Josué V. Harari presents the French Enlightenment as a volatile lab for playing with imagination, subjectivity and the production of the “real.”

Moving through Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot and other eighteenth-century writers, Harari asks what happens when supposedly rational systems depend upon fantasies, projections and imagined bodies to hold themselves together. The exploration of the metaphysical is core to the text. Rousseau’s educational theory slips into reverie; Montesquieu’s Persian Letters turns political authority into a drama of absence, desire and projection; Enlightenment ideas of knowledge continually reveal an imaginary architecture underneath their claims to objectivity. 

A distinctly late-twentieth-century work of literary theory, drawing on psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism without abandoning close reading. Dense, strange, and very good on the point where systems of knowledge begin secretly manufacturing the realities they claim merely to describe.

Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1987. First edition. Hardcover with dust jacket. Printed in the USA on acid-free paper. Dust jacket shows light rubbing, minor edge wear and a little creasing, particularly at the extremities. Boards and text block appear very well preserved; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition in very good dust jacket.