Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Thread starter Clinamenic
- Start date
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Proust and the Sex Rats
A modest investigation into whether the French writer indulged in an unusual fetish.
Probably a nasty slur, like the one about me owning a fleshlight that's drying with the dishes not ten feet from me as I type this
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Thats more people than those who have mentioned Rousseau in this very thread!
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
So I just finished the second discourse, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, and I’m ultimately impressed with the coherence and scope of the argument here. He’s basically saying that pre-rational man lacked the faculties from which society emerges, and which by extension gives rise to the various agreements and conventions that enable reputation and esteem, and the inequality therebetween.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
He makes a lot of conjecture about the pre-rational state of “natural man” but I think it’s permissible within the context of the points he was trying to make.
dilbert1
Well-known member
After having read it in paraphrases alome I’m finally finishing up the Second Discourse @thirdform, amazing how intuitive so many of the criticisms feel vis a vis a nascent leftist consciousness. Rousseau would have loved the Flux of Pink Indians. And how juicy the language and convincing the argument still appears, in so many guises as its repeated itself since, being that while the reversion is impossible and undesirable to those who would want to push modern freedom beyond itself, we haven’t exactly been able to prove him wrong. I’m pretty immune to the romanticism myself, and still don’t understand how such lamenting reverie for the intermediary Savage can follow up his exaltation of 18th c. Geneva with the latter seeming all that genuine
dilbert1
Well-known member
Of he course doesn’t reject modernity tout court and sees the exchange of “natural liberty” for “moral freedom” as both irreversible and ambiguous, a task for his own time to make good on
“The principle of freedom and its corollary, ‘perfectibility,’ . . . suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless. . . . Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau’s new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared. . . . As Hegel put it, ‘The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.’ ” — James Miller, from the introduction
“The principle of freedom and its corollary, ‘perfectibility,’ . . . suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless. . . . Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau’s new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared. . . . As Hegel put it, ‘The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.’ ” — James Miller, from the introduction
dilbert1
Well-known member
“To be and appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake. […] [Man] must… constantly try to interest [others] in his fate and to make them really or apparently find their own profit in working for his: which makes him knavish and artful with some… and places him under the necessity of deceiving all those he needs if he cannot get them to fear him… [A]mbition… instills in all men… a secret jealousy that is all the more dangerous as it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to strike its blow in greater safety…” (Rousseau).
Society was always already a society of the spectacle for him
Society was always already a society of the spectacle for him
this stuff is of course fine with the proviso that it is realised that all culture is in the final instance bourgeois (which is not a condemnation of its aesthetic merit.) even the cultures we romanticise such as jungle and football. the inverse of this is Fisherite romanticism for the BBC as incubator shaping the minds of the young generation (popular antimodernism?) and inane democratic chatter of pundits, the same defect which caused Fisher to become a spectacularly idiotic labourite cretin sexing up Russell Brand and for @craner to gravitate to blandly conformist statist zionism, two sides of the same coin.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Have you read Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded?
yes, but Samuel Beckett's Murphy is better.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Well get into the thread then you slacker!
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
.
No, I've read the collector though. Fowles is a great rushy prosist but his plot ideas are rote.
No, I've read the collector though. Fowles is a great rushy prosist but his plot ideas are rote.
why? all that 60s culture is snooze inducing to me these days. You seem to serve as Synecdoche for Luka's failure to graduate from Bohemia
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Can't believe I'm seriously contemplating reading it but it's fallen into my lap so I'm gonna give it a go. Looks truly awful in a good way