Starobinski's Resistance to Theory—Le regard de l'absent

Abstract

Starobinski's Resistance to Theory—Le regard de l'absent Evelyne Ender In memory of Jean Starobinski The work becomes person only if I cause itto live as one. My reading must breathe lifeinto the work so as to endow it with presenceand appearances of personality. I must bringthe work back to life in order to love it; Imust make it speak in order to respond to it… One might say the work always begins as'our dearly departed' awaiting resurrectionthrough us, or if not resurrection then atleast the most vivid evocation. --Starobinski, "The Critical Relation" This essay, devoted to a master of close reading and of the interpretation of signs and symptoms—textual and medical—was born in a classroom at Johns Hopkins University.1 It was born, furthermore, in the very place that shaped the vocation and the intellectual trajectory of a young, highly gifted literary scholar and medical student from [End Page 878] Geneva. In the mid-1950s, accompanying his wife Jaqueline who was in training at Hopkins Hospital, Jean Starobinski followed medical rounds while polishing his doctoral thesis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and taking part in the intellectual creative spirit that marked those Hopkins years. This was a time when many ideas about the creative potential of cross-disciplinary exchanges were first seeded, a time that found its echo when visitors (many from Paris) convened with the local intelligentsia a decade later at Hopkins at an international symposium. In the chronicle of American intellectual life, this 1966 conference, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," marked the birth of "theory." In this initial gathering, local faculty, scholars representing highly diversified fields, and guest speakers from Europe had convened for presentations and conversations that prompted a radical rethinking of longstanding enlightenment ideals and values. Embedded in the cultural and intellectual crisis of a Europe torn apart by two wars, the conference also prompted a radical rethinking of values attached to learning and culture in academia; "human sciences" and the humanities were at the forefront. The proceedings for the 1966 conference were later collected under the heading of Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato's The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism; the Sciences of Man (1972), thus inviting a connection between the original event and the twentieth-century epistemic and philosophic revolution brought about by structuralism. However, Jean Starobinski was not present and his name is barely mentioned in the proceedings; his absence seems all the more remarkable when one considers the wide-ranging influence of his book, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle. On his return to Europe, after finishing his internship in psychiatry, Starobinski did not open a cabinet médical, but began instead a life of reading and teaching. The first step into his life journey as a critic had steeped him in the "fusion and confusion of existence and the idea" in the oeuvre of an author, Rousseau, which he helped build (Transparency and Obstruction 9).2 The practice of close, symptomatic reading and the philosophical questions defined in this book had a major influence, meanwhile, on critical thought and the linguistic turn that marked late twentieth-century hermeneutics, especially with Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. [End Page 879] In his critical dialogue with Rousseau's texts, Starobinski offers an utterly transformative approach to author criticism. Though indissociable from literature, it deciphers in its subject an epoch-making history of ideas, of sensibility, and of consciousness. Thus, the patient examination of Rousseau's every word and work offers new keys to the "interiority" and sensibility of an eighteenth-century luminary. Seen through the eyes (le regard) of a trained psychiatrist, Rousseau's existence provides the richest of case studies for the exploration of the modern psyche and, to use Freud's coinage for "Dora," of das Seelenben, namely what constitutes modern subjectivity.3 Studying a work of such scope sets up a challenge under any circumstances and yet, as the originating point of Starobinski's critical imprint, Transparency and Obstruction, could not be overlooked. In our seminar at Hopkins, we read most of it, adding ancillary materials as well as other crucial...