Comment le rapport au texte biblique transforme le rapport au texte littéraire au XVIIIe siècle : le cas Rousseau
How 18th century changing approach to the Bible reshaped the relationship to literary text: the case of Rousseau

Summary/Abstract: In the 18th century, the Bible felt the full force of criticism by radical Enlightenment thinkers who read it piece by piece and denounced its making as an imposture - thus extending the break initiated by moral and historical critiques of the previous century. In doing so, they nevertheless did not grant it the literary status of a “profane work”. Yet, Rousseau, who produced a literary rewriting of the Book of Judges with his Levite of Ephraim, pondered over the violence inflicted to biblical intertextuality during his exile in Môtiers: in his Letters Written from the Mountain, he thus made it an analogon of the violence caused to his own literary works. By drawing this parallel, he opened a reflection on the different manners to read a text, as well as the possibility of regulating the reader’s violence through proposing an ethics of literary reception. Analogy might not work as a substitute; however, it enabled Rousseau to go beyond the mistreatment which anti-philosophers or philosophers inflicted to his works, by giving, among other things, an autobiographical orientation to his writing: one in which the author is ready to take responsibility for giving himself to the reader. The ambivalence of the sacred and the profane, the perception of a common essence of religion – defined either by sacrifice or gift – were thus what helped Rousseau invent the autobiographical pact.

• Details
• Contents