Notes Introduction 1. Even nonfeminist readers have concurred with this assessment— though to justify it rather than critique it. See, for example, Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Allan Bloom’s introduc- tion to Emile (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 2. Paul de Man, “Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–41. 3. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 1. 4. Cited in Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean- Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 33–34. 5. See Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, and Writings for the Theater , ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (2004), vol. 10 of The Collected Writings of Jean- Jacques Rousseau , 12 vols., ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007) [hereafter Letter ], 325–26; Oeuvres complètes de Jean- Jacques Rousseau , 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95) [hereafter OC ], 5:92–93. 6. Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes , trans. Christopher Kelly (1996), vol. 5 of Collected Writings [hereafter Confessions ], 369 ( OC , 1:439). Translation modified. 7. I am certainly not the first to read gender in Rousseau as per- formative. Several recent feminist readers also make this claim. See Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–12. A simi- lar reading is also put forward by Nicole Fermon in Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman, and Nation (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997) and by Linda Zerilli, Signifying 146 NOTES Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)— which I discuss briefly fur- ther on. But in the earlier readings, Rousseau’s awareness of gen- der as performative leads to a political and cultural enforcement and justification of norms and roles rather than their subversion. 8. See, for example, Judith Butler’s “Preface (1999)” in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2006), vii–xxvi. 9. Butler, Gender Trouble , 187. Butler’s emphasis. 10. Confessions , 10–11 ( OC , 1:12). 11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. Derrida is of course making a greater critique against the meta- physics of presence (and mistakenly, I would argue, a critique of Rousseau as exemplary of the desire for pure presence). Derrida’s point is that it is impossible to have access to a reality before, beyond, or outside of language/writing. 12. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), x. Kavanagh’s emphasis. 13. For a review of such works, see Jean Starobinski, Jean- Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 201–67. A notable exception is Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). Kelly argues that the Confessions can be read as a political work similar to Emile — only Rousseau has substituted his own life for the fictional one of Emile. 14. Paul Thomas, “Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Sexist?” Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 195. 15. Susan Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 99. 16. Sarah Kofman, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean- Jacques Rousseau , ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 231. 17. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 149–50, 198–200. 18. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 11–12. 19. Ibid., 66–89. 20. Confessions , 7 ( OC , 1:8). 21. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University NOTES 147 Press, 1981); Lynda Lange, “Rousseau and Modern Feminism,” in Lange, Feminist Interpretations of Jean- Jacques Rousseau , 24–42; Penny A. Weiss, Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Mira Morgenstern, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity: Self, Culture and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 22. Morgenstern, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity , 245. 23. Zerilli, Signifying Woman , 18. My emphasis. The reference to Felman is “Rereading Femininity,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 42. 24. Lori Jo Marso, (Un)manly Citizens: Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s Subversive Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 76–77. Marso’s emphasis. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. See Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 27. Cited in John D. Caputo, “Dreaming of the Innumerable,” in Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman , ed. Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 154. 28. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 196–97. 29. See Derrida and Christie McDonald, “Interview: Choreographies,” in Diacritics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1982), 76. 30. Caputo, “Dreaming of the Innumerable,” 156. The title of Caputo’s essay refers to and is an extended meditation on Derrida’s comments in the previously cited interview, “Choreographies.” 31. My reading of the ménage à trois in Rousseau— particularly what I have termed a “positive” formulation— is indebted to MacCannell’s reading in Regime of the Brother , 87–89. 32. This term is Judith Butler’s. See Undoing Gender , 134. Recent feminist thinkers have sought to rethink the oedipal drama that invariably (or ideally) unfolds with the aim of achieving gender com- plementarity and heterosexual love. For example, Jessica Benjamin adds an addendum to the oedipal drama, calling for another stage of development she calls “postoedipal.” The postoedipal, as the term suggests, comes after the oedipal and incorporates the preo- edipal (imaginary) stage prior to gender differentiation, thus allow- ing for more fluid gender identifications and nonheterosexual love relations. See Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995) and Shadow of the Other: 148 NOTES Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). For Butler’s critique of Benjamin, and her attempt to rethink a triadic notion of desire that does away with the oedipal altogether, see Undoing Gender , 134–51. 33. Rousseau also literally refuses the role of the father, admitting to having placed his five children in the foundling home. 34. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy , trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993) vol. 3 of Collected Writings [hereafter Second Discourse ], 77 ( OC , 3:205). 35. In a sense, my argument is thus in agreement with Landes’s ear- lier: Rousseau does advocate a move away from the “spectacu- lar” pleasures of the theatre of absolutist France toward textual, literary pleasures. However, the main difference is that I do not consider the former to be “feminine” and the latter “masculine” (nor, I contend, did Rousseau). For a comprehensive reading of Rousseau’s reasons for privileging literature (though without a consideration of the role of gender), see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 36. The ambiguity of the Social Contract is apparent in the multiple and contradictory interpretations it has generated. Furthermore, although the Social Contract is seemingly Rousseau’s most political work, even this has been called into question. De Man posits, for example, that the Social Contract can be considered a novel, whereas Julie is a political work; Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979). But in regard specifically to the question of women and Rousseau’s political philosophy, the Social Contract is obviously the least relevant text: women and the family are barely mentioned. And I am not entirely convinced that this is, as feminist readings of Rousseau argue, because women are implicitly excluded from the social contract and from the political. 37. I mean “anecdotal” in the sense that Jane Gallop describes in Anecdotal Theory (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–12. 1 Sexual/Political Inequality 1. “Letter from Voltaire to Rousseau,” in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy , trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993), vol. 3 of The Collected Writings , NOTES 149 ed. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007) [hereaf- ter Second Discourse