To be oneself that noise, that music, that spectacle, that comedy, to realise oneself as both a thing and an illusory thing, and thus to be not simply a thing but also void and nothingness, to be the absolute emptiness of the absolute plenitude that fascinates from the outside, to be the circular, voluble vertigo of that nothingness and that being, to be at once the total abolition that is an enslaved consciousness and the supreme glory that is a sovereign consciousness that no doubt is the meaning of Rameau's Nephew, which in the mid eighteenth century, long before Descartes' word was truly understood, offers a lesson more anti Cartesian than anything to be found in Locke, Voltaire or Hume.