Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment (review)

This volume offers a selection of Marian Hobson's writings from the early 1970s to the present, not only on Diderot and Rousseau, but also on a host of other Enlightenment figures. In their Introduction, editors Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman propose two aims: to honour Hobson, of course, but also to 'stimulate new research in Diderot and Rousseau, particularly in English' (p. 2). As they observe, whereas Rousseau's major works have been well integrated into the discourses of the social sciences, Diderot's contributions to those domains, or to many others, such as linguistics and the history of science, continue to be marginalized. From beginning to end, Marian Hobson's work provides a demonstration of why this should not be the case. Her meticulous readings of Diderot invariably situate them within the interlocking discursive worlds within which they emerged and to which they respond: philosophy, linguistics, art, architecture, mathematics, poetics, life science, political theory. Thus her articles on the philosophical dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau place the text at the intersection of rhetoric and the physiological/medical understanding of sensibilité; her discussion of the novel Jacques le fataliste considers both moralist and mathematical accounts of probability and chance. In a cluster of essays grouped under the rubric 'Measurement', Hobson reflects on the ways in which the concept of 'proportion' both cuts through and unites morality and aesthetics, norms and forms. None of these ideas circulates in a vacuum, and no connections or analogies among writers are taken for granted. Hence Hobson carefully delineates Diderot's relationships with architects and engineers while analysing his (and their) accounts of line and proportion, and she examines what Diderot had read of Hogarth and what Kant had read of Rousseau. It would be one-sided, however, to suggest that the value of these essays lies in their historiographical dimension. Written in French, Hobson's early articles from the 1970s played a major role in the new reading of key Enlightenment texts that emerged in the wake of post-structuralism and in particular the work of Jacques Derrida. It is a pleasure to read them again in Tunstall and Warman's fine translations. They are as acute and relevant as ever. The 1976 piece 'Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds et les muets: Language and Labyrinth' remains one of the finest readings of that complex work. Hobson provides a lucid exposition of the 'inversion debate' that exercised the grammarian-philosophers of the 1750s, then goes on to show how Diderot responds with a stunning critique of conventional notions of meaning and 'the dissolution of the concept of imitation' (p. 256). This piece should be required reading for everyone concerned with language theory, poetics, or translation theory. The editors of the volume claim that 'what we have is not so much a deconstructive reading of Diderot's Lettre as a compelling demonstration of its proto-deconstructionist qualities' (p. 10). I would argue that Hobson's readings exemplify 'deconstructive' reading at its best: philosophically rigorous, historically precise, and attuned to the text in all its multifarious affiliations and subcurrents.