We owe our knowledge of Rameau’s Nephew, Denis Diderot’s celebrated dialogue on the contradictions of Enlightenment culture, to that admi- rable, intricate web of cosmopolitan intellectual relations known as the ‘“republic of letters.” Fourteen years after Diderot’s death, the text was unknown to his literary executor Naigeon when he published his friend’s collected works in 1798. It is not known precisely how Catherine the Great of Russia, Diderot’s enthusiastic correspondent, obtained the manuscript she deposited in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage. But we do know that it was in the form of Goethe’s German translation of this version that the dialogue was first made available to the general German read- ing public. Famously, this public included none other than the young
Hegel, who in the inaugural years of the nineteenth century had begun to compose his magisterial intellectual epic, Phenomenology of Spirit. For the Hegel of the Phenemenology, Rameau’s Nephew came to emblematize the inner tensions of the world of culture of the French Enlightenment— including its eventual self-actualization in the bourgeois revolution— whose unprecedented social upheaval was still unsettling European culture as Hegel wrote the influential passages which refer to Diderot. Intriguingly for my purposes, Hegel chose to qualify the new topsy- tur vy world of Enlightenment culture with the term “per version” (Verkehrung). And crucially, he associates the perverse with the Nephew’s uncanny ability in Diderot’s dialogue to cast suspicion on his interlocutor’s every attempt to defend the legitimacy of the ethos of noble virtue from the corruptions of an increasingly hegemonic bourgeois-capitalist world. To be sure, this world had long since begun to penetrate and destabilize the proud terrain of the feudal-cum-monarchical state. Indeed, the Nephew’s discourse represents for Hegel the very Spirit of Enlighten- ment culture itself, which happily runs roughshod over every ethical and political certainty left over from an ancien régime whose desperate efforts to cling to the old ways had long since begun to seem patheti- cally out of date. Thus, “perversion” in Hegel’s analysis refers to the appearance, during the latter eighteenth century, of the effects of an emergent capitalism of private economic self-interest beyond the control of state power; these contradictions turned on its head the worldview of noble privilege and allowed for the vertiginous perception of an absolute relativism of value—the dialectical drama of identities turning into their opposites—to which the Nephew’s discourse bears witness.
My suggestion in this chapter will be that Hegel identifies in the character of Rameau’s nephew an ambivalent and politically worrisome, but nonetheless potentially subversive, response to the uncertainties of this new unstable world. This response features a latent fetishization of the new economic powers of the bourgeoisie, one which vacillates be- tween a drive toward self-enslavement to the demands of the new eco- nomic order, and an embryonic, self-censored critique of its continuing social injustices. But my aim will be not merely to diagnose the Nephew by attributing to his person this or that psychoanalytic clinical category; he remains, after all, a literary character. Rather, I will argue that though the Nephew’s discourse as informed by Hegel’s interpretation does in- deed betray indications of perversion in its strong, structural psychoana- lytic sense, it also contains the seeds of an authentically political process of hystericization. Indeed, the Nephew’s inkling of the self-deception and ultimate emptiness of a bourgeois ideology which attributes self- consciousness to wealth brings to light the disruptive, at once social and
subjective, truth Hegel wants to claim as a valuable legacy of Enlighten- ment culture.
We may begin by recalling the parameters of Diderot’s singular text.
Rameau’s Nephew is effectively a dialogue between two characters, re- ferred to as Moi and Lui, interspersed with occasional first-person nar- ration from Moi’s point of view. Moi is an embodiment—but simplified to the point of caricature—of the French Enlightenment philosophe,1
with his characteristic faith in disinterested virtue, continuous social progress, and innate human rationality. Indeed, Moi provides Diderot with a position from which he can critique the naive assumptions of his own intellectual class, in particular its failure to acknowledge the archa- ism of a system of noble virtue whose certainties had been crushed by the deterritorializing violence that capital performed on the traditional prerevolutionary social identities. The philosopher’s interlocutor Lui is the bohemian, possibly deranged, in any case disreputable nephew of the great Rameau, the noted eighteenth-century French composer. As the reader learns, the Nephew earns his living as a kind of professional clown or court jester who is theoretically hired by rich bourgeois fami- lies (with aristocratic pretensions) to work as the children’s music tutor, but who in practice provides mindless distraction and amusement for all. Everywhere Diderot emphasizes the Nephew’s absolute economic de- pendence on his nouveau-riche patrons, as well as the virtually unbear- able psychical tension to which his position gives rise. Mounting a performance of polite obedience in which on one level he seems desper- ate to believe, the Nephew is forced to repress his awareness of the brute injustice of his situation in a world increasingly enslaved to the cult of wealth.
Diderot presents his text as a comic pastiche of the Socratic dia- logue, albeit one with thoroughly serious philosophical implications. The dialogue pits the philosopher’s dogmatic faith in human goodness and the collective good against the Nephew’s rather unhinged, yet poten- tially subversive, discourse which lays bare, often despite itself, the socioeconomic power relations of late ancien régime society. On the surface Diderot’s dialogue functions mainly as a vehicle for his discus- sion of the aesthetic questions—the nature of artistic genius, the relative merits of French versus Italian musical styles—with which he was con- cerned. But on a deeper level it is to the question of the possibility of an authentic ethics in a brutally unjust world that Diderot devotes his liter- ary and philosophical imagination. And not coincidentally, it is to the suggestive theoretical implications of the dialectical conflict between Moi’s moral dogmatism and Lui’s relativist nihilism that Hegel, in his compelling interpretation, trains his dialectical eye.
More specifically, the fundamental disagreement between the two interlocutors takes place around the problem of the nature and value of virtue. The philosopher, a sort of journalistic pseudo-Kantian, is con- vinced of the human agent’s capacity to devote itself purely to the public interest, unsupported by the promise of material gain. As I will explore further below, Hegel’s analysis implies that in sociological terms the philosopher’s ideology arises from the separation of the classical seven- teenth-century ideal of honnêteté from the structure of noble privilege which was its material condition. The Nephew, better acquainted than the philosopher with life’s brute realities, avers that the world, ruled by the law of the jungle, destroys all those who do not presuppose the omnipotence of self-interest in the regulation of human affairs. In Hegel’s analysis, the Nephew partially embodies the new bourgeois ethos, which invests its ambitions firmly in the accumulation of private wealth, and which consequently, in proto-Foucauldian fashion, views all normative, altruistic values as impositions of an alien power. But because the Nephew is only a parasite of the bourgeoisie, and therefore not in any objective sense a member of it, he is capable of recognizing the fundamental illusion on which its thought is based. Such, then, is the context of the controversy that the dialogue enacts. For the Nephew, everything is permitted in a transformed, untrustworthy world in which all values tend toward their ignoble opposites; the philosopher, in pathetic con- trast, valiantly advances his faith in the imminent transcendence of human interest, all the while being forced to grant the scandalous truth of the Nephew’s counterarguments, and failing to match in examples of virtue his opponent’s seemingly endless stream of evidence of the baseness of human motivations.
The placement of the commentary of Rameau’s Nephew within the general architectonics of Hegel’s text provides a number of clues about the significance of his interpretation of Diderot. The section containing the rather discreet references to the dialogue is situated within the subchapter “Self-alienated Spirit. Culture.” This section outlines the dia- lectic of Enlightenment’s “pure intellectual insight,” which attempts to recuperate faith’s placement of the essence of consciousness in an otherworldly beyond within a form of being-for-self located inside the limits of a worldly, secular culture.2 For Hegel, the moment of culture
(Bildung) to which Rameau’s Nephew belongs refers historically to the apogee of French court society which, he suggests, already contained the seeds of its own destruction. With its characteristically intricate battles for distinction and recognition through the performance of conversa- tional brilliance, as well as its embodiment of political authority in the sole personage of the absolute monarch, culture represents within Hegel’s
larger dialectical framework an unprecedented extraneation of the self from its natural immediacy into a universal form. Hegel considers this modern self-alienation to be much more radical and universal than that suffered by the atomized consciousness articulated through Spirit’s previous incarnation in Roman legal right. On a more abstract or con- ceptual level, culture’s significance consists for Hegel in the unprec- edented manner in which it attempts to resolve the contradiction between the in-itself and the for-itself by means of a forced externalization of consciousness in the universal substance, one in which the self could then presumably recuperate its being in a unified self-apprehension, alienated by no objectification from a form of self-consciousness exter- nal to itself.
As the rest of Hegel’s analysis makes clear, the emergence of this ever-changing field of culture is made possible by the destabilization of the old feudal social identities put in place by the differentiating, ab- stracting, and relativizing forces of monetary relations which begin to act in modernity as the new magnets for self-consciousness. Referring to the emergent class of financiers already socially visible in the late seventeenth century, La Bruyère claimed that such people “are neither parents nor friends, citizens nor Christians, nor perhaps are they even men—they have money.”3 Thus, the early-modern, prerevolutionary
period inaugurates for Hegel a world in which the subject’s essence is no longer identified with its objective positioning within the social hier- archy, as was the case in the feudal social formation. Rather, this posi- tioning becomes a function of the subject’s ability to alienate its natural essence through a skillful manipulation of the codes and conventions by which it is circumscribed, a cultural mobility made possible by the new mobility of capital. Indeed, in the world of culture which produced Diderot’s dialogue, these externalizations of consciousness acquire an ambition of absolute totality, giving rise in the process to what Hegel calls “pure intellectual insight,” a form of self-consciousness which rec- ognizes no alien “outside,” no stubborn in-itself which resists such an imperative of extraneation. Recognizing “everything as self,” pure intel- lectual insight negates the possibility of both the transcendental self- presence posited by the heavenly beyond of faith, as well as any immanent, intrinsic objectivity which would place a limit on either the secular absolute Being of Deism—that peculiar, nominally atheist reli- gion of Enlightenment—or the hegemony of the principle of utility, which would finally come to dominate the development of Enlightenment ethi- cal ideology (486).
Intellectual insight’s unlimited mediation of consciousness comes to define the ver y essence of Enlightenment culture for Hegel. “This
insight, as the self that apprehends itself,” he contends, “completes [the stage of] culture. It apprehends nothing but self, and everything as self. It comprehends everything, wipes out the objectivity of things and con- verts all intrinsic being into a being for itself” (486). In this way Enlight- enment Spirit in its most developed form attempts to transform the field of culture into an independent, hermetic, full totality severed from any form of suture to the real of sociopolitical antagonism. In psychoanalytic terms, Hegel’s world of culture puts into practice a kind of proto- postmodern ego psychology in which, though allowance is made for continual flux and dialectical reversal, consciousness is nonetheless formed through a gesture of disavowal. What is disavowed is the ego’s subjection to a painful exclusion from consciousness which disallows the full translation of the cultural universality into the terms of symbolic or linguistic exchange. By denying that culture (or discourse in the contemporary Foucauldian sense) might prove inadequate to the histori- cal or psychical real, Enlightenment’s pure intellectual insight declares its opposition to faith and the supremacy of the principle of utility: No reference to a transcendental or unknowable realm of divinity is re- quired to legitimate the field of cultural forms; nor is there any longer a conceptual impediment to the full extension of a rational criterion representing the collective Good.4
Through its proclamation of the absolute Self, radical Enlighten- ment for Hegel effectively collapses the distinction between subject and object, thereby equating consciousness with the objective forms through which it is made manifest, and subsuming judgments pertaining to cul- tural and political value under an unlimited and omniscient sensuous ego. This unlimited, perverse extraneation of self-consciousness disal- lows all reference to anything outside itself, thereby inaugurating a radi- cal epistemological relativism and linguistic nominalism, the distressing consequences of which, I will suggest, are figured in the person of Diderot’s Nephew. But before turning to a closer examination of how the Nephew embodies the symptoms of Enlightenment’s cultural ambi- tion, let us first interrogate in greater detail this ambition’s kinship with the project of a contemporary postmodernity.