In chapter XIX of his discourse De la poésie dramatique, which appeared with Le Père de famille the year after Le Fils naturel, in May 1758, Diderot again insists on the need to strip the stage of all loaded scenery:

Theatrical painting will forbid itself many things, which ordinary painting allows itself. Whether a studio painter has a hut to represent, he will lean its frame against a broken column; and from an overturned Corinthian capital, he will make a seat at the door. Indeed, it's not impossible that there's a thatched cottage where there used to be a palace. This circumstance awakens in me an incidental idea that touches me, by recalling the instability of human things. But that's not what theatrical painting is about. No distraction. No supposition that makes in my soul the beginnings of an impression other than that which the poet has an interest in arousing. Two poets can't show themselves to one another.
Two poets cannot show themselves at once with all their advantages. (p. 1333-1334; DPV X 405.)

The comparison between theater and painting is motivated here, of course, by the subject matter: it is, after all, the same painter who paints sets and pictures, the autonomous pictorial scene and the pictorial prop at the back of the theater stage¹. The parallel between great painting and decorative painting runs throughout the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry², while the "paintings" evoked in the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel were living tableaux, with no immediate reference to painting.

The set is not the stage, whose limits it merely circumscribes. As an example, Diderot imagines the entrance to a cabin³. The painter immediately adds an object of focus, on which to fix his meditation on the ruins. The overturned capital is the point of crystallization in the image from which to deploy a discourse ("This circumstance awakens in me an accessory idea..."): to the visual accessory corresponds the discursive accessory⁴.

However, this object is ruined: the "upturned Corinthian capital" introduces us to the poetics of ruins and meditation on the collapse of empires. It disseminates thought and disseminates itself in a metonymic process: it's a capital for a palace, a palace for an empire. Diderot introduces this capital into the set, only to remove it immediately: on the part of the spectator, there should be "no distraction", let us beware "that there be no supposition"... painted on the set, the capital would risk distracting the audience's attention from the living, performed scene. To this threat of dissemination, corresponds the dissemination of the object, of the ruined and then removed marquee.

The chapter "De la décoration" concludes with a description of the ideal salon:

Do you have a living room to represent? Let it be that of a man of taste. No magots; little gilding; simple furniture: unless the subject expressly requires otherwise. (P. 1334.)

At the end of the day, here it is: the salon of a man of taste, a stripped-down salon that breaks with the rocaille style brought into vogue by Madame de Pompadour. The salon is superimposed on the hut, in front of which the upside-down capital has been removed: behind the theoretical statement, seemingly motivated solely by a concern for artistic efficiency, the philosopher-art critic's stances are already taking shape, against Boucher and his court painting, against an aesthetic of decoration that would evacuate the real: under the salon, Diderot recalls the hut and, in front of the hut, the upside-down capital.

I. Against discourse, the visual effect of the scene

On the surface, the purpose of chapter XI, "De l'intérêt", has nothing to do with that of chapter XIX "De la décoration". The material conditions of the performance (XIX) are opposed by the poet's purely textual fabrication of the play (XI): the poet interests the spectator, addresses him; the decorator, who must not compete with the poet, addresses the poet, serves the text the poet has created. Chapter XIX seems to accommodate this dichotomy, inherited from Aristotle's exclusion of theatrical off-text. It is, however, radically challenged in chapter XI, the most famous of the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry.

At the beginning of the chapter "De l'intérêt", Diderot poses the problem in Aristotelian terms, on which all poetics of the time largely depend.

In complicated plays, interest is more the effect of the plan than of the speeches; it is, on the contrary, more the effect of the speeches than of the plan, in simple plays. But to whom should interest be attributed? Is it the characters? Is it the spectators?
The spectators are merely ignorant witnesses to the thing.
"So, it's the characters who should be the focus of attention?" I think so.
I think so. Let them form the knot without realizing it; let everything be impenetrable for them; let them advance to the denouement without suspecting it. If they are in turmoil, I will have to follow and experience the same movements. (P. 1306; DPV X 367-8)

The opposition of "complicated plays" and "simple plays", i.e. with or without peripateties, and correlatively the opposition of "plan" and "speeches", or in other words plot and tirade, refers directly to chapter VI of Aristotle's Poetics:

"Moreover, if a poet puts end to end tirades which paint characters, perfectly successful in expression and thought, he will not achieve the effect which is that of tragedy (τὸ τῆς τραγῳδίας ἔργον), in contrast to a tragedy that would be inferior on these points but would include a story and a system of facts (μῦθος καὶ σύστασις πραγμάτων) ; Let's add that what exerts the greatest seduction in tragedy are parts of the story: the coups de théâtre and the reconnaissances. Here, moreover, is a clue: those who begin in poetry are capable of finesse in expression and character before they know how to arrange the system of facts, and this was also the case with almost all primitive poets." (Aristotle, Poetics, 50a29-38, trans. Dupont-Roc/Lallot, pp. 54-57.)

For Aristotle, what produces the effect of tragedy, what makes it most interesting, is not the tirades but the arrangement of the plot: a story and a system of facts. This passage serves as a thread running through the entire beginning of Discourse on Dramatic Poetry: in chapter V, Diderot preached the superiority of "simple dramas" over "composed dramas"; in chapter VII, he recognized the superiority of genius in "plan" rather than "dialogue" or "speeches".

Like Aristotle, Diderot here does indeed pose the question of dramatic interest in terms of effect (τὸ τῆς τραγῳδίας ἔργον): effect of the plan in complicated plays, effect of the speeches in simple plays. But with this categorization, he neutralizes, as it were, the Aristotelian opposition: the tirades make the interest of a certain type of play; the plot - of another type. Categorization resolves, pacifies the opposition.

Diderot shifts the problem: the effect of a play is not a rhetorical matter of discursive arrangement; it's a question of rapport, or in other words of aesthetic relationship: interest implies the bringing together of two instances. The poet is not so much concerned with how his piece is written, as with whom it is addressed. Paradoxically, these people are not the spectators⁵, but the characters and, behind them, the actors who will represent them. When composing his play, the poet must not address the spectators (for example, by lecturing them), but the actors (to whom his text must provide the necessary indications for their performance). Hence this decisive formula, that interest must be reported not to the spectators, but to the characters.

What is the nature of this report? Here again, Diderot breaks with the Aristotelian tradition: the relationship the poet establishes, the effect the play produces, is not of a discursive order. The order of discourse plunges into invisibility: the character advances towards the denouement "without realizing it"; the end of the plot must remain "impenetrable" to him.

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This relationship is not defined in terms of communication, of a message to be conveyed. On the one hand, it's a question of what must remain "ignored of the thing" (the stage must ignore the spectators), on the other of what "must be in sight" (the actor must see his character), i.e. a visual device: the characters are placed in the light, in sight; the spectators are subtracted, relegated to the shadows, ignored. The poet arranges the characters in view of the spectators; the effect of theater (ἔργον) lies in this arrangement (σύστασις): visual and spatial effect, which obscures discursive logic (μῦθος)⁶.

The play's communication and message are therefore indirect: they pass through this layout. A scene, then, is given to be seen. A scenic space is laid out, perfectly intelligible: "Everything must be clear to the spectator." Here we come to the fundamental paradox of chapter IX: while Diderot radically forbids any relationship with the spectator, to whom the play must never be directly addressed, he intends the slightest secrets of the plot to be delivered to him from the outset, to ensure the visibility and perfect intelligibility of the scenic space. The poet does indeed address the spectator, to whom he hides nothing, but he does so without the knowledge of the characters, who remain in the fiction that their monologues, their confidences, are not heard by the audience. Discursive communication, the verbal message that is in fact aimed at the audience, is contradicted by visual non-communication, which keeps the viewer in the position of the "ignored witness of the thing."

Diderot even suggests that the interest lies essentially in the theater in this contradiction between discursive communication and visual non-communication. He proscribes the coup de théâtre, for the sake of which part of the story had to remain hidden from the spectator for a long time. Aristotle is again the target here, for whom "what exerts the greatest seduction in tragedy are [...] coups de théâtre⁷". The Aristotelian dramaturgical spring, because it relies on the story and not on the visual effect of the scene, provides only an ephemeral effect, unprofitable in terms of dramaturgical effectiveness:

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The poet spares me an instant of surprise by secrecy; he would have exposed me, by confidence, to a long anxiety.

To illustrate his point, Diderot contrasts two scenes from Voltaire's Zaïre : the first, based on recognition, draws its interest from the resources of a story kept hidden from the spectator; the second, based on dramatic suspense, draws its effect from the contradiction between what the spectator sees and knows and what the character neither knows nor sees.

Lusignan doesn't know he's going to find his children; the spectator doesn't know either. Zaire and Nerestan don't know they're brother and sister; the viewer doesn't know either. But however pathetic this recognition may be, I'm sure the effect would have been much greater still, had the spectator been warned. What wouldn't I have said to myself as these four characters approached? How attentively and disturbingly would I have listened to every word that came out of their mouths? How embarrassed would the poet have made me? My tears only flow at the moment of recognition; they would have flowed long before.
What is the difference in interest between this situation, in which I am not part of the secret, and the one in which I know everything and see Orosmane, dagger in hand, waiting for Zaire, and this unfortunate woman advancing towards the blow? What movements would the spectator not have felt, if the poet had been free to draw from this moment all the effect he could produce, and if our scene, which is opposed to the greatest effects, had allowed him to make Zaire's voice heard in the darkness, and to show her to me from further away? (P. 1307.)

In Act II, Scene 3, old Lusignan emerges from the dungeon of Orosmane, Sudan of Jerusalem, to meet a French knight sent by Saint Louis, Nérestan, to whom he owes his release. Lusignan recounts to Nérestan the succession of his misfortunes, and as he goes further and further back in time, Nérestan gradually recognizes his own origins. Lusignan, almost blind, finally recognizes his children, first Nérestan, then Zaïre: "You... lord!... This seraglio raised your childhood?... / Watching them. / Alas! of my children would you know? / They would be your age, and perhaps my eyes... / What ornament, madam, foreign to these places? How long have you had it?" (vv. 287-291.)

So it's Lusignan's circumstantial narrative that brings recognition: the characters' words gradually build and reveal reality, but stop at the threshold of awareness, which comes through sight. Lusignan the blind man sees, or rather makes visible through his speech, Zaire's pendant cross, then his scar.

The jewel and the scar, visual elements, will be the true supports of a recognition that speech makes possible, but does not accomplish. In the emotion of recognition, sentences are cut, suspended, the text marked by suspension points. At the decisive moment in the scene, discursive logic is defeated by the visual intensity of another, stronger, closer, more authentic form of communication, conveyed by objects that can be seen (the jewel) or, better still, veiled, withdrawn into the intimacy of clothing (the scar). What is shown to the character is only seen fleetingly: we move from Lusignan's blindness to the secrecy of a hidden scar. The great constant is the invisibility of the stage; the stage is a space of invisibility, where the characters do not see, where the signs and knowledge they carry are not visible.

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But this space of invisibility is only fully realized on condition that it is, for the spectator, panoptic⁸. The viewer needs to know everything in order to see everything. The dramatic tension rests on this contradiction of panoptic invisibility, which characterizes the scene: the spectator sees everything, while the character sees nothing. This differential play on the order of the visible is the very essence of theatricality, for which all discourse is feint, procrastination and deception. Lusignan's narration delays stage emotion: "Nothing very energetic will come of it; we'll be subject to preparations that are always too obscure or too clear", as Diderot would later say. In scene 3, as conceived by Voltaire, the spectator, unaware of the reality of the ties that bind the protagonists, cannot enjoy their blindness: he receives Lusignan's speech as he goes along, as a piece of information addressed to him, rather than as an overall speech that forms a tableau. If the scenic device were operative, the old man's speech would become a visual element of the show, pathetically staining it to signify, beyond the words, his blindness. The character's speech functions above all as an internal didascalia: it gives the actor the stage directions needed to interpret his role, and is therefore not directly addressed to the spectator. The poet must make the actor see the character, not inform the spectator; the interest must be reported not to the spectators, but to the characters.

This is achieved in the penultimate scene of Zaire, where Orosmane, unaware that Nérestan is Zaire's brother, watches for his beloved's rendezvous, who herself arrives and speaks to her confidante unaware that she is being spied on. Every character here is locked in, blinded in their ignorance, while the viewer is informed of everything⁹. This absolute knowledge of the spectator frees the scene from any logic of communication: the words deliver no information, but tableau as signs of the characters' unfamiliarity, i.e. as interfaces between the theatrical visibility of the scene for the spectator and its pathetic invisibility for the characters:

ZAYRE to Fatime.

This is the way, come, support my courage.

FATIME

He will come.

OROSMANE

That word gives me back all my rage.

ZAYRE

I walk shivering, my heart is distraught...
Is it you Nerestan, for whom I have waited so long? (vv. 137-140.)

Zaïre and Fatime speak to give themselves courage in the night: they learn nothing, either for themselves, or for Orosmane who spies on them, or for the spectator who knows that the heroine is running to her death. The words speak of ignorance: "He's coming" reminds us that Nerestan is not coming; "Are you Nerestan?" heralds the deadly face-to-face encounter with Orosmane. The word is mistaken in the information it thinks it delivers or requires, but through this very lack of knowledge, it creates a tableau, painting the two incompatible expectations. "This word gives me back all my rage", exclaims Orosmane: the "word" globalizes the discourse of Zaire and Fatime; the word gives to see.

So everything here is in what we see, since words communicate nothing. The word shows the bewilderment of both the speaker and the listener, even though it was not intended for them. The misunderstanding becomes a tableau, and through it, the stage begins to exist as a dramaturgical space, making sense independently of the text and even against it. But precisely because it begins to exist dramaturgically, the stage space poses a problem: Orosmane is waiting for Zaire to kill her, but he can't kill her on stage without violating decorum. This is why Voltaire makes Zaire's voice heard in the distance, "marching through the night in the recess of the theater", and Orosmane must leave the stage to stab the one he loves at its edge, behind the backdrop¹⁰ :

OROSMANE running to Zayre.

It's me you betray: fall at my feet, perjurer.

ZAYRE falling backstage.

I'm dying, oh my God!

OROSMANE

I have avenged my insult.
Let us depart from this place. I cannot... What have I done?..." (vv. 141-143.)

At the moment when the stage becomes a dramaturgical space in its own right, it becomes empty; at the moment when the place is given to be seen, it withdraws from vision. What Diderot gives as a paradigm of the scene is an impossible scene: "this situation where [...] I see Orosmane, dagger in hand, waiting for Zaïre, and this unfortunate woman advancing towards the blow" is an unrepresentable situation. Orosmane can't wait for Zaire, who can't come forward because she mustn't die on stage. Voltaire is trapped, as betrayed by verse 143, spoken by Orosmane from the wings: "Ôtons-nous de ces lieux. I cannot...". He can't leave the stage, since he's already gone out; so he'll go back in!

Diderot is, moreover, perfectly aware of the dramaturgical problem posed by the stage, as he adds a codicil expressly aimed at the conventions of classical drama: "What movements would the spectator not have experienced [...] if our stage, which opposes the greatest effects, had allowed [the poet] to make Zaire's voice heard in the darkness, and to show her to me from farther away?"

Zaire's voice is indeed heard in the darkness, but the classical stage, corseted by both propriety and the narrowness of the venue, dictates that Zaire remain offstage, that she not be shown from further away. Diderot knocks down the back wall, making visible Zaïre, who in Voltaire is merely a voice¹¹.

II. Vague space, restricted space

Let's return to the moment of the scene that precedes the murder and makes tableau. The space of the scene is then double: in front, "I see Orosmane, dagger in hand, waiting for Zaire"; behind, in another register of the visible, Zaire wanders in the darkness. In front, the spectator's eye is drawn, focused by the machinery of the ambush, prepared for scene 8: the space narrows from the cache¹² to the motionless man posted¹³, then, in scene 9, from his convulsive hand to the sheer glare of the blade¹⁴. This space implements a mechanism that will close: it's the restricted space of the scene.

Behind, the eye is distracted by two uncertain shadows, wandering in an unbounded space: this is "Zayre and Fatime, marchant pendant la nuit". The ideal, writes Diderot, would even be to "show them from farther away", to take the viewer's gaze to the deepest depths. This space is an eternally open distance, a flight of the eye into the indeterminacy of depth: it is the vague space of the scene¹⁵.

Diderot emphasizes the scenic doubling by retracting the backstage partition to allow Zaire to be seen throughout the scene: Orosmane's oppression corresponds to Zaire's wandering, and the restriction of the space where one stands is matched by the vagueness of the space where the other advances. This interplay of two spaces is compared to the famous scene from Racine's Britannicus (II, 6), where Junia tortures her lover with a feigned coldness compelled by the presence of Nero concealed behind a curtain:

If I ignore that Nero is listening to the conversation between Britannicus and Junia, I no longer feel terror. (P. 1307; DPV X 369.)

In contrast to the confined space of the dialogue, where Junia retreats into reticence, is the vague space behind the curtain: is Nero still there? Will he come out? For Diderot, the differential play between the two spaces, which projects the spectator's imagination from the shown to the hidden, from the restricted to the vague, visually materializes the fundamental spring of dramatic tension, the contradiction between non-communication through speech and communication through image, or, what amounts to the same thing, between the characters' talkative ignorance and the spectator's mute knowledge.

The stage split had already been mentioned in the second interview on Le Fils Naturel :

Such was, or may once have been, the scene in Aeschylus' Les Euménides . On one side, it was a space over which the unleashed Furies sought Orestes, who had evaded their pursuit, while they were dozing. On the other, the culprit, his forehead girded with a bandage, kissed the feet of the statue of Minerva, imploring her assistance. Here, Orestes complains to the Goddess. Here, the Furies are agitated; they come, they go, they run.
[...] Will we perform anything like this on our theaters? We can never show more than one action, whereas in nature there are almost always simultaneous ones, whose concomitant representations, mutually fortifying each other, would produce terrible effects on us. [...]
[These phenomena of ancient tragedy] await, in order to show themselves, a man of genius who knows how to combine pantomime with speech; to intermingle a spoken scene with a silent one; and to take advantage of the meeting of the two scenes, and especially of the approach, either terrible or comic, of this meeting, which would always take place. After the Eumenides have stirred on stage, they arrive at the sanctuary where the culprit has taken refuge, and the two scenes become one. (P. 1152; DPV X 112.)

The prayer of Orestes, surrounded and constricted on the precarious altar where Minerva protects him, is contrasted with the unleashed, unfurled dance of the Erinyes who seek to reach him. Each time, a vague space (wandering Zaire, hidden Nero, the restless Furies) contrasts with a restricted one (Orosmane frozen in expectation, Junia forbidden to face Britannicus, Orestes tense on his altar). What differentiates the two spaces is not thematic: the speller and the spied, for example, are distributed differently in Britannicus and Zaire. The difference is topological, practical: the restricted space is the materially constricted¹⁶ space of the classical Italian stage, which the text of the Entretiens suggests is the space of discourse. The vague space is a second space, which Diderot opens up by knocking down the back partition, which separates the stage from the wings. This space opens up depth; it loosens the stage, it pushes back its limits¹⁷: it's vague not because it's blurred or hard to see, but because it gives the spectator the illusion that the overall space of the performance is no longer narrowly circumscribed, but extends far, without limits. The vague space reminds us that outside the stage itself, outside the restricted space, there is a whole world, that the stage is part of a vast reality. The Eschyléan example of the Entretiens identifies the vague space with pantomime, which is opposed to the discourse held in the restricted space. In vague space, Nero is silent, Zaire "makes her voice heard in the darkness", the Erinyes utter inarticulate cries:

What a moment of terror and pity it is to hear the unfortunate man's prayers and groans pierce through the cries and appalling movements of the cruel beings seeking him.(Ibid.)

From within, cries break through to this oppressive outside. The vague space of the infernal dance envelops the restricted space of prayer. The restricted space is a "sanctuary where the culprit has taken refuge", the very sanctuary of the classical scene, stricken with a series of properly religious prohibitions. The fulfillment of the scene, the resolution of the dramatic tension involves the desecration of the sanctuary and the reunion of the two spaces.

But desecration is not necessarily thematized, as it is in the Eschylean example. The mere fact of abolishing the boundary between vague and restricted space, of making a tableau by lifting this internal separation, is profanation, because the very delimitation of the space of representation is undermined here, and with it the legitimacy of the stage and the differential play it establishes. The example of Zaïre is characteristic: Diderot takes as an example a scene that is unrepresentable because of the classical conventions of separation between stage and backstage; from this scene, he makes a paradigm by retracting the partition. But the partition doesn't disappear because it's slid away; it remains as a suppressed separation, as the virtuality of a forbidden gaze.

III. The fourth wall

Theatrical stage layout

The vague space emerges from the invisibility of the wings and visibly envelops the restricted space of the stage. Invisibility doesn't disappear, but becomes internalized and disseminated: the entire stage is now conceived as a space of invisibility, where characters are seen not to see. By enveloping the restricted space, the vague space separates the audience from the stage proper. Separation for the meaning first of all: what is said on stage does not deliver information for the spectator; the discourse lies, stumbles, slips and, through its failures and feints, makes a tableau. For the spectator, the discourse held in the restricted space is relativized, distanced by what is played out in the vague space. Pantomime's distancing of the spoken scene deconstructs theatrical dialogue and pictorializes discourse: the verbal message becomes the word that paints.

To this separation for meaning, we must add a separation for the eye: enveloped by the vague space, the actor can no longer address the audience directly. The injunction to report interest not to the spectators, but to the characters, translates into the establishment of a fundamental spatial interdict, which echoes and universalizes the fiction of the Fils naturel performance: the spectator sees everything on the stage; but the stage does not address the spectator. Diderot materializes this ban, this screen of representation, by setting up a virtual wall between the stage and the audience, which today we call the fourth wall¹⁸. An essential consequence of this ban is to place the actor at the center of poetic reflection. The poetics of texts becomes the poetics of devices. Diderot then challenges the poet:

I noticed that the actor played badly all that the poet had composed for the spectator; and that, if the parterre had done its part, it would have said to the character: Whom do you blame? I'm not. Do I meddle in your affairs? Go home; and that, if the author had done his, he would have come out of the wings and replied to the audience: Pardon, messieurs, it's my fault; another time I'll do better, and so will he. So, whether you're composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing, composing?
So whether you're composing or performing¹⁹, don't think of the audience as if they didn't exist. Imagine on the edge of the theater a great wall separating you from the parterre: play as if the canvas did not rise. (Pp. 1309-1310.)

The stage is a room from which the fourth wall separating it from the parterre has been removed. The spectators see through this fourth wall, which is virtual for them, while the actors must regard it as real and ignore what lies behind it. The fourth wall functions, as it were, as a one-way mirror behind which the actor is unknowingly studied by the spectator investigator and witness.

Les Misotechnites aux enfers, 1763, figure 3." data-entity-type="image" data-entity-uuid="0" src="../Images/A/0/A0921.jpg" />

"Phylakei writes against the glory of Monsieur *** which he does not see, or by a broken visual ray". Charles Nicolas Cochin, Les Misotechnites aux enfers, 1763, figure 3.

The fourth wall alone characterizes what makes the stage space so singular, a space both enclosed and open, a space of invisibility and a panoptic space. But the separation that the fourth wall materializes between stage and parterre must not be dissociated from the other, perhaps even more fundamental, separation between vague space and restricted space. Diderot speaks of "toile" ("play as if the canvas were not rising"): he is referring to the sipario of Italian theater, a canvas stretched over a frame and most often depicting a history scene (sipario storico)²⁰. From the technical point of view of theatrical machinery, the sipario is a "backstage", similar in nature to the backdrop. It represents a stage in the same way as the ensemble formed by the real actors and the painted scenery at the back of the theater. In front of the actors as behind them, it's the same frame, the same mobile interposition for the gaze, the same substitution of a painted depth for a real one.

This identity of the two frontiers is represented by the apologue that precedes: Diderot envisions a performance gone awry. Ignoring the performance screen, transgressing the invisible boundary, the actor has addressed the audience directly, either to preach or to take it to task. The audience must then rebel and take the actor to task, in other words, transgress the same screen of representation in the other direction. But the transgression doesn't stop there: the poet himself is summoned from behind the scenes to apologize! If the virtual partition slides in front, it also slides behind. The actor is surrounded.

"If the parterre would have done its part... and if the author would have done his": the triple transgression of the performance screen (by the actor, by the audience and by the poet) is returned to the unreal of the past. The text thus demonstrates the fundamentally virtual nature of the boundary we're trying to establish: it's not just a mental separation (a wall that exists only in the mind); it's an intermittent separation, which the mind posits and revokes, transgresses and revolts against. Everywhere, always, in the face of it, the eye expresses the rebellion constitutive of the new aesthetic relationship: "Who do you blame? I'm not. Do I meddle in your affairs? Go home." The spectator's oblivion is a provocation: not to address him, to oppose him with the wall of a blinding ban, is to place him in a position of forced transgression, not without enjoyment.

Notes

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