Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• McKeane, John

Titel

Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (review)

Ist Teil von

• Eighteenth - Century Studies, 2020-04, Vol.53 (3), p.502-504

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• First published in French in 2002, Poétique de l'histoire seems to have little to do with either poetics, history, or indeed the poetics of history. (Lacoue-Labarthe, who with Jean-Luc Nancy published a text named Scène, is playing here on the Freudian "primal scene," on which he has also written.) Elsewhere in this English translation, a further round of proofreading might have been beneficial (see, for example, the inconsistency between "the big Books of the Moralists" and "the fat Books of the Moralists" (18, 19) and in that between "the preliminary and the exordium" and "the Preface and the exordium" (19, 23). Rousseau associates civic festivals with broader civic purpose, a value that he does not grant tragic theater: such festivals are described as "the utopia of a pure spectacle, a spectacle without 'spectacle,' reduced to the sole self-representation of the people in the joy of love and fraternity; communion itself, in a Spartan mode (as is required), or the felicitous realization of the community as a living work of art" (64). [...]civic festivals serve as a stage for the self-realization and self-fulfilment of communities, a function that stultifyingly worthy exempla of committed art cannot serve.