Abstract
J.-J. ROUSSEAU AND M. BUTOR : LESSONS IN SIMILARITY M.L. compares two corpora from the same literary genre, the open letter, both real and fictitious, with a comparable content : retrospective summaries of the political history immediately preceding the act of writing. The texts are taken from J.-J. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne (7th, 8th and 9th letter, 1764) and from M. Butor, « Chers amis », an article which appeared in the Quinzaine littéraire, 16th apríl 1979. M.L. concentrates on the comparative study of the metaphorical networks around sickness, sleep and holidays in relation to the semantic networks of change and resistance. On the basis of M.B. 's suggestion in the previous interview, M.L. analyses the strategic points of the texts studied : titles, genres or sub-genres used, beginnings and ends of letters. He notes a similarity in the usage of the biological metaphor applied to politics. In M.L.'s view, the idea common to both J.J. Rousseau and M. Butor — that society based on property is a sick society and the remedy lies in resisting this evil while waiting for this evil to right itself — gives rise to a shared vocabulary and shared metaphors. They differ, however, in their different strategies of resistance and possible remedies.