“The Barometres of the Soul”. The Meteorological Model in the Writing of the Self in the Eighteenth Century
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2022
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Anouchka Vasak, « “The Barometres of the Soul”. The Meteorological Model in the Writing of the Self in the Eighteenth Century », Dix-huitième siècle, ID : 10670/1.e494df...
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Rousseau is often considered to be the precursor of the “meterological self” – the perception of an unstable subjectivity according to variations in the weather. In the first promenade of the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, he imagines, in a celebrated passage, a protocol of quasi-scientific allure. His scheme, which Pierre Pachet in Les baromètres de l’âme. Naissance du journal intime (1992) has shown, engendered a new literary genre where, from now on, a new subjectivity exercises itself in its variability and discontinuity. The article aims at widening Pachet’s enquiry: the metaphor of the barometer thus becomes a topos of the writing of self in the enlightened Europe of the last decades of the century. For which social, scientific, philosophical reasons was the barometer perceived to be the apt instrument for the expression of this new subjectivity?
