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lets him dominate the conversation - Rameau's Nephew.
Who is the Nephew? The philosopher's opponent or his hidden
self? The opposite other or the nocturnal double that comes to the sur–
face? A clear-cut answer to the question would bring the pantomime to
an end and betray the "mental trollops" that Diderot, in an extraordi–
nary flight of polyphonic fancy, presents in fact through the confronta–
tion between
Myself
the philosopher and the strange
He.
Different and
accomplices, others and the same,
Myself
and He are in conflict, agree,
even change places
(He,
insolently, all of a sudden extols virtue . ..)
Rameau's Nephew
does not want
to settle down - he is the soul of a
game that he does not want to stop, does not want to compromise, but
wants only to challenge, displace, invert, shock, contradict. Negation,
this is understood, not only of conscience and morality but of the will as
passion: a twisting of sexuality - and then a negation of such negations.
The Nephew is the cynic's cynic: he experiences its rhetoric and
carries it to its peak, remaining up to the end foreign to ethical identity,
even that of the cynic. In that sense, the Nephew is closer to a cynic
who left his imprint on literary genres by inventing a new model of satire
- Menippus of Gadara, who, besides, was a corrupt usurer and ended up
hanging himself. Diderot speaks of him in his article on the "Cynic":
"Menippus ... was one of the last cynics of the ancient school; he made
himself more commendable for the kind of writing to which he gave his
name than for his morals and his philosophy." Bakhtin sees him as the
founder of dialogism and of that rhetorical polyphony out of which the
Western novel arose. Outside of the ethical heroism of Diogenes, who
succeeded in submitting the passion-inspired strangeness of natural man to
a moral imperative, the Nephew, and Diderot too, leave such asceticism
to Rousseau; they adopt only its acceptable portion - the play in lan–
guage, the logical violence that destroys and does not cease being aware
even of its own disappearance. The Nephew's pantomime is faithful only
to Menippus's rhetoric, not to Diogenes's virtue. Diderot never con–
veyed so drastically the fact that the ethics of his day could only be a
given language: 'a cultivation of strangeness to the very end, without fin–
ish or conclusion.
Such a scouring of apparent identities - ethicl or logical - is sup–
ported by a biological model. Diderot shows himself to be very much
mindful of it in his
Elements de physiologie.
He goes so far as to view any
sensation as bound to "organic convulsions." Indeed, when the Nephew
reaches the climactic frankness of his pantomime, he reveals his
"thoughts," which are at the same time sensations, through a language
made up of spasms, convulsions, and starts. Strangeness, which we have
seen as rhetorical (cultural), would be neurological in nature (organic):
