Scenes of Hospitality in Rousseau

• Published in: Discourse (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 41; no. 2-3; pp. 228 - 247
• Main Author: Burt, E. S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Detroit Wayne State University Press 01-03-2019
• Subjects: 18th century; Authenticity; Authorship; Autobiographies; Confessions; Consciousness; Essays; Hospices (Terminal Care); Human rights; Libraries; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary Genres; Literary influences; Literary translation; Logic; Morality; Narrative techniques; Person; Politics; Poverty; Readers; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Runaways; Seminars; Social contract; Sovereignty; Speech; Spoken written language relationship; Swiss literature; Writing
• ISSN: 1522-5321; 1536-1810; 1536-1810
• DOI: 10.13110/discourse.41.2-3.0228

The topic is an enormous one, and there is no space to do it justice here, in part because Rousseau not only theorized about hospitality in political texts such as the Social Contract when treating such questions as sovereignty and le droit des gens, the eighteenth-century term for international and human rights; his thinking was also related to a practice of hospitality, such as he lived it and insofar as in writing he practiced autobiographical intrusions into genres that conventionally eschew first-person discourse. The first example comes from an episode at the beginning of Rousseau's wanderings in Book 2 of the Confessions, and the second is from the very end of the "Ninth Promenade," the penultimate chapter of his last text, the unfinished Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. In both episodes a triple reflection on hospitality is available: the events recounted occur within the context of hospitality; the first-person narrator acts as the hosting consciousness regulating the narrative space into which readers are invited; and each passage dramatizes the relation between speech and writing through the first person and thus between what is construed as a "home" language of the exchange of signs of hospitality and what is—problematically in Rousseau—construed as a parasitical instance, namely writing. The poverty of the runaway, the fact that both his father and brother had left Geneva under dubious circumstances, and the fact that he is virtually nameless and without marketable skill all tend to push the young Rousseau into another category, that of the the vagabond, or peregrinus, to whom scant welcome would be extended.