On Labor Day 2009

On this Labor Day 2009, it is fitting to reflect on the lot of working people in the USA. Those of us fortunate enough to be employed are working harder than ever. A recent labor report announced that in the second quarter of 2009, the American work force produced the largest increase in output since 2003. As Walter Kirn notes in his 9/06/09 New York Times editorial, “What caused the jump is open to speculation, but I imagine it was partly because of nervousness. … Anxiety is nature’s most plentiful stimulant. Under its influence, trembling fingers fly.”
How sad it is, then, that a vast cross-section of our work force remains on the job today, on this rare holiday designed to honor labor. From department stores and restaurants to gas stations and universities, millions of people went to work today. My institution gave the administrative staff a holiday, but it was work as usual for the 12,000+ faculty and students on campus. Might we remind the powers-that-be that charity is supposed to start at home? As Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted in 1762: “L’essentiel est d’être bon aux yeux des gens avec qui l’on vit. Défiez-vous de ces cosmopolites qui vont chercher loin dans leurs livres des devoirs qu’ils dédaignent de remplir autour d’eux. Tel philosophe aime les Tartares, pour être dispensé d’aimer ses voisins » (Emile, Livre 1).
If Labor Day is, as we hope, to have lasting significance for the American people, may all employers heed Rousseau’s advice and take care of their own. One last day of respite to enjoy summer’s bounty will not make us less productive. Who knows, it may be just the boost we need to out-produce the competition in the hectic months ahead.

Pity and its adversaries

Villette, “Something to Reflect Upon for the Crowned Jugglers,” 1793.

Is emotion political?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined pity as a profoundly human emotion.

Why did revolutionary thought associate pity with weakness, manipulation, and deceit?

I am currently preparing a lecture,  « La Pitié et ses adversaires :  La politique de l’émotion dans les écrits révolutionnaires» to be presented at « Emotions et puissance de la littérature » conference at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris, June 12, 2009.

The lecture builds upon my research on the pamphlets, fictions, and correspondence on the King’s demise following his ill-fated attempt to flee the country in 1791, and considers these materials in the light of the history of “emotives” outlined in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2001) and “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (June 1977).

The fall of Louis XVI is an excellent case to test Reddy’s claims that 1) sincerity is culturally managed; and that 2) “emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power” (NF, 111; “AC,” 335).  My study explores how authors described and criticized who could be a rightful recipient of pity at three key moments in the political history of the French Revolution:  1791, 1800-01, and 1803.  Not only was the king’s  sincerity and legitimacy radically challenged after he was arrested in June 1791 at Varennes, he also lost the right to people’s pity.  Most intriguing from a literary perpective is the contrast  between Regnault-Warin’s novel, Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, and the king’s correspondence (1803, ed. Helen-Maria Williams).  Whereas the former presents an explicitly sympathetic reaction to the king’s fate, mirroring through a number of mise en abyme techniques the desired reader’s response, the latter repeatedly challenges the king’s claims of sincerity and efforts to elicit pity with an ironic series of editorial ”commentaries.” 

Death of Louis XVI, King of France

In updating this message tonight, after posting the ”Weird Liaisons” article earlier today, I was struck by my own insensitivity to the man known as Louis XVI.  Surely the decapitated head above is just as offensive as the Dolce & Gabbana imagery of bloody victims?   How quick we are to dismiss a person–because of his or her status, creed, or color–as unfitting of basic human pity and kindness.  I have thus posted this sympathetic English icon of Louis’s execution to render homage to another facet of his memory.  Tyrant or timid, dull or deliberate, Louis XVI was no monster, and his memory deserves a more dignified tribute than Villette’s grotesquerie.