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D id erot from O u tsid e the R esearch M ach in e;nmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVU or R econ tex tu alizin g D id erotQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA R E M Y G. SA IS SE LIN In his difficult but devastating A rt as E x p erien ce, John Dewey re­ ferred to Dr. Johnson as a philistine and even dared to question Kant. The book is devastating of the genteel tradition which Santayana saw as being at bay in the twenties; but which is still far from dead. Dr. Johnson a philistine! What a liberating thought and one which could only have been uttered before the creation of ASECS and the Johnson papers production company got underway. But then there seems to have been some thinking going on in the university community of the 1930s. Now this daring irreverence of Dewey's made me doubt my own teaching and eighteenth-century-literature experience. Was not the eighteenth century made up of so many sacred cows not to be dis­ turbed as we made our way through the university obstacle course? Thus when asked to participate in a panel on Diderot I recalled Dewey and wondered if anyone had ever been irreverent about Diderot since the creation of D id erot S tu d ies. I also wondered if any one, given the multinational enterprise of Diderot studies and Diderot papers pro­ duction, could possibly have anything left to say which had not been said or written before. Is it still possible to think of Diderot and his work or works with one's own mind or must all the other minds who have had thoughts on him and his work be incorporated into one's 241 242 / ponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA SAISSELINnmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA thinking? Surely it is impossible for one man or one woman to read all that has been written and is still being written and spoken about Di­ derot. And surely if the Diderot bibliography is so huge it must be because Diderot is worth this vast research enterprise. The very thought of the task of writing still another paper on Diderot, a respect­ able, and respectful, learned, footnoted, acceptable-for-publication, innocuous, bland, but solid paper on Diderot stunned me, paralyzed me as I vainly tried again to read through the Diderot works I have in my study only to be reminded of all I had not read on or by Diderot. Yes, I tried to read those sacred texts, read so often, quoted so often, commented, analyzed, explicated, edited, reedited, re-reedited, and I could not. Diderot had interested me some twenty years ago when I first started to work in an art museum and had to edit a journal of aesthetics and learned how wrong aestheticians could be when they wrote histories of aesthetics by mostly dismissing French aesthetics. And I thought I freed myself of Diderot once I was safely in a museum and read a paper in Chicago called TSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA D id erot's A esth etic M u d d le. But one can't get away from him and some four or five years ago I had to re­ read him with care for at least one chapter of a study of the Neo­ classic. By early this year I saw no reason for another paper on Di­ derot. Then came a letter from the chair of this section and I was suddenly haunted by Dewey's p etite p h rase. Dr. Johnson a philistine! Think of the shock and the joy of hearing something like that actually said, written, printed. And think of the implications for all those En­ glish departments teaching the Age of Johnson! It was inspiring. And I suddenly started thinking of other potential shocks: D id erot serait-il p h ilistin ou D id erot bou rg eois? D id erot arriv iste! D id erot m arch an d d e tableau x ! After all, p ou rqu oi p as? He was a petit bourgeois who made it to bourgeois respectability; and from Grub Street he made it to the editorship of the E n cy clop ed ic; and among all those hacks who...

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