From Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew to J.-A. Miller’s Lacan’s Nephew

What is it about?

Two decades ago, midway between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers, Franco Moretti offered a geographical sketch of modern European literature. A decade later, halfway between Moretti’s sketch and my article here, Rastko Močnik proposed a theoretical formalization of modern European politics. Writing in a time when Europe fell “in love with Milan Kundera,” Moretti sensed the end of modern European literature, including its novel. Writing in a time when the “implicit philosophy of the Council of Europe” entrusted culture to “the invisible hand of the ‘free market’,” Močnik announced the eclipse of modern European political institutions, including its nation-states. I use these respective histories of the European novel and the European nation-state in order to trace and comparatively read a set of modern texts on the relationship between uncles and nephews: Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, Marx’s Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Althusser’s L’avenir dure longtemps, and Miller’s Le Neveu de Lacan.

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Why is it important?

Traces a set of modern materialist accounts of the symptomatic pre-moden relationship between uncles and nephews: Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Louis Althusser’s The Future Lasts Forever, and J.-A. Miller’s Lacan’s Nephew.