Voltaire the historian, or the incomprehensible as method

This is not the scholastic Voltaire of the Contes, nor even the media Voltaire of business, but the heart of the work, those thousands of pages written, expanded, retold over forty years and devoted to world history. Looking at the content of his writings, one might at first step back in disappointment: Voltaire doesn't seem very original. He compiled, copied and even plagiarized so much that his work as a historian, to which he devoted most of his time and study, offers little new information compared with the knowledge of the time, as collected and disseminated, notably by Jesuit historians (such as Father Gabriel Daniel) and Benedictine historians (Dom Calmet).

This conclusion, towards which all current scholarly research into Voltaire's sources and the major critical editions of his texts are tending, is nevertheless counterbalanced by a lingering impression of reading. The salt of Voltairean phrasing, that pithy, punchy way of saying things that makes the Voltairean text singular and inimitable, produces a dazzling effect in the very moment of the most shameless plagiarism.

How to explain this effect ? A wise answer has long been proposed: Voltaire's singularity lies not in his new or distinctive philosophical thinking, but in a style, a formatting whose effectiveness proves formidable. This is Voltaire's famous irony, which covers up a rather poor or superficial thought, but dresses up this common thought with the shimmer of its scathing formulations. Voltaire polemicizes and seems to contradict violently, precisely at the moment when he borrows from his contradictor : the enunciation theatricalizes and factitiously turns around a statement that is not new.

There would therefore be no Voltairian philosophy of history, but rather an irony about history.

What is Voltairean irony ? Can it be defined rhetorically, i.e. as a particular use of the mechanisms of language ? Let's say it straight out  Voltaire's irony, or more generally the specificity of Voltairean writing, doesn't seem to us to simply involve the shaping of an agreed-upon meaning. The seated study of texts, in the shelter of libraries, must not blind us to the fact that Voltaire, who practiced this very study, was at the same time a man of commitment and combat. Polemic is no rhetorical game when you're the conscience of Enlightenment Europe, and when the lives, honor and culture of the persecuted are at stake. Voltairian irony is not a game about the signified  it expresses the real.

Expressing the real is not the classical, ordinary function of discourse, which in principle refers to a signified, i.e. to the mediation of a code, to cultural values, to a certain symbolic ordering of the world. Classical discourse does not express reality, but a sense of the world (a world that does not itself coincide exactly with reality). Whether it's the preacher in the pulpit, the actor in the theater, or the moralist with his allegorical characters and characters with Greek names, the discourse carried by those charged with enunciating the word of classical culture evolves in a space of representation ostensibly separated from reality.

To leave classicism is to leave the expression of meaning and enter the expression of reality. Voltaire initiated this semiological revolution in his work as a historian. Voltairean irony is not simply a rhetorical dramatization of meaning  it is the conflict of meaning, the destruction of meaning by this conflict, the stripping away of the gangue of meaning to bring out what lies beneath, the real.

The incomprehensible as a principle of irony

The Essai sur les mœurs provides Voltaire with the ideal terrain for implementing and evolving this practice and conception of writing and the writer's craft, not only because /// this work accompanied him and grew throughout his career as a writer, but also and above all because, as a work of history and an encyclopaedic work, it combines the classical requirement to constitute a total discourse on the world with the new requirement to do away with discursive mediations, in order to establish a direct relationship between writing and reality.

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From questions about origin to outrage at barbarism

The indictment of discourse in general, and discourse on history in particular, forms the core of the philosophical device Voltaire implements in the Essai sur les mœurs. This implementation consists in presenting discourse not as the unfolding of a demonstration or a story, not as a succession of events or arguments, but as a verbal object, given to be seen globally, brutally and at a distance. Once discourse becomes a verbal object, it ceases to be comprehensible and becomes a tableau. In Voltaire's work, there is a kind of iconicity of the verbal object, which constitutes the narrative matrix of the philosophical device.

The content of this verbal object is subject to a strange reversion. The stated ambition of the Essai sur les mœurs is a questioning of origins : the various discourses on the origin of the world, of man, of societies, of religion, of kings, of laws, constitute the verbal objects that Voltaire throws out to the reader as incomprehensible discourses. But very quickly, this essentially theological questioning is turned upside down by a questioning that is properly historical and political: behind this absurd verbal object, what is incomprehensible is not so much the content of the discourse on the origin of human institutions, as the very reality of the origin, which the verbal object painstakingly attempts to screen. Dismantling this screen reveals the ignominy of the origin and the ridiculousness of the discourse that seeks to veil it. It is therefore not so much the discourse as the real that is incomprehensible, and this incomprehensibility of the real is gathered up, condensed in writing by the stroke, the point, the ironic accentuation of Voltairian speech.

Irony is therefore not a writing process, but an effect of the dismantling of the ideological screen constituted by the discourse on origin. Irony is the poetic consequence of the irruption of reality into the text. Irony is therefore not a mere form  it is indissolubly linked to the content of Voltairean reflection on history and to the unmediated relationship that Voltairean writing attempts to establish with reality.

Irony displaces the incomprehensible : what is incomprehensible is not discourse, as one might at first believe, but reality, whose incomprehensibility bursts into the regulated space of discourse under the name and with the power of barbarism. The essential issue at stake in Essai sur les mœurs is a questioning of barbarism.

We therefore move, in the text, from the question of origin, which is a question in the order of discourse, to the question of barbarism, which is a question in the order of the real. This shift manifests itself in a shift away from the incomprehensible: the incomprehensible is first shown and dismantled as a verbal object, as an incomprehensible discourse on origin ; but the demystification through irony, the deconstruction of this discourse into joking absurdity, into witty play with words, does not reduce the incomprehensible, which on the contrary erupts much more disturbingly beyond the discursive screen, as the brutal and historically recurrent power of barbarism.

An example of dismantling discourse : manners around the time of Charlemagne

Let's take as an example chapter XVII of the Essai sur les mœurs, entitled " Mœurs, gouvernement et usages, vers le temps de Charlemagne ". This chapter opens with a /// contradiction :

" I pause at this famous period to consider the customs, laws, religion, mores, that reigned then. The Franks had always been barbarians, and still were after Charlemagne. Let us note carefully that Charlemagne did not seem to regard himself as a Frank." (P. 337¹.)

The introductory verb is intended to contrast a chapter devoted to morals with the previous chapter, " Charlemagne, empereur d'Occident ", devoted to the narrative of events. The idea is to stop the linear unfolding of time and consider, with the distance of the demonstrative, " this famous era ". The word epoch is still imbued, in the classical language, with its Greek meaning : ἐποχὴ, the point of arrest, of suspension above  ἐποχὴ, the distance of the skeptic, the apogee in the course of a star. To stop at the epoch is to consider the historical narrative globally, to transform an unfolding into an object through the gaze, and to give that object to be seen. The epoch becomes a painting.

Or, from the moment the historical narrative tips over into the tableau, its logical articulations fall away and its brutally juxtaposed elements enter into contradiction. So here we have " this famous era " famous because of the great name of Charlemagne, which marks the beginning of the Carolingian dynasty, the beginning of European monarchies. It is in this spirit that we must "consider the customs, laws, religion and mores that prevailed at that time " as the point of origin of today's institutions. To consider an era is to consider an origin of culture, an origin of civilization.

Voltaire's gaze then takes shape in three stages : first, it's a matter of " considering ", an abstract theoretical project ; then the picture returns an initial global vision, " The Franks had always been barbarians, and still were after Charlemagne ", a general proposition that is still in the realm of discourse ; finally, the gaze becomes more concrete and focused as it approaches its object : " Let us carefully notice that... ".

The project fixes an object of fascination, " this famous era " ; the first vision demystifies this fascination : " barbarians " contradicts " famous era "  the attentive gaze, finally, radically blurs the meaning, excluding Charlemagne from the painting which nevertheless exists only by and for him.

In fact, if we follow the reasoning that runs behind the slight breaks in this text, here is an era that is at the origin of today's laws, religion and mores. But the people who shaped the physiognomy and identity of this era were barbarians, and remained so: they brought neither values nor culture, only the terrible weight of a new balance of power. Finally, the emperor with whom this people is identified, and whose name alone sums up this era, was not part of this people.

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What is Voltaire doing, if not deconstructing the very possibility of a historical discourse, if not methodically disarticulating all the elements of this discourse ? Discourse on origin is no longer simply incomprehensible. It becomes impossible.

Les Capitulaires, screen text

The first part of Chapter XVII will therefore be devoted to the Franks, but paradoxically, as constituting the reality of an era that the texts of the period itself distance and define as foreign. The Franks are at once familiar and foreign  they are us and they are something irreducibly other and horrifying. The Franks are unheimlich, strangely disquieting².

Who are the Franks ? Voltaire's question carries well /// on reality, but a reality that is revealed to us only gradually, behind the screen of historical discourse, a screen that Voltaire identifies in this chapter with an otherwise crucial archival document, the Capitularies of Charlemagne.

From Voltaire's reading of the Capitularies, of which the whole of chapter XVII constitutes a barely disguised commentary, it is clear that Charlemagne did not consider himself a Franc :

" You'll find proof of this in the capitulary of Karl or Charlemagne, concerning his metairies, art. 4 : "If the Franks commit any offence in our possessions, let them be judged according to their law." It would appear from this order that the Franks were not then regarded as Charlemagne's nation. In Rome, the Carlovingian race was still considered German. Pope Adrian IV, in his letter to the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, expressed himself in these remarkable terms: "The empire was transferred from the Greeks to the Germans; their king became emperor only after being crowned by the pope... All that the emperor possesses, he takes from us. And just as Zechariah gave the Greek empire to the Germans, we can give the German empire to the Greeks." "

Before our eyes, Voltaire transforms texts into documents, i.e. verbal objects.

In the first instance, we can consider that it is not the obvie content of these texts that interests Voltaire : neither the problem of the coexistence of heterogeneous legal systems, nor that of the precedence of popes over emperors, or of the Church over political power are the subject of this paragraph devoted to the Franks. The discourse conveyed by these two texts is not read directly, as content, but obliquely, as a symptom of a reality it expresses only allusively : if Charlemagne contrasts " the Franks " and " their law " on the one hand, " our possessions " on the other, it is, implicitly, that Charlemagne does not consider himself a Frank. If Adrian IV identifies the current empire with the empire of the " Germans ", this indirectly means that for the pope the emperor Charlemagne is not Frankish but German.

But obviously the choice of texts is not insignificant, and their obvie content makes sense despite everything : the judicial breakdown prepares the theme for the second part of the chapter  the conflict between the priesthood and the empire, prepares the third part. The dissolution of law and the coup de force originated by the Church's political authority are, moreover, central themes of the Essai sur les mœurs.

Finally, the point being made - that Charlemagne was not a Frank - is not a gratuitous deconstruction of historical discourse  if Charlemagne was German, he was not French. The founder of the French monarchy was a foreigner, just as, as Voltaire repeatedly insists, the founders of Christianity were Jews. Strangeness, negativity and exteriority are at the root of all origins and foundations. It is with this movement of reversal, which carries within it the seeds of horror and abjection, that Voltaire concludes the first part of chapter XVII :

" However in France the name Franc always prevailed. Charlemagne's race was often called Franca in Rome itself and in Constantinople. In the time of the Othons, the court even referred to the Western emperors as Frankish usurpers, Frankish barbarians : it affected a contempt for these Franks that it did not have. " (P. 338.)

It's clear, then, that Voltaire's aim is not to set Franks and Germans against each other, or to exclude Charlemagne from his people, but rather to posit the Franks as the incomprehensible dimension of the reality underlying this era. The Franks embody the contradictory nature of the discourse on Charlemagne's time  their strangely disquieting character is a symptom in the texts  the /// Francs are the incomprehensible of the time.

Let's insist once again on a capital point : the Capitularies of Charlemagne, the letters of Adrian IV are not in themselves incomprehensible texts. Similarly, to take a more familiar example, when Voltaire castigates this or that theological writing or controversy as incomprehensible, these writings, these controversies are not necessarily obscure, absurd, incomprehensible in themselves. Voltaire practiced them, read them, understood them very well (he was probably one of the finest biblical exegetes of his time). Incomprehensible discourse is discourse which, in the textual device set up by Voltaire, is apprehended no longer as the unfolding of content, but as a global verbal object. It is therefore the Voltairean device that renders this discourse incomprehensible and, precisely thanks to this incomprehensibility, that points beyond it to the horrifying dimension of reality, which the discourse veils and covers up.

Here, the textual device set up by Voltaire means that any discourse in which the Franks are mentioned, even peripherally, becomes incomprehensible : they are us and outside us, they have power and are foreign to power, they are barbarians and they are the origin of civilization. The Franks are the epoch, in other words, the stopping point, the point of suspense around which something turns. This something is the horrifying engine of history.

Franca : the Franks are denied, despised in the discourse and texts of the ancient powers, in Rome and Byzantium. But this contemptuous name that suddenly appears in texts is a symptom of the emergence of a new force. One does not despise what one is forced to name, even and especially if one names it by hemming it in with contempt.

From the incomprehensible to the horrible

Ambivalence of the original image

The second and third parts of chapter XVII penetrate this horrifying beyond of the real. Now that the framework has been set, this new, incomprehensible fact of reality that is the Franks, Voltaire unfolds the picture of manners in two stages that make up the second and third parts of the chapter  first the manners of the peoples ; then the manners of the princes.

" Charlemagne's reign alone had a glimmer of politeness which was probably the fruit of the journey to Rome, or rather of his genius.
   His predecessors were illustrious only for their depredations : they destroyed cities, and founded none. The Gauls had been happy to be defeated by the Romans. Marseilles, Arles, Autun, Lyon, Trier, were flourishing cities that peacefully enjoyed their municipal laws, subordinated to the wise Roman laws  a great commerce animated them. "

This first picture of Gaul is an ambivalent image, characteristic of the point of reversion at which the text has arrived : the politeness of Charlemagne's reign is juxtaposed with the depredations of his predecessors. But the fleeting evocation of the disasters of the barbarian invasions is immediately turned into a riotous image of the flourishing cities of Roman Gaul, itself set against the backdrop of the Gallic War.

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The text moves backwards in time, so that the images do not follow one another in a historical sequence, but are superimposed and offer themselves to successive unveilings. Early Gaul is both barbaric and civilized, flourishing and ruined. This ambivalence of the original image crystallizes the epoch (the stopping point of the text, the moment when discourse is reduced to a verbal object) as a space of reality. In this space, the symbolic order comes to split into two: the epoch is certainly the sublime, idealized point of origin of the symbolic institution, the place where all laws are founded and from which mores derive their meaning and legitimacy; but at the same time, the epoch is the point of negation of all symbolic institutions, where ruin..., /// devastation and barbarism open up the atrocious gap in history where reality is seen in its most ferocious brutality³.

The original image is therefore reversible and blinding, as evidenced by this eclipse of vision :

" We see from a letter from a proconsul to Theodosius, that there were in Autun and its suburbs twenty-five thousand heads of families. But as soon as the Burgundians, Goths and Franks arrived in Gaul, there were no longer any large populated towns. The circuses and amphitheatres built by the Romans up to the banks of the Rhine were demolished or neglected. If the criminal and unfortunate Queen Brunehaut preserves a few leagues of these great roads that were never imitated, we are still astonished. "

The opposition of " on voit " and " on ne voit plus " is dissymmetrical : what we see " par une lettre " is still discourse  what we no longer see, the " villes ", is real. What we see is the same type of verbal object as in the first part of the chapter. It is a text that is not considered in the obvie unfolding of its content, but as a symptom of a reality out of step with what it signifies. " On voit " is still of the veiled order, while " on ne voit plus " marks the moment of unveiling, of horrifying face-to-face confrontation with reality.

The real is not only what is lacking. The real is incomprehensible because it is disarticulated : " circuses, amphitheaters " no longer make sense in a world where they have no use. Roman roads survive only in fragments, as " a few leagues of these great roads that were never imitated ". Barbarism manifests itself first and foremost as a fragmented, ruined space.

Irony as revolt

The verbal object has been posed and undone, revealing below it the original image where the matrix and stakes of Voltairian history are played out. The Voltairean device is now complete. Then comes the properly Voltairian moment of ironic accentuation, of textual slippage out of textuality :

" Who prevented these newcomers from building regular edifices on Roman models ? They had stone, marble and more beautiful woods than we do. Fine wool covered English and Spanish flocks as it does today  yet fine cloth was only made in Italy. Why didn't the rest of Europe bring in any of Asia's commodities? Why were all the conveniences that sweeten the bitterness of life unknown, if not because the savages who crossed the Rhine made other peoples wild ? "

The falsely naïve questioning, the brutal juxtaposition of refinement and savagery, the establishment of meaning (the very meaning of history) in the nonsense of this juxtaposition, are characteristic of irony, understood not as a rhetorical device (meaning the opposite of what one says), but, in the filiation of Plato, as a radical questioning of the symbolic institution of discourse.

Voltairian indignation, indignant impotence in the face of the spectacle of barbarism, manifests itself in a kind of verbal takeoff : as the questions are asked, the pace quickens, and above all the enumeration of materials, which directs the gaze downwards, contrasts with the flight of questions, which re-establishes in the questioning virtuality the movement, circulation, articulation of space, which are the sign of culture. On the one hand, stone, marble and wood prolong the evocation of the pieces and fragments of the original image; on the other, buildings, commerce and luxury re-establish, in the rebellious movement of questioning, the world of culture precisely where it is most lacking.

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Participating both in the /// From the heaviness of the original image to the flight of questions, the moment of ironic accentuation is therefore a dialogic moment, where meaning is established as a pas-de-sens⁴, i.e. both as nonsense, as an expression of the incomprehensibility of the real, and as a step that makes sense, as a junction between the real and the reverse of the real that the question carries.

Something very important is at stake in this reversal. First, there's the linguistic effect of pas-de-sens, which makes it possible to define irony as revolt against the brutality of the real, and to grasp in irony the fundamental spring of writing in revolt. The dialogical effect of irony makes us suddenly aware of the fundamentally dual nature of the symbolic order, which is both the order of the symbolic institution, the conservatory of culture and mores, and the order of the symbolic principle, where the barbaric origins of the world, the horrific foundations of civilization, are revealed. Rebellious writing thus appears as the writing of the relationship between these two orders, of the exacerbation of their discordance. The emergence of the incomprehensible in literature is the moment when the dissonances of symbolic splitting are expressed.

The " extravagant horrors " of the law

For it is indeed in that it participates not in pure asymbolia, but indeed in a symbolic splitting, that barbarism reveals itself strangely disturbing : this moment of undoing of all the articulations of culture and civilization that characterizes the irruption of reality is at the same time the moment of establishing the law. Voltaire is still meditating on Charlemagne's Capitularies:

 

" Let us judge by these Salic, riparian, Burgundian laws, which Charlemagne himself confirmed, unable to repeal them. Poverty and rapacity had put a price on men's lives, the mutilation of limbs, rape, incest and poisoning. Anyone who had four hundred sous, that is, four hundred écus of the time, to give, could kill a bishop with impunity. It cost two hundred sous for the life of a priest, the same for rape, and the same for poisoning with herbs. A witch who had eaten human flesh was paid two hundred pennies; and this proves that in those days witches were not only found among the dregs of the people, as in our last centuries, but that these extravagant horrors were practiced among the rich. As we shall see, fights and ordeals were used to decide who could inherit a property, and whether a will was valid or not. Jurisprudence was that of ferocity and superstition. " (P. 339.)

Of course, it's always a question of considering these legal texts as verbal objects, i.e. as symptoms of reality. On the one hand, the textuality of the text fixes the framework of the law and proportions the fines  on the other, the horror of the real explodes the revolting character of the framework of the law and dismantles this textuality, the horrifying image breaking through the institutional, legislative screen of discourse.

Even more clearly here, the text detaches itself from its own textual content, its textuality, as if Voltaire were dancing on the crest of this horrifying groundswell : the text reports the law less and less, the writing rebels against the seriousness of the law. First, it accumulates and reduces to a group of horrors (" the life of men, the mutilation of limbs, rape, incest, poisoning ") what, in the law, is carefully distinguished and proportioned. Then she reverses the text of the law, which ceases to punish the crime, but, by pricing it, authorizes it : one " could kill a bishop with impunity " for four hundred sous. The pas-de-sens reveals the profound link between the law and the negation of the law, the punishment of crime and the encouragement of crime. Then prices fall and the horrors multiply. He /// is no longer about authorizing, but encouraging crime  the expression " Il en coûtait deux cents sous pour... " no longer indicates punishment, but the price of pleasure, the cost of entertainment. This insidious reversal becomes explicit when Voltaire evokes the cannibal witches : the fee of two hundred sous " proves that then witches were not only found among the dregs of the people, as in our last centuries, but that these extravagant horrors were practiced among the rich ". In other words, you had to be rich to afford the luxury of playing the witch. The practice of crime and its pricing were the only marks of culture.

The incomprehensible as a principle of a philosophy of history

The theory of no-meaning

This outpouring of pas-de-sens is always a matter of conjuncture : firstly, because pas-de-sens crystallizes an unscheduled, random encounter with reality, and secondly, because this encounter operates the junction of two orders in principle disjointed, the order of culture and the order of barbarism, the symbolic institution and principle. The pas-de-sens is impromptu and dialogical  it is what stumbles upon the device of the text and what constitutes the text as device.

Taking up Freud's analysis of the mot d'esprit, Lacan shows that the psychic mechanism dismantled by Freud revolves entirely around the formula of sense in nonsense. Freud's formula⁵ and its Lacanian complement thus lie at the heart of a reflection on the incomprehensible, whose fundamental reversibility they underline : the mot d'esprit casts a light on the incomprehensible, but this ocean of incomprehensibility only appears as such because it is suddenly crossed out, and illuminated, by the mot d'esprit⁶. Conversely, the moment of the witticism is certainly a moment of illumination of meaning. But the sudden nature of the stroke, and its fleetingness, prohibit the discursive development of an ordered meaning: the meaning of the witticism is luminous only in the instant of the stroke. It remains vague and uncertain before and after the stroke. Discourse regains meaning, while the stroke in turn becomes incomprehensible.

Lacan exploits this crystallizing power, this conjuncture of the stroke. The pas-de-sens both bars meaning and establishes it. Lacan compares this phenomenon to a short-circuit. The signifier loop takes a shortcut: instead of taking the usual detour through the fabric and intricacies of discourse, the signifier passes directly from subject to object, from the demand at the origin of all speech to the satisfaction of that demand. The signifying loop is thus cut, barred, but at the same time, through this cut, it acquires an extraordinary force of signification.

One of the fundamental themes of Lacanian meditation  is clearly taking shape here: what's at stake in the pas-de-sens is jouissance, the immediate satisfaction of this demand that constitutes the libidinal motor of speech. In so doing, another aspect of Freudian thought is, if not obscured, at least relegated to the background  it is the power of aggression, of revolt of the mot d'esprit.

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Or this dimension is fundamental if we are to take the measure of the effects of this short-circuit, no longer on the path of the signifier, but in the order of the signified, which is of primary interest to us here, as part of a reflection on the incomprehensible. We have seen how, in Voltaire's work, the request is recurrently formulated as a questioning of origins: in this questioning, we must certainly understand the questioning of a certain theological and political discourse of origins, but also an appeal, at the heart of the text and of the pleasure it offers its reader, to the originary dimension of all requests.

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If we ignore the Freudian distinction between irony and wit⁷, we'll note that etymologically both irony and history are inquiries : εἰρωνεία is falsely naive questioning, or more accurately, repeated, weary questioning ; ἱστορία, inquiry, comes from ἱστορῶ, to seek to know, to question, to interrogate. The historian's approach and the ironic attitude thus have this profound community : they place inquiry at the forefront of their activity.

Of course, they are not the same demand : the desiring impulse that is at the origin of speech, this original demand, is covered by its intellectualized translation into the order of discourse, on the one hand the futile or absurd demand that carries ironic speech, on the other the serious, philosophical questioning that drives the historian's approach. The difficulty lies in taking into account the original dimension of the demand underneath the obvie object of discourse, without reducing the demand formulated by discourse to the original demand: pas-de-sens is both a singular affair of jouissance and an intellectual commitment, putting the speaking subject in relation with a certain ideological collectivity, or constellation.

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The iconic stakes of the incomprehensible

Speech's confrontation with the incomprehensible is therefore not just the regressive moment of a return to the pure jouissance of the signifier. It is also an insurrection of the mind, constitutive of all thought⁸. When the witz is, strictly speaking, a word of the mind, it's possible that this word crystallizes, in being uttered and heard, a jouissance that would be of the order of a return to early babblings. We believe, however, that while the return to an archaic dimension of the mind is fundamental to the phenomenon of pas-de-sens, the linguistic dimension is not essential, and that it is not the form of the signifier that triggers jouissance and provokes crystallization.

If we formulate the hypothesis that the archaic dimension of the mind proceeds from the image, that the first thought is a thought through the image, it seems obvious that meaninglessness, by blocking the normal functioning of linguistic signs, does not destroy the signified in favor of the signifier, but displaces the signified from the verbal order to the iconic order. The image takes over from the spoken word, and it's true that the speaking subject rediscovers an archaic means of expression. However, this is not an archaic path of verbalization, but an archaic, pre-verbal path of signification. The faces of loved ones, the color of the day, the night and the room, and the child's own facial expressions are the first signs for the child, iconic signs before any meaning emerges from the hubbub of sounds heard and uttered. Dreams are mute⁹. The grammar of dreams, with its system of condensation and displacement, is a grammar of images.

It is precisely because the pas-de-sens expresses not the defection, but the displacement of meaning from the verbal to the iconic, that the incomprehensible always manifests itself in an unstable and reversible way and that, in a certain way, in another order of signification, it gives us something to understand.

Let's take as an example, in the third part of chapter XVII of the Essai sur les mœurs, a witticism more collected than in the previous examples, and perhaps more typical of what is ordinarily defined as Voltairian irony. After having, in the second part of the chapter, painted a picture of people's morals through the penal laws that regulated the punishment of crimes in Charlemagne's time, Voltaire turns to the morals of princes and, after listing a half-atrocious, half-burlesque series of family crimes, he seeks to demonstrate the indigence of the French court.

" Historians talk a lot about the magnificence of this Dagobert, and they quote /// proof of this is the goldsmith Saint Éloi, who is said to have arrived at court with a belt garnished with gems, meaning that he sold gems and wore them on his belt. There's talk of the magnificent buildings he had built  where are they ? The old church of Saint-Paul is only a small Gothic monument. What we do know about Dagobert is that he had three wives, that he convened councils, and that he tyrannized his country. "(P. 340.)

The starting point of the mot d'esprit is the discourse of historians, i.e. the textual screen that veils reality. This screen is distanced by Voltaire through a series of modalizations : " Les historiens parlent beaucoup de... ", " ils citent en preuve ", " dit-on ".

The crystallization of the pas-de-sens takes place around the famous " preuve ", by means of a restriction of field, a focus on what, in the historians' text, will make tableau : from Dagobert's court we pass to Saint Éloi alone, from Saint Éloi, to his belt, from the belt garnished with gems to gems alone. The image unravels the articulations of discourse, reducing the signifying fabric (a description would inscribe spaces and objects in an articulated discourse, with sequences) to a lacunar juxtaposition of insignificant materials. We've already seen how the Gallo-Roman city, with its public buildings, roads and luxury shops, was reduced at the moment of meaninglessness to an enumeration of the materials it was made of: stone, marble, wood, wool. The same is true here, where the magnificence of a royal court is first signified in the historians' discourse by the grand entrance of a prime minister and the display of his princely garb. Then this magnificence is reduced to the material of gems alone, detached from all the codes and rituals through which it takes on meaning.

The eye now sees only the stone, like the eye of the child, fascinated in an environment still blurred, poorly delineated and inhabited massively by the incomprehensible, the singular, isolated brilliance of something that shines. The Voltairian line begins by regressing our trained eye as readers to the repetition of this archaic pleasure of coming face to face with the purely iconic object.

This object is not, however, insignificant, or de-emiotized. To stare at it is already to give it meaning, to confer on it the dignity of an object of demand, to establish with it the maintenance of a desire.

The object is not, however, insignificant, or desemiotized.

Let's take Voltaire's phrase : Saint Éloi " arrived, it is said, at court with a belt garnished with gems, that is, he sold gems, and he wore them on his belt ". Voltaire deletes the articulation " avec " and replaces it with the juxtaposition " et ". In so doing, he destroys the system of encoding meaning used by historians, the framework of propriety that attributes to clothing the meaning of a position in the world. But he substitutes another mode of signification, where the juxtaposition of " and " becomes signifying.

It's no longer a question of linking the image of Saint Éloi's appearance with the symbolic setting of his arrival at court, but with his real activity as a goldsmith and merchant. The stones don't lose all meaning  they change meaning. The regression to the archaic image effected by the pas-de-sens allows us to get rid of the signifieds imposed by the symbolic institution of discourse, but this de-emiotization is not an end in itself. It is the prelude to a refoundation of meaning based on the real. Of course, this reality also carries a symbolic dimension: St. Eloi's work as a goldsmith, like court ceremonial, is part of a symbolic network, but a different kind of network, one that has nothing to do with the symbolic institution. The reality of Saint Éloi's power, the power that earned him the title of minister and saint, has nothing to do with the symbolic institution. /// to do with the functioning, the rehashing of political routine  its fortune is of the order of the conjuncture and was made outside the field explored by history, precisely in that place of the real that Voltaire hunts down and where the symbolic institution is renewed.

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St. Éloi's jewels are the principle of his power. He wears them not as the canonical attributes of his office, but as attachments to what he comes from, because it is through them that he has conquered his office. The jewels break through the framework of the symbolic institution and impose a new world order, for Saint Éloi is a parvenu. Here, the pas-de-sens unlocks the symbolic principle in its articulation with the symbolic institution. This articulation takes place through the image, in the real, and manifests itself through the phenomenon of the incomprehensible.

Symbolic doubling and the philosophy of history

However, we shouldn't reduce this phenomenon to its technical modeling : a shift from the verbal to the iconic, dialogization, a direct relationship with reality, a refoundation of meaning. The refoundation of meaning effected by Voltairean irony constitutes a genuine philosophical process : while Voltaire did not write his thought on history in the form of a systematic discourse, he did elaborate a philosophy of history, as evidenced by the first title of what would constitute, from 1769 onwards, the introduction to the Essai sur les mœurs : Philosophie de l'histoire. But this philosophy is not embodied in a discourse  it expresses itself as an approach, in the movement of irony and the practice of pas-de-sens.

The question of origin then takes on its full meaning  the Voltairean philosophy of history is built from the reversal of this question, a reversal which it erects, negatively as it were, as the principle of History. The refoundation of meaning brought about by the pas-de-sens is superimposed on and identified with the symbolic refoundation that Voltaire pursues in every historical period. The picture of barbarism doesn't just discredit the discourse of historians. It also signifies, in the real, the failure of the symbolic institution, and the recourse, original, to the symbolic principle.

This refoundation always appears aberrant, and constitutes the most disturbing moment of Voltairean speech : there's a certain unhealthy proximity between the surge of barbarism and the founding narrative, the moment of the origins of this symbolic institution, which is the moment of barbarism, and the institution itself (what Voltaire calls mores), where the refinements of culture and the straitjacket of traditions coexist.

It's as if, quite systematically in the Essai sur les mœurs, a kind of logical leap is repeated between the barbaric principle of foundation and the familiar result of institution. This incomprehensible leap, this unheimlich flip side of the Enlightenment that Voltaire brings into play, opens literature to a new semiology that, in a way inaugural in our history and culture, places the real at the heart of its system of signification.

 

Notes

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