Rousseau's Knees

It may seem a little perverse to address the topic "Rousseau and emotion" through what seems, at least on its most evident surface, such an unemotional text as Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. In its 100 Pléiade pages the word "émotion" occurs but three times. Indeed, this text is the record of a willed flight from emotion, which is all but banished from the ambling thoughts strung together in the reveries. The experience the text aims to record is the "sentiment de l'existence depouillé de toute autre affection."¹ Emotion is associated with agitated movement and random reactions of a kind the writer-walker wants to avoid. But precisely because the work is in flight from emotional agitation, it keeps emotion's image in its rearview mirror, so to speak. Looked at from this angle, one may see how a certain idea of emotion is being repeatedly defined by this text.

We can begin to discern that image by looking at the three occurrences of émotion. The first is from the Fourth Promenade, when Rousseau is recalling how a friend almost knocked the young Jean-Jacques's brains out:

Je ne vis de ma vie une agitation pareille à celle de ce pauvre garçon voyant mon sang ruisseler dans mes cheveux. Il crut m'avoir tué. Il se précipite sur moi, m'embrasse, me serre étroitement en fondant en larmes et poussant des cris perçans. Je l'embrassois aussi de toute ma force en pleurant comme lui dans une émotion confuse qui n'étoit pas sans quelque douceur.

(OC 1:1037, emphasis added)

Despite the gruesomeness of the accident, this is a sweet memory, associated with the uncertain emotion "qui n'étoit pas sans quelque douceur." It is sweet to recall how the poor perpetrator manifested sincere affection toward me, Jean-Jacques. At the thought I might be dead, he almost went mad. In its next occurrence, émotion is likewise associated with a child's spontaneous show of affection toward Jean-Jacques, now a lonely old man:

Je marchois distrait et rêvant sans regarder autour de moi quand tout à coup je me sentis saisir les genoux. Je regarde et je vois un petit enfant de cinq ou six ans qui serroit mes genoux de toute sa force en me regardant d'un air si familier et si caressant que mes entrailles s'émurent. [...] [J]e suis repassé plusieurs fois par Clignancourt dans l'espérance d'y revoir cet enfant, mais je n'ai plus revu ni lui ni le pere, et il ne m'est plus resté de cette rencontre qu'un souvenir assez vif, mêlé toujours de douceur et de tristesse, comme toutes les émotions qui pénetrent encor quelque-fois jusqu'à mon cœur.

(OC 1:1089-90, emphasis added)

Like the preceding anecdote, this one recounts a chance event as the occasion for émotion. Both are sweet memories insofar as the other's affection for the subject was made manifest by unmistakable signs: actions, gestures, and bodily eruptions like cries or tears. They also share a particular trajectory, which is most apparent in the scene between the old man and the child. The dreamy walker has been startled out of his reverie by the shock of an outside force, the child's impulsive embrace. Seeing the benevolent face of the boy, he is moved, "mes entrailles s'émurent." The movement of émouvoir draws the subject out of himself into a social space where he becomes an object for others. There he is seized by the knees, by the genoux, that is, also by the jenous, where the singular I and the plural we gap into each other and leave a trace of inappropriable otherness. Later on, we'll come back to this recollection so as to read there a scene of Rousseau seized by writing in his body.

The space of the je-nous is always potentially the danger zone for the walker-writer, the agitated zone of plural passions he has fled. In the encounter with the child, this dangerous move is compensated by the face "me regardant d'un...