Matter and Sensitivity: Chardin According to Diderot
Jean-Siméon Chardin, Still Life with Jar of Olives, 1760. Oil on canvas, 71 x 98 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris
About a year ago I was invited to write an article for a book about sensitivity in Denis Diderot’s philosophy. That was a completely unexpected invitation, seeing that I had distanced myself from studying the 1700s and this great thinker a long time ago.
I discovered Diderot at the beginning of my undergrad studies. It was love at first sight. Reading his books was entering a world of multiple interests through the optics of materialism, discovering the matrices of modern literature, coming across unorthodox opinions about the actor’s craft, and visiting halls with walls covered with paintings from ceiling to floor. I enjoyed everything. I still fully identify with these insightful, ironic and, mainly, wandering texts.
For five years I studied the texts he wrote about art. This research resulted in my master’s degree thesis, Diderot: Mecanismos da invenção crítica (Mechanisms of Criticism Invention), in which I analyze the criticisms he wrote about the works exhibited in the Salons of the Academy in the 18th century. In addition to that, I published commented translations of several works by Diderot, among them the novel Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. But after Diderot’s writings led me to study Poussin, I had never read a single line of his books again.
The invitation to write about Diderot made me come back to his work. How well it made me feel to find once again his imagetic, exciting style. Only then did I realize how I missed reading this thinker full of paradoxes and inapprehensible truths.
In my article for the book Sensibilidade e matéria no pensamento de Denis Diderot (Sensitivity and Matter in the Thought of Denis Diderot), which has just been released by the University of Coimbra, I decided to explore the criticisms he wrote about the still lifes of Chardin, one of the 18th century painters I appreciate the most. It was the push I needed to analyze, with due depth, Diderot’s perception of Chardin, which I was not able to do thirty years ago when I focused on making a rhetorical reading of Diderot’s Salons to understand art criticism as a literary genre.
The book Sensibilidade e matéria no pensamento de Denis Diderot was edited by Joaquin Braga and Fabiana Tamizari, of the Institute of Philosophy Studies Institute in the School of Letters at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Sign up herefor free access to the book’s electronic edition (in Portuguese). Soon, the book will be on sale through Amazon in Europe as a print-on-demand edition.
Good reading.