Galathée pulvérisée. Expérience de l’altérité et sensibilité dans « Le Rêve de d’Alembert » de Diderot

As a matter of fact, the pulverization of Falconet’s statue, which Diderot sketches out at the beginning of his Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), does not represent an iconoclastic act, but it’s rather an attempt to tell the genesis of a conscience – regardless of the traditional forms of the myth, but on the basis of its material. This way, the materialist approach to physics is reflected by a materialism of writing that decomposes in order to create something new. In doing so, Diderot readopts his reflection on the corpuscular and atomist theories: it’s exclusively in relation to a second molecule that the particle’s function within a system can be defined. Thus, the philosophe affirms the pivotal importance of the experience of alterity with the aim to integrate a part into a whole, but also of the completion of conscience as self-consciousness. By analogy, the sensibility of the living being arises due to the rhythm of an external impulse and its absence. In the context of such a dialogic founding of the subject, Diderot ends up suggesting a rearrangement of Falconet’s sculpture, whereby the sculptor doesn’t content himself with only kneeling at Galatea’s feet but actually touches her.