which Caesar, in keeping with his policy of consensus and clemency, decided to grant him if the Senate officially intervened on his behalf. It was during the session when the senators put to the vote the request for Marcellus' recall that Cicero, instead of simply opining like his colleagues, delivered or improvised this ceremonial speech with no real political stakes, since the matter had already been settled with Caesar.

.

The real stakes of the speech are therefore not Marcellus' pardon, but the very word of Cicero, who on this occasion attempts a kind of return to the public stage and poses as mediator between Caesar and the moderates of the defeated party. How can we fail to compare the discomfort of a Cicero seeking to erase his political opportunism by appearing to solicit for his erstwhile friends with the discomfort of a Diderot whose letter to d'Argenson and Berryer was not a model of philosophical heroism? Cicero's return to the public stage echoes Diderot's return, who publishes this Lettre sur les sourds with a far less sulfurous subject matter than the Lettre sur les aveugles and Les Bijoux.

Order of words and order of ideas : deconstructing the Lockean model

But regardless of the personal resonances that the grammatical example of the Diuturni silentii may have, it is first and foremost the double scene implied by this phrase that interests Diderot :

" When Cicero begins the Oraison pour Marcellus with Diuturni silentii, Patres Conscripti, quo eram his temporibus usus, etc., it's a double scene. ¹¹, we see that he had had in his mind prior to his long silence an idea which was to follow, which commanded the termination of his long silence, and which compelled him to say Diuturni silentii, and not Diuturnum silentium. " (P. 25.)

In this development, all in imperceptible shifts, we must follow the displacement /// Diderot's decisive contribution to the discussion. It is the example of the Diuturni silentii that will lead to the reorientation of the grammatical question of inversions into the philosophical question of thought through images.

For the moment, it's still a question of word order, of that beginning of a sentence with a genitive that will remain in abeyance for two lines before the noun whose complement it is appears. If diuturni silentii is in the genitive, it's because Cicero thought of the end of silence, finem, before silence itself. So the order of discourse is not the order of thought. How can we distinguish between these two orders?

" Indeed, in the preceding period, what determined Cicero to write Diuturni silentii in the genitive, quo in the ablative, eram in the imperfect, and so on from the rest, than a pre-existing order of ideas in his mind, quite contrary to that of expressions, an order to which he conformed without noticing, subjugated by the long habit of transposing ? And why shouldn't Cicero have transposed without realizing it, since it happens to us, who believe we have formed our language on the natural sequence of ideas? I was therefore right to distinguish the natural order of ideas and signs from the scientific and institutional order" (P.25.)

The distinction between " the natural order of ideas and signs " and " the scientific and institutional order " refers to an earlier development on the precedence of the adjective over the noun : " we must distinguish here the natural order from the order of institution, and so to speak the scientific order ; that of the views of the mind, when the language was quite formed. " (P. 14.) According to Diderot, who here echoes Locke, while the natural order of ideas brings first the adjective, the sensible qualities of an object, and only secondarily the noun, for the abstract noun does not strike the eye at first sight, grammar and scholastic logic have reversed this natural order to create a scientific order, or order of institution, a kind of logical hierarchy elaborated after the fact, for which the noun is first and the adjectives second. The order of language often follows this institutional order, which is not the natural, intuitive and sensible order.

But if the reasoning has a semblance of logic as regards the order of succession of nouns and adjectives, it becomes aberrant as regards Cicero's sentence : how does starting a sentence with a genitive relate to a " scientific and institutional order " ? Here, Diderot mechanically imports Lockian reasoning without checking whether it can be applied to the example at hand. The only thing he's interested in here is the unconscious movement of transposition, which for him is the very movement by which thought moves from image to language. Diderot no longer speaks of inversion, but of transposition. It's no longer a simple question of order in succession, but of the passage from one level of thought to another. Here again, Lockian reasoning is no longer appropriate. Diderot still speaks of " the natural order of ideas and signs " when for him there is no longer any natural order of signs. It is the transposition of ideas into signs, of the image that the mind forms of ideas (the views of the mind) into discourse, that poses the problem of order. Signs are never natural  they are always already part of an institution, with the possible exception of those gestures of the conventional mute quickly abandoned as impossible to realize, or sublime gestures, which precisely cannot constitute models because they are by nature exceptional and transgressive.

.

It's the reference to the Lettres sur la phrase française by Batteux, the very academic recipient of the Lettre sur les sourds, that's going to deliver the coup de grâce to the theory /// grammatical inversions :

" You thought, however, Sir, that you should maintain that in Cicero's period, which we're talking about between us, there was no inversion, and I don't deny that in certain respects you may be right ; but to be convinced of this you need to make two reflections, which, it seems to me, have escaped you. The first is that inversion itself, or the institutional order, the scientific and grammatical order, being nothing other than an order in words contrary to that of ideas, what is an inversion for the one will often not be for the other. For in a sequence of ideas, it does not always happen that everyone is equally affected by the same one." " (Pp. 25-26.)

This time the opposition between the order of signs and the order of ideas is explicit, and inversion becomes " inversion for the one ", which " often will not be for the other ". Diderot subjectifies inversion and, by subjectivizing it, leaves the field of grammar to explore the inner workings of thought. It's a question of imagining how ideas affect intimate sensibility, of virtually reconstructing the singular tableau that from the inner scene of " moi " will be transposed onto the public stage of language.

From grammar to painting : serpentem fuge

Diderot then takes up another example from Abbé Batteux :

" For example, if of these two ideas contained in the phrase serpentem fuge, I ask you which is the main one, you will tell me, you, that it is the snake ; but another will claim that it is flight, and you will both be right. The fearful man thinks only of the snake ; but he who fears less the snake than my loss, thinks only of my escape : the one frightens and the other warns me. " (P. 26.)

The fact that the example is already to be found in Batteux is a clue that this is yet another textbook case, and one might think that serpentem fuge was to be found in a number of grammar or rhetoric textbooks and courses. It's quite possible that Poussin's famous Landscape with the Man with the Snake was conceived - ironically ? - as an illustration of a grammar example familiar to the cultivated public. Diderot would devote a long development to Poussin's painting in the article " Loutherbourg " in the Salon de 1767, which completes and makes explicit the intuitions of the Lettre sur les sourds ¹². To go back from the phrase serpentem fuge to the mental image that may have prompted it, we need to recreate the three-way scene that confronts the listener with the man who saw the snake. Here again, the image that generates thought and speech is a dialogical one: serpentem fuge is an addressed sentence, an exchange between two interlocutors facing an object. The transposition inherent in the passage to speech is represented, as it were, by the very action that accompanies the sentence, the reversal into flight. If the speaker is fearful, there is no inversion: he speaks without distance as he feels it, evoking first the fear of the snake and then a desire to flee that is more valid for him than for his interlocutor. If, on the other hand, he is a man of " cold sense ", i.e. both one of those heroes capable of the sublime gestures described above in the Lettre and a great comedian such as Diderot will describe in the Paradox ¹³, he'll think first of warning his interlocutor to flee the cause of this flight, the snake, will only occur to him later. The sentence, identical in form, will then proceed from an inversion between the order of ideas and the order of words.

However, the meaning and intonation of the serpentem fuge are not at all the same in the two cases and /// It's clear where Diderot's preference lies: to the hypocritical, cowardly interjection described by the rhetor Batteux, incapable of imagining anything other than a shameful flight, Diderot contrasts the sublime word of the courageous friend who risks his life to stand between his interlocutor and the snake. The word sublime presupposes inversion. Inversion is therefore not randomly distributed among different people and situations. It becomes the hallmark of the great genre, the factory of the ideal : here prepares the development on hieroglyphics that will complete the Lettre.

It must be conceded that Poussin's painting vindicates Batteux rather than Diderot : it has also been entitled Les Effets de la peur. In the Salon de 1767, after describing the various planes of the landscape from the background, Diderot comes to what he himself calls the " devant de la scène " :

" Quite to the right and at the front is a man standing, transfixed with terror, and ready to flee, he has seen. But what is it that gives him such terror? What did he see? He saw, quite to the left and in front, a woman lying on the ground, embraced by a huge snake that is devouring her and dragging her to the bottom of the waters, where her arms, head and hair already hang. " (P. 742.)

It's not just the snake that inspires terror in the man on the right, but what Diderot describes as a woman " entwined with an enormous snake ". In the article " Julliart " he similarly spoke of " une femme enveloppée d'un serpent qui l'entraîne au fond des eaux " (p. 645). It's doubtful, however, that Poussin really painted a woman  the title of the painting, which is not his own but sets the standard interpretation, indicates that it is rather a man who has been identified there. The woman suffocated by the snake comes out of Diderot's imagination, as an extreme figure of horror.

The horrifying scene in the painting then prompts dialogue, a dialogue that irresistibly evokes the serpentem fuge from the Lettre sur les sourds :

" One is tempted, at the aspect of this scene, to cry out to this man who rises from worry : "Flee"  to this woman who is washing her clothes : "Leave your clothes, flee"  to these travelers who are resting : "What are you doing there ? fuyez, mes amis, fuyez." " (P. 743.)

The horrifying image elicits the eye's detour, the interjection to the most distant characters : speech distracts from the vision and screens it. Dialogue conjures up horror, the opening of a scene of speech reacts to the wound to the eye, to the injury inflicted by the spectacle of the monster and the woman embracing. Yet what is this spectacle, which Diderot refines after Poussin to make a kind of archetypal figure of terror, if not the imaginary face-to-face of the " transi " child and his ¹⁴ monstrously mated mother, which Freud models under the name of the primitive scene ?

How does the serpentem fuge come to fit within the example of the Diuturni silentii in the Lettre sur les sourds ? Isn't there a thread running through the Pro Marcello, the exile, and therefore the flight of Marcellus, and the reversal of the image of the tyrant Caesar, the fatal enemy of the republic, into the image of the victorious Caesar, clement and magnanimous ? Caesar is the snake that Marcellus but also Cicero has fled, so that the example of the serpentem fuge constitutes and unconsciously expresses the intimate reach, the secret, unspeakable scene, which the Diuturni silentii comes to screen : serpentem fuge contains the primitive image of Pro Marcello and figures the enunciative device to which Diderotian writing will henceforth remain fundamentally attached. The arrangement of examples in the text thus completes what remains to be seen. /// half implicit in the demonstration.

Iconic short-circuiting and meaninglessness

The comparison with Poussin's painting reveals that the principle of the double scene leads us not only to oppose the scene of discourse to the scene of the attack, which it screens, but to distinguish in the scene of the attack the attack itself and the people, the places where it is likely to reverberate. Similarly, at the beginning of Pro Marcello, Diderot distinguishes between the image that inhabits the speaker and the quite different one " that must have struck his listeners " ; it's the interplay between the two images that constitutes the scene of the attack :

" I picture Cicero going up to the rostrum at the harangues, and I see that the first thing that must have struck his listeners was that he had been a long time without going up ; so diuturni silentii, the long silence he has kept, is the first idea he must present to them, though the main idea for him is not that, but hodiernus dies finem attulit ; for what strikes an orator most as he rises to the pulpit is that he is going to speak, not that he has kept silent for long. I note yet another finesse in the genitive diuturni silentii : the listeners could not think of Cicero's long silence, without at the same time seeking the cause, both of that silence, and of what determined him to break it. Now, the genitive being a suspensive case, naturally makes them wait for all these ideas that the speaker could not present to them at once. " (P. 26.)

The moment of speaking is the meeting, the clash of two antithetical images, the image of silence on the one hand, kept by Cicero since his return to Rome from Brundus, and the image of the speech on the other, which the speaker has in mind and of the meaning that this unexpected and spectacular speech will take on. The image of silence is the one that Cicero's listeners have in mind; the image of speech is the one that inhabits Cicero's mind. The sentence will establish the link, the passage from one image to the other  speaking must take listeners from their mental image to that of the speaker. The theatricality of speech is born of this short-circuiting of mental images  the sensational effect is achieved when the sentence gives the illusion of globally and simultaneously assailing all the mental images that the discourse is nonetheless de facto obliged to separate, articulate and therefore make succeed one another.

.

This effect, as Diderot notes, is produced at the beginning of the Pro Marcello by the genitive diuturni silentii : a suspensive case, it forces the listener to seek out, to supplement the noun to which this noun complement refers, i.e. " to seek at the same time the cause, and of this silence, and of what determined him to break it ".

The short-circuit triggered by the theatrical effect of the suspended genitive superimposes the two images, image of silence and image of speech. From then on, there is no longer any question of an order of succession in thought : diuturni silentii and hodiernus dies finem attulit will be thought at the same time, thanks to the syntactic artifice, inversion or rather grammatical suspense to which Cicero resorts.

Diuturni silentii begins by meaning nothing. The sentence begins by being incomprehensible. But from this very incomprehensibility arises the search for meaning that will superimpose the two a priori irreconcilable images of silence and speaking, and involve listeners and speaker in the same community of thought that was not - far from it - given in advance. The phenomenon, which we have likened to a short circuit, constitutes a " pas-de-sens " : words that have no meaning force listeners to take a step towards the still foreign image that the speaker has in mind, to establish the link, the superposition of their views with his views. The pas-de-sens turns the incomprehensible into the spectacular establishment of meaning, and opens up the space for dialogue, /// the minimal community of thought from which a word can be established.

.

The pas-de-sens reveals the fundamental iconicity of language because, in it, discourse is undone, reduced to the image it ordinarily covers, then redone but no longer in such a way as to cover one image, but to superimpose two.

The pas-de-sens finally forces the sense  in the listener the speaker triggers, repeats in an attenuated way the wound he carries within. This wound of a long silence that mortified Cicero brutally becomes the embarrassing image he imposes on his fellow senators before leading them, as if by aftermath, as if in reparation for this inaugural brutality, to the pacifying speech he opens with the end of his first sentence.

Diderot goes further. The theatrical effect of suspending meaning and then superimposing images produced by the Diuturni silentii is an exceptional discourse effect. But it reveals a much more common and even universal phenomenon  it is the fundamental iconicity of thought.

" But let's go further : I maintain that when a sentence contains only a very small number of ideas, it is very difficult to determine what is the natural order that these ideas must have in relation to the speaker. For if they don't all appear at once, their succession is at least so rapid, that it is often impossible to distinguish the one that strikes us first. Who even knows whether the mind may not have a number of them in exactly the same instant? You may, Sir, cry paradox. " (P. 26.)

The idea is so revolutionary that Diderot doesn't immediately formulate it in all its radicality. On the one hand, the phenomenon would not affect all sentences, but only sentences containing a very small number of ideas  on the other hand, the ideas ¹⁵ would not present themselves simultaneously to the mind, but in an order of succession so rapid that it remains undecidable. This double precaution, or limitation, will soon be swept away.

The desire for forbidden fruit, an indivisible instant

Diderot follows up with the example of the fruit, as if the desire to eat the forbidden fruit stemmed from the previous evocation of the serpent :

" For although all these judgments the beautiful fruit ! I am hungry, I would gladly eat it, are each rendered by two or three expressions, they all presuppose only one view of the soul  the middle one I am hungry is rendered in Latin by the single word esurio. Fruit and quality are perceived at the same time ; and when a Latin said esurio, he thought he was rendering just one idea. I would gladly eat icelui are but modes of a single sensation. Imarks the person who experiences it ; mangerais the desire and nature of the sensation experienced  volontiers, its intensity or force  icelui, the presence of the object desired ; but sensation does not have in the soul this successive development of discourse " (p. 27).

Diderot goes on to speak of the " simultaneous movements of the soul ", the " continuity " of sensations, to come to the most decisive formulations, in a passage that has remained famous. Tracing in broad strokes the progressive perfection of language, he concludes:

" The state of the soul in an indivisible instant was represented by a host of terms which the precision of language demanded, and which distributed a total impression into parts : and because these terms were pronounced successively, and only heard as they were pronounced, we were led to believe that the affections of the soul which they represented had the same succession ; but this is not so. One thing is the state of our soul, and another is the account we give of it, either to ourselves or to others; /// One thing is the total and instantaneous sensation of this state, another the successive and detailed attention we are forced to give it in order to analyze it, manifest it and make ourselves heard. Our soul is a moving picture from which we paint ceaselessly  we spend a lot of time rendering it faithfully  but it exists in its entirety and all at once  the mind does not move in counted steps like expression. The brush executes only over time what the eye of the painter embraces all at once. The formation of languages required decomposition ; but seeing an object, judging it beautiful, experiencing a pleasant sensation, desiring possession, this is the state of the soul in the same instant. " (Pp. 29-30.)

By successive shifts, Diderot moved from the Aristotelian conception of thought as a verbal succession of ideas, a conception presupposed by the grammatical question of inversions, to a somewhat Platonic conception of thought as the contemplation of ideas. To achieve this, he progressively reduced the succession of ideas, eventually positing their necessary simultaneity. This " indivisible moment " of thought is constituted by " a total impression ", a " total and instantaneous sensation ". But the sensualist-influenced contest of all the senses that Diderot formulates soon focuses essentially on sight  the soul is a " tableau " and the activity of thought is comparable to that of a painter working instantaneously. In other words, thought is photographic...

IV. Hieroglyphics

There is an illusion of the emblem : the image is not chosen by the artist from a pre-established collection of figures that he will combine to construct meaning. It is essential to detach our approach to the image from the linguistic model that tends to identify it with a sign, a letter, a word. Images pre-exist meaning, maintaining a certain vagueness and semantic playfulness. It is born of an encounter that takes place in the intimacy of the creative act : the idea, the ideas enter into resonance with this intimacy.

This intimate encounter, in the invisible and impartable, how do we account for it ? We'll see that it always comes down to the repercussions of a deepest wound, an unspeakable wound. The instantaneous experience of thought, which brings together the vision of ideas and the desire for the object, is the attenuated repetition of this encounter, this original wound, in which we must seek the hidden spring of speech. If discourse is content to reduce this experience to the expression of a meaning, the transposition of thought into the succession of language effectively translates this meaning, and Diderot praises the French language in passing for " the neatness, clarity, precision, qualities essential to discourse " (p. 31).

But if it's the very experience of thought that needs to be communicated, discourse will have to find a way to cancel out this succession, to restore, to communicate the original image, to recreate the illusion, the impression, the effect of instantaneity. This is where the famous " hieroglyphics " that have so fascinated Diderotian critics come in. The hieroglyph is that which in discourse restores the original, instantaneous experience of thought through image.

It would be highly reductive to confine hieroglyphs to poetry, although Diderot's statement and choice of examples invite us to do so. Hieroglyphics is not a simple notion of aesthetics; it involves a philosophy of language, an epistemology, a metaphysics. At the time Diderot wrote the Lettre sur les sourds, he still saw no application for it other than in poetry and, possibly, music. But it is in fact the relationship of all forms of thought to writing that is at stake : the writing of the Salons, centered on the notion of " moment ", then that of the philosophical dialogues, with their /// reveries, their pantomimes, the practice and theory of theater, identifying the stage with a painting, will be decisively marked by this invention of the Diderotian hieroglyph.

.

It would be tedious to review all the poetic examples, French, Greek and Latin, that Diderot cites and analyzes. Instead, we'd like to draw out what links the hieroglyphs together, to show that there are, in these commentaries often judged by critics with severity or, at best, with an indulgent casualness, recurring mechanisms tending to constitute, so to speak unconsciously, a common semiological model.

The corpses of Saint Bartholomew

The two verses from La Henriade that open the series describe the corpses of Saint-Barthélémy :

"  And from 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. " (P. 35.)

Diderot's analysis unfolds in three stages, marked by the repetition of " Who is it that sees ", followed by the variation " The dread of the seas is montré ". Diderot thus distinguishes three images in the second verse alone : the pile-up of corpses, then their descent, finally the expanse of the sea. The image is, as it were, charged, placed in suspense (" the course... as suspended "), then triggered, set in motion (" sagging and descending "), finally turned upside down, the sea opening up in front of our gaze another horrified gaze. This reversal, very noticeable in Voltaire's verse, is redoubled in Diderot's commentary by the passage from the active (" Qui est-ce qui voit... ") to the passive (" est montré ").

The acquiescence of Zeus

If we now turn to the third example, the three lines from the Iliad where Homer describes how Zeus accedes to Thetis's prayer for vengeance for her son Achilles, whom Agamemnon has humiliated by taking his captive Briseis from him, we notice once again that Diderot breaks down his example into three images, delimited by semicolons :

" ἧ, καὶ κυανέησιν ἔπ᾽ὀφρύσι νεῦσε Κρονίων-
ἀμϐρόσιαι δ᾽ἄρα χαῖται ἐπερρώσαντο ἄνακτος
κρατὸς ἀπ᾽ἀθανάτοιο, μέγαν δ᾽ἐλέλιξεν Ὄλυμπον¹⁶.
How many images in these two verses! We see the frown of Jupiter's eyebrows in ἔπ᾽ὀφρύσι, in νεῦσε Κρονίων, and especially in the happy redoubling of the Ks, from ἧ καὶ κυανέησιν ; the descent and waves of his hair in ἐπερρώσανντο ἄνακτος, the god's immortal head majestically raised by the elision of ἀπό in κρατὸς ἀπ᾽ἀθανάτοιο ; the shaking of Olympus in the first two syllables of ἐλέλιξεν, and in the last full word where the shaken Olympus falls back with the verse, Ὄλυμπον. " (P. 37.)

First it's " the frown ", then " the descent and waves of her hair ", finally " the shaking of Olympus ". We find the time of suspense in the first image, the setting in motion of the painting in the second with the verb ἐπερρώσανντο, and the widening of the landscape with the shaking of Olympus in the third. Olympus suffers the backlash of Jupiterian acquiescence, just as the sea, in the verses of La Henriade, received through /// the corpses carried by the rivers.

The death of Euryale

In the apparently more complex example of Euryale's death, which Virgil recounts in Canto IX of the Aeneid ¹⁷, we find the same breakdown into three images : first is the stroke, which stops the image and forms the frame of the picture, it cruor, " the image of a jet of blood ", suspending Euryale between life and death. Then comes the slow fall, the hero's subsidence compared to a mown poppy  the image then begins to move, a movement that is always that of sliding towards catastrophe. Finally, the third image is suggested by " gravantur which ends the picture " (p. 36) : it's no longer a hero who dies, a flower that is cut, it's a whole field that the rain lays down and overwhelms with its weight.

The analysis of Virgil's verses describing Euryale's death is part of a development on the difficulties of poetic translation. Diderot will later evoke Virgil's difficulties in translating Homer, and Euryale's death should no doubt already be read, if not as a translation of a precise passage from the Iliad ¹⁸, at least as the Latin translation of a Greek, Homeric practice of epic comparison. To approach the poetic emblem, the hieroglyph, from the angle of translation, is to deconstruct from the outset the possibility of a rhetorical analysis, not to analyze after the fact the poetic effects, the stylistic embellishments of a text already there, given to consume, to taste, but indeed to rediscover the creative movement that leads from the poetic idea, from the informal image, to its verbal translation, to its discursive shaping. Diderot warned us: " the intelligence of the poetic emblem is not given to everyone  one must be almost in a state to create it to feel it strongly " (p. 34). Yet the creative act is an act of translation : original translation of the image into language, or, failing that, second translation, behind the foreign language, of the rediscovered image, which must be acclimatized to the new language.

.

It's almost impossible to translate : " The deft emblem, the subtle hieroglyph [...] necessarily disappears in the best translation " (p. 36). Yet the entire effort of Diderot's text will go in the direction of this translation, which he begins by not providing, whose impossibility he states, before producing, as it were, its supplement, i.e. its deconstruction.

.

After quoting Latin verses, Diderot is in fact expected to translate them : this was common practice in the eighteenth century, when recourse to raw Latin ceased to be the norm  in the Encyclopédie for example Latin is systematically translated. The translation of a Latin quotation, in the eighteenth century, is generally not marked typographically  there are no notes, indents, case changes or quotation marks. The French follows, and sometimes precedes, the Latin as if echoing or fading in, discreetly supporting the reader's translation effort. The Latin must reverberate, refract into the French, as it were, insensitively.

Or this refraction does indeed take place here in what comes to make up for the absence of translation. Diderot compares the impossible French equivalent of Virgil's verses to " quelque jet fortuit de caractères ", as if in despair the translator were playing dice with the printing presses, in the unlikely expectation that chance would provide him with what his creative impotence fails to formulate. This scene in the hollow, as it were Borgesian, informs and subtly reorders the entire passage. On the one hand, the image of the jet actually translates the Virgilian image, the it cruor, " the image of a jet of blood ". On the other hand, /// associated with the impotence of the translator it represents, it motivates the evocation of Petronius' parody, in which the sublime weariness of poppies laid down by rain becomes a blasphemous image of Encolpe's impotence ¹⁹. The great epic death of the it cruor is matched by the small death of jouissance  Euryale's accomplished death is opposed by Encolpe's unaccomplished jouissance  Virgil's impossible-to-translate spurt of blood is echoed by the simply impossible spurt of semen for the old debauchee of the Satiricon.

The translator, the one who experiences the hieroglyphic as close as possible to the creative process, stands exactly at the interface of the two spurts, in the movement of the reversal of its iconic fullness (Virgil's sublime image) into its verbal bursting, its discursive dissemination, its undoing in and through language. This suspension between the two meaning-producing logics, this ambivalence of brilliance (brilliance and bursting, fullness of image and deconstruction of syntax), Diderot manifests in the long enumeration of images contained in the verse, typical of a paratactic style whose permanence in his work Georges Daniel has shown.

The enumeration is an amplification : it exalts the power of the emblem and, so to speak, mimes its magnitude. But at the same time enumeration is a deconstruction : it breaks down all syntax, blurs meaning, annuls the difference between comparator and compared, crumbles effects.

However, the Latin syntagms are not arranged at random. Diderot first omits the first quoted hemistiche, pulchrosque per artus, as well as its reprise in the following verse, inque humeros, the beautiful image of the young man lying down, which Virgil then scratches out, or stains with a spray of blood. Artus, humeros, the limbs, are repressed as the image of the jet, jet of blood, jet of dice-like characters, jet of semen, comes into work. If artus, or humeri, are anodyne words in Latin, membre in French plays right into Petronius' parodic reversal of Virgil. While Diderot provides the visible elements of what he explicitly names " le tableau ", a hyper-theatrical tableau of Euryale's death, the sexual dimension of this tableau, what in it perversely motivates and triggers the jouissance of the spectator reader, is provisionally elided, and will only be provided later, allusively and disassociated.

It's impossible to translate Virgil, because the French precipitates the poetic emblem towards its obscene reverse : the limb and the jet irrepressibly lead Diderot towards a false meaning that couldn't be more right, a deliberate false meaning, for which he explains himself : Virgil compared Euryale's beautiful body slumped in a spray of blood to a poppy flower succisus aratro, cut, sliced, crushed by the plow. Diderot, who does not translate but rather attempts to render the asyntactic brilliance of the superimposed images blow for blow, evokes " the sound of a scythe sawing ". Scythe, not plough. In a note, our philosopher specifies that " Aratrum does not mean a scythe ; but we'll see below why I translate it that way ". At the end of his commentary, he invokes the sound effect, which justifies a correction by Virgil even as close as possible to the Homeric idea : " the aratro which follows the succisus does not seem to me to complete the hieroglyphic painting of it. I'm pretty sure that Homer would have placed a word at the end of his verse that would have continued in my ear the sound of an instrument sawing. " The sound of the scythe sawing, the sequence of monosyllables, make us see " the soft fall of the top of a flower " : the scythe is not just a word ; it's the very sound of the cut neck.

The hieroglyph articulates these two scenes, as expressed in his own way by Diderot, who speaks of " double hieroglyph ". There's the " jet de sang ", then " la tête d'un moribond /// that falls back on his shoulder " ; there's " the sound of a scythe sawing ", then " the failure ", " the softness ", " the demisere " and " the gravantur ". The images don't accumulate just anyhow ; they are arranged according to the dichotomy " effort and fall ", which Diderot reformulates again thus, when translating the phonic effect of pă/pāvĕră : " the first two syllables hold the poppy's head straight, and the last two incline it ". Diderot's analysis here is motivated by the prosody of dactylic hexameter. Papavera, which comes at the penultimate foot of the hexameter, which is always a dactyl, is effectively cut off by the accent on the second a. Up to this accent, the verse follows its course, with the surprises of alternating dactyls and spondees; after it, the verse returns to its obligatory rhythm, uniform from one verse to the next, and thereby, rhythmically, necessarily marking a fall. Here, the spondee/dactyl alternation is perfect right up to the start of papavera, which can give the impression of suspense, of the effort of a blow-for-blow battle. With lās/sōvĕ pă/pāvĕră, two dactyls follow each other ²⁰ : unlike the two long syllables of the spondee, the three syllables of the dactyl (one long followed by two short) necessarily precipitate the rhythm and, at this place in the verse, they do precipitate a fall.

The hieroglyph combines effort and fall. And isn't effort the effort of battle, the visible scene of the hero on the field of honor, while the fall is not just Euryale's fall into death, but the fall of the poppy and, from there, sexual breakdown and castration anxiety ? Diderot suggests : " You would not have been so pleasantly affected by this application, if you had not recognized in the lasso papavera collo a faithful painting of Ascylte's disaster. "

The image of the mown poppy applied to Euryale's death pleases, according to Diderot, only because of its reverse, the parody imagined by Petronius. The " weakness of Ascylte " and the " disaster of Ascylte " refer to the failure of the limb, whose image has been obscured in the enumeration of the painting's constituent images. So there is indeed a place and a reverse side to the hieroglyph, a visible scene and a space of invisibility where something intimate, defective and horrifying is played out, even if the text here certainly treats this intimate infringement with the most ironic distance and the most casual lightness.

Ajax's prayer

The Homeric prayer of Ajax fighting around the body of Patroclus mowed down by Hector is chosen and cut up so as to find the same process of mise en images. Diderot then fights fiercely (and rightly, I might add) against Boileau's and La Motte's translations to re-establish in French the three-step development, materialized by the three verses he proposes and the three images that make up the tableau :

"  Faudra-t-il sans combats terminer sa carrière ?
Great God, drive away the night that covers our eyes,
And may we perish in the brightness of heaven. " (P. 39.)

The opening interrogation, which is not in Homer, restores the suspense of the first image, first suggesting Ajax stopped, prevented in his fight ; " one sees there only a hero ready to die ". The second line, in which Diderot follows Boileau, transforms the call for light ²¹ into the movement of the night chased like a curtain drawn, like a screen raised. The third verse expands the visual field to the whole battlefield, virtually illuminated ejn de ; favei, to the brightness of the heavens, while the first-person opposition (" que nous /// perissions ", a creation by Diderot) to the second in the second verse (" chassez ") establishes a face to face between the two images, a dialogic opening.

Neptune rising from the waves

Similarly, the end of the storm in the first book of the Eneid evokes Neptune's emergence from the waves in three stages, three similar images if we follow the Diderotian breakdown.

Interea magno misceri murmure pontum
Emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus, et imis
Stagna refusa vadis ; graviter commotus, et alto
Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda ²². (Eneid I 124-127 ; Vers. IV 44)

Although Diderot spares us the commentary here, we find here the first image, which evokes Neptune's alert senses, sensit Neptunus : suspended listening to the storm, Neptune remains motionless. The second image accompanies the emergence of the head from the waves, caput extulit. The third opens the gaze to the vastness of the spectacle, alto prospiciens. Note, moreover, the beautiful Virgilian inversion, which first evokes Neptune's gaze above the waves, alto prospiciens, which may come, however, only after his head has risen from the sea depths, caput extulit unda.

The three times of hieroglyph

The recurrence in this series of examples of the same type of sequence and arrangement of images enables us to identify a kind of structural model for the Diderotian hieroglyph. The first moment, the first image, is one of suspense, of a pause : these are the corpses held back by the rivers before they flow into the sea  the nod of Cronos' eyebrows before it is echoed in the flow of his hair  the jet of blood gushing from the wounded Euryale, stopping him in his tracks before he collapses to the ground the questioning of Zeus by Ajax, prevented from fighting by the darkness, before he evokes light and death in honor  and finally, Neptune listening at the bottom of the sea as the storm rages, before he lifts his head above the waves. This marked stop triggers the "pas-de-sens ", the short-circuit in the discourse by which it is suddenly no longer received as meaning-bearing text, but recaptured in the primitive dimension of the image that conceived it. In other words, the first image "becomes a tableau", i.e. it opens up the incomprehensible dimension of the image in discourse, and restores, or transposes, the impact of the original stroke from which thought is constituted. It is from this attack that it mobilizes that the first image draws its power of impact, of stroke, of arrest : the rivers receive the corpses, Zeus receives the prayer of Thetis, Euryale receives the mortal blow, Ajax is stopped in his combat by the night, Neptune feels the storm.

.

The second beat of the hieroglyph organizes a journey, a movement. It accomplishes the step of " pas-de-sens ", it makes a passage similar to that which leads listeners to the pro Marcello from the image of silence to the image of speaking. The silence, or on the contrary the line, the bewildered suspense is echoed in a landscape, an expanse. The initial view, intimate, singular, incommunicable and incomprehensible, is reversed into a global, universal, communicable view, from which discourse is once again possible. The step of " pas-de-sens " is the descent of the corpses into the sea, the descent of the wave of hair that Zeus shakes, /// Euryale's slump to the ground, the curtain drawn from darkness to the light Ajax demands, the rise of Neptune's head from the bottom of the sea to the surface of the waters.

.

The third beat of the hieroglyph brings an image that reverses and globalizes the point of view : the corpses of St. Bartholomew's Day are seen from outside France, from the seas where the rivers flow ; Thetis's prayer to Zeus is seen from the whole of Olympus, which is shaken by the acquiescence of the king of the gods ; Euryale's death is no longer experienced from within as a spurt of blood (it cruor), but seen globally and as it were from the external viewpoint of nature, as the expanse of the battlefield is compared to a field whose bloodstains, now poppies, are laid to rest by the rain the whirlwind of the storm in which Aeneas brushes with death (magno misceri murmuro) is seen from afar through the placid eye (placidum caput) of Neptune.

Each time, then, the third image widens the field and externalizes the point of view. This reversion enables superimposition with the first image, whose most accurate discursive translation is the epic metaphor, to which Virgil resorts for Euryale's death : " Purpureus veluti cum flos ", as when the red flower...

It's this reversion and superimposition produced in the third beat that properly constitutes the hieroglyph. We then see the corpses from Paris and from the sea, Zeus with the eyes of Thetis and from the side of the mountain of the gods, Ajax fighting in the dark and struck down in the light, Euryale bleeding and the poppies lying in the rain, the storm from the shipwreck of Aeneas and from the Olympian gaze of Neptune. The simultaneity of images is reconstituted in the mind of the listener, who is thus transported to the origin of thought, upstream of the very word into which it has been transposed. The power of the hieroglyph is that of the erasure of language and the restitution of an original iconic state where ideas are simultaneously present.

Engraving in the Letter : phantasmatic implications

This restitution exposes a violation and, in so doing, exposes something of the self. As we have seen, Diderot repeatedly acknowledges a certain unconsciousness on the part of the artist. The transposition of the iconic state of thought into articulated discourse is an unconscious transposition. The creation in discourse of hieroglyphs capable of restoring for the recipient, in addition to the obvie message, the rational content of thought, the image, the original images that this discourse transposes, is also largely a matter of unconscious mechanisms.

.

We are therefore entitled to wonder about the phantasmatic significance for Diderot of the last hieroglyph that he summons and that, unlike the others, he somehow creates. This hieroglyph is composed of a clever collage : Diderot juxtaposes Virgil's verses describing Dido's death and those of Lucretius in Book I of De natura rerum. These verses are illustrated by an engraving depicting not Book I, but Book V of the De natura rerum and depicting the plague in Athens. The image, in accordance with Diderot's request to his bookseller, has been transformed :

" You will find in the plate of the last book of Lucretia, from Havercamp's fine edition, the figure that suits me  it is only necessary to remove a child who half hides it, to suppose a wound below the breast, and to have the line taken from it. " (Vers. IV 12.)

Finally, Diderot imagines for this last " example " an opera aria whose music he composes, cut into three phrases that correspond to the three beats of the hieroglyph.

The aim seems to be to superimpose the singular image of Didon's suicide and the global image of the plague victims' death, of which the woman lying with her child imagined by F. Van Mieris seems to constitute for Diderot the /// emblematic figure. Diderot distorts the dying mother in the engraving so that she can also figure Didon.

The evocation of the plague in Athens enabled Lucretius to describe the effects of terror, and in particular the birth of all phenomena of superstition. Diderot's choice of this episode establishes a filiation with the example of the serpentem fuge, whose links with Poussin's Les Effets de la peur we have shown. The example thus constitutes a discreet allusion to the materialist convictions of Diderot, a reader and admirer of the materialist Lucretius, in a Lettre that explicitly addresses only anodyne topics of grammar and aesthetics. In other words, this hieroglyph constitutes a signature and commits Diderot personally.

From van Mieris's engraving, then, it's a matter of removing the son from the pertiferous mother and replacing that son with Didon's wound. The pestiferous mother is, moreover, indirectly related to Poussin's Paysage with the Man with the Snake, where Diderot believes he sees a dying woman being carried away by the enormous snake in the foreground.

Serpentem fuge : one must flee from the mother who is dying of the son's lovelessness. The mother kills the son who kills her. Diderot lost his mother young, in circumstances that are not known to us. What is certain is that the mother figure haunts his imagination far more than that of the father : just think of the heroine of La Religieuse, whose mother is indeed the one guilty of having picked the forbidden fruit (we think of the example treated in the Lettre sur les sourds, " Le beau fruit ! I'm hungry, I'd gladly eat it²³ "). The mother kills her daughter by forcing her to atone for her illegitimate birth with a religious vocation Suzanne doesn't have ; and the daughter kills her mother with this lack of vocation. In Jacques le Fataliste, Madame de la Pommeraye bears the forbidden fruit and the wound it provokes in her very name (pomme and raye)  she seeks revenge on the heart of the Marquis des Arcis, who wounds her twice, first by his inconstancy, then by his constancy with the d'Aisnon who has become his wife. Between La Religieuse and Jacques le Fataliste, " l'Antre de Platon ", in the Salon of 1765, features the same type of couple : Callirhoé put to death by an effect of Corésus' revenge provokes the latter's suicide. This couple, superimposed on the one formed by Suzanne and her mother, and the one formed by the youthful Marquis des Arcis and the widow-duchess de la Pommeraye, is in fact an imaginary mother/son pairing. Here we see the emergence of an original scene fundamental to Diderot's imagination: it's neither an Oedipus, nor any of its variants, but a much more archaic relationship to mother and death.

.

We know what advantage psychoanalysis has taken of the Oedipus complex to account for the advent of language in the child and, more generally, the articulation between the unconscious and speech in the analysand. Yet the Lettre sur les sourds deals in its own way with the advent to language, whose process the hieroglyph restores, as it were, in reverse. The tripartite structure of the hieroglyph - /// suspens, liaison, globalization - is not unrelated to the Saussurian structure of the sign - signifier, semiotic cut, signified - which it somehow reverses : the first image of the hieroglyph marks a pause in the discourse, a failure of the signifier  the second unrolls a movement, establishes a continuum, a liaison (Diderot was fond of this word), i.e. the very opposite of the semiotic cut  the third operates a superposition and completes the pas-de-sens, which is properly the reverse of the signified. The hieroglyph thus appears as a kind of anti-sign. Even though it is a work of language, and signs constitute it, it makes us forget its linguistic form, and tends to restore another signifying constitution, anterior to language in the movement of thought. If there's a relationship between symbolic castration and the semiotic cut that orders the Saussurean sign, we might think that there's also a relationship between this image of the murderous, bruised mother and the pas-de-sens that orders the hieroglyph. By relying on hieroglyphs as a signifying structure that competes with discourse, image-based thought certainly resorts to signs, but by exploiting what remains non-functional, impure and archaic in them. Thought through images resurrects the iconic thickness of signs, restoring what resists transparent use, what goes beyond their status as functional tools of discourse.

There is thus a form of thought through images, to which Diderot gives the name hieroglyph. But this form is immediately associated with a content that is emblematized by the illustration chosen by Diderot for the Lettre sur les sourds, this Venus mother of all heroes that Lucretius invokes and who is here turned into a murderous, bruised mother. Thought through image constitutes the materialistic foundation of thought, stretched between the horrifying image of the pestiferous mother and its sublime flip side, the Æneadum genetrix that opens the De rerum natura and that Diderot will invoke repeatedly in the Salons. We can certainly illuminate this double image in the light of a personal Diderotian myth ; but Lucretius' Venus, beyond the mere stakes of an intimate configuration of the imaginary, above all proposes for reason a universal model of thought, while the hieroglyph, beyond the punctual poetic prowess of a Homer or a Virgil, reveals the universal iconic foundation of all thought : if the poetic hieroglyph always manifests itself as a miraculous exception in language, it nonetheless reveals a permanent spring of thought, usually masked by its conventional discursive expression.

Notes

///