Pour une esthétique herméneutique. Du Dictionnaire historique et critique de Bayle à l’Encyclopédie

This paper explores tensions at work in the great 18th-century Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert between, on the one hand, the need for abridgement and summary in order to manage the early modern abundance of knowledge; and, on the other, the critical spirit of copious polyphony that animates the encyclopaedic project. These tensions are the legacy of the dictionary conflicts of the late 17th century, but are also very much at work in the digital age. In the Encyclopédie they lead to the elaboration of a new interactive aesthetic that we have designated “hermeneutical aesthetics”. With the help of computational approaches developed in the digital humanities, the paper analyses the fragile equilibrium between abundance and criticism that the encyclopédistes sought to establish and maintain with varying degrees of success. Once uncovered, it becomes clear that the playful instability at the core of this aesthetic underscores the relevance of the Encyclopédie in dealing with the digital abundance of our own age.