Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

chapter one

By all accounts, Rousseau lived much of his life enjoying, but also regretting , the hospitality of others. Not unlike his own itinerant hero Saint Preux, he too was a wanderer“with no family and almost no country”(Cranston , Solitary 58). Motherless, fatherless, and homeless by the age of fifteen, Rousseau would fall in and out of favour with a virtual host of patrons, including his dear “maman” Mme de Warens, Mme d’Épinay, the Luxembourgs , and Pierre-Alexandre Du Peyrou, whom Rousseau would affectionately come to call“my dear Host”(Cranston, Solitary 125). He was a“Citizen” of no place, a foreigner perpetually abroad, claiming birthrights from a country to which he no longer belonged. Despite an addiction, as it were, to being received as l’hôte, as the welcomed one, Rousseau suffered a peculiar allergy toward the obligations engendered by another’s beneficence. Forever suspicious of the motives and the politics of Parisian politesse (a subject to which I will return), he was loathe to receive gifts of any kind and in time became infamous for refusing them, the most notable instance of which was his rejection of Louis xv’s offer of a royal pension. For Rousseau there was something profoundly unsettling about his hospitable encounters, as though these rendezvous had a way of reminding him that he would never find himself at home, that he would indeed be forever estranged, uneasy about his place in the world. “[M]ore alone in Paris than Robinson [Crusoe] in his Island” (Dialogues 826, cited in Strong 50), he became a hermit, a notorious recluse who, in his old age, expressed more hospitality toward his dog Turc than toward his friends and neighbours (Cranston, Noble 336). Preferring a good 23 chapter one Unsettling Rousseau Hospitality in Emile and Discourse on Inequality The wandering life is what I like. —The Confessions (167) J 01_unsettling 3/1/07 12:04 Page 23 book to a table companion (Confessions 255), Rousseau was the consummate solitary eater—a distinction that renders him an ironic counter-example to my analysis of Kant’s dinner party in the next chapter. In this chapter, I want to explore Rousseau’s aversion-attraction to the protocols and manners of hospitality as it relates to his writings. What sorts of welcome does this theme of the hôte receive from a thinker who would prefer visiting to hosting, who would refuse a gift for fear of having to return the favour? While conflicting answers to this question inevitably arise, my purpose is not simply to weigh one possibility against the other, as though this chapter were simply a matter of reconstructing a dominant theory of hospitality in Rousseau at the expense of many others. Rather I am primarily interested in suspending such judgment, for I believe that the place of the guesthost relation in Rousseau’s work is as troubled—indeed, as unsettled—as was his own personal experience with hospitality. Such an analysis must, of course, recognize that“personal experience”points not to the spotless recovery of a lived life but “to something that cannot quite be represented either in the text or the public life of the author” (Rajan, “Autonarration” 161). Understanding that the “life writing” of a text like Rousseau’s Confessions is irrevocably complicated by what Rajan calls “autonarration,” this chapter will treat the“transposition”of personal experience into fiction as discursively constructed (150). “Work”and“life”are figures of discourse—neither escapes the generative process of textualization, especially in a writer whose life and work are so complexly intertwined.Whether we choose to speak of Rousseau the writer or Rousseau the man, we are dealing with a text in process—which is to say, a text that continues to produce and re-produce itself in an endless play of articulation and disarticulation. One way or the other, we encounter Rousseau as he continues to engage and disengage himself with a theory (or many theories) of hospitality. In what follows, I intend to rehearse some of these engagements while paying particular attention to their repressions, avoidances, and logical lacunae.As for determining how a Rousseauvian theory of hospitality might look, all we can say is that, if such a theory does exist, it is fundamentally unresolved. What is more, I want to argue that this irresolution is constitutive of the very meaning of the term hospitality insofar as hospitality as such is less a concept than it is an experience of disruption and unsettlement occasioned...