Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot (review)

L'Esprit Créateur way the Délie incorporates or responds to earlier texts (Gérard Defaux, Joann Dellaneva, François Rigolot). Two chapters deal with music: Cynthia Skenazi studies the philosophical underpinning of music in the Délie, and Edwin M. Duval, in a particularly striking study, points out the structural affinity between the form of the Scevean dizain and that of the popular chanson. Nancy M. Frelick gives us a psychoanalytic reading that focuses on the function of desire in the text. Jerry C. Nash also focuses on desire but arrives at conclusions that are strikingly different from those of Frelick. Other chapters (by Raymond C. and Virginia A. La Charité, Hope H. Glidden, Tom Conley, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, and Yvonne Bell enger) deal—interestingly in every case—with specific textual matters. Offering readings that are fresh, insightful and rewarding, this volume is a microcosm of the best Scevean criticism today. Robert D. Cottrell Ohio State University Julia Simon. Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995. The dual ability to pursue critical questions raised across disciplines and simultaneously to see where and how the domains of fiction, philosophy, social, political, ethical and aesthetic theory and history intersect characterizes the breadth and value of Prof. Simon's book. The overarching question and paradox of individual identity and reason organize this work throughout. "To pose the question in the most general terms, the problem of mass culture arises as part of the individual's changing relation to the social order" (170). Following the methodological and theoretical tenets in large part of the Frankfurt school of philosophy (Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas), Simon clearly illustrates how the dark or "negative side of enlightenment" functions as a result of a "conception of reason as domination" (4) or "instrumental reason" (5). She explores bourgeois ideology within the context of the French Enlightenment specifically with respect to the link between the eighteenth-century establishment of early capitalism and its subsequent legacy to contemporary twentieth-century "mass culture." This study of the Enlightenment thus reveals a "constant focus on the problems of modernity" (4), whose emergence can be traced already in its eighteenth-century precedents. Simon concentrates on two of the most prominent French Enlightenment figures, Rousseau and Diderot, whom she designates the "first critical theorists" (173) and whose works before Horkheimer and Adorno already question the assumptions of the Enlightenment . For example, an interpretation of Rousseau's "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality " (ch. 1) simultaneously acknowledges the critical faculty inherent in the individual and provides an early model of his alienation—a characteristic of modern mass culture. Simon's is an exciting and dynamic study which asserts some of the most complex problems of our contemporary culture through analysis of their eighteenth-century paradoxes. Several of Simon's earlier articles on Rousseau and their subsequent development in her book culminate in the lucid and flowing chapter 3 on Rousseau's autobiographical projects . Here, using in particular the perspective of Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Simon shows most definitively the "impossibility of autobiography conceived as private writing" (93). Rousseau's project of defining a "private self" is coupled paradoxically with the commodification of the individual as a product of society's growing capacity already in early capitalism to manipulate and distort images of the individual. The very separation between the private and public that Rousseau repeatedly attempts to achieve is constantly baffled. 120 SUMMER 1996 Book Reviews As Simon says, "every attempt to represent the private sphere amounts to a publication of it" (93). Simon demonstrates a commendable capability for synthesis. In the methodological "Introduction," in the few pages at the end and beginning of each chapter, in the pages termed "Transitional Interlude" separating the two major sections of the book, and finally in a "Conclusion," Simon is continually refining and distilling the syntheses arrived at in her text. Her facility in locating the subtle paradoxes of an argument is accompanied by an ability to elaborate them in an increasingly clear and accessible synthesis for the reader. If I were to make one general criticism of her work, it would be that at moments, perhaps because of...