Rousseau ou la conscience sociale des Lumières par Éliane Martin-Haag (review)

media, from the moment when her first submitted manuscript, Hygiène de l’assassin , was recognized in Le Monde des livres as a first novel comparable to those of Le Clezio and Modiano decades earlier. Others (including the prestigious Gallimard, who dismissed her first submitted manuscript as a prank) suspected “Amélie Nothomb” of being a pseudonym for an established male writer, like the major character in her novel. This doubt about her identity extended even to her family name of Nothomb—“personne, même en Belgique ne pouvait s’appeler comme ça” (Nothomb quoted by Lee [24])—ironically, because the Nothomb family is well represented in Belgian history. In fact, Lee terminates his study with a reflection on Nothomb’s complex relationship with her official identity as a citizen of Belgium, a “homeland” she saw for the first time at the age of seventeen , after having followed her diplomat-father in postings around the world. It is because of these repeated accusations of her non-existence, Lee argues, that Nothomb was forced to present herself to the media, soon becoming a sort of literary “rock star,” with her large black hats borrowed from Belgian paintings and her idiosyncratic eating habits. In this media-driven re-invention of identity, Lee finds a relationship with Nothomb’s literary work, particularly her autobiographical Métaphysique des tubes, a complex and puzzling re-creation of her first three years of life. Developing his analysis with reference to Freud’s family romance and Marianne Hirsch’s analysis of mother-daughter relationships, Lee makes a convincing argument for the significance of the repeated episodes of drowning, which he sees echoed in the account by Nothomb’s beloved Japanese nursemaid of her own experience, during wartime bombings, of being submerged in the rubble of her family home (a photo of the adored Nishio-san with the young Amélie Nothomb appears on the cover of Lee’s book). Grounding Nothomb’s literary search for identity in her key autobiographical work, Lee expands this analysis to become a frame in which to situate his interpretation of Nothomb’s other novels, as well as of several separately published short stories. Because of this narrative grounding, Lee’s study of Nothomb’s work is informative and interesting, not only to the rapidly expanding groups of Nothomb specialists, but also to those who, like myself, have enjoyed Nothomb’s novels without fully understanding their place in the French literary curriculum. By focusing his study on the question of identity and grounding it in the autobiographical work, Lee presents a strong argument for distinguishing Nothomb’s serious literary production from the playful media figure she has been obliged to develop, in order to situate her work firmly within the ever-expanding corpus of contemporary French literature. Dartmouth College (NH) Mary Jean Green MARTIN-HAAG, ÉLIANE. Rousseau ou la conscience sociale des Lumières. Paris: Champion, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7453-1868-8. Pp. 382. 73 a. This stimulating book is true to its title but in a way that confounds initial expectations. It is not a study of Rousseau as the gadfly conscience of the Enlightenment but rather a philosophical analysis of the notion of “conscience” in Rousseau’s work. As commonly understood, “conscience” as Rousseau describes it in Émile is a variant of the traditional Christian idea of a moral guide to individual behavior separate from materialistic motivation, a “divine instinct” in Reviews 755 which the emphasis is on the divine rather than on the instinctual. Even those who suspect Rousseau of not really believing in God find it hard not to see him as accepting some kind of mind-body dualism, given his use of a language drawn from Descartes, Malebranche, and Fénelon, even though any such dualism is hard to square with the resolutely materialistic anthropology of the Discours sur l’inégalit é. Martin-Haag grasps the nettle by defining Rousseau’s “conscience” as “une force ou un conatus affectif” (29) growing out of the human being’s basic amour de soi, and whose character is best described as “ethical-social” rather than moral. If “la force de la sensibilité” is not “‘morale’ au sens des valeurs...