5/16/2023 0 Comments Rousseau musique![]() ![]() As I will discuss in detail below, Derrida’s reading of the Essai changed the categories of perception of Rousseau’s work, offering a reading that highlighted his place in the history of thinking about language. In the late 1960s, Derrida pushed the Essai sur l’origine des langues from its relative obscurity as a marginal text into the limelight of twentieth-century critical theory. One such example is Jacques Derrida’s pathbreaking De la grammatologie. In other words, a seminal reading has often elevated a particular text to the status of “worthy of critical attention,” followed by heated debate. While the critical reception of Rousseau’s corpus has broadened gradually to include all of the major works attended to by scholars in disciplines as diverse as political science, philosophy, literature, and musicology, the slow addition of texts to the canon has often followed specific critical readings. ![]() The corpus provided sufficient fuel in all of its internal contradictions for an array of critical readings from positions situated all along the political spectrum. As the threat of a repeat of the atrocities of the Terror receded in collective consciousness and the experiments with forms of political authority-empire, constitutional monarchy, republic, empire-unfolded in nineteenth-century France, the critical condemnations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave way to more nuanced readings of Rousseau’s work, although still largely focused on the political theory. In the wake of the French Revolution, Rousseau’s work was reductionistically viewed with skepticism and even fear as the philosophical inspiration behind Robespierre and the Terror. While this is true of most writers, it is all the more true of the author of Du contrat social and the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. The history of the critical reception of Rousseau’s corpus bears the traces of interests conditioned by historical circumstance. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, book 5 Il faut assurément que je sois né pour cet art, puisque j’ai commencé de l’aimer dès mon enfance, et qu’il est le seul que j’aye aimé constamment dans tous les tems. Simon argues that much of Rousseau’s “modernism” resides in the unique role that he assigns to music in forging communal relations. The choice of music as the privileged aesthetic object enables Rousseau to gain insight into the role of the aesthetic realm in relation to the social and political body in ways often associated with later thinkers. She links Rousseau’s understanding of key concepts in music, such as tuning, harmony, melody, and form, to the crucial problem of the individual’s relationship to the social order. In Rousseau Among the Moderns, Julia Simon puts forth fresh interpretations of The Social Contract, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Confessions, as well as other texts. Critical analysis of Rousseau’s work in music has been principally the domain of musicologists, rarely involving the work of scholars of political theory or literary studies. He composed operas and other musical pieces, invented a system of numbered musical notation, engaged in public debates about music, and wrote at length about musical theory. Renowned for his influence as a political philosopher, a writer, and an autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known also for his lifelong interest in music. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |