01. Badiou - Lacan and the Pre-Socratics0001

8/7/2019 01. Badiou - Lacan and the Pre-Socratics0001

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1Lacan and the Pre-Socratics

Alain Badiou

IIis always perilous to approach Lacan from a philosophical point of view.For he is an anti-philosopher, and no one is entitled to take this designationlightly.Considering him in relation to the Pre-Socratics isa still more risky under-laking. References to these thinkers in Lacan's work are rare, scattered, andabove all mediated by something other than themselves. There is, moreover,the risk oflosing one's thought in a latent confrontation between Lacan andIleidegger, which has all the attractions of a rhetorical impasse.Having arrived at this perspective on the scope of Lacan's texts, one shouldnot lose sight of the fact that it isa localization, the disinterested examinationof a symptom.The revelatory power of Lacan's references to the Pre-Socratics is secret -Iwould almost say encoded. Three thinkers are invoked: Empedocles,Heraclitus and Parmenides. The invocation is itself caught up in four princi-pal problems. The first can be formulated as follows: to what originaryimpulse of thought is psychoanalysis the heir? The question reaches farbeyond the point where, with Descartes, we enter the modern epoch of thesubject, or what Lacan calls the subject of science. Of course, psychoanalysiscould appear only within the element of this modernity. But as a generalfigure of the will to thought [vouloir-penserl, it enigmatically bears a confron-tation with what ismost originary in our site. Here it isa question ofknowingwhat is at stake when we determine the place of psychoanalysis in the strictlyWestern history of thought, in which psychoanalysis marks a rupture, andwhich isnot at all constituted bybut, rather, punctuated by philosophy.The second problem concerns the relation - which is decisive for Lacan -between psychoanalysis and Plato. Driven by rivalry and contestation, thisrelation is unstable. Lacan's references to the Pre-Socratics clarify theprinciple behind this instability.The third problem is, of course, that of providing an exact delimitation of


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8 THE SILENT PARTNERSLacan's relation to Heidegger. It is to Heidegger that we owe the reactivationof the Pre-Socratics as the forgotten source from which our destiny tookflight . If i t is not a matter here of 'comparing' Lacan to Heidegger - whichwould be meaningless - the theme of origins alone compels us to search forsome measure ofwhat led one to cite and translate the other.Finally, the fourth problem concerns the polemical dimension of psycho-analysis. With respect to what primordial division of thought does psycho-analysis make its stand? Can one inscribe psychoanalysis within an insistentconflict that long preceded it? There isno doubt that Lacan here makes use ofthe canonical opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Lacan opts,quite explicitly, for the latter.

Freud's work was a new foundation, a rupture. But it was also the productof an orientation within thought that rests on divisions and terri tories thatpre-existed it.Lacan's references to the Pre-Socratics thus attest - and herein lies theirdiff iculty - not so much to what is truly revolutionary in psychoanalysis

as to what inscribes it within dialectical continuit ies of what we might callcontinental reach.

1.Those of Lacan's psychoanalytic discoveries that can be made to enter intoresonance with the Pre-Socratics can be grouped around two themes: theprimacy of discourse and the function oflove in the truth-process.

On several occasions Lacan praises the innocent audacity of the Pre-Socratics, who identified the powers of discourse with the grasping of being[ la p ri se s ur l 'e tr ej . Thus, in the seminar on transference, he writes: 'BeyondPlato, in the background, we have this attempt, grandiose in its innocence _this hope residing in the first philosophers, called physicists of finding anultimate grasp on the real under the guarantee of discourse, which is in theend their instrument for gauging experience."

How are we to characterize this peculiar balancing of the 'grandiose' andthe 'innocent'? The grandiose aspect liesin the conviction that the question ofthe Real is commensurable with that of language; the innocence is in nothaving carried this conviction as far asits true principle, which ismathemati-zation. Youwill recall that Lacan holds mathematization to be the key to anyI hi nk .i hl r el at io n to the Real. He never varied on this point . In the seminarI','I/ul/I', he says, without the slightest note of caution: 'Mathematization alonen '; lc iJ cs a r ea l. '. ' Without mathematization, without the grasp of the letter [la

LACAN AND THE PRE-SOCRATICS 9

p ri se d e la le ttr e], the Realremains captive to a mundane reali ty driven by aphantasm.Is this to say that the Pre-Socratic physicists remain within the boundsof the mythic narrat ive which delivers us the phantasm of the world? No,for they outline a genuine rupture with tradit ional knowledge, albeit oneinnocent with regard to the matheme.The latter point is essential. Lacan does not conceive of the Pre-Socratics asthe founders of a tradition, or as a lost tradition in themselves. A tradition iswhat'tra-dicts' [fait ira-dictions the reality of the phantasm of the world. Inplacing their trust in the pure supremacy of discourse, the Pre-Socratics hadthe grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge.This iswhy their writings prefigure mathematization, although the latter isnot present in its li teral form. The premonit ion appears in its paradoxicalinversion, the use of poetic form. Far from opposing, as Heidegger did, thePre-Socratic poem to Plato's matherne, Lacan has the powerful idea thatpoetry was the closest thing to mathematization available to the Pre-Socratics.Poetic form is the innocence of the grandiose. For Lacan, it even goesbeyondthe explicit content of statements, because it anticipates the regularity of thematheme. In Encore, he writes:

Fortunate ly, Parmenides actually wrote poems. Doesn't he use linguistic devices- the l inguist 's tes timony takes precedence here - tha t c lose ly re semble ma the -matical articulation, a lternation after succession, framing after a lternation? It isprecisely because he was a poet that Parmenides says what he has to say to us inthe lea st s tupid of manners . Othe rwise , the idea tha t being is and tha t nonbe ingis not, I don't know what that means to you, but personally I find that stupid.'

This text indeed registers an innocence in its trace of stupidity. There issomething unreal in Parmenides' proposition on being, in the sense of a stillunthought attachment to phantasmatic reality.But the poetic form contains agrandiose anticipation of the matheme. Alternation, succession, framing: thefigures of poetic rhetoric are branded, as ifby an unconscious lightning flash,with the features of a mathematization to come; through poetry, Parmenidesattests to the fact that the grasp of thought upon the Realcan be establishedonly by the regulated power of the let ter. It is for this reason that the Pre-Socratics should be praised: they wished to free thought from any figure thatinvolvesthe simple transmission of knowledge. They entrusted thought to thealeatory care of the let ter, a let ter that remains poetic for temporary lack ofmathematics.The Pre-Socratics' second foundational innovation was to pose the powerof love as a relation of being wherein lies the function of truth. The seminar


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10 THE SILENT PARTNERSon t ransfe rence is, of course , our guiding refe rence here. Take the fol lowingpassage: 'Phaedraos tells us that Love, the first of the gods imagined by theGoddess of Parmenides, and which Jean Beaufret in his book on Parmenidesidenti fies more accurately, I be li eve , wi th tru th than wi th any other func tion,truth in it s radical struc ture .. :. 4 In fact, Lacan credits the Pre-Socratics withbinding love to the question of the truth in two ways.

First of all, they were able to see that love, as Lacan himself says, is whatbrings being face to face with itself ; this is expressed in Empedocles' descr ip-tion of love as the 'power of cohesion or harmony'. Secondly, and above all,the Pre-Socratics pointed out that it is in love that the Two is unleashed, theenigma of the di fference between the sexes. Love i s the appearance of a non-relat ion, the sexual non-relat ion, taken to the extent that any supreme relat ionis punctured or undone. This puncturing, this undoing of the One, is whataligns love with the question of the truth. The fact that we are dealing herewith what brings into being a non-relation in place of a relation permits usalso to say that knowledge is that part of the truth which is experienced in thefigure of hate. Hate is, along with love and ignorance, the very passion ofthe t ruth, to the exten t that i t proceeds as non-re lat ion imagined as re lat ion.

Lacan emblematically ascribes to Empedocles this power of truth as thetorsion that relates love to hate. Empedocles saw that the question of ourbeing, and of what can be stated of its truth, presupposes the recognition of anon-re la tion, an original d iscord. If one ceases to misconstrue i t according tosome scheme of dialectical antagonisms, the love/hate tension is one of thepossible names of this discord.

Freud, as Lacan emphasizes, had recognized in Empedocles somethingclose to the antinomy of drives. In the 'Rome Report', Lacan mentions'the express reference of [Freud's] new conception to the conflict of thetwo principles to which the alternation of universal life was subjected byEmpedocles of Agrigentum in the f if th century BC'. 5 If we allow that what is atstake here is access to being in the shape of a truth, we can say that whatEmpedocles identifies in the pairing of love and hate, philia and neikos, issomething akin to the excess of the passion of access.

Lacan, one suspects, recalibrates this reference in such a way as to putincreasing emphasis on discord, on non-relation as the key to truth. To thisend, he fleetingly pairs Empedocles and Heraclitus. Empedocles isolatesthe two terms through which the necessity of a non-relation is inscribed;Empedocles names the two passions of access, as deployed by a truth.Heraclitus sus tains the primacy of discord; he is the thinker of non-relat ion' schronological prior ity over relat ion. Take, for example, the following lines on(he death drive in 'Aggressivity in Psychoana lysis': 'a v ita l dehiscence tha t is


constitutive of man, and which makes unthinkable the idea of an environ-ment that is preformed for him, a "negative" libido that enables theHeraclitean notion of Discord, which the Ephesian believed to be prior toharmony, to shine once more'." In Lacan's work, the negative libido is con-stant ly connected to Heracli tus. In short , the connect ions be tween love , hate,truth and knowledge were establi shed by Empedoc les and then rad ica li zed byHeraclitus, the originary thinker of discord, of non-relation.

A furthe r p roof of the Pre-Socra ti cs' ant icipat ion of the death drive l ies inthe consequences that can be drawn from their wri tings regarding God. Sincethe God of Empedocles knows nothing of hate, and therefore nothing of thenodal point of excess for the passion of access, one would therefore expectsuch a God's access to truth to be correspondingly rest ric ted. This i sp recise lywhat Lacan, adducing Aristotle's commentary in support, attributes toEmpedocles in Encore:

There was someone named Empedocles - as ifby chance, Freud uses him fromtime to time l ike a corkscrew - of whose work we know but three lines, butAristotle draws the consequences of them very wellwhen he enunciates that, inthe end, God was the most ignorant of all beings according to Empedocles,because he knew nothing of hatred ... . If God does not know hatred, accordingto Empedocles, it isclear that he knows lessabout it than mortals.'

For the startl ing consequences tha t can be drawn from these considerat ions ofGod's ignorance, I refer the reader to Francois Regnault's marvellous bookDieu est inconscienti

What mat te rs here , however, is tha t we observe that , af ter noting the poe ticanticipation of the free functioning of the matherne, Lacan credits thePre-Socratics with an intuition that has far-reaching implications for theresources of truth inherent in sexual discord.

2 .

Let us turn to the problem of stabilizing the relationship between psycho-analysis and Platonism.

In Heidegger 's s trategy, the Pre-Socratics were deployed largely in order todeconstruct Plato and, as a side-effect, to plot the emergence of the systemof metaphysics. Does Lacan conduct a similar operation? The answer iscomplex.Lacan never pursues purely philosophical objectives. His intention, then, isnot to dissect Plato. Rather, Lacan maintains all ambiguous r ivalry with Plato.


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12 THE SILENT PARTNERSFor Plato and psychoanalysis have at least two conceptual undertakings incommon: thinking love as transference, and exploring the sinuous trajectoryof the One. On these two points, it matters a great deal to Lacan to establishthat what he called the 'Freudian way' isdifferent from the Platonic.

In the end, however, it remains the case that Lacan summons the Pre-Socratics to his aid while struggling to mark the boundary between psycho-analysis and Platonism. And it is also clear that the central wager in thisattempt at demarcation once more concerns the theme of non-relation,of discord, of alterity without concept; and, consequently, concerns thedelinking of knowledge and truth.Lacan attributes to Plato a desire for being to be completed by knowledge,and therefore an identification (itself entirely a product of mastery) ofknowledge with truth. The Idea, in Plato's sense,would be an equivocal pointwhich is simultaneously a norm of knowledge and a r a is o n d ' e t r e. For Lacan,such a point can only be imaginary. It is like a cork plugging the hiatusbetween knowledge and truth. It brings a fallacious peace to the original

discord. Lacan holds that Plato's standing declines in the light of Empedocles'and Heraclitus' propositions on the primacy of discord over harmony.It is therefore certain that, for Lacan as for Heidegger, something has beenforgotten or lost between the Pre-Socratics and Plato. I t is not, however,the meaning of being. It is, rather, the meaning of non-relation, of the firstseparation or gap. Indeed, what has been lost is thought's recognition of thedifference between the sexes as such.One could also saythat between the Pre-Socratics and Plato, a change takesplace in the way difference is thought. This is fundamental for Lacan, sincethe signifier is constituted by difference. Empedocles and Heraclitus positthat, in the thing itself, identity is saturated by difference. Assoon as a thing isexposed to thought, it can be identified only by difference. Plato could be saidto have lost sight of this line of argument, since he removed the possibility ofidentifying difference within the identity of the Idea. We could say that thePre-Socratics differentiate identity, while Plato identifies difference. This isperhaps the source of Lacan's preference for Heraclitus.Recalling, in his very first seminar, that the relation between the conceptand the thing isfounded on the pairing of identity and difference, Lacan adds:' IIcracli tus tel ls us - if we introduce absolute mobil ity in the existence ofIhings such that the flowof the world never comes to pass twice by the same

situation, it is precisely because identity in difference is already saturated int l: Ihing'.9 Here we see how Lacan contrasts the eternal identification ofd iIfnl'llces according to the fixed point of the Idea - as in Plato - with thea!Jsolllic differential process constitutive of the thing itself. The Lacanian

LACAN AND THE PRE-SOCRATICS 13conception of the relation between identity and difference - and therefore, inthe thing, between the one and the multiple - finds support, contra Plato, in(he universal mobilism of Heraclitus. This iswhat Lacan observes with regardto the God of President Schreber in the text 'On a Question Preliminary toAny Possible Treatment of Psychosis'. For Schreber, the Creator is 'Unique inhis Multiplicity, Multiple in his Unity (such are the attributes, reminiscent ofHeraclitus, with which Schreber defines him)."?In fact , what Heracli tus allows us to think - and what Plato, on the con-trary, prohibits - is the death drive. The Platonic effort to identify differencethrough the Idea leaves no room for it; Heraclitean discord, on the otherhand, anticipates its every effect.In Seminar VII, when he discussesAntigone'ssuicide in her tomb, and our ignorance of what is happening inside it,Lacan declares: 'No better reference than the aphorisms of Heraclitus.'Among these aphorisms, the most useful is the one which states the corre-lation of the Phallus and death, in the following, striking form: 'Hades andDionysus are one and the same'. The authority of difference allowsHeraclitusto perceive, in the identity of the god of the dead with the god of vit~lecstasy,the double investment of the Phallus. Or, as Lacan notes of Bacchicprocessions: 'And [Heracli tus] leads us up to the point where he says thatif it weren't a reference to Hades or a ceremony of ecstasy, it would benothing more than an odious phallic ceremony,"! According to Lacan, thePlatonic subordination of difference to identity is incapable of arriving atsuch a point.The Pre-Socratics, then, provide ample material from which to reconstruct,from its origins, a far-reaching disorientation of Plato. In this sense,they formpart of the polemical genealogy of psychoanalysis.

3.Turning to Heidegger, we should of course recall that Lacan translated hisLogos, which deals in particular with Heraclitus. I believe that three principalconnections can be drawn between Lacan and Heidegger. They involverepression, the One, and being-for-death [ l 'etre-pour- la-mort]. All three aremediated by the Pre-Socratics,First, Lacan believes he can go so far as to say that there is at least asimilarity between the Freudian theme of repression and the Heideggerianarticulat ion of truth and forgett ing. It is significant for Lacan that, asHeidegger remarks, the name ofthe river of forgetting, Lethe, can be heard inthe word for truth, aletheia . The link is made explicit in the first seminar


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14 THE SILENT PARTNERSwhere, in his analysis of repression in the Freudian sense,we come across thefollowing observation: 'In every entry of being into its habitation in words,there's a margin of forgetting, a lethe complementary to every aletheia?" Sucha repression, then, can with good reason be called 'originary'. Its originarycharacter accords with the correlat ion in origins Heidegger establishesbetween truth and veiling, a correlation constantly reinforced through etymo-logical exegesisof the Pre-Socratics.

Secondly, Lacan takes from Heidegger's commentary on Heraclitus thenotion of an intimate connection between the theme of the One and that ofLogos. This, for Lacan, is an essential thesis. Itwill later be formulated instructural fashion: the aphorism 'there is something of (the) One' [ il y ad 'l 'Un] is consti tutive of the symbolic order. But starting in Seminar III ,in a discussion of the Schreber case, Lacan confirms Heidegger's reading ofHeracli tus. Commenting on the fact that Schreber only ever has one inter-locutor, he adds:

This Einheit [oneness] is very amusing to consider, if we think of this text on'Logos' byHeidegger I have translated, which isgoing to be published in the firstissue of our new journal, La Psychanalyse, and which identifies the logos withHeraclitus's En [One]. And in fact we shall see that Schreber's delusion is in itsown way a mode of relationship between the subject and language asa whole. 13

It is in the most intimate part of clinical practice - that which deals withpsychoses - that the clarificatory power of Heraclitus' aphorisms, supportedby Heidegger, now reappears.Finally, Lacan believes he can also connect the Freudian concept of thedeath drive to Heidegger's existential analysis,which defines Dasein as being-for-death. The emblematic figure of Empedocles serves, in the 'Rome Report',as the vector for this connection: 'Empedocles, by throwing himself intoMount Etna, leavesforever present in the memory ofmen this symbolic act of

his being-for-death'."You will note that in all three occurrences of Heidegger - truth and for-getting, One and Logos, being-for-death - the Pre-Socratics are a requiredreference. Indeed, they are necessary to the extent that one cannot decide ifthe Pre-Socratics are a point of suture, or projection, between Lacan andHeidegger; or if, on the contrary, it is Heidegger who allows Lacan accesstoa more fundamental concern with the Pre-Socratic genealogy of psycho-analysis. I, for one, tend towards the second hypothesis.


4 .

h)J Lacan intends to inscribe psychoanalysis within a destiny of thoughtrh.u is determined by oppositions and divisions originally informed by theI' II :--Socratics.On this view there are two crucial opposit ions: one, as we1 t , I Y e seen, contrasting the Pre-Socratic sense of discord to the dominance of[(Icntity in the Platonic schema. But there is also an opposition, perhaps ~tilliuore profound, within the ranks of the Pre-Socratics, that sets Heraclitus,IPainstParmenides. The clearest text is in Seminar XX:,0

The fact that thought moves in the direction of science only by being attributedtothinking - in other words , the fact that being ispresun:ed to think - : iswhatfounds the philosophical tradition starting from Parmemdes. Parmemdes waswrong and Heraclitus was right. That isclinched bythe fact that, in fragment 93,Heraclitus enunciates oute legei oute kruptei alia semainei, 'he neither avowsnorhides, he s ignifies ' - putting back in its place the discourse of the winning s ideitself - 0 anax ou to manteion este to en Delphoi, ' the prince' - in other words, thewinner - 'who prophesies in Delphi' .15

It is interesting to note that Lacan attributes the foundation of the philo-sophical tradition not to Plato, but to Parmenides. .I said at the outset that the grandiose innocence ofthe Pre-Socratics was tohavebroken with the traditional forms of knowledge. But Parmenides himselfisalso the founder of a tradition. We need, then, to locate two ruptures. Onthe one hand, the Pre-Socratics break with the mythic enunciation, with thetradition of myth that ' tra-dicts' the imaginary reali ty of t?~ wod? But .onthe other at least one of the Pre-Socratics founds a tradition WIth whichLacan in' turn breaks: the philosophical tradition. For Lacan is an anti-philosopher. This anti-philosophy, however, is already manifested, in a certainsense, by Heraclitus. The philosophical idea is that being thi)~ks,~orwan~of aReal [1 ' e tr e p e ns e, a u m an qu e le ree l ]. Against this idea, Heraclitus immediatelyputs forward the diagonal dimension of signification, which is neither revela-t ion nor dissimulation, but an act. In the same way,the heart ofthe psycho-analytic procedure lies in the act i tself . Heracli tus thus puts in its place thepretension of the master, of the oracle at Delphi, bu~ also the pr~tension ~fthe philosopher to be the one who listens to the VOIceof the being who ISsupposed to think. .Finally,Lacan has a dual, even duplicitous re~ation to t.he Pre-SocratlC~,ashe does to the entire history of philosophy. It ISembodied by the relation-ship between two proper names: Heraclitus and Parmenides. Parmenides


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16 THE SILENT PARTNERScovers the traditional institution of philosophy, while Heraclitus refers tocomponents of the genealogy of psychoanalysis. Lacan will adopt the sameprocedure to stabilize his relationship to Plato, distributing it between twoproper names: Socra tes, the discour se of the analyst , and Pla to, the discourseof the master.But this duplicitous split is an operation carried out within the signifier.'Parmen ides i swrong , Heracl itus is r ight ,' says Lacan. Should we not take thi sto mean that, as thought from the point of view of psychoanalysis, philosophyappears as a form of reason that stagnates within the element of this wrong?Or as a wrong which, within the maze of its illusion, none the less makessuffi cient contact with the Real to then fa il to recogn ize the reason behind it?

The Pre-Socrati cs, then, who remain fo r us li tt le more than an assortmentof proper names to whom scattered phrases are ascribed, serve for Lacan as aformal rese rvoi r. These names - Empedocles, Heracl itus, Parmen ides - havejust enough literal weight, just enough aura of significance, to allow him toseparate out , to draw together and, f inally, to formalize the internal dialect icsof anti-philosophy.

Notes1. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VIII Le transfert , 1960-1961(ed. Jacques-Alain Miller) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 98-9.2. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limitsof Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, 1999), p. 131.3. Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan Book XX, p. 22.4. Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre VIII, pp. 66-7.. . s . !acques Lacan, 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis',

IIIEcrits: A Selection (London, 2001), p. 112.6. Lacan, 'Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis', in Ecrits; p. 24.7. Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 89.8. Francois Regnault, Dieu est inconscient (Paris: Navarin, 1986).9. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan, Book I:Freud's Papers on Technique1953-1954, ed. Iacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge, 1988), p. 243.

I? Lacan, 'On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis'in Ecrits, p. 225. '11. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,1959-1960, (New York, 1992), p. 299.12. Lacan, Seminar I, p. 192.13. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956(New York, 1993), p. 124;translation modified.14. Lacan, 'Function and Field ', p. 114.IS. Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 114.

2The Omniscient Body

Miran Bozovic

\ I" Ie the majority of Denis Diderot's most important works - for exampleI, ",'ve de d'Alembert, and the two philosophical novels, Le Neveu de RameauI J "I lacques le [ataliste, that is, the works tha t he is mainly famous for today-

"~I only publi shed posthumously, one of the works tha t acquir ed a certainJ J J t, -rnat iona l fame and even notorie ty in hi s li fetime , but is rare ly read today,J IllS first novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748).III thi s nove l, the philosophy is expounded by the body i tsel f. In this philo-"I'hical fantasy, the body itself has come to speak. The body has a speech

'" gall of its own: it speaks through the organ traditionally considered to bet 1 , ( least submissive to the soul or mind - that is, through the organ that also. t" !ves as the reproductive organ, called euphemist ical ly by Diderot le bijou,

t h,. jewel. These are perhaps the only words in the history of philosophy"' II spoken by the soul or the mind, but by the body (for this reason alone,Ihisexceptional document would deserve a place in the his tory ofphilosophy).lhc philosophy expounded by the body reflecting upon itself and its soul isone of materiali sm, tha t i s to say, Diderot 's own philosophy. This work marksIhe author's transition from the deism of the early Pensees philosophiques(1746) to the fully f ledged mater ialism of Lettre sur lesaveugles (1749) and hislater works. Itwas, then, in considering how to make out the case for thephi losophy of material ism tha t Diderot came up with the idea of the speakingbody, Firmly believing that the body knows more about itself and. its soulthan the soul knows about i tself and its body, Diderot presents the philosophyof mate ria lism as the body's discourse on itse lf. In cont rast to sp iritual ism,where the soul is distinct from the body it animates, in materialism, wherethe soul is nothing other than 'the organization and life' of the body itself,we encounter a body that is its own soul. Once the body is given the powerof speech, the philosophy it will develop is sure to be one of m~terialism,just as the philosophy embraced by fictitious - in ot?er words, h~er~ry orfilm - characters reflecting upon their own ontological status within the

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