Things versus words

Chardin, Les Attributs des arts et les récompenses qui leur sont accordées, oil on canvas, 102x140.5 cm, 1766, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage

The problem of defining words and its encyclopedic model

Words and things

In the article Dictionnaire de l'Encyclopédie (1754), D'Alembert distinguishes three kinds of dictionaries : " dictionaries of languages, historical dictionaries, & dictionaries of Sciences & of Arts ". To this disciplinary division, he superimposes a technical division: " dictionaries of words, dictionaries of facts, & dictionaries of things ". But this second division turns out to function rather as a gradation, from the explanatory dryness of the word, to which a meaning is assigned, to the descriptive development of the fact, which already implies a narrative of phenomena, to the genealogy of things, which passes through reasoned explanation.

Thus, if facts initially appear to D'Alembert to be the hallmark of a science dictionary, the science dictionary will confine itself to facts only " whenever the causes are unknown to us ". Explaining the causes of facts means going from facts to things. In the same way, " a dictionary of languages, which appears to be only a dictionary of words, must often be a dictionary of things when it is well done: it is then a very philosophical work ". The same applies to history: " a historical dictionary written by a philosopher, will often be a dictionary of things: written by an ordinary writer, by a compiler of Memoires & of dates, it will hardly be more than a dictionary of words. "

" Ouvrage dans lequel les mots d'une langue sont distribués par ordre alphabétique, & expliqués avec plus ou moins de détail, selon l'objet qu'on se propose " : there is therefore a dictionary pretext, " les mots d'une langue ", distributed alphabetically, and a dictionary object, " selon l'objet qu'on se propose ". The real object, the one we should ideally always propose to ourselves, is, beyond words and facts, those " things ", vague and undecided, more or less extended, developed, where the philosopher's thought should find room to unfold. The dictionary functions as an operator of thought: the definition of a word opens the way to reflection on the thing; the speed and ease of alphabetical order - to the slowness of deepening a field of knowledge. Diderot adds to the Encyclopédie article¹ :

" Let us conclude, then, that a good vocabulary will never be executed without the assistance of a great many talents, because definitions of names are not different from definitions of things (See art. Definition), & that things can only be well defined or described by those who have made a long study of them. But, if this is so, what will it not take for the execution of a work in which, far from limiting itself to the definition of the word, it will be proposed to set out in detail everything that belongs to the thing ? "

The definition of name, or word, borne the article, while the definition of thing opens up not only to detailed exposition but to the contest of talents, i.e. to the dialogical reflection of knowledge. It is no longer simply a matter of unfolding a discourse  materials must be arranged, voices must be brought together : understood as an operator of thought, the dictionary generically prepares the collapse of monological discourse.

The shift /// philosophical

By its size, by the subjects it tackles, by the spirit that drives it, Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique seems a priori far removed from the encyclopedic project. Yet the very title echoes the formula of D'Alembert, to whom Voltaire was infinitely closer than to Diderot, as evidenced by his correspondence :

" Indeed, a dictionary of languages, which appears to be only a dictionary of words, must often be a dictionary of things when it is well done: it is then a very-philosophical work. "

In the Dictionnaire philosophique, the question of the definition of the word almost always constitutes the prerequisite of the article : but it is somehow posed with distance and irony ; it is designated from the outside, as what should have been done, as what should have been found in a dictionary. The definition is the prerequisite that the work of the thing deconstructs, reverses and dialogizes. It is through the deconstruction of the definition that the operator of thought is brought into play, and the dictionary switches from vocabulary to philosophy.

But this term " philosophique " refers above all to a great predecessor, whom D'Alembert mentions in the article Dictionnaire : it's Bayle.

" Bayle's dictionary has been criticized for mentioning a fairly large number of little-known authors, & for omitting some very famous ones. This criticism is not entirely unfounded; however, it can be argued that since Bayle's dictionary (as a historical work) is merely Morery's supplement, Bayle is only supposed to have omitted those articles that did not require correction or addition. It may be added that Bayle's dictionary is only improperly a historical dictionary  it is a philosophical and critical dictionary, where the text is only the pretext for the notes: a work that the author would have made infinitely estimable, by deleting anything that might offend religion and morals. "

Behind its historical alibi, Bayle's dictionary is " un dictionnaire philosophique et critique " that is, a philosophical dictionary because it is critical, pairing up with its Catholic and agreed-upon counterpart, Moreri's dictionary. In a way, Bayle was writing a dictionary in the second degree, and it was this second-degree approach that Voltaire was to take up, accentuating it to the point of caricature. Bayle offends religion and morals, and feigns offence at D'Alembert, who publishes here with the King's approval and privilege : this double impropriety will in a way constitute the specifications of the Voltairian dictionary.

Etymology as scenography : the Abbé article

Voltaire thus starts with language and, as a language dictionary would require, often practices etymology. Thus, from the very first article:

" Where are you going, monsieur l'abbé ? etc.? Do you know that abbé means father ? If you become one, you're doing the state a favor "

First, the rocket of the saucy couplet. Voltaire doesn't just set the folky tone, the playful rhythm of the salutation. He sets the scene, sets the anecdote. The etymology of abbé comes next, and briefly, like a catch-up, or a reminder. This is not a dictionary; we've already read elsewhere what abbé means, which is only recalled here to introduce the dissidence of the two constituent voices of the trait d'esprit, that of instituted discourse on the one hand, which attributes all paternal reverence to abbé, and that of the brutal return to the principle of generation on the other, which presupposes, in order to become a father, that we have sex. To the question of meaning that arises at the threshold of every dictionary article, in this case " what does abbé ? ", the song's line answers with another question, which unravels the discourse and crystallizes the picture : " Where are you going sir? /// l'abbé ? " Caught on the prowl, discovered in full contravention of his vows, the abbé loses his title of father and gains it at the same time, serving the Church and, in so doing, finally doing the State a favor  the etymology of the word, turned against itself, reveals here more forcefully than ever the paternal metaphor constitutive of the witticism. Between the father of generation and the father of reverence, between the real father who unveils the thing and the symbolic father who veils it with his word, the dictionary deploys the hiatus, the "no-meaning " of the anecdote. The scene that the anecdote outlines here constitutes the operator of thought, which reverses the word into the thing, then the thing into the word.

Compare this typically Voltairian introduction with the much more detailed etymology that was also the starting point for the Abbé article in the Encyclopédie :

" The name Abbe derives from the Hebrew word אב, meaning father ; from which the Chaldeans & Syrians formed abba : hence the Greek abbas, which the Latins retained. From abbas comes in French the name Abbé, &c. S. Marc & S. Paul, in their Greek Text, use the Syriac abba, because it was a word commonly known in the Synagogues & in the first assemblies of the Christians. They add to it as a form of interpretation, the name of father, abba, O Πατηρ, abba, pere, as if they said, abba, that is, pere. But this name ab & abba, which at first was a term of tenderness & affection in Hebrew & Chaldean, afterwards became a title of dignity & honor. The Jewish Doctors affected it, & one of their oldest Books, which contains the Apophthegms, or Sentences of several of them, is entitled Pirke abbot, or avot; that is, Chapter of the Fathers. It was by allusion to this affectation that J. C. forbade his Disciples to call pere any man on earth : & S. Jerome applied this defense to the Superiors of the Monasteries of his time, who took the title of Abbot or Father. "

Under a much more erudite guise, the scholarly etymology deployed by the Encyclopédie² also implements, albeit more discreetly, a similar reversal : from " term of tenderness and affection " we move on to " title of dignity and honor ", which Christ, out of humility, forbids his disciples to give to " no man on earth³ ", i.e. first to himself. This defense is then transposed by St. Jerome " to the Superiors of the Monasteries of his time ", so that the article suggests that the title of abbot is always a usurped title : but it doesn't say so  the deployment of the word's meanings invites the reader to reflect on the thing, reflect, that is, turn the word against itself.

What characterizes Voltaire here, unlike any other dictionary, is the scenic ordering of his thought operator, it's the iconic façade of the witticism, it's the slinging movement of the anecdote : " Where are you going, Monsieur l'abbé ? " He had already left. At the Voltairean interpellation, the abbé turned around. The genius of this scenographed volte-face consists in concretely, visually depicting the process of unveiling the thing through the dialogization of the word.

Etymology as dissemination : the Messiah article

For the article Messiah, Voltaire confronts the article of the same name in the Encyclopédie, written by Jean Antoine-Noé Polier de Bottens (1713-1783), a Swiss Protestant theologian descended from Rouergue nobility. Polier de Bottens collaborated on the Encyclopédie for /// the letter M, with Mages, Magicien, Magie, Messie. He had met Voltaire in Germany, and Voltaire revised his Messiah article from the Encyclopédie, which thus already bore his mark, with a few corrections and additions. But the scholarly etymology that opens the Messiah of 1757 is indeed the work of the Swiss theologian's erudition :

MESSIE, Messias, s.m. (Theol. & Hist.) this term comes from Hebrew, meaning unxit, unctus ; it is synonymous with the Greek word christ : the one & the other are terms consecrated in religion, & which are given today only to the anointed one par excellence, that sovereign deliverer whom the ancient Jewish people awaited, after whose coming they still long, & whom we have in the person of Jesus son of Mary, whom they regard as the Lord's anointed, the Messiah promised to mankind. The Greeks also used the word of eleimmenos, which means the same as christos.

Polier de Bottens immediately sets the definition in tension, between Hebrew etymology on the one hand (curiously the Hebrew letters are missing, משיה Mashia'h), which leads to the thing, the anointed one, and the translation of the word on the other, which unfolds in the constellation of languages : unctus, christos, eleimmenos. On the one hand " this term comes from... " ; on the other it " means ". Between the word messiah and the anointed one, the lexical discourse of the dictionary is traversed by the figure of " the anointed one par excellence " who both is and isn't Christ, or more precisely whom the Jews were waiting for and whom we have. The point here is not to turn the word against itself, but rather, from the word, to produce the pulsation of the presence-absence of the thing : between them and us, between their expectation and our certainty.

For it is indeed a pulsation, as the very strange interplay of pronouns shows. At the outset, the opposition between them and us is clear : on the one hand " the ancient Jewish people awaited " the Messiah ; on the other, we Christians have him " in the person of Jesus son of Mary ". But who is this final " they ", " whom they regard as the Lord's anointed, the Messiah promised to mankind " ? Strictly speaking, it was the Jews who etymologically coined the word Messiah from this image of " the Lord's anointed ". But what is given, not to be conceived abstractly, but to be seen concretely and finally, that " which we have in the person of Jesus son of Mary ", the Jesus of Christians therefore, from whom the lexicographer, caught up in the balancing act, distances himself. So it is deliberately unclear whether we are dealing here with the promised Messiah or the Messiah who has come. We find here, without the wit and fulgurance of the Voltairian stroke, the swing of the murderous point that closes the article Judea in the Dictionnaire philosophique, " terre promise, terre perdue ".

You only have to compare this with the entry for Messiah in dom Calmet's Dictionnaire de la Bible:

" Messias. This term comes from the Hebrew masch, to anoint. It is given principally and par excellence, to the sovereign Deliverer whom the Jews awaited, and whom they still wait for uselessly today, since he came at the preordained times in the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. "

Calmet's point of ambiguity, where the word takes on a figure without possible doubt, and the " ils " of error is reversed into the " nous " of unquestioning faith.

In the Messiah of the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire tightens Polier de Bottens's text, and makes the figure of Christ disappear :

MESSIE. Messiah or Meshiah in Hebrew ; Christos or Celomenos⁴ in Greek ; /// Unctus in Latin, Anointed. (Graphie de l'éd. Varberg, t. II, p. 138.)

It's not just the unifying image of Christ-Messiah that disappears  it's also the genealogical discourse that made the link from the Hebrew language to the Greek and, through the genealogy of the word, legitimized the Christian translatio imperii : from Old to New Testament, then from Greek to Latin.

The sheer juxtaposition of lexical equivalences, treated moreover with a certain casualness (what is this " Celomenos in Greek ", if not a pure barbarism ?), makes the figure burst, and this will henceforth be the issue of the article that Voltaire tightens : there is not one, but lots of messiahs, and the Bible itself, supposed to legitimize the figure of the only Christian messiah, produces a whole slew of them.

The thing disappears ; only the name remains, hollowed out of substance : " the name Messiah was often given to idolatrous or infidel princes " ; " the name Messiah is expressly given to Cyrus " ; " Ezekiel... gives the name Messiah to the king of Tyre " ;" This name of Messiah, Christ, was given to the kings, prophets, & to the high priests of the Hebrews " ; " If the name Messiah, anointed of the Lord was given to idolatrous kings... ".

The word establishes in things a difference that makes a picture. As soon as the word is disseminated, exported, spread, this difference fades : the deployment of things then, in reverse, destroys the specificity of the word. The dictionary becomes a dissemination machine that, by globalizing meaning, undoes it. By multiplying messiahs, none remain.

The alibi of compilation : Bayle's model

This multiplication leads us to question a second aspect of the dictionary, which no longer concerns the articulation of the words in the dictionary and the things they designate, but another articulation, of the dictionary's discourse to the discourses that preceded it, which on the one hand it recycles and compiles, and which on the other it criticizes and distances. The thought operator's shift from the textual material of the dictionary to its philosophical object also involves this double movement of compilatory absorption and critical abjection, a properly generic movement that, in Voltaire's work, supports the obsessive metaphor of devouring and gives it both structural support and symbolic significance.

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D'Alembert alluded to this in connection with Bayle, in the article Dictionnaire de l'Encyclopédie : " c'est un dictionnaire philosophique & critique, où le texte n'est que le prétexte des notes ". The text produces the discourse of compilation, or more exactly of compiling synthesis, which the notes are supposed to redeploy. But this redeployment outlines the movement of a revolt, from the margins of the page against its center, from the marginal reality of things against the central discursive screen. The typographical layout of Bayle's dictionary, as well as that of Prosper Marchand's, makes this device immediately visible. Indeed, whereas Moréri's dictionary⁵ is printed in two continuous columns, without notes, according to the classic typographical layout of dictionaries that would be used in the Encyclopédie, Bayle's⁶ adopts an extremely complex layout : the base text, in one column, rarely exceeds a quarter of the page  it is followed by extremely abundant notes in two columns, themselves accompanied by marginal references. Note references in the text are capital letters; note references in the notes are numbers. Occasionally, the basic text also requires marginal references  in these cases, the calls for notes are in lower case, and a single page is used for all notes. /// three different note systems.

Let's take the article Adam as an example. In Moréri, Adam is first and foremost a word, a name:

Adam is first and foremost a word, a name.

" Adam is the ordinary word the Hebrews use to express man. It means earth red ; but this name was given particularly to the first man, whom God created with his own hands, on the sixth day of the creation of the world, as it says in the first chapter of Genesis, v. 26. "

From the word definition, which confines Adam to the " red earth " from which he was made, Moréri moves on to the thing definition, which, from the biblical reference, unfolds the creation narrative. The logic of the word dictionary, which is also the institutional dictionary, identifying linguistic knowledge and ideological institution, is a logic of discourse: the word, fixed in its meaning, unfolds a narrative of the thing, i.e. an unfolding of events. The meaning established, the reference posed motivated an " exposé en détail ", to use Diderot's formula in the Encyclopédie article : " far from limiting ourselves to the definition of the word, we propose to expose in detail everything that belongs to the thing. "

However, the Adam article in Moréri's dictionary doesn't stop at the account of genesis, which constitutes only its first part. A second paragraph begins as follows :

" This is all that scripture tells us of Adam's life, from the 1st chapter of Genesis to the 6th^e. The rest of what is said is either uncertain or false, or full of reveries and errors. It appears that it cannot be denied that Adam was created perfect in mind, endowed with good sense and capable of reasoning well about all things  but that he possessed in perfection all the sciences and arts, is what cannot be assured, nor what some have said of his perfect beauty. "

The monological institution of the word dictionary, once deployed in the detailed exposition of things, meets the Babelian polyphony of commentaries, opinions, discursive alterities. On the one hand, " what writing teaches us ", on the other " the rest of what is said " : this vague, disquieting " on " Moréri sets out to ward it off. His aim is to discredit it, to refute its discourses as " uncertain or false " as " full of reveries and errors ". This attempt to ward off the disquieting polyphony of discourses on things, which threaten the univocity of the name, is first and foremost an attempt at rationalization. "Speculations about Adam's science and beauty are pure fantasy. This irrational discourse of the heterodox is an embarrassed, entangled discourse. First, it draws us in with complicated reasoning  " it seems that it cannot be denied that... ". These verbal convolutions are opposed by the monological assurance of the dictionary : " c'est ce qu'on ne peut assurer ".

However, the encyclopedic vocation of the dictionary obliges us to take account of these discourses, which ideally should all be reviewed. Scholastic erudition is deployed here, and the talent of the compiler proliferates : this deployment, which is supposed to be null from the point of view of science, nevertheless scientifically endorses the monological institution of the dictionary's auctorial discourse. The extent of this vain erudition legitimizes the choice and value of the definition :

" We must put down to daydreams, what the rabbis (among others, Manassés-ben-Israel, and Maimonides) advanced, that he had been created male and female, that is, with two bodies, and that the formation of Eve was merely the separation of the female body from that of the male. "

Menasseh or Menasseh-ben-Israel (1604-1657) was a rabbi from Amsterdam, of the diaspora /// contemporary and friend of Rembrandt. Maimonides, who lived in Cordoba in the twelfth century, is probably the source Menasseh cites. This hermaphroditism of Adam⁷, perhaps influenced by Platonism⁸, is worth noting : Bayle and Voltaire will ensure it a certain posterity...

Moréri emphasizes the absurd nature of these " reveries " : " nothing is more ridiculous in this genre than what some rabbis have advanced "  " nor should much faith be added to what several ecclesiastical authors... "  " several errors have been spouted about Adam ".

Of course, Moréri guarantees the prevalence and dissemination of Catholic dogma through this conjuration of heterodox discourse. However, he does not base this prevalence on arguments of authority (the authority of Scripture, of the Church, superior to the authority of the Thalmudists, of the Jews), but on the confrontation, which he claims to be rational, between assured facts and uncertain or false reveries. The reasoning is undoubtedly tendentious  the whole mythology of the earthly paradise and the fall is held to be unhesitatingly certain, right up to Adam's death " age of 930 years ", and one may well ask in what way these " facts " are more certain than that of Adam's perfect beauty, his androgyny, or that he would be the author of several books... The important thing is not there : the shift from the argument from authority to the argument from reason puts all discourses on the same level. Among the rejected discourses, Moréri makes no distinction between " the rabbis ", " some rabbis " and " several ecclesiastical authors ". In passing, he emphasizes the heresy : " la Peyrere, born Protestant... claims that Adam was not the first man "  " Tatian, ancient heretic, ... believed that Adam had not been saved " ; but " what Origen, S. Athanasius, S. Augustine " who are themselves perfectly orthodox, " have said that Adam was one of those who rose with Jesus Christ is not certain ". The monological institution of the dictionary equalizes and levels discourse. It ultimately condemns the hierarchy of orthodoxy and heterodoxy; it institutes a market of knowledge, in which the encyclopaedist makes choices and goes for the best-offering discourse. The function of the display of vain erudition is also to establish this market of knowledge. The monological institution of the dictionary, based on the definition of a word, and the objective closure that such a definition implies, tends to be threatened by what we might call the law of the knowledge market, the free competition of erudition. Faced with the institution of the word, the principle of things : things and their discourses return to the word.

This return effect manifests itself only as a tendency from monological discourse to polyphony in Moréri. In Bayle, the typographic layout immediately catches the eye : the polyphonic apparatus of the notes competes with, circles, crushes the monologism of the word definition in the body of the text. Bayle's introduction to the Adam article has nothing in common with Moréri 's:

" Adam, stem and father of the whole human race, was produced immediately from God on the sixth day of creation. His body having been formed from the powder of the earth, God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, that is, animated him. "

Bayle's discourse is not exactly Moréri's : he deletes the definition of name ; Adam is not a word before being a person  Bayle starts right away with the biblical narrative. Moréri supports this narrative at every turn with a precise reference to the biblical text, which he quotes  Bayle frees himself from it and tells the story in his own words. The dictionary discourse /// is emancipated. Moréri hurries to place Adam in the earthly paradise  Bayle lingers on Adam's creation  he gives it a long view : first it's the " powder of the earth ", then the " breath in the nostrils ", finally the object that is created, " this compound that is called man, which includes an organized body, and a reasonable soul ". This takes us away from the Scriptures and brings us closer to the Cartesian physiology of the man-machine, this " organized body " whose movement is governed, regulated by " a reasonable soul ". The ideological content of the dictionary's discourse is thus inflected, even if Bayle concludes with Moréri that Adam " died at the age of 930 ".

Same articulation then as in Moréri from instituted discourse to the baroque enumeration of rejected discourses :

" That's all we know about his chapter. An infinite number of other things, which have been said about him, are, either very false, or very uncertain. "

Fundamentally, then, the economy of the body of the text remains the same as in Moréri : affirmation of a discourse that first institutes a monological knowledge (even if this discourse is no longer based either on a definition of name, or on a formal and scrupulous recourse to auctorial texts, tending in a way to emancipate itself, to become autonomous as Bayle's discourse)  in a second stage, enumeration of rejected discourses, in all their bariolure.

But this economy of the body of the text is parasitized by notes : from the very first lines, the seemingly innocuous assertion, that Adam's body was " formed from the powder of the earth ", is the subject of a delirious note (deliberately delirious, obeying in this a concerted design by Bayle) on the original egg :

" De la poudre de la terre. Photius, if Father Garasse is to be believed, reported that the Egyptians said that Sapience laid an egg in the terrestrial Paradise, from which our premiers peres emerged like a pair of chickens. I don't think Photius said this, and I'd be very much mistaken, if it isn't an overly licentious paraphrase of this Jesuit, forged on what Photius reports concerning a certain sailor man named Oé, whom some people made issu ἐκ τοῦ προτογόνου Ὤου, that is, according to P. Garasse, in another Book, of the race of the first of all men, who was called Oeuf : or : according to P. Schottus, e primo parente Ὤου. There would be a thousand researches to do on the Egg, which served, according to the doctrine of the Ancients, for the generation of things, when the chaos was unravelled. We touched on a few particularities under the word Arimanius. "

The syntagmatic axis of the body of the text is opposed by the paradigmatic axis of the notes. If God formed Adam's body " from the powder of the earth ", the first man could just as easily have been formed from an egg. The egg is a paradigmatic variation on the powder of the earth. Bayle has omitted to motivate the Adamic narrative thing from the meaning of the name Adam, the red earth. But the note motivates the heterodox account of the primordial egg from the name of its first man, Oé, Ὤος, the egg. The thing motivated by the name of the note tends to supplant the thing not motivated by the name of the body of the text.

The subversive effect of this note is not apparent at first : the delirious discourse of Father Garasse, a Jesuit with whom the Protestant Bayle settles accounts, serves as a heterodox counterpoint to the monological institution of the body of the text and endorses a contrario the reasonable legitimacy of the body of the text. But behind Garasse, Bayle exhumes Photius, not writing. It is Photius he legitimizes. " I don't think Photius said that " : the primordial egg may not have given birth to two chickens, but the myth of Oé deserves attention : " there would be a thousand researches to be done on the Egg ", which a /// fortiori proves far more worthy of interest than Adam's silt. The Egg offers the reader, notably through the reference to Arimanius⁹, an alternative scenario of genesis: between Moréri's scenario in the body of the text and Photius's in the note, Bayle omits to choose. The typographical device clearly indicates the respective institutional position of the two discourses, but in so doing breaks the monologism of the dictionary of words in favor of a polyphony of things, towards a free competition of text and notes, notes and their cross-references.

Voltaire will remember this " sailor man named Oé " who is said by Photius to be the first man : he becomes in the Chinese Catechism " a famous pike named Oannès " who " had once taught theology " to the Chaldeans (p. 77). Was the pike " laité ou œuvé ", i.e. male or female, or hermaphrodite, asks Voltaire, who turns what has become an absurd fable into the archetype of all theological controversy : the egg becomes the symbol of a clan, that of the " theologians of eggs ", opposed to the partisans of the laité pike. The egg is one discourse  the milky is another : everything is equal and deserves to be eaten at the grand banquet of theological discourses, at the globalized market of ancient knowledge folklorized by the encyclopedic economy of the Enlightenment.

But back to Bayle's Adam article. Like Moréri, Bayle evokes, among the condemnable discourses on Adam, the hermaphroditism of the first man :

" but it is quite false that he was created with both sexes. To have imagined such a reverie is to have stumbled heavily on the words of Scripture. Antoinette Bourignon's revelations would be ill-timed to confirm this false gloss. It would be just as well to use Jacques Sadeur's romantic narrations for this purpose. "

Here again, the body of the text seems to go in the same direction as Moréri's, even if the references to Menasseh-Ben-Israel and Maimondides are referred to in notes, expanded and completed. In their place, Bayle introduces Antoinette Bourignon, a seventeenth-century mystic from Lille (1616-1680). Among her treatises, that Du nouveau ciel et du règne de l'Antéchrist contains her revelations on the true nature of Adam, which a Vie continuée de Mlle Bourignon reports were revealed to him in ecstasy¹⁰. Bayle reports them in a note in order, he says, " that we may better discover the extent of the misguidance of which our mind is capable ". Thus we learn that the pre-Original Sin Adam whom Mlle Bourignon saw in ecstasy was endowed, instead of sex, with a nose that laid eggs every time Adam became inflamed with divine love... Adam's first eggs would have been Jesus Christ...

As in the note on Photius and Père Garasse, Bayle will partially rehabilitate Antoinette Bourignon. Her delusion is not unique : in thirteenth-century Paris " a heretic named Amaulri " was condemned for a similar delusion  Lefèvre d'Étaples also believed in Adam's hermaphroditism  as for Paracelsus, he did imagine that genitalia had only appeared on Adam and Eve's bodies after original sin : " La Bourignon was therefore not the first, who taught these things, but she put a lot of herself into them ". Bayle trivializes, and at the same time subjectifies, heterodoxy. Always already said, cushioned, blunted by the exercise of subjectivity it manifests, the rejected discourse no longer causes, no longer needs to cause scandal. Bayle preaches moderation:

" I would like the Author of the New Visionary of Rotterdam¹¹ would not have insulted, as he did in a too playful way, the Vision of this girl, and those of the Minister he attacks. One could ridicule the latter on his imaginations of the marriage of Adam and Eve, without so greatly enlivening this subject. "

This time, it's not a question of recovering, in Antoinette Bourignon's visions, a credible alternative discourse, or at least one that competes with the discourse of the body of the text. Here, the vision is strictly parasitic: the note is set against the text, visual economy against discursive economy, mystical delirium against conventional narrative, obscene scandal against the moral institution of original sin. Five lines of text against 135 lines of note in battle array over two columns: Bourignon's vision invades, colonizes and deconstructs the discourse of conjuring up heterodoxies. What Bayle is moderating is not the scandal itself, which he has foreseen and orchestrated himself, but the ridiculing of Antoinette Bourignon, which would risk anaesthetizing the effect of a vision that has become worthless. We must establish the value of the vision of Adam laying eggs through a sex-nose, establish this value on the global market of folk knowledge, of world discourses, for it is this value that gives this vision its deconstructive power.

The scandal is therefore necessary, a scandal that targets not Bourignon, but his vision. Bayle explains this in the second edition of his Dictionnaire, where he extends note (G) by a paragraph :

" il s'est trouvé des gens si bourrus, qu'ils ont dit que mon article d'Adam contenoit des obscénitez insupportables. To them we must reply that they are too delicate and scrupulous, and that they ignore the rights of History. Those who make the Life of a wicked man can and must represent in general the derangements of his fornication. [...] The greatest scruples of style can never prevent them from presenting dirty and obscene images to their Readers. What justifies me here in particular is that I am reporting absurdities, which are contained in a Book that is sold publicly. Besides this, I have for myself the example of the ancient Peres, who inserted in their works the most awful impurities of the Heretics. "

Bayle uses the title of his dictionary, Dictionnaire historique et critique, to claim what he calls " the rights of History ", i.e., against the constraints and prescriptions of the monological institution of the dictionary, the prerogatives of the real : " la Vie d'un méchant homme ", " un livre qui se vend publiquement ". The reality of things works against the institution of words. This reality of things constitutes what I have called the global market of knowledge, towards which Bayle's dictionary tends to tip, while Moréri's seeks to ward it off. This market constitutes the new public space of enlightenment, a space of globalized communication and exchange: Antoinette Bourignon's revelations are sold "publicly"  they are delivered to public opinion  they cause a scandal in that opinion. The new public space, the emerging knowledge market, legitimizes them as a discourse of opinion. But the legitimacy of this discourse can only be achieved in the context of a general devaluation of discourses that have been left to the deregulation of the knowledge market. Thus Bayle, who keeps Antoinette Bourignon under the semiotic bar of the body of the text, in the infrapaginal space of the notes, never calls these revelations discourses, but images : " ces choses impures et qui salissent l'imagination ", " des images sales et obscènes ", or à la rigueur " des absurdités ", the degree zero of discourse.

At last, Bayle returns to the old device, that of Moréri, with its auctorial discourse and conjurations : he compares himself to " anciens Peres, qui ont inséré dans leurs Ouvrages les /// plus affreuses impuretez des Hérésies " : Bayle would thus, like the Church Fathers, hold a discourse of orthodoxy, in which reference to heresies would only constitute a repellent. I have tried to show that, in many respects, Bayle had broken away from this old textual device: the interplay of notes and references, the competition of discourses they introduce, the parasiting of the dictionary's monological institution by the scandal of images, all precipitate the dictionary's discourse towards its deconstruction. It was this deconstructive game that fascinated Voltaire in Bayle. The Dictionnaire philosophique, strongly marked by Bayle's influence, completes the shift he initiated in the textual economy, from a monological economy to a polyphonic economy outlining the contours of a global knowledge market, which Voltaire assumes without complexes and with intrepid brazenness. Witness his article Adam, whose tagline directly echoes Bayle :

" The pious Mme Bourignon was sure that Adam had been a hermaphrodite, like Plato's divine first men. God had revealed this great secret to her ; but as I have not had the same revelations, I will not speak of it. " (P. 9.)

The article Adam is not introduced until the 1767 edition. It is therefore a late article, in which the shift from words to things, from monological discourse to the deconstructive polyphony of a verbal free-trade zone, is complete. Unlike Abbé (" abbé means father "), Abraham (" Abraham is one of those famous names "), Âme (" We call âme that which animates "), Angel (" Angel, in Greek, sent "), Baptism (" Baptism, Greek word meaning immersion "), Adam is not a name, does not propose a definition of name. From the outset, Voltaire superimposes two discourses, or more precisely, two representations of the first man: the Judeo-Christian Adam on the one hand, and the original Platonic hermaphrodite on the other. There's no question here of a footnote, or of a discourse reduced to the inferior, degrading, parasitic status of a dirty image. Voltaire omits auctorial discourse altogether; he merely posits it as an implicit prerequisite. Obviously, Adam hermaphrodite makes us laugh, produces the short-circuit of pas-de-sens through his confrontation with this implicit prerequisite  in the end, the reader is supposed to have read Bayle's article before Voltaire's, or in any case Voltaire's takes all its salt from its confrontation with his model, which it completes¹².

For Ms. Bourignon is no longer that mad heretic whom Christianity must condemn. The disappearance of the auctorial discourse from the statement shifts the parallel  on the one hand, Mme Bourignon receives delirious revelations from God  on the other, the divine Plato, i.e. another god, the God of another folklore, this one Greek instead of Jewish, produces a similar discourse, comparable to that of Mme Bourignon, who has become the representative of the Christian sect in the face of the Platonic sect. And here, it's delirium against delirium, in the great market of exotic products.

Facing this market, where Mme Bourignon and Plato find themselves arranged side by side, Voltaire asserts his prerogatives as a subject. " As I have not had the same revelations, I will not speak of them. " In the marketplace of folkloric discourse, the Voltairean client-subject is king. He can choose or not choose, praise, criticize or not comment. And there's even more: to produce a discourse on the things of the market is to become a discourse of the market oneself, on a par with the divine Plato of course, but also with the pious Mme Bourignon. The avoidance of discourse is the condition for maintaining a position of mastery  Voltaire is astonished, questioning, indignant  but only exceptionally does he hold an assertive discourse. To assert oneself as a subject is to place oneself in the position of client, /// i.e. suspense in the face of things : a posture of communication, not consumption.

Voltaire reiterates the device with the question of Adam's books, which Moréri already ranked among the errors to be warded off, but in a very neutral discourse :

" Several books have been attributed to Adam. The Jews claim that he made a book on the creation of the world, and another book on divinity. A Mohammedan author named Kissœus reports that Abraham went to the land of the Sabeans, opened Adam's chest and found his books, along with those of Seth and Esdris or Enoch. They say that Adam had about twenty books that had fallen from heaven, containing many laws, many promises and many threats from God, and predictions of many events. Some rabbis attribute Psalm 92 to Adam... "

The mere accumulation of this extraordinary information, as numerous as it is vague (" several laws, several promises and several threats ") discredits the discourse and drops it to the rank of " errors about Adam ". Moréri's paragraph is reproduced almost word for word in note (K) of Bayle's article. Voltaire condenses and adds some piquant details he found in Dom Calmet's Commentaire littéral sur la Genèse:

" The Jewish rabbis have read the books of Adam ; they know the name of his tutor and his second wife : but as I have not read these books of our first father, I will not say a word about them. Some hollow minds, very learned, are quite astonished, when they read the Veidam of the ancient Brahmans, to find that the first man was created in India, etc, that he was called Adimo, which means the begetter. "

The Adam books come from Moréri and Bayle  the tutor Jambusar and Adam's first wife before Eve, Lilith, are with Calmet¹³. Voltaire so condenses the discourse of erudition that it is no longer a matter of conjuration, but of necrosis : only the flash of the semiotic short-circuit remains, the instantaneous pas-de-sens that triggers the typically Voltairian fizzle of the mind. But above all, Voltaire contrasts Adam's obviously non-existent books with the concrete reality, according to him at least, of the " Veidam of the ancient Brahmans ", in fact largely a forgery : the Ezour-Veidam on which Voltaire raves was a veidic forgery, an apocryphal Veda said to have been written by Father Roberto de Nobili in the early seventeenth century, or rather according to him a little afterwards.

On the one hand, there are the books that can't be read, " les livres d'Adam " ; on the other, the book that Voltaire has before his eyes, holds in his hands (even if it's a forgery), and which speaks of an Adimo more ancient, more original than the Hebrew Adam. The parallel between the books of Adam and the Veida, placed side by side in front of Voltaire, who will say nothing about them, reproduces the parallel between Madame Bourignon and Plato in front of a mute Voltaire. Adimo competes with Adam just as the divine Plato competed with the God of the pious Mme Bourignon. Like Plato, he appears more commendable. If Adam did not have the honor of a word definition, Adimo is a word for Voltaire, endowed with a meaning : " Adimo, which means the begetter ". The meaning of Adimo makes sense logically, against the elided meaning of Adam, the red earth, which was an image in the fabulous, irrational context of the Genesis myth. Adimo remotivates Adam as a word that makes sense again.

But Voltaire doesn't commit himself to the choice of Adimo against Adam  it's not he who has read the Veidam, they are, he says with affected contempt, " some hollow minds, very learned " : they " are quite astonished... to find that... " ; " they say that the sect... " ; " they say that the Indians... " ; " they say that it is very difficult... " ; /// "What don't they say? As for me, I say nothing". Voltaire's strategy of preterition is always the same: by refusing to produce his own discourse, or rather by pretending to refuse it, Voltaire keeps the customer in control, in a position of choice in the market of colourful speeches. At the very least, at the last minute, he could side with the discourse of the sect of Jews usurping Indian myths, i.e. with Catholic orthodoxy.

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At the limit on the other hand, Voltaire mocks the Indians : it's folklore against folklore, the supposed anteriority of the Veidam simply allowing us to denounce the folkloric bricolage of what was supposed to constitute a founding myth of our culture. For Voltaire, there is no longer any monological institution of discourse, however rationalized (as was Moréri's enterprise), however inflected towards a largely secularized historicism (as Bayle had endeavored to do). It's the very idea of a hierarchy of discourses that falls : all are returned to ineptitude, to nonsense.

Didn't these " esprits creux, très savants " who seemed to be ironically depicting Voltaire, end their questions with a pirouette that's hardly more serious than Mme Bourignon's delusions ?

" they say it is difficult that Adam, who was red-haired, and had hair, should be the father of the negroes, who are black as ink, and have black wool on their heads. "

Moréri spoke of " terre rouge " for Adam ; Bayle is content to acquiesce in Adam's beauty. Voltaire did not find in Calmet that Adam was red-haired, but, as in Moréri, and already in Flavius Josephus at the beginning of the History of the Jews, that Adam meant in Hebrew " red earth "¹⁴ :

" Adam. He was the first man created of God. It is said that he was given the name Adam because of the russet color of the earth from which he was taken ; for Adam in Hebrew means red-haired or red. The name also designates any man in general. " (Dictionnaire historique et crique de la Bible, 1722-1728.)

In fact, Calmet says little more than Moréri : both bring the reddish color back to the earth from which Adam was created, not to his hair. Adama is the soil, not the hair. Adam's red hair, contrasted with the black crepe of the negroes, is pure Voltairian fantasy designed to shatter the monological unity of instituted discourse.

Voltaire finally takes a back seat to Father Isaac Joseph Berruyer and his monumental Histoire du peuple de Dieu depuis son origine jusque à la naissance du Messie, tirée des seuls livres saints, Paris, Bordelet, 1747, bizarrely condemned in 1756 by the Archbishop of Paris. The beginning of Berruyer's Histoire recounts in detail Adam's creation, then his fall, but doesn't venture into this kind of " recherches ". Berruyer extrapolates a whole, rather ridiculous novel from the pithy account of Genesis. The question about Adam's red hair is a parodic stylization of the naive Jesuit's amplificatio. Voltaire delegates his perverse questions to a Jesuit condemned by the Church : the Adam article closes with Berruyer as it had opened with Mme Bourignon. Both are figures of delusional discourse, naively confident in themselves. Voltaire exploits what the dictionary carries rather than what it is supposed to aim at: a vast storehouse of discursive garbage rather than a system of definitions. In the end, there is no dictionary genre for Voltaire : there is only distrust of a bygone discursive imperialism.

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Notes

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This Bourignon had printed nineteen large volumes of pious reveries at her own expense, and spent half her estate on proselytizing. She had succeeded only in /// and even suffered the persecution that comes with any innovation. Finally, despairing of establishing herself on her island, she had sold it to the Jansenists, who did not establish themselves there any more than she did. " (Chap. 37, " Du jansénisme ".)

The last lines of the Adam article in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie are devoted to Lilith : " We will not speak here of Adam's second wife, named Lillith, which the ancient rabbis gave him ; it must be agreed that very few anecdotes are known of her family. "

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