Word: rousseau
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None of these societies is Nirvana. Indeed, the anthropological record provides little support for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the "noble savage" and rather more for Thomas Hobbes' assertion that life for our distant ancestors was "nasty, brutish, and short." The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has written of his first encounter with the Yanomamo: "The excitement of meeting my first Indians was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage into the village clearing." Then "I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their...
...Rousseau's Dog is not meant to encourage spinoffs, or copycat theses. Kennedy warns that her method was suggested naturally by Rousseau's own thinking and should not be used as a widespread model: "It would be presumptuous and vaguely absurd of me to propose the dog as a new category for general use in feminist analysis: the last thing we need is another set of cumbersome and contested terms. I am far from suggesting that we should take up the question of Nietzsche's dog or Dostoevsky...
...should not get the impression that Kennedy limits her discussion to dogs. She is quite lucid on the subject of Rousseau's urinary tract, for instance. Commenting on Rousseau's fear that a piece of a broken catheter had lodged there, Kennedy writes, "but it makes a certian kind of sense that Rousseau, starting with a lifelong urinary problem, would then graft the fantasy of a baby inside his penis onto his illness...
...Rousseau's Dog manages to teach painlessly. Kennedy's delight shows through her writing, as in the punny title of her introductory chapter, "Cherchez Le Chien." Most of all, the thesis surprises its reader constantly. Kennedy does not stop with Rousseau's dog, or even his urinary tract; her irreverence continues into the modern era, with her bizarre discussion of Allan Bloom's desire to revive the homosexual relationships between teachers and students of ancient Greece...
Perhaps it is Professor Jardine who best captures the essence of Rousseau's Dog. "Who would have ever thought that an understanding of the history of women's education in the West required an understanding of Rousseau's dog? Jennifer Kennedy has taught old dogma some new tricks." Thanks to Noab Feldman...