Rousseau et les philosophes ed. by Michael O’Dea (review)

One of the greatest strengths of Martin’s Napoleonic Friendship is that it reaches across multiple disciplines in history, literature, art, and gender studies. Perhaps of most interest to literary scholars is the fact that Martin also perceptively recognizes the intertextuality within these nineteenth-century memoirs and novels and situates them against a long tradition of French epic poems, epistolary novels, and pastoral romances. Though a bit repetitive at times, overall this timely study poignantly resonates with modern-day discussions regarding gays in the American military. University of Central Florida Sharon Larson O’DEA, MICHAEL, éd. Rousseau et les philosophes. SVEC 2010:12. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7294-1004-5. Pp. 274. £65. The nineteen essays collected here grew out of the Rousseau Association’s 2007 Colloquium on Rousseau’s vexed relationship to the Enlightenment. Bruno Bernardi and Mark Hulliung, whose essays frame the collection, underline the timeliness of the volume: rather than pitting Rousseau against the philosophes, they invite us to follow Hulliung’s lead in reading Rousseau’s work as an ‘autocritique of the Enlightenment’ and a guide for revisiting our own relationship to modernity. Each essay focuses on specific quarrels and debates, and while most readers will no doubt dip in where their interests lie, the volume merits being read as a whole: several of the essays echo one another and are the richer for being read together. The volume is structured in three sections. The first, “Situer Rousseau,” investigates the roots of Rousseau’s dispute with the philosophes. It opens with two essays on reason in Rousseau: Bernardi’s “Sur le concept de lumières publiques: Rousseau comme Aufklärer” and Christopher Bertram’s “Rousseau and Morality: Between Naturalism and Rationalism.” James Swenson’s “Du matérialisme chez Rousseau” and Christophe Van Staen’s “Un océan de connaissances inutiles: Rousseau face aux Glaucus modernes,” both question the place of Rousseau’s alleged anti-materialism in his break with the Encyclopédistes. Swenson offers a provocative reading of the Contrat social as a materialist work, while Van Staen joins Christopher Kelly (“Rousseau and the Bad Calculations of the Philosophers”) and Alexandre Provencher-Gravel (“Une philosophie pour les autres?”) in anchoring Rousseau’s rift with the Encyclopédistes in fundamentally different visions of the ends of philosophy. Part two, “Lire Rousseau,” offers a series of close readings of particular texts. Three essays seek to provide a philosophical explanation for Rousseau’s writings against the philosophes: Jean-François Perrin’s superb “L’art de ces Messieurs: Rousseau et la question herméneutique” casts the Dialogues, too often read as little more than the paranoid rant of an aged Rousseau, as a groundbreaking work in the history of hermeneutics; Catherine Volpilhac-Auger’s “‘Tais-toi Jean-Jacques...’ D’Émile aux Dialogues” offers a smart reading of Émile and its relationship to the Dialogues; and Caroline Mineau brings to light the philosophical strategy at play in Rousseau’s unflattering representation of his former friends in Les confessions (“La fiction de l’autre dans le portrait de soi: le rôle des figures de Grimm, de Diderot et d’Holbach”). Ourida Mostefai marshals proof of Rousseau’s continuing engagement with the Encyclopédie in “Une dette non avouée: Rousseau, Diderot et 578 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 l’Encyclopédie,” while O’Dea carefully traces the conflicting meanings of the term ‘philosophe’ throughout Rousseau’s work in “Soundings: the Word ‘philosophe’ in Rousseau’s Works and Correspondence.” The section ends by turning to politics with Kiyotaka Kawai’s “Rousseau citoyen de Genève et sa critique du système représentatif.” Part three, “Dialogues et confrontations,” zeroes in on specific debates. Two essays focus on Diderot: Carole Martin’s “Formes de l’empathie chez Rousseau et Diderot” (which successfully uses reproductions of Dürer and Vivant Denon to illustrate a complex theory about specularity), and John T. Scott’s “Another Dangerous Supplement: Diderot’s Dialogue with Rousseau in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville.” Maria Leone’s “La nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs philosophes ” shows how Rousseau integrated the problem of reception into his novel; together with Perrin’s and Volpilhac-Augers’s essays...