Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Literature, Politics and the Economy of the Lie

Abstract

The following paper seeks to develop – or rather discern – what could be called the politics of literature in Rousseau’s work, by attempting to situate the contradictory nature of the faculty of the imagination in relation to the possibility of lying. While the Rêveries frame literary fiction as a harmless lie, even a redemptive deployment of the imagination, the Deuxième Discours inscribes the imagination into the very logic of historical (as) violence. From this tension, the paper argues that Rousseau opens the possibility for a politics of literature: a critical praxis of a fiction that contests the re/production of the ideological foundations of law, property, and inequality, which fiction itself enabled. It will appear then, as I will argue, that Rousseau’s description of a natural, pre-historic condition without (the possibility of) fiction is itself inscribed in this battle of fiction against fiction: the politics of literature.