The Invention of Celebrity by Antoine Lilti

Author:Antoine Lilti
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

This apparent comedy should be taken seriously for its image of a credulous and malleable public opinion lost to all critical sense when it came to celebrities. What is clearly apparent through this image of a universal conspiracy denounced by Rousseau is celebrity itself, the growing distance between the man he knew himself to be and the various representations of himself that the public delighted in believing were true. In several different places, the Dialogues explicitly associate the “celebrity” of Jean-Jacques and the persecutions that hound him. “He believes, for example, that all the disasters of his destiny since his fatal fame are the fruits of a long-standing plot.”136 He lamented the fate of J.J., who, instead of advantages, found only insults, misery, contempt, and defamation attached to celebrity.137

Of course, by describing celebrity as a form of persecution, Rousseau outrageously blackened his public image. Every form of curiosity and admiration was transformed into hostility. “Admiration is above all a word which signals a traitor. It is like the politeness of tigers who seem to be smiling at you the moment they are coming to tear you apart,” he wrote to the Comte de Saint-Germain, in a letter laying out all aspects of the conspiracy.138 It is the nature of delirium to push an admired and popular writer to think that he is unanimously detested. But once the core problem has been identified, the proliferation of public representations, discourse, texts, and images associated with his name, which he does not control and in which he does not recognize himself, it matters very little, in the end, whether or not these images are favorable or unfavorable. They are painful because they imply that “Jean-Jacques” has become an autonomous public person, creating a kind of shield between Rousseau and his contemporaries. Paranoid delirium makes the description of celebrity particularly sinister, because it transforms curiosity, even admiration, into hate and contempt. But above all, there is a striking contradiction between the prestige associated with the public proliferation of a name and the impossibility of private recognition. Being too well known makes one unknown and blocks every authentic affective relationship. Bernardin was not wrong: “the celebrated man had made the sensitive man very unhappy.”

The Dialogues are preceded by a Foreword, “On the Subject and Form of this Writing,” that leaves no doubt what is at issue in the book, the hostile entity to which Rousseau attributes his misfortunes: “the public.” In just a few pages, the term appears six times, always in an operative position, as the main cause of defamation, not simply the passive recipient of calumnies. Immediately, in the first lines of the text, Rousseau invokes “the public, […] perfectly sure” of its rights, a pretension he later contrasts with “the incredible blindness of the public.” Jean-Jacques is “the person the public delights in disfiguring and slandering.” The objective in the Dialogues is to closely “examine the conduct of the public in relation to [him].” Later, other terms take the place of the

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