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Rousseau ’s Confessions : A Te chnology of the S elf
Huck Gutman
For a long time ordinary individuality--the everyday individuality of everybody-remained below the threshold of description.
Foucault, Discipline and P unish
This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection... the appearance of a new modality of power in which each individual receives as his status his own individuality and in which he is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps, the “marks” that characterize him and make him a case.
Foucault, Discipline and P unish
It is very unhappy , but too late to be helpe d, the discovery we have mad e that we exist. That discov ery is called the F all of Ma n.... Life will be im aged, b ut it canno t be divided or doub led. Any in vasion o f its unity would be ch aos.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”
Immanuel Kant was a man of extremely regular habits. Each afternoon he would go for a walk through the streets of Koenigs berg. His itine rary was so re gular and his p ace so pre cise that the town sfolk would se t their watches b y his appearance on their Street. Only twice was Kant’s routine interrupted. Once was on that day when he learned of the storming of the Bastille, the day that ushered in the French Revolution. The other interruption was for a period of two or three days, during the perio d he was reading Ro usseau’s Emile. Although we know that Kant was of the opinion that Rousseau was the most remarkable mind of his time, we do not know for certain why he interrupted his fixed and determined routines to read Emile. Howev er, it is not difficult to understand, for Rousseau seems to have had a profound effect on almost everyone. Great numbers of people, like Kant, saw Rousseau as the harbinger of great possibilities for human growth and freedom. Not everyone, of course, found Rousseau remarkable or liberatory; many reviled him, so many that it is not unfair to say that no name or person was more hated in Europe from his day forth, until the arrival of a very different sort of person, Adolph Hitler, upon the historical scene. But it was no blood lust that Rousseau satisfied, nor did he promise relief for the anxieties of existence through a commitment to an ideal of racial purity. Rousseau’s immense appeal—and the equally enormous d isapproval he elicited— was directly owing to his sensibility, to the shape of his perceptions. What Kant, the philosopher who bound truth to the shape of human perception, responded to in Rousseau seems clear. Rousseau reveals and celebrates the atomistic, autonomo us self: He is perhaps the first human being to insist upon his o wn singularity. “M y mind,” he sa ys, “needs to go forward in its o wn time, it canno t submit itself to anyone else ’s.”^1 “For I knew that my experience did not apply to others” (67). He shatters the great paradigm of microcosm and macrocosm. If his life’s story has relevance to the reader, it is not because we are all reflections of Rousseau but rather b ecause we. are all unique, all selves with our individual histories and idiosyncratic perceptions. Indeed, Rousseau understands his significance is rooted not in his similarity to others but in his “exaggerated sensibility” (235). Kant must also have responded to a genuinely new conception of the self which shapes Rousseau’s presentation of his life, a conception which sees the emotive life as the basis for individuality. “I felt before I thought” (19), Roussea u claims early in h is autobiogr aphy, emp hasizing in one short phrase both the prim acy of feeling that w as to mark his uniq ue sensibility and the prescien t recognition th at it is in time, through te mporal su ccession, that the self comes to be wha t it is.^2 In a famous p assage exp laining the onse t of the physical d isabilities that were to plague him for the latter half of his life, Rousseau speaks of a life governed b y his emotions:
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and
my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possession of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake. (199)
Although this valorization of feeling has roots in the Reformation, with its emphasis on the individual as the ultimate hermeneutic authority, it is with Rousseau that a genuinely mo dern temper, which we c all romanticism, first comes clearly into view. Rousseau was the first Romantic. There is a clear correspondence between the two aspects of Rousseau’s sensibility—the emergence of an individuality, a clearly defined self, above the threshold of visibility, and the valorization of the emotive life—for the two exist in a reciprocally defining relation. When Rousseau meditates upon the activity he is engaged in, that of writing his life’s history, he says:
I have only one faithful guide on which I can count; the succession of feelings which marked the development of my being, and thereby recall the events that have acted upon it as cause or effect. I easily forget my misfortunes Ethis is in fact not the case, despite his claim] but I cannot forget my faults, and still less my genuine feelings. The memo ry of them is too dear ever to be e ffaced from my hea rt. I may om it or transpo se facts, or m ake mista kes in dates; but I cann ot go wrong about wha t I have felt, or about wh at my feelings hav e led me to do; a nd these are the chief subjects of my story. The true object of my confessions is to reveal my inner thoughts exactly in all the situations of my life. It is the history of my soul that I have promised to recount, and to write it faithfully I have need of n o other m emories; it is enough if I enter aga in into my inner self, as I h ave don e till now. (262)
What Ro usseau “confesses” is that he is who he is— an individuated self whom he calls “Jean-Jacques”— because he has had a succession of emotions prior to, interwoven with, and resultant from his interactions with the world. And, as we shall see, it is not accidental that the emergence of this feeling and individuated self is connected to, and dependent on, the activity of writing. In order to understand what Rousseau was d oing, and also what he was not doing, in his Confessio ns, we must look back to Aug ustine, bishop of Hippo. In 397, Saint Augustine wrote his Confessio ns, a work that in retrospect we might call a spiritual autobiography. A ugustine lays before his readers the chron icle of his spiritual waywardness and his even tual turn toward the church an d the service of God. But calling this p roject a spir itual autobio graphy is misleading in two respects. First, Augustine is not primarily concerned with his spirit, and second, although he recounts the episodes of his life that are important to his purpose, his purpose itself is not to tell the story of his life. What Augustine does is use his own experience as an exemplum of the glory of G od and th e workings o f His spirit. Augustine, it is true, recounts his specific experience of stealing pears from a tree and his own strong attraction toward carnal knowledge of women, but he relates these episodes in order to show how even the least worthy of human beings can still discover the grace of God, whose mercy and forgiveness is available even to such a debased creature as the libertine Augustine once w as. Any modern read er of Augustine’s Confessions is struck by how little Augustine, and how much revelation of God’s work, it contains. Although the Confessions is an enorm ously important work in that history of the gradual emergence of a visible self, its importance arises from the inclusion of individual experiences and personal shame as an exemplum of God’s ability to rescue sinners from their life of sin. That Au gustine com mitted his life and actions and his feelings to writing, so that they might be observed by his readers (a nd himself), wa s of signal impo rtance to the W estern tradition ; on the other h and, nowh ere in his Confessions does one find Augustine celebrating e ither himself or his o wn autono my. The re velation of self, as it is hesitatingly prese nted in Aug ustine, is solely a veh icle to a higher e nd, which is the g lorification of G od’s beneficenc e and mer cy. How different are Ro usseau’s Confessions! The purpose here is secular, not religious: It is not to glorify God and urge devotion to Him as the proper course for human beings. Rather, Rousseau’s purpose is twofold: to unburden himself of his shame, to reveal himself in his weakness (“One goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell,” as Foucault puts it),^3 and to crea te a “self” which c an serve to d efine himself, to himself and to others, in the face of a hostile social orde r. This defined self is what Michel Fo ucault has so thoroughly and eloquently shown to be a historically produced phenomenon in Discipline and Punish and The History of S exuality, the “immense labor... to pro duce... men’s su bjection: the ir constitution as su bjects in bo th senses of the w ord.” 4 Let me here state explicitly the central theme of my argument: If there has indeed been an immense labor to turn man into a subject (an individuated self and a defined personage in the social order) in order to subject him more completely and inescapably to the traversals and furrowings of power—and I think Foucault has conclusively shown that this is indeed the case— then Rousseau’s psyche an d in particular his Confessions have
gaze, and the need for complete disclosure:
A change in my relations with Mamma, of which I must speak, since, after all, I must tell everything. (184)
(There is) m y indispen sable du ty to fulfill it in its entirety.... If I am to be kno wn I mu st he know n in all situations, both good and bad. (373)
(In) my memoir... will be found... the heart of Jean-Jacques, which my contemporaries have been so unwilling to recognize. (585)
This maj or shift in conscio usness has take n place in the m any centuries tha t separate R ousseau fro m Augustine. It is a shift that Professor Foucault has addressed in his contribution to this volume. Nowhere is the new consciousness that has emerged more apparent than in the sense of division that structures Rousseau’s world. If we are to understand his sensibility, his celebration of the self and of feelings, it is toward an examination of these divisions that we must turn. In order for a man or woman to be constituted as a subject, he or she must first be divided from the totality of the world, or the totality of the social body. For a “me” to emerge, a distinction must be made between the “me” and the “not-me.” T he bound aries of the self are those lines that d ivide the self from all that which is not the self, which is beyond the self. The first, and essential, move in the constitution of the self is division.^7 And it is division, above all, that we discover in Rousseau. Division is the primary move in the countless analyses he provides as the explanation of the course of his existence. Rousseau divides, and then sees opposition between, head and heart; reason and emotion; nature and society; self and society; country and city; and self and nature. It is this act of dividing that creates the two elements of his sensibility as he presents it. Rousseau’s time had already divided the head from the rest of the body: It was, after all, the Age of Reason. What Rousseau did, following the cult of sentimentality that was his precursor, was rebel against the overvaluation of reason by asserting the claims of the emotions.^8 This dividing strategy is the base of Rousseau’s strength. In dividing himself from the world, he creates a self, he constitutes himself as a subject of knowledge and examination. He will explore, in the Confessio ns, the particular experiences he has had and, Out of those experiences, he will trace the development and boundaries of his own, particular, consciousness. The modern secular confessional, as invented by Rousseau, involves not merely the recital of sins but the enumeration of each a nd every experience that has m ade one what and who one is. In the process of examining the division of the self and the world, Rousseau creates the Romantic paradigm: the recounting of the history of the self so that the self can concurrently create itself in writing and affirm that self it has created. “I am made unlik e anyone I h ave ever m et; I will even ventu re to say that I am like no one in the whole world” (17). So substantial is the self he has created that he can treat that self as some sort of external object to be examined, as a thing with existen ce apart fro m his consc iousness. I refer here to Ro usseau’s strang e work, Rousseau Juge de Jean- Jacques, 9 a dialogue—Foucault calls it “anti-Confessions”—in which a nameless Frenchman, a representative of the public gaze, subjects Jean-Jacques to an inquisition. Rousseau’s “self” has become an object; it has become the subject of this investigation (inquisition). There is a clear relation in this colloquy between two forms of being a subject (a subject to be discussed, a subject in the political sense of being in an inferior relation to power) and a third form, in which th e self recogniz es it has its own sub jectivity. Nowhere is the self Rousseau has created by the dividing strategy, a self disparate from the world of nature and society, more in evidence than in the paranoid stance that marks his later works. The grand conspiracy that emerges as his constant theme in the second half of the Confessio ns, in the Dialog ues, and in the Reveries, is the structural result of that move Rousseau made in dividing himself Out from the rest of the world.1 0^ Having separated self from other, it is no surprise that Rousseau discovers that the other is alien and, ultimately, inhospitable. In order to understand that inhospitality more closely we might profitably examine Rousseau’s reaction to the appearance of a rival at the menage of Mme. de Warens. Mm e. de Warens—”M amma,” as Rousseau called her— provided Rousseau with the home for which he longed. Protectress, support, and ultimately sexual partner, Mamma was Rousseau’s bulwark against the world. When the remarkable domestic triangle of Mme. de Warens, her older lover Claude Anet, and Rousseau, that symbolic family of which he says, possibly accurately, “between the three of us was established a bond perhaps unique on this earth” (194), was disrupted by the death of Anet and the
temporary departure of Rousseau, the space occupied by the two men—and that of Rousseau in particular—was filled by a strange r, Vintzenre id. Rousse au’s place, b oth in Ma mma’s affectio ns and in her b ed, was take n by this young rival. R eturning to Le s Charme ttes and con fronting the new domestic o rder, Rou sseau desc ribes his predicament: “Insensibly I found myself isolated and alone in that same house of which I had formerly been the centre, and in which I now led, so to speak, a double life” (252). If we read these words as extending beyond the confines of his particular situation in the household of Mamma, we stand before another major constituent of Rousseau’s sensibility. “I found myself isolated and alone.” Having divided the “me” from the “not-me,” th e “me” disc overs itself apa rt, separated , isolated, alon e. The wo rld of totality, which was sun dered in o rder to form a new who le, an individua ted self, is no long er a totality. As we read this passage symbolically, we see the co mforting centrality of the constituted self giving way to isolation and loneliness. Although the first reward of co nstituting oneself as a subject is a fee ling of centrality and well-being, an ine vitable consequence of that constitution, which depends upon division, is isolation. All selves lead double lives as object as well as subjec t (to be a sub ject is to be ab le to see one self as an obje ct); to know the fullness of the self is to encounter the seeming poverty of the world from which that self has been sundered, and out of whose plenitude the self has been filled. It is not surprising tha t Rousseau finds his internal d ivision “has thro ughout my life se t me in conflict with myself” (23). Divided by the individu ating proce ss from the soc ial world, Ro usseau reco gnizes that an “e xaggerated sensibility” contributes powerfully to his growing pa ranoia. “I was in the most unbearable position for a man whose imagination is easily set working” (458). Such paranoia is but an extension of that primary move that divides self from the world and places the self above that from which it has been separated. Rousseau’s imagination— that central agent of the Romantic sensibility—is here acknowledged as a force in the emergence and expansion of his paranoid sense of a grand conspiracy that is marshaled against him. But the role of the imagination, the power of the individual mind to create and re-create the world, is not limited to the expa nding vision o f an alien, dang erous, and ultimately perse cutory world. The role of imagination in Rousseau’s sensibility is dialectical: While it expands the inhospitable, it creates for itself at the same time a bulwark against this inhospitality. The imagination, which exaggerates the isolation and estrangement of the solitary consciousness that has separated itself off from the world, also domesticates a new (imaginary) world, so that the unhappy consciou sness can regain, through the workings o f the imaginative power of re-creation, what it has lost, so that it can once again be at home in the world. Early in the Confessions Rousseau recou nts his experience as an appre ntice. Denied both auto nomy and a sense that the small world he inhabits is his home, he feels deprived; and deprivation leads to the attempt to find satisfaction in what might be called “devious” ways. “Because I was deprived of everything,” Rousseau informs the reader, “so it was that I learnt to c ovet in silence, to conceal, to dissimulate, to lie, a nd finally to steal” (4 0). This structure—deprivation succeeded by the attempt to regain that of which he is deprived—underlies later, more profound developments in Rousseau’s stance toward the world. Roussea u turns to the wo rkings of his imag ination beca use the imagin ation can sup ply the lack he fe els. Shortly after the passa ge about ste aling cited ab ove, Rou sseau obse rves his youthful se lf “tenderly nursing my illusions... since I saw nothing around me I valued as much” (49). He speaks as well of his absorption in books, and this leads him to make this revealing statement: “The fictions I succeeded in building up made me forget my real condition, which so dissatisfied me” (48; emphasis mine). Rousseau is explicit later in the first part of the Confessions:
It is a very strange thing that my imagination never works more delightfully than when my situation is the reverse of delightful, and that, on the other hand, it is never less cheerful than when all is cheerful around me. It cannot beautify; it must create.. as I have said a hundred times, if every I were confined in the Bastille, there I would draw the picture of liberty. (166)
Nowhere is the relation between deprivation and the imagination clearer than in Rousseau’s description of the creation of La Nouvelle Hélolse:
The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart. ... altogether ignoring the human race, I created for myself societies of perfect creatures. (398)
recount every detail of his life—in suggesting that existence is more than the sum of the statements one can make about it. Later , the “perma nent state” is eq uated with the a social and u ndirected activity of the youn g and the ag ed in a passage that attempts to describe his feeling of happiness on Saint Peter’s Island:
The idleness I love is not that of an indolent fellow who stands with folded arms in perfect inactivity, and thinks as little as he acts. It is the idleness of a child who is incessantly on the move without ever doing anything, and at the same tim e it is the idlenes s of a ram bling old man w hose m ind wan ders while his arms a re still.... I love... to fritter away th e whole d ay incon sequen tially and in coheren tly, and to fo llow noth ing but th e whim of the mo ment. (591—92)
Ten years after he wrote this in the Confessions he returned to the same su bject— his happine ss on Saint P eter’s Island—in the “Fifth Walk” of the Reveries:
When evening approached, I would come down from the heights of the island and gladly go sit in some hidden nook alon g the beach a t the edge of the lake. Th ere, the noise of the wa ves and the tossing of the water, captivatin g my sen ses and c hasing a ll other disturb ance from my sou l, plunged it into a deligh tful reverie in which night would often surprise me without my having noticed it. The ebb and flow of this water and its noise, continual but magnified at intervals, striking my ears and eyes without respite, took the place of the internal movements which reverie extinguished within me and was enough to make me feel my existence with pleasure and without taking the trouble to think. From time to time some weak and short reflection about the instability of things in this world arose, an image brought on by the surface of the water. But soon these weak impressions were erased by the uniformity of the continual movement which lulled me and which, without any active assistance from my soul, held m e so fast that, c alled by th e hour a nd agre ed-upo n signal, I c ould no t tear myse lf away w ithout effort. What do we enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence. As long as this state lasts, we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God. The sentiment of existence, stripped o f any othe r emotion , is in itself a precio us sentime nt of conte ntment a nd pea ce which alone w ould suffice to make this existence dear and sweet to anyone able to spurn all the sensual and earthly impressions which incessantly come to distract us from it and to trouble its sweetness here-below. But most men, agitated by continual pa ssions, are little acquainted w ith this state and, having tasted it only imperfectly for a few momen ts, preserve only an obscure and confused idea of it which does not let them feel its charm. 1 3
What w e see in these p assages is a stunn ing converg ence. By a bandon ing himself entirely to his reverie, to the imaginary, the imagining self is annihilated, and the self and nature, me and notme, are merged into an undifferentiated and undiv ided unity. Fre ud, who ca lled this state, referring to its ubiquitou s appeara nce as a varie ty of religious exp erience, the “o ceanic feeling ,” a phrase o ne imagines R ousseau wo uld have fou nd felicitious, see s in this “oceanic feeling” the requited desire of the ego for a loss of itself, for its undifferentiated merge into the cosmos.1 4 Thus, Rousseau in the Confessions intuits, and in the Reveries discovers, th at the created self, the division o f self from the world, is a strategic move finally incapab le of engendering human happiness. The p rofound irony is this: The great architect of the modern self ends up discovering that the building he has constructed is, when it comes right down to it, uninhabitable. The imaginary, into which the self has retreated as its protection from the world, ends up by discarding the self and m erging, in unmediated fashion, into the totality of things. Yet, despite Rousseau’s ultimate dissatisfaction with the self he had done so much to create and differentiate, the reader of the Confessions understand s that its immense significance, its aura of newness, ha s to do with its documentation of the emergence of that subject which was theretofore largely hidden: “For a long time ordinary individuality— the everyda y individuality of ev erybody— remained below the thr eshold of d escription.” 1 5^ What Rousseau does is take an essential step toward lowering this threshold: He describes himself, his individuality. He invents (or, in some senses, he elabor ates and extends) several vital technique s in the constitution of the self as a subject. We have seen these techniques and the role they play in the Confessions:
- The emergence of the unique. individuated self as a subject of observation and description
- The divisio n of human experienc e into self and o ther, me and not-me, individ ual and soc iety
- The emergence of the self as object of the gaze of the other, the public: what Foucault might call the self under examination
- The de velopme nt of the (secula r) confession al mode o f consti tuting the self by writing it, with its Rousseau ian stress on co mpletenes s, on the inclusio n of every de tail
- The dissatisfaction with these four techniques and their results, which leads to the valorization of the imaginary—only to culminate in the final annihilation, by the imaginary, of the self, division, the gaze, and writing The importance of these first four techniques (we shall return to the fifth presently) cannot be overestimated. Roussea u helps to inve nt—an d to justify and to circulate— those techniq ues which co nstitute the mod ern subjec t. The emergent self becomes the locus on which, through which, in which, the technology of power that Professor Foucault ha s traced will elab orate and invent itself.1 6^ If we apply his three modes of constituting the subject both as object of power and as the self-recognized subject of power,1 7^ we see all three at work in the Confessio ns. Rousseau constitutes the self as subject by objectivizing the speaking subject in language, by presenting him to the gaze of the knowledgeable reader. He objectivizes the subject by means of division. And he refines a technique (the written confession) by means o f which the self co mes to reco gnize itself as subj ect, and ob ject. Roussea u develop s a technolo gy of the self which, a lthough not a s yet observe dly traversed by power , was shortly to become a prime agent in the modern elaboration of power. Rousseau brings the self above the threshold of visibility, and he p rovides sev eral means b y which this self can b e made su bject. But if Rousseau is an unwitting agent in the elaboration of the technology of power, it must also be remembered that he is, ironically, also a prime agent in the emergence of a new and powerful opposition to regnant power. Just as the creation and celebration of his own self contained the imperative that led to that self’s annihilation, so the creation of a public self sub ject to the mic rophysics o f power gav e rise to a cou nterforce tha t would op pose all regnant power. In the Confessions we encou nter everywh ere the sense o f deprivation which, I have a rgued, is generated by that very division that constitutes the self. Because the self comes into being simultaneously with the perceptio n of lack and loss, that emerg ence is everyw here linked to conditions th e self must refuse to accept. Yet, as Rousseau’s constitution of the self has had historical ramifications, as the forms and techniques of knowledge that he developed have been traversed by power, so also his deprivation and refusal to be deprived have had politica l and historica l effects. The ve ry self that has bee n created b y division, by the a bundanc e of detail amassed about its activities, b y its subjection to the public ga ze and the p ublic judgm ent, this constituted self generates not only its subjection but also an opposition to such subjection, a movement toward liberation. The spirit of Rousseau is, after all, the spirit of the French Revolution. It was Rousseau who said, “I had seen that everything is rooted in politics” (377). It was Rous seau who w ould claim o f the knowled ge/powe r relation, “I cou ld see only foolishness and error in the doctrines of our sages, nothing but oppression and misery in our social order” (387). And, finally, it was the very self that Rousseau helped to create that became the basis for the revolutionary desire to transform society so that it would be conducive to the liberty and equality of all men and women, each of whom po ssessed their o wn individua lity. Thus, the emergence of the modern self, the self as subject, figures prominently in the subjection of humankind, and figures p rominently in the genesis of thos e modem struggles that seek , in the face of that sub jection, to rec laim their humanity for men and women.
Notes
- The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was completed in 1765 and first published in 1781. The English translation is by J. M. Coh en (Harm ondswo rth: Penguin B ooks, 19 53), p. 11 8. Subseq uent quota tions from this edition will be c ited parenth etically in the text.
- See M ichel Fouc ault, The Or der of Th ings An Archae ology o f the Hum an Scien ces, (New Yo rk: Pantheon Bo oks,
- , where the co nstitutive princip le of the epistem e of the ninetee nth and early tw entieth centurie s is shown to be temporality and causation. Rousseau’s stress on his own development is thus a key element in the transition from an Enlightenment episteme based on mathesis, or spatial placement, to the barely emergent episteme of the later period.
- Miche l Foucault, The Histo ry of Sexu ality, vol. I: An Intro duction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 59.
- Ibid., p. 6o.
- Ibid., Pp. 59, 61.
