In view of the way in which the earliest societies united, was it surprising that the first stories were set in verse and that the first laws were sung?
—ROUSSEAU, ESSAI SUR L’ORIGINE DES LANGUES
FOR MORAL philosophers of the eighteenth century, self-identity is tightly bound up with the issue of self-representation. There is concern for the capacity to give one’s subjective position a form that may be communicated to others and therefore to oneself. The rational use of language, understood as intentional and referential, works precisely to this end. Thus the first-person narrator of Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau is all too eager at the head of the dialogue to present himself as someone in control of his verbal utterances. The need to be in command of his statements, including his self-representations, is aimed toward establishing a set identity, toward the formation of a figure—by means of mimesis—that would adequately (completely) correspond to the subject of language.
This process has decisively moral implications, in relation to both self and the other. Moi presents himself as an exemplum of constancy (he is always at the same café), as a rationalist capable of gathering and reconciling the most disparate of elements (his thoughts are his catins). That is to say, he proceeds from the belief in personal identity, which further orients his approach to the nephew. Thus the latter’s madness must be systematized (for example, as a means for intellectual fermentation—“he is the speck of yeast that leavens the whole” [NR 5/35]). Likewise, musicality must conform to a mimetic program, that is, it must become musica ficta, sound absorbed into discourse, ready and able to represent or express. To this end, Moi—who has a decided knack for splitting experience into perfect oppositions (“Qu’il fasse beau, qu’il fasse laid”), who likes to spend his afternoons watching games of chess that neatly divide all encounters into black and white—works to inscribe Lui’s alterity into an operative difference, so as to reinforce the logic of totality.1
The nephew, however, is the nonconformist, radically other, equal to nothing, a force of impropriety or even nonidentity. His madness therefore does not simply indicate his failure to represent himself rationally but rather demonstrates—perhaps like every monster—the failure of representation tout court. His flaunting of mimetic processes—the bizarre gestural language, the ridiculous imitation of orchestral instruments, the role-playing, and so forth—dismantles the entire mechanism. His gift for unmasking barely conceals his iconoclasm, which is not content to demolish merely images but language as well. And yet the volatility of his musical madness cannot be limited to a purely destructive function. Indeed, his unworking of language hints that there is more to selfhood than can be expressed rationally, more to life than can be molded into an identifiable figure or a representative discourse. The narrator’s allusion to Alcibiades’ speech—“And you, with a paunch like Silenus …”—in granting the nephew a Marsyan-Socratic nature, marks the noncoincidence between the madman’s appearance and his interiority. His impropriety may, on the one hand, invite Apolline formation and rational reenlistment, while, on the other hand, it may suggest that there are already gods within, chthonic powers below or beyond any system of figuration, able to break any form, brazenly able to resist the draft into sense.
The fact that the nephew is a mad musician is crucial. It indicates that there may be other dimensions to language that are not included in the rationalist model. Rhetoricians, beginning with Aristotle, had long distinguished the expressive force of what is being said from its lexical meaning. In the eighteenth century, the opposition between expression and semantics, or between force and meaning, was often based on the distinction between speech and song. In verbal communication, a statement’s musical properties, that is, its voice, was constituted by intonation, rhythm, accent, pitch, and so forth. The consequence of all this was that it could account for the totality of human experience without reducing it to the lexicon. Rousseau’s pentecostal dream of reversing Babel, of reuniting speech and song, is directed to this quest of keeping force and meaning together. With his nephew, Diderot upsets the plan. By insistently questioning the notion of self-representation, Le neveu de Rameau turns representability itself into a problem. In other words, force is detached from expression. The voice is no longer understood as a medium expressive in itself but rather comes forward simply as the material substrate of language, necessary for the transmission of sense but not in fact contributing or belonging to semantics. The intensity of the eighteenth century’s work to bring the alterity of madness and music back into the fold testifies to an extraordinary difficulty.
Toward the conclusion of the dialogue, the madman’s question occasions the philosopher’s confession:
LUI: What is a song [chant]?
MOI: I confess the question is beyond me. That’s what we are all like [Voilà comme nous sommes tous]. In our memories we have nothing but words, and we think we understand them through the frequent use and even correct application we make of them, but in our minds we have only vague notions.
(NR 77/98)
In setting a musical fool as the antagonist to the first-person narrator, the dialogue challenges conventional concepts not only of general terms but also of individual identity and autobiography, representation, and self-representation. “What we are all like” may in fact be concealing a delusion of habit, a “vague notion” that generalizes and glosses over the singularity of objective and subjective experience for the sake of communicative ease.
As an embodiment of the twin themes of music and madness, the nephew introduces a meaninglessness that turns all ontological questions into semantic ones. Exasperated by the madman’s musical displays, the represented self—Moi—must rephrase his line of inquiry: rather than explore the possible meanings of “song,” he turns to the meaning of words, for example, the words “je” and “moi.” Certainty is abandoned. Accordingly, the dialogue as a whole is replete with confessions of the philosophe’s frustration: “I was listening to him … my soul stirred by two opposite impulses … I felt embarrassed [“Je souffrois”] … I was dumbfounded [“J’étois confondu”]” (NR 24/51). Hegel, who accorded Diderot’s satire the crucial role of marking the end of the Enlightenment subject, explains that it was specifically “the derangement [Verrücktheit] of the musician” that revealed the breakdown of linguistic norms and modern man’s subsequent self-alienation, his “tornness,” his Zerrissenheit. But why this? How do music and madness work together? And what precisely is their threat to subjective knowledge and individual identity? Is all music mad and all madness musical? Or is it not rather the case that music is mad only insofar as it exposes the madness of language, which would sublimate all singularity, all uniqueness?
The questions all turn on the issue of mimesis, variously understood. Generally speaking, the charge of madness is based on a failure to represent, which includes the failure to represent oneself as a cognitive subject. Here, in the crudest terms, “madness” means “nonmimetic.” Moreover, it can be applied to opposing parties. Neoclassicists disparage music as mad insofar as it is nonrepresentational, while those who distrust words complain of language’s madness, that is, its incapacity to represent the soul, to be emotionally specific, to be—in Rousseau’s sense—musical. A close reading of Le neveu de Rameau, however, shows that these seemingly straightforward positions are far more complex. If Diderot argues elsewhere for the mimetic—and therefore sane—character of music, in this text he allows his views to be seriously challenged. He exposes himself—as a thinker, as a philosopher, as a writing subject—to an intense self-interrogation.
To appreciate the challenge presented by Diderot’s mad musician, one should contextualize it within the broader trends of eighteenth-century aesthetics. An especially illustrative example is the work of Johann Christian Gottsched. It may seem odd to turn to a German theoretician as a way into Diderot’s text, but Gottsched’s capacity to formulate injunctions of French neoclassical practice and to do so in an eminently systematic fashion warrants this approach. It is not gratuitous that he earned among his Lutheran contemporaries the dubious title of the “pope of poetry.” Gottsched would have strongly disapproved of Diderot’s dialogue. He was highly suspicious of music and had no patience for the madman. In his theater reviews, published weekly in the Beyträgen zur critischen Historie der deutschen Sprache, Poesie, und Beredsamkeit (1732–44), he rallied against the figure of the Hanswurst, which in his opinion should be banished from the German stage. The fool’s improvised jokes and disruptive antics bore no relation to the plot at hand; they offered nothing save the muddled contents of a warped mind, “eine unordentliche Phantasie” that loudly distracted the audience from the true purpose of theatrical performance, namely, the imitation of nature.2 The satirical (and satyrical) violence of such figures, including Harlequins, Kasperls, and Pickelherings, transgressed conventions and disrespected all Aristotelian prescriptions. Where Descartes had seen mad behavior as an example of the possible deceptiveness of sensory knowledge, Gottsched regarded the indecorous behavior of jesters as a useless display of mere sensibilia that hindered the mind from arriving to the meaningful and truthful realm of the intelligible. The problem finally was also national, since Gottsched viewed the Hanswurst not as a leftover from the earlier German Possentheater but rather as a dangerous import from the south, an invasion by the irreverent fools of the commedia dell’arte.
Significantly, Gottsched’s concern with the mad player is echoed in his distaste for opera, which he also attributed to Italian origins. “[The opera is] merely a work for the senses [“ein bloßes Sinnenwerk”]: the understanding and the heart get nothing out of it. Only the eyes are dazzled [geblendet]; only the ear [das Gehör] is tickled and stunned: reason, however, must be left at home, when one goes to the opera.”3 Opera is irrational because its music, together with its spectacular visual effects, subordinates the rule of poetry. It neglects to honor the correct function of music, which according to Gottsched should be entirely subservient. The description here is perfectly classical, modeled both on the Horatian dictum of instruction and pleasure (aut prodesse aut delectare) and on the tripartite division of the Platonic soul. When properly imitative, art pleases and instructs, affecting both the heart (thymos) and the understanding (nous), respectively. The sensual shock of opera, however, works on desire alone—Plato’s epithymia—which usurps the position of the heart and mind. The condition is analogous to the case of the tyrant, whose soul is described in the Republic as steered solely by appetitive desire at the expense of understanding and heart and who therefore is explicitly characterized as a madman (9.571a–573c). To escape connotations of madness, music must be satisfied with being the handmaiden of verbal sense and emotional veracity.
According to Gottsched’s genealogy of poetic forms, music’s true role had always been supportive and compliant. To this end, music had to be fundamentally repeatable. He understands the regularity of epic representation in dactylic hexameter as a repetitive pattern of return that lends coherence to the linear unfolding of narrative. Gottsched emphasizes the sense of turning (“Umkehren”) in the terms “strophe” and “verse” (from “vertere”), taking each line as a melody that returns to the beginning.4 Correct imitation is grounded in word’s power over tone—a mastery that is carried out by reiteration, by turning melody around and converting it to mimetic purpose. Operatic song is dazzling, stunning, and finally mad because here the force of music is all too eventful, not permitting the repetition decisive to Gottsched’s program. Like the intrusion of the Hanswurst, operatic effects derail the discursive sense of the story.
Gottsched associates music with the problem of madness, because both are based on spontaneous sensuality with no regard for intelligible or well-grounded emotional experience. The transalpine heat no doubt contributed to the infectious threat perceived by the northern man of cool, clear-headed reason. The peril, however, not only consisted in figures of the commedia dell’arte or in spectacles by settecento impresarios: Italian instrumental music, boldly divorced from words, was incomparably dangerous. Nonvocal music was the maddest of all, since it denied art of any mimetic function. Without textual supervision, musicians were deemed incapable of being imitative. That is to say, mere music could not represent the particular in a communicable form that could be cognitively grasped.
However differing in their rationale, many eighteenth-century theorists remarked on music’s struggle with representation, be it physical or psychological.5 On the one hand, the vague semantics of purely musical pieces was taken as a frightening incapacity to represent nature. On the other hand, in regard to interior experience, the unexpected and frequent changes in emotions could be considered as a kind of frenzy, imitating the passions of someone without rational consistency. For example, in the opinion of Noël Antoine Pluche, sonatas are like the expressions of madmen, who pass from laughter to tears and from joy to anger without any comprehensible motivation.6
It is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who most avidly attempted to reverse these pejorative opinions. While sharing Gottsched’s view of language as having its origin in song, while insisting as well that music is most effective as a melody committed to the representation of human passion, he disagreed that music constituted a threat to mimesis. On the contrary, the menace came from verbal language, whose articulations severed expression from its original efficacy. For this reason, Rousseau praised the superiority of the Italian language, which he felt retained more of the natural accents of original speech, as opposed to the unmelodious, overarticulated patterns of the French. If music was considered mad, it was only because societal conventions alienated the individual. For Rousseau, language was indeed a matter of turning music—of Gottsched’s vertere—however, not as a positive conversion of the sensible into the intelligible but rather as a negative perversion that cheated words of their original, musical power. Where Gottsched believed that the imitation of nature required word’s mastery over tone, Rousseau argued that only music could revitalize the cold abstractions of verbal language.
Although Rousseau’s theoretical positions undo Gottsched’s disapproving assessment of music as an art allied to the irrational, his writing nowhere addresses the theme of music and madness in an explicit and extended fashion. That fell to Diderot, whose disruptive, unstable, and musical nephew occasions a reexamination and complication of all the terms involved. Le neveu de Rameau not only deals with the problem of representing external reality or internal states but more radically scrutinizes the idea of mimesis itself.
“Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis.” With this epigraph from Horace’s Satires, Diderot places the nephew beneath the sign of “the adverse or unequal [iniquis] Vertumni,” that is, under the protection of the gods in charge of alternating the seasons. Their name—also derived from the verb “vertere”—posits the nephew as an allegory of change itself, with all its connotations of conversion, perversion, and inversion. As a Marsyas, however, the nephew does not invoke an inversion of the formless into the formed but rather a perversion of the formed into the formless. Better, he effects an inversion of inversion. Thus, in Diderot’s text, doctrines of mimesis are unworked, exposed to the difficult tensions between semblance and deviation, difference and repetition, propriety and impropriety. With its portrayal of a mad musician who acts and is described as someone “differing from himself,” the dialogue draws out the semantic, moral, and ontological implications of every mimetic operation. The nephew punctures the philosopher’s masterful control, by means of a series of bizarre impersonations that demonstrate the madness implicit in every imitation. Theories of semblance—from Rousseau’s dream of social transparency and communal equality to notions of self-sameness that ground individual identity—are disrupted by this insane lover of Italian opera and a kind of Hanswurst in his own right, who is nonetheless unequal to everyone, including himself.
MIMESIS: CRATYLUS AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
Despite Gottsched’s and Rousseau’s rather straightforward positions, imitation has never been a simple affair. The classical tradition that coursed through eighteenth-century aesthetics reveals instead a fundamental ambiguity. As will be shown, Diderot’s contribution to this tradition is highly significant insofar as it aggravates many of the tensions that others would ignore.
One may begin with the reduplicative form of the Greek word “mi-mê-sis” itself, which could be taken as an iconic depiction of the term’s duplicity. Someone like Plato’s Cratylus would hear the term “mimesis” itself as an imitation of imitation, for Cratylus believes that names work in the same way as music, that each name puts forward in its phonetic makeup a description of the very thing it names. He regards the words of language as established by nature (physei), and that is the main point of contention against his antagonist, Hermogenes, who understands words as set by convention. Hermogenes takes language as working according to posited law or nomos, not natural but arbitrary. Cratylus, on the contrary, hears words as mimetically motivated. For him, language is not an arbitrary system of signs at all but, rather, naturally true.
In Hermogenes’ view, Cratylus is mad. His refusal to “speak clearly” likens his speech to prophecy (manteia [384a]), which Socrates, in the Phaedrus, defines as one of four types of divine madness. But it is not merely Cratylus’s tendency to obfuscate that marks him off as a madman. After Socrates defends Cratylus by establishing that a word is indeed an “imitation” (mimêma), he chides him for implying that mimesis is simply a matter of perfect similarity, unadulterated by difference: “Now then, Cratylus, those things that are named by names would suffer ridiculously [γελοĩα … πάθοι] if they should be entirely similar in every respect, for everything would be doubled, and no one would be able to say in any case which is the thing itself and which the name [τὸ µὲν αὐτό, τὸ δὲ ὂνoµα]” (432d). The ridiculousness of Cratylus’s position consists in the desire to override the gap inherent in every repetition. Despite his generous disposition toward Cratylus’s idea of mimesis, Socrates cannot abide the suppression of difference: “Do you not perceive how far images [eikones] are from possessing the same qualities as those things they represent?” (ibid.)
To illustrate, Socrates turns to the idea of personal representation: “The image must not by any means reproduce all the qualities of that which it imitates, if it is to be an image…. Would there be two things, Cratylus and the image, if some god should not merely imitate your color and form … but should also make all the inner parts like yours … should place beside you a duplicate of all your qualities? Would there be in such an event Cratylus and an image of Cratylus, or two Cratyluses?” (432b–c). Socrates realizes that, no matter how one understands imitation’s truth, its vraisemblance, mimesis is always problematic. As a re-presentation (a reenactment or a repetition) of what is naturally given, imitation works according to a duplicitous logic. Its energy derives from the irresolvable tension between the same and the different. The split between the first phoneme (mi) and the second (mê) marks a difference held together by semblance. Cratylus is laughable because he confuses repetition with equivalence. He fails to recognize that positing equivalence entails a degree of inequality.
In a passage from the Physics, Aristotle respects the double, alternating logic of imitation in a comprehensive definition of art: “In general, on the one hand, art [technê] accomplishes those things that nature is incapable of working out [apergasasthai], while on the other hand it imitates those things” (199a 15–17). In the first place, art takes and finishes what nature leaves unworked, while, in the second place, it produces something entirely new that belongs and does not belong to the natural—something connected to the natural by way of similarity yet unbound from it by way of difference. The distinction between completion and invention complicates the terms of the debate between Hermogenes and Cratylus. On the one hand, technê proceeds with what nature itself has given, albeit unfinished, while, on the other hand, the technical consists in the conventions that determine a representation to be true. In either case, technê is both motivated and arbitrary. Consequently, it allows two conceptions of the natural to emerge that depart from the Cratylist belief in nature as plenitude: in regard to imitative invention, nature is deficient (there is now something in the world that is not entirely natural), and, in regard to artistic completion, nature is simply idle—incapable of work—désœuvrée.
Throughout Le neveu de Rameau, Diderot respects the complexities of the mimetic enterprise. For example, when pressed into giving a definition of his own art, the crazed nephew makes a declaration full of qualifications: “Song is an imitation, by means of sounds of a scale, invented by art or inspired by nature, as you please, either by the voice or by an instrument, of the physical sounds [“des bruits physiques”] or accents of passion” (NR 78/98). Following the clear announcement that “song is an imitation,” the nephew’s remark immediately falls into a number of duplicities, reminiscent of Aristotle’s alternative between the naturally given and pure invention. The statement is in fact an exercise in alternation, almost to the point of parody, whereby imitation is grounded in a series of possibilities: art or nature, voice or instrument, sounds or accents. In this way, mimesis turns out to be the principal object of the satire: a presumably identifiable topic that eludes identification.
Elsewhere, however, in other writings on music, Diderot shows himself to be allied with a less complicated understanding of the mimetic function of music, one that is clearly in line with the philosophical program associated with Rousseau. A great impetus behind this program came from Jean-Baptiste Dubos, who deployed the Cratylist distinction between natural and arbitrary signs by distinguishing the musical language of the passions, which was “instituted by nature,” from articulated speech, which is merely conventional.7
Rousseau famously employed this distinction in his essay on the origin of language, which posits an original identity of word and tone founded in a life of passion and strong emotion. The subsequent rationalization of speech was literally a disenchantment, whereby language lost its naturally given accent in increasingly conventional articulations. One may still hear the passionate tone in modern French—for example, in the vowels and the internalized nasal sounds—but this natural accent is all but lost in the articulations of the tongue and teeth. For Rousseau, the dental and fricative modifications of sound—hallmarks of northern languages—express a neediness that drives men to possession and therefore to isolation. Arguing against Condillac, who attributed language’s origin to need, Rousseau sees the primary motivation in desire and pleasure, that is, in those passions that bring men together.8 Here Rousseau betrays his Cratylism by referring to the impassioned “m” of “aimer,” whose expression of love is replaced by the dental articulation of need in “aider.”9 A single letter, then, is sufficient to remove mankind from a life of immediacy in nature to a world of cold reflection, where nature is to be articulated, utilized, and used up. As he remarked earlier, concerning the inarticulate languages of nature: “You will find that Plato’s Cratylus is not as ridiculous as it may seem” (ROC 5.383). Nonetheless, Rousseau can hardly escape the double bind that mimesis imposes. In revealing language’s proximity to its source, accent also establishes its distance. As Derrida tirelessly points out, the origin is already divided by a necessary articulation.10 The replacement of “m” with “d” is but a mimetic symptom of mimetic duplicity.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates has recourse to the very same Cratylist-Rousseauist argument, concerning genealogical features of language. The explicit subject of Socrates’ remarks is not the love that joins men together but rather the madness that brings men close to the gods: “It is worthwhile to bear witness that the men of old who invented names did not consider madness to be shameful or disgraceful, for they would not have connected it [the word “mania”] with the noblest of arts, that which judges what is to come, which they called the manic art [manikên]…. But the men of today tastelessly insert a tau and call it the mantic art [mantikên]” (244b–c). The word “mania”—consisting of only nasals and vowels and therefore softly evocative of Rousseau’s “aimer”—undergoes the same dental articulation that distinguishes original speech from the speech of today. The “t” introduces the idea of art or technê, the rational, calculated procedure that is necessarily subsequent to the irrational, incalculable moment of divine inspiration. The structure of the Phaedrus suggests that the event of manic immediacy enjoys a nearness to the source (the gods or the Muses) that is afterward articulated in the reflective work of philosophy. In the same way, Socrates’ “mad” speeches (manikôs [265a]) are followed by the labor of explanation. Madness, be it prophetic, ritualistic, poetic, or erotic, is understood by the work it accomplishes after the fact. Rousseau, whose “pure language” would be described by Hölderlin as divinely inspired by the mad god Dionysos, is indeed insane, if he believes it can occupy the site of origin, uncontaminated by the conventions—the nomoi—that mediate that event through the articulations of language.11
Rousseau’s political program is also based on a story of discontinuity and decadence: the inequality that pervades modern society is a direct result of the articulations that split human communities, for example, into subordinate and dominating groups, into possessors and the disenfranchised. To correct the injustices caused by inequality, it would be necessary to re-enchant language itself, to dissolve its articulations and restore its natural accent.12 The reaccentuation of language would return humanity to an original, transparently communal state founded on compassion—on la pitié—that first allowed one man to recognize and identify with the vocal utterances of another as a representation of his passion, joy, fear, or pain. In Rousseau’s view, it was this experience of discovering semblance in another that first established not only community but also the feeling of being an individual, whose existence was inextricably bound to the fact that one belonged to a community.
Rousseau’s statements on music correspond well with this scenario. The Querelle des Bouffons, which broke out in 1752 with the Paris performance of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, compelled Rousseau to specify his position. His emphasis on melody or song (chant) as a language of the heart argued against the mathematical practice of harmonic systems like the one proposed by the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, who essentially treated music as lifeless acoustic material to be manipulated, controlled, and tempered. From Rousseau’s point of view, Rameau perpetuated the inequality inherent in Cartesianism by removing music from its source in lived experience.
For the most part, throughout his career, Diderot shared Rousseau’s position by referring to music as an expression of the passions, grounded in sensibility. In the Leçons de clavecin (1771), Diderot explains that a succession of musical sounds should “know how to speak to the soul and to the ear and know the origins of song and of melody, whose true model is in the depths of the heart [“au fond du coeur”].”13 Earlier, Diderot had developed a theory of gesture and pantomime, for example, in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751) and the Entretiens sur le fils naturel (1757), whereby preverbal or extraverbal affective movements of the body could introduce a more natural, less conventional language into theater. “Inarticulate words” (as in impassioned cries or sudden exclamations), “violent emotions,” inflections of “voice and tone,” corporeal gesticulations—all could reenergize the performance and return to it the “accent of truth.”14 Despite his distaste for the theater, Rousseau’s partial contribution to the Querelle des Bouffons, his opera Le devin du village, fondly acknowledges his friend’s work by incorporating a pantomime scene onstage.
Rousseau’s opera, written as an intermezzo, makes a formal allusion to the opera buffa, which developed from the comic intermezzi performed between acts of an opera seria. In this regard, the opera buffa performed a structural role analogous to ancient comedy, to the Satyr plays that disrupted the graveness of tragic performances. Entirely untrained in the art of composition, Diderot offered his own intermezzo in the wake of the Querelle—not an opera buffa but rather a dialogue, Le neveu de Rameau, which bears, in the orthography of the manuscript, the subtitle “Satyre.” Like the actors in the Italian intermezzo, who exploited improvisatory elements of the commedia dell’arte, Rameau’s nephew performs the satirical functions of overturning social norms and conventions of language. His wild pantomimes, his irreverent behavior, and his virtuoso display of accent are all reminiscent of the opera buffa. They would at first appear to execute the Rousseauist agenda of igniting the cold conventions that rob human expression of its heart. A master at impersonating accents, the nephew could recharge language by way of mimesis, which for Rousseau would demonstrate man’s similarity to his neighbor. The nephew’s musicality, however, fails to unite men into an ideal community of shared compassion. On the contrary, his bizarre performances are more pitiful than pitied. As a madman and outsider, he neither exists in nor belongs to a community. As a social parasite, he is more needy than loving. Rather than solving the problem of inequality, the musical language of this depraved man’s heart seems to perpetuate it. Here, contrary to Rousseau, the nonsemantic force of song becomes a cause for breaking all identification. It is important to stress that this function runs counter not only to Rousseau’s theory but also more remarkably to the majority of Diderot’s own aesthetic positions. The autobiographical self—le Moi—has indeed found its antagonist.
Let us return to the dialogue’s epigraph, taken from Horace, Satires 2.7: “Vertumnis quotquot sunt natus iniquis.” Ernst R. Curtius, in the concluding excursus to his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, recommended that the motto should be taken as an invitation to read Diderot’s text together with the entirety of Horace’s satire.15 Indeed, the correspondences are great. In Horace’s poem, the slave Davus takes advantage of December’s Saturnalia (“libertate Decembri” [4]), impersonating a free man to berate his master. The figure of the slave-cum-master literally evokes the opera that instigated the Querelle des Bouffons, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (The Servant Mistress), in which the outspoken housemaid Serpina cunningly tricks her master into marriage. The festival of the Saturnalia—which, incidentally, resonates with the term “satura” by paronomasia—takes place during the days that fall outside the calendar. A time outside of time, it is the appropriate place—just once a year—for the inversion of all hierarchical ordering. Analogously, Diderot’s narrator remarks how he makes the exception of conversing with madmen like the nephew but “once a year” (“Ils m’arrêtent une fois l’an” [NR 5/35]). Like the nephew, Davus takes his master’s claims of constancy to task. He argues that most men are fickle, like one Priscus, who lived a life of capriciousness (“vixit inqaequalis” [10]). One day a “rake” (moechus) the other a “sage” (doctus), you could say Priscus was “born beneath the unequal Vertumni, however many there are” (14). When Davus directs his diatribe against his master, accusing him of the same moral variability, the latter loses all patience. He shouts, looking for a weapon, for a stone or arrows. Davus counters: “aut insanit homo aut versus facit” (117)—“The man’s either insane or making verse”—linking the poet’s act to madness, while reiterating the perversity of versification. As deities in charge of alternating the seasons, the Vertumni are perfectly musical, insofar as music is the art of time par excellence, an art of process, change, and alternation. The Vertumni confer a capacity for turning things into something else, for effecting conversions and inversions. In Horace, they are predicated with adversity or inequity (iniquis), although it is difficult to ascertain in what fashion. As regulators of seasonal change, they may be contrary to Priscus, who follows no order whatsoever. Yet it is also arguable that the Vertumni are the agents of change itself, imposing inequality on those born under their influence. Are they constant and therefore “unequal” to those inconstant? Or are they inconstant, “unequal” to everything and everyone? These questions complicate the function of Diderot’s epigraph. Furthermore, although the majority of readers assign it to the nephew’s character, it is perfectly possible that it reflects the narrator’s as well.16 Certainly, the nephew enjoys neither communal identification nor selfsameness—“Rien ne dissemble plus de lui que lui-même.” Yet, as I have shown, Moi is no more an exemplum of perfect constancy. Indeed, Horace’s satire suggests that it is the one who fancies himself so that is most open to accusation. Hence fixed concepts of identity become shaken, be it the subjective identity that grounds vocal utterances or the productive identity that establishes something as a work of art.
It is the nephew’s lack of subjective stability that prepares him for satirical disruption, which he carries out by way of musical performances, and this musicality in turn pokes holes in the narrator’s sense of selfhood.17 As Plato observed, madness, especially the madness provoked by music, is terribly infectious.
In assuming a wide range of masks, the nephew is capable of exposing society itself as populated by masked personalities. In this sense, his unmasking is congruent with the Rousseauist scheme. A master of accent, he reminds us all of our natural origins, breaking down all conventions and cultural articulations. In this way, he resembles the master actor of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien, who is able to appropriate a vast variety of identities, precisely because he himself lacks one. The great actor, paradoxically, must be empty. He must have “no sensibility,” if he is to be able to “imitate everything.”18 Like the nephew, he must be—to borrow a phrase from Lacoue-Labarthe—a “subjectless subject.”19 One might presume that the actor’s vacuity is closely akin to the nephew’s derangement. As I shall show, however, the similarities between the nephew and the actor can hardly be maintained.
The series of performances by which the nephew interrupts the dialogue clearly demonstrates his mimetic, musical talent: “He wept, he cried out, he sighed; his gaze was either tender or soft or furious: he was a woman swooning with grief [“une femme qui se pâme de douleur”], a poor wretch [“un malheureux”] abandoned in the depth of despair, a temple rising up, birds falling silent at sundown, waters either murmuring in a place solitary and cool, or tumbling in torrents down the mountain side…. It was night with its shadows, it was darkness and silence, for silence itself can be depicted in sound. He had completely lost his head [“Sa tête était tout à fait perdue”]. Exhausted with fatigue, like a man coming out of a deep sleep or a long distraction, he stood there motionless, dazed, astonished” (NR 84–85/104).
Here is no insensitive, calculating actor but rather a hypersensitive victim of overwhelming passion. The madman’s enthusiasm is opposed to the actor’s detachment. Instead of exhibiting the empty subjectivity of the great mimetic actor, the nephew seems to undergo a loss of subjectivity altogether.20 Like Cassandra, he acts as though there is a god working inside of him (“avec l’air d’un energumène”). The trancelike state does not suggest cool distance but rather complete ecstasy. The nephew may start out as an actor, appropriating an array of masks to be used according to calculated intent, but he ends up deranged, identifying himself with the masquerade. His ecstasy reveals that the distance that kept the disinterested actor safe has been flooded over. This sublime experience, this loss of self, implies that the nephew, contrary to the actor, does have a subjective identity, for a loss of self depends on the fact of having a self to begin with.
Whereas the mimetician puts nature to work, the nephew is idle or désœuvré. Rousseau defines genius as the capacity to render emotion by means of accents; he even declares, like Diderot’s narrator, that genius can “make silence itself speak.”21 The nephew, too, can make silence speak, not out of some genial prowess but rather out of the passive experience of losing himself. When asked why he never produced a work of art of his own, the nephew confesses: “I had persuaded myself that I was a genius, and at the end of the first line I can read that I’m a fool [un sot], a fool, a fool” (NR 98/115). The comédien, who actively practices his work of appropriation onstage, finds his shadow in the madman, who unmasks society by passively losing himself behind an endless array of masks. The nephew, then, is restless, in constant motion without being active in the subjective sense, that is, he is active without doing anything. His inexhaustibly frantic behavior barely conceals his idleness. He is unable to produce anything of lasting worth.
In aesthetic terms, the nephew’s entirely ephemeral improvisations betray a conception of music that rests more on temporal performance and audition than on composition. The compositional paradigm in music stresses the authority of the composer’s subjective identity, which is thus preserved from any possibility of error, misinterpretation, or corruption. The potentially disfiguring aspects of a public performance are thereby relegated to accidents, which in no way detract from the transcendent essence of the work. A musical opus thereby enjoys a privileged status, distinct from and uncontaminated by all performance histories. In other words, the accomplished work of art is situated outside time, undisturbed by the immanent, material conditions of musical production. Music historians have defined this idea as the “work-concept,” which in fact is an innovation of the modern period.22 The performative paradigm in music challenges this view by asserting the horizontal, existential conditions of production and audition. From this standpoint, taken to the extreme, an unplayed piece of music is no music at all, just as language does not exist apart from individual utterances.23 The immanent circumstances of the musical instruments and the individual performers, the intent of the conductor and the preoccupations of the soloists, the concert hall’s acoustics, the seating plan, the attire, the weather—all these contribute to the piece’s actualization and severely undermine any belief in the fixed identity of a composition. In this regard, the performative paradigm underscores music’s fundamental temporality, its transitoriness and ungraspability.
While the composer’s accomplishments may secure his legacy for posterity, the nephew’s performances simply pass away with the time needed to carry them out. The evanescent quality of these displays calls attention to an experience of music that is presubjective—before identity, before a reflective sense of personhood. The nephew—possessed by lyrics not his own—disrupts models of authentic expression or original composition. Along these lines, Roland Barthes speaks of the voice’s “grain,” where the voice itself is emphatically something “not personal”: “It expresses nothing of the cantor, of his soul; it is not original … and at the same time it is individual: it has us hear a body which has no civil identity, no ‘personality,’ but which is nevertheless a separate body.” Thus, he concludes, “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings,” which is “in no way ‘subjective.’”24
Bent on securing a transcendent, subjective position, Diderot’s narrator enters into portraits and descriptions of the nephew that belie his indebtedness to a specific hermeneutics, namely, a will to circumscribe this musical dementia by some kind of theory. He is eager to convert the nephew’s mad pantomime into an imitative, expressive art form so as to make it comprehensible, a conversion that could reinforce the narrator’s own position as a subject of language. The narrator, in other words, clings to a Rousseauist position, which strives to reveal the mimetic quality of music, even to show that music is a kind of heightened, naturally motivated language. But mimesis is not so simply steered. This fact is precisely what shakes the narrator when he unplugs his ears and begins to listen to the mad musician.
Earlier, in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (Letter on the Deaf and Mute), Diderot shared Rousseau’s hope that mimesis could reinstate societal equality. Ironically, he did so by keeping his ears plugged. The Lettre relates how, during a theatrical performance, Diderot stuffed his ears, to the astonishment of his companions, asserting that in this way he could better observe the mimetic content of bodily movements.25 He goes on to report a meeting with an anonymous deaf-mute during a chess match at the Café de la Régence. To this point, the anecdote perfectly foreshadows the philosopher’s encounter with the nephew, who also appears over chess at the selfsame café. As in Le neveu, the chance meeting leads to the topic of music. The Lettre describes how the deaf man was taken to the apartment of Père Castel in order to learn his reaction to the famous “color harpsichord.”26 After a brief performance on Castel’s claveçin oculaire, which involved a succession of colors appearing alternatively on a screen, Diderot’s deaf examinee concludes that music is “a particular way of communicating,” that instruments are analogous to “speaking organs” that produce expressive signs. He therefore confirms Rousseau’s assertion that “melody not only imitates, it speaks.” For Diderot, the deaf-mute’s experience demonstrates that there is “sense [sens] in sounds [sons].” In other words, it substantiates Castel’s theory and the philosophes’ presupposition, namely, that music functions linguistically, generating a kind of text. Diderot’s inference begs additional credibility by way of paronomasia: a mimetically charged rhetorical device, based on the visual appearance of the written word, which here emphasizes the underlying association of “sens” and “sons.” Music is thereby redeemed, but only on the basis of vision, only for the deaf or for philosophers with ears plugged.
The initial topic of the Lettre sur les sourds is grammatical inversions, for example, the postpositioning of the adjective in French. As Diderot argues, this kind of articulation obscures the historical development of language based in sensory experience, where qualities precede the recognition of substantives. In direct contradiction to Condillac, Diderot asserts that the articulateness of the French language essentially reverses natural perception by placing adjectival modifiers after the common noun.27 To introduce the topic of inversion, Diderot offers an epigraph from Vergil:
Versisque viarum
Indiciis raptos; pedibus vestigia rectis
Ne qua forent.
The words, which thematize the act of turning (versis), are taken from the Aeneid, book 8, where Cacus—driven by madness or furor (“furiis Caci mens effera” [line 205])—steals cattle from Hercules and to conceal his crime reverses their tracks by dragging them backward into his cave. Beyond the manifest theme of inversion, however, Diderot’s citation masks a deeper comment on epistemological presuppositions. A turn to Vergil’s text immediately shows that Diderot himself has inverted this description of inversion:
atque hos, ne qua forent pedibus vestigia rectis,
cauda in speluncam tractos versisque viarum
indiciis raptos saxo occultabat opaco.
(and these [bulls and heifers], lest their tracks show the right way,
were dragged by the tail into the cave, and reversing their paths’
traces, he hid the stolen herd behind a dark rock.)
(AENEID, BOOK 8, LINES 209–11)
Although Diderot does not explain his use of the citation, his intention in reordering the words is perfectly clear. Where Vergil’s lines proceed from reflection to action, Diderot’s manipulation demonstrates how the act precedes the thought. In Vergil’s text, Cacus ponders possible consequences (“ne qua forent”) and then acts accordingly (“versisque viarum indiciis raptos”). Diderot’s rewriting, on the contrary, places the fear clause after the deed is done. This order is congruent with the Lettre’s larger claims. What language hides most of all, the Lettre eventually concludes, is its own tracing to an origin in gestures, in bodily action. Diderot’s consideration of the deaf and mute therefore wants to invert linguistic inversion. It targets the poetic art that glosses over human movement, for example, Vergil’s spondaic smoothness, which converts into art the sweaty toil of dragging livestock by the tail.
— — | — — | — — | — — | — ∪ ∪ | — —
cau-d(a)—in-spe-lun—cam-trac-tos—ver-sis-que-vi—a-rum
But there is more. Implicit in this epigraph is an allusion to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, where the infant god steals Apollo’s cattle and, by cunning art (technê), reverses their tracks to conceal the crime.
δολίης δ’ οὐ λήθєτο τέχνης ἀντία ποιήσας ὁπλάς, τὰς πρόσθεν ὄπισθεν, τὰς δ’ ὄπιθεν πρόσθεν.
(And he did not forget cunning art [doliês … technês],
reversing [antia poiêsas] the hooves, making the front behind,
and the hind before.)
(HYMN TO HERMES, LINES 76–78)
When Apollo discovers the transgression, when he recognizes the crafty, poetic deed [poiêsas], Hermes offers in compensation his newly invented lyre—an instrument, we recall, made from a live or mortal tortoise, whose shell was converted into a deathless, resonant body.
If Diderot’s Lettre proceeds, with ears plugged, to understand verbal inversion and the inequality it breeds, Le neveu de Rameau marks an even greater complication by keeping philosophy’s ears open to the implications of this hermetic music and to sounds otherwise suppressed. In the name of the Vertumni, the text signals how philosophical retroverts may themselves suffer inversion. As I have already noted, at the dialogue’s opening, the narrator begins by presenting himself as a man of theory, shutting his ears to the bustle (“écoutant le moins que je pouvois”), happily engaged in speculative conversations with himself alone. When the nephew arrives, however, he explicitly unplugs his ears. Shocked and confused, he gropes for comprehension. He attempts to render the madness into conceptual schemes. His only option is to muster textual forms, which invariably come up short. Like Apollo, he tries to transform the Marsyan nephew into an instrument of sense, but, like Socrates, the nephew is always ready to break apart what ever form is imposed.
CRISIS AT THE CAFÉ DE LA RÉGENCE
The intellectual climate of the Encyclopédie fostered great optimism, thanks in large measure to the conviction that language, when used properly, was perfectly efficacious. In converting every aspect of human knowledge into discursive shape, the project’s contributors intended to promote the free circulation of ideas, which would thereupon provide the basis for an egalitarian community. As the article “Language” by the Chevalier de Jaucourt asserts, language use presupposes a degree of equality: “Ever since man felt driven by taste, need, and pleasure to join together with his companions [semblables], it was necessary for him to develop his soul in relation to another, and to communicate its situations.”28
Diderot’s musically mad nephew upsets this scenario, insofar as he is presented as someone fundamentally improper and dissimilar. As a text fraught with division, the dialogue as a whole appears to be a grand experiment in testing the efficacy of language as well as problematizing the notions of personal identity that it grounds. Division is so evident in Le neveu that it may be said to constitute its very theme. A dialogue in the truest sense, it derives its narrative energy from the clash of antagonistic forces. The process of opposition is already initiated with the title itself, which blatantly names two distinct personages. The differences between the celebrated composer Jean-Philippe Rameau and his idle nephew, Jean-François, are encapsulated in the title’s contrast between proper name and common noun (le neveu de Rameau) as well as between what is original and what is subsequent, between creator and epigone, composer and performer (le neveu de Rameau). On the level of both form and content, these basic oppositions go on to organize many of the discussions in the body of the dialogue, articulated more specifically between fame and obscurity, success and failure, productivity and sloth. Thus a guiding division is established between the interlocutors as they consider and debate issues in morality, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.
Prima facie, philosophy thus confronts its other; the subject of language confronts the subjectless subject. The divisions, however, not only separate the enlightened freethinker from the cynical madman but also split the author himself in two. The psychomachia, which divides his soul into two opponents (Moi and Lui) leads to the exposure of the multiple distinctions endemic to language use: between the author and narrator, between Diderot and Moi, between the writing subject and his uncanny double, the represented subject.
Such mimetic divisiveness questions the efficacy of language and thereby weakens the viability of the Encyclopédie. Diderot suffered this skepticism, especially in the years following the project’s public condemnation in 1759. Would the work withstand the violence of time? Could its validity persist in the hands of posterity? In his article on the term “encyclopédie,” that is, in the project’s highest mode of self-reflection, Diderot never refers to posterity as a timeless realm of truth; instead, tellingly, no less than four times, he characterizes future readers as “our nephews.” “The goal of an Encyclopedia is to assemble the knowledge scattered across the earth’s surface; to set forth [exposer] its general system among those with whom we live and to transmit it to those who will come after us; in order that the works [travaux] of centuries past might not be useless for the centuries to come; that our nephews [nos neveux], becoming better instructed, may become at the same time more virtuous and happier and that we may not die without having been worthy of the human race [genre humain] (s.v. “Encyclopédie,” 5.635; my emphasis).29 As an elaboration of one of these nephews, Lui reminds the encyclopedist that the hope of posterity—of continued progress toward a more learned, more virtuous, and happier future—must entertain the risk of perversion.
Still, despite his perversity, Diderot’s mad musician does communicate. That is, he speaks and sings, even though the significance of his utterances is persistently questioned. With this characterization, Diderot seems to present the possibility of expressing pure difference in spite of but also by way of the conventional system of signs called language. One episode serves as an especially good illustration: the story of the Renegade of Avignon.
Just past the dialogue’s midpoint, the tale of the Renegade brings both the philosopher and his companion to the point of exasperation. Eager to demonstrate his “excellence in degradation,” the nephew introduces the vile man, who won the confidence and protection of a kind, wealthy Jew, only to betray him to the Holy Inquisition and escape with his fortune (NR 74–76/94–96). Of all the anecdotes related by Diderot’s fool, this one stands alone in bringing both interlocutors to the point of having nothing left to say, to a limit beyond which there may be no further communication. Moi is at a loss: “I didn’t know whether to stay or run away” (NR 76/96). The nephew’s vicious celebration of betrayed trust, anti-Semitism, murderous greed, and travestied justice, however, is not merely repulsive for the man of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, the storyteller himself, whether overcome by mad delight or embarrassing shame, also seems compelled to give up on language. For both men, language has run its course. The nephew reverts to one of his discomforting routines, performing a confused “fugue,” while the narrator retreats into contemplation, entirely unsure as to what to do. Diderot frames the story of the Renegade as if it reached a degree of immorality so deep, so thorough, that the promise of verbal communication, grounded as it were in the selfsame structures and beliefs that underwrite moral behavior and judgment, were no longer possible.
The dialogue, however, does not end here but instead turns to a full discussion of music. The topic was already broached by Moi, whose only comment on the Renegade’s crime concerns the “tone” of the nephew’s voice in telling it. “I don’t know which strikes me as more horrible, the villainy [scélératesse] of your renegade or the tone in which you talk about it” (NR 76/96). The nephew’s use of language demonstrates that depravity has permeated both content and form. The criminality of what is said corresponds to the wickedness of how it is recounted. Thus the details of the story readily conflate the protagonist with the storyteller. The Renegade’s plot, which deployed language as a tool for deception and manipulation, perfectly parallels the narrative act of Lui—a veritable nihilist bent on dismantling language’s relation to truth. Both the nephew and the con man come across as thorough liars, as grand abusers of communicative trust. The possibility of a set correspondence between words and things or even between utterance and intention has been exposed as something altogether fragile and exploitable.
There are many hints that a kind of semantic disintegration has taken place: the Renegade’s utterly deceitful use of speech; the vulgar stereotype of the Jew unable to read past the literal; and even the resonance of the name Avignon, a place that marks the schismatic history of the church, possibly serving as an allegory of how the transcendent ground of meaning may be contested. On the level of narration, there is the dubious boasting of a madman whose capacity for dissimulation and self-contradiction is frightening. The crime of the Renegade, who betrayed the trust confided to him and sent a man to a cruel death, matches the talk of a fool, who reneged his commitment to true speech and thereby consigned language itself to an auto-da-fé.
It is out of this crisis that music comes to the fore, both as a topic for debate and as a performative evasion. Lui withdraws into his bizarre routines, while Moi presses for definitions of what music is, what it does, and to what end. The philosopher’s cross-examinations are answered by crazed pantomimes of orchestral fanfares and operatic displays. Altogether, following upon the Renegade story, the twin theme of music and madness emerges precisely where language breaks down as a vehicle of truth. The musicality of language, the tone of what is being said, fascinates the philosophe insofar as it reveals an embodied—malicious—voice beyond denotative meaning. Semantics is no longer sufficient for understanding language as a means of communication. Rather, it comes forward as a medium through which one can dissimulate. The nephew’s conglomeration of operatic snippets exploits this dissimulating capacity.
Nonetheless, phoenixlike, the semantic project is resurrected so as to attend to its own limitations vis-à-vis musical experience. In addition to extended discussions on the essence of music, the reader is offered further mad performances by the nephew, spectacles whose frenzied appearance occupy a space of nonmeaning that challenges the philosopher’s desire for comprehension. Questions on the possible meaning of music parallel concerns over the nonmeaning of mad behavior. If madness constitutes a nonsignifying relation to some metaphysical regime of meaning, then this text suggests that music stands in an analogous relation, a relation of non-signification as conventionally understood. The crucial point, however, is that despite this failure of signifying logic, thanks to music and madness, language does carry on. Even after speech has been evacuated of meaning, there emphatically is more to say.
SATIRE, INEQUALITY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Subtitled “Second Satyre,” Le neveu should be read in connection with two other pieces, with which it bears many similarities: Satire I, sur les caractères et les mots de caractère, de profession, etc, first published in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire (October 1778), and a very brief, unpublished dialogue simply entitled Lui et Moi.30
Lui et Moi, clearly a predecessor to Le neveu, relates another encounter between a philosophe and a villainous interlocutor. An opening paragraph sets the scene. Despite the many occasions on which Moi had been duped, he continued to lend money to this rascal (coquin), who recently had the audacity to use the funds to finance a satire against his very own benefactor. Now, after some months, Moi chances upon Lui, who appears haggard and malnourished. This time Moi refuses to succumb to pity; this “leech” (sangsue) is beyond reform, and Moi is beyond compassion. The dialogue reaches the same level of horror that followed the nephew’s anecdote of the Jew and the Renegade—“I was seized by horror” (715). Here, however, the moral shock is not overcome by music; the conversation does not continue. Instead, the text ends abruptly, leaving the philosopher’s abhorrence to resonate in silence. Diderot stops writing when his characters stop talking. Here, at least, nihilism has the last word.
Satire I deals with the diversity of human character. Yet, unlike La Bruyère’s earlier project, Diderot’s investigations are in search of infinite difference, irreducible to rationalization or typology. Like Le neveu, this text is also governed by epigraphs from Horace’s Satires, from the first poem of the second book:
Sunt quibus in satura videar nimis acer, et ultra
legem tendere opus
(There are those to whom I may seem too harsh in my satire, and that I seem to stretch the work beyond the law)
(SATIRES 2.1.1)
Quot capitum vivunt, totidem studiorum
milia
(A thousand living persons, as many thousand desires)
(2.1.27)
Thus Diderot adopts Horace’s satiric program, namely, to investigate language’s capacity to register the fine nuances of individual emotion and passion—a particularly harsh or impassioned project that would move beyond conventions (“ultra legem”). Like Diderot, Horace places himself in the text as a represented subject, an uncanny double, a figure explicitly to be seen (“videar”). Here the satirical voice does not yet fall to a deranged nephew but rather to the first-person narrator, whose sharpness would cut through all representations, including his own.
Specifically, in seeking out the detailed differences of individual expression, Satire I contributes to Diderot’s refutation of the mechanistic arguments put forward by Helvétius, whose De l’esprit (1758) claimed that all men are born exactly the same, that human diversity is merely a result of education and general environment. Helvétius writes, for example: “It is therefore certain that intellectual inequality [“l’inégalité d’esprit”] … does not at all owe its excellence to being innately better or worse organized but rather to the different education that they receive in diverse circumstances.”31 To correct this view, Diderot insists on human inequality. He stresses the influence of natural, innate aptitude in shaping each human character as a unique being. As Diderot argues, this condition has obvious consequences for the understanding of language: “Is it possible that, human organization being different, the sensation may be the same? Its diversity is such that, if each individual were able to create a language analogous to what he is, there would be as many languages as there are individuals. One man would say neither hello nor good-bye like another.”32 Although indispensable for intersubjective communication, language’s generalizations all but efface the particularity of human sentiment. The faint hints of an individual’s speech can only be heard in the person’s tone: not in what’s been said but how it’s been said. As in Cratylus’s laughable aspiration, musicality should present language before or beyond conventional agreement, beyond nomos—ultra legem, so to speak, like Horace’s acrid satire.
As already suggested, Le neveu de Rameau is the story of how the philosopher chose to listen to this mimetic cry not as a dissolution of socially unjust articulations but rather as the siren song of inequality. There is a resolve here to get behind a legality that would establish equality or a rectification of natural differences. The ethical problems are obvious. Is there a way to respect individuality without allowing for gross injustices? Is the effacement of singularity—its equalization—not a worthwhile price to pay for societal justice? To what extent does the divisive nature of the individual—of the genius, for example, or the madman—belong to the collective? And can one even speak of an individual apart from this collective?
The singular, unequal music of the madman’s language seduces the moralist to flirt with injustice. To be sure, as a madman the nephew matches the horrific lechery of the coquin in Lui et Moi, but as a musician he emits a tone that entices the philosopher to stay rather than flee. The highly individual, unequal music of his language draws the philosopher in. The anecdote of the Renegade and the Jew—two figures of alterity—fills the philosopher with such horror that he would have fled, had it not been for the nephew’s masterful tone. The pessimism of Lui et Moi, which rests on the decidedly nonmusical, noisome qualities of the parasitic leech, is healed by the hope of hearing something beyond language.
Le neveu de Rameau, whose conclusion leaves us uncertain as to who will have the “last laugh,” could also be read as an honest consideration of human inequality in response to Helvétius’s biological egalitarianism. Certainly, the nephew is nothing if not unequal. Unlike Satire I, however, this radical inequality suggests that perhaps the search for an individual voice—including the authorial voice—is from the start faulty. The concept of identity—which is grounded in some idea of equality, in self-sameness over time, in the potential for repetition—is unable to cover the nephew’s baffling individuality. Le neveu pursues the unique, but does so by relaxing ideas of identity in order to consider the possibility of an individual who is split among many voices, always different and never equal to himself.
The word “inégalité” in fact occurs only once in the entire dialogue (that is, without repetition), tellingly during the course of the story of the Renegade and in explicit relation to tone. Lost in reflection, the narrator excuses himself: “I am thinking how variable your tone is [“je rêve à l’inégalité de votre ton”], sometimes high, sometimes low” (NR 74/94). Throughout the dialogue it is tone that produces the split between morality and art. Tone is the way one’s speech manifests itself as unequal to intention. As the nephew confesses, he reads Molière in order to disguise his true aims, in order to be avaricious without sounding avaricious, to be a hypocrite without sounding hypocritical (NR 60/82). He is like and unlike the actor—imitating but really imitating imitation.
The shift to questions of tone reinforces the hypothesis that the entire issue of inequality is associated with music and the problem of meaning. Whereas conventional discourse is presumably based on the transparent circulation of selfsame identities, musical discourse introduces a different kind of conversation. After attempting to define music, the narrator must confess that “the question is beyond” him. For him, the vagueness of the term “chant” opens on to the issue of vagueness in general. As in Satire I, in good empiricist fashion, words are regarded as being too general, too conceptual, to register the subtleties of individual experience. The nephew would agree, were it not for the possibilities offered by musical expression. For him, language may still represent the particular fine points of personal emotion as long as it is wedded to music. Individuality is saved, but only if speech becomes a tune, only if articulation yields to accent.
To this end, the nephew pronounces: “Musices seminarium accentus: accent is the nursery bed of melody” (NR 79). The statement rehearses the general position of Rousseau’s Origin of Language essay, namely, that the loss of accent in modern language is concomitant with its rationalization. Where Rousseau insists on the function of similarity in mimesis, however, Diderot recognizes that all semblance is grounded in difference. Unequal to everyone, including himself, the nephew’s ecstatic performances work at cross purposes to his subjective statements: music (tone, accent, rhythm, the cry) cannot express personal identity because the very principle of identity is already a result of a demusicalization—a disenchantment. Music can indeed restore song to speech, it can effectuate the desired re-enchantment, but it cannot abide identity, which is simply a construct of convention, repetition, and personal memory. By performing madly in strictly irreversible time, the nephew demonstrates that the notion of identity is already at a far remove from its origin in song. The “I” only emerges with the establishment of the community, with the articulations that halt the evanescence of ephemeral accents and convert acoustic experience into a lasting work to be identified and memorialized. The nephew’s improvisations resist the assignation of an opus number. His music unworks the drive to pull existence out of time.
In this regard, Le neveu illustrates the materialist epiphany expressed by d’Alembert in the dream recorded by Diderot. Deep in a fevered trance, d’Alembert shouts prophetically in staggered prose, as his caretakers, the physician Bordeu and Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse, listen on: “And you talk of individuals, you poor philosophers! Stop thinking about your individuals [“Laissez là vos individus”] and answer me this: Is there in nature any one atom exactly similar [semblable] to another? … No … Don’t you agree that in nature everything is bound up with everything else, and that it is impossible for there to be a gap in the chain? Then what do you mean with your individuals? There is no such thing; no, no such thing.”33 As d’Alembert’s guests go on to discuss, not only identity but the entire notion of individuality (as an essence identifiable across time) is grounded in a fragile belief in self-sameness. It is all but a result of the capacity for memory, which each nerve fiber possesses to varying degrees. Music, the most Vertumnal of arts, has, according to Diderot, the most powerful effect on our nervous system. It is therefore best equipped to qualify the idea of personal identity as a purely physiological symptom. As in d’Alembert’s delirious ravings, the nephew’s rhapsodies reveal the fragility of this convention and the reality of atomic, musical inequality. The nephew’s madness reveals our existence as ever-changing, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It shows us that our self-sameness is grounded in self difference. It exposes our individual sense of self as a metaphysical, mimetic delusion.
The nephew’s identity consists in the constant loss of identity; impropriety is all that is proper to him. He is in fact a figure of pure alterity: “Nothing is less like him than himself.” In short, he is what he performs. In connecting music and madness, Diderot’s text elaborates the fundamental—mimetic—tension between the singular and the general, repetition and difference, between poles that are at once distant and near, shared and isolated: from a place somehow the same but always unequal.
Gottsched, Rousseau, and Diderot’s philosopher (Moi) all share the conviction that art should be mimetic; they differ, however, not only on what mimesis is but also on what is and is not capable of accomplishing it. Gottsched privileges the semantic weight of words and therefore reserves a merely ancillary role to music, which in itself, as pure sound, is nonsemantic. For him, mimesis is strictly imitation—that is, the re-presentation or depiction of something anterior. The representandum is the original element that renders every imitation as secondary, whose only substance is derivative. Mimesis as such may be related to either external or internal experience. In both cases, be it the imitation of la belle Nature or of personal emotion, mimesis is best achieved when language imposes its rational, narrative energy on the musical material, when it turns music into patterns that are repeatable and therefore knowable. When music, however, is not bound to the semantic clarity of words, it becomes threatening as an irrational or mad force; its mere sensuality overtakes the guidance of either the heart or the mind; art becomes neither pleasurable nor instructive.
The mimetic imperative is no less great in Rousseau, but with an emphasis on the originality of the expression, which promotes it above the status of being a secondary, derivative copy. For him, the expression has substance in itself. While granting the signifying capability of words, Rousseau nevertheless recognizes verbal language as somewhat deficient. Its tendency to abstract, to present mere concepts sundered from the singular power of life, is the cause for the inferior mimetic capabilities of words. Thus human expression is better served by music in general and by melody in particular, for melodic inflections alone may dissolve the articulations of rational language and reintroduce an original accent. It is language’s suppression of this accent that renders society’s individuals mad, insofar as they are deprived of a more authentic relation to themselves and to others. The restoration of music within language therefore promises the reestablishment of human equality: a society grounded in justice and full transparency. It is important to note that Rousseau’s mimeticism is here bound to a Cratylist idea of motivation and has little to do with “representation” in the neoclassical sense. The mimetic force of accent in fact imitates or “re-presents” nothing. That is to say, it is recognized as the true expression of one’s inner experience. Ultimately, the only way to ensure equality is to have everyone imitate nothing (The Social Contract is clear on this point in relation to “sovereignty” and the “general will”).34 A musicalized community—a community in accord—consists of individuals who participate in an authentic expression of their inner self, equally and therefore justly.
In the majority of his writings on music, Diderot seems to agree with Rousseau’s position on the mimetic potential of personal expression. His theories of gesture and pantomime all work together to create an art of accent that unworks the cold conventions and abstractions of verbal designation. His satires, however, reveal that the utopian dream of social equality is not served by the restitution of accent. On the contrary, the mimetic power of music is a kind of violence that reveals infinite difference and radical inequality—Quot capitum vivunt, totidem studiorum milia (A thousand living persons, as many thousand desires). Hence the nephew’s performances confirm the rationalist’s fears: music is mad, not simply because it upsets one’s communicative relationship to others but also because, as an art of nonrepeatable time, it unhinges one’s relationship to oneself. The terrifying lesson of the nephew’s musicality is precisely this: nothing differs more from ourselves than ourselves; nothing is more evanescent. Despite major differences, then, Diderot’s text at least shares with Gottsched’s neoclassicism the suggestion that the musicality of language may be mad. Together, in varying ways, they respond on either side of history to Rousseau’s valuation of nature and the natural, including the natural motivation of language in song. Hegel, who, as I shall discuss, had recourse to Le neveu in order to formulate his own anti-Rousseauist position, introduces the terms of this debate into a philosophical discourse that will play a significant role in the development of the link between music and madness, particularly in Kleist and Hoffmann. The mad musicians who inhabit the fiction of German romanticism are, in a certain sense, but modulations or variations of the themes introduced by Diderot’s deranged performer.