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Introduction to the “Age of Diderot” A Self-Portrait Why on earth did I ever part with it? It was used to me and I was used to it. It draped itself so snuggly, yet loosely, around all the curves and angles of my body—it made me look picturesque as well as handsome. This new one, stiff and rigid as it is, makes me look like a mannequin. As for the old one, it used to lend itself complaisantly to any demand I chose to make on it, for the poor are almost always quick to be of service. If a book was covered with dust, one of the flaps of my old dressing gown was always ready to hand to wipe it clean. If the ink was too thick and refused to run out of my pen—presto, there was the skirt of my old dressing gown ready to serve as a pen wiper. You could see how many times it had done me this service by the long, black stripes it bore. Those stripes were the badge of an author, part of the evidence that I am an honest workman. But now I look like a rich loafer, and nobody can tell by looking at me what my trade is.1 This anxious cry of loss, filled with melancholy, mourning for a past existence from the present vantage of (supposed) anonymity; this jubilant, frivolous , self-mocking, and self-ironizing comic look at one’s glory and virtue; this dramatic self-display, this joyous act of writing, is Diderot. Or at least Diderot as he depicts himself, bequeathing to us a self-portrait that could be entitled “The Philosopher in His Study” but is known as “Regrets On Parting With My Old Dressing Gown,” a celebrated and brilliant autobiographical sketch, a text that is almost nothing, barely a few pages long, the opening lines of which have just been quoted. I would like, in the following pages, to look at this short sketch as an allegory of the revolution in thinking that Diderot is attempting to introduce. Who is Diderot, you may ask, wanting to fill out the portrait a bit further? Well, let him tell us about himself, introduce us into his study. Apparently he is a philosopher who loved his old dressing gown, but some1 2 DRAMATIC EXPERIMENTS how—strangely, incomprehensibly, in a way despite himself, and against his knowledge and better judgment—gave it up. Why, oh why, in what moment of weakness and folly, did he do that? For now he has been transformed from a hard-working, undistracted, and constant philosopher into an idle good-for-nothing, steeped in luxury, unrecognizable to himself and to others. What was the old dressing gown, what did it mean? It was a garment that was almost not a piece of clothing but virtually an organic part of the body, at one with it, in no way inhibiting it and thus, almost magically, inhabiting a zone between nudity and dress, almost cancelling the distinction between being with oneself, intimately and familiarly, and being present to others, to whom one cannot expose one’s natural condition. With the aid of this magical gown, one could completely be oneself, in one’s study as well as in the world; one could let the world in and let oneself out, or at least open oneself to visitors—everyone was welcome in the study, as Diderot says later on—without anxiety or shame, completely naturally. In short, the old dressing gown was what fulfilled the ultimate philosophical dream: to make one’s home the world, and the world one’s home; to be everywhere the same.2 And although this dream of natural self-sameness, everlasting constancy , seems to eliminate any apprehension of exposure to others, it nevertheless involves, as an integral part of its constitution, an appearance, for one appears in this dream “beautiful and picturesque.”3 To be always oneself and thus fully self-sufficient, and to appear or to be subjected to a view from elsewhere: though it might seem otherwise (and has been seen otherwise by the philosophical tradition) these are actually not disjunctive conditions but come together, are essentially interrelated. Yet it is a very specific appearance that is in question: an appearance to a gaze of whose approving judgment one can be certain. To appear beautiful, in this constellation , would be to gain from the gaze that judges its approval: and the gaze saw that...

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