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Résumé

In 1770, an untitled Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes was published, with Abbé Raynal as the main author, but not the only one. Diderot, in particular, contributed almost a third of the text. The work was a huge success, and was reprinted several times. He signed the 1780 edition, with his portrait on the frontispiece. Scandal erupts, and Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, a natural ally of the philosophers, disassociates itself from Raynal. Grimm confronts Raynal with this dilemma: "Either you believe that those you attack will not be able to take revenge on you, and it is cowardice to attack them; or you believe that they will be able and willing to take revenge; and it is madness to expose yourself to their resentment." Diderot reacts violently to this dilemma and takes up Raynal's defense against Grimm, his friend of 30 years: this is the Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal, which lays down the principles of the Enlightenment philosopher's political commitment, beyond the humanist demands of posterity. This raises the question of commitment without the name, which we propose to study in the present article.

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Références de l’article

Stéphane Lojkine, « “Et l’auteur anonyme n’est pas un lâche…” Diderot, l’engagement sans le nom », Littératures classiques, dir. Ch. Delmas, P. Ronzeaud, Ph. Chomety, A. Colin, 2013, p. 249-263

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Ressources externes

"And the anonymous author is no coward..."

I. Grimm's dilemma: the dispossession of the name

At the beginning of the Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal, Diderot recalls the sarcastic dilemma that Grimm had thrown at Raynal, who had just provoked scandal by displaying his portrait and name at the head of the Histoire des deux Indes:

"Either you believe," he told him, "that those you attack will not be able to take revenge on you, and it is cowardice to attack them; or you believe that they will be able and willing to take revenge; and it is folly to expose yourself to their resentment." (CFL XIII 671)

The position of the anonymous, which was Raynal's when the Histoire des deux Indes was first published, in 1770, would therefore be the position of the coward, who attacks institutions and people without presenting a name, a figure to answer to, without assuming the political, judicial consequences of his accusations; and when Raynal, buoyed by the book's immense success, discovered himself in 1780, with a new, even more radical edition of the text, which this time he signed, he was mad to expose himself. Madness is another dispossession of the name: an alienation.

The dilemma thus pits not anonymity against commitment, but, in misunderstood commitment, two forms of dispossession of the name. Diderot reacts violently, showing that this is by no means a matter of prudence, that it is the position, the very function of the philosopher, of the man of the Enlightenment, that is threatened:

The dilemma, then, does not oppose anonymity, but, in misunderstood commitment, two forms of dispossession of the name.

"Mr. Grimm's dilemma closes the mouth of the enlightened man, the man of good, the philosopher, on laws, mores, abuses of authority, religion, government, vices errors, prejudices, the only objects worthy of occupying a good mind." (p. 68)

Grimm, first closing the philosopher's mouth, finally empties his mind. It is the very spirit of the Enlightenment that is at stake, a spirit that does not pass through the affirmation of the name, but through investment in the political2.

"He who names himself on the frontispiece of his work is imprudent, but not a fool; and the anonymous author is not a coward.
How did we get out of barbarism? Fortunately, there were men who loved truth more than they feared persecution. These men were certainly no cowards. Shall we call them mad?" (ibid.)

Diderot names no names: he will later cite Tiberius, Caligula, Nero in the face of impersonal "philosophers of the most opposing schools": the name is tyranny. We can certainly recognize Raynal here in the imprudent man who named himself at the head of the Histoire des deux Indes, but that's not the point: Diderot transforms the face-to-face dilemma, the closed structure that opposes the coward and the fool, into a progressive movement of both dispossession and collectivization of the name: from "he who names himself" to "the anonymous author", then to the collectivity of "we" ("How did we get out of barbarism?), then to the impersonal ("there have been men"), a name is lost and a network created. The opening denial ("n'est pas un fou... n'est pas un lâche") is opposed, in chiasmus, by the final interrogation ("n'étaient pas des lâches. Les appellerons-nous des fous?"). The chiasmus3, the question indicate, prepare the reversal.

The coward is not the anonymous one; on the contrary, he is precisely the courtier, the one who is in the process of making a name for himself by betraying after exploiting him the name of the philosophers. Maria Theresa of Austria made Grimm a baron in 1774:

"You no longer know, my friend, how men of genius, courageous men, virtuous men, contemptors of those great idols before which so many cowards do themselves the honor of prostrating themselves; you have forgotten how they wrote their works." (ibid.)

It is the self-serving prudence of the courtier, not the philosopher's contempt for danger, that signs cowardice. Cowardice thus changes sides, while the name, far from offering the promise of posterity for which Diderot had argued so strongly against Falconet, now designates a world of idols, Catherine, Frédéric, the Comte de Vergennes... The name of others, the fascination with the name, the ambition to make a name for oneself, socially, diminishes the courtier:

"Ah my friend, I see well, your soul has dwindled in Petersburg, in Potsdam, at the Œil-de-bœuf and in the antechambers of the great. [...] My friend, I no longer recognize you; you have become, without perhaps suspecting it, one of the most hidden, but one of the most dangerous anti-philosophers. You live with us, but you hate us." (p. 69-70)

Small Grimm, hidden Grimm, unrecognizable Grimm is now the nameless coward. Paradoxically, he loses his name to individualize himself, as a worldly star running the capitals of Europe and making himself known to the greats, while his friends take on the consistency of manifesting themselves only in the indivision of the we. The indivision4 is the positivity of anonymity, enabling commitment without the name. Diderot goes on to describe the dialogue, the process, very precisely:

"I said to Abbé Raynal: Mais, mon ami, qui est-ce qui sera assez osé pour publier et pour avouer cela? He replied with pride: Me, me. - You'll lose yourself. - I'll lose myself! Ah, I see you think I have less courage than I do.
Tired of working, and looking for a pretext that would shorten the length and fatigue of my task, I wrote to the Abbé: But dear Abbé, aren't you afraid that all these deviations, however eloquent you suppose them to be, might spoil your work a little? - No, no," he replied, "always do as I ask. - They'll say it's rhetorical. - They'll say? who? the servants of the great... I've come to expect it. Here, my philosopher, I know the public's taste a little better than you do; it's your lines that will save the boredom of my eternal calculations. Do you know by whom one is read? by the scoundrel who tears us apart." (p. 77-78)

Raynal excites Diderot to boldness, he frees him from the bondage of the name, which he assumes; the public will recognize Diderot by the boldness of the digressions requested and provided, but it is Raynal who signs the whole and takes the risk of publication, indignation, scandal. Anonymity is not a refusal, but quite the opposite, an economy of risk, which enables the efforts to be multiplied: to Diderot the risk of the pen, the intellectual effort of the book to be made; to Raynal the risk of the name on the frontispiece, the political responsibility of the book made.

II. Dissemination of the name, dissemination of things

Such a distribution of responsibilities and daring is not new, nor merely conjunctural in Diderot. His entire collaboration on Grimm's Correspondance littéraire obeys the same principle: Grimm assumes the dissemination of what Diderot writes, in the fiction of a protected intimacy and in the insistent form of epistolary confidences to his friend. Prior to this, the encyclopedic adventure obeyed the same principle: D'Alembert, the geometer recognized and accepted by the institution, had to endorse and promote Diderot's project. Even when D'Alembert, unable to assume the publicity of the name, withdrew, Jaucourt continued to play this role to some extent: he was the only one to sign his articles transparently, all the other contributors being designated by a letter that was not the initial of their name, while Diderot oscillated between the asterisk and pure anonymity.

.

Diderot's anonymity5 is not a dissimulation: under the guise of modesty, it establishes a strategic overhang. Behind the published name, a philosophical commerce is at work, involving dialogue, the arrangement of ideas and texts, agency, contamination, ebullition. Behind Le Fils naturel, set back from Dorval's salon which it exhibits, the Entretiens (1757) deploy Diderot's dramatic theory under Dorval's name, or more precisely in the division between Dorval's name and Diderot's name. And what of the Réfutation d'Helvétius (from 1774), the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou Dialogue entre A et B (1772), whose titles speak for themselves? The Lettre sur les sourds (1751) responds to Abbé Batteux's Lettres sur la phrase française comparée avec la phrase latine, while the Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773) unfolds only as an anonymous dialogue, between the first and second interlocutors, only from an early monological version supposedly reporting on a pamphlet by Sticotti, Garrick ou les Acteurs anglais (1769).

The Encyclopédie was the laboratory for this practice of disseminating the name, which is the very opposite of the dispossession stigmatized by Grimm: theorized from the outset in the Prospectus (1750), it does not attack, but displaces the philosopher's position:

"Chambers added almost nothing to what he translated from our authors. Everything therefore determined us to resort to the workers.
We turned to the most skilled craftsmen in Paris & the kingdom. We took the trouble to go into their workshops, to question them, to write under their dictation, to develop their thoughts, to draw out the terms appropriate to their professions, to draw up tables, to define them, to converse with those from whom we had obtained memoirs, & (an almost indispensable precaution) to rectify, in long and frequent discussions with some, what others had imperfectly, obscurely, and sometimes infidelously explained. [...] We saw workers who had been working for forty years, without knowing anything about their machines. We had to exercise with them the function of which Socrates boasted, the arduous & delicate function of giving birth to spirits, obstetrix animorum." (DPV V 100; CFL II 293-4)

It's not simply a matter of distributing a subject among recognized specialists who, for each branch of a hypothetical tree of knowledge, will contribute their competence and their name. It's a matter of making up for a knowledge that has no patent representatives, of gathering, eliciting, producing a word that exists only scattered and latent. Not only does Diderot in a way withdraw his name, but, from this withdrawal, he brings to life in the Encyclopédie the anonymous, collective, interactive thought and knowledge of the workers. Anonymity is therefore both the condition and the symptom of the encyclopedic maieutic: it transforms the author that was Chambers into the master builder that Diderot becomes; it catalyzes the emergence of a speech in motion, a kind of discourse of the mutes of the realm. It is through the disappearance of the name that Diderot makes, from 1750, a committed work.

To his detractors who, notably in Trévoux's Dictionnaire, claimed that he would never complete his undertaking, Diderot responds in the Encyclopédie article with a quotation from Chancellor Bacon, otherwise more decisive than the postictal endorsement of the Système figuré des connaissances humaines:

De impossibilitate ità statuo ; ea omnia possibilia & praestabilia esse censenda quæ ab aliquibus perfici possunt, licèt non à quibusvis ; & quæ à multis conjunctim, licèt non ab uno ; & quæ in successione sæculorum, licèt non eodem ævo ; & denique quæ multorum curâ & sumptû, licèt non opibus & industriâ singulorum. Bac. lib. II. de augment. scient. cap. j. pag. 103.(Diderot, *Encyclopédie, Philosophie, V, 6356; DPV VII 174)

Before judging an undertaking impossible, we must consider as possible and feasible everything that can be accomplished by certain people, even if it is not given to anyone; by people getting together, even if it is not given to a single person ; by an effort over several generations, even if it's not given to a single generation; finally, by the effort and contribution of a large number of people, even if it's not given to the means and commitment of an individual7.

The more difficult the undertaking, the greater the need for anonymity, an anonymity that has nothing to do with a dispossession of the name, but rather consists in the transition to an auctorial meta-personality, unfolding in a network both in space and time. For Diderot, the model of the single author is a tyrannical model:

"I do not believe that it is given to a single man to know all that can be known; to make use of all that is; to see all that can be seen; to understand all that is intelligible." (DPV VII 175)

This fantasy of omnipotence, chimerical for a single man, becomes possible when the work is constituted by arrangement, disposition, coordination of the thoughts and labors of a collectivity.

"I distinguish two ways of cultivating the sciences: one of increasing the mass of connoissances by discoveries; & this is how one deserves the name of inventor: the other to bring discoveries closer together & to order them among themselves, so that more men may be enlightened, & that each may participate, according to his scope, in the light of his century; and we call classical authors, those who succeed in this genre, which is not without difficulty. " (DPV VII 179)

It's not just a question, for the director of the Encyclopédie, of distributing the work among the members of a "society of people of letters and artists". Each of the authors is summoned to proceed, in his very contribution, according to the same logic of disposition and coordination of the knowledge and materials of others. Unlike the inventor, who is immortalized by the work "published in his name", the contributors are what Diderot calls classical authors, i.e. already meta-authors, who do not bring to the common work the identity of a name, of an invention linked to that name, but an ordered arrangement of heterogeneous contributions, the effort "to bring discoveries together and to order them among themselves". Each name is thus disseminated in a coalescence of contributions.

This is not an external organization of work: it is the very, intimate work of the Enlightenment, the system of its thought. The Enlightenment consists in "everyone participating, according to his scope, in the light of his century". But at the same time, the Enlightenment promotes a way of thinking about participation and disposition: at the same time as the author abandons his name to engage in a collective process of knowledge, knowledge itself is thought of as a system of relationships, a disposition of elements and, within this disposition, as effervescence, the emergence of movements, dynamics and commitments. Nature itself ceases to be a table of names, a taxonomy, to tip over into anonymity and its devices8.

Already in the Preliminary Discourse, D'Alembert had warned us; the ordering of the Encyclopédie's articles according to a knowledge classification system of the type bequeathed by Bacon, adapted at the end of the Prospectus and rebricked at the head of volume I is a red herring:

"If it happens that the name of the Science is omitted from the article, reading will suffice to connote to which Science it refers; & when we have, for example, forgotten to warn that the word Bomb belongs to the military art, & the name of a town or country to Geography, we count enough on the intelligence of our readers, to hope that they will not be shocked at such an omission. Moreover, by the arrangement of the subjects in each article, especially when it is a little extended, one cannot fail to see that this article relates to another which depends on a different Science, this one to a third, & so on." (D'Alembert, "Discours préliminaire", Encyclopédie, I, xviii)

The "arrangement of subjects in each article", far more effectively than a taxonomy of sciences and a mechanical system of cross-references, not only produces meaning, but suggests, predisposes the network of connections to be made in encyclopedic matter. The choice of Bombe as an example is a mischievous wink: nomenclature reserves bombs, the bomb gives the model of dissemination: "this article holds to another which depends on a different Science, that one to a third, & so on." From the outset, D'Alembert replaced the system of names not so much with a visible, mechanical system of cross-references, but rather with a concept of arrangement and relationships. It is within each article that the dissemination of the name takes place: the same word splinters into headings, into different fields of knowledge; but this splintering is at the same time a revealing of new relationships, a friction of heterogeneous materials held together by the identity of the name. Secondly, each heading summons up knowledge that is developed elsewhere: this development is, or is not, indicated by a cross-reference. Above all, there is an "arrangement of subjects" that leads the reader to make connections. As a result, the nominal autonomy of the article is dissipated, disseminated in this interplay of relationships, and, in the matter itself, in the exercise of thought it provokes, the network replaces the name9.

III. Anonymity and encyclopedic modeling

The arrangement of materials then ceases to be a model for organizing knowledge and becomes a model for apprehending and, hence, organizing nature itself. Thus, in the article Air:

"Most Philosophers make the elasticity of air consist in the figure of its particles. Some want them to be small floccons similar to tufts of wool; others imagine them turned round like hoops, or rolled in a spiral like archal threads, wood shavings, or the spring of a watch, & striving to recover themselves by virtue of their contexture; so that to produce air, it is necessary, according to them, to produce particles arranged in this manner, & that there are no bodies fit to produce it, but those which are susceptible of this disposition. [...]
But Newton, (Opt. p. 37110.) proposes a different system: [...] as he claims that all bodies have an attractive & repulsive power, & that these two qualities are all the stronger in bodies, as they are denser, more solid, & more compact ; he concludes that when by heat, or by the effect of some other agent, the attractive force is overcome, & the particles of the body moved apart to the point of no longer being in the sphere of attraction, the repulsive force beginning to act, causes them to move away from each other with all the more force that they were more closely adherent to each other, & thus a permanent air is formed11. " (D'Alembert and Formey, Air, I, 226)

The first, Cartesian-inspired mechanism thinks of air as an arrangement of figures. The flake, the hoop, the archal wire, the chip, the spring are all forms, names that enable air to be assigned a singular identity in the general system of nature's elements. But the figure of air particles thus imagined does not allow us to think of its elasticity: the model thus moves from figure to context, to disposition, preparing the shift to the second, Newtonian mechanism, based on attraction and repulsion, or in other words on the action and reaction of particles with each other12. The double movement of dissemination and adhesion of bodies outlines the dynamics of the encyclopedic enterprise in nature: the committed anonymity of the encyclopedists and the Newtonian modeling of air proceed from the same model.

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When we move from physics to metaphysics, we find the same conceptualization model, based on arrangement, disposition, action and reaction. Thus, in the article Ame des bêtes:

"Suppose one of those masterpieces of mechanics where various weights & springs are so industriously adjusted, that at the slightest movement given to it, it produces the most surprising & visually pleasing effects; as you would say one of those hydraulic machines of which M. Regis13, one of those marvelous clocks, one of those moving pictures, one of those animated perspectives; let's suppose we tell a child to press a spring, or turn a crank, & that as soon as we see superb decorations & rians landscapes; that we see several figures moving & dancing, that we hear harmonious sounds, &c., isn't this child an agent of change? isn't this child a blind agent, in relation to the machine? He's completely unaware of its layout, he doesn't know how & by what laws all these surprising effects occur; yet he's the cause of these movements; by touching a single spring he's made the whole machine move; he's the moving force that sets it in motion. Mechanism is the business of the worker who invented this machine to entertain him: this mechanism that the child ignores is made for him, & it is he who makes him act without knowing it. This is the ame of beasts" (Yvon14, Ame des Bêtes, I, 349).

The soul of beasts is this wonderfully complex machine set in motion by a blind agent, a child, without knowing the mechanism. Yvon first offers a Cartesian description of this mechanism: the child presses a spring, turns a crank, actuates the machine from the outside, as Descartes' pineal gland does with animal spirits15. It "stirs and dances several figures", it moves an external mechanical structure whose play, always the same, is programmed in advance.

Already with Descartes, the mechanism of the machine man was entirely programmed by sight, the impression of which constituted the typical impulse on the pineal gland. Cartesian mechanics is first and foremost an optic, and its linear logic explaining movement is subordinated to the vague globality of a vision, of an original sensation, which gives the impulse. Yvon deploys to the extreme this visuality of vision, taken here not as origin, but as the product of machine action: the "mechanics", the "springs", the "clock" produce "visually pleasing effects", "moving pictures", "perspective", "decorations", "landscapes". The paradigm of the soul is no longer a machine, but a view, a site, a panorama. Faced with this view, the child is the subjective instance that orders the spectacle and enjoys it: in Descartes, there is indeed an author of the soul.

Yvon then sets out to deconstruct this instance:

"But the example is imperfect; we must suppose that there is something to this spring on which the play of the machine depends, which attracts the child, which pleases him & which engages him to touch it. Suppose the child is walking along a grote, and no sooner has he put his foot on a certain spot where a spring is, than Neptune appears and threatens him with his trident; frightened by this appearance, he flees to a spot where another spring, being pressed, causes a more pleasing figure to appear, or makes the first one disappear. You see that the child contributes to this, like a blind agent, whose activity is determined by the pleasant or frightening impression caused by certain objects. The soul of the beast is the same, & hence this wonderful concert between the impression of objects & the movements it makes on their occasion." (Continued from previous)

The child no longer operates the machine, but is sucked into it, integrated into its Baroque grotto machinery. The manipulative actor becomes a manipulated spectator, in a device to whose mastery he surrenders, between terror and pleasure: each position he occupies triggers a figure and pushes him towards another figure; it's no longer a simple mechanism, it's the trap of a chain reaction. The child becomes one with the cave, with the action and reaction of the figures, and it is no longer possible to differentiate between the action of the child and the reaction of the machine: the child has disseminated into the machine. The soul of beasts provides the model of a soul without author, of an anonymous soul.

This dissemination of the auctorial instance into the very nature of things is reflected, in the most diverse fields, by an attention to disposition, much more than to structure...: in the article Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow), D'Alembert describes the arrangement of the globules of rain in relation to the sun and the eye of the beholder (I, 596); in the article Ardoise (Slate), Diderot evokes the figure and arrangement of the benches in the mines, in the manner of large, long steps of a staircase (I, 628-9); the Astronomy article, by Formey and D'Alembert, first considers "the true structure and disposition of the celestial bodies" before considering the causes of their movements and "the action they mutually exert on each other" (I, 793); the Aube article whirls before us the ingenious dispositions16 that move the mills :

"* If one considers that the velocity of water is not the same at different depths, & several other circumstances, one will conjecture that the most favorable number & arrangement of blades on a wheel, are not easy to determine. [...] It has been thought to give the blades the disposition of windmill wings, & it has been said: what air does, water can do; instead of in the ordinary disposition of the blades, they are attached to a shaft perpendicular to the thread of the water, here they are attached to a shaft parallel to this thread. The impression of the water on the blades arranged in the ordinary way is unequal from one moment to the next: its greatest force is at the moment when one blade, being perpendicular to the current, and fully immersed, the next enters the water, and the previous one leaves it. [...] If we have not thought of giving the windmill wings the disposition of the aubes, as we have thought of giving the aubes the disposition of the mill wings, it is because the mill wings being entirely immersed in the fluid, its impression would tend to overturn the machine, by acting equally on all its parts at the same time, & not to produce a circular movement in some of them." (D'Alembert and Diderot, Aube, Hydraulique, I, 863)

Why does the vane of watermills differ essentially from the wing of windmills? Not because one reacts to water and the other to air, for both air and water are fluids driven by currents. But because the windmill's wing is immersed in the air, while the dawn sometimes plunges into the water, sometimes emerges from it. So we need to think of the machine as both external and internal to the agent that drives it, as part of a system of action and reaction, and as a third party. The arrangement of the blades (not only their internal conformation, but their position in relation to a shaft, or hub, parallel or perpendicular to the river) does not articulate an agent to a machine, but a machine sometimes within an agent, sometimes outside it17.

In the article Atomism, Yvon and Formey quote Aristotle, who reduces the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus to "three things, figure, disposition, & situation" (I, 822). In fact, disposition is always an overcoming of figure, and situation an overturning of disposition. Disposition is everywhere. It defines a whole series of actions, found, for example, in the articles Magnet, Adjust, Apparatus, Assimilation, Pendulum... Encyclopedic thinking about nature is thinking that deconstructs disposition: from Cartesian knowledge, it inherits the mechanical disposition of things, whose origin and limits it questions in order to unfold, through attention to fluids, movements, relationships, all the dynamics of the living network that undoes the play of figures, the play of the name, in favor of a systemic meta-figure.

The drift of meaning through the succession of Disposition articles in the Encyclopédie (IV, 1042-1044) is characteristic of this orientation, this post-mechanist inflection that its director intends to give to encyclopedic matter: the first disposition is the rhetorical one of discourse, which mechanically orders its parts. This arrangement is the work of an author, even if the article as a whole is formulated impersonally ("it is a question of...; it is not enough...; it is necessary...; we put...; it is much simpler..."). From there we move on to the medical meaning of the word, where disposition, διαθέσις, "means the state of the human body", which is at once a situation, a clinical picture, and a predisposition to a whole series of changes. Disposition thus takes the place of action, abolishing the difference between subject and scene of action18. This deconstructive tendency is accentuated when we move on to the juridical domain: a disposition is "an act that orders something", but at the same time defines, within this act "some arrangement", "conventions"; "The dispositions are all enclosed in the last part of the judgment, which we call the dispositif". Every disposition reduces itself to its last part and thereby makes itself elusive. There is a practical, empirical, piecemeal aspect to disposition; a disposition is a singularity in the body of the act, an accommodation of structure to reality. Yet it prevails over the generality of the law:

"The disposition of man is opposed to that of the law; & the maxim in this matter is that the disposition of man causes that of the law to cease. It is not that individuals have the power to abrogate laws: it only means that the disposition of man prevails over that of the law, when the latter has ordered something only in the case where man would not have ordered it otherwise, or when the law has simply disposed without forbidding derogation from its disposition. (A19)"

Man's disposition is not the affirmation of subjectivity, not even strictly speaking of will: in the state of goods, properties, enjoyments, it establishes succession, groupings, appropriation. The law, with its principles, its categories, intends to organize and distribute logically, from above; disposition, with its subterranean affinities, the particularisms it confesses and those it conceals, imposes its networks from below and in the shadows, so that paradoxically it is an anonymous subject that the disposition of man makes prevail.

It's by confronting this with his social and scientific practice as an encyclopedist, which he would later radicalize in the Elements of Physiology and the Observations on Hemsterhuis, that Diderot's violent reaction to Grimm's attack takes on its full meaning. Of course, the generous philosopher is indignant at the courtier's insinuations and comes to the defense of his unjustly vilified friend Raynal. But the defense of anonymity as a necessary form of philosophical engagement goes far beyond such noble sentiments.

All encyclopedic thought was in fact driven and conditioned by a practice of anonymity: thought not of one man, but of a society of people of letters; thought not of people of letters alone, but of those great names associated with artisans whose experience and practice would innervate encyclopedic discourse and provide it with the counterpoint of plates; thought not of an era, but of a succession of eras, whose mingled discourses would disseminate their names.

There is a courage superior to that of the name advanced for an idea: it is that of erasing one's name, of melting it into the enterprise of thought. Why is this dissemination of the name necessary? Because it follows the order of things: to the dispositions of nature, to the action and reaction of things, to the networks of the sensible and the living, corresponds the arrangement of materials in the Encyclopédie, the mixtion of the signed and the unsigned, then, after the Encyclopédie, the practice of the fragment and the arrangement of heterogeneous writings, not only in the dialogue of fictional interlocutors, but in the game of Observations and Réfutations, after that, which Diderot practiced at a younger age, of translations and rewritings.

Thinking about nature, political and legal thought proceed from this same post-mechanist movement of dissemination of the name. It's a matter of thinking one's own effacement in the moving network of molecules, men and ideas.

Notes

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1

The manuscript of the Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal à Monsieur Grimm, composed by Diderot on March 25, 1781, is preserved in the Manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, N. a. fr. 24932, fol. 3-12. As the Lettre is not yet published in the current edition of the Œuvres complètespublished by Hermann (the so-called DPV edition), we give the references in the Lewinter edition of the Œuvres complètes published by Club Français du Livre (the so-called CFL).

2

See G. Benrekassa, "Scène politique, scène philosophique, scène privée : à propos de la Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal à Monsieur Grimm", Interpréter Diderot aujourd'hui, colloque de Cerisy, Le Sycomore, 1984, p. 181sq.

3

On the chiasmus as a figure of thought in Diderot, see Jean Starobindki, "Sur l'emploi du chiasme dans Le Neveu de Rameau", Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Apr.-Jun.juin 1984, n° 2, p. 182-196, ; on analogy and syllogism, in which the chiasm is embedded, see Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie. Répercussions de la notion de fermentation dans la pensée et l'écriture de Diderot, thesis defended at the University of Provence on Dec. 18, 2009, Part II.

4

On the dissemination of the very notion of work in Diderot, see G. Benrekassa, "Diderot, l'absence d'œuvre", Études sur Le Neveu de Rameauet le Paradoxe sur le comédien de Denis Diderot, Cahiers Textuel, n°11, 1992, p. 133-140.

5

This paradoxical anonymity constitutes a withdrawal of the name, rather than its actual concealment. On the very special relationship that, by this means, Diderot maintains with his work, see Pascale Pellerin, "Diderot et l'appel à la posterérité : une certaine relation à l'œuvre", Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, no. 35, Oct. 2003, pp. 25-39.

6

The reference is given to the original edition of the Encyclopédie, here Volume V published in November 1755. The same passage was already cited in a note at the beginning of the Prospectus (DPV V 85). Francis Bacon's The Advancement of learning, published in 1605, was published in Latin in 1623 under the title De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum. Several editions are known of it up to 1652; in the 18th century, only the one published in Lyon in 1763.

7

I translate. See otherwise Francis Bacon, Du progrès et de la promotion des savoirs, translation of the 1605 English edition by Michèle Le Dœuff, Gallimard, Tel, 1991, p. 89.

8

For M. Foucault, the critique of classical taxonomy (which thinks of science and the world as a grammar and orders its thought as a discourse) prepares the advent of anthropology and the critique of man (Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, II, 9, 7, Gallimard, 1966, p. 355). This progress of reason, whose deconstructive dimension he emphasizes with implicit reference to Derrida (criticism of the origins of man, languages and societies), is first and foremost a logical regression, privileging analogy over enchainment and impression over deduction. The erasure of the name participates in this regression, where the objects of discourse dissolve into the fabric of experience.

9

In the Encyclopédie article, it is no longer "disposition" but "succession" that becomes the key word, not because Diderot would return to a linear conception of encyclopedic order, but because his disposition is projected into time, as a work in the making, in successione sæculorum.

10

Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light, London, Smith and Walford, 1704. Newton's treatise had been translated into French in 1720 by Pierre Coste: Traité d'optique sur les réflexions, réfractions, inflexions et couleurs de la lumière, par M. le Chev. Newton, translated from English by M. Coste on the second edition augmented by the author, Amsterdam, P. Humbert, 1720, 2 vols. in-12. Second edition, Paris, in 1722.

11

"particles detached from a body by heat & fermentation, have no sooner crossed the sphere of attraction, than they move away with rapidity from this body, & from each other, sometimes until they occupy a space a million times greater than that which they occupied at the time of their aggregation. Now it is not possible to explain this prodigious contraction & expansion, by supposing the particles of air, to be elastic, rowing, or like wicker bent into hoops: the only means of accounting for them, or sooner of producing them, is a repulsive power driving these particles apart from each other." (Newton, Traité d'Optique, ed. N. Beauzée, trans. J. P. Marat, Paris, Leroy, 1787, t. II, p. 265-6)

12

On this question at the frontier of physics and chemistry, which plays a decisive role in Enlightenment scientific thought, see Jean Starobinski, Action et réaction. Vie et aventures d'un couple, Seuil, 1999, especially pp. 85-88.

13

Cartesian Pierre-Sylvain Régis (1632-1707) explains the workings of fountains and water jets in his Système de philosophie, contenant la logique, metaphysique, physique & morale, Lyon, Anisson, Posuel et Rigaud, 1691, book V, particularly chap. 8, "Des Jets d'Eau". But the reference to Régis is motivated by the 1st part of Book VII, where Régis sets out to examine "all the springs, of which the Machine of Animals is composed": "And although in explaining all the functions of Beasts, we make no mention of their Soul, we will not nevertheless deny them life or feeling, provided however that by the life and feeling of Beasts, we mean nothing other than the heat of their blood, & the particular movements of the organs of the senses which depend on it. For nothing is more unreasonable than to attribute to Beasts a Soul which is a substance really distinct from the Body, & which nevertheless cannot exist outside the Body" (Book Seven, "Of Beasts in General", Avertissement, p. 407).

14

Abbé Claude Yvon, author of the Soul and Atheist articles in the Encyclopédie, was suspected of having dabbled in Abbé de Prades' thesis and fled to Holland in 1752.

15

"Now the principal effect which follows from this consists in that the spirits, coming out thus more particularly from some places of the surface of this gland than from others, may have the force to turn the little pipes of the inner surface of the brain in which they go to the places from which they come out, if they do not find them there already all turned ; and by this means, to move the limbs to which these pipes relate, towards the places to which these places on the surface of the H gland [= the pineal gland] relate. " (Descartes, L'Homme, p. 181; Œuvres philosophiques, ed. F. Alquié, t. I, Garnier, 1988, 1997, p. 455)

16

One is struck, in the Encyclopédie article Aube, by the omnipresence of the word "disposition". The term virtually disappears in the Aubedu article of Jombert's Dictionnaire d'architecture civile et hydraulique (1755), which was nonetheless probably inspired by it.

17

Generally speaking, hydraulics, which developed at the end of the 17th century, carried with it a critique of Cartesian mechanism. See Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique, Minuit, 1977. Michel Serres shows how ancient atomism and Epicurean materialism relied on a physics that was a physics of fluids, whose epistemological model is radically heterogeneous to the mechanics of solids that developed in Europe from the Renaissance.

18

So here we find the same shift as in the article Soul of Beasts.

19

The signature (A) refers to Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d'Argis, lawyer and jurisprudence specialist. Boucher d'Argis contributed over 4,000 legal articles to the Encyclopédie.

Référence de l'article

Stéphane Lojkine, « “Et l’auteur anonyme n’est pas un lâche…” Diderot, l’engagement sans le nom », Littératures classiques, dir. Ch. Delmas, P. Ronzeaud, Ph. Chomety, A. Colin, 2013, p. 249-263

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