Incomprehensibility and brutality in D'Alembert's Dream

Le Rêve de D'Alembert contains hypotheses, bold statements that rudely clash with commonly accepted eighteenth-century opinions. On a philosophical level, Diderot methodically and systematically breaks with Cartesian dualism, which articulates and opposes matter and thought. He claims, as it were, as a prerequisite for reflection what would otherwise be a haphazard conclusion, a radical materialist monism whose audience, one wonders, was ready to accept.

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More brazenly still, the biological modeling of this materialism constitutes an intellectual approach so singular, so different even from the mechanistic materialisms of the time, that Diderot confronts himself, in this text, with the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of communicating his ideas. He knows himself, he feels himself to be confusedly incomprehensible.

The philosophical dialogue therefore has to confront this dimension of the incomprehensible. Diderot's response is neither a pedagogical effort to clarify his theses, nor a didactic voluntarism that compensates for the boldness of his theses and positions with rigorous method and systematic exposition. Quite the opposite, in fact. Diderot takes the side of the incomprehensible, and exploits the possibilities for thought and reasoning that this incomprehensibility offers. It's certainly not a question of saying things that don't make sense. It's a matter of integrating into the dialogical ritual the idea that what is being developed here has a strong chance of passing for incomprehensible.

By taking this approach, Diderot does not confront head-on the cultural, social and ideological obstacles that stand in his way. Instead, he incorporates this obstacle into his text by confronting all the characters in the dialogue with D'Alembert's délire. Through this face-to-face confrontation, the text recognizes, and by this recognition conjures up, the incomprehensible dimension not only of the theses, but of the very discourse it sets out to develop.

In return, the acceptance of a certain incomprehensibility consubstantial with this philosophical discourse influences the content of the theses and the course the reflection takes. The brutality of the theses put forward is then insidiously disseminated through the delirious fragmentation of the dream discourse, and is imaginally displaced by the images from which the thought is elaborated. A different economy of speech then emerges: from Falconet's shattered statue to the mutilated beams of the sensitive network, the same brutal, original gesture is repeated in Le Rêve de D'Alembert. It's no longer a question of confronting an Other of dialogue who won't understand; it's a question of confronting the very brutality of reality, that brutality deaf to speech, heterogeneous to all discourse, that the body experiences in suffering, in disability, in accident and in mutilation. We pass from the Other who doesn't understand what we're saying to the Real as an objective category of the incomprehensible. Brutality here constitutes the objectification in the Real of the incomprehensible. Le Rêve is the test of this passage, which shifts the dialogical confrontation from the incomprehensibility of discourse to the brutality of the device. Through this brutality, the dimension of the real bursts into literature.

On the one hand, then, in the text, we have repeated allusions to the fact that what is said is incomprehensible, then delusional, then morally unavowable; on the other, the dialogue refers to experiences all marked by the brutality of an inaugural destructive gesture, then by suffering, the distancing of this suffering and its effects-returns. The aim here is to show that these two phenomena, which are highly visible when reading the text, yet seemingly heterogeneous to one another, in fact constitute precisely the fundamental problematic articulation of D'Alembert's Dream.

The discourse of the Dream is thus worked through by the incomprehensible, an incomprehensible that it conjures through reasoning at one level of the dialogue, but which it incorporates and puts to good use at another. This incorporation manifests itself in a very concrete way in the passage from the conversation to the dream proper: D'Alembert's delirious body becomes the closed field of dialogical elaboration. But the incorporation of the incomprehensible is a phenomenon that manifests itself from the very start of the dialogue, through the establishment of a network of images marked by the brutality of an inaugural destruction, and brought in to derail the dialogical game. The confrontation with the other side of the dialogue - not with the interlocutor with whom we're in collusion, but with the reader, the audience who won't understand, who will receive this text as an aggression - this difficult confrontation soon becomes eroticized. Sexual deviance, circumvention and avoidance of the confrontation with the Other of desire, constitute both the metaphor and the culmination of this incorporation of the incomprehensible. The chambre aux cornets, the onanism scene, the evocations of homosexuality, and above all the delirious fantasy of a human hybridization that would produce the goat-footed constitute, beyond the "philosophy of the polyp" highlighted by Jacques Proust, a disquieting interrogation of the symbolic principles of humanity, principles we'll wonder whether Le Rêve de D'Alembert recasts or deconstructs.

First, we'll study Le Rêve de D'Alembert's relationship with the enunciative frameworks of dialogue, frameworks it institutes and at the same time hijacks, bringing to light the incomprehensible dimension of the discourse it seeks to communicate. Then we'll look at the imaginary devices put in place in Le Rêve de D'Alembert to both figure and ward off this threatening incomprehensibility of discourse. Finally, we'll ask whether the brutality of these devices is not at the root of their eroticization. This erotic end of the Dream - both that towards which it tends at all times and that by which it chronologically ends - remains problematic indeed. It could constitute the point of conjunction between the incomprehensibility of the discourse and the brutality of the device.

I. From discourse to dialogue: poetics of the incomprehensible

From scholastic obscurity to "incomprehensible intervals"

The face-to-face encounter with the incomprehensible is the starting point for D'Alembert's Dream. D'Alembert's description of God is incomprehensible:

"a being of such a contradictory nature is difficult to admit. But other obscurities await the one who rejects him."

From the outset, the incomprehensible is not the affair of the camp of the others, in the face of which the materialist camp would have the lion's share of a well-ordered discourse. The ideological confrontation is one of "contradictions" versus "obscurities". The position of the interlocutor Diderot is incomprehensible:

D'Alembert. - I can't hear you.
Diderot. - Je m'explique.(GF36.)

But D'Alembert on the other hand can't bring himself to accept the existence of God:

Diderot. - And to go further, would we be allowed to invent an agent contradictory in its attributes, an empty word, unintelligible?
D'Alembert. - No. (GF46.)

The dialogue thus traps the interlocutors between two incomprehensibilities. It's not a question of choosing sides: Diderot, at the end of the first interview, by denouncing the impossibility of a skeptical position, denounces the very idea of a confrontation of side against side, discourse against discourse. It's from discourse itself that we need to emerge.

We need to move from the incomprehensibility of discourse to the only incomprehensibility that matters, the incomprehensibility of reality. The metaphor of the sensitive cord initiates this passage from discourse to reality:

"This instrument has astonishing leaps, and an awakened idea will sometimes thrill a harmonic which is at an incomprehensible interval." (GF49.)

The resonances, the harmonics of the harpsichord metaphorize the sensitive communication that takes place in the body through the nerves, in the mind through analogy, the circuit of ideas, this communication in the mind being merely the natural continuation, the sensitive extension of the bodily communication of sensations. But where does the new idea come from? There are "incomprehensible" leaps.

We've moved, in dialogue, from God as an incomprehensible scholastic discourse to that incomprehensible interval that is measured and observed in the living, in the real. The incomprehensible has been incorporated as a datum of the living, a datum on which, through metaphor, we can produce clear reasoning: the reasoning of the harpsichord-philosopher defining thought as musical harmonics.

The philosophical dialogue does not, then, dispel the incomprehensibility of the discourse of explaining the world. It displaces it from discourse on reality, from metaphysical abstraction to biological complexity, which allows, through dialogue, a refoundation of reasoning.

Philosophical dialogue does not dispel the incomprehensibility of discourse to explain the world.

Parody of discourse and the irruption of reality

The face-off between the two discourses has thus been replaced by the face-off between discourse and reality. Thus, regarding the genesis of the chick:

"Will you claim, with Descartes, that it's a pure imitative machine? But little children will laugh at you, and philosophers will retort that if that is one machine, you are another." (GF52.)

To the face-off between Descartes¹ and the "philosophers", whose discourses reduce the world to a set of incomprehensible machines, are opposed the laughter of children and the sensitive evidence of the chick, all movement, all warmth, all feather. The laughter of the simple deconstructs all discourse as incomprehensible, initiating dialogue instead of discourse, and the principial power of reality instead of abstract modeling. The incomprehensible is symptomatized by the laughter that dialogizes speech: the enunciative framework of philosophical dialogue is, as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown, that of the Menippean; dialogical thought originates, as Jean Starobinski has shown, in the cynicism of Diogenes.

The children's view of the philosopher is at the same time an inner view. The incomprehensible introduces an inner split in the ego:

Diderot.- Listen to yourself, and you will pity yourself; you will feel that, in order not to admit a simple supposition that explains everything, sensibility, a general property of matter, or a product of organization, you renounce common sense, and precipitate yourself into an abyss of mysteries, contradictions and absurdities. (GF53.)

There's a rush into the incomprehensible. It's a question of stopping at the threshold of this precipitation of discourse, of not slipping. The conjuration of the incomprehensible is the experience of this limit, of this new relationship introduced with reality ("Do you see this egg?") identified with "common sense", itself posited as the principle of a new speech, a new rationality. D'Alembert doesn't immediately break with the old rationality and its discourses:

D'Alembert. - [...] I see that sensibility is a simple quality, one, indivisible and incompatible with a divisible subject or suppository.
Diderot. - Galimatias métaphysico-théologique (GF54.)

D'Alembert counters Diderot with a logical contradiction, in the Scholastic tradition of Aristotelian reasoning: sensibility does not cut itself into pieces, while matter cuts itself into pieces. Sentience and matter are therefore heterogeneous and incompatible. Sensibility is a "quality" that may or may not be attributed, that may or may not be found in a given "subject" or "object". Of course, as soon as we stop talking about "quality" and "subject", and consider sentience as an effect that has no existence in itself, as something produced by matter and not added to matter, everything changes. But the notion of effect, and hence of movement, of physical or chemical process, induces an epistemological break, a radical change in the frameworks of reasoning. It's no longer a question of metaphysical distinctions (between "substance" and "attributes", between "quality" and "supplicant"), but of physical and biological analysis: then the experimental given, which serves as the basis for reasoning, necessarily appears as unique. It's not a matter and of sensibility, it's an egg. The real becomes the symbolic principle of reasoning: not only does experimental physics replace, as a paradigm, idealistic metaphysics, but, even outside experience, the semiological framework in which the speech of dialogue evolves is no longer the rhetorical and syllogistic one.

It is from this new epistemological framework that the old discourse is distanced as an incomprehensible object, as "galimatias". But in the first conversation, this new framework remains a horizon claimed by the dialogue's interlocutor Diderot, without being able to impose itself. The incomprehensible still manifests itself as the work that dialogical negativity performs on discourse. It tends to abolish the boundaries of the two metaphysically opposed camps, as denoted by this insidious use of "you" in Diderot's mouth:

"Be a physicist, and agree on the production of an effect when you see it produced, though you cannot explain to yourself the connection of cause to effect." (GF54.)

It's a question of moving on from metaphysical discourse, denigrated as galimatias, to the attitude, the intellectual posture of the physicist, who envisages sentience no longer as a "quality", in the Aristotelian sense of the word, but as an "effect".

Abolishing the rhetorical cut and generalizing the link

At this point, the dimension of the incomprehensible slips from discourse into reality, into the phenomenon itself, whose causal sequence we cannot explain. From syllogistic chain to phenomenal chain, the incomprehensible is reduced to the real, de-mediatized. It becomes a problem of connection: matter produces sentience, but the connection between matter as cause and sentience as effect remains incomprehensible. This absence of connection in the real, or more precisely this incomprehensible connection, constitutes the real as an experience of brutality. Something in matter breaks free, becomes sensitive. Suddenly, it smells.

It's not a question of suppressing the incomprehensible, but of moving from "a cause that cannot be conceived" (God breathing sentience into matter) to a connection that cannot be explained (the connection of inert matter to sentient matter). Little by little, dialogue builds the device of face to face with reality.

This is what's at stake here: as we've seen, these successive shifts move the incomprehensible from discourse to reality, then reduce the cuts constitutive of the old structure of controversy - the ideological cut confronting two heterogeneous discourses, the logical cut organizing reasoning around the syllogism. We move from a rhetorical order of cuts to a dialogical order of links, based on the highlighting of co-presences, of conjunctions: conjunctions in the reality of phenomena, conjunctions in the dialogue of utterances, the same discourse circulating from one interlocutor to another. This system of connections aims at the rhetorical destructuring of text and reasoning, the passage from structure to device.

D'Alembert clearly perceives that what's at stake here is the very rationality of discourse:

D'Alembert. - For example, we don't really conceive, according to your system, how we form syllogisms, nor how we draw consequences. (GF56.)

Diderot's principle of universal binding prohibits the modelizing distancing that syllogistic discourse establishes. There's a link between the way Diderot proceeds in dialogue, this way of arranging ideas in a certain dialogical enunciative framework that stands in radical opposition to metaphysical discourse, and the way Diderot conceives of matter and the living. To define man as a sensitive harpsichord is to define him no longer as a "subject" mastering faculties, but as a device where the real produces resonances: there is a continuity of the real in the Ego, from the matter of the world to intimate thought. This continuity is represented by Berkeley's delirious thought, delirious and at the same time foundational:

"There was a moment of delirium when the sensitive harpsichord thought that it was the only harpsichord there was in the world, and that all the harmony of the universe went on in it." (GF56.)

What is delirious once again is this connection between the world and the self, just as the connection between matter and sensibility is incomprehensible. But this delirium nonetheless forms the basis of the logical revolution that will underpin the enunciative framework of the second conversation, the "Dream" proper. The incomprehensible must be made to work not in discourse, but in nature:

"we do not draw [consequences]: they are all drawn by nature. We merely state joint phenomena, whose connection is either necessary, or contingent." (GF56.)

This shift induces the passage from the syllogistic model, based on the logical parallelism of propositions, to a dialogical model based on liaison, conjunction, a model that abolishes the distance of the reasoning Ego from the object about which it is reasoning. Delirium, a figure of the abolition of this distance, then becomes the necessary framework for dialogical elaboration.

II. Delirium, madness: ruin of discourse and passage to the image

The incomprehensible has thus slipped from discourse into the real. It thus attacks the very structure of dialogical enunciation, since the new dialogical reasoning is identified with the very concatenation, or rather conjunction, of the phenomena of nature. Delirium, which abolishes the distance that discourse puts between the speaking subject and the object of speech, becomes the necessary condition of reasoning.

The second interview, which takes note of this new enunciative device by placing D'Alembert's delirium at the heart of the discussion, thus reverses the relationship to the incomprehensible. It's no longer a question of designating metaphysical discourse as galimatias, and making it a deterrent to dialogical elaboration. On the contrary, it's a matter of incorporating galimatias, which becomes the new material of dialogical reflection.

"It was, in the beginning, a galimatias of vibrating strings and sensitive fibers" (GF67)
"After your radotage or his, he told me" (GF75)
"His reverence didn't stop there" (GF78)
"Then he said?... - Des folies qui s'entendendent qu'aux Petites-Maisons" (GF79)
"Me, I call them folies that I allow to dream while we sleep, but that a man of good sense who's awake will never care about." (GF87)
"What folies!" (GF92)
"You must have a wonderful penchant for folie" (GF101)
"There comes to me a very folly idea" (GF113)
"Have I been dreaming? - All night, and it was so much like delusion, that I sent for the doctor this morning" (GF130)

Galimatias, ramblings, daydreams, follies, delirium become the form of the new philosophical speech. They designate this speech as deconstructed discourse, as the disarticulation of discursive logic. We're thinking here of the speech of jewels, which Diderot designates in Les Bijoux indiscrets as caquet. Jewels gossip, babble, ramble, stammer. They spout verbiage, extravagance, impertinence. The jewels' first speeches are perfectly clear; it's the public that receives them as incomprehensible, because propriety refuses to admit to the dignity of comprehensible and listenable speech what comes from the body and sex. In the course of the novel, however, the jewels' discourse changes. It is objectively affected by the incomprehensible. Interspersed words, sighs, silences and hysterical cries puncture and destabilize the signifying chain. In chapter 29, Mirzoza's metaphysics recasts a feminine world order very similar to that proposed by Julie de L'Espinasse with the image of the spider. Mirzoza imagined the soul traveling through the various parts of the body; Julie imagines the ego as a spider moving through the web of her body and its sensitive extensions.

The incomprehensible, in passing from discourse to the real, has become corporalized. Becoming sensible incomprehensible, it manifests itself as hysterical discourse: the convulsive discourse of D'Alembert's dream, which only a woman can note and restore in dialogical space. This detour of the feminine, which formed the fabric of the fiction of the Bijoux, which was found in Le Fils naturel with Constance's taking the floor in Act IV, scene 3, cannot be fortuitous here. The metaphysical discourse has been identified with the discourse of a natural son, of this D'Alembert whose genesis Diderot has mischievously traced in the first interview, based on the molecules of the military man La Touche and the canoness de Tencin. To move on to the other word, D'Alembert withdraws into himself, dispossesses himself of himself in dream and delirium, to communicate himself not to Diderot, but to Julie, a kind of inner Julie who constitutes in himself, or more precisely in the Ego in general and in the reader's Ego as well, the feminine part. L'incompréhensible is a feminization of discourse insofar as this discourse of the feminine, this hysterical discourse of jewels, constitutes a corporalization of the enunciative device. The theme of hysteria is present in both Les Bijoux and Le Rêve. It constitutes the moment of the corporalization of the incomprehensible: it is within the ego, and not on either side of two antagonistic ideological camps, that the dialogue takes place. The dialogic break is involuted in the ego, which disseminates it and restores it in the form of words and then delusional images aimed at warding off this break, turning it into a bond.

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III. Image and brutality

This corporalization cannot therefore be reduced to a mere deconstruction, a simple slide of rhetoric into nonsense. Another semiology, another method of intellectual investigation is put in place, which passes through the image, in the same way that the alternative in Les Bijoux was the Vision, that the alternative in Le Fils naturel and the Entretiens was the pantomime and the tableau.

The image is a device articulating the incomprehensible dimension of the real and the bankruptcy of the discourse supposed to represent it with the brutality of what, in the real, manifests itself as a failure of connection. We have seen how the incomprehensible slips, as we move through the text, from discourse to reality, from metaphysical-theological galimatias to that connection which is but which we do not understand, between matter and sensibility, between sensibility and thought.

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The images translate, on the brutality side, i.e. the effects, the same shift: we move from the brutality of the experimenter's gesture to the brutality of the thing experienced, which makes a disturbing comeback.

The first brutal gesture is the gesture that reduces Falconet's statue to powder:

"I put it in a mortar, and with great blows of the pestle..." (GF39.)

This gesture of destroying culture to bring about the living is a terrible, unbearable gesture. Falconet's statue blown to pieces is an image of the discursive collapse that strikes philosophical dialogue. Writing has been subjected to the same brutality.

In the Avertissement à Catherine II du Manuscrit de Saint-Pétersbourg, we can indeed read, about the manuscript itself:

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"It is here only a broken statue, but so broken, that it was almost impossible even for the artist to repair it." (DPV XVII 221.)

The destruction of the manuscript of D'Alembert's Dream, to which this passage alludes, is a mystification. It only points all the more strongly to the intrinsically broken nature of dialogic writing for Diderot. In its very conception, Le Rêve is a shapeless, destroyed text, stricken by dissemination.

The image thus recovers the brutality of what, in reasoning, appears as forcing, an unacceptable intellectual brutality: "Making marble edible." The image will turn what is an impossible passage ("I don't really see how one makes a body pass from the state of inert sensibility to the state of active sensibility", GF38) into a visible passage: the latus makes tableau, conjures the logical incomprehensibility of the passage through the vision of humus, plants and my flesh growing from having eaten them.

Sadistic pleasure

From the outset, sadistic pleasure circumscribes experience. Logical impossibility ("I don't really see how") is succeeded by the pleasure of destruction ("I love this passage", GF41). Similarly, with D'Alembert's origins, the starting point is the face-to-face encounter with the incomprehensible, with the logical impossibility of the passage to the sensible:

"How nothing! We make nothing out of nothing."

The process table triggers the same pleasure:

D'Alembert. - So you don't believe in pre-existing germs?
Diderot. - No.
D'Alembert. - Ah! that you give me pleasure.

Pleasure arises from the evacuation, the destruction of the pre-existing germ, that is, from the acceptance of this original Nothing that D'Alembert had initially rejected. Acceptance of the brutality of nothing (the pulverized statue, the original nothing that was D'Alembert) triggers pleasure and conjures up the incomprehensibility of the sensible connection.

The image suspends the blockage of dialogue; it makes up for the incomprehensibility of discourse by staging a brutal interruption, a brutal confrontation with the emptiness of the world. When it comes to extinguishing and relighting the sun, the starting point is still D'Alembert's incomprehension.

"How did you say that?" (GF44.)

The image is a digression; it doesn't prolong, but quite the opposite suspends the discourse:

"this will take us away from our first discussion."

Turning off the sun proceeds from the same destructive gesture that pulverized the Pygmalion and annihilated D'Alembert. When the painting comes to an end, the problem of passage remains:

"Frankly, you'd oblige me greatly to get the hell out of there. I'm in a bit of a hurry to think." (GF46.)

The object of the interview is completely corporalized by D'Alembert, as if the experiment were taking place inside him. The image serves to distance D'Alembert from the threat of subjective dissemination, a threat that becomes more pressing as the text progresses. The brutality of the image distracts from this inner dissemination induced by reasoning, materialistic logic.

D'Alembert is suffering, suspended between sensibility and thought. He is suffering without consciousness, the perverse object of the text's sadistic pleasure.

D'Alembert is suffering, suspended between sensibility and thought.

The image of the Cartesian chick starts from the same observation of incomprehensibility and leads to the same sadistic pleasure, pleasure of the Other of the dialogue, of Diderot.

"I hear. Thus, if this sensitive and animated harpsichord were still endowed with the faculty of feeding and reproducing itself, it would live and engender by itself, or with its female, small living and resonant harpsichords²." (GF51.)

D'Alembert's irony points to the incomprehensible: his "I hear" that leads to an absurd procreation of "little living, resonant harpsichords" means I don't understand, or rather there's nothing to understand: this model of materialistic explanation through the harpsichord is incomprehensible.

Diderot in response slides to the image, from the serinette to the serin, from the harpsichord to the chick: the egg toppling "all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth" exerts the brutality of the real and triggers pleasure:

"One guess! It pleases you to say." (GF53.)

The materialistic image arouses a perverse pleasure, the sadistic, brutal pleasure of a destruction of the object, the pleasure of brutalizing D'Alembert through the image.

The second interview is marked by the perverse incorporation of the word of the Other: D'Alembert diderotizes in a dream, masochistically incorporates what Diderot has inflicted on him in the repetitive form of a brutal gesture of destruction.

The dissemination of the Ego: image of the cluster

The first image to emerge from the delirium is that of the grappe, immediately identified, by the obscene gesture, with the sexual organ:

D'Alembert. - Come closer... again... I have something to propose to you.
Mlle de L'Espinasse. - What is it?
D'Alembert. - Hold this bunch, here it is, you can see it there, there; let's do an experiment.
Mlle de L'Espinasse. - What?
D'Alembert. - Take your scissors; do they cut well?
Mlle de L'Espinasse. - A ravir. (GF75.)

What are the gestures in this scene? The bunch is shown, given to see, to weigh with the hand. But what kind of grape are we talking about in this nocturnal face-off between lover and mistress, in this face-off where the lover asks her to come ever closer because he has something to propose? And what could that proposal be, if not that of another cluster? What malicious pleasure then than that of cutting the bunch, what perverse jubilation, for Julie, than that of playing her scissors which don't cut well, or correctly, but "à ravir", that is, literally, to take away with pleasure?

The image of the cluster here presents its double face: it metaphorizes sexual jouissance, phallic exhibition, and it unfolds in the brutal perversity of the cutting of the sex, of the experience of the chisel. D'Alembert's incomprehensible delirium covers the brutality of the sadistic image with its incomprehensibility, always the same image of castrating dissemination. There is a direct relationship between the obscene allusion carried by the gesture (D'Alembert in the masochistic posture of one who offers his sex as a sacrifice³) and the scientific, theoretical content of the experiment: the scissors worn on the cluster should enable us to touch the link between the sensible and the thinking, from the sensible existence of each bee to the thinking coexistence of the swarm.

D'Alembert identifies with the cluster. The same verb "approach" designates the face-to-face encounter of the dreamer with his companion, then of the cluster with its experimenter:

"Approach... again... again..."
then
"Approach gently, very gently"

The gesture of cutting the bees off at the legs is indeed the same gesture of brutal dissemination that pulverized the statue of Pygmalion.

The experience of dissemination, of submission to pulverization by the Other of dialogue, is the renewed source of D'Alembert's pleasure:

"Males resolving into males, females into females, that is pleasing..." (GF79)

Human polyps are an extension, an explicitation of the cluster metaphor. The productive dissemination of polyps turns the brutal experience of the chisel into a moment of perverse jouissance, into a fantasy of homosexual multiplication.

The original brutality of the experimental gesture fades here, but manifests itself again further on, in the experience of the hand placed on the thigh:

"When I place my hand on my thigh, I feel well at first that my hand is not my thigh, but some time later when the heat is equal in both, I no longer distinguish them." (GF89.)

The experiment assumes, to succeed, that one is naked. This can be seen as another onanistic evocation, especially as the same experiment was attempted, with more pronounced undertones, in the Lettre sur les aveugles (DPV IV 62 and 30-31; see also Rêve, GF119).

Or, after the moment of dissolution, after the sensitive experience of subjective dissemination, it is suffering that circumscribes, that delimits the Ego:

"Yes, until one or the other is pricked from you; then the distinction is reborn.
[...]
It's [your pricked hand] that suffers, but it's something else that knows it and doesn't suffer." (GF89.)

The experience of suffering is constitutive of the Ego. The perverse brutality of the sting dispels the incomprehensibility of the Ego, delimits through suffering this Ego that discourse, that reasoning cannot circumscribe, explain, designate.

Bordeu pushes Julie further and further into sadistic experimentation. Thus Cyclops:

"Do by thought what nature sometimes does; mutilate the bundle of one of its strands; for example, of the strand that will form the eyes." (GF109.)

After cutting the bundle, Julie gouges out her imaginary patient's eyes: the castrating metaphor continues to do its work. The imaginary experience continues, with the incantatory repetition of the same terms, as in a magical ritual:

"Do by thought what nature sometimes does. Remove another strand from the bundle, the strand that is to form the nose, the animal will be without a nose⁴." (GF110.)

Then, little by little, the brutal gesture of the experiment is integrated into the real: we leave the fantastical sphere of virtual operations to enter the concrete evocation of medical experiments.

First, there's La Peyronie's trepanate, who "had received a violent blow to the head" (GF118). Trepanning reproduces the accidental brutality of the blow, and repeats it when the abscess is cleaned. The experience is indeed one of dissolution of the ego and re-creation, of circumscription through experience, through the passage of pain.

The whole of this second conversation consists in corporalizing the latus, making the epistemological leap from matter to thought a sensitive experience of masochistic pain.

The involution of brutality: the parish priest of Moni

The anecdote of the curé de Moni constitutes a kind of paroxysm in the staging of masochistic pain as an experience of self-absence, of that voluntary alienation that Diderot would find again in the Paradoxe sur le comédien with the figure of the cold-blooded comedian.

"He was attacked by the stone, he had to be cut." (GF141.)

The lapidary formula, "tailler", exerts its brutality on an operation known to be particularly painful; the tailler doesn't attack the stone but the whole patient. The patient is trimmed after having been attacked: the brutality of the scenario precipitates the anecdote towards its incomprehensible core, the serenity, literally the unconsciousness of the curé.

"he receives us with a serene air"
and further
"We operate, he remains motionless, neither tears nor sighs escape him, and he was delivered from the stone he ignored." (GF142.)

The parataxis characteristic of Diderotian style precipitates the process towards an outcome for which the passage, the real, intermediary moment of pain, is elided. "On opère" refers to the moment when the lower abdomen is opened; "il reste" and "il ne lui échappe" indicate the reaction to the opening, or rather the absence of reaction. Then the imperfect passive tense designates without transition the outcome of the operation. The moment of extraction from the calculus, the crucial moment of the operation is missing from the text, just as the moment of fertilization was missing from D'Alembert's genesis⁵. The text is marked by a hole in the signifying chain, a hole prepared by parataxis, which is abolition of binding, regression from continuous to contiguous.

The brutal moment is the primitive scene obsessively repeated in Le Rêve de D'Alembert, a sadistic, perverse scene where, in pain and self-possession, a general dissemination is played out that the work then sets out to ward off.

The anecdote of Moni's priest proposes a materialist version of what could be described as a mystical experience. As Jean Varlot suggests, the parish priest is implicitly compared to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who died stoned to death in Jerusalem by the Jews on the orders of the Sanhedrin.

Etienne is first brought before the assembly of the Sanhedrin and gives a long speech retracing the history of the Jewish people, who, according to him, persecuted all their prophets. He ends his speech with the famous formula:

"Ah," he said, "I see the heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." (Acts of the Apostles, VII, 56. Echo of Daniel's vision, VII, 13, vision of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven.)
In the Vulgate, Ecce video caelos apertos et Filium Hominis a dextris stantem Dei.

The expression of "open heavens", caelos apertos, is used twice in Le Rêve, just before and just after the anecdote of Moni's priest:

"the fanatic who sees the heavens open" (GF140)
"doubt that he whose chest bones were broken with pebbles did not see the heavens open" (GF142)

In the first interview, the biblical formula memento quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris had served as the imaginary foundation for the work of signifiance initiated by the pulverization of the statue. Here it's another biblical formula, video caelos apertos, that serves as the basis for imaginary elaboration and materialist détournement.

But the stones that killed Stephen from the outside are here involuted as the inner stones of the kidney stone. The brutal exteriority of the world is incorporated into the sensitive brutality of the suffering body. This is the very movement of the spider eating the web of the world.

What is this stone from which the priest suffers? What is it if not the powder of the broken statue at the start of the Dream, powder that the body does not assimilate: the image resists theoretical discourse; the image makes a comeback, revolts against philosophical reasoning. It is the stumbling block to reduction, to the materialist latus.

This return effect is recuperated in the following example, that of the philosopher tormented by an "earache": meditation "artificially deceives [his] pain" (GF143), but only to resume on leaving the "contention of mind", "with an unheard-of fury".

The sadistic experience of disseminating the patient through suffering returns with violence (GF 136, 144, 150, 153). Violence is the incorporation of brutality, the transformation of the incomprehensible brutality of reality into sensible, corporeal, involuted violence. Sadistic experience biologizes brutality. It thus shifts the problem. By eroticizing the question of latus, it detaches it from a question of incomprehensibility to a question of immorality. The passage from matter to thought was first a matter of sensibility; from sensibility, Diderot slides to suffering, where the continuity of the "I" is at stake, and hence the passage from sensible matter to thinking matter. But suffering makes a comeback: insofar as it presupposes the setting up of a sado-masochistic device, of an imaginary incorporation of the world, through it something escapes experimental control.

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The device is then confronted with both its erotic dimension and the moral dimension of the latus: this is the issue at stake in the third interview.

IV. The eroticization of the device

The third latus

"What do you think of species mixing?" (GF172.)

D'Alembert's Dream had announced two latus, two problematic passages; that from inert matter to sensible matter was the subject of the first interview, that from sensible matter to thinking matter was addressed in the second. The third interview uncovers a third latus that poses a problem and that the iconic devices set up in the previous interviews have revealed: this is the question of jouissance, of the passage therefore from thought, from man's consciousness, to his jouissance, insofar as this jouissance overflows the boundaries not only of subjectivity, but, more radically perhaps, of humanity itself.

The unity challenged here is no longer, as in the second interview, the unity of the "self", but the unity of the species. This change of perspective is reflected in an even more radical semiological break than between the first and second interviews. On the one hand, the play on the incomprehensibility of the discourse disappears for good; on the other, the destructive brutality of the experimental gesture disappears. Incomprehensibility and brutality are reabsorbed, settled by the setting up, by the stabilization of the dialogic device.

Transformations of devices

The incomprehensibility of the discourse symptomatized the incompatibility of the discourse first with reality, then with the social acceptance that could be made of it, with propriety. The brutality of the experimental gesture attempted to break down this incompatibility, to force the order of discourse, reasoning and scientific modeling to communicate with the order of reality. In the third conversation, the aim is no longer to force this connection, but to regulate the relationship between discourse and reality, thought and society, society and experience through the dialogical device.

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This discourse will develop freely and therefore clearly, because philosophical dialogue will offer it a sheltered, protected space for expression. As for experience, it was gradually brought back from mythical images (the cluster of bees, the spider) to real medical cases (the trepanatee at Lapeyronie, the twins at Rabastens, the curé de Moni operated on the stone). The third interview continues this normalization of the referent, of the image of reality on which the discourse is based: "solitary actions" (GF175), the choice "of two actions equally restricted to voluptuousness" (GF180), "these combinations" (GF181), "these followed attempts" (GF183), "these abominable tastes" (GF186), each of these terms designates a new variant of avoidant or deviant sexual experience. But what's striking, compared to the passive posture that characterized the experiences of the second interview, is the reversal that's at work here: we're no longer talking about patients undergoing mutilation and operations, but actors of jouissance satisfying a need. The actions in question compensate for a lack. This is not an apology for homosexuality or zoophilia. The ideal remains heterosexual:

the "greatest happiness one can imagine, that of confusing my senses with the senses, my drunkenness with drunkenness, my soul with the soul of a companion my heart would choose, and of reproducing myself in her and with her" (GF176-7)

Union with the heterosexual Other is the ideal of a successful fusion. The verb is significant: confondre is not to confront the cut of otherness; on the contrary, it is to resorb, to abolish this cut, to establish the liaison, the sensible continuum. Putting the noun complement, "d'une compagne", into a common factor delays the appearance in the sentence of the Other as Other. Syntax mimics the fusion that is the ideal dissemination of the Ego:

"confuse my senses with the senses, my drunkenness with drunkenness, my soul with the soul"

The heterosexual experience is the experience of the abolition of the my, of the passage from the my to the the, to the the. The ego disseminates, generalizes, melts into the world, into the universal enjoyment of the world.

But to access this jouissance, which society paradoxically restricts, delays, constrains, requires a latus. Onanism, then homosexuality, which is preferable to it because it communicates, shares enjoyment (GF180), are the intermediate actions, the suppletive combinations that lead to this "greatest happiness imaginable". Imagination starts from itself, from narcissistic pleasure, and tends towards ever greater otherness: one's own sex, then the other of the same sex, then the other of the other sex, then the other of another species. What's at stake is always this progressive assimilation of the heterogeneous, mimicked by the metamorphosis of the statue into humus.

"I hear that the circulation of beings is gradual, that the assimilations of beings want to be prepared." (GF183.)

This evocation, which prepares the zoophilic goat-foot experiment, takes up the terms of the very first experiment:

"because when you eat, what do you do? You remove the obstacles that opposed active sensitivity to the food. You assimilate it with yourself" (GF39)

Assimilation conjures brutality. To the brutality of slavery, it substitutes the creation of the hybrid, the goat-foot.

Conclusion

Le Rêve de D'Alembert is Diderot's first philosophical dialogue. Diderot elaborates its form, its enunciative framework, at the same time as he offers the reader the site of his theoretical and experimental reflection on materialism. The text can thus be read in the movement of this double development, or rather this double research.

The model that serves as a repellent at the outset is that of the controversy and its syllogistic reasoning. Parodied, reduced to snippets, the discourse of ancient metaphysics provides nothing but incomprehensible galimatias. But this dimension of incomprehensibility is neither negative nor sterile in this dialogue. First and foremost, it allows representation to take on the materiality of the real, its brutality, that is, what is raw and irreducible to discourse modeling. The incomprehensible, as it slips from discourse into the real, turns around and becomes positive. It then opens up to another form of speech, the speech and reasoning of dreams, positively characterized as madness and delirium. The space of dialogue is no longer that of face-to-face discourse, of camp versus camp. The interlocutors gather around D'Alembert's suffering and/or enjoying body; they no longer oppose, but conjugate their words in a dialogical space identified with this body.

This new semiology of liaison, in which reasoning progresses through image networks and the work of signifiance, stabilizes in the third interview, becoming eroticized: the dialogue then appears regulated by a barrier of modesty, which isolates an intimate space in which to express oneself with impunity, a space to which the public gains access only by breaking in. But this very impunity allows reasoning to slide out of control. The ultimate images of the rapist and rebellious goat-foot, the cardinal and the orang-utan escape the very idea of the finality of dialogue. They camp on its horizon the threat of their brutality and the instability of a thought whose share of the incomprehensible conjures any attempt at closure.

Notes