Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Orientador : João Carlos Kfouri Quartim de Morais / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-19T11:17:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sahd_LuizFelipeNettodeAndradeeSilva_M.pdf: 36141152 bytes, checksum: c1bd255a10d2eee0fa0dea787c4b38bd (MD5) Previous issue date: 1994 / Resumo: Não informado / Abstract: Not informed. / Mestrado / Mestre em Filosofia

My dissertation examines the relationship between collecting knowledge and writing the world, taking two central figures of the Enlightenment as its starting point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) and Denis Diderot (1713-84). Employing the disciplinary frameworks and methods of early modern history of science and literary studies, I analyze practices of knowledge collection in their two respective “Enlightenment projects,” arguing for the centrality of knowledge and scientific practices in the constitution of the category of literature, especially realist prose writing. I show this, firstly, by examining Rousseau’s large extant collections of pressed plants, the product of his passion for botany in his final years, which he inserted into a late practice of writing and philosophizing the self as promeneur solitaire. Secondly, I demonstrate that the Encyclopédie (1751-72), Diderot’s massive compendium of all knowledge of the arts, sciences, and crafts, was developing an intermediate register of style and representation of knowledge. I focus on the middling status of chemistry and engraving, and discuss the image of the homme de lettres crossing the thresholds of artisans’ workshops to argue that the Encyclopédie generates a mode of representation of the variety of socio-economic life that is an origin point for nineteenth-century realism. These two models, the promeneur solitaire and the homme de lettres, re-emerge in the second half of my project in two later case studies of practices of knowledge collection and writing the world, Émile Zola’s novel series chronicling Second Empire France, the Rougon-Macquart (1871-93) and W.G. Sebald’s (1944-2001) literary-historiographical writings. These examples serve to make a broader argument about how knowledge collection has continued to be central to the category of literature. The jump forward in time necessitated by such a claim is accomplished via a “grammar of juxtaposition” across time and place, outlined in my introduction, which takes as its basis Sebald’s literary practice of bringing together fragments and moments of the past. I show how the extensive notes or dossiers préparatoires that are the extant evidence of Zola’s practice of collecting knowledge via “scientific,” on-the-ground research, conducted on battlefields, in department stores, mines, and food markets were a weapon in his campaign for getting a new kind of socially engaged novel accepted by the literary institution. My final chapter turns back to Sebald to argue that his texts, which juxtapose instances of knowledge collection assembled by a walking historian of nature and human civilization, are a framework for a history of knowledge collection within a broad concept of the Enlightenment.

My dissertation seeks to restore the sentiment of pity to Rousseau’s moral and political system. Rousseau scholarship tends to offer a proto-Kantian interpretation of Rousseau’s concepts of moral liberty and the general will. I argue that these readings neglect Rousseau’s own definition of virtue as the product of an individual’s pity moderating rational self-interest (amour de soi). I offer an account of Rousseau’s moral liberty dependent on this concept of virtue that incorporates the sentiments. I then argue that pity must perform a similar role in the general will because it is through the general will that people express their moral agency. To do so, I explore how Rousseau’s account of pity as a social sentiment is more expansive and active than standard interpretations allow, and thus it is better described as expanded pity or sympathy. Understanding pity’s role in the general will also affects Rousseau’s accounts of equality and individuality. Because virtue demands that pity moderate impulses to excess, the general will that arises from a virtuous citizenry will tend toward distributive equality. A state then best achieves equality by cultivating virtue through private institutions like education and public institutions like civil religion. Finally, I argue that Rousseau’s account of pity alleviates the perceived conflict, first posed by Judith Shklar, between the individual life of man and the homogenized life of citizen. In its expanded form, pity motivates individuals to care about others’ pursuits of their own personal interests while also maintaining a separation between self and other. Exploration into Rousseau’s pity thus has important implications for the kind of political emotions we should look to revitalize in modern democratic society.

This dissertation explores the history of social-constructionist theories of sexual difference through the surprising connection between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the lesbian-feminist writer and theorist Monique Wittig. Wittig developed a social contract theory that radically denaturalized sexual difference, an approach she credited to Rousseau. I offer an interpretation of her appropriation of Rousseau that frames it within the French women’s liberation movement. Then, re-reading him through her lens, I argue that Rousseau too viewed sexual difference as a social construction. Chapter 1 argues that Wittig’s concept of “the lesbian” is modeled after Rousseau’s “natural man.” Wittig used this notion in the “lesbian question” quarrel in the women’s movement to depict human freedom after the abolition of sexual difference. In chapter 2, I show how Wittig interprets the social contract as a political and epistemological concept that encodes the presuppositions, like heterosexuality or race, which shape the social order and knowledge production. Through this concept, she engages in a debate with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss over Rousseau’s legacy. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Rousseau retooled the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s methodology and data in order to denaturalize sexual difference. From there, he posited that sex originates in the transition from proper nouns to common nouns, and is therefore a linguistic construction. This construction allows humans to understand virtue, because without it, humans are unable to access their moral sense. In chapter 4, I argue that his novel Julie represents his most sustained effort to harness material science to favor the development of moral sense. The novel synthesizes spiritual exercises’ emphasis on linguistic representations with materialist ideas about language’s influence on the body. It calls on readers to use spiritual exercises to shape their sexual identities in order to conform with rigidly defined gender roles. In the conclusion, I bring Wittig and Rousseau together within a loosely existentialist framework. I argue that by severing the chain of necessity between biology and sex, they posit a meaninglessness underlying our sexual identities; they react differently to this abyss, but it is in their realization of it that their work has a striking relevance today.

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