Rousseau's Republican Romance (review)

Rousseau's Republican Romance. By Elizabeth Rose Wingrove. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Elizabeth Rose Wingrove's Rousseau's Republican Romance is an extended study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's peculiar and subtle notion of consent. Wingrove convincingly argues that for Rousseau, consent always involves willing the circumstances of one's own domination, and is thus always a form of submission. According to Wingrove's Rousseau, this "consensual nonconsensuality" is the precondition for our participation in social norms, but it also founds our status as autonomous human beings capable of consent in the first place. The question of why and how we consent to our own subjection is one that has demanded the attention of all serious readers of Rousseau. Against the standard picture in which Rousseau founds consent and submission in a formal contract, Wingrove proposes that consent and submission are founded in sensuous desire, acted out in the first instance at the level of erotically charged, sexed bodies. As she puts it, "The possibility of consent is premised on the possibility of coercion, and yet both of these possibilities emerge only in the particular practices of sensuously motivated creatures" (56). Her book is the story of how sensuous eros plays this founding role in Rousseau's texts, and of the picture of consent that emerges out of it. Wingrove's text explores the mutual constitution of freedom and submission through Rousseau's narratives of the erotic confounding of the line between them. Finding this dynamic between the citizen-subject and the patrie on the one hand, and between heterosexual couples on the other, Wingrove reveals a Rousseau who introduces eros into the essential heart of republican citizenry, and relations of authority and coercion into the essential heart of romantic love.

Two other themes are central to Wingrove's book. First, she wishes to argue that it is distinctively heterosexual eros that serves to structure and cement social bonds, or in other words that the Rousseauian dialectic of consent and submission is a heterosexual dialectic. Second, she reads Rousseau as offering an account of gender as performative. Wingrove points out that while some readers have attended to the social functions of actual, material women (and men) as Rousseau describes and prescribes them, others have attended to the place of the feminine (and to a lesser degree the masculine) as a semiotic or symbolic force in the Rousseauian mythos. She argues that insofar as gender is performed, we can say that an important part of women's and men's material social work is the theatrical enactment of these semiotic functions, thereby synthesizing these two former strands of gender analysis. The induction into and maintenance of consensual submission is effected at the level of the passions, through performed seductions. These performances play the rhetorical role of initiating freely chosen submission in a way that appeals to discursive reason could not. Thus "sexed bodies [and the imaginative play they can stimulate] perform the rhetorical operations" that seal political logic (239), and hence "at issue . . . in cultivating girl's bodies is how they will function as signs" (74).

In chapter 1, Wingrove examines the problem of the founding of consent and legitimate subjection in Rousseau, arguing that Rousseau resorts of necessity to rhetorically contorted, impossible origin stories to explain this founding. In chapters 2 and 3, she gives close readings of Rousseau's own extended case studies of romantic, heterosexual love. These chapters do the main work of teasing out the actual dialectics wherein eros and desire found and sustain consent and submission. In chapter 4, Wingrove transfers her attention from sexual to civic bonds, via the rhetorical figure that ties these imaginatively together: the body politic. She argues that gendered passions are the medium through which the freedom and subjection that make up Rousseauian amour de la patrie are sustained. Chapter 5 examines the role of "spectacle"—performance, imitation, representation and theatricality—in forming and corrupting these social bonds. Chapter 6 is a close reading of one of Rousseau's...