Abstract

The body issue is frequently discussed by contemporary critical theory. It relates to philosophical, cultural and visual endeavors and originates in the Platonic opposition between mind and body, thinking and feeling. In order to comprehend our present, it is therefore necessary to look back into past assumptions and dogmas. ;My dissertation is inscribed in the field of History of Ideas. It is inspired by Foucault's notion of archeology of knowledge. I demonstrate that Diderot's Salons articulate a shift from classical aesthetic philosophy to a -modern conception of art criticism. I contend that Diderot's emphasis on the physical, his prioritizing subjectivity over rationality and sensation over judgment, derive from his very physiological experience of the nine cataloguing of the Louvre's exhibits. By relying not only on the Salons but also on seventeen other of his texts, I show that Diderot ruptures from his era's postulates of Ideal Model, Beautiful Nature ... to ground aesthetic pleasure and evaluation within his own and his readers' body, and bring them back from the realm of transcendence. ;Reading his work through Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida primarily, I ask that Diderot be included in a genealogy of post-modernity, as I define it, and that these texts be read from a post-modern perspective on the Body elaborated by the American feminist critique founded on these thinkers and Lacanian psycho-analysis. ;Chapter I retraces Diderot's philosophical background and deconstructs his subversion of aesthetic postulates. ;Chapter II focuses on his manipulating the literary media at his disposal to translate his physical reaction to works of art as individual phenomena. ;Chapter III demonstrates his construing a solely male public and analyzes the kind of gaze involved in his criticism. ;Chapter IV proves that, in spite of his positive attitude towards female intelligence, Diderot perpetuates the exclusion of women from artistic and intellectual endeavor. ;I conclude that although Diderot differed from his contemporaries by constructing the body as Content and no longer pure Form, he was unable to go beyond seeing women as sheer object of a gaze and failed at envisioning the Body in its gendered totality