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Rudy Le Menthéour, La Manière trouble: essai sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris: Hermann, 2025. Notes, references, and index. 222 pp. 25 € (pb) ISBN: 9791037038227.
Review Essay by Flora Champy, Princeton University
“Rousseau a perfectionné l’art de troubler les lecteurs dans leurs idées comme dans leurs sentiments” (p. 186). In his conclusion, Rudy Le Menthéour pithily restates the argument of his essay: the power of Rousseau’s writing lies in his ability to unsettle his readers’ intellectual as well as emotional certainties. This claim will certainly come as a challenge for all those who came to Rousseau studies through Jean Starobinski’s seminal book, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’obstacle.[1] Starobinski famously identified the desire for unmediated communication, and its constant frustration, as the main forces guiding Rousseau’s writing. As Le Menthéour himself acknowledges in the introduction, while Starobinski’s account remains influential and valuable to understand the inner “structures” of Rousseau’s “own world” (in Starobinski’s own terms), shifting the focus to how Rousseau’s texts reflect his debates with readers and fellow writers brings out different results.
La Manière trouble thus adds another piece to the growing body of scholarship examining Rousseau’s multifarious, proactive relation to his readership. Robert Darnton’s seminal essay on “Rousseau’s readers” famously emphasized how Rousseau’s books ushered in a new era, when readers unquestioningly identified with what they supposed to be the writer’s experience as reflected in his books.[2] More recently, among others, Masano Yamashita’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau face au public: problèmes d’identité and John T. Scott’s Rousseau’s Reader: Strategies of Persuasion and Education, for instance, examine in detail how Rousseau deliberately anticipates his audience’s reactions, incorporating them in the very fabric of his writing.[3]
La Manière trouble is different in the sense that Le Menthéour explicitly acknowledges how much his own experience as a reader shaped his approach. The subtitle’s seeming modesty (Essai sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau) indicates that the book does not aim to be an exhaustive or systematic inquiry. It is structured as a collection of “reading experiments” (“expériences de lecture,” p. 11) spanning different sides of Rousseau’s work: political writing with the second Discours, fiction writing with Julie, polemical writing with the Lettre à d’Alembert, pedagogical writing with Émile. Yet it matters that these experiments are conducted by a highly knowledgeable reader, who knows his author inside out. Using his scholarly erudition cogently and pointedly, Le Menthéour gives helpful insights into Rousseau’s extensive readings (for instance Warburton, or Saint-Lambert). This offering turns La Manière trouble into a refreshing and approachable read that will prove fruitful to seasoned scholars and curious students alike.
The study indeed endeavors to elucidate an impression to which every reader of Rousseau may relate. His writing often prompts a specific puzzlement that resists a tight definition. This puzzlement is why Le Menthéour resorts to the notion of “trouble,” which in French literally describes hazy or blurred material, and metaphorically refers to a state of inner confusion and bewilderment – often associated, in early modern texts, with erotic emotion. The power of Rousseau’s writing, Le Menthéour argues, lies in the operation of “seduction” (p. 54) it conducts on the reader by deliberately blurring or deepening the usual meaning of words: “c’est en troublant le langage que Rousseau suscite le trouble du lecteur” (p. 10).
This approach allows Le Menthéour to renew our understanding of Rousseau’s oeuvre on two counts: the way poetic or literary articulation conveys philosophical argument, and his impact in the long history of reading. La Manière trouble aptly ends by drawing a parallel between Rousseau and Lucretius’ De Rerum natura, quoting the passage in book IV which famously describes poetry as the sugarcoat necessary to make bitter philosophy taste sweeter. In particular, chapter 2, titled “Une sorte de propriété,” highlights the stylistic as well as philosophical proximity between the second Discours and Lucretius’ history of the human race. However, Le Menthéour beautifully demonstrates that Rousseau goes beyond the decorative use of literary flourish to adorn philosophical arguments: he draws on the very deficiencies of language as a way to gain greater conceptual precision. In one of the most illuminating passages, the book shows how recurring phrases such as “une sorte de,” “une espèce de” (such as “une espèce de loi” or “une sorte de propriété”), point to a question central to Rousseau’s philosophy: “Rousseau se pose au fond la question de l’émergence, qu’il s’agisse des idées, des institutions ou de la conscience morale” (p. 31). Rather than defining social institutions and moral features in the abstract, Rousseau aims at examining how they come into being, illuminating the processes that made them emerge. The stylistic feature then works as an indicator of the modernity of his thinking, questioning how seeming self-evidences may in fact be nothing but the naturalization of inequity.
Le Menthéour also sheds a new light on Rousseau’s role in the history of reading, bringing nuance to the picture of him radically breaking from previous traditions. The third chapter, focusing on the construction of Molière’s Le Misanthrope in the Lettre à d’Alembert, beautifully demonstrates how the deep connection Rousseau creates between book and reader is in fact largely a response to questions inherited from the previous century: “Rousseau joue avec une virtuosité vertigineuse d’une réflexivité littéraire qui se développe depuis la fin du siècle précédent” (p. 75). One of the main strengths of the book in this regard is to situate Rousseau’s thought on the powers of literature in relation to Diderot’s. Le Menthéour’s demonstration on this point is fully convincing: the materialist editor of the Encyclopédie is much more of a moralizer than the citizen of Geneva. In denying every possibility of moral reform through theater, because that medium is irretrievably fueled by self-love, Rousseau also delineates a new space for creative freedom – and identifies a new “art d’intéresser” that is rooted on the trouble, or inner confusion, of its recipient.
Le Menthéour is thus able to turn on its head the accusation levelled at Rousseau by Jacques Rivière in a book coauthored with Ramon Fernandez in 1932, Moralisme et littérature, which he mentions to start his inquiry.[4] The effect of trouble characteristic of Rousseau’s writing is not a way to impose simplistic views or to channel all the attention on the author’s person – far from it. It may even be a way to do exactly the opposite, complexifying commonly held views and inviting the reader to self-reflection.
Two reservations might be objected to this recent contribution to Rousseau studies. The first is the restricted place given to political writing. This decision seems jarring, in a study that delivers some of its most eye-opening passages in the chapter devoted to the second Discours and ends on the redefinition of the sublime through civic eloquence. In the introduction, Le Menthéour gives as a justification the idea that the Contrat Social has become the specific preserve of philosophical studies; this is a way to put on the side some recent literary analyses of the work, such as Masano Yamashita’s article “Laconism and the Literary Politics of the Social Contract” in the 2020 volume Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau.[5] Secondly, given the emphasis the book sets on the relation between author and reader, as well as on the social impact of art and literature, the notion of “literary citizenship,” coined by Christopher Kelly in his Rousseau as Author, could also have played a fruitful part in Le Menthéour’s conceptual framework.[6]
These two reservations, however, only show how inventive and stimulating La Manière trouble is. It is likely to fuel many subsequent studies of an author who is thankfully unlikely to ever stop troubling his readers.
Flora Champy
Princeton University
fchampy@princeton.edu
Notes
[1] Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’obstacle (Plon: Paris, 1957); English translation by Arthur Goldhammer, Transparency and obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
[2] Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
[3] Masano Yamashita, Jean-Jacques Rousseau face au public: problèmes d’identité (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017); John T. Scott, Rousseau’s Reader: Strategies of Persuasion and Education (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
[4] Jacques Rivière and Ramon Fernandez, Moralisme et littérature (Paris: Éditions R.-A. Corréa, 1932).
[5] Masano Yamashita, “Laconism and the Literary Politics of the Social Contract”, in Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau, eds Brigitte Weltman-Aron, Ourida Mostefai, Peter Westmoreland (Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2020), 64-78.
[6] Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 133-139.
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Volume 21 (2026), Issue 3, #5