History and structure of our Traité des trois imposteurs

Abstract

Other papers presented here cover the material we are about to treat here from diverse points of view. Their authors are philosophers and historians of philosophy, of ideas, of the Huguenot diaspora, of Dutch intellectual history.... The Traite des trois imposteurs can surely support discussion from all these points of view, and indeed profit from them. We shall adopt a literary point of view since literature is our discipline. However, we are dix-huitiemistes, and the professional deformation of anyone in that field is a tendency to study the history of ideas, whether in the old-fashioned, teleological sense of ‘how did humanity, i.e., European and American thought, get from there—whatever starting-point seems most pertinent—to the optimum where it is now’, or in the Foucaldian sense that examines diversity, lines of thought with little or no posterity, because such historians who follow his example are much less certain that where (Occidental) humanity is now represents a moral or political optimum. We shall thus try to apply to the Traite des trois imposteurs both the perspective of the history of ideas and some of the techniques that one of us (Schwarzbach) half recalls from the late Jean Hytier’s lectures and from his remarkable book on Gide.2 Of course, Hytier would never have dreamt of working on the Traite des trois imposteurs, not literary enough for him.