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  • Voix et mémoire: lectures de Rousseau by Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre et Michael O'Dea
  • Kevin Inston
Voix et mémoire: lectures de Rousseau. Textes réunis et présentés par Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre et Michael O'Dea. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2012. 382382 pp., ill.

Researchers at the University of Grenoble and members of the research group LIRE marked the 2012 tercentennial of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's birth by collecting in a single volume their essays on Rousseau from the last twenty years. The title not only refers to the essays' analyses of the themes of voice and memory in canonical texts (La Nouvelle Héloïse, Les Confessions, Émile, Les Rêveries) and lesser studied works (Le Devin du village, Le Dictionnaire de musique, Lettres écrites de la montagne, Les Dialogues), but also to the plural voices of the Rousseauists at the university and LIRE and the memory of their research. While the essays do not always cohere into a sustained meditation on voice and memory, they compensate by bringing out the multiple representations and inflections of these concepts in Rousseau's work. In the first section, Jean Sgard, Claude Labrosse, Pierre Rétat, and Jean-François Perrin explore how memory and creation are inseparable not simply in terms of the writing of the past but also in terms of the interpenetration of time, space, fiction, and reality: these categories mutually constitute one another in and through Rousseau's writing. Whereas Sgard focuses on the link between landscape and memory as a source of creativity, Labrosse and Rétat consider the structuring force of fleeting and yet founding moments of time in Rousseau's fictional and autobiographical texts, and his use of illustrations or poetic writing to make permanent what remains ultimately impermanent. Perrin demonstrates the ethical implications of memory: the [End Page 410] aesthetic reconfiguration of the past proves essential for learning the art of living in the present. With the exception of Perrin's second contribution, which looks at the question of internal voice, section two of the volume is less concerned with Rousseau's concept of voice per se and more with the many voices to which he responds in his writings. Pierre Saby reads Rousseau's Devin du village as a manifesto against French music, particularly against the ideas of his adversary d'Alembert, while Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre skilfully analyses Rousseau's dialogue with Voltaire on fanaticism in the Lettres écrites de la montagne. Michael O' Dea and Terence Cave both examine Rousseau's complex relation with the addressee of his work: O'Dea reflects on Rousseau's claim in the Rêveries to write only for himself, and Cave foregrounds the ambiguities that Rousseau's autobiographical letters to Mirabeau create for the epistolary pact. Yves Citton provides one of the most original and stimulating contributions: through his masterful reading, Rousseau's Dialogues, a text often dismissed as a paranoid flight of fancy, becomes a source of astute social critique. Whereas the Contrat social analyses the constitution of a democratic people, the Dialogues lucidly analyses the people's mutation into a multitude blindly and subserviently following conspiratorial propaganda. The two texts dialogue with one another, highlighting the legitimacy and dangerous excesses of popular involvement. Voix et mémoire attests the diverse and rich scholarship on Rousseau produced in the region of Grenoble, as well as the continuing vibrancy of Rousseau studies in general.

Kevin Inston
University College London
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