Le Neveu de Rameau Reading Order

Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew, written c.1762-77, first published in Goethe's German translation 1805, French original 1823) by Denis Diderot is one of the strangest and most philosophically rich works in the French tradition — a dialogue between 'Me' (Diderot or a Diderot-figure) and 'Him' (the actual nephew of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, a failed musician, parasite, and brilliant mimic), set in the Café de la Régence in Paris. The dialogue ranges across topics — music, morality, the theater, the life of the philosophe, the role of the flatterer at a great man's table, the education of children, the question of whether a person of real talent must be a person of integrity — and is notable for the extraordinary vitality and freedom of 'Him', who argues for a kind of principled amorality with such intelligence and verve that Diderot (as interlocutor) cannot entirely refute him. The work is one of the foundational texts of modern thought about the relationship between aesthetics and morality, and about the role of the disreputable, socially marginal figure as a truth-teller about the systems that exclude him. Hegel read it (in Goethe's translation) and called it 'the world spirit's self-estrangement'; it is one of the works Marx recommended most highly; and it is recognized as one of the masterpieces of French prose.