- L’Écriture et l’éthique: Rousseau et le sentiment de l’extériorité by Benoit Caudoux
Benoit Caudoux’s philosophical study of Rousseau’s writing as a life ethics resituates the Genevan writer-philosopher’s work as a unique project of modernity; one that seeks a way beyond the impasse of what Adorno and Horkheimer famously diagnosed as the Enlightenment’s manipulations of instrumental reason. Taking up Hegel’s understanding of modernity as a form of critical self-consciousness, Caudoux proposes that Rousseau’s conception of writing as a living embodiment of sensibility is a response to what he perceived to be a dulling of sentiment brought about by the critical discourse of the philosophes. Covering the major works as well as less-studied texts such as Les Amours de Claire et de Marcellin and the Lettres morales, Caudoux ambitiously attempts to revise Derrida’s seminal analysis, which challenged the supposed primacy of voice over writing in Rousseau’s aesthetic imaginary and which questioned the logic of supplementarity. For Caudoux, Rousseau’s privileging of the medium of writing as a vehicle for capturing ‘l’empreinte sensible’ (p. 340) and as a tool for self-knowledge, constitutes his most significant contribution to an ethical understanding of the project of the Enlightenment. Rousseau’s writing is hence neither derivative, nor a mourning of the loss of direct communication, but ‘la construction d’un espace permettant le vis-à-vis des âmes’ (p. 197), a regenerative public discourse seeking to redress the imbalance of Enlightenment thought that veers, according to both Rousseau and Caudoux, towards empty rhetoric and intransitive expression. Offering an attentive engagement with contemporary Rousseau scholars such as Christopher Kelly, Jean-François Perrin, Paul Audi, and Yannick Séité, and engaging in a close reading of Derrida’s De la grammatologie, this volume is a philosophical study well suited to specialists but perhaps less appropriate for a broader audience. It is written in the style of a French thesis and its substantial length (more than seven hundred pages) does require some patience on the reader’s part. However, Caudoux’s contribution to notions of authenticity, modernity, and affect resonates with many of the concerns of contemporary society regarding a liberal social lens that risks atomizing the world into a society of individualistic strangers. Its main insight, that ‘l’éthique de Rousseau est une éthique de la sensibilité, au sens où c’est celle-ci qui fonde, chez lui, la dignité des êtres’ (p. 201), attributes a salutary role to writing, and one that reinforces the social and ethical importance of the modern writer as a crucial public voice amid the chatter of the world.
