Rousseau Between Nature and Culture: Philosophy, Literature, and Politics (Culture & Conflict Book 8)

Rousseau has been seen as the inventor of the concept of nature; in this collective volume philosophers and literary specialists from France and the United States examine how Rousseau's philosophy can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a constant dialectical debate between nature and culture. In this, Rousseau is our true contemporary.-- Provided by Publisher.

Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities.

Editors:
Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Editorial Board:
Arjun Appadurai, New York University,
Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg,
Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich,
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam,
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University,
Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen,
Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College,
Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra,
Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna,
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University,
Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania,
Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin,
Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong

Table of Contents 5 Editions and Abbreviations 7 Introduction 9 I Technology: Between Nature and Anti-Nature 17 Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss’s “Master” 19 Rousseau and the Authority of Nature 35 Nature as Blind Space 53 Rousseau and Technology: The Invention of a New Ecological Paradigm 65 Rousseau and “The Mechanical Life” 75 II Politics and Ethics: Beyond the Nature/Culture Polarity 91 Rousseau’s Ethical Freedom 93 Remarks on Rousseau’s Dictatorship: Between Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt 109 Politics and Religion in the Social Contract 119 Alienation and Freedom: Rousseau and Transcending Nature/Culture Dualism 127 Rousseau and the Sovereignty of the People 145 III The Philosophical Novel: Culture as Nature’s Supplement 159 Nature and Supplementation in Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse 161 Recomposing the Diffracted Text: Rousseau and the Metaphor of the Book of Nature 175 Nature, Culture, and the Social Contract: Emile’s point of view 187 Contributors 205 Index 209 Rousseau has been seen as the inventor of the concept of nature; in this collective volume philosophers and literary specialists from France and the United States examine how Rousseau's philosophy can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a constant dialectical debate between nature and culture. In this, Rousseauis our true contemporary.0