On Jean-Jacques Rousseau : considered as one of the first authors of the Revolution

In order to grasp what it means to call Rousseau an author of the Revolution, as so many revolutionaries did, it is necessary to take full measure of the difficulties of literary interpretation to which Rousseau s work gives rise, particularly around such a charged term as author.

On Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows that Rousseau s texts consistently generate a division in their own reading, a division both designated and masked by the fiction of authorship.

These divisions can occur successively as in the narrative reversals and discontinuities characteristic of Rousseau s fictional and autobiographical works or simultaneously, in the form of incompatible attempts to apply the lessons of a single text to an urgent historical moment.

Given the structure of these texts, their influence can only occur in an equally paradoxical form.

Rousseau s contribution to revolutionary thinking lies in his conceptualization of the constitutive function of misunderstanding and narrative discontinuity, in history and political action as well as in literature.