Polipi, retori e dizionari. Diderot e l’ordine ironico dell’Encyclopédie

This article tries to show how, in his philosophy, Diderot assumes the character of a rhetorician: each idea is inseparable from the imagination that has created it, constituting a thought that is based on analogical and metaphorical references. In this perspective, my article considers the Encyclopédie as the most specific product of the philosopher-rhetorician’s thought: here the human knowledge organizes itself in a totality unfinished and everchanging, where the articles are placed in a network of multiple references, never unambiguous and transparent. The result is a work in which each statement has an ambiguous and never final status: with this background, irony now appears as the constitutive factor of a human knowledge that always redefines its centres and its suburbs, creating unstable symmetries and balances.