Political Fictions: Revolutionary Deconstructions in Diderot

Diderot died in 1784 and never wrote about the Revolution. Necessarily we see him from the other side of this epochal event. How might we relate to him today? Modernity and postmodernity have regularly been dazzled by Diderot. We have seen our contemporary preoccupations uncannily anticipated in his reflections and representations. Any reader of Jacques le fataliste can recognize just how much the antic textual practices with which Diderot was experimenting in that novel foreshadow familiar postmodernist textual moves. Is this similarity a coincidence? I will claim the contrary. A double relation, of technical inheritance and of shared cultural problematic, links eighteenth-century reflection on "fiction" and "verisimilitude" to current worries about "representation," "language," and "textuality." My essay seeks to tell a story about the perplexities that occur when culture changes-particularly, about what happens when the changes in question involve a fundamental register through which people make sense of the world. In this case, the register in question is the functioning of representation. In our world of virtuality today, the capacity to deal with fictions seems intrinsic and indispensable to experience. But this was not always so. "Fiction" was once a problematic and controversial attainment. During that period of incipience, writers and readers wrestled