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Stéphane Lojkine, communication au congrès de la Société américaine d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, Albuquerque, 2010.

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Paradox device

Logic of discourse: the paradox of the Paradox

The cry and decency (affirmation and dispossession)

""But decency! decency!"
That's all I hear repeated. Barnevelt's mistress enters her lover's prison disheveled. The two friends embrace and fall to the ground 1. Philoctete once rolled up to the entrance of his cave. There he would let out the inarticulate cries of pain 2. These cries formed a sparse 3 verse. But it tore at the viewer's insides. Have we more delicacy and more genius than the Athenians?... What then, could there be anything too vehement in the action of a mother, whose daughter is immolated 4? Let her run across the stage like an angry or troubled woman. Let her fill her palace with cries" (Le Fils naturel, Premier entretien, DPV X 93; Vers 1137-1138).

Gestures of despair or effusion, demonstrations of pain or friendship, cries and, to top it all, a mother's hysteria-these are what the theater must represent on stage and make the spectator feel. It's not about reasoning or discourse; nor, initially at least, is it about morals and virtue. It's about a deep, gut-level movement, more fundamental than any exercise in language, a movement that asserts itself and communicates itself, from the stage to the parterre. This is what is at stake in theatrical performance: we come to receive this affirmation of a presence, which is nevertheless only expressed by means of a dispossession, of the repeated implementation of a technique5.

Sensitivity and cold sense (singularity and repetition)

The paradox of the Paradox on the actor rests on this contradiction between affirmation and dispossession: decency on the one hand, and number on the other, dispossess the actor of himself, inscribing him in the repetitive, normative machine of theatrical writing6 ; torn entrails of the other, and inarticulate cries, assert outside discourse, outside logic, a presence of the body and the cry, and exclude any form of inscription, normalization, repetition7.

How can the theatrical session produce this effect (this affirmation, this restoration of a singular presence), when the normalization of theatrical play, when the repetition of sessions betrays the artifact of an absent, mechanized, in a word dispossessed8 word8?

Since it's not a question of reasoning, language or logic, but of guts and emotion, sensitivity in a word, the common view is that the actor produces and then communicates the theatrical effect using his own sensitivity: the actor's emotions manufacture the emotions of the show, the same sensitivity, of the same nature, is transmitted from the actor's guts to the stage, from the stage to the spectator's guts. The doxa thus defines an origin and a process of representation.

Contrary to this common opinion, the first interlocutor in the dialogue, known as "the man with the paradox" 9, defends the opposite thesis, which constitutes the paradox on the actor: it is by resorting to the cold sense 10 that the actor produces the theatrical effect. This effect is the result not only of the actor's technical preparation (training, rehearsing his role), but also of his intellectual creation: he is led to construct an "ideal model" for his role, i.e. a virtual image of the character, which he keeps in mind, summons up and perfects at will. He then copies this model as faithfully as possible during the performance. For the man with the paradox, the great actor is an intellectual, a creator not so much at the moment of the performance as before it, during its preparation. Theatrical performance is then essentially a matter of technique and rehearsal.

Dialectics of meaning (the impossible origin)

The articulation between the two theses that clash in the dialogue, the sensibility thesis and the actor's cold sense thesis, rests entirely on the word sense. It's easy to see why it's essential to restore the original spelling of sens froid here: although the two discourses on acting seem radically opposed at first glance, they clash on the basis of the same word and even a common notion. To feel, in the classical language, is on the one hand to receive, from the outside, sensations, to experience sensibility; on the other hand, like the Latin sentire, it is to think, to exercise judgment, and, by so doing, to mark one's distance from sensibility11.

The paradox is therefore not a means of opposing two autonomous and distinct theories on acting, as a traditional and simplistic interpretation of the Paradox on the actor suggests 12. The two theses at stake each constitute the reversal of the other around this pivotal notion of sense, with all its nebulous, cold sense, sensibility, feeling.

The sensitive origin of the theatrical effect is only a delusion, according to the first interlocutor, because, on either side of the fourth wall of the scenic space, the actor's cold-sense and the spectator's sensibility are opposed. But if the sensitive effect of the theatrical performance is an artefact of the actor's sense-cold, the actor has produced this effect by copying expressions of sensibility from nature and society: these copies, this ideal model, therefore originate in the natural expression of sensibility. In other words, the spectator's sensibility replaces the actor's cold sensibility; but the actor's cold sensibility replaces nature's sensibility. Here we touch on the contradiction of origin highlighted by Derrida under the name différance, a contradiction that deconstructs the differential interplay of sensibility and sense-cold, of what is of the order of the entrails, the cry, the presence on the one hand, of reason, distance, construction and artifact on the other.

This contradiction itself masks a dialectical interplay, which Diderot (like Derrida) explicitly nurtures from the Platonic model: the ideal model is both an origin and an achievement, the negation of sensibility and its paroxysmal expression. In other words, sensibility must negate itself in order to accomplish itself: cold-sense, in the dialectic of sense, designates this necessary work of negativity.

Under the paradox, the stage (dialectic and device)

The debate on acting thus unfolds, discursively, as a dialectic of meaning. But it would be a mistake to reduce Diderotian dialogue to a pure exercise in thought, however subtle. The paradox about the actor, and the dialectic it sets in motion, are in some ways no more than the superstructure of the Paradox, whose logical aporia13 can only unfold from a "closure of representation"14 : this enclosure is not only the logical enclosure of the aporia; it is also the material enclosure of the "stage", of this "theater" which is thought of as a special, extraordinary space, where things don't happen as they do in the "real" space, "society". Between theater and society is played out the infrastructure of difference that founds representation, a difference whose horizon of abolition is "nature" and its simplicity.

Social scene and theatrical scene

There is therefore an infrastructure of paradox, a geometrical difference that founds logical difference: this is the opposition between theater and society, which Diderot had developed at length in the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel:

"you tell a story in society; your insides move, your voice intersperses, you weep. You have, you say, felt and felt very keenly. I agree. But were you prepared for it? No. Did you speak in verse? No. But you were engaging, astonishing, touching, producing a great effect; it's true. But bring to the theater your familiar tone, your simple expression, your domestic bearing 15, your natural gesture, and you'll see how poor and weak you'll be. You'll cry, you'll be ridiculous, we'll laugh. It won't be a tragedy, it'll be a 16 tragic parade you'll play. Do you believe that scenes by Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, even Shakespeare, can be spouted with your conversational voice and the tone of your hearth corner? No more than the story from the corner of your hearth with the emphasis and mouth opening of the theater." (DPV XX 58; Vers 1385.)

Not only the same story, but the same play, the same enunciation do not produce the same effect at home in front of friends and on a theater stage17. The stage imposes exaggeration and magnification, in other words, a whole series of representational devices. Here we measure the gap between reality and representation, which explains the failure of transpositions from one space to another:

"Comedies of verve and even character are exaggerated. The social joke is a light froth that evaporates on the stage; the theatrical joke is a sharp weapon that would wound in society. We don't show imaginary beings the kind of consideration we owe real ones." (DPV XX 84; Vers 1399.)

To the "light froth" of wit, which characterizes private, intimate enunciation, between friends, guests, hosts of the same salon, is opposed the "sharp weapon" of the line, which is exercised with all the power of the theatrical exchange, and all the repercussion of a public word, addressed beyond its immediate addressee to the audience of spectators and, from there, symbolically, to the whole community.

This power, this resonance inherent in theatrical speech, even in comedy, even in light inflections intended to trigger laughter, raises the problem of theatrical emphasis18:

"When, through a long habit of the theater, theatrical emphasis is kept in society and Brutus, Cinna, Mithridate, Cornelia, Merope, Pompey are carried around, do you know what one does? You couple to a small or large soul, from the precise measure that nature has given it, the outward signs of an exaggerated and gigantic soul that you don't have; and from this is born ridicule." (DPV XX 105; Vers 1412.)

Just as the effect of a private witticism, spontaneously spouted in salon conversation, would be nil and fall flat on stage, so theatrical emphasis, highly effective on stage in front of spectators, becomes ridiculous in society. Diderot systematically associates the speech regime with the space in which speech is uttered, a space that is both material (the salon / the theater) and symbolic (the real / representation).

The double stage

Moving from society to the stage

But just as there is no linear discourse of paradox, which would refute one thesis of sensibility by means of the opposing thesis of sense-foid, so in fact the two spaces are not irreducibly external and opposed to each other. The whole game consists in moving from one to the other, and better still, superimposing them. Superposition is a dialectization of geometrical opposition, just as aporia dialecticizes discursive opposition.

First, there are the gymnastics to which dialogue forces us, the turnstile that moves us from one word and space to another:

"Once again, whether good or bad, the comedian says nothing, does nothing in society precisely as he does on stage; it's another world." (DPV XX 111; Vers 1415.)

The actor therefore lives in two worlds, constantly moving from one to the other. His passage from private to public space, from reality to representation, constitutes the substratum of the passage from one sense to another, from the sense of the sentient being to the sense of the being who feels:

"It's that being sensible is one thing, and feeling is another. One is a matter of the soul, the other a matter of judgment. It's that we feel strongly and can't render; it's that we render, alone, in society, in the corner of a fireplace, reading, acting, for a few listeners, and render nothing worthwhile in the theater; it's that in the theater with what we call sensitivity, soul, guts, we render one or two tirades well and miss the rest ; it's that embracing the full extent of a great role, sparing the light and the dark, the soft and the weak, showing oneself equal in the agitated places, being varied in the details, harmonious and one in the whole, and to form a sustained system of declamation that goes so far as to save the poet's quips, is the work of a cool head, profound judgment, exquisite taste, arduous study, long experience and uncommon tenacity of memory" (DPV XX 120 ; Circa 1420-1421).

"To be sensitive" and "to feel"; "one feels" and "one renders": logical oppositions are based on etymological filiations or consonances, opposites cover similarities. But above all, the spatial infrastructure integrates oppositions that, logically, seemed irreducible. Wandering from reading and solitary meditation to the salon, to society where he makes a spectacle of himself, then from society to the theater where he delivers his tirade, it is now the same "we" that orders the reversal of feeling, from the lightning effect of solitary sensibility to the theatrical mastery of cold-sense, via all the social experiences of sensitive expression 19.

What counts is this finger-in-the-glove reversal of sensibility through experience, a reversal supported, materialized by the passage from one space to another. Between society and the theater, between the parterre and the stage, the curtain, the banister, the fourth wall materialize the interface function of meaning in the process of representation.

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The sense functions as a pivot barrier, a screen between the private sensibility and the public rendering of the performance. The sens is first and foremost sensibility, and as such it initially prevents the sensitive man trapped in his entrails from rendering what he feels, i.e. from playing it coldly, technically, efficiently. But, in a second stage, the sense manifests itself to the actor as the cold sense on which his entire acting craft is based; it is then the sense that enables him to render intellectually and technically what he has felt intuitively and sensitively. The cool sense proceeds from the reversal, the intellectualized reinvestment of sensibility. It doesn't oppose sensibility, it turns it inside out, retrojects it. Witness the metaphor of ice:

"It will not be daily 20: it is an ice always disposed to show objects and to show them with the same precision, the same force and the same truth." (DPV XX 49-50; Vers 1381.)
"The gestures of his despair are from memory and were prepared in front of a mirror." (DPV XX 55; Vers 1384.)

The mirror figures the constitutive reversal of sense. From its immediate brilliance, like a nerve impulse, it immediately echoes reality, it propagates its effects with the energy of sensibility. But ice is cold, impersonal: a neutral interface, it stands between the object to be shown and the subject, the actor showing. Ice objectifies representation, which becomes a distanced production of the actor's cold sense.

The ice metaphor highlights a veritable screen of meaning, which on the one hand intercepts, filters, objectifies objects before showing them, but which on the other hand enables this immediate, sensitive rendering, full of force and truth.

High scene and low scene (Le Dépit amoureux)

The simultaneous play of sensitivity and cold sense is then declined in a series of anecdotes, such as this ménage scene between two actors who are simultaneously performing a scene from Molière's Dépit amoureux:

"The actor Eraste, Lucile's lover.
Lucile, Eraste's mistress and the actor's wife.
The actor. Non, non, ne croyez pas, Madame,
Que je revienne encore vous parler de ma flamme...
It's done; ... I hope so.
I want to heal myself, and know well
What of your heart has possessed mine...More than you deserved.
Such constant wrath for the shadow of an offense..." (DPV XX 69; Vers 1391.)

The amorous spite played out in the noble style and in a high voice is contrasted with the real, intimate resentment, noted in italics and persisted in a low voice. The scene is thus a "double scene, one of lovers and the other of spouses"; there are "two simultaneous scenes21", a "high scene" that simulates the most extreme sensitivity and a "low scene" that proves that this is only artifice.

However, on closer inspection, the opposition between the two scenes, high and low, between the two spaces, public and intimate, is not so clear-cut: in both cases, the spite is the same vis-à-vis Eraste and the husband. The lower scene agrees with the upper scene, acquiesces in it. It comments on it and reinforces it, while the latter theatrically frames the intimate dissension and feeds on it. The lower scene is not an autonomous scene: the first italicized lines constitute an intimate overkill of theatrically declaimed verses, before the progession of fury turns the text against itself, in a revolt that dialogizes it in defiance of the initial separation of spaces and enunciations: "You, offend me! I do you no such honor" contradicts to the letter in the lower scene what is said in the upper scene, but overall, for meaning, continues to reinforce the point of Dépit amoureux.

Touching scene and meditative gaze (Fashionable Prejudice)

A second anecdote recounts a performance of Nivelle de la Chaussée's Préjugé à la mode, with the same actress, whom we can cross-check to assume was Gaussin: indeed, it was she who played the role of Constance, a virtuous wife indignantly deceived, in 1735.

"However this actress cheats on her husband with another actor, this actor with the Chevalier, and the Chevalier with a third whom the Chevalier surprises between his arms22. This one has meditated a great revenge. He will place himself in the balconies, on the lowest bleachers. (Then the Count of Lauraguais had not yet cleared our stage of them.) There, he has promised himself to disconcert the infidel by his presence and contemptuous glances, to confuse her and expose her to the booing of the parterre. The play begins; his betrayer appears; she catches sight of the Chevalier, and without shaking in her game, she says to him with a smile: Fi! the ugly sulker who gets angry over nothing. The Chevalier smiles back. She continues: Are you coming tonight?... He falls silent. She adds: Let's end this flat quarrel, and get your carriage moving... And do you know in which scene this one was interspersed? In one of La Chaussée's most touching scenes, where this actress sobbed and made us cry our eyes out." (DPV XX 72-73; Vers 1393-4.)

The words in italics are spoken mid-voice by the actress to her jealous lover, who is not acting but has placed himself at the extreme boundary between the spectator space and the performance space. The shameless effrontery of these remarks contrasts violently with the heightened sensibility of the scene intended for the audience. Le Chevalier relies on this contrast to dismantle Gaussin: his mute irruption on the last bench of the most advanced balcony, as much as on the stage itself, his gaze alone charged with contempt, should disconcert the unfaithful double and "shake her out of her game". The lower stage is summoned to destroy the upper stage.

The opposite happens. The meditative gaze of the indignant lover, invisible to the audience, cannot ridicule Gaussin. The Chevalier paints a picture for her, but for her alone, and all the more so as the plot of Préjugé à la mode places the sublime Constance in a situation that exactly mirrors the one silently imposed on her by the Chevalier. Indeed, the story is that of a loving, faithful wife whose fickle husband, d'Urval, falls in love all over again: the couple find themselves, at the end of the play, more united than ever. The Gaussin's first line, Fi! le vilain boudeur qui se fâche pour rien, is uttered as "the play begins", i.e. as Constance persuades Damon to marry Sophie regardless of the disorders in her own household. From the outset, we suspect a tender interest between Constance and Damon, the husband's friend, which materializes on the theatrical stage what the Chevalier has actually caught in the Gaussin's alcove. In this first scene, Damon turns away for a moment to pity, separately, Constance:

"Damon.
Madame, forgive...à part.
Righteous as well as unfortunate wife!
Constance.
If I make a few vows, it's for your hymenée." (I, 123.)

The Gaussin's address to the Chevalier necessarily slips in during Damon's aside, which gives him a moment's freedom. It takes on all its salt, and is in a way an ironic commentary on Damon's prevarications.

The last word the actress whispers to her importunate lover, "Let us finish this flat quarrel, and get your carriage moving", for its part, is placed "in one of the most touching" scenes of the play: arguably, it concerns, in Act V, the confrontation between Constance and a "man in disguise", whom she initially takes to be Damon, but who will turn out to be her husband:

Constance congedie Florine.
Here you are... let's pick up the thread of this speech,
Whose course we were prevented from continuing.
Damon, allow me to shed tears In the bosom of a sensitive friend.
In the bosom of a friend sensitive to my allarmes;
In the eyes of all the world they would betray me:
This is another reason why I had to flee.She wipes her eyes.
(V,5, p. 114.)

Certainly, Constance sheds tears for the audience as she persifests the Chevalier. But isn't the turmoil she plays out theatrically superimposed on the turmoil produced by the irruption, opposite her, of the petrifying Chevalier? La Gaussin feeds the turmoil played out on stage with the turmoil encountered, conjuncturally, in the real world. And there's more: in this decisive scene, Constance's interlocutor turns out not to be who she thought he was. The plot devised by Nivelle de la Chaussée implies a double addressee for Constance's words, since d'Urval is in fact present before Constance, but masked so that she believes he is speaking to Damon. The Chevalier's presence only serves to redouble the data in the fiction, since Gaussin only addresses him through the words she says to the "Masque", or in the margins of them. She thus has two interlocutors, in reality and in the order of fiction.

At the end of the scene, the false Damon unmasks himself and d'Urval pathetically throws himself at his wife's knees to ask her forgiveness for his past infidelities:

"Constance.
Ah! why didn't I warn my husband?
Drive me, let's run...
D'Urval, demasked, at her feet.
he's at your knees...
This is where I must die... Leave me in tears
Atone for my excesses, and avenge all your charms."

Isn't it particularly comical to simultaneously hear Constance ask Damon-D'Urval to lead her offstage ("Conduisez-moi, courons...") and the Gaussin suggest that the Chevalier take her to dinner in town ("faites avancer votre carrosse")? Here again, high stage and low stage, far from opposing each other, mutually reinforce each other, the dramatic intensity resulting from this circulation of the intimate and the public, of sensitivity and cold sense.

Semiramis' pendant

A third anecdote features Lekain, the famous tragedian who so often distinguished himself in the company of Mlle Clairon, notably in Voltaire's tragedies:

"The Kain Ninias descends into his father's tomb, he slits his mother's throat there; he comes out with bloody hands. He is filled with horror, his limbs twitch, his eyes are bewildered, his hair seems to bristle on his head. You feel yours shudder, my terror grips you, you're as distraught as he is. However, Le Kain Ninias pushes with his foot towards the wings a diamond pendant that had come loose from an actress' ear. And this actor smells? He can't. Would you say he's a bad actor? I don't think so. What is the Kain Ninias? He's a cold man who feels 24 nothing, but who figures sensibility superiorly. No matter how much he cries out, Where am I? I reply, Where are you? You know it well; you're on boards, and you're pushing a pendeloque towards the wings with your foot." (DPV XX 82; Vers 1398-9.)

No low mass here; no other scene. Yet once again, despite everything, two antinomic spaces are superimposed: real space is encumbered by the triviality of objects, by that earring that could catch the eye, detach the spectator from the tragic vision and bring him back to the visible materiality of the place. The ideal, unreal space of the performance, a space without objects, stricken with horror, blindness and invisibility, is opposed to the stage, the backstage, and from one to the other by the path of the pendeloque pushed by Lekain's foot: Where am I?, exclaims Ninias, ecstatic, signifying by this interrogation the fundamental effect of derealization through which the tragic sublime space is constituted.

Certainly, the anecdote of the pendeloque comes to demonstrate that Lekain isn't all that horrified, since his mind is occupied with such a trivial detail as that of this inadvertently dropped buckle. Lekain is acting like a professional, solving a technical problem. But the anecdote suggests another spring of theatrical effect. Lekain reveals himself to be sublime not in the movement of his eyes exorcised by the fiction of the crime committed, but in the trivial gesture of his foot pushing the curls backstage. Diderot sees Lekain pushing the buckle and enjoys this moment of tragic horror precisely because, at the same time, the object, the detail denies the reality of this horror and denounces the artifice of the play.

The theatrical effect is therefore fundamentally an effect of superimposition between a space of reality and a space of truth. The scene in Semiramis is particularly apt, as Ninias exclaiming "Where am I?" marks the vacillation in the status of space: is Lekain-Ninias on the boards pushing the pendeloque, or is he emerging from his father's tomb, his mother's bloody hands having just been murdered?

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So we can't simply separate, oppose a space of society and a space of theater governed by different rules: the principle of theater is the superimposition of these two spaces, which means that we know full well that the performance is a fiction and yet we enter into the theatrical illusion.

The Deserter's chair

Diderot multiplies anecdotes along the same lines. For example, actor Caillot arranges the chair where he will have to lay the fainting Louise, in Sedaine's Le Déserteur :

"[The Princess of Gallitzin] had observed that this great imitator of nature, at the moment of his agony, when he was about to be dragged off to be tortured, realizing that the chair where he would have to lay fainting Louise, was badly placed, rearranged it by singing in a moribund voice: But Louise is not coming, and my hour approaches..." (DPV XX 116; Vers 141825.)

The trivial, technical question of the chair's placement in the actual space of the stage may seem jarring in this sublime moment of tragic bewilderment. In fact, the installation of the chair in the field of representation indicates the symbolic aim of the scene, the fall towards which it tends: the on-the-fly catch-up of a scenographic blunder then becomes a brilliant mise-en-scène, where the expectation opened by the alexandrine26 uttered "in a dying voice" is carried, underlined by the chair, which gives it material form, by its visible evidence and the vacancy it indicates.

La jarretière de Baron

Same stroke of genius from Baron performing Le Comte d'Essex, a tragedy by Thomas Corneille. Baron loses his garter during a dramatic scene and his stocking threatens to fall off. Anyone other than this seasoned actor would have covered himself in ridicule.

"What does he do? He puts his foot on the balustrade, reattaches his garter, and answers the courtier he despises, head turned on one of his shoulders; and so an incident that would have baffled anyone but this cold, sublime comedian, suddenly adapted to the circumstance, becomes a stroke of genius 27." (Vers 1421-2; DPV XX 121.)

Here again, the incident that's supposed to disrupt the scene actually reinforces its dramatic effectiveness, by underlining the noble count's scathing contempt, as he races to his death, for a servile courtier who perfidiously feigns a façade of friendship. The gesture with the garter, an obscene jibe, integrates itself from reality as a stroke of genius into the symbolic play of representation: the two superimposed spaces of reality and representation merge. The stroke is what links the two spaces, turning the ridiculous defect in reality into sublime excess in representation.

In the garter anecdote, it's explicit that everyone saw Baron reattaching his garter, whereas in the pendeloque anecdote only Diderot caught Lekain pushing the pendeloque, i.e. expelling it from the space of representation. From one passage to the next, Diderot's thinking has shifted. It is no longer a question of representing the superimposition of two spaces (society/theatre; reality/performance; nature/stage) to highlight the enlargement and, hence, the theatrical artifice, but, on the contrary, of deconstructing this artifice, thinking of its historical end and its overcoming.

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Detheatricalizing theater

Simplicity of the stage (the abolition of difference)

In fact, the succession of anecdotes aimed at concretely imaging the interplay between the two spaces is accompanied by a muted critique of this interplay. The classic device of theatrical representation, and particularly of tragic representation, is based on the gap between the social, familiar space and the theatrical space, a space where not only are characters, gestures and speech magnified, exaggerated, but where speech is subject to a whole series of rhetorical constraints, ranging from form (versification, rhyme) to substance (respect for decorum) 28. These constraints are part of the technical instruments that enable theatrical exaggeration, even if it's not these constraints that the first interlocutor emphasizes, preferring to insist on the actor's imaginative work, which constructs the ideal model of his character.

The praise for simplicity in the theater 29 thus constitutes something of a paradox within a paradox: simplicity tends to reduce the gap between the two spaces, to merge them into a space of "nature" that exports the bourgeois values of the salon to the stage. Yet the thesis of the actor's cool sense rests on a classical, aristocratic conception of theatrical representation, at odds with the innovations of bourgeois drama that Diderot promoted elsewhere: this apparent contradiction overlaps with the one, long since highlighted, between the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel and the Paradoxe sur le comédien.

"I am delighted to hear Philoctetes say so simply and so strongly to Neoptolemos..." (DPV XX 106; Vers 1412)
"The more the actions are strong and the words simple, the more I admire" (DPV XX 107; Vers 1413).
"How ampoule I find our dramatic authors! How disgusting their declamations are to me, when I recall the simplicity and the nerf of Regulus' speech (ibid.) 30"

Simplicity is always coupled with its apparent antonym, strength, nerve, in a word that heroic grandeur that we'd attribute a priori rather to bombastic declamations. In fact, this simplicity refers back to the real world, as this commentary on Philoctetes' speech to Neoptolemos indicates:

"Is there anything in this speech other than what you would address to my son, than what I would say to yours?
The second. No.
The first. But it's beautiful.
The second. Certainly.
First. And would the tone of this speech delivered on stage differ from the tone in which it would be delivered in society? The second.
Second. I don't think so.
First. And would that tone in society be ridiculous? The second.
Second. Not at all." (DPV XX 106; Vers 1413.)

The major contradiction implied by this praise of simplicity in the theater was already encountered in the Entretiens and in the Discourse on dramatic poetry 31. We also find it in the Salons, about choosing the right moment to paint in history painting. There's no logical inadvertence here, but rather a dialectical interplay: the Paradox makes us aware of the gap between society and the scene, and then reduces that gap. We need to make this gap visible to understand the theoretical challenge, which has always been the same for Diderot: to deconstruct, to undo on stage what constitutes the latter as an other, foreign, associal, unreal space. To de-theatricalize.

From the private to the intimate: a new scenic effraction

It all began with the Fils naturel venture. Whereas the Paradox is based on the opposition between theater and society, Le Fils naturel and the Entretiens wanted to believe in the reduction, then disappearance of this opposition, by merging the space of the theatrical stage and Dorval's salon, by making the play, the performance of a dramatic poem and the commemorative feast, the rehearsal on the very sites of the events, of the real family story by its real protagonists, coincide. The Entretiens stage Moi's resistance to this merging of the two spaces, and Dorval's attempt to overcome this resistance 32.

To achieve the fusion of salon and stage, Diderot imagined that Dorval would have Moi secretly attend the family performance of Fils naturel, in her salon:

"I entered the salon through the window; and Dorval, who had pushed everyone aside, placed me in a corner, from where, without being seen, I saw and heard what we are about to read" (DPV X 17; Verse 1083).

Moi here is merely a spectacular, novelistic realization of the classic device of theatrical representation, based on the screen and the break-in. The spectator always sees what he shouldn't, and the actors play out the fiction that no spectator is watching them, that a fourth wall encloses the stage, the antechamber, the salon where the play takes place 33. This fourth wall constitutes the screen of the performance, the curtain we lift to watch, as voyeurs, what's going on behind it.

The Paradox doesn't implement the screen device as spectacularly, but the series of anecdotes that tend to reveal the splitting of the stage space (high, public stage, and low, intimate stage) does proceed from the same mechanism: Gaussin's low-voiced conversation, or conversation between his teeth, Lekain's, Caillot's or Baron's practical gestures to rearrange or remove objects, are overheard by Diderot through breaking and entering. The power, the magic of theatrical illusion should have kept them invisible: it is indeed from a first space, that of the upper stage, that transgressing a virtual screen, crossing a symbolic boundary with his gaze, Diderot gives us a glimpse of a second space, that of the lower stage.

However, this effraction that the Paradoxe implements is, on second thought, of an entirely different nature. Moi gains access to the upper stage through the curtain behind which Dorval placed him in Le Fils naturel. It's to the lower stage that, thanks to the line of anecdotes in Paradox, the first interlocutor leads us. This involved crossing not one, but two screens: from the parterre to the stage, from the stage to the actor's intimate space. The play no longer moves from the private space where the spectator is confined (the living room, society) to the public space of representation constituted by the stage 34, but from the public space to the intimate space where the actors' marital affairs are settled, where adornments are arranged (like the diamond pendant), where clothes are fastened (by the garter).

So, if the Fils naturel implements the transfusion of private space into public space, the Paradox, on the other hand, operates the transfusion of public space into intimate space, which becomes, in the 1770s, the new paradigm. Private space and intimate space have nothing to do with each other, despite appearances: private space is a space of sociability and exchange through language; intimate space is a space of solitude and thought. Anecdotes only show the caricature of the two. The fundamental issue of intimate space is the elaboration of the ideal model.

The ideal model is the new screen of the stage

Early in the dialogue, the first interlocutor contrasts "actors who play from the soul", i.e. by resorting to their own sensibility alone, and "the actor who will play from reflection, from study of human nature, from constant imitation after some ideal model" (DPV XX 49; Vers 1380)35. Mlle Clairon is a good example, who "made herself a model to which she first sought to conform; doubtless she conceived this model the highest, the greatest" (DPV XX 50; Vers 1381). The real creation lies there, in the construction of this model, through which the actor extends, continues the creative work of the playwright: "What then is the truth of the stage? It is the conformity of actions, speeches, figure, voice, movement, gesture, with an ideal model imagined by the poet, and often exaggerated by the actor" (DPV XX 61; Vers 1387). Impossible to work well, under these conditions, when the great actor is confronted with a mediocre partner: "he will be forced to renounce his ideal model to put himself on the level of the poor devil with whom he is on stage." (DPV XX 64; Vers 1389.) The elaboration of the ideal model requires the comedian to be, far more than a mere histrion, a true intellectual: "The great comedian observes phenomena; the sensitive man serves him as model, he meditates on it" (DPV XX 81 ;Vers 1398). For the poet, this thoughtful, abstract creative dimension of the actor's work implies a veritable dispossession of the text. Voltaire, hearing La Clairon perform one of his plays, is said to have exclaimed: "Est-ce moi qui a fait cela?" (DPV XX 89; Vers 1402). La Clairon has recreated, remodeled Voltairean fiction: "In this moment at least her ideal model, in declaiming, was far beyond the ideal model the poet had made for himself in writing, but this ideal model was not her" (ibid.). We must therefore distinguish "the external symptoms of the borrowed soul", the visible aspect of acting, everything that externally mimics the character, from this very soul, which must be reconstituted from within: "He, then, who knows best and renders most perfectly these external signs according to the ideal model best conceived is the greatest actor" (DPV XX 104; Vers 1412). In this game, the actor who counterfeits sensibility will have an easier time than the one who actually experiences it. He "will not have to separate himself from himself, he will suddenly and with full leap rise to the height of the ideal model." (DPV XX 122; Vers 1422.)

The ideal model is the key notion of the Paradox on the actor. The revelation of the existence of an intimate space underlying the public space of performance implies the implementation of the ideal model to articulate these two spaces: it is by abstracting from himself, going so far as to "separate himself from himself", that the actor produces the ideal model which he then, on stage, wraps himself in: Mlle Clairon "is the soul of a large mannequin which envelops her" (DPV XX 51; Vers 1381); the actor "encloses himself in a large wicker mannequin of which he is the soul" (DPV XX 123; Vers 1423). Here, then, the anecdotes pierce a screen of a different kind: it's no longer the fourth wall, the screen that cuts, that divides space in two, the stage on one side, the parterre on the other and, from there, symbolically, the theater on one side, the salon or society on the other. This time, the screen is the ideal model itself, a wicker envelope around the actor's intimate self, intimate bark, sheet of the spectre, of the ghost that the actor stirs around him.

Throughout the Paradox is spun the image of the ghost, Diderot playing on the word's classic double meaning, which allows it to designate either a spectre or the equivalent of the Greek phantasma from which it derives. is a representation, an ideal model. What's fundamental is that, as a result, the nature of the break-in changes: from a semiology of the wall, we move on to a semiology of the envelope. What was given to see behind the wall is transmuted into given to touch behind the garment: symptomatically, the first theatrical reference in the Paradox is a line from Tartuffe, "Je tate votre habit, l'étoffe en est moelleuse".

It's a question, in the intimate break-in, of crossing the iconic envelope of the ideal model to reach the intimate fold of the self. This intimate breach triggers the spectator's jouissance. As for the actor, his performance consists in establishing, from this intimate fold, a link, a trait with the envelope, the mannequin, the phantom, the ideal model. The link, the stroke of genius, consists in incorporating the inside into the outside, in consciously, voluntarily, and masterfully alienating oneself in the character one is playing: then Baron's untied garter becomes the sublime gesture, the pantomime of the Earl of Essex.
Incorporating the inside into the outside: the movement is paradoxical; indeed, it is the very movement of paradox, which begins by denying the "self", only to assert itself in the reversal of the thought of others. It's no longer a question of simply describing the actor's performance: it's the very exercise of Diderotian thought that's at stake. The elaboration of the ideal model and the interweaving of the self with the idea constitute not only the actor's creative activity, but intellectual activity in general.

.

Notes

1

Here, Dorval evokes the fifth act of Georges Lillo's Marchand de Londres, a domestic tragedy from 1731. At the very spot where Barnevelt (Barnwell) is to be executed, as punishment for the crime to which the courtesan Millwood has driven him, she, who is his mistress, throws herself at his feet (V, 11). The scene between the two friends predates this: it's Trueman's visit to Barnevelt (V, 5).

2

Sophocles, Philoctète, vv. 730sq. Philoctetes emerges from the cave where he has been holed up for ten years in suffering and injustice, supported by Neoptolemos who has come to fetch him, bringing him back to the camp of the Greeks. Philoctetes' interspersed speeches are punctuated by almost inarticulate groans. A Philoctète by Father Brumoy was performed at the Plessis-Sorbonne college in 1700 and 1715, printed in a Théâtre des Grecs in Paris, by Rollin, in 1730. J.-B. Vivien de Châteaubrun had another Philoctète performed in 1755, published in 1756 by Brunet. There would be other Philoctètes again in the 80s, by La Harpe in 1783, by Renou in 1788. On Philoctète, see also the Deuxième Entretien, p. 1155, the Troisième Entretien, p. 1180, the Paradoxe, pp. 1412-1413.

3

Numerous: Latinism for numerosus, rhythmic, cadenced, harmonious.

4

This time it's Clytemnestra learning of the scheduled sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia. See Euripides, Iphigénie à Aulis, vv. 1276-1335. Diderot repeatedly returns to Iphigénie: "Do you know a situation more similar to that of Agamemnon in the first scene of Iphigénie than the situation of Henri IV, when obsessed with terrors that were only too well-founded, he said to his familiars: They will kill me, nothing is more certain, they will kill me..." (DPV XX 60; Vers 1386).

5

"Despite all it must ransack in its path, "the theater of cruelty / is not the symbol of an absent void". It affirms, it produces affirmation itself in its full and necessary rigor. [...] Now, as we know, Artaud lived the day after a dispossession: his own body [...] had been stolen from him at birth" (Derrida, "Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation", L'Écriture et la différence, Seuil, Points, pp. 341-342). Of course, thematically, there's nothing to see between the self-possession at work in the sens-froid comedian and Artaud's creative madness: yet it is indeed the same "différance" that is at work, that is, the same contradiction of origin in the differential game of representation.

6

Writing, in the sense developed by Derrida in De la grammatologie and in "La pharmacie de Platon", is the frozen supplement to the living word. In this sense, language, but also theatrical performance, are already writing: they repeat an original scene from which they are differentiated.

7

Repetition is the First Interlocutor's major argument, against the thesis of the actor's sensitivity: "If the actor were sensitive, in good faith would he be allowed to play the same role twice in succession with the same warmth and success? "(Verse 1380); "when she has once risen to the height of her phantom, she possesses herself, she repeats herself without emotion" (Verse 1381). We gradually move on from the public rehearsal of the sessions to the notion of preparatory rehearsal, i.e. the work of staging: "to be pushed just right, they were repeated a hundred times" (Verse 1384); "And do you know the object of these rehearsals so multiplied?" (Verse 1389); "It is when the actors are exhausted from the fatigue of these multiplied rehearsals" (Verse 1416). A contrario, offstage, the salon anecdote is impossible to repeat: it's "an experience you'll have repeated a hundred times" (Verse 1385).

8

"When I tear out my entrails, when I utter inhuman cries; they are not my entrails, they are not my cries, they are the entrails, they are the cries of another whom I have conceived and who does not exist.... ", says Garrick, in the preamble to the Salon of 1767 (DPV XVI 75; Vers 528).

9

"the ideas of the man with the paradox"; "Here, the man with the paradox was silent"; "the paradoxical man" (DPV XX 121, 123, 125; Vers 1421, 1423, 1424).

10

In the eighteenth century, we don't write sang froid, but sens froid, and in any case it's always this spelling that's found in manuscripts of the Paradoxe. The word only appears after a few pages, generalizing the opposition of Dumesnil's play and Clairon's play: "It is to cold-sense to temper the delirium of enthusiasm." (DPV XX 52; Vers 1382.) This is a 1773 addition: the opposition between sensibility and cold-sense is much less clear-cut in the Observations sur Garrick, the first, monological version of the Paradox, in 1769.

11

In Trévoux's Dictionary (ed. 1771), sentir is first defined passively, as "to receive some impression by means of the senses". But it immediately adds: "On le dit de même des différentes acceptions de l'ame." Note also this example from Malebranche: "What happens in the organs of the senses, is only the occasional cause of what the soul feels." From here, we come to the active definition: "Sentir, se dit aussi de la persuasion intérieure, de la conviction où l'on est qu'une chose est véritable, ou fausse. Les Juges ont bien senti qu'il y avoit de la fourbe & de la calomnie dans ce procès. Faire bien sentir la conséquence d'une proposition." And at the end: "On le dit dans un sens approchant, pour s'appercevoir, connoître." (VII, 652-653.)
This double meaning of the word, active and passive, is emphasized in the Encyclopédie, in the article sens: "on en doit distinguer de deux especes, d'extérieurs & d'intérieurs" (XV, 24). "The external senses are consequently powers of receiving ideas, at the presence of external objects", while "The internal senses are powers or determinations of the mind, which rests on certain ideas which present themselves to us, when we apperceive objects by the external senses." In other words, to use Freudian categories, sense designates both perception and consciousness; it is a Pc-Cs system.

12

Yvon Belaval, L'Esthétique sans paradoxe de Diderot, Gallimard, Bibliothèque des idées, 1950.

13

The sensible effect has its origin in an established ideal model of sense-cold; but what sense-cold produces has its origin in sensible effects. In other words, A is the origin of B and B is the origin of A. This aporia is the aporia of "writing" as Derrida develops it in De la grammatologie and in La Dissémination.

14

"Because it has always already begun, representation therefore has no end. Enclosure is the circular limit within which the repetition of difference is repeated indefinitely." (Derrida, "Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation", op. cit., p. 367.) Representation has always already begun, because it is caught up in the circular game of origin: the actor performs according to an ideal model constructed from sensitive expressions that have made a tableau, and, by the same token, themselves refer back to other models. The enclosure evoked here is less a spatial enclosure than a logical circle, the contradiction of origin that makes it impossible to think of the origin of the ideal model (see the preamble to the Salon de 1767). The difference that is asserted in representation is the difference between the real referent and the represented object, which is merely its supplement, and refers back to it. But this difference can only be posited in repetition: what makes us not in the real is that representation can be repeated indefinitely.

15

Domestic, in the Latin sense: adapted to the home, suitable for the private.

16

Parade is a spectacle of fair theater, usually parodic: a tragic parade is a parody of a fashionable tragedy, outré on purpose to make people laugh.

17

Compare with the First Interview, Verses 1132, 1135, the Second Interview, Verses 1159.

18

"We have retained from the Ancients the emphasis of versification [...] and we have abandoned the simplicity of plot and dialogue, and the truth of tableaux." (Deuxième Entretien, DPV X 117; Vers 1156). Diderot comments on Horace's formula, "ampullas et sesquipedalia verba, sentences, blown bottles, words a foot and a half long" (Art poétique, v. 97).

19

Diderot is here implicitly talking about himself. He is more explicit elsewhere. See the anecdote about Sedaine (DPV XX 74-75; c. 1395) and the final confession (DPV XX 109; c. 1414).

20

It won't be any different from one day to the next.

21

DPV XX 71; Vers 1393. The double scene is not to be understood here simply as the interweaving of two autonomous scenes, but as the manifestation of what Derrida, borrowing an expression from Mallarmé, calls "double séance", "that wedge between literature and truth" (Derrida, "La double séance", La Dissémination, Seuil, Points, p. 219). Truth (the mute pantomime of Mimique, here the triviality of the lower stage) drives a wedge into literature (the interior writing of Philèbe, here the noble, normalized repetition of the upper stage) and designates representation as "BETWEEN." i.e. both as "antre" (space, pocket, imaginary reserve, enveloped, subtracted) and "entre-deux" (latency in acting, a blank that manifests the superposition of spaces) (see p. 223).

22

Who is this Chevalier? In 1687 the Théâtre français had given a play, Le Chevalier à la mode, attributed to Dancourt, but said to be by Saint-Yon (Anecdotes dramatiques, I, 192). It was performed over forty times. The lover of the Chevalier de Ville-Fontaine, an adventurer and fat man, was a ridiculous widow, Madame Patin, in whose home the scene is set. Act I, Scene 8 is the first scene to confront the widow and the Chevalier: while she makes advances, the Chevalier discusses his new carriage and crew with his valet Crispin, for whom he soon leaves her. Hence the comment from Lisette, Mme Patin's next-door neighbor: "Ma foi, madame, it was not worth leaving the game to be sacrificed by monsieur le chevalier to the impatience of seeing his carriage." The Gaussin's persiflage, "faites avancer votre carrosse", could allude to this scene.

23

Le Préjugé à la mode, comedy in verse and five acts. By M. Nivelle de la Chaussée, Paris, Le Breton, 1735, p. 2. The printer has placed "à part. " on the same line as "Madame, pardonnez...", to save space, which makes a contradiction...

24

"You feel shivering"; "And this actor feels?"; "a cold man who doesn't feel anything": the sense of feeling is pulled here towards "experiencing sensitivity".

25

See Le Déserteur, drama in three acts, in prose mixed with music; By M. Sedaine. La Musique par M***. Représentée, pour la premiere fois par les Comédiens Italiens ordinaires du Roi, le Lundi 6 Mars 1769, Paris, Claude Hérissant, 1769. Diderot refers to the arietta in Act III, Scene 4. Alexis, the deserter condemned to death, writes to Louise from his cell, in front of Montauciel, with whom he is locked up: "Mais... mais... mais...
"But... but... you're not coming, & my hour is drawing near:
If your father is the cause, was it his design?
You're not coming; & my time is drawing near;
It would have been so sweet to kiss you.
Before the moment I see coming." (P. 63.)
Meanwhile, Louise has asked for her pardon and obtained it from the King. She runs to take it to the prison before the execution. Louise arrives and doesn't faint in Alexis's arms until scene X:
"Louise enters her shoes in hand, her hair a mess. She says only: Alexis, ta... & falls fainting into the arms of Alexis, who approaches her with a siege, on which she remains unconscious." (P. 77.)
Caillot thus anticipated, six scenes in advance, the scenic layout he would need in scene X. Louise and Alexis, saved, embrace in scene XV and last (p. 81).

26

Diderot actually transforms Sedaine's decasyllable ("Tu ne viens pas, et mon heure s'approche") into a shortened alexandrine (approche pour s'approche retamote un pied).

27

The anecdote is recounted in greater detail in d'Hannetaire: "If this accident had happened to him while he was on the stage with the Queen or the Duchess, certainly [Baron playing the Earl of Essex] would not have seemed to take any notice of it; but as he then had only the traitor Cecil in front of him, whom he was entitled to treat cavalierly, he took advantage of it to give himself one more fine attitude : leaning his leg casually on one of the theater balconies, he put his garter back in front of Elizabeth's minister, without pausing for a moment and instead continuing to talk to him with his back to him. " (Jean Nicolas d'Hannetaire, Observations sur l'art du comédien et sur d'autres objets en général concernant cette profession, 1771, p. 157; quoted in Bert Edward Young, Michel Baron acteur et auteur dramatique, Slatkine, 1971, chap. IV, p. 76.)
Scene 3 of Act I pits the feisty Cécile (Robert Cecil, minister to Elizabeth I, nicknamed "the pygmy" by her) against the Count, who finally assails him: "But as friendship makes you so charitable, / Since when, & on what do you think you are allowed / To think that time could have made us friends? / Have I ever been seen, through unworthy weaknesses, / Loving cowardice, appeasing baseness, / And taking the side of these faithless men, / Who make the art of betrayal their sole employment?"

28

"Ah cruel decorum..." (Deuxième Entretien, Vers 1154; DPV X 114).

29

DPV XX 106-107; Vers 1412-1413.

30

Regulus' speech is reported by Horace in an ode, i.e. in colloquial poetry.

31

"It is then that we shall see on the stage natural situations..." (Second Interview, DPV X 116; Verses 1155-1156, example of Philoctetes repeated in the Paradox, DPV XX 91; Verse 1404) and "Who would dare among us to spread straw on the stage..." (Discourse on dramatic poetry, chap. XVIII, "Des mœurs", DPV X 403; Vers 1332).

32

See in particular the First Interview, Vers 1135; the Second, Vers 1150-1151 and 1159.

33

See also the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry, chap. XI, "De l'intérêt", DPV X 373; Vers 1310.

34

See J. Habermas, L'Espace public, chap. I, 1962, French trans. M. B. de Launay, Payot, 1978, 1993.

35

As early as De la poésie dramatique (1758), Diderot referred to "an ideal man that I will form for myself [...] and of which I will limit myself to being only the faithful echo" (DPV X 424; Vers 1348). But the "ideal model" as such doesn't appear until the preamble to the Salon de 1767.

Référence de l'article

Stéphane Lojkine, communication au congrès de la Société américaine d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, Albuquerque, 2010.

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