ABSTRACT
To the reader familiar with Brecht, it comes as a surprise that in this eighteenth-century treatise, written against the background of bourgeois emancipation and Enlightenment philosophy, Diderot was proposing a theory of acting which in its technical aspects, and sometimes even in its formulations, foreshadows Brecht's twentieth-century modernist innovations. Parallels between these two dramaturgical systems have been described in terms of a shared Enlightenment politics. Theatrical aesthetics emerge as an order with its own specific laws and powers that are not necessarily always congruous with the moral ideas of the bourgeois philosopher. Here, the notion of alienation transpires as a consequence of acting itself. In sum, Diderot's self-alienated acting technique is thus one of liberation, one in which the mind is endowed with uncompromised voluntarism and authority in order to realize the poetic as well as political project of the text.
