Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics

Introduction

Introduction Je parle de la musique. Il faut assurément que je sois né pour cet art, puisque j’ai commencé de l’aimer dès mon enfance, et qu’il est le seul que j’aye aimé constamment dans tous les tems. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, book 5 The history of the critical reception of Rousseau’s corpus bears the traces of interests conditioned by historical circumstance. While this is true of most writers, it is all the more true of the author of Du contrat social and the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. In the wake of the French Revolution, Rousseau’s work was reductionistically viewed with skepticism and even fear as the philosophical inspiration behind Robespierre and the Terror.1 As the threat of a repeat of the atrocities of the Terror receded in collective consciousness and the experiments with forms of political authority—empire, constitutional monarchy, republic, empire— unfolded in nineteenth-century France, the critical condemnations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave way to more nuanced readings of Rousseau’s work, although still largely focused on the political theory. The corpus provided sufficient fuel in all of its internal contradictions for an array of critical readings from positions situated all along the political spectrum. While the critical reception of Rousseau’s corpus has broadened gradually to include all of the major works attended to by scholars in disciplines as diverse as political science, philosophy, literature, and musicology, the slow addition of texts to the canon has often followed specific critical readings . In other words, a seminal reading has often elevated a particular text to the status of ‘‘worthy of critical attention,’’ followed by heated debate. One such example is Jacques Derrida’s pathbreaking De la grammatologie. 2 Rousseau Among the Moderns In the late 1960s, Derrida pushed the Essai sur l’origine des langues from its relative obscurity as a marginal text into the limelight of twentiethcentury critical theory. As I will discuss in detail below, Derrida’s reading of the Essai changed the categories of perception of Rousseau’s work, offering a reading that highlighted his place in the history of thinking about language. Derrida’s close examination of the Essai sparked a wave of interest by an array of critics intrigued by the philosophical stakes of not only the Essai but also a variety of works in the corpus, now read through the lens of literary-philosophical concerns.2 Overall, the history of Rousseau’s critical reception traces a gradual widening of the corpus from an early narrow focus on the political theory toward the integration of fictional and nonfictional works of a decidedly more literary bent. Although the types of works subjected to scholarly attention has grown, the difficulty remains in moving among the various disciplinary fields represented. Rousseau’s corpus taken as a whole presents the critic with the challenge of working and synthesizing across multiple disciplinary domains. Most significant in this regard is the relatively scant attention paid to the works dedicated to music by scholars outside of musicology .3 Oddly enough, and in spite of the full title of the famous Essai sur l’origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie, few critics outside of musicology have sought to integrate a consideration of the works on music into the broader whole.4 Rousseau Among the Moderns undertakes just such an approach. If historical circumstance conditions critical reception, why integrate the work on music now? A number of factors determine this choice. First is the state of the field. The publication of De la grammatologie ushered in a period of intensely theoretically oriented readings of most of the major authors of the French Enlightenment, Rousseau included. Derrida, de Man, Starobinski, and others contributed to a wave of critical attention informed by a range of theoretical approaches. In short, theory was all the rage and Rousseau provided grist for the mill. In the wake of the theory wave, the field of eighteenth-century studies (and literary studies more generally) experienced a period of uncertainty.5 Interdisciplinary studies—both of the highly theoretical and the more empirically driven varieties—have become increasingly prevalent in the field. This is not to say that all scholarship has taken a turn toward interdisciplinarity, but since the ‘‘theory wave,’’ eighteenth-century studies has become increasingly marked by an interest in expanding the narrow bounds of national literatures and histories...