Diderot's Part (review)

Diderot's Part continues the fruitful line of research that argues for the philosophe's precocious modernity as a thinker who has come of age in the post-structural moment. As Andrew Clark tells us in one of many expertly crafted footnotes, the idea to explore the relationship between the part and the whole in Diderot's œuvre is inscribed in scholarship carried out over the past two decades by Walter Rex, Wilda Anderson, Daniel Brewer, Jay Caplan, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Rosalina de la Carrera, Julie Candler Hays, Thomas M. Kavanagh, and Pierre Saint-Amand. Their work valorized Diderot's œuvre as key to understanding what was at stake in the Enlightenment, namely its dialectical nature under the dual guises of reason and the senses. While the critics cited above expressed their exploration of this duality through a variety of metaphors, including counterpoint, circuitry, and labyrinths, Clark has taken up the felicitous example of the part and the whole. This allows him to delve into areas of Diderot's thought on art, body, and the theatre, where the contradictions inherent in Diderot's epistemology now reveal themselves as productive instead of oppositional. Rather than a struggle between competing forces resulting in nothing, Diderot's contradictions, or 'dissonances', as Clark refers to them in Chapter 3, 'The Figure of Dissonance', are read as sites of production and creativity in Diderot's artistic, physical, and philosophical worlds. Clark's insistence on the application of the term 'dissonance' and his analysis of the term are key to this breakthrough in Diderot Studies. The perception of dissonance is predicated upon the ear's identification of two distinctly separate notes whose relationship is evident nonetheless in the vibrations that unite them and in our perception of their relationship as dissonant. Indeed, dissonance requires recognition of the other and negotiation. Using ample examples from Diderot's œuvre, Clark reinforces this principle. A remarkable instance is provided in Chapter 2, 'The Poetics of Order', where Diderot's 1743 translation of Shaftsbury's 1711 Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit, is analysed. The translation reveals Diderot's breaking with Shaftsbury's notion of the unwavering relationship between the part and the whole in animal economy and the eschewing of the monstrous. Diderot is aware of how translation uproots the identity of the text. Through language, through translation, fixed orders are undone, making new orders possible, such as the order of the monstrous. Diderot's translation has undermined the final causes in Shaftsbury's argument through a 'poetic' reading, with notes and commentaries of dialogic grist that call attention to how the translation of particular terms liberate Shaftsbury's text. In Clark's volume comprised of three lengthy chapters, Chapter 3 constitutes a culminating moment where the contents of the first two chapters, 'Autonomous Fibers and Secreting Organs' and 'The Poetics of Order', are distilled in a discussion of dissonance as musical, somatic, and poetic figures that, when studied together against the paradigm of the part and the whole, make it possible to see more clearly the postmodernism of the Enlightenment, especially when read through Diderot. Diderot's Part should not be tackled by the novice; for the experienced Diderot scholar, however, it provides both a synthesis of the best of recent Diderot scholarship and a direction for its future.