Staged Truth and Travel Epistemology in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles

Staged Truth and Travel Epistemology in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles LORRAINE PIROUX Anyone who is familiar with Rousseau's Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758) and the long critical tradition associated with his anti-theater stance, might be puzzled to see the text included in the category of travel narratives. Certainly, nothing in the polemical rhetoric of the Lettre, nor in its thematic content, seems to indicate that it is generically akin to, say, Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville or Paul et Virginie. Owing perhaps to the highly visible circumstances of its publication , the Lettre à d'Alembert is more often regarded as a prime example of the kind of intellectual debates that took place within the Republic of Letters —a debate, moreover, long considered key to understanding Rousseau's moral and political thought. As is well known, the work was Rousseau's response to d'Alembert who, in 1757, had published in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie, under the "Geneva" entry, a recommendation to establish a theater in the Swiss city. Blaming the Calvinist ministers for the ban imposed on the theater, d'Alembert argued for the moral and social utility of culture in what clearly reads as a rebuttal of Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts. The following year, Rousseau seized the opportunity of d' Alembert's proposal to launch an attack on the evils of theatricality and more generally, on the perversions of urban and cosmopolitan culture. His response to d'Alembert, however, was purposely conceived as 155 156 / PIROUX a rupture with the main forces of the French Enlightenment, and the publication of the Lettre struck the Parisian scene with the force of a major event. By means of the open letter, he put an end to his association with the Encyclopedist party, dissolved his friendship with Diderot, denounced the philosophical culture of the Republic of Letters, and withdrew from cosmopolitan society by proclaiming his Genevan citizenship.1 As Dena Goodman notes, Rousseau was to thereafter "create his own myth of the solitary seeker of the truth, the lone man of virtue in a corrupt world."2 Yet to understand how Rousseau orchestrated such a rupture, one must look beyond the argumentative logic of the Lettre à d'Alembert and the circumstances in which it was published. Fundamentally, what Rousseau sought to create with his open letter was a mode of discourse capable of emancipating knowledge from its social constraints so as eventually to return to contemplative ways of knowing. That distancing from the Enlightenment ideals of a rational and collaborative epistemology occurs in a performative rather than argumentative manner. Better than any of his contemporaries , Rousseau knew "how to do things with words."3 What follows , then, is primarily an account of the separatist performance by which the Lettre enacts the philosopher's radical break with Encyclopedic culture while securing new boundaries around the field of Rousseauist truth. The story performed in the Lettre à d'Alembert, I argue, is that of an epistemological journey in which one witnesses the homecoming of truth and its settling on Genevan ground. However, Rousseau does not limit himself to liberating knowledge from the yoke of objectivism, rationalism, and human collaboration—the tenets of enlightened philosophy. The Lettre, I further argue, sketches the blueprint for a travel epistemology which, against the Cartesian cognitive domination of the natural world, redefines knowledge as the enraptured contemplation of Nature's wonders.4 In 1758, Rousseau had already cast the subject of knowledge in the role of the endlessly wandering explorer destined to succumb to the mesmerizing power of the unknown. To that very same subject of knowledge, he would later give the leading role in the Lettre 's companion performance, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776-77). On what ground, then, can this polemical text be assimilated into the category of eighteenth-century travel literature? The second part of the Lettre à d'Alembert contains a rather odd passage where Rousseau deliberately compares the Molard, Paquis and the Eaux-Vives—districts of the Swiss city—to a seaport. Like the "foreigner coming to Geneva," the reader here discovers Rousseau's hometown depicted in a...