Diderot's Encyclopedic Poetics

In this essay, I argue that Diderot's writing on Vernet in the Salons becomes a place in which Diderot puts forth an encyclopedic poetics that transforms the end of the poetic and what WJT Mitchell calls "ekphrastic impossibility" into a kind of counter-poetics, in which the isolated list, the extreme structure, becomes a form of poetry, a conceptualist poetics of knowledge that rethinks categories and is epistemologically specific. In doing so I argue against Hegelian readings of Diderot's text, such as that of Norman Bryson in Word and Image who sees the contradictions of modes in Diderot's writing on Vernet as representing the end of the poetic and the triumph of reason.