Diderot: le combattant de la liberté by Gerhardt Stenger (review)

postale par Begag est amplement discutée ainsi que plusieurs albums bilingues (288). Dans la troisième partie destinée aux enseignants, Schneider analyse les implications pédagogiques de l’enseignement de la littérature migrante, dont elle regrette l’absence dans les manuels scolaires. Dans un plaidoyer pour le multiculturalisme, elle lance le ton pour une défense de l’enseignement des littératures migrantes et préconise son enseignement en l’absence de l’histoire de l’immigration. Elle propose deux études de cas qui reflètent les concepts de résilience/reliance dans les œuvres de Halley L’oasis d’Aïcha et Un train pour chez nous de Begag (362–63). Schneider épilogue avec l’analyse de deux cas d’études destinés à un jury d’IUFM: Mon miel, ma douceur de Piquemal et la pièce Bleu, Blanc, Gris de Smadja ainsi qu’une étude comparative de l’œuvre-clé de Begag Dis Oualla dans deux lycées professionnels. Cet ouvrage a le mérite de mettre en amont la recherche internationale avec des experts des littératures francophones, des études postcoloniales et de la littérature de jeunesse. Huston-Tillotson University Anne Cirella-Urrutia Stenger, Gerhardt. Diderot: le combattant de la liberté. Nantes: Perrin, 2013. ISBN 978-2-262-03633-1. Pp. 790. 29 a. A celebration of the tricentennial of Diderot’s birth, this extensive volume is at once a biography and a series of analyses of his works. Stenger painstakingly studies the writings of the eighteenth-century philosophe from the beginnings of his career to his final years. A great effort is made to elaborate all their complexities and ambiguities of meaning without simplification. There are irreducible difficulties in any attempt to find an all-embracing unity in Diderot’s thoughts and ideas. An especially complex issue is that of morality and freedom of choice. In his earlier writings, Diderot celebrated bienfaisance as the foundation of ethics. One derives fulfillment from doing good to others. Benefitting one’s fellow human beings benefits oneself. Later he placed greater emphasis on the concepts of political freedom and justice as the bases of his moral code. The citizen achieves the greatest happiness by merging his/her own selfinterest with the interests of the social collectivity. At the same time, Diderot never reached a completely clear definition of the extent to which we can make free choices. We are determined by our biological make-up as well as by the education we receive. The words virtue and vice are sometimes dismissed as meaningless, sometimes the objects of sentimental effusions. Great geniuses are accorded the right to transcend the rules imposed on the majority. Diderot sometimes pondered the question of how one can live a moral existence without belief in God and the sanctions of religion. He thought it was possible but also had doubts. Stenger finds a consistency of atheistic materialism from Diderot’s earliest works and plays down the description of his first philosophical writings as deistic. Diderot came to reject the Newtonian worldview of a mechanistic universe in favor of a more biologically/chemically oriented vision of an 230 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 231 ever-growing, developing universe where matter is perpetually in motion and everything is in a process of change. “Subsistant” nature is the world we see now, but our knowledge of it is limited by the fact that it is only a moment in the unending evolution of “general” nature, a material but sensitive organism that is eternal and infinite. The culminating expression of his cosmic vision is in Le rêve de d’Alembert.Along the way, Stenger offers some fine insights into Diderot’s best-known works. In Jacques le fataliste, an exploration of all the possibilities of storytelling, the reader is left wondering whether people act because it is written on high or whether it is so written after they decide on what to do. The debate presented in Le neveu de Rameau seemingly ends in a draw between two atheistic materialists whose differing moral codes are equally valid extrapolations of their shared beliefs. The divergences in their social behaviors appear merely projections of their inherent personalities...