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  • L’Autorité du discours: recherches sur le statut des textes et la circulation des idées dans l’Europe des Lumières
  • Jessica Goodman
L’Autorité du discours: recherches sur le statut des textes et la circulation des idées dans l’Europe des Lumières. (Les Dix-huitième Siècles, 147). By Franck Salaün. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010. 450 pp. Hb €85.00.

Taking his inspiration from the Encyclopédie article of a similar name, Franck Salaün brings together a series of his own writings, many of which, at first sight, have only a loose connection with the most basic definition of textual authority given by the Encyclopédie: ‘le droit qu’on a d’être cru dans ce qu’on dit’. However, as the longer title indicates, the status of texts in a much larger sense is also at stake here, and Salaün’s wide-ranging examination of the relationship between form and content tackles this theme in novels, reviews, theatre, philosophy, translation, and more. A long opening section on materialism serves as the basis for a discussion of definition: both the self-definition of the materialists themselves, and the ways in which their contemporaries were forced to take a position with regard to their texts, defining the status of these texts in the process. The category philosophe, too, is drawn into question, with the [End Page 533] exchanges and conflicts between Rousseau and Diderot in particular used as a model for a grand intertextuality: a collective creation in which the authority of individual texts comes precisely from their links with everything external to themselves. These two figures receive particular attention throughout. The ‘character’ of Rousseau himself, like his creations, is viewed as the artificial product of a network, while Diderot’s reflections on his audience, especially in the form of the theatre spectator, serve to demonstrate how reception can also be a collective experience, in which an individual’s reactions are reinforced by those of his peers. These propositions in place, Salaün moves on to a nuanced examination of the tactics of the single author playing with questions of authority in translations (Prévost’s ‘Effet héroïque de vertu morale’), journals (the Abbé Gauchet’s reviews), and fiction (Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste). This analysis of explicitly textual authorial tactics, from denial, anecdote, and displaced critique, to the creation of the reader and the slippage between fiction and truth, which may have seemed the most obvious starting point for a discussion of ‘l’autorité du discours’, is revealed as only one of a whole raft of approaches for acquiring the authorial right to be believed. Salaün’s journey through the landscape of eighteenth-century textual production leaves the reader with the impression, well tested in this period, that no single authority can be trusted. However, while this is commonplace, what Salaün does reveal convincingly is how the exchange and debate that were so characteristic of the Enlightenment also made themselves felt very strongly in the mechanics of textual production and reception. In both domains collectivity was one way of approaching some measure of authority. Absolute truth is not the aim; rather, this method provides the reader with that cherished Enlightenment experience of applying his own reason, and reaching his own conclusions. And indeed, Salaün’s own self-collection acts in a very similar fashion, for in retrospect the initially disparate approaches of his various articles can be seen to form a coherent and intellectually stimulating whole.

Jessica Goodman
Worcester College, Oxford
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