The beholder as a voyeur: political implications of diderot´s thought on arts

Abstract

In this article we propose a link between the dramatic and pictorial theories and the social and political criticism of Denis Diderot. In the historical moment of the decline of both tragedy and neoclassical conventions, the philosophe tries to recover the moving capacity of theater. In order to achieve this objective, he suggests, among other things, that the plays should be written and acted as if the beholder didn´t exist, placing him in the position of a voyeur that has access to glimpse, from a hidden place, what is not meant to be seen. The same requirement is repeated in his reflections on painting, outlined in the Salons that he writes for the Correspondence Littéraire from 1759. In an extensive reading of the author’s works, we demonstrate that the strategy defended by him has a relevance that transcends its poetical and pictorial implications: it arises, in fact, from a political inconvenience and aims to denounce the hypocrisy and falsehood surviving in in eighteenth-century French culture as remnants of courtly and aristocratic society.