What is a thought? A thought can be seen as a process (the act of thinking) or as a result (what has been thought). Scholarship is generally interested in the result. But this approach proves inoperative in the face of Diderot's work.

Diderot's eclecticism

The anti-systematic character of Diderot's thought has long been emphasized, and the article Eclectisme he wrote in the Encyclopédie is readily cited as such. But it's important to read and understand what Diderot means by eclecticism:

"We must not confuse eclectism with syncretism. The syncretist is a true sectarian; he has enlisted under standards from which he scarcely dares to depart. He has a leader whose name he bears: it may be Plato, Aristotle, Descartes or Newton, but it doesn't matter. The only freedom he has reserved for himself is to modify his master's sentiments, to tighten or extend the ideas he has received from him, to borrow a few others from elsewhere, & to bolster the system when it threatens ruin. If you imagine a poor insolent man who, dissatisfied with the rags with which he is covered, throws himself at the best-dressed passers-by, rips from one his casaque, from another his cloak, & makes himself out of these spoils a bizarre adjustment of every color & every piece, you will have a fairly exact emblem of the syncretic. [...]
The eclectic does not assemble truths haphazardly; he does not leave them isolated; much less does he persist in fitting them to some determined plan; when he has examined & admitted a principle, the proposition he deals with immediately afterwards, either obviously links up with this principle, or does not link up with it at all, or is opposed to it. In the first case, he regards it as true; in the second, he suspends his judgment until the intermediate notions that separate the proposition he is examining from the principle he has admitted, show him its connection or opposition with this principle; in the last case, he rejects it as false." (DPV VII 38-39.)

The eclectic in the usual sense of the term is the one Diderot designates as the syncretic, to oppose him radically to the method of thought he intends to promote under the name of eclecticism. The syncretic starts from a system of thought, a result (Diderot speaks of "standard", "leader", and finally "system") and to "support the system when it threatens ruin" borrows from other thoughts. The Diderotian eclectic doesn't start from a system, from "a determined plan", he "doesn't collect" anything to establish a thought that would be a result. What counts for him is the method, the sequence: how to move from one principle to another, how to link one proposition to another. For him, thought is a process, and it's no coincidence that Diderot's first model of an eclectic is paradoxically Descartes, i.e., the author of the Discourse on Method: "from which we see that Descartes, among the Moderns, was a great eclectic."

Diderot's reasoning here is significant: in this article Eclectisme, he implements precisely the eclecticism he promotes. It is the opposition of the syncretic and the eclectic that drives the reasoning forward, a literally iconic opposition: of the syncretic, Diderot proposes not so much a definition as an "emblem", which he gives to "imagine" as if he were providing the program for an engraving. This is not a realistic portrait of a philosopher, but a figure, a coded image such as might be found in collections of emblems or allegorical frontispieces to philosophical works. The harlequin habit that the syncretic makes for himself, haphazardly, is traditionally the habit of the madman.

As opposed to the syncretic, the eclectic doesn't paint a picture, doesn't show the attributes of a figure: he's an image in the making, like the thought he practices. Diderot's entire article will then focus on showing that historical eclecticism, that the philosophers who claimed to be eclectics, were in fact nothing but syncretics, practicing "the most monstrous system of extravagances imaginable" (DPV VII 40).

Defiguration and absence of work

Saying that Diderot's thought is eclectic therefore doesn't get us very far, since this is a philosophy without a figure, or disfigured. This disfigurement was Diderot's personal experience, and was almost deliberate: let's not forget that most of what we read of Diderot today was not published during his lifetime, and was not written for publication. Diderot's writing revolves around a work that cannot come to pass. Diderot produced no results.

The indictment of classical theater, which Diderot makes in Le Fils naturel and his Entretiens, then in Le Père de famille and the Discourse on dramatic poetry, finally in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, does not translate into the construction of a theatrical work, and the bulk of Diderot's theater has remained in outline form, or even, for the best, slipped in as a novelistic scene, in the Salons, novels, even correspondence.

The practice of Salons leads to no treatise on aesthetics, at most fragmentary remarks, Pensées détachées. Aesthetic reflection remains embryonic, and is expressed for the most part in digressions to the occasional comments on paintings required by the journalistic work of reporting on the Salons.

What, finally, can be said about philosophy? The writing of the philosophical dialogues, entirely oriented towards materialist questioning, does not lead to any system of materialist thought. It dissolves in the uncertainty of D'Alembert's dream. Similarly, the meeting with Catherine II and the political reflection that seems to crystallize on this occasion do not lead to any constituted political philosophy.

Of course, we can try at all costs to tie up the threads of this absence of a work, to try to reconstruct a system of Diderotian thought by carefully and discreetly re-establishing the missing articulations between the various fragments that we'll put end to end, in the manner of that brilliant archaeologist, Evans, who last century reconstructed the palace of Knossos in Crete and the frescoes on its walls. The effect is grandiose and bears witness to nineteenth-century dreams, not the realities of Minos's city.

Or, unlike the situation Evans faced, we are not dealing with a lost or deteriorated work, but indeed, deliberately, with a writing that has inscribed itself from the outset and continuously in an absence of work. The fragments are original. Diderot's thought can only be grasped as a process, because it is the very process of thought that interests Diderot. Let's take a look at just two examples.

The hieroglyphs of thought

In the Lettre sur les sourds, Diderot pretends to wonder, along with the grammarians of his day, about the question of inversions: what is the natural order of succession of words in language, and which language follows this order most closely? This question is soon completely blurred in the text, which reveals a far more important issue: language translates into succession what in the mind is thought simultaneously. So there's no natural order to language, but always a translation-translation of the iconic, scenic simultaneity of thought into the succession, the concatenation of discourse. Here we come to the heart of our subject: for Diderot, thought is first thought through images; there is an iconic register of thought that pre-exists the order of language. This idea from the Lettre sur les sourds, allows us to measure the both introspective and universalizing character of Diderotian thought: to ask how we think is to plunge into the depths of oneself; but it is also to share what, in oneself, is most universal, the very process that leads to the emergence of reason.

From matter to thought

It is indeed this process again that occupies Le Rêve de D'Alembert. Le Rêve is not a treatise on materialist philosophy. To ask how we pass from inert matter to thinking matter is to confront both the necessity and the impossibility of scientific experience. (This dual relationship to experience is constant in Diderot: one need only think of the impossibility of witnessing cataract surgery at the beginning of the Lettre sur les aveugles). D'Alembert's delirious incorporation of the revolutionary theses of the Diderot-character of the first interview is characteristic of this introspective movement. It's a question of following the process of thought within oneself, of rediscovering the inert matter from which sensibility, and then thought, are formed. The staging of the surveyor's delirium fulfils this function. Here again, the aim is not to build a system of thought, but to trace the very process by which matter becomes thought. And once again, this process is identified with the transformation of image into language. At the beginning of Rêve, Diderot places the statue of Falconet's Pygmalion: the statue, imago, is shattered to bring about a discourse, Bordeu's discourse, which will translate D'Alembert's dream into the order of language. But Bordeu, who initially lends himself to the game, shies away in the end, avoiding the constitution of a result.

The principle of the double scene

How can we describe the process of thought, which in Diderot is both at work and constitutes the ever-postponed object of this absence of work? The Lettre sur les sourds suggests the existence of a dual register of thought: the iconic register is primary; ideas arise simultaneously in the mind, in the form of a vision, which puts them into relation. This linking constitutes thought, which the discursive register, in a secondary process, translates into the order of language.

But haven't we described a result here, aren't we in the process of constituting a system, after having defended ourselves against it? We must always bear in mind this danger, this risk of crushing Diderotian thought by constituting as a definitive result what is always with him only a provisional modeling. This result, the double register of thought, enters itself into a process, constitutes only a stage in the reflection on thought.

What, then, can we rely on in our analyses, if what Diderot says at one moment ceases to be valid at the next? Diderot summons the image and, if he doesn't complete a philosophical work, his writing puts literature to work: what is permanent in this process, which is as much a process of artistic creation as of conceptual elaboration, is not theoretical but poetic. Diderot's thought is based on a very particular poetics, because, while it makes extensive use of images, it is not exclusively textual. This combination of the use of writing and the circulation of images in all their forms (real and imaginary images, paintings and visions, dreams and allegories) cannot be modeled with the Aristotelian tools of poetics. Only a semiology enabling the analysis of the dispositives constituted by this mix in which Diderot excels will be able to account for the process before us.

We won't therefore treat the dual register of thought, iconic and discursive, as a theoretical result, as a theory of knowledge among many others, but as a device. Diderot superimposes two registers; he implements an iconic infrastructure, a kind of stage before the stage, where the things of thought occur, but which remains in itself unrepresentable, unknowable. The principle of knowledge remains inaccessible to knowledge. Above this iconic infrastructure, discourse unfolds, i.e. the oratory stage, the theatrical space of representation. The oratory stage screens the chamber of the mind, obscuring it: but at the same time, the oratory stage merely translates the chamber of the mind. Traces, vestiges, remain of this chamber within the scene. In the Lettre sur les sourds, these traces enable the constitution of hieroglyphics; they manifest themselves in the thickness of language, in what, of language, resists the rhetorical rationalization of scholastic discourse.

The question of the order of language and the double register of thought ceases to be topical for Diderot after the Lettre sur les sourds. On the other hand, the device that superimposes the iconic infrastructure of the chamber and the oratorical superstructure of the stage is found throughout the work. In his famous commentary on Fragonard's reception piece at the Académie royale de peinture, the Corésus et Callirhoé from the 1765 Salon, Diderot superimposes the myth of the Platonic cave and the painting he claims not to have seen. The cave, where chained men, their backs turned to reality, see only simulacra projected onto the back wall, is a myth of knowledge and, by extension, an iconic means of thinking about the process of thought. On the wall of simulacra, at the far end of the Platonic lair, Diderot imagines the pictorial scene composed by Fragonard to be projected. The superimposition of painting and myth is thus expressed in the most concrete terms. Fragonard's scene, publicly exhibited in the Salon carré of the Louvre, constitutes an oratorical superstructure: through it, the artist addresses both the public and the Académie, whose approval he seeks by producing a history painting, i.e. an image intended to be read as a text, like the textual unfolding of the story of Corésus and Callirhoé, as told, for example, in Pausanias' Description of Greece. The public competition of the Salon, the discourse conveyed by the history painting, thus screen the intimate process of thought (Diderot describes himself reading Plato's dialogues at home), the inner workings of vision, of this dream that Diderot had and that Fragonard's work comes to cover.

Beneath the scene, there's another image: beneath Dido's hieroglyph, at the end of the Lettre sur les sourds, there's Lucretius's evocation of the plague in Athens, with Diderot strangely asking his printer to extract a figure for Dido from the plague engraving. The Virgilian oratory scene of Dido's suicide, abundantly exploited by Baroque opera, screens the silent horror of the plague. The spurned lover covers the dying mother. The mortal wound the Queen of Carthage inflicts on herself is superimposed on the abandoned child in Avercamp's engraving.

We shouldn't forget either that the Fils naturel play is set in a device that superimposes Dorval's salon on the scenic space of the performance. Similarly, as we have already alluded to, the oratorical scene of controversy, which pits Diderot against D'Alembert in the first interview, is built on the opening horror of Falconet's Pygmalion reduced to powder.

This principle of the double scene is not a consequence of the formulations in the Lettre sur les sourds, for it pre-exists them. In Les Bijoux indiscrets, the gallant scene, with its decorum and rituals, play scene, seduction scene, boredom scene, discovers its infrastructure thanks to the magic of the ring that makes women's jewels speak: incomprehensible, unseemly, the language of jewels is not of the order of discourse. On the contrary, it's a tableau, revealing what gallant conversation obscures. In the Lettre sur les aveugles, the theatrical scene of Saunderson's last moments covers the missed opening scene, Réaumur's cataract operation. But this operation, which cannot form a stage, is itself a screen for the primitive horror of the blind man's confinement in his inner night. For Diderot, this confinement figures the chamber of thought, which constitutes the scenic infrastructure of the ultima momenta of the atheist Saunderson. In the Promenade du sceptique, finally, the three alleys only seem to constitute three paths, three parallel philosophical discourses. The central allée des maronniers, the allée sceptique, is merely a screen between the allée des épines, where walkers are the blind men wearing the blindfold of faith, and the allée des fleurs, the allée sans allée where the gallant scenes of pleasure are played out. The allée des épines is the chamber of the mind, covered by the scenic space of the allée des fleurs. The bewilderment of the allée des fleurs is seen from the blindness of the allée des épines.

Viol and thought

There is no truth of the infrastructure (or image, or room) that would oppose a lie of the oratory scene (or speech, or screen-scene). While it sometimes seems to work this way, notably in Les Bijoux indiscrets, this result is once again just one stage in an ongoing process of demystification. In the ring's first attempts, the crystal-clear sincerity of the jewels contrasts with the hypocritical mask of gallant women. But very quickly this opposition is blurred, according to the same process that blurs, in the Lettre sur les sourds, the opposition between the natural order of language and the institutional order. The jewels become mute, or justify their mistress instead of accusing her. What is at stake is not fundamentally the establishment of a moral characterology of women, but, always, a certain relationship of thought with that primitive chamber that the libertine tale provisionally images as the female sex.

The infrastructure of the oratorical scene is a chamber of the mind identified with an assault, a rape, a nameless brutality: Saunderson describes himself as by birth thrown into the dungeon; similarly, there's that immemorial blindfold of faith that La Promenade du sceptique would like to tear off. As for the register of the image, the Lettre sur les sourds gives as examples Lady Macbeth's nightmare, Dido's suicide, Cicero's haunting of exile and proscription. In the text on Coresus and Callirhoe, the heads of the men in the Platonic cave, wedged into wooden splints to prevent them from turning over, evoke in another register a similar bodily attack, a destructive immobilization, a forcing of the body that has to do with rape: Is Callirhoé not condemned to death for resisting Corésus's rape, just as in Les Bijoux, in an apparently more pleasant mode, Kersaël was condemned to castration for paradoxically not having raped Fatmé? Lucretia's rape, explicitly cited in the text of Les Bijoux, is relayed by Phèdre's attempted rape of Hippolyte, which we shall show serves as the imaginary core of the plot of Fils naturel. The evocations of sacrifice - the sacrifice of Coresus, the sacrifice of Iphigenia that haunts the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel and has since Lucretius (not the victim of Sextus Tarquin, but the Epicurean poet!) constituted the founding scene of materialism - already constitute re-elaborations, figurations in the order of discourse, of this primordial rape that no discourse can express.

The double scene is based on a rape, constitutive of the act of thinking. The bedroom, or intimate living room, is enclosed by four walls. The fourth wall of the bedroom must be forced to establish the scene, in theater as in painting. The entire intellectual and imaginary elaboration of both the Entretiens and the Paradox rests on this forcing. The stage is built from this forced partition, the technical translation of imaginary rape.

Here, the Freudian approach can help us understand this device. Doesn't what he describes in The Man with the Wolf as the play of the primitive scene and the screen scenes fall under the same principle of the double scene? In Le Neveu de Rameau, the dinner at Bertin's during which Rameau is expelled for a bon mot that his protector didn't appreciate does indeed constitute the primitive scene of dialogue, the closed and forced room whose primitive reach is covered by the dialogic scene. Rameau's pantomimes screen this pitiful but brutal expulsion, which itself refers Rameau on the one hand to the original family injustice (of the great Rameau, he is only the nephew) and Diderot himself on the other to the symbolic expulsion signified to him by his father.

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This linking of the original expulsion (which the earliest hieroglyphs, the Coresus and Callirhoe, The Natural Son were already implementing) with the intellectual exchange of the philosophical dialogue should not be read solely archaeologically, as a means of uncovering, beneath the characters' discourse, the imaginary substratum and unconscious configurations of the Diderotian ego. What is revealed in the primitive scene is not very personal. Rather, we're interested in the process by which the injury suffered in the primitive scene leads to the elaboration of a thought. Thought reacts to the attack of the primitive scene, turning the intimate aggression suffered into a theatrical and public aggression, of which the victim becomes the author. Such is the discourse of the jewels, such are the terrible words of Saunderson on his deathbed, such is the diatribe that Rameau extracts from the iconic energy of his pantomimes.

Discourse and thought

The process of thought is thus described as the advent of the chamber to the stage, of the image to discourse, of the violation played out in the primitive scene to the representation that comes to screen this violation. The scene contains the chamber; discourse carries within it an iconic substratum; representation envelops the primitive scene.

Thought through images cannot be opposed to thought through discourse, just as more generally in classical culture one cannot dissociate a text from an image, a history painting from the history it is supposed to represent.

Discourse is not simply a disguise for thought. It carries that thought within itself.

The Diderotian text often appears digressive, disjointed; it sometimes seems to slip into insignificance. A thought is at work within it, a process is underway. Discourse can only be smooth in order to give an account of a finished thought, a result. In Diderot's work, writing mimics the thought process as closely as possible, and the forcing that this process implies is reflected in the structuring of the discourse, which calls into question both the structure of the text, its syntax and the communication device in which it comes to be inscribed.

The demand for structure is deliberately and constantly rejected: the genres of the letter, the philosophical dialogue, the journalistic account, the novel, are borrowings of appearance that writing always reduces to the mode of conversation, with its digressions, its slowness, its inconsequences. Conversation is the degree zero of the genre: it reduces the public space of literary enunciation to the intimate chamber of unwitnessed confidence. Jacques le fataliste constitutes an extreme example of this systematic deconstruction of textual structures.

Diderot's syntax is also characteristic of this withdrawal of discourse below its rhetorical ordering: to the oratorical period and theatrical alexandrine, Diderot prefers the meticulous description of silent scenes, the parataxis that breaks down movement into successive clichés, the chiasmus that envelops discourse in the vertigo of its reversion.

The deconstruction of genre into conversation, of syntax into parataxis and chiasmus, goes hand in hand with the establishment of a protected enunciation, a philosophical filiva. The text is not addressed to an audience, but to the friend, who must not divulge its content. The scene of discourse is enveloped in the fiction of a room, which it offers to the reader to break into, to reach.