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14 - Rousseau's Late Botany: Living to the End
- Edited by Andrew Sobanet, Georgetown University, Washington DC
- Kylie Sago
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- Book:
- Revisioning French Culture
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 10 July 2020
- Print publication:
- 07 November 2019, pp 213-228
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Summary
J’herboriserai […] jusqu’à la mort.
Letter to Du Peyrou, February 28, 1769Jean-Jacques Rousseau's interest in botany has a complex genesis. I propose to investigate the varying contexts in which this interest arises over the course of Rousseau's life and works. His initial discovery of botany is first recounted in The Confessions: it was at Les Charmettes, the central locus of the author's childhood, where he enjoyed the happiness and protective company provided by Madame de Warens, the woman he simply called Maman. However, this interest proves to be brief, a missed opportunity of sorts, and botany becomes a catalyst for a flood of happy memories associated with a previous time, in Annecy. Indeed Rousseau becomes less engaged in the act of recalling botanical lessons (he hardly makes any effort in the description of the structures of the plants themselves) than in releasing the power of affective memory. Thus Annecy and Les Charmettes overlap in Rousseau's imagination. The botanical walk becomes the setting for the recollection of a dream experienced earlier at Annecy, a reverie in which Jean-Jacques's union with Madame de Warens remains suspended in eternity. He writes:
while I was gathering twigs of dry wood to make our coffee, mamma amused herself by herbalizing among the undergrowth, and with the flowers of the bouquet which I had gathered for her while we made our way she made me notice a thousand curious things in their structure which amused me very much and should have given me a taste for botany, but the moment had not come; I was distracted by too many other studies. An idea that happened to strike me diverted me from the flowers and plants. The situation of soul in which I found myself, everything we had said and done that very day, all the objects that had struck me recalled to me the sort of dream I had while wide awake at Annecy seven or eight years before.
Another scene deserves mention, also in The Confessions, one in which botany provokes a kind of revulsion in Rousseau.
6 - Diderot's letters to Sophie Volland
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- By Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University
- Edited by James Fowler, University of Kent, Canterbury
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- Book:
- New Essays on Diderot
- Published online:
- 11 April 2011
- Print publication:
- 24 March 2011, pp 86-98
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The Letters to Sophie Volland are a documentary record of Diderot's relationship with Louise-Henriette Volland (1716–84), whom the philosophe decides to call ‘Sophie’, a name evoking wisdom. As Sophie's own letters have disappeared without trace, this correspondence can seem like a long monologue on Diderot's part, a drawn-out plaint from the man of letters who has fallen in love, an extended apostrophe. Jacques Chouillet uses the striking phrase ‘un dialogue à une voix’ (‘a one-voice dialogue’) to describe the collection. To add to this effect, history records almost nothing about Louise-Henriette. Trousson is only able to furnish the sparsest of details. He notes: ‘[elle] était fille d'un avocat au Parlement de Paris, ensuite directeur des gabelles – l'impôt sur le sel’ (‘she was daughter of a lawyer at the Paris parlement, who went on to become director of gabelles – the salt tax’), adding that Diderot remembers her mother's maiden name (Carlière) when he writes one of his short stories. So we have no choice but to follow the example of Odile Richard-Pauchet and reconstruct ‘Sophie’ from the image which Diderot has bequeathed in his correspondence. His object of love is also his ideal addressee: ‘Épistolière esthète et philosophe à ses heures, lectrice enthousiaste d'une œuvre qui n'a pas donné toute sa mesure, sensible et indépendante, telle est Sophie.’ (‘A letter-writer capable of being an aesthete and a philosopher; the enthusiastic reader of a work that has not yet fully blossomed; sensitive and independent: such is Sophie.’)
48 - Eighteenth-century margins
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- By Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University
- Edited by William Burgwinkle, University of Cambridge, Nicholas Hammond, University of Cambridge, Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of French Literature
- Published online:
- 28 May 2011
- Print publication:
- 24 February 2011, pp 432-440
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Exploring ‘margins’ in the eighteenth century entails searching the places where the century overflows its bounds, and refuses to be contained or corralled by any monolithic notion. In a book published several decades ago, Georges Benrekassa reopened this question, with a view to re-examining the screen of rationality that veiled the century, a rationality conceived as ‘faith’. For Benrekassa, the margins of the Enlightenment are to be found above all through a process of ideological tunnelling, in order to uncover the spaces eccentric to the age of reason understood as a ‘thought of ordering’ (p. 12). In clarifiying his approach, his effort to avoid the trap of concentricity, he wrote that ‘the question we are faced with is how to break these circles within which the ideology of the Enlightenment contemplates itself’ (p. 13). In effect, Benrekassa's critique belongs to a genealogy that began with the work of Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a critique of Enlightenment reason as a force of domination, and that was continued by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977). Foucault lays bare, behind the positivity of the contract and the idealisation of law promoted by the philosophes, a series of disciplinary devices, technologies of coercion. This essay will explore the question of margins in a less ideological fashion by repositioning the literature of the eighteenth century in the context of certain works of history with a sociological dimension. A reversion to concentricity tends to circumscribe the period's major writers, the philosophes.
15 - Freedom and the project of idleness
- Edited by Christie McDonald, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Rousseau and Freedom
- Published online:
- 05 May 2010
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2010, pp 245-256
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Rousseau's autobiographical works base a series of practices of freedom on an unexpected foundation: that of idleness. My examples will be drawn mainly from two representative works: Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In contrast to Rousseau's political writings, where freedom is defined in relation to work, as a condition of the citizen's political emancipation, Rousseau's autobiographical period performs a virtual about-face when he develops his grand project of idleness. This reorientation is neatly summed up in a statement from his Considerations on the Government of Poland: “Repose and freedom appear incompatible to me; it is necessary to choose.” But, as we shall see, “doing nothing” becomes the formula for the solitary experience of freedom. Rousseau seeks to remove himself from various forms of constraint or subjugation. He chooses disengagement and disinterest. It is as if the thinker of the Social Contract later came to invent a logic of subjective freedom that is unfettered by any bond or attachment, a new sovereignty of liberty.
Laziness is the organizing principle of Rousseau's entire moral persona. He seeks to withdraw from the universe of action. This is what impels him to give in to a series of pursuits that could be described as invisible: for example, that of music, which Rousseau tells us is suited to his “lazy mind.” He adjusts easily to his middling financial condition – neither luxury nor deprivation – and his intellectual work is measured by the same yardstick of moderation.