Présentation du livre de Barbara Carnevali, Romantisme et reconnaissance. Figures de la conscience chez Rousseau

Présentation du livre de Barbara Carnevali, Romantisme et reconnaissance. Figures de la conscience chez Rousseau

Discutants : Claude Habib (Université Paris 3), Antoine Lilti (EHESS), Martin Rueff (Université de Genève), Céline Spector (Université Bordeaux III)

Presentation

'Be yourself': this modern imperative is generally ascribed to Rousseau. Rousseau's readers from the Romantic Age onward viewed his life and work as a paradigm for a new moral universe, one which celebrated originality, solitude, and the quest for a 'natural self' independent of inter-subjective relationships.

This book offers a different reading: it rediscovers the Rousseau of the 'social self'. Through consideration of his two 'histories of consciousness', the Discourse on Inequality and the Confessions, this study uncovers a philosopher of recognition, conscious of the importance of mediation in the construction of identity; a psychologist of rivalry and mimicry; a sociologist of prestige; an ambitious commoner, the precursor of Julien Sorel and Lucien de Rubempré; a social dissenter, who skillfully staged his rebellion against the society of spectacle.

Rousseau's thought is riven by the tension between a Romantic impulse and a need for recognition, which he expresses ­–in the moral language of the day – as an opposition between amour de soi and amour-propre. In this respect Rousseau reveals the central conflict of modern subjectivity: the opposition between the aspirations of the individual and the social demands of the human condition.