Denis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), which was written between 1761 and 1774 but not published during the author’s lifetime, can justly be considered the first, and for a long time unsurpassed, example in the (western) European world of a literary reflection on comparative media studies and the philosophy of esthetics. It is said to take place in just an hour of narrative time, from a visit to a café at 5 p.m. to the beginning of an opera at 6 p.m. Moreover, it opposes the figure of the nephew—who at the time of writing had certainly not yet been canonized, much less sacralized, as he would be in Germany a little later—to that of the philosopher. The uncle, the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, who is already dead at the time the story takes place, is the bogeyman, as the author of a treatise on harmony (1722). Dissonance is the principle of the nephew’s life, and also the guideline of Diderot’s text. By contrast, harmony—the dominant ideal since Greek antiquity, as the combination of social, political, and artistic unity in the sound of the spheres—is taken apart step by step. Disruptive elements force their way into the foreground: the philosopher loses his power to interpret; the (self-proclaimed) artist is in turn a beggar, a clown, and a protégé of rich masters or virtuosos. In the end, his physical identity breaks down into grimaces and grotesque contortions, running makeup, and perhaps even epilepsy or tuberculosis. Translated by Goethe in 1805, and enthusiastically welcomed by Schiller shortly before his death, it has inspired numerous artists from E. T. A. Hoffmann to the present to make room for an esthetic of the absurd, the grotesque, the abject, and in any case the marginal. In his four-and-a-half-hour cinematic essay Rameau’s Nephew—a collaboration with Nam June Paik—the Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow sublates the structural differences between music, language, and gesture into a new universalism.