Starobinski on Rousseau, or the Heuristic Power of Opacity

Jean Starobinski’s critical voice is one of the most engaging and seductive of the late twentieth-century writers.’ This is due in part to his elegance, the simple style of his exposition, his self-effacing foregrounding of the inner workings of a number of writers’ imaginaires, especially Montaigne, Diderot, and of course Rousseau. His is not only a distinctive voice, but also a particularly effective, even emblematic, one, demonstrative of the potential of literary criticism to speak to the urgency and value of the literary project. It is on the origins of the singularity of this voice that I would like to speculate, taking my cues from his long and complex reflection on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Indeed, if there is one author whom we immediately think of when we hear the name Starobinski, it is of course Rousseau. Starobinski’s engagement with Rousseau stretches from the beginning of his career and continues to today. The book that launched his career, La Transparence et l’obstacle (much of which was worked out in his few years in Baltimore) was first published in 1957, and remains one of his most insightful and important. In 1971 he brought out a second edition with a weighty appendix containing seven more significant articles on Rousseau that he had published in the intervening years, leaving out only the long essay in L’Œil vivant from 1961. His other great entanglement with Rousseau was the almost life-long work of writing significant introductions and elaborate notes for the volumes of the definitive edition of Rousseau’s work in the Pléaide, to which we will return later. Clearly Rousseau was a thinker who never ceased to challenge and provoke Starobinski, and it is worth investigating why his was a privileged relationship to this awkward and difficult thinker.

The first lines of the first of the additional articles in La Transparence et l’obstacle “Rousseau et la recherche des origines” are, “On n’en a jamais fini avec lui: il faut toujours s’y reprendre à neuf, se réorienter ou se désorienter, oublier les formules et les images qui nous le rendaient familier et nous donnaient la rassurante conviction de l’avoir défini une fois pour toutes. Chaque génération découvre un nouveau Rousseau, en qui elle trouve l’exemple de ce qu’elle veut être, ou de ce qu’elle refuse passionnément…. C’est une oeuvre qui … joue sur un nombre considérable de registres et occupe une étonnante diversité de dimensions spirituelles.”¹ If we look at the many titles and subjects over the years in which Starobinski wrote about Rousseau, this is certainly the case. In fact, it is clear that Starobinski often shifted his point of view (although not his opinions on the functioning of the work) to highlight and reveal very different facets of it. It is significant, I think, that even though his work with scholars like Poulet and his own medical training often led him to privilege what we might call a psychological analysis for many of the authors he studied, this was only one point of attack on Rousseau, and one which, despite the obvious temptation to produce conventional readings of Rousseau as a paranoic, he almost immediately went beyond. Let us provisionally hazard that what really interested Starobinski in Rousseau was the intimate interrelationship in all of Rousseau’s writings, from the earliest to the latest, of three issues. First, indeed, the sentimental (which is a better characterization than the psychological), but only when informed by Rousseau’s peculiar definition of the second perspective, the historical and third, what I will call the principial. It is the agonistic interaction of these three types of conceptualization in Rousseau’s work that produce Rousseau’s idiosyncratic rhetorical stance; this is what I think Starobinski is referring to when he speaks of Rousseau’s poetics. And what Starobinski saw or responded to was the very particular reader called for—or, better, produced—by this conceptual dynamic.

Let us consider a single example of Rousseau’s use of this complex. It is...