Ravishing Transports

Abstract

Influence is an important notion in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thinking. However, the event of influence is related to contamination, corruption, and alteration in Rousseau’s philosophical system. At the very beginning, the first Discourse (1750) presents the critique of culture and social taste. The author points out the damaging influence of ‘public opinion’, ‘riches’, and ‘powerful actors’ on the morals of a society. These entities corrupt the social morals and set a depraved example to follow. On the other hand, there is a clean and progressive way of influence between individuals without moral abuse. This is the case of the Genius, who comes to the world exclusively under influence of another Genius. There is no Genius – whatever this notion is supposed to mean – in itself. His birth is the result of a strong influence: it came to the world in a ‘ravishing transport’ as the entry “Genius” describes its genesis in A Complete Dictionary of Music. Purely positive influence is a ‘stimulus’ as Rousseau names it in Dialogues. My paper describes what the ‘stimulus’ means and how the uncorrupted ‘inhabitants of the other sphere’ are disposed by this stimulus. The example of the Genius demonstrates more eloquently the process of the positive influence, which is also a possibility to a sourceless beginning. To illustrate this idea and make it more concrete I will reference Julie’s paradise in Rousseau’s masterwork, Julie, or the New Heloise. In Julie’s garden, called Elysée, we have the topology of a perfect wilderness, a landscape at first sight uncontaminated by human artefact. The structure of the vegetation testifies of a beginning without beginning. The décor looks like a setup with no human intervention. This idea of creation is close to the idea of insemination, and more precisely to the ‘dissemination’ key word of Derrida’s work, Dissemination. My article is a lecture regarding the entry “Genius” in A Complete Dictionary of Music and a thought-experiment about how this entry can be interpreted in a deconstructive context.