ABSTRACT
The power of illusion that Diderot seeks to enforce in his theatre largely articulates itself in terms of the visual medium. Concepts such as the tableau, gesture and pantomime, aesthetic postulates that were first formulated in De la pesie dramatique and the Entretiens, continue to be key to a theory of illusion in the Paradoxe. Diderot's materialist representation of time, as opposed to a historical materialist aesthetic, captures a successive rhythmical experience. Brecht, on the other hand, extracts from the gestus the dynamics of an imitatio naturae. For Diderot, the tableau unambiguously serves as a means to frame sociopolitical situations in a way that they authorize a particular viewpoint on them as an objective kind of aesthetic configuration of reality. Despite Diderot's eighteenth-century reflections that highlight the expressive and affective qualities of the gesture, it is possible to detect in his writing and thinking an intense preoccupation with the gesture that marks an interest in alienation.
