ANTOINE LILTI The Writing of Paranoia: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Paradoxes of Celebrity On Saturday, February 24, 1776, Jean-Jacques Rousseau visited the cathedral of Notre Dame carrying a manuscript. This manuscript, on which he had been working for four years, was entitled Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques; it was meant as a denunciation of a plot against Jean-Jacques and a defense of his innocence. Not knowing to whom he should give the manuscript, as he suspected his closest friends of belonging to the conspir- acy, Rousseau preferred to confide his text to “Providence.” And so he de- cided to leave the manuscript on the great altar of Notre Dame, in the hope that it would be found and given to the king. God and the king: nothing less was needed to break the circle of conspiracy and do justice to Jean-Jacques. But a terrible surprise was waiting for him. As he approached the altar, he found that the chancel was separated from the nave by a grate that he had never before noticed, and that blocked his way. It was a dreadful shock: “I was overcome by a dizziness like a man with apoplexy, and this dizziness was followed by an upheaval of my whole being” wrote Rousseau in a text he composed afterwards, and added to the manuscript as an appendix. 1 “All the more struck by the unforeseen obstacle because I hadn’t told anyone of my project, I believed in my initial transport that I was seeing Heaven itself collaborate in the iniquitous work of men.” And this revelation tore from him a “murmur of indignation.” Did God himself belong to the plot? Is it possible to imagine a more striking image of paranoia? It is worth noting that this famous episode, after all, is only known to us because Rousseau himself tells the story, in a text in which the denunciation of the plot takes on such incredible dimensions, ap- proaching delirium, that the suspicion of madness weighs on every page. It is hardly an unremarkable fact that this text, of which critics long held an ex- ceedingly poor opinion, is one of the least read and least discussed of its 53 ABSTRACT This article proposes a historical account of Rousseau’s paranoid writings by showing how he experienced the contradictions of celebrity, which deeply transformed his status as a writer and his relations with readers. It thus stresses some hitherto unnoticed paradoxes of the eighteenth- century public sphere. / R EPRESENTATIONS 103. Summer 2008 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages 53–83. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http:// www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.DOI:10.1525/rep.2008.103.1.53.