Rousseau - Masks and Theater

Rousseau is so deeply shaken by a society all in dissimulation and hypocrisy that he never ceases to denounce its masks: “the man of the world”, he writes in Emile, “is entirely in his mask. Almost never being in himself, he is always a stranger to it, and ill at ease when he is forced to return to it. What he is is nothing, what he seems is everything to him”. He is, like Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld, an "unmask".

Is it for this reason that this follower of face-to-face assemblies thundered against the theatre? This is a thorny question where politics and aesthetics, but also anthropology and morality intersect. There is also, in Rousseau, a pedagogy of the mask because masks can frighten: “All children are afraid of masks. I begin by showing Emile a mask with a pleasing face; then someone applies this mask to his face i…