Dramatic Experiments: Life according to Diderot

Two: Who Speaks?

TWO Who Speaks? Between Dreaming and Waking BORDEU: Est-ce vous qui parlez? MLLE DE L’ÉSPINASSE: Non, c’est le reveur1 We are dealing then with a dramatic dialogue—a dialogue showing that it is impossible to gather the whole into a single meaningful voice, demonstrating the necessity of at least two speakers being haunted by an outside —whose subject or theme is the question of the relations between an originary absolute sensibility, life, and the genetic emergence of identities, or formed actual things, out of this sensibility. These identities can then appropriate events of sensibility, and such a capacity for appropriation has led theoretical thought to eventually formulate a thinking that assumes a primacy of identity or actuality and is thus a thinking where sensitivity as exposure became secondary to the one who appropriates, understood as having been there at the origin, and as external, or transcendent, to what is to be appropriated. After demonstrating to the unconvinced, yet disturbed, geometrician D’Alembert the experimental principles of his “Why not?” philosophical method, Diderot predicts that D’Alembert will dream about the conversation they have had. Which indeed happens: a dream signals the transition to the dialogue’s second part, “D’Alembert’s Dream” proper, in which the character of Diderot as a speaker disappears, only to be replaced by two (perhaps three?) other speakers: D’Alembert’s companion, Mlle de L’Espinasse, and a medical doctor, le Docteur Bordeu, to whom she sends an urgent summons, being alarmed by the strange, delirious nature of the geometrician’s dreaming speech. I have said that Diderot’s absence is filled by either two or three 43 44 DRAMATIC EXPERIMENTS speakers, since D’Alembert himself becomes a split speaker, speaking in his sleep as well as sometimes intervening, half-awake, in the conversation. We are thus faced with the complication, ever more significantly growing , of the conditions of speech in this text. As a result the questions of who is speaking, how many speakers are there, and the conditions out of which they speak are highlighted and become some of the main issues involved in any engagement with this mysterious text. We therefore must consider to a further extent than we have so far done how the text’s “content” and themes are inextricably implicated with its conditions, or frame, of utterance , with its dramatic medium. Where once the text was the arena of two speakers haunted by an outside, it is now occupied by three speakers, one of whom is dreaming: that is, someone whose speech is double, who speaks beyond himself, so to speak. On top of that, the voice of the philosopher has been replaced by two (or three) voices, whose situation is marked by an additional complication related to the question of sexual difference. The speech situation of the text is thus complicated by 1) the proliferation of voices, from two to three or perhaps four speakers; 2) the emergence of a special type of speech, a dream speech, which is something that speaks beyond or in excess of waking speech; 3) the introduction of the voice of a woman, which thus raises the question of how significant a dialogue across sexual difference is to understand the dramatic speech situation as it is slowly developed in this text, and 4) the more specific question of the figures occupying this complicated speech position, from the philosopher-geometer couple to the woman-medical doctor-dreaming geometer triangle. A pertinent question here is why, precisely, are these the figures who occupy a dramatic text whose subject is the replacement of a metaphysical logic by sensibility’s experimental thinking, a drama which implies that the haunting phantom of an outside precludes the possibility of a monologue or meaningful utterance of a transcendent voice in whose speech everything could gather. Let us start with the question of the dream and of the significance that one of the main speakers of a new type of philosophical text, a text that intends to replace metaphysical transcendence, is a delirious dreamer, and a dreaming geometer at that. What is a dream in this context? It is first of all a speech, and a speech that seems to arise out of a conversation that starts in medias res between two speakers exposed to an outside that can never become part of the conversation. It is, we have seen, the attempt to live up to the conditions of their dramatic-conversational situation and to its conceptual implications...