Kristin Reichel

The works of Denis Diderot, classics of the Enlightenment, to this day fascinate in their various and heterogeneous forms of representation and continue to raise interpretative questions. With the help of a methodological concept of transformation, Diderot’s œuvre is to be reexamined and answers to these questions shall be proposed, premised on the assumption that Diderot consciously constructed the relationship between content and form in his texts. From this perspective, motifs and topics shall be traced across the entire period of the 'philosophe's' creative productivity; smaller linguistic and semantic units shall be examined as well. The direction of transformation is a given within the postulate of the Enlightenment. In the case of Diderot, transformations begins with criticism of metaphysical and religious world interpretations and progresses toward a materialistic and scientific description of the phenomena – a description yet to be determined more precisely in the course of this study.

The crux of this project's argument rests in the thesis that Diderot not only "enlightens" content, but that he also "enlightens" modes of representation. This means that language, as the most important of the 'philosophe', is itself subject of criticism, and thus recives in Diderot's sense, a "materialistic" form. The problematization of language is intertwined with that of the author, i.e. the writing subject. Much diverse evidence for this thesis can be found in Diderot's texts, particularly in his fiction.

A further thesis is that this constellation of problems – the precarious subject/author and its forms of representation against a backdrop of an idealistic or materialistic approach to the world – also can be found in the works of Hegel and Roland Barthes. However, the focus shall not be on the similarities between the three authors, but rather on the differences contingent upon historical circumstances.