ABSTRACT
"I am not made like any of those I have seen." With that announcement in The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents his reader with a strange new hero. The conviction of his uniqueness distinguishes him at once from Augustine, who would have condemned Rousseau for the sin of pride. Rousseau's overriding passion is a need to dramatize himself, to show himself as other–and this passion cannot be reduced to moral or exemplary terms. The Confessions belongs to a side of Rousseau that made him uneasy when he thought of the role he had created for himself as citizen of Geneva, the champion of the Spartan virtues. The guilt retains a residue of anxiety, but in the confessional act it is strangely robbed of its moral quality and becomes instead an energy, an expansiveness of the heart, a dramatic occasion. The confession itself, then, is no longer an occasion for genuine contrition and expiation. The act of confession tends to bestow forgiveness.
