Rousseau and Reformulating Celebrity

This essay examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s changing efforts to grapple with his unprecedented celebrity through each of his major autobiographical texts (the Confessions, the Dialogues, and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire). It argues that Rousseau advocates a new, if ultimately untenable, model of celebrity that emphasizes the authenticity of the author’s embodied person. With this new model, Rousseau suggests that his person must be read along with his texts. Highlighting the author’s fraught attempts to manage his celebrity through his autobiographical texts, the essay explores the inherent slippages between Rousseau’s embodied person, textual representation, and celebrity persona.