JULIA KRISTEVA
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tempted to embody perfect legality, but above
all
in the "weakness" and
"shyness" of his subjects, who are subject to cosmopolitical laws only
when their rights to concord are recognized on the basis of their singu–
larities, which cannot in themselves be harmonized. Beside the
political
and the
social,
there would then emerge, in a dignity that cannot lawfully
be bypassed, the
private
domain. At the same time, the level of political
power would find itself scaled down in its intrinsic use and distributed
between the
social
and the
private
sectors. That implies not only that
"heroes" and "great leaders" in politics are vanishing, but that there is a
new concept of politics, understood as an attempt to harmonize what is
irreducible through an interplay of diversified systems and stratums. Let us
not forget that Montesquieu's cosmopolitanism was the consequence of his
fundamental concern to turn politics into a space of possible freedom. His
"modernism" is to be understood as a rejection of unified society for the
sake of a coordinated diversity.
Within that frame of mind, the image of the "good savage" that
had already been coined by the Renaissance underwent a metamorphosis.
What comes into view is a
foreigner,
as odd as he is subtle, and who is the
alter ego
of national man, one who reveals the latter's personal inadequa–
cies at the same time as he points to the defects in mores and institutions.
The
foreigner
then becomes the figure onto which the penetrating, ironi–
cal mind of the philosopher is delegated - his double, his mask. He is the
metaphor of the distance at which we should place ourselves in order to
revive the dynamics of ideological and social transformation.
This apology of the "private" and the "strange," including
"idiosyncracies" - which, however, does not cease being the leaven of a
culture when the latter is aware of and transcends itself - reaches a power
that still enthralls us today in the writing of Denis Diderot (1713-1784).
The pinnacle of those peculiarities that other eighteenth-century writers
had depicted under national colors,
Rameau's Nephew
(written in 1762,
published in German in 1805, in French in 1821) internalized both the
discomfort and the fascinated recognition aroused by the strange and
carried them to the very bosom of eighteenth-century man. Ifhe were to
wander to the end of his passion for altering, dividing, knowing, modern
man would be a foreigner to himself - a strange being whose polyphony
would from that moment on be "beyond good and evil."
When Diderot "allows [his] mind to rove wantonly," a henceforth
famous partner answers him in an open dialogue, without synthesis; it is a
text
the cynical, "Menippean" derivation of which has often been em–
phasized. That partner is one of those "peculiar characters," one of those
"eccentrics," held in little esteem by the philosopher, who nonetheless
