Knowing Before Loving
Knowing Before Loving
Rousseau and the Ethics of Exposure
Chapter Two examines how Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic fiction and utopian social theory expose and seek to redress the epistemic contradictions of sentimentalism. Designed to ensure mutual transparency of thoughts and feelings, Rousseau's ideal communities effectively eliminate psychic interiority. This chapter traces the surprising ruptures and melodramatic breakdowns that beset these imagined communities from within, arguing that in these works we find an exhaustion of the effort to align knowledge of others with feeling for others.
Keywords: Sentiment, feeling, marriage, community, transparency, privacy, trust, fidelity
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