Rousseau, el perseguido persecutor de los jesuitas

Abstract

What does a girardean reading of his autobiographical texts reveal about Rousseau and about the Enlightenment in general? Perhaps that, at the very heart of this movement that supposedly inaugurates the Age of Reason, what is basically at stake is a mimetic crisis, not very different from those that characterize the primitive sacrificial religions.

After a brief introduction in which we list the tensions that characterize Rousseau, and after a very brief exposition of the girardian theory of the mimetic crisis, and of the trap of the cross, we will show how the rousseauian expedient fully meets all the requirements for that it be considered a mimetic crisis in which, given the all against one, the scapegoat is expelled.

We will also show that in this crisis Rousseau plays the double role of secondary persecuted, and persecutor, in turn, like the rest of the enlightened, of the Society of Jesus.