ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a case study, Denis Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameait. It examines whether a kind of deferred context in the culture of the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be constructed for it, and in particular, whether Hegel's use of it in what was its future can be so construed, revealing something about the temporality of the satire. Diderot is, in Le Neveu de Rameau, worried by the monotony and banality of much of modern life, the pressures to behave like everyone else, coupled with the need to behave unlike anyone else in order. Treating concerns that surface chronologically later in the eighteenth century — the measurements of classical statues, their relation to individuals, the way their averaging of individual aspects is used to achieve the 'classical', the normal, the neutral — can act as a context for a series of Diderot's works.
