Rameau's nephew
a dialogue for the enlightenment
pp. 147-151
in: Bo Göranzon, Magnus Florin (eds), Dialogue and technology, Berlin, Springer, 1991Abstract
Diderot's body of writings — including his translation of Shaftesbury, his biography of Seneca and his dialogues — is described as a persistent search for the vital interlocutor, for that other who might stimulate his imagination and onto whom he could project his ideas. To Diderot the dialogue was far more than a narrative strategy or a component of rhetorical technique: he had an aversion to literary speech limited to a single voice. None of his writing is farther removed from monologue than Rameau's Nephew, and it belongs to the dimension of the ambiguous, the uncertain and the paradoxical. If offers a world where new questions are generated and where isolated thought is changed into genuine dialogue.
