Social Contract, Masochistic Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau by Fayçal Falaky (review)

the“geste pantagruelique”with an impressive array of sources ranging from Erasmus to Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Marguerite de Navarre, and Noël Béda. Eric MacPhail adopts a similarly wide angle for his “Rabelais and the Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism.”He stresses the conflict between stability and versatility in his convincing endeavor to show the specific function of commonplaces in fiction. One is however, a little surprised not to see a direct reference to Francis Goyet’s classic 1996“Le sublime du‘lieu commun,’”which could have added even more weight to the argument. Rabelais’s critical attitude toward received truths and the role of the reader in the questioning of such dogmata permeate both of these opening studies and the juxtaposition of Horatian and Juvenalian stands toward central issues in the critics’ argument such as critical thinking, or administering a cure to social ills might also have added a useful dimension, but these are minor points. Raphaël Cappellen’s fascinating philological detective work of the annotations on the 1552 edition of the Tiers Livre from the University of Virginia’s Gordon Collection make a case in favor of the first proto-critical edition of Rabelais, focusing on lexicography, the correction of errors, and the Chinonais’s sources, especially his debt toward Erasmus’s and Rhodiginus’s compilations.Within the framework of this“erudito ludere”(95) rich in information about the early reception of Rabelais, the critic follows the trace of the libertine Guy Patin. Jonathan Patterson discusses the relatively neglected Papefiguesepisode from the Quart Livre within the fruitful perspective of “villainy.” Although there are a few minor logical stretches and gaps in the argument (lack of the moral angle; difference between male and female villains; the impact on the mirroring Papimanesepisode ), the inherent ambiguity of the concept of the villain and the reflection of the changing social and economic landscape are tangible and quite convincing result of the analysis. François Rouget closes the volume with another solid philological investigation (“Avantage Saint Gelais: retour sur l’attribution de l’‘Énigme en prophétie’, Gargantua, chap. 58”), accumulating strong arguments and sources in favor of the attribution of the poem to Saint Gelais while not excluding the possibility of the Rabelais’s active participation in its composition. City University of New York Bernd Renner Falaky, Fayçal. Social Contract, Masochistic Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau. Albany: SUNY, 2014. ISBN 978-2-86820-378-6. Pp. 236. $70. The strength of this work resides in the fact that it is not just an important contribution to the fields of Rousseau studies. As the title indicates, the book is a reflection on the masochistic tendencies that can be detected in all of Rousseau’s important texts. They reveal themselves in his repeated attempts to translate the dominant religious values of the pre-Enlightenment era into a secular episteme and 252 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 253 to reimagine desire and personal sexual politics after “the death of God” (7). At the same time, Social Contract, Masochistic Contract is also a book about Rousseau, written by someone who is clearly fascinated by Jean-Jacques, and who uses the methods of literary criticism—from close readings to theoretical grounding—to make sense of what has traditionally been seen as internal contradictions in Rousseau’s writings. The focus on Rousseau’s life-story and on the psychological processes at play in his selfanalysis are what make Falaky’s monograph so enjoyable to read—and, at times, a page turner. The reader is invited to meet again with an old friend and to revisit works of political economy through the prism of autobiographical and fictional texts. This strategy helps Falaky trace the philosophical and moral continuities in Rousseau’s thoughts across a range of texts all written by the same author, but different in style and ambition. Even though Falaky takes the unusual approach of focusing on the author’s emotional presence in his writings (and thus, for instance, reads a novel like La nouvelle Héloïse as the expression of Rousseau’s own phobias and desires), he systematically grounds his insights in detailed and powerful textual...