There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
Friedrich NietzscheWhile the French Revolution was brewing in Europe in the mid-1700s, black radical revolution had been lurking in the realities and the imagination of enslaved and colonized peoples of Europe since the beginnings of Western expansion. While often the self-proclaimed revolutionary subject coming out of the French Enlightenment was the revolutionary intellectual and the bourgeois, the revolutionary collective that Denis Diderot, among the most prominent of these revolutions’ ideological and philosophical parents, imagined in Les bijoux indiscrets, was neither bourgeois nor European: it was artisan as well as aristocratic, female, and black. This novel is generally placed in the genre of a roman-à-clef in the French orientalist tradition, and accorded little literary significance beyond its being a rather transparent allegory for a dissipated pre-Revolutionary French society, set in a fantasy where the sexual organs of women speak.Footnote 1 My reading understands the jewels in the title of the novel not only as a reference to women's sexual organs, but also as a symbolic reference to the colony of Saint Domingue as the jewel par excellence of the French colonial system. In his short essay “On the Problem of Translation,” Friedrich Nietzsche posits that, in the context of early European imperial processes, literary translation was the cultural handmaiden of the material violence of imperial conquest; that, in the case of the early Roman translators of the Greek poets, “anything past and alien was an irritant, [and] nothing but a stimulus for yet another Roman conquest.” In a word, “to translate meant to conquer.”Footnote 2 In this vein, and as Doris Garraway points out, “In the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, ‘colonial discourse’ has been described as the epistemological corollary to colonial violence, a system of knowledge and representation through which Europeans produced, defined and contained non-European difference and, in the process, developed ideological justifications of colonialism.”.Footnote 3 Thus, within this framework, this article reads the incomprehensible language that is the core concern in Diderot's novel as the emergence of a disruptive language (the language of the non-European other) that is making itself heard. In addition, through a Nietzschean understanding of the power struggles inherent in language, I understand Diderot's narrative about a dissipated sultan intent on translating and understanding the incomprehensible speech of women's sexual organs to be, at a deeper level, about the unspeakable repressed European self-horror that emerged in relation to the advances of colonialism and anticolonial black agency in the Americas. The depth of this horror combined with the highly repressive political regime and censorship of Louis XV to produce a narrative, an unspeakable self-knowledge that could only be articulated in what Diderot presented as an indiscreet language, produced by the morally questionable organs of dissipated female bodies. Within the logic of the narrative, the indiscretion of the female sexual organs is that they speak a language that is deeply disruptive and alarming to the fabric of society. In my reading, the indiscretion of this language is that it speaks of black revolution. In his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche writes of language and power, almost as if with Diderot in mind:
That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuition rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.Footnote 4
This article proposes that Diderot's Bijoux be understood as a symbolic representation of the smashing of the immense ideological, political, and discursive framework of the processes of Enlightenment, colonialism, and empire in which Diderot finds himself; a coded expression of a kind of forbidden and indiscreet knowledge that emerged in relation to the horrific practices of the colonial Antilles. This indiscreet knowledge, or dangerous awareness, could not be articulated within the Encyclopédie, which was written and produced under the dangerously censoring eye of the king, and yet needed to find expression. My reading of what is often criticized as an incoherent novel written on a whim understands it as a muffled tale of the unspeakable subjects of Europe: black self-agency, the horrific colonial cruelty to which blacks were responding, and the unjustifiability of a Europe defined and enabled by the labor, consciousness, and being of the blacks without whom Europe would not be. My argument does not require that Diderot was directly representing Caribbean slave revolts. I contend that his text represents something that Diderot could only represent through indiscreet babble, forbidden metaphors and the imaginative pairing of the most alien things: the awareness of a culturally dispersed European anxiety concerning Antillean black consciousness and rebellion as an undoubtedly justified response to European colonialism and empire and the centrality of black consciousness to revolution and social change in Europe.Footnote 5
Using Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets as a case study, this article suggests that the unspeakable elements of the revolutionary imaginary in France were partly worked out in marginal texts that were written alongside the major intellectual treatises of the time, most notably the Encyclopédie.Footnote 6 These peripheral texts, of which Bijoux is an example, can be understood as shadow repositories of an ideological process documented in the Encyclopédie. This is to say, the intrinsic importance of Africa and blacks to the Enlightenment is registered unevenly in texts like Bijoux.Footnote 7 In his encyclopedic work, Diderot would organize and categorize knowledge in a process that would set the horizon for cultural debates that would produce and register a new social order. Bijoux reveals a web of consciousness – the blackness of the French imaginary and the horror of colonialism – which the Encyclopédie could not register. Diderot was contracted to compile the Encyclopédie in 1747, and published Bijoux in 1748. As he documented the emerging trends of thought that would reshape the foundational power network of the French monarchical system in the Encyclopédie, the traditions and histories of anticolonial activism had already constituted a lived reality for thousands of colonial subjects across the sea. American and African populations had been subjected to the European colonial system for hundreds of years and had crafted rich and unevenly legible traditions of resistance and self-affirmation throughout the Americas.Footnote 8 The heightened violence peculiar to some colonies provoked greater resistance: Suriname and Saint Domingue, two of the harshest plantation colonies, produced important cultures and traditions of black self-organization and resistance, which, in the case of Haiti, resulted in the declaration of the first black nation in the Americas. The revolution in Saint Domingue was key, inspiring a similar, although failed, movement on Guadeloupe. In addition, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Simón Bolívar looked to Haiti for support in his struggle for the independence of Greater Colombia, which marked the beginning of the revolutionary wave on the central and southern American continent. At the time that Diderot and d'Alembert had begun to work on the Encyclopédie, the first volume of which was published in 1751, it had been almost two centuries since Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas had published his Brevísima Relación de La Destrucción de Las Indias (1552), a testimony of the devastation of Spanish colonialism on Hispaniola. More than two centuries later, by the time Diderot and d'Alembert began their collaboration, European colonial discourse had developed extremely powerful tools to justify the continuation of the savagery of European colonialism.Footnote 9 But the criticism of European colonialism that Diderot would articulate in his contributions to Abbé Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes (1770), as well as in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772), did not emerge suddenly. The critique of colonial practice that would emerge clearly in the Histoire and the Supplément was latent already in 1748 when he wrote Bijoux. It is my contention that this critique emerged in relation to the effects of black agency on the French imaginary well before the rise of the anticolonial consciousness exemplified in the Histoire and the Supplément. Moreover, if Bijoux can be understood as a transparent critique of monarchical power in France, it is my contention that this critique is articulated through an anticolonial positionality resulting from the largely unacknowledged influence of black anticolonial consciousness on white European subjects.
The story the novel tells is not only indiscreet because of the organs and bodies through which it is told. This is only the surface transgression, which I contend masked a much deeper affront to the French imaginary: a coded representation of the inherent blackness of France, the impossibility of the free French subject without the example of black struggle for self-determination, and the monstrosity of the self that was produced in relation to the inhuman practices of colonialism. If Saint Domingue was the bijou par excellence in the French crown at the time when Diderot was writing, then it was indiscreet because it told a story about France that challenged the dominant understanding of where in the colony/empire divide the power in fact lay. One of the driving engines of colonialism was the wealth produced by the mining of the New World, for gold, silver, and precious stones. The process of mining, however, was more than material, and it was not only precious stones and nuggets of precious metals that were sought. In the literatures of the time, figures and representations of precious gold and silver stones certainly reference the human beings who performed the material labors of mining, production of wealth, and construction of empire.Footnote 10 But they also can be understood as figurations of the wealth of knowledge that Europe extracted from the lands it colonized and from the peoples it enslaved and exploited. Saint Domingue was known as the jewel of the Antilles because it was one of the locations that produced the most material wealth for Europe. As C. L. R. James has shown, this lucrative colony was constitutive of France's knowledge of itself as empire, and provided the material riches it needed to cover the cost of the production and construction of that self through continued wars of expansion and colonization.Footnote 11
When Diderot was writing, future Haitians were producing vast amounts of wealth for the French by way of its slave plantation economy. Without question, Saint Domingue was the “jewel” in the French crown. In Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime, James E. McClellan describes Saint Domingue, and specifically Cap François, as a burgeoning “center of civilization” and a “colonial center of science.” He argues that “French science and learning” was a “productive force” that was inherent in the process of colonization.Footnote 12 While this is an important contribution to the sociopolitical relationship between France and Haiti, my argument extends and somewhat radicalizes McClellan's: as I see it, it is not that French scientific knowledge was also developed in Saint Domingue, or that it came as part and parcel of France's colonial relations with Saint Domingue, but that French knowledge of self as empire and center of knowledge was in fact inseparable from and unimaginable without African systems of knowledge that the French encountered in Saint Domingue. Examples of the sort of knowledge that was developed in the colonies because of colonial contact with African-descended people and African knowledge include medical botanical knowledge and healing technologies such as inoculation.Footnote 13 While this sort of scientific knowledge was intrinsic to the processes of colony and empire, my argument is more focussed on the sociopolitical knowledge and historical sense of self that was developing in Europe alongside the development of scientific knowledge, colonialism, and empire. An example of the depth of self-understanding to which I am referring can be captured in the juxtaposition of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the Code Noir of 1685, where it is possible to see that some of the most crucial freedoms and rights outlined in the Declaration had been first outlined as freedoms to be denied to blacks on the island of Saint Domingue. Moreover, it is precisely black Saint Domingue, the burgeoning Haiti and beacon of the southern American revolutions, that is integral to French self-imaginings. The implication here in terms of the significance of the novel, then, is that Bijoux, generally received as a novel of little philosophical or political value in relation to the philosopher's dominant oeuvre, is the place where Diderot tells the unspeakable.
In 1981, Jameson's The Political Unconscious argued for an understanding of narrative (historical, literary, cultural, visual, etc.) as a symbolic act with material consequences in society.Footnote 14 In particular, dominant narratives had to be read symptomatically in order to reveal the hurts that they produce and hide in order to release the stories silenced by dominant narratives. Jameson taught historians and literary and cultural critics alike that, in order to locate the counterstories held within dominant history, we had to learn to read and narrate the past in a new lexicon. In addition, Jameson emphasized the primacy of narrativity as an object of study in itself. Narrative is thus a mode of thinking, a continuous process of negotiation and production of meaning based in continuous mistranslations.Footnote 15 Serving dominant colonial narratives and ideological frameworks, these mistranslations cause violence to the subject or object being represented. However, as I have shown elsewhere, these spaces of mistranslation are always also spaces of unsuccessfully repressed countercolonial agency. In the case of Bijoux, we see perhaps not so much a silencing or mistranslation, but a garbled anticolonial consciousness. Read through Greimas's notion of semiotic reduction, the image of the abject human being (in Bijoux the stifled female) is utterly violated, dominated and reduced. At the same time, her very abjection has a subversive function that haunts the text. In the babbling language of the female, we encounter an unsettling and productive narrative that speaks the stories of struggle and freedom.
My reading seeks out the legacy of anticolonial and antiracist agency that colonial documentation and the archives of dominant history have repressed and consistently coded as master narratives of racial and colonial subjection and domination. If, as Jameson posits, a new lexicon is needed to tell the untold stories of history, I take the most fundamental unit of grammar of this language to be the most dehumanized and monstrified figures of dominant narratives of the Enlightenment, of colonialism, and of imperialism: colonized and enslaved human beings. The figuration of these human beings as monstrous and less than human must be read as symptoms of an illegible social narrative hidden in dominant narratives that reveal antirevolutionary, pro-imperial and anti-abolitionist affinities. Where some might choose to dismiss Bijoux as nothing more than a deeply stereotypical portrait of Africa, it is my contention that it is precisely in such a text that black agency – although violently repressed and disavowed – is perceptible.Footnote 16 Moreover, as I will show, what appears to be a narrative that overtly monstrifies and silences Africa can be read as part of a covert prefigurative register of a transatlantic black anticolonial agency and voice that would crystallize in Saint Domingue.
C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Cedric Robinson (and their intellectual offspring) have shown, on multiple levels and from various disciplinary and theoretical angles, that the tradition of Enlightenment radicalism was not autochthonous to Europe but deeply indebted to African peoples, traditions, and patterns of knowledge.Footnote 17 In addition, Cedric Robinson shows that African slavery was mapped onto a preexisting system of divided labor on European slaves, “slavs”; the tradition of slave revolution would have been imaginable as long as Western expansion, conquest, and enslavement of non-imperial peoples and communities had been occurring. According to this history, the tradition of African anti-Western revolution would have been as old as the “West.”Footnote 18 Nevertheless, there is still an insistent strand of scholarship that understands the intellectual and social revolutions of the Enlightenment to be a product of “European” intellectual and social developments and that these allegedly “European” processes drove the revolutionary events that would result in the overthrow of the French monarchical system, the rise of black radicalism in the Caribbean, and the emancipatory movements of transatlantic nationalisms.
Critical discourse that responds to Les bijoux has tended to dismiss it as the least important of Diderot's oeuvre, a novel written solely for the purpose of erotic entertainment.Footnote 19 But these criticisms can be understood as the successors of the traditional narrative about the autochthony of the Enlightened subject that this novel destabilizes. These criticisms repress a subtext that makes this novel centrally important to the understanding of the ways in which Africa, Haiti, and the black radical tradition underlay the Enlightenment imaginary of France.
As I read Diderot's novel, the organs speak the emerging language of a new social order. Expressed in a language that is neither recognizable nor translatable because it is new, the garbled vaginal speech references an order that prefigures the disintegration of a monarchical system based on an ailing structure of power.Footnote 20 On one level, the babbling organs speak of deep and yet inarticulate social change activated in pre-Revolutionary France. But these organs also tell a more fragmented story, the first piece of which is insinuated in the figurative reference to the precious value of Saint Domingue (the jewel of the Antilles) in the title; Bijoux registers a fragmented narrative about the prize colony of France and the social change the future Haitian people were actively and indiscreetly seeking.
Living in a harem and lacking in his own intellectual resources, the Prince Mangogul of Congo in the city of Banza depends, for his entertainment as well as for his acquisition of philosophical knowledge, on the intellect of his favorite concubine, Mirzoza. Their relationship is not sexual and revolves around dialogue and narrative about the indiscreet language of the female organs of Banza, for Mirzoza prefers the pleasures and desires produced within the abstract realm of narrative, thought, and knowledge:
Mirzoza had already engaged Mangogul's attentions for some years. The two had professed and repeated a thousand times all the things that a violent passion might suggest to the most spirited lovers. They had become confidants; and they would have considered it a crime to conceal the smallest detail of their lives from each other.Footnote 21
Mirzoza distracts Mangogul from the sexual favors he seeks from her – and for which she has little interest – by telling him of the gallant adventures and sexual exploits of the people of the city of Banza.Footnote 22 She craftily averts Mangogul's sexual agenda with tales of other people's sexual embarrassments, scandals, and ridiculous exploits. She possesses knowledge, reason, and wit, as well as the necessary and uncommon talent of telling a good tale. But having exhausted her repertoire of libertine stories with which to please the sultan's ear, Mirzoza suggests that he consult with the family genie, Cucufa, in the hopes of ridding herself of his somewhat tiresome presence. With the help of the genie's ring, Mangogul embarks upon a lustful search for the “truths” that he supposes the jewels, under the spell of the ring, will tell. Mirzoza guides him, giving him clues and suggestions as to whose jewel might tell the sort of story he seeks. As we first come upon the lovers, they are revealed in suggestive intimacy: “the sultan [was] idly stretched out on a sofa, across from his favorite, who was knotting in silence.” The prince's great material exploits do not match his intellect:
in less than ten years Mangogul acquired the reputation of a great man. He won battles, captured towns, enlarged his empire, quieted his provinces, repaired the disorder of his finances, caused the arts to flourish, erected monuments, immortalized himself by creating useful institutions, reinforced and corrected legislative power, and even founded academies; and he accomplished all of this without knowing a single word of Latin, which his university never could understand.Footnote 23
What Diderot describes here is not only imperial expansion and the securing of power, but also the process of colonization, all of which Mangogul manages to accomplish despite (and here we may sense Diderot wink) his lack of knowledge of one of the founding languages of empire.Footnote 24 Although this may appear to be a small detail, the reference to Mangogul's lack of knowledge of the language of empire introduces a sense of the precarity of Mangogul's power, and the connection of this precarity of power to language. Because the narrative presents the prince's lack of enlightenment as a given, the reader is somewhat duped into thinking that the kind of knowledge sought by the sultan is merely sexual, a curiosity about the illicit sexual exploits of the women of Banza. Nevertheless, it is still a quest for knowledge in which he looks to Mirzoza, to the genie, and ultimately to the bijoux for enlightenment. While the sultan expounds to Mirzoza about his despair and boredom, Mirzoza is herself engaged in the manual art of knotting. Although knotting may have been a common domestic activity for bourgeois women at the time Diderot was writing, it is possible to read a deeper meaning into it: Mirzoza's knotting seems to echo the weaving of Arachne, who, according to Greek mythology, challenged Athena to a weaving contest and offended the goddess with the subject of her tapestry, which depicted Zeus with his various lovers. Thus, from the outset, this novel is about different modes of knowing and telling an unspeakable story with potentially dire consequences: for Arachne, the consequences of the story she wove was death as a human and transformation into a spider; the story told by the organs of the women of Banza brings on suffocation and the potential destruction of the whole community. Mirzoza warns Mangogul that with this “diabolical” device he “will spread discord in every household, undeceive every husband, drive every lover to despair, ruin wives, dishonor maidens, and cause countless other disturbances”.Footnote 25 Although the telling of the forbidden story brings about the destruction of the one who tells it, it does so only because of its subversive power. Mangogul's lack of and search for knowledge belies his power as a prince, while Mirzoza's knotting, and the parallel of her knotting with Arachne's weaving, suggest a dangerous and subversive power. Not only does Mirzoza's knotting tell an untold story, but the parallel to Arachne's tapestry suggests that she herself is in fact producing the story/knowledge that has the potential to undo the power of the prince. Articulated in the act of silent knotting, Mirzoza's knowledge is neither legible nor recognizable in speech. The scene suggests that what she knows is potentially subversive. Her knowledge is connected to the speech of the jewels, since Mirzoza makes suggestions as to whose jewel Mangogul might visit, as well as what each jewel would have to say:
Cyldalisa's jewel … has many a story to tell. And if it is as indiscreet as its mistress, it will not have to be asked twice. Haria's jewel retired years ago, and from it Your Highness will hear only tales from my grandmother's time. As for Glaucia's jewel, I think it is a good one to consult, for she is flirtatious and pretty.Footnote 26
It is at the urging of Mirzoza that Mangogul goes on his search. On one level we have an ailing monarchical society afflicted with the malady of a dissolute sultan who, out of boredom, is on a quest for knowledge. He hopes to locate such knowledge in the garbled speech produced uncontrollably and often in public by the genital organs of the women in his court. This pursuit soon takes on enormous dimensions, for what begins as Mangogul's personal quest will become the central concern of state intellectuals. The power of the speech of these organs lies in the sultan's belief that the words released from the depths of these babbling female bodies hold the secret to the troubled values at the heart of the kingdom. In Banza, the phenomenon of vaginal speech is studied by the kingdom's scholars from the fields of science, philosophy and religion. Dissatisfied with the “scholarly” outcomes, the sultan turns to the family genie, Cucufa, who provides him with a ring of invisibility, thus granting the sultan the ability to introduce himself unseen into female-gendered spaces. By rubbing the ring, the sultan is not only able to oblige any woman's bijou to speak, but is also granted the power to understand the otherwise incomprehensible genital language. Armed with this powerful translation device, Mangogul takes it upon himself to systematically mine this garbled speech for answers to the troubles of his kingdom. This quest provides an implicit indictment of the status quo – that is, the nation as a modern political organization based on Enlightenment reason against the structures of the ancien régime. Reflecting on the languages and forms of knowing necessary to implement a new social order, Diderot simultaneously writes the Encyclopédie and the novel, Bijoux. Both texts document the European imaginary: the Encylopédie reflects what is speakable, while Bijoux is a document of the unspeakable.
Although the setting of the novel in the Congo may be guided by orientalist convention, it is also recognizable as a narrative ploy to escape the dangers of censorship.Footnote 27 But to limit our understanding of the novel to the horizon of these conventions detracts attention from a careful consideration of the blackness of the space in which Diderot's fantasy takes place. At a moment where new systems of thought were breathing change into the existing social order – as Diderot was doing with the Encyclopédie – to fantasize about a society disrupted by the speech of female genitals is to actively imagine things as they might be otherwise, as well as an acknowledgment that things in fact should be otherwise: Diderot's fantasy is an act of imagining otherwise. Bijoux explores the contours of a social order beyond the monarchical regime in relation to black space, indiscreet speech, the repercussions of this speech, and the body of people empowered by it.Footnote 28 But even the revolutionary imaginary of the Enlightenment is not its own: if we follow the figurative connection between Saint Domingue and the bijoux, it is out of Saint Domingue – not France – that the French pre-Revolutionary imaginary evolves.
In 1748, the overthrow of the French monarchy and the revolution on Saint Domingue were still half a century away. But the freedom fight – in Europe and in the Antilles – was well under way, and knowledge of both registered in the French imaginary. Bijoux presents revolutionary space and language as illegitimate, female, and black. This language/body is chaotically and unpredictably generative of pleasure, hilarity, marital infidelity, and sexual deviancy.Footnote 29 It requires discipline and translation. The garbled speech constitutes a knowledge that threatens the failing dominant political and ideological system represented in the dissolute character and weak intellect of the sultan/monarch. The ring – a translation device and potential conduit of knowledge – provides the Sultan with the possibility of exercising power that otherwise he would lack. However, despite the translation provided by the ring, he is still unable to understand the meaning of what is said, as Mirzoza will point out to him. His repeated attempt to understand and decipher the speech of the jewels is a coded reference, through the connection established at the opening of the novel between language and power, to the failure of power, foreshadowing both the end of the monarchical regime and the end of France's control of Saint Domingue. This perceived threat requires discipline: first, by the sultan, who initiates the concerted attempt to understand the garbled speech; second, by the philosophical and scientific debates in the Academy, where experts attempt to study and make sense of it; third, by the magical ring of translation provided by Cucufa the genie and used by the sultan to translate it; fourth, by the invention and production of a muzzle to silence it; and finally by the tracheal suffocation suffered by the women whose vaginas are muzzled. The knowledge resulting from the attempt to discipline black female counter-speech represents a dilemma for the colonial power. This speech cannot be repressed without threatening the lives of the women who disrupt the state and yet are the channel through which the state must reproduce itself. The knowledge that constitutes and yet threatens to destroy speaks of the impossibility of extricating the black colony from empire without destroying empire – the unimaginability of France without Saint Domingue, and of Europe without Africa. Mangogul's use of the ring to translate the vaginal speech could suggest that this speech is in fact under the control of the sultan, in which case the speech does not pose a threat but acts as a reaffirmation of the prince's power. But the fact that the jewels speak at the behest of Mangogul is much less important than the fact that even with the aid of the ring of translation, he still does not grasp the meaning of what they say. Despite the control the prince might exert with the power afforded him by the ring, his power ultimately depends on the bodies that produce this disruptive speech: the destruction of the speech with the muzzling device would ultimately mean the destruction of his empire. Moreover, the disciplined bodies of the women of Banza signify doubly: because the female body was one of the sites where the mechanisms of colonial discipline were developed and refined, we can read the fictional violence imposed on the indiscreet women of Banza in relation to the historical colonial violence unleashed on enslaved women who challenged the authority of the dominant classes in the Antilles.
In this text, Diderot goes to extraordinary lengths in order to depict disruptive speech and bodies as monstrous. His text points to an acute anxiety about the disruptive power of the black female body in relation to the intimate dependence of the European populations (both in Europe and in the colonial communities in the Americas) on black women. As mothers, lovers, nannies, and concubines, these women were uniquely positioned in the social and economic realms to affirm and undo the material and affective fabrics of Europe. If antimonarchical emancipatory discourses of the Enlightenment drew force from the black tradition of resistance to European expansion, the emancipatory discourse of white female speech drew its force from non-European bodies, contexts, and spaces. It has been convincingly argued by Moira Ferguson that white feminist discourse of the revolutionary period drew force through attachment, by way of the abolitionist movement, to the black bodies whose cause white feminist discourse claimed to forward.Footnote 30 Cedric Robinson pushes us to go further. It is not that European feminist discourse took material and discursive force from abolitionist visions of freedom. What Robinson shows us is that the emancipatory discourses of Europe are not “European” at all, or are “European” only in the sense that all European discourses are always already black.Footnote 31
The aberrant female discourse articulates with other emerging structures of the nation to challenge a monarchy in decline. One of the ways we see that aristocratic rule is under stress is through Mangogul's concern with the lack of female virtue and service to the state. We see this at work in a bet wagered between Mangogul and Mirzoza. Mangogul's fixation with the bijoux is entirely driven by this wager. He wonders if even one virtuous woman can be found in all of his empire. Mangogul assures Mirzoza that if he finds one virtuous woman in the Congo, he will endorse with all of his authority her claim that where there is one virtuous woman there are many. The prince promises her that if he is “satisfied with [her] arguments on the existence of virtuous women, [he will] authorize [her] logic with all [his] power, and give [her his] chateau at Amara, and all the Saxon porcelain [in it, including even] the little enamel spider monkey and other valuable knick-knacks.”Footnote 32 Mirzoza accepts the wager, but is not interested in his offer to endorse her logic. It is almost as if his endorsement would discredit her. Of the things he offers her, the most precious to her is the little enamel spider monkey. This could be understood as a whimsical attachment to a little jewel that has struck Mirzoza's fancy, but Diderot draws attention to it by reintroducing it at the very end of the chapter, when, after their conversation has concluded and as Mangogul leaves her boudoir, Mirzoza calls after him, confirming that the wager includes what is in fact most precious to her, which is not the chateau, but the little enamel spider monkey. The monkey figure in question is a very specific kind of monkey, which Jaucourt, who wrote the entry for “Singe” in 1765 for the Encyclopédie, would state was to be found in the Americas.Footnote 33 Thus, in this very small but heavily charged reference, Diderot symbolically places the subject of the Americas within a narrative about the loss of empire and the struggle to maintain it. Not only is Mirzoza unimpressed by Mangogul's proclaimed authority, but she locates the most value in a small enamel spider monkey (a jewel of sorts) which is symbolically related to the coded speech of the women of Banza and to the jewel of the Antilles, both of which represent subversive agency.Footnote 34 Under the highly repressive regime of Louis XV, Diderot articulated the transgressive processes of a nation through an imaginary black society whose king and kingdom were entirely dedicated to the task of understanding and controlling the phenomenon of the black female body and her garbled speech. Female speech takes the floor as a symbol of the emerging nation's dangerous creativity outside reproduction and revolutionary agency.Footnote 35 Diderot's nation emerges from the combination of, first, the mysterious speech and energies of the female and colonial bijoux, and, second, the artisan body, whose sociopolitical value rests upon its ability to produce material artifacts beneficial, desirable, and useful to the larger body politic. The speech of the bijoux (the black female/colonial illegitimate voice) becomes, then, the primary metaphorical site for the generation and expression of revolutionary thought. In Banza, the female aberrant speech poses a threat to an entire society, and elicits a cross-class endeavor to theorize and understand it. Interestingly, the solution to the social distress does not come from any of the major state actors: it comes from neither the sultan nor his scholars. In large part, the elite and intellectual classes also fail to reach any understanding of the vaginal voices. Yet, as I will discuss in the next section, the artisan class (represented by Diderot as monstrous in its own terms) invents a highly marketable solution: a muzzle.Footnote 36
The disorderly speech that Diderot places in Banza doubles as the revolutionary discourse coming out of Saint Domingue. As an informed reader of Europe and of European colonial processes, Diderot was undoubtedly aware of the mechanisms of repression used against rebellious people in the colonies. From his perspective, the muzzle provided an image with at least two levels of meaning. First, the artisan classes in his imaginative narrative had devised the muzzle to silence the unruly females and their speech. Second, its material and historical counterpart was the device routinely used to instill terror during the ancien régime both in the metropole and in the colony. Read in this way, the violently monstrifying mechanism – the muzzle – necessary to contain the speech emanating from the bijoux, represses a deep horror at a series of ideological and material mechanisms – state terror, colonialism, the slave trade, and the colonial plantation system. Each of these mechanisms attempted to translate human subjects and agents of history into abject laboring bodies in metropole and colony alike. The muzzle must quell the revolutionary murmurings of the emerging antimonarchical consciousness as well as the dependence of the emerging nation-state and the existing monarchy on the resources produced by the future Haitian people. Refusing to be silenced, the incomprehensible language of the bijoux is a mistranslation or mishearing of the intimate and inalienable dependence of France on the Antillean people. Given that this dependence has no recognizable expressive grammar in Europe's self-perception of the time, the language that attempts to relay this insight is distorted; the voice and body that articulate it are illicit, unfaithful to discursive, social, and sexual norms, and monstrous.
THE OBJECT OF THE MUZZLE: BLACK, FEMALE AND ANTILLEAN
Vaginal speech functions to demonize the female noble body at the same time as it identifies it as one of the generative spaces through which a new social order could be imagined. This generative space is first gendered female. It is from the folds of talking wombs and from the imaginary horizon referenced by indiscreet jewels such as the little enamel spider monkey that the critique of the ancien régime and the possibility of a different social order emerges. The idea of the nation is produced through the female body, which is the repository for the malady that necessitates the imagining of a remarkably different social order. As the sultan sees it, the malady of the kingdom derives from a moral dissoluteness reflected in the faceless speech of the female organ. The cure to the kingdom's malady requires the management of this licentious and illegitimate pleasure symbolized in the speech of the bijoux. Significantly, the talking vaginas are never visually depicted in the narrative. They evoke a political monster whose figure remains unseen but nevertheless signifies through speech. Excessive and uncontainable, the babbling female organs symbolize the unraveling of the political order of the reign of the sultan as well as the order that will take its place. They throw the structures of society into chaos, yet is quickly absorbed into scientific research as an object to be normalized through scholarly analysis:
a rumor spread throughout Banza that all the maidens in the Congregation of Brahma's Coccyx were speaking from their jewels. This rumor … pricked the curiosity of the learned. The phenomenon was examined thoroughly, and the great minds began to seek in the properties of matter for the explanation of a thing they had at first deemed impossible. The chatter of the jewels produced a great number of excellent works, and this important subject swelled the collection of the academies with several treatises that may be considered among the most advanced efforts of the human mind.Footnote 37
Unprecedented and threatening, vaginal speech must be domesticated and bent to conform to the discourse of the scholarly institutions of Banza. Both institutions grapple to understand this phenomenon: “This phenomenon was slippery; it eluded attraction; subtle matter was not drawn to it. In vain did the director call upon those with ideas to communicate them; a deep silence reigned in the assembly.”Footnote 38 The collective struggle to translate and understand the emergence of vaginal speech encodes a reference to the development of novel forms of thought. At first, these systems of thought do not have any coherence, seeming only to produce, like the bijoux, nonsense. But they make meaning as they proceed in their inquiry:
The academy was currently divided into two factions, the one composed of Vorticists, and the other of Attractionists. Olibrio, a skillful geometer and great physicist, founded the sect of the Vorticists. Circino, an able physicist and great geometer, was the first Attractionist. Both Olibrio and Circino took it upon themselves to explain nature.Footnote 39
Diderot describes the two systems of analysis in terms of the narration of items into an order that resembles organized knowledge. He underscores the ways in which arbitrariness and chaos can be molded and translated in such a way as to produce the semblance of a valued form of language or field of knowledge. The passage breathlessly unfolds, stumbling chaotically upon itself, much like the systems of knowledge it describes:
Olibrio's principles have, at first glance, a seductive simplicity. They satisfy the principle phenomenon on the whole, but they contradict themselves in the details. As for Circino, he appears to base his ideas on an absurdity; but it is only this first step that works against him. The minute details that ruin Olibrio's system serve to establish Circino's. He follows a path that is obscure at the beginning, but which becomes more and more clear as one advances.Footnote 40
The last sentence foregrounds the productivity of obscure methods of inquiry in the quest for producing new knowledge. The narrator suggests that new knowledge has no method: it is initially unforeseeable, potentially disruptive, and, in this novel, unquestionably monstrous. With repeated examination, this new knowledge becomes delineated, recognizable, normalized, and finally disciplined. The above passage illuminates the processes whereby what is perceived initially as nonsense is in fact generative of new knowledge and meaning. In order to discover meaning, one must be willing, like Circino, to follow what appears to be absurd, the path that is obscure. This mode of reading grows out of a text in which it is easy to get lost in the narrative twists. Indeed, it seems one must “lose one's self” in these moments of chaos in order to perceive meaning. This twisting and untwisting, knotting and weaving of the unfamiliar into the familiar is the disciplining and yet potentially subversive act of translation. Such a process places the novel Bijoux in parallel relation to the multiple attempts at reading and deciphering the language produced by Mirzoza and the organs/characters (bijoux) in the novel; the reading of the novel itself is a process of translation that engages the reader invested in understanding the subversive meaning of the novel. Like a felicitous reading experience, a felicitous translation – a translation that succeeds in twisting the unfamiliar into the familiar – depends on the ability to wrest meaning from the obscure. In the case of the language of the bijoux, the members of the academy who study it miss the meaning of the speech of the bijoux and in fact are silenced by it. Mangogul also repeatedly misunderstands what the bijoux say, despite the translation the ring affords him. Although the ring renders their babbling into language Mangogul recognizes, it is still as if they spoke in a foreign language. In the regime under which Diderot was writing, revolutionary discourse, whether Antillean, American, or European, was censored, fragmented, garbled. Despite often being articulated in very similar terms, the language of freedom wielded by colonial revolutionaries in their demand for independence from Europe was received as a declaration of war. When it was uttered by Antillean blacks, it was undecipherable.Footnote 41 If Diderot's text was referencing an eventual revolution in France, it was doing so through the female bijoux that double as the black colony that produced the wealth that enabled the revolution in the metropole. In Banza, academic discourse does not manage to satisfactorily explain, contain, or describe the phenomenon of the talking jewels. Even the official institution that studies and attempts to decode the speech is confounded:
What do I hear in all the social circles? A confused murmur, a noise unheard of reaches my ears. All is perverted, and the power of speech, which by the grace of Brahma has hitherto been assigned to the tongue alone, has been transferred to other organs as a result of his vengeance. And what organs! You know, gentlemen. Ungrateful people, was it necessary for a new miracle to rouse you from your torpor!Footnote 42
The vaginal speech, an untranslatable expression of a radically different social order, is represented as a “confused murmur,” a “noise unheard of.” In the opening frame of the novel, an omniscient narrator interpellates his reader, Zima, tempting her to read the forbidden lines that follow by indicating that others she knows have already read and greatly enjoyed it. This rhetorical strategy of interpellation inserts Diderot's immediate and contemporary readers into Zima's community of furtive readers at the same time as it requires that engagement with this dangerous imaginary occur at a distance from France.Footnote 43
In the following passage the sexual references are articulated around the activity of reading and writing within a secret community of females, somewhere in the Congo, on the boundary of their society and the society from which they are imagined. The implication is that to read this is to be initiated into a female community on the border of the licit and the illicit, independent of and yet connected to the patriarchal system. The patriarchal figure looms as a delayed presence, his temporary absence allowing the women to “entertain” and “distract” each other and themselves:
Seize the moment, Zima. The aga Narkis is entertaining your mother, and your governess is on the balcony, watching for your father's return. Come and read, there is nothing to fear. Should someone discover The Indiscreet Jewels behind your dressing table, do you think it would come as any surprise? No, Zima, no; it is hardly a secret that The Sofa, The Tanzai, and The Confessions have all spent time under your pillow. Still you hesitate? You should know, then, that Aglae herself has not disdained to set her hand to the work you blush to accept.Footnote 44
The management and control of female genital speech and alternative knowledge drives every aspect of the narrative. Beneath what appears to be nothing but the sultan's lustful pursuit of a “true” and faithful woman lies the quest for moral and political consciousness.Footnote 45 The undeciphered piece of knowledge that inhabits this garbled speech might provide the answer to the sultan's quest. The talking organs channel the multiple concerns of the community of Banza in such a way that the traditionally vertical mechanisms of power and language are rearranged into a chaotic network of alternative language and relations – the crucible of an emergent nation.Footnote 46 The dreadful quality of the jewels derives from a sense of anticipation at the impending “truth” or “words” that the bijoux might produce, for they threaten to break the institutional codes of the monarchy and, if we remember the bijou of the Antilles, the colonial regime.
THE SUBJECT OF THE MUZZLE: THE ARTISAN CLASS
The speaking, remembering and narrating jewels disrupt the social composure of noble women. But they are also intimately linked to the burgeoning sector of the ever-present, and dangerously mutating, urban population. This body of people acts within the norms and conventions of society while at the same time challenging them. I leave the passage unbroken in order to allow the reader to grasp its cumulative excitement, energy, rhythm and movement:
While the Brahmins were inducing Brahma to speak, parading the pagods about, and exhorting the populace to penitence, others dreamt of making a profit from the chatter of the jewels. Big cities teem with people whom poverty makes industrious. They do not steal or swindle; but they are to swindlers what swindlers are to thieves. They know everything, they do everything, they have ways around everything. They come and go, insinuate themselves at court, in the city, the palace, the church, at the theater, with courtesans, at coffeehouses, the ball, the Opera, in the academies. They are everything you want them to be. If you solicit a pension, they have the minister's ear. If you have a lawsuit, they will solicit for you. If you like gambling, they are croupiers; as for eating, they keep a good kitchen; and as for women, they will introduce you to Amina or Acaris. From which of the two would you prefer to buy disease? Make your choice; and once you are infected, they will see to your cure … It is on their behalf that on street corners, at temple doors, theater entrances, and park exits people distribute leaflets informing you, free of charge, that so and so, who resides at the Louvre, at Saint-Jean, at the Temple or the Abbaye, at such-and-such address, such-and-such floor, swindles at home from nine in the morning until noon, and the rest of the time in town.Footnote 47
The omnipresence of this teeming population, its uncontrollable presence everywhere, its malleability, and its overwhelming ability to glean profit from another's distress clearly place it in the category of social parasite. Indeed, the excessiveness of this population aligns it with the disruptive vaginal speech. The teeming population understands perhaps not the meaning of the vaginal speech, but certainly how to silence it. In fact, the community of swindlers that produce the muzzle are set not against the bijoux, but against “you,” the community of readers to whom this swindling activity poses a threat. The swindling, swarming and metamorphosing population is described in terms of both disease and property, two of the main tropes used in Enlightenment discourse to describe the emerging national consciousness.Footnote 48 These ubiquitous bodies permeate the spaces which, under the monarchical system of distributing space, would have been the exclusive “property” of the aristocracy and the nobility: the palace, the academy, the courtesans and the theater. It is the bourgeoning creativity and production of new knowledge that make this class of people transgressive. Once again, as in the case of the babbling organs, unexpected patterns of creativity and social exchange, new forms of power, register as monstrous.Footnote 49 The bijoux are complimented, complemented, and echoed by a chameleonic population that will also tell other narratives, writing its body, accessing new spaces and forms of knowledge. The passage above highlights the multiple relations between the diseased aristocracy, the talking jewels, and the monstrous progeny that is the nation. It is in the hands of Eolipila that Diderot places the invention of the muzzle, the device coveted for its ability to silence impertinent jewels, a commodity popular among women anxious that their jewel might speak. The speech of the jewels is partially silenced by the swarming population of swindlers and artisans who design the device to silence the jewels. Unlike the sultan, the noble classes, and the scholars of Banza, the artisan class understands the mechanism that produces the speech well enough to invent a device to silence it. Not only does the artisan class understand the mechanism that produces the speech, but also Diderot suggests, through the detail of the enamel spider monkey, through Mirzoza's attachment to it, and through the reference via Mirzoza's knotting to Arachne's subversive tapestry, that the artisan class was also speaking the same language as the babbling organs.
Cucufa's ring gives Mangogul a superficial understanding of the words of the bijoux. However, Diderot indicates that the meaning of this language and the alternative systems of knowledge and sexual practices connected to them escape Mangogul. At the opening of the novel, Diderot's narrator establishes a split between the acts of “speaking” (parler) and “saying” (dire): “I shall pass lightly over Mangogul's first years. The childhood of princes is the same as that of other men, except that princes have the gift of saying a thousand charming things before they know how to speak.”Footnote 50 Here again the suggestion of a disjuncture between what is spoken and what is actually said indicates two levels of discourse in female speech. Consider for a moment the distinctions that Diderot sets up among the acts of speaking, saying, hearing, and (mis)understanding. Within this horizon of distinctions, one can say but never speak, and the power of the ring of translation over language is precarious, no matter the source. One can say but perhaps be misunderstood because mistranslated. Mangogul's search for illicit knowledge can neither escape nor overcome the dependence between language and felicitous translation. When he presents Mirzoza with the ring supplied to him by Cucufa, her response reveals that she has knowledge of the difference between what the ring of Cucufa translates and what the bijoux are saying:
“Ah, what diabolical secret has he given you there?” cried Mirzoza. “But, Prince, do you intend to use it?”
“Mercy, what is that?” exclaimed the sultan. “Do I intend to use it? I shall begin with you if you try to argue with me.”
At these terrible words the favorite paled, trembled, pulled herself together, and beseeched the sultan in the name of Brahma and all the pagods of the Indies and the Congo not to test on her a secret power that showed so little faith in her fidelity.
Feeling the danger of being subjected to the power of the ring, Mirzoza uses the distinction between what her bijou might say – dire – and what it might speak – parler – to indicate that there is a layer of meaning that will escape understanding regardless of the power of translation of Cucufa's ring:
“If I have always been good,” she continued, “my jewel will not say a word [ne dira mot], and you will have done me as much wrong as I will not forgive. If it comes to speak [s'il vient à parler], I shall lose your esteem and your heart, and you will be in despair. Until now you have been, it seems to me, rather content with our love. Why risk destroying it?”Footnote 51
She reiterates this, a few lines later, as Mangogul speculates on what would have happened if she had not woken up in time to stop him from exerting the power of the ring on her: “What would have happened,” said Mirzoza, “is that my jewel would have taught you nothing [mon bijou ne vous aurait rien appris], and you would have lost me forever.”
Mirzoza draws subtle distinctions between what a jewel might say and what the prince might be able to learn from it. Mirzoza warns him, specifically, of the danger the speech of the jewels represents:
I still consider it diabolical. Doubtless it will amuse you, but that amusement will have dire consequences. You will spread discord in every household, undeceive every husband, drive every lover to despair, ruin wives, dishonor maidens, and cause countless other disturbances.Footnote 52
The violent power of the jewels’ speech registers within the normative convention of a household or patriarchal structure whose maintenance, in terms of name and property, is based on control of women's bodies and sexual activity. In this context, to learn of subversive sexuality is to become conscious of the disempowerment of the patriarchal structures that relied on reproductive sexual practices on which in turn both the feudal society and the nation would be constructed. By eliciting speech from the jewels, the sultan establishes the conditions and fortifies the networks for the disorder, discord, disturbance, and disruptive agency that the bijoux will breed. Mirzoza's warning (“you will spread discord in every household … and cause countless other disturbances”) can also he read as an affirmation of the power of the language of the bijoux not only against the patriarchal regime, but also in the colonial context, where subversive language also revolved around freedom, exploitation, and property. On Saint Domingue, the bijou of the Antilles, the sustained exploitation of future Haitians had already established the conditions in which they had developed networks of knowledge that would eventually disrupt the colonial regime.
Shadowing the obsession of the metropole with the study and exploitation of the colonies, Mangogul's obsession with the elusive speech of the jewels drives him to order minions to other lands to study female organs in other societies. Not surprisingly, when the sultan's researchers return from their fieldwork and recount their findings to Mangogul, Mirzoza leaves the room and returns just before the end of one of the tales. Despite her absence, Mirzoza seems able to judge and critique the knowledge that has just been imparted. Her demonstration of intellect and quickness of wit drives Mangogul quite mad. “You are unbearable! You can be taught nothing; you guess everything.”Footnote 53 Somehow, Mirzoza already knows the information that the travelers bring back from other worlds. It seems that she is somehow engaged in the process of discovery, for she manages or produces the new knowledge before it gets to the sultan. But this might not come as a surprise, if we remember Mirzoza's fixation with the little enamel spider monkey, the object which, although precious to her, lay beyond anything Mangogul could comprehend as valuable. It may be that Mirzoza has some connection to the “other” worlds. Indeed, both her appreciation of the value of the little enamel spider monkey, and the activity of knotting, suggest that she does. Not only is her activity of knotting in the first scene remiscent of the tapestry with which Arachne challenged the authority of the Greek gods, but it also could be a reference to the system of knots with which the Inca recorded their history, signifying yet another of the countercolonial systems of knowledge against and with which Europe imagined itself.Footnote 54 If this were the case, this is yet another piece of evidence that, albeit admittedly very small, could, be seen, like the little enamel spider monkey, to be significant of a larger, deeper narrative not only of the blackness of Europe, but of a potent web of multilingual and multisited subjectivities and agencies materially and discursively disavowed by the dominant processes and narratives of Europe. In this way, the novel Bijoux itself can be understood not so much as a peripheral literary curiosity, but as one of the small threads in the larger fabric of European self-presentation through which the disavowed inner image of a black Europe, or a Europe disabled without its colonies, could be fashioned: as the utterance of the unutterable from the depths of a fraught, self-contradictory and self-horrified European consciousness.
