Name: Les confessions
Rating: 3.272727272727273 (11 reviews)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Les confessions

When it was first published in 1781, The Confessions scandalised Europe with its emotional honesty and frank treatment of the author's sexual and intellectual development. Since then, it has had a more profound impact on European thought. Rousseau left posterity a model of the reflective life - the solitary, uncompromising individual, the enemy of servitude and habit and the selfish egoist who dedicates his life to a particular ideal. The Confessions recreates the world in which he progressed from incompetent engraver to grand success; his enthusiasm for experience, his love of nature, and his uncompromising character make him an ideal guide to eighteenth-century Europe, and he was the author of some of the most profound work ever written on the relation between the individual and the state.

Confessions

Gavin

I am prejudiced against Rousseau, him with his straightforwardly false anthropology, melodramatic politics, and preposterous egotism. His three big legacies are even easier to disparage – ‘Revolution as salvation’, ‘Feelings as truer than thoughts’, and the ‘Noble savage’ idea. 

This much arrayed against him, it’s miraculous that Confessions (‘the first modern autobiography’) is as clear and wise as it is – a deeply honest story by a deeply deluded man. (Just one instance of courage: to talk about being a sexual sub, as a man, in eC18th Europe!) 

Still he is a stroppy Forrest Gump – blundering into great events, loudly blaming them for the collision – but he is also big enough to test the great iconoclasts of his time. (Strong parallels with DH Lawrence, another supremely wilful, influential, and ridiculous soul.) Skim heavily.

Seth Kalback

Marco Moraga

Andrea Ordoñez 

Fruzsina Juhász

Joshua Line

Amro Gebreel

Je sentis avant de penser : c'est le sort commun de l'humanité. Je l'éprouvai plus qu'un autre. J'ignore ce que je fis jusqu'à cinq ou six ans ; je ne sais comment j'appris à lire ; je ne me souviens que de mes premières lectures et de leur effet sur moi : c'est le temps d'où je date sans interruption la conscience de moi-même. Ma mère avait laissé des romans. Nous nous mîmes à les lire après souper, mon père et moi. Il n'était question d'abord que de m'exercer à la lecture par des livres amusants ; mais bientôt l'intérêt devint si vif, que nous lisions tour à tour sans relâche, et passions les nuits à cette occupation. Nous ne pouvions jamais quitter qu'à la fin du volume. Quelquefois mon père, entendant le matin des hirondelles, disait tout honteux : " Allons nous coucher ; je suis plus enfant que toi. "

Les confessions

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