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Seeing Through Rousseau Peggy Kamuf T O SEE, OR RATHER TO SHOW SIGHT in its proper light is a fairly good description of what Rousseau says he is up to in the Dialogues. Whereas the Confessions proposed to “ montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature,” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jaques takes this project either one step further or one step back, depending on how you look at it. In his preface to the Dialogues, he writes: “ il fallait nécessairement que je dise de quel œil, si j ’étais un autre, je verrais un homme tel que je suis.” 1Between the seemingly straightforward “ Voilà l’homme que je suis” of the Confessions and this otherwise contorted demonstration of the Dialogues, there had inter­ vened the general failure of Rousseau’s contemporaries to see the man he had taken such pains to show them .2It is easy to suppose how (unable logically to conclude that the fault was his, that he had obstructed public view rather than set himself in plain sight), Rousseau had to diagnose an obstruction, malformation or distortion within the very faculty of sight he had counted on to apprehend his true nature. After all, there is little point in showing someone what to see—“ un homme,” for example—if that person does not even know how to use his own eyes. The experiment of the Confessions had shown that, with few exceptions, Rousseau was surrounded by unsighted creatures who persisted in “ seeing” not the man who had placed himself squarely in the light but only dim figures in the shadows with which the light contrasted. The Dialogues, therefore, would undertake to show nothing more nor less than sight, which is in itself nothing. The text is not a “Lettre sur les aveugles” but a “ Lettre aux aveugles” and therein lies the considerable if not impossible dilemma it has posed for itself. In one sense, one can say that Rousseau never resolved this dilemma; that is, he never figured out to whom he could show this letter once it was written. Addressing it first as he did to divine providence only confirmed the dilemma without resolving it. In another sense, however, the terms in which the dilemma is posed—the visual terms—are themselves made obsolete or at least irrelevant by the performance of the Dialogues. 82 W in t e r 1988 K a m u f Saying what you See This performance requires a division of the “je” among at least three positions: “ il fallait nécessairement que je dise de quel oeil, si j ’étais un autre, je verrais un homme tel que je suis.” There is the “ je” who says “ What if I were another?” ; there is then this other “je” who offers his judgment on the man he sees; and there is finally the man like me, “ un homme tel que je suis.” These are the three positions implicit in every socalled autobiographical writing—The Confessions, for example—where writer, narrator and principal character of the narration are presumed by the conventions of what Philippe Lejeune calls the autobiographical pact to be identifiable by the same nam e.3 But the Dialogues depart from Lejeune’s schema in a manner which is finally troubling for any effort to define the limits of the genre because, precisely, the text does not break with or abandon the convention; on the contrary, it re-marks that con­ vention and exploits it to the limit. In so doing, the Dialogues demon­ strate the essentially fictional resource at the source of autobiography, the fiction of “ si j ’étais un autre” that is conventionally covered over and forgotten by convention. The programming sentence of this text, however, remarks the fiction not only in a thematic mode but also in a grammatical one. Its syntax assigns not three but four positions to “je,” although the second two are logically identified with each other: “ . . . de quel œil, si y ’étais un autre, je verrais. . . .” The fact that there is a surplus articulation of the “je” should not be overlooked because it is this surplus, precisely, of a neces­ sary articulation (“ ilfallait que je dise” ) over...

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