Rousseau and Derrida on Liberty and on Language, the First Social Institution, Barry Stocker

Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes an idea of antique provenance, that language is a defining feature of humanity, and turns that from an attribute to a pervasive aspect of human existence, not separable from its many aspects, bringing together music, poetry, passions, communication, history, political institutions, physical geography, human physique, and social conditions. His position has precedent, notably the work of Giambattista Vico in the New Science (1984), though given the closeness in time, it could be said that both Vico and Rousseau are the products of an Enlightenment reaction to classical rhetorical theory, natural law, civil society, and historical views of humanity. One way of thinking of the The Essay on the Origin of Languages (in Rousseau 1998, which will be referred to in future discussion as the Essay) would be as an extraordinarily concise and deep summary, and rewriting, of the New Science, taken in conjunction with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1991). The Essay is not a text greatly discussed in succeeding decades, but there is a range of philosophical work going up to Friedrich Nietzsche by way of German Idealism, including Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language and Søren Kierkegaard on the possibilities and limits of communication, which seem to follow up the Essay, if more from accidental resonance than deliberate reference. As Jacques Derrida indicates in Of Grammatology (1997a), Rousseau’s thought about language can be found dispersed across his texts, so any influence on later thinkers about language and communication might be through various conduits. These indirect relations parallel the relation between Rousseau and Giambattista Vico, overlapping that of Montesquieu and Vico, which is never made clear by Rousseau or Montesquieu and may again be as much a matter of an accumulation of resonances and echoes as direct influence.

The story of language in the Essay is in part an essay on music, and includes a discussion of liberty, so in this context language encompasses issues of melody and harmony in speech and political institutions based on liberty. The discussion of the origin is a complex one in which language as a distinguishing feature of humanity does not appear in nature, since language is the first social institution.

Speech distinguishes man from the animals. Language distinguishes nations from each other; one does not know where a man is from until after he has spoken. Usage and need make each learn the language of his country; but what causes this language to be that of his country and not of another? In order to tell, one has to go back to some reason that pertains to locality, and precedes even morals:[] speech, being the first social institution, owes its form only to natural causes. (Rousseau 1998, 289)

One possible implication of the passage above is that humans are animals before they arrive at the stage of language competence, but there is nothing else to suggest that Rousseau thinks pre-linguistic humans are animals, he even seems to think in the Essay that language goes back to Adam. Even when he discusses pre-social humans without reference to an Adamic stage, in the Discourse on Inequality (in Rousseau 1973, which will be referred to in further discussion as the Discourse), he creates intermediate states between animal and human, with considerable ambiguity about when language of some kind might originate.

His claims that humans are distinguished from (other) animals by language, is deepened by the sense that not only is it the defining attribute of humans, but that it establishes humans as the animal that lacks an essence, because their essence is dispersed in language. The uniqueness of humanity in possessing language is what gives them an essence distinct from any biological or physical type. The ways that Rousseau understands this can be importantly, though not exclusively, understood with reference to the role of imagination in the Discourse

Men, dispersed up and down among the rest, would observe and imitate their industry, and thus attain even to the instinct of the beasts, with the advantage, that whereas every species of brutes was confined to one particular instinct, man, who perhaps has not any one peculiar to himself, would appropriate them all, and live upon most of those different foods, which other animals shared among themselves; and thus would find his subsistence much more easily than any of the rest. (1973, 48)

Humans are not driven by instinct, but by the capacity to imitate the consequences of instinct in other animals. There is an infinity of possible animal actions within humans. In this text, it is not bare minimal language which distinguishes humans from other animals though. Rousseau concedes that other animals can have language, rather undermining some of the more absolutist statements about language. The difference is in free will. Animals can combine signs, but not from the work of free will. Free will operates in the context of an understanding driven by the passions. That might be considered to undermine the idea of free will, since the influence of the passions has often been understood to show lack of free will. We can take this from Plato to Rousseau’s some time friend David Hume. The famous phrase that ‘reason is and ought only to be a slave of the passions’ (Hume 2000, 266), from A Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3, is part of a deterministic position with regard to the possibility of free will. The version of this belief, that where passion begins free will ends, was best known at the time in association with Stoicism, particularly Epictetus, and Hume’s comment is part of an argument against that position. Rousseau’s position on free will is part of a questioning of Stoicism which, broadly defined, had enormous influence on early modern thought. The questioning of it does not come from out of nowhere in Rousseau. We can take his positions on the relations between humans and non-human animals, free will, and the passions back to Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne followed the ancient Stoics, but also questioned the possibility of complete rationalism, as a philosophical system, or as an account of how we might have free will. In Montaigne’s account, or as far as an account can be retrieved from the restless questioning and self-questioning of the Essays (2003), the human mind is too easily influenced by passions, and by passing ideas, to really match the Stoic ideal (Essays I.12 ‘Of Constancy’). Montaigne refers to his own mind as changeable, though he has some qualities of Stoic calm. He exists through the writing of himself in the Essays, though writing is detached from life (II. 37 ‘Of the Resemblance of Children to the Fathers’, III.9 ‘Vanity’). So his life is a fragile thing existing through the writing of it. There is no theory of free will in Montaigne, but there is an indeterminism arising from the failure of the mind to be consistent and rise above the passions, and in a view of nature as what produces an infinite number of forms, many of which seem to us to be outside any kind of order. These thoughts have many resonances in Rousseau’s work. In his thought on language and on the social existence of humanity, we can see the continuation of the interest in the restlessness of the human mind, its willingness to follow any idea, and its lack of continuity over time. Montaigne also shows an interest in the natural moment before a community is divided by economic, comparative, and egotistical interests (Essays I.36 ‘Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes’). Montaigne was also concerned with overlaps in intelligence between animals and humans, insisting that dogs have some reasoning capacity, as well as famously musing on whether the was playing with his cat, or his cat was playing with him (Essays II.12 ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’). We can see Rousseau in a tradition going back to Montaigne in these aspects of his thought, as well as a revolutionary thinker about language; and that revolution is best understood with reference to Montaigne’s ways of thinking about humans, animals, writing, and the mind, as embedded in repetition. We can better grasp the relation between Rousseau and Derrida, if we think of the ways in which their writing continued Montaigne’s writing, along with that of Blaise Pascal (Stocker 2000). The element of national tradition there (allowing for Rousseau’s origins in and intermittent loyalty to Geneva) is an appropriate method of sorting thinkers, though not the only one, and a theme of discussion from a Derridean point of view, since Derrida himself wrote on the place of national tradition in philosophy, ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’ (in Derrida 2007).

A lengthy discussion of Rousseau makes up a large part of Of Grammatology, one of the three books Derrida published in 1967, and which established him as a major intellectual force, along with Voice and Phenomenon (2010) and Writing and Difference (1978). One reason for the importance of Rousseau in Derrida’s early work is the coincidence of names between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The shared ‘Jacques’ may seem like a trivial issue, but for Derrida names (1988, 1995) and verbal accidents are very important, and not just for reasons which come out of a twentieth century interest in word play and personal identity, as in Derrida’s interest in James Joyce. Back in the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne raised the issue of shared names, accidentally and through family connection, in the Essays (2003): 1.46 ‘Of Names’.

Derrida is reading Rousseau in a way which is influenced by Montaigne to comment on someone influenced by Montaigne. The chance of being influenced by Montaigne in some way is very high for a French thinker, nevertheless the Montaigne-Rousseau-Derrida triangle is a particularly important line of influence. It is not just a straight line, since the Derridean reading of Rousseau brings out the particularly Montaigne related aspects of Rousseau, if not very directly. Derrida’s understanding of Rousseau was influenced by Montaigne, but Rousseau also influenced his understanding of Montaigne in ways that cannot all be traced back to Montaigne. Just thinking about the ways the lines of influence work historically, and in the readings itself, promotes Derridean thoughts about the contextuality of any discourse, which always allows for adding new contexts to see what that brings out of the discourse in question. It also promotes thoughts about circularity in addressing a tradition of some kind, since the idea that Derrida, Rousseau, and Montaigne belong together in some way itself assumes interpretations, which themselves rely to some degree on the assumption that resonance is inheritance and tradition. Derrida himself addresses this issue with reference to Rousseau in ‘The Linguistic Circle of Geneva’ (in Derrida 1982a) and in The Truth in Painting (Derrida 1987), with regard to philosophy of art as discussed by Hegel and by Heidegger.

Derrida brings up issues of ethics, identification and alienation in our awareness of others, mimesis, the limits of philosophical discourse, the place of passion and need in language, in his reading of Rousseau, all of which are discussed in other texts in other contexts. Derrida’s way of reading Rousseau makes it seem that Rousseau had anticipated Derrida’s major themes and approaches to philosophical writing, and while some of this comes from Derrida’s own interpretative-critical assumptions, a good deal of it shows how he had picked up on themes present in Rousseau. Derrida even finishes the discussion of Rousseau, and the whole of Of Grammatology, with a quote from Rousseau’s Émile, which strongly suggests that he sees himself in Rousseau: “… the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say I too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake” … (Derrida, 1997a, 316). The quoted passage, in the context of Derrida’s text, suggests the elevation of Rousseau to the status of one of the great thinkers of the end of philosophy, alongside Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger; and that Rousseau is a great poet-philosopher (using poetry in its broadest sense) alongside Plato, Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Derrida’s reading suggests a place for Rousseau above that of being one of the giants of political theory and literary autobiography, who made some interesting interventions in other areas, which is the average attitude. Derrida does not make this argument in an explicit manner, and does not return much to Rousseau in later works, though that should not prevent the reader from reading Derrida’s later texts as the reports of the dreams of a bad night passed onto the awake.

Rousseau’s position in Derrida’s philosophy is to be defined as deconstructive, most obviously in one aspect of deconstruction, but also we shall see another aspect. Where Derrida does engage in some explication of what deconstruction is in his earlier texts, he suggests it has two poles (Stocker 2006, Chapter 8). One pole is the aspect of nostalgia, the attempted return to Being, which exposes its absence and the inherent impossibility of arriving at that moment; the other pole is the celebration of the dispersal of Being, of difference, materiality of language, and the plurality of meaning. This occurs in the contrasts between: Husserl and the literature of James Joyce (Introduction to ‘The Origin of Geometry’, 1989), Heidegger and Nietzsche (‘Différance’ and ‘The Ends of Man’, in 1982a), and more implicitly Rousseau and Nietzsche (1997a, 143), with Rousseau and Heidegger almost implicitly merging with each other at times in opposition to Nietzsche, around the relation to death, the element of nostalgia for nature or Being, and the orientation between primary difference (between the natural and the social, Being and beings). That is to say that Derrida’s reading of Rousseau is full of Heideggerian undertones, so that he is sometimes a displaced version of Heidegger in Derrida’s argumentative strategies.

Derrida finds the Essay to be a highly deconstructive text, or at least that is the implication of the attention he pays to it. It is writing about the limited usefulness of writing, language used to explain the separation of humanity from its nature in language. The Essay is writing against itself, in this reading, which is driven by the longing for the complete immediacy of consciousness to itself, uninterrupted by language, time, or thoughts of death. Those three go together for Derrida, as can be seen in his reading of Husserl in Voice and Phenomenon (2010). What Derrida emphasises in Rousseau includes concerns with paradox and repetition in style and in themes of writing, which feature in Derrida’s own writing. This continuity extends to an approach toward metaphor. Rousseau’s concerns about language go to the heart of what Derrida liked to find in language, at least in respect to metaphor. A slightly later text, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ (in Derrida 1982a), where the impossibility of eliminating metaphor from philosophy is a major theme, is Derrida’s most extended contribution on this topic. Metaphysics it is suggested, is the attempt the evade metaphor, to turn language into something neutral. However, for Derrida any attempt to define metaphor in language relies on metaphor, and there is always metaphor of some kind, that is transference of properties from one word to another in language in order for it to be language.

Let us reconsider the systems of metaphors. Natural pity, which is illustrated archetypically by the relationship between mother and child, and generally by the relationship between life and death, commands lie a gentle voice. In the metaphor of that soft voice the presence of mother as well as of Nature is at once brought in. That the soft voice must be the mother’s as well as Nature’s is clear from the fact that it is, as the metaphor of the voice always indicates in Rousseau, a law. (Derrida 1997a, 173)

Rousseau does implicitly regard metaphor with anxiety as an undermining of mimesis, which is not a Derridean posture; but the awareness of a difference between metaphor and mimesis is very Derridean. Where language is metaphorical it cannot be imitative, and representation is disrupted. It is the ideal of representation, of the return of what represents to what is represented, which is deeply present in metaphysics for Derrida. What unifies Jacques Derrida and Jean-Jacques Rousseau is that the importance of metaphor and mimesis is acknowledged in the disturbing power of metaphor with regard to any attempt at imitation.

Derrida does admit the possibility of formal languages, even the genetic code, as language without metaphor: “[…] the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing” (Derrida 1997a, 9). He defines that form of language as ‘writing’ not ‘language’, which is a way of suggesting that writing is no less primordial in relation to language than speech, since writing is part of the code of life. Language must be full of metaphor, and full of the constitutive paradoxes Derrida explores as ‘deconstruction’.

Like Rousseau, Derrida finds that language in its metaphorical and related capacities is driven by desire, by the tension between pleasure and need, which he thinks of through Freudianism.

In a certain way, I am within the history of psychoanalysis as I am within Rousseau’s text. Just as Rousseau drew upon a language that was already there – and which is found to be somewhat our own – in the same way we operate today within a certain network of significations marked by psychoanalytic theory, even if we do not master it and even if we are assured of never being able to master it perfectly. (Derrida 1997a, 161)

Rousseau sees a moment which transcends desire, which seems different from Derrida’s philosophy, but there is an aspect of Derrida which seeks the end to the absences and contradictions inherent to language. The aspect of language which fascinates Derrida, alongside metaphor, is the performative. His discussion of this Austinian term of analysis, only used provisionally by J. L. Austin himself, starts briefly in ‘Signature Event Context’ (in Derrida 1982a), but is central to Glas (1986), his longest piece of continuous writing and the Derrida text that is most difficult to process in non-Derridean terms. The role of the performative in that text becomes relatively clearer in The Postcard (1987), which includes its own extraordinary piece of Derridean writing ‘Envois’, as well as some relatively straightforward philosophical prose. What Glas and The Postcard show is the Derridean desire to reach some moment in language, where the gap between the intentionality in words and the event in the world which is part of that intention disappears. He analyses that structure of desire, but is also complicit with it. That is an apocalyptic moment, which presumes the divine power for words to become deeds without interruption. Such an event would be the end of meaning and communication in any recognisable way, which are always caught up in uncertainties about the delivery of a message, even before discussing questions of unexpected consequences. That aspect of Derrida’s interest in language can be seen at the time of Of Grammatology and is perhaps most clear in those essays in Writing and Difference (1978), which deal with the limits of language in poetry, law, religion, and the apparent disappearance of language in the ‘theatre of cruelty’.

The way that Derrida and Rousseau approach the limits of language, institutions, and liberty can be usefully contextualised with reference to Montaigne. The first page of ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (in Derrida 1978) begins with an epigram from Montaigne, from the last of the Essays, ‘Of Experience’ (Montaigne 2003): ‘We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things’. Derrida has a more extended, if still brief encounter with Montaigne in ‘Force of Law’ where he looks at Montaigne as the source of remarks in Pascal about how a foundation for law must be in pure force or divine justice (Derrida 2002, 239–40), again referring to the essay ‘Of Experience’. The most extended encounter is with regard to friendship, as treated by Montaigne in the essay ‘On Friendship’, which Derrida discusses in Politics of Friendship (1997b), particularly in Chapter 7, ‘He Who Accompanies Me’. The discussion of Montaigne on friendship is of relevance to Rousseau’s thoughts about the nature of political community, in the emphasis on the ideal nature of community between humans and the difficulties of attaining it, so that it always seems to be in the past, as in Montaigne’s own dead best friend Etienne de La Boétie, or his many references on this topic, and others, to classical antiquity. There is also background to Rousseau in ‘Of Experience’, certainly with regard to the inevitable tendency of interpretation towards interpretation of interpretations rather than interpretation of things; and the mixture of the mystic and the violent in the formation of law. The relations between natural force and social institutions, and the regress of interpretation are very present in Rousseau’s thoughts on language, and are particularly at play in a reading influenced by Derrida, and by Derrida’s reading of Montaigne.

Natural force and a kind of pre-linguistic writing appear in gestures, which are more natural than full language, but are associated by Rousseau with anxiety.

Our gestures signify nothing but our natural uneasiness; it is not about these that I want to speak. Only Europeans gesticulate while speaking. One would think that all the force of their speech was in their arms. They further add to this the force of their lungs, and all this is hardly of any use to them. When a Frenchman has quite strained himself, quite tormented his body to say a lot of words, a Turk removes his pipe from his mouth for a moment, softly speaks two words, and crushes him with one aphorism. (1998, 290)

Gestures also appear as decisive means of communication avoiding the diversion of speech. Some of the examples Rousseau gives are rather disturbing though, Tarquinius Superbus cutting off the heads of poppies to communicate an order for the massacre of leading citizens is a gesture of tyranny. He first gives the related example of Thrasybulus, the seventh-century BCE tyrant of Miltetus, who according to Herodotus (Histories 5 92f), and in a reversed form of the story by Aristotle (Politics 1284a), gave advice to Periander, tyrant of Thebes, on how to administer his state by cutting off the flowers of poppies in a field in front of Periander’s messenger. The story about Tarquinius and the the poppies is from the sixth century BCE, so may well be a Roman legend copying what may well be a Greek legend from a century before. The issue of distinguishing imitation from origin fits with Rousseau’s focus on the first, and original, event of language and therefore of social institutions, and on the difficulty of isolating such an event. The status of the origin is also at stake in these stories of tyrants using gestures instead of words, suggesting that the first form of language, gesture, is the expression of unlawful force. It is the Tarquinius version of the story (In Livy’s History of Rome, Volume 1, Book 1), which has become better known. It’s most notable appearance in later literature is in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, as discussed by the present author in Chapter Two of Kierkegaard on Politics (2014), and it has a wider cultural resonance, even for those unaware of the ancient stories, in the phrase ‘tall poppy syndrome’.

So Rousseau’s example is full of resonance in his own time, and has acquired more resonance since. It is impossible to say how aware Rousseau was of all the possible references when he was writing, and impossible to say how distinct the understanding is of later authors, or how far they are aware of Rousseau’s remarks. These multiplying sources, ambiguity about the original story, authenticity, intention and interpretation, resonance and deliberate allusion, are at the heart of Derrida’s philosophical enterprise. If we bring those concerns into all discussions of language, consciousness, and representation, then we have one perspective on understanding the nature of Derrida’s philosophical enterprise, and what it is he brings to the reading of Rousseau.

Another example of extreme state force is given by Rousseau, which is an example of what might be allusion and what might be resonance, is in reference to the King of Scythia and Darius of Persia. The Scythian king sends a messenger to Darius with a frog, a bird, a mouse, and five arrows. Vico gives a slightly different version of the same story (New Science paragraphs 48, 99), which comes from Herodotus’ Histories IV.131–133. There are various echoes of the New Science, first published in 1725 and in the third and final edition in 1744, in the Essay, as Derrida recognises in Of Grammatology (1997a, 215, 272, 298).

These various dispersed associations, changing over time, are aspects of language, which Rousseau finds disconcerting, are to do with its distance from the original situation. Rousseau’s discussion of language has a very political aspect, alluded to in the examples of Thrasybalus and Tarquinius, and which is the topic of the last chapter, ‘Chapter XX: Relationship of Languages to Governments’ and Rousseau’s political concerns with the contract and the loss of the original social contract as he imagines it. That is the loss of the world in which a community gives and agrees on the laws that make it a political community.

There are languages favorable to liberty; these are sonorous, prosodic, harmonious languages, in which discourse can be made out from a distance. Ours are made for the murmuring in sultans’ Council-chambers. Our preachers torment themselves, work themselves into a sweat in churches, without anyone having known anything of what they have said. After tiring themselves out shouting for an hour, they leave the pulpit half dead. Surely this was not worth such an effort. (Rousseau 1998, 332)

We see an aesthetic aspect of politics here for Rousseau, in which language serves as a common factor. Liberty requires a prosodic language, referring to the idea of prosodic language explored by Rousseau in Chapter VII, ‘On Modern Prosody’. Prosody is the musical aspect of language which disappears when the same speech can be set to a variety of tunes. The use of accent marks shows a decadence in language as pronunciation and spelling diverge: ‘Derivative languages are known by the discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation’ (Rousseau 304). English is particularly marked by this lack of prosody, which Rousseau links with the absence of liberty.

In order to know English it must be learned two times: once to read it and another time to speak it. If an Englishman reads out loud and a foreigner glances at the book, the foreigner will not perceive any relationship between what he sees and what he hears. Why is that? Because while England has been successively conquered by various peoples, and while the words have always been written the same, the manner of pronouncing them has often changed. (1998, 304)

The historical claim about the successive conquests of England is not very tenable. The relevant conquests are the partial conquests by the Vikings in the ninth century, speaking a Germanic language related to English, and the more complete conquest by the Normans in the eleventh century. Both conquering groups were absorbed into English society. That absorption may be what Rousseau means by the negative intrusion of conquerors, but twice in the whole history of England is less frequent than Rousseau suggests. France itself suffered one complete conquest, the German-Frankish conquest of Roman Gauls speaking the earliest form of French, the partial Viking conquest which covered Normandy, and temporary but extensive conquests and inheritance of French lands by the English monarchy in the Middle Ages. However, Rousseau can only be understood as saying that English is more marked by conquests than French. With regard to the overall argument developed by Rousseau, this rather shaky historical claim does reinforce the idea that language has something to do with liberty, and that the interest in the relation between spoken and written language does have something to do with political liberty.

Rousseau expands on what separates written language from spoken language with regard to Ancient Egypt and modern Poland. “When a language is clearer by its spelling than its pronunciation, it is a sign that it is written more than it is spoken. Such may have been the scholarly language of the Egyptians; such are the dead languages for us. In those languages burdened with useless consonants, writing even seems to have preceded speech, and who would not believe that such is the case with Polish?” (1998, 304). The example of ancient Egypt is clear enough and has a historical basis, the origins of writing in sacral, but also bureaucratic, usages remote from popular understanding. The reference to modern Polish is more hard to understand, but is presumably related to the aristocratic domination of Poland, in a political system for which Rousseau was invited to write a reform proposal. We can read the result in Considerations on the Government of Poland (in Rousseau 2012). The idea that, for the Egyptian language, writing came before speech is part of a set of oppositions and anxieties about what language really is, and what the origin is, which is presumed to be its essence. The idea that writing might precede speech is disturbing for Rousseau for a mixture of political, aesthetic, and cognitive reasons. If writing preceded speech, then language belongs to the priests and princes who usurp sovereignty, not the sovereign people. If writing preceded speech, then prosody is not at the heart of language, minimising the role of music. If writing preceded speech then knowledge does not come from experience.

Consonants without vowels are legitimate for Rousseau in ancient Hebrew, since he claims that it was just obvious what the vowels were. In other circumstances though, many consonants refer to the triumph of writing over speech, even the monstrous situation in which writing precedes speech. Algebra is taken as an example of the latter situation. There is no direct criticism of algebra by Rousseau, but he certainly leaves the impression he regards it as evidence of decadence in language, which fits with the ideal of an early moment in history where there was liberty, and language had an appropriate form in speech. This contrasts with Derrida’s ready acceptance that the genetic code is a form of writing preceding human language, and that language can never be fully characterised by semantic meaningfulness, as algebra and software language suggest. However, the tensions between these different aspects of language are a matter in which Derrida takes inspiration from Rousseau.

The ideal of language and liberty continues in Rousseau, but adapted to circumstances in which a literal gathering of all is impossible, and with other constraints like language not originating in speech; much of what Rousseau says about the laws and constitutions suggests he was not inclined to see history as flowing in an uninterrupted way from an initial foundation of law and institutions. Laws are given by legislators appealing to supernatural authority, or grow over time, in the political communities Rousseau admires. In the overall strategies of Rousseau’s arguments, the ideal situation for law creation is more of an ideal used for criticism of existing laws than a call for a return. That does not diminish the tension the ideal brings into the examination of real laws and polities. In the same way, Rousseau does not demand a return to the original moment of language, but his analysis is always marked by the tension between what is described and the ideal situation.

As with law and politics, another set of tensions appears around the relation between the natural and the social, expressed in the physical conditions in which a community lives, and its social existence over history. The physical, or natural, conditions are determinate in the first place, but the social forms which arise from physical forces obtain some autonomy and force of their own. The natural-social relationship picks up from Montesquieu and has an afterlife up to the present day in the Marxist relation between economic base and social superstructure, along with various other discussions of the relation between the natural and the social, the more material and more ideational aspects of a culture, the basis of history and social structures in physical geography and climate.

Looking at Rousseau in relation to the Enlightenment, we can see that he belongs to a way of thinking in which a series of oppositions between the natural and the civil or social prevail. However, in some cases, the natural is necessary for the flourishing of civil association, as Adam Smith puts it, in the role of a ‘system of natural liberty’ ([IV.ix.51] 1981b, 687), including a ‘liberal system of free exportation and free importation’ ([IV.vb.39] 1981a, 538), and ‘allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice’ ([IV.ix.3] 1981b, 664). Smith puts a more positive value on commercial society than Rousseau, and in some ways represents the opposite point of view in politics and economics, but was certainly aware of Rousseau’s social thought, and took up some of its themes with various degrees of agreement and disagreement (Rasmussen 2006, 2008). That is, Smith’s thought is partly informed by Rousseau’s understanding of the oppositions between the natural and the social, and the ways in which the natural reappears in the social as a source of critique for social relations thought to be out of harmony with natural man.

Smith’s fellow Scottish Enlightenment theorist Adam Ferguson produced a social and historical philosophy in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1995), which is roughly halfway between Smith and Rousseau in the positive value it gives both to commercial society and natural force in pre-commercial society. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1989) also has a roughly halfway position within the French Enlightenment between the value of pure republics with no inequality, where laws are unwritten, and which hardly have economic exchange, and commercial society. Through comparing Rousseau, Smith, Ferguson, and Montesquieu, we can see the possibilities for natural force, sociability, unwritten customs, written laws, and commercial society to oppose, overlap, and interact. This contextualisation indicates the ambiguity of Rousseau’s linguistic and social philosophy in which we find both nostalgic rejection and corrective internal critique, with regard to the evolution of language and laws. We have some choice which to emphasise, and there is no complete distinction between the ‘real’ inner argument in Rousseau, the judgements we bring to bear, and the context in which we place Rousseau.

Rousseau’s Essay expands upon a view of language already present in the Discourse, or that is what Rousseau claims in the preface to the Essay. So on Rousseau’s own account, the Essay is framed by parts of the Discourse, or is an extension of it, or a complement to it. That still leaves the question of why Rousseau could not incorporate it into the Discourse; that is the question of how it might challenge the structure of the Discourse. The first part of the Discourse discusses language over six pages (Rousseau 1973, 58–64) and then leaves it before a brief return early in the second part (80). The dominant theme in the Part-One discussion is that language must have emerged simultaneously with society: ‘I question […] that a kind of society must already have existed among the first inventors of language’ (58), maybe with the qualification that there could be extreme idiolects in pre-social humans spoken only by that person (59). The idiolect must come from the child rather than the mother, because the child must have more to say to the mother than the mother would have to say to the child. Wants give rise to communication, and the child has more wants in relation to the mother than the other way around. Rousseau is not entirely clear on whether we should think the idiolects had some existence before the emergence of society simultaneously allowed language as a full means of communication. His idea of language in society is of language with a full set of grammatical parts, including abstract expressions (63), which still leaves the possibility of a variety of idiolects in which pre-social humans thought about their world and maybe engaged in some reflection. Rousseau makes mutual assistance beyond immediate help from those in sight a condition of language properly understood as a complete language.

But be the origins of language and society what they may, it may at least be inferred, from the little care which nature has taken to unite mankind by mutual wants, and to facilitate the use of speech, that she has contributed little to make them sociable, and has put little of her own into all they have done to create such bonds of union. It is in fact impossible to conceive why, in a state of nature, one man should stand more in need of the assistance of another than a monkey or a wolf of the assistance of another of it’s kind: or granting that he did, what motives could induce that other to assist him; or even then, by what means they could agree about the condition. (63)

Nature itself has failed to push us together in forms of sociability and communication, as in a state of nature we only have the mutual needs and communicative capacity of monkeys and wolves. Rousseau makes his point with reference to the monkeys which are related to humans and share common ancestors, and to wolves which are the ancestors of the dogs kept by humans as guards and companions. The introduction of wolves and monkeys does not obviously connect with other themes and arguments in Rousseau, and does not advocate the evolution of species, but however accidentally does put the emergence of human community in the context of non-human origins and its interaction with animals, which also leave the state of nature.

Human community, including language in any strong sense, is unnatural, but does come about because of natural circumstances. However, Rousseau does not find that regular natural circumstances explain the linked moves towards human community and language. This forces Rousseau into the awkwardness of implicitly exceptional episodes in nature, which have overtones of divine intervention and Biblical accounts of early human history. These are disaster conditions in nature, as he explains in Part Two of the Discourse:

We can see here a little better how the use of speech became established, and insensibly improved in each family, and we may form a conjecture also concerning the manner in which various causes may have extended and accelerated the progress of language, by making it more and more necessary. Floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with precipices or waters: revolutions of the globe tore off portions from the continent and made them islands. It is readily seen that among men thus collected and compelled to live together, a common idiom must have arisen much more easily than among those who still wandered through the forests of the continent. (80)

Floods, earthquakes, and islands splitting off continents are exceptional events in nature necessary for humans to move from nature to social institutions, and stand out as a model of trauma in the transition from nature to society, a repetition itself repeated in the traumas of transition from the earliest simple communities to large commercial societies, and in various other transitions. The possibility of divine intervention here links Rousseau’s thought on language and the origins of society with Catholics of the time, including Giambattista Vico in the New Science (1984), who were very willing to combine the Hebrew Bible account of human origin and early history with Stoic inspired theories of cyclical history as part of a ‘natural’ cycle. Rousseau’s formulations may have been influenced by Vico, or they may have shared common influences, but in any case some parts of Rousseau seem to demand expansion via Vico, like the passage quoted above, though it will not be possible to explore that contextualisation here.

Rousseau implicitly specifies a non-natural nature that pushes natural humans into communities of assistance and linguistic communication which are not natural, though coming out of nature. These difficulties for Rousseau in defining the natural, the social, and the relations between them, are present in the brief suggestion of the idiolects of pre-social humans (Rousseau 1973, 58–9), which are not fully formed languages, but are languages of some kind, existing maybe in great numbers and great diversity. They are part of the difficult transition in Rousseau from natural to social, a pre-social use of signs which is not part of the communication necessary for community. As noted above, Rousseau himself raises a problem with pure idiolects in the process of setting up this possibility, which is that the infant cannot learn language from the mother, unless she is part of language as a social institution (58). It is still the case that what follows seems to suggest the emergence of individualistic simple language as a precondition for fully elaborated language in a social context. It is not a firm claim of Rousseau’s; it is a suggestion that is neither clearly taken up or clearly rejected, and in the Essay as, we shall see, he seems to reject the idea.

Rousseau’s social metaphysics of pure origins and oppositions, along with the moments Rousseau creates where the nature-social relationship in language become troubling, or are dramatised in some way, fascinate Derrida. He is particularly fascinated by the idea of a festival in both the Discourse and the Essay which marks the appearance of language in human society, but is a form of or return to the natural, along with the ways in which Rousseau conceives an ideal political community in terms of linguistic immediacy, even the absence of language in mute forms of communication, which Derrida emphasises are still language, and no less so than speech. The festival has an equivalent in the primary political event for Rousseau, the first appearance of the general will as peasants gathered under an oak tree described in the first paragraph of The Social Contract IV. Rousseau’s festival can be taken in comparison with Nietzsche’s festival of cruelty in On the Genealogy or Morals, Essay II, Section 7, which Derrida emphasises in contrast with Heidegger in ‘The Ends of Man’:

His [the Superman’s] laughter will then burst out, directed towards a return which no longer will have the form of the metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor, doubtless, “beyond” metaphysics, the form of a memorial or a guarding of the meaning of Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being: He will dance outside the hour, the active Vergesslicheit, the “active forgetting” and the cruel (grausam) feast of which the Genealogy of Morals speaks. (Derrida 1982a, 136)

Here Derrida emphasises the idea of Nietzsche as the philosopher who has ended metaphysics, or at least exposed its limits, and tries to write outside the metaphysical limits of abstract forms, transcendental unities, and the purity of original truth. The language employed is very much directed at Heidegger, in the references to guarding the meaning of Being, the house and truth of Being, and can be taken as directed against references in Rousseau to the purity of nature, and to the consciousness of natural humans. The Nietzschean alternative is Dionysian, the enjoyment of the body in dance, the escape from memory, and the ‘cruelty’, which is an awareness of the body and its suffering, and which partly comes from the constraints on instinct imposed by culture, partly from a reaction to those constraints. However, the Nietzschean dance and cruelty is not free of Heideggerian and Rousseauesque aspects. The ‘active forgetting’ is an attempt to return to the immediacy of consciousness which Rousseau associates with the natural condition of humanity, and this is true of the dance as well. The wandering Rousseauesque savage is outside a house, other than a temporary shelter in nature as wilderness, as well as lacking in any sense of time beyond the passing of the moment. Derrida’s opposition of Nietzsche to Heidegger is ambiguous in that the Heideggerian exploration of Being as a non-metaphysical idea places him at the end of metaphysics as well, rejecting a kind of triumphalist subjectivism in Nietzsche, however much close reading of Nietzsche might lead us to question that subjectivism. We can apply that ambiguity to Rousseau and see him as the thinker of the end of metaphysical humanity, as well as a thinker of metaphysical moments and forms in human (pre-)history.

Rousseau’s account in the Discourse of the origin of language is in the movement from the natural to the social, which is both destructive of inner peace and natural strength; and is productive in creating human communities that develop faculties and forms of moral concern lacking in nature, through history.

As idea and feelings succeeded one another, and heart and head were brought into play, men continued to lay aside their original wildness; their private connections became every day more intimate as their limits extended. They accustomed themselves to assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of men and women thus assembled together with nothing else to do. Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice. From these first distinctions arose on the one side vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy: and the fermentation caused by these new leavens ended by producing combinations fatal to innocence and happiness. (1973, 81)

There is a dance and singing in the origins of language and social institutions in the Discourse account. The conditions for this are that heart and head are brought into the succession of ideas and feelings. Heart and head refer here to what brings an end to wildness and a beginning to community, by enduring in a way that ideas and feelings do not. Ideas and feelings can succeed each other in consciousness with little to connect them. Community depends on a subjectivity that is not completely fragmented between moments of consciousness, which means that the subject must have self-awareness and a form of self-communication, in the belief that present states of mind will be remembered in a flow of experience grasped as unified over time. Though Rousseau is a bit coy about saying so here, the community and the capacity for self-consciousness arise with a transformation of sexual desire, in the movement from brief random satisfaction of urges in the wild, to a theatrical staging of a competition to establish who is most desirable, and presumably therefore who is able to have relations with the person of the other gender who is most desirable. This staging is also the moment of corruption of innocence, as the competition to judge who ranks most highly in desirability sets off all the destructive forces of comparison and envy. Self-consciousness, community, and the regulation of desire to be more than a search for brief random satisfaction, has an innocent looking moment of origin, which is also the moment of degeneration.

Nietzsche, in his account of a primal festival in On the Genealogy of Morals (II.7), may or may not have had some wish to comment on Rousseau’s festival in its origin, but certainly provides a powerful contrast. The earliest humanity is not characterised by a capacity for pity as Rousseau thought, but by cruelty, a time of greater optimism than now, because there was no shame at the inherent human enjoyment of cruelty. The critical references to shame at cruelty and pessimists suggest Schopenhauer rather than Rousseau, but then there would have been no Schopenhauer without Rousseau (Ure 2006).

[…] in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now that pessimists exist. The darkening of the sky above mankind has deepened in step with the increase in man’s feeling of shame at man. […] The gods conceived of as the friends of cruel spectacles – oh how profoundly this ancient idea still permeates our European humanity! Merely consult Calvin and Luther. It is certain, at any rate, that the Greeks still knew of no tastier spice to offer their gods to season their happiness than the pleasures of cruelty. With what eyes do you think Homer made his gods look down upon the destinies of men? What was at bottom the ultimate meaning of Trojan Wars and other such tragic terrors? There can be no doubt whatever: they were intended as festival plays for the gods; and insofar as the poet is in these matters of a more “godlike” disposition than other men, no doubt also as festival plays for the poets. (Nietzsche 1989, 67–9)

In Nietzsche’s commentary on the cruel festival at the origin of human community, early religion and literature are deeply embedded in cruelty, as are later developments in religion. The leaders of the Protestant Reformation are as much inspired by cruelty as the ancient Greek polytheists. The cruel festival in Nietzsche refers to the earliest known literature of Europe, Homeric epics, and the earliest know religion, Greek polytheism, and is suggestive of a deeper origin in the formation of community, an origin which reverberates in Homer, and what is known about early religion. War itself is tied up with the enjoyment the Gods take in observing cruelty, an enjoyment shared by the poet. Nietzsche awards the poet godlike status here, but this is certainly telling us something about the role that cruelty plays in all human communities, as explored across Genealogy II. As with Rousseau, the origin is a moment of innocence and corruption. There is no inherent shame, in Nietzsche’s account, in cruelty, but the growth of shame, combined with the refinement of cruelty, is a necessary aspect of the history of human community in Genealogy II. We should not take the evaluation of cruelty in Nietzsche’s account to be determined by the hint of approval either, since Genealogy II overall takes a negative attitude to the need for cruelty. Cruelty has a relative innocence in the spontaneity and non self-conscious attitude at the very origin of human community, which must also be lost at the moment of origin. The Homeric epics and corresponding form of polytheism are a repetition of that origin in a context where shame has already emerged, as in the tone of regret for the sufferings of the Trojans in the lliad or the suitors of Penelope at the end of the Odyssey.

The moment of innocence and loss of innocence appears again in Rousseau in the Essay, though with differences from the Discourse despite the supposed origin of the Essay in the Discourse. In this case the festival beneath the trees, so closely tied to nature, has less of the envy, self-consciousness, and envy that is mentioned in the Discourse. Natural passions appear to express themselves happily. Quoting from Essay IX,

In this happy age when nothing marked the hours, nothing obliged them to be counted; time did not have any measure apart than amusement and boredom. Beneath aged oaks, conquerors of years, an ardent youth gradually forgot its ferocity, gradually they tamed one another; through endeavoring to make themselves understood, they learned to explain themselves. There the first festivities took place, feet leaped with joy; eager gesture no longer sufficed, the voice accompanied it with passionate accents; mingled together, pleasure and desire made themselves felt at the same time. There, finally, was the true cradle of peoples, and from the pure crystal of the fountains came the first fires of love. (Rousseau 1998, 314)

The ardency of youth is tamed through community and language, pleasure and desire appear together without mention of competition and envy. Love appears as a natural force, fire from the crystal fountains, but is a product of this simple community which is both an intensification of natural forces and a shift from natural forces into social institutions. As in Nietzsche, there is no shame and there is an innate spontaneous theatricality to the origin of community.

The passage from the Discourse is more obviously pessimistic than that from the Essay. The Discourse festival presents the origins of inequality, associated with vice, vanity, shame, and envy. Both refer to an innocent looking birth of sustained desire, or love, in contrast with the moments of sexual connection that Rousseau believes is the product of erotic urges in the state of nature. A whole history of humanity as marked by amour propre, a secondary love of self constituted by competition for recognition is implicit in the Discourse passage, whereas the Essay passage is more a moment of innocent beginning, which will be lost, but can serve as the point of critique of later phases. In both cases, there is song and dance associated with the shelter of trees. The shelter of the trees marks a natural thing which can be used to seek shelter from nature, and here shelters the emergence of social institutions from nature, including language in the form of singing. In both cases, language as singing is connected with desire, and the whole situation is that of the social regulation of desire. The timeless present of consciousness in the state of nature appears in the trees, though it is the Essay which makes that most explicit.

What the comparison between Rousseau and Nietzsche around the original festival suggests is that we regard the beginning of history as a moment of truce with regard to natural tendencies to unsociability and conflict, but also as the beginning of new conflicts based round loss of innocence in self-hatred and self-consciousness. Τhe comparison between Nietzsche and Rousseau is not just that of mutual exclusion, but a way of reading Rousseau, which is a background assumption in Nietzsche’s approach. That is the assumption of contradiction and difference even in the most apparently ideal and innocent situations, a way of reading Rousseau in which we look at moments of apparent ideal sociality in the Essay through the conflicts and self-distancing of the Discourse. These thoughts apply to language, which is seen with regard to tensions between materiality and ideality, speech and writing, gesture and voice, melody and harmony, that recur in Rousseau’s philosophy of language. We put that ‘Nietzschean’ perspective above any tendency to find a moment in Rousseau of contained unity and the presence of pure meaning. Even the descriptions of natural humanity are full of tension and non-presence to the self, a self which is always distant from its complete metaphysical existence.

The Essay expands on the natural history of language, its social history, and the positive political possibilities of language. The positive aspect of language in politics, in the last section of the Essay, refers to the liberty of a community which is no larger than what can hear a speaker, though a speaker who has a natural power and musicality of speech lacking in modern communities. Within the Essay that idea relates to a presumably idealised account of Homeric epics early in Greek history existing through public readings as a central event in defining the community.

These community creating and dependent events of political and poetic speech recall the condition of community in the Discourse, described through the lack of community: ‘they had hardly any other method of not losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight’ (59). What Rousseau refers to here is most directly how the child leaves the mother, when he does not constantly have her in sight. There is an assumption of lack of memory here, which suggests a connection between language and memory. What we also see is that the earliest form of community, that between mother and child, relied on sight and that was the limit of mutual human concern in the natural state. The voice of the public speaker in a community of liberty has a parallel function to that of the sight of the mother. The direct connection through voice or vision is what creates the most meaningful kind of community. In nature, the child loses the community with the mother, just as humans in conditions of society lose the political community of liberty once a community cannot all unify around the voice of a public speaker, who could be the legislator, the political leader, or any citizen.

So for Rousseau, the ideal political communities are small city republics where everyone can gather within the voice of one orator in a public meeting. Rousseau does not just leave related ancient republics such as Sparta and early Rome as unchallenged utopias though. He is conscious of the place of slavery in ancient republics, an institution he rejects not just as a moral outrage but as in contradiction with the idea of citizenship based on contract (The Social Contract I, iv). The reality of human history is of large states where the general will is a rather abstract notion and the government is provided by a monarchy inclined to overreach its just limits, in a commercial and aristocratic society lacking the pure virtues Rousseau associates with the most pure law governed communities. These deviations from the most pure forms of community explain decline in capacities for spoken language, though Rousseau leaves some difficulties here. The ‘Turk’ who can overcome the Frenchman in speech lives under a Sultan, who poses the same problems as the western monarchs for liberty, and maybe more so if Rousseau holds at all to Montesquieu’s characterisation of the Ottoman polity as ‘despotic’.

We have moved from republics, flawed by slavery, to less pure forms of law and liberty, because of the decay inevitable in human affairs. Government will always, sooner or later, exceed its proper bounds under the laws of the general will. Sooner or later it will be taken over by those who put personal and factional interest above the interest of the government (The Social Contract III, x). That natural inevitability within society parallels the non-natural behaviours of nature in the storms and earthquakes, which push humanity to living in communities suitable for language. There is a natural decay in all situations, though in both cases fall also allows progress. In modern monarchies, we discuss the injustice of slavery in ways that did not occur to the ancient republics. All these falls lead to a more general form of communication, sociability and ethical concern, but undermine some high level of self-containment; the natural self, the republics of enduring citizen virtue. Idiolect is subordinated as the result of natural catastrophe and social history to more abstract complex language, language that increasingly becomes communicated through shouting rather than the musical aspects of language and gesture. Rousseau’s thought keeps gesturing towards lost forms of social organisation or the perfection of simplicity, but also shows the dynamic which makes simplicity unsustainable.

The Essay deals with the possibility of extreme idiolects, though in a more sceptical manner than the account in the Discourse discussed above.

Upon separating, the children of Noah gave up agriculture, and the common language perished with the first society. This would have happened even if there had never been a tower of Babel.[] Solitary individuals living on desert islands have been seen to forget their own language. Rarely do men who are away from their country preserve their first language after several generations, even when they work together and live in society among themselves. (Rousseau 1998, 308)

Rousseau forces the Hebrew Bible narrative into a more cyclical view of history, though the cycle is less the whole of history as in Vico’s New Science, but the history which takes humans from isolated savagery to social institutions. In the phase before the joint emergence of language and social institutions, there is an extreme fragmentation of language into idiolects. The Discourse thinks of the idiolectic fragmentation as occurring in the first attempts at language, while the Essay suggests that the idiolects result from a fall, not directly from the Fall of Adam and Eve, but from the dispersal of humans when Noah’s children moved to different places after the Flood, a delayed consequence of the Fall, before which Adam learned language from God. The implication is that after the Flood, the language from God fragments. The Robinson Crusoe type characters invoked by Rousseau are a despairing version of Adam in Eden, isolated individuals without God and without human contact. Rousseau appears to acknowledge, unlike Daniel Defoe, that linguistic capacity withers away without human contact, in contrast with the possibility briefly opened up in the Discourse of language communities numbering one speaker, presuming that audible speech is involved. Given the emphasis Rousseau sometimes puts on the perfection of an isolated human living in the immediate present, the briefly indicated despair of isolation on a desert island is a self-questioning moment.

The community before institutions and language brings us to a problem for all the thinkers of the origin of society and laws in a natural situation, including Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, and Montesquieu. Contractual relations between humans existed as enforced by a state, which is absent when those forms of community first appear. Common language has the same place as the social contract and state for the social and political thought of the time. For Rousseau, the common language of the people which shares social institutions may be foreshadowed by extreme idiolects or by the divine language.

That language is at first musical in a sense which is very imitative of nature and a continuation of nature. Language is poetic and musical before it is prosaic, because that is the connection with nature. As Rousseau emphasises in the Essay, music is first melodic and imitative, harmony representing a secondary less natural organisation of the vocal material. Music and poetry are onomatopoeic and passionate, rather than abstract and organised. The natural speech is the speech of the south compared with the speech of the north which is determined by the needs arising from a hostile climate, speech which is harsh and guttural rather than musical.

The insistence on the primacy of melody over harmony in the Essay is qualified by the attitude to the language of liberty, the discussion of which in Chapter XX finishes the Essay: ‘There are languages favorable to liberty; these are sonorous, prosodic harmonious languages, in which discourses can be made out from a distance’ (Rousseau 1998, 332). An emphasis on ‘harmonious’ language is not the same as harmony in musical composition, nevertheless the idea of the language of liberty as including harmony puts the criticisms of the primacy of harmony in music in a different perspective. The perspective is that of the importance of repetition and displacement in Rousseau. Society means the loss of natural happiness, but has its own ideal starting point in the pre-linguistic, pre-institutional community, which displaces natural happiness. The new starting point itself is displaced by the moment of language and of the social contract.

The linguistic foundations and political foundations must be closely related in Rousseau, though he does not say much about how that works. Language appears to be both gestural and musical-poetic in its first appearance. The language of liberty appears to belong to a later stage of prophets, secular and religious, who institute ideal laws, which displace, but supposedly also repeat, the situation of the original social contract, a purely voluntary spontaneous agreement to submit to jointly agreed upon law. All these repetitions and displacements bring Rousseau closer to the world he lives in, including the languages and institutions of that world. The series of origins create points of critical perspective, which may be used according to context. So in some contexts, harmony is criticised as a non-natural constraint on our sound system, while in other contexts a prophet speaking with a harmonious voice is the perspective within which we can criticise the laws and politics of the contemporary world, from that more ideal moment.

Rousseau’s thought about original and existing laws also leaves an epistemological legacy that could be said to culminate in Derrida’s philosophy. Rousseau’s epistemological legacy that does not become really clear until the twentieth century, and for Derrida is mediated by Edmund Husserl, with regard to work towards the end of his life on crisis in The Crisis of European Sciences (in Husserl 1970), and shorter works like ‘The Origin of Geometry’ (in Husserl 1970). Husserl is concerned with the distinction between the historical moment of the emergence of a science and the transcendental contents of that science as an ideal body of knowledge. About the same time, Gaston Bachelard produced a theory of how science emerges from experience as an organised system, as a scientific spirit (2002). Both are picking up on the Rousseauesque understanding of language emerging as a system from experience, and never overcoming the moment of rupture. The epistemology of Bacheland and Husserl focused on the ambiguous rupture between science and experience, which left a mark in French epistemology that became best known through Louis Althusser’s idea of an epistemological break in For Marx (2006) between the earlier and later Marx, itself preceded by Althusser’s discussion of the origin of the science of society in Montesquieu and Rousseau. The other names who come out of this Bachelard-Husserl style of epistemology include Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault and Derrida himself, both students of Althusser. In Derrida, that ‘French’ epistemology informs his discussion of Rousseau, so circling back to the beginning of the tradition, and interrogating the concepts in that tradition of thought, while to some degree assuming the tradition’s validity. An inevitable appearance of circularity in philosophy from Derrida’s point of view, following precedents in Hegel, Heidegger, and others.

Husserl is a brief point of reference in relation to the history of linguistics (1997a, 64) and the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss (128) in Of Grammatology, and Husserl’s Phenomenology is a major theme across Derrida’s earlier work. However, Bachelard is not discussed. Derrida does come close to acknowledging Bachelard in ‘The Linguistic Circle of Geneva’, though in the passage below the starting point is the linguistics of Noam Chomsky.

One is authorised to speak of a linguistics of Rousseau only on two conditions and in two senses:

1. On the condition and in the sense of a systematic formulation, one that defines the project of a theoretical science of language, in its method, in its object, and its rigorously proper field. This might be accomplished by means of a gesture that for convenience’s sake could be called an “epistemological break,” there being no assurance that the stated intention to “break” has such an effect, nor that the so-called break is ever a – unique – datum in a work or an author. This first condition and first sense should always be implied by what we will entitle the opening of the field, it being understood that such an opening also amounts to a delimitation of the field.

2. On the condition and in the sense of what Chomsky calls the “constants of linguistic theory”: in that the system of fundamental concepts, the exigencies and norms that govern the linguistics called modern, such as it is entitled and represented in its scientificity as in its modernity, is already at work, and discernible as such, in Rousseau’s enterprise, in its very text. Which, moreover, would not only be (and doubtless would not at all be) to interpret this text as the happy anticipation of a thinker who is to have predicted and preformed modern linguistics. On the contrary, is this not a question of a very general ground of possibilities, a ground on which might be raised all kinds of subordinate cross-sections and secondary periodisations? Is it not a question of both Rousseau’s project and modern linguistics belonging in common to a determined and finite set of conceptual possibilities, to a common language, to a reserve of oppositions of signs (signifiers/concepts) which first of all is none other than the most ancient fund of Western metaphysics? The latter is articulated, in its diverse epics, according to schemas of implication that are not as easily mastered as is sometimes believed: whence the illusions of the break, the mirages of the new, the confusion or crushing of layers, the artifice of extractions and cross-sections, the archeological lure. The closure of concepts: such would be the title that we might propose for this second condition and this second sense. (Derrida 1982a, 140)

The epistemological break is mentioned largely in order to clear away any idea of a clean break between science and pre-science, which Bachelard appears to be assuming. At the end of the quoted passage, it is suggested that the break is an illusion. The break is an illusion, because the ‘science’ is the repetition of metaphysical ideas, it is text in which we find pre-scientific concepts are still at play, because that is the only way the science can be formed. This comes to some degree out of the reading of Rousseau, and the ways in which his claims to have a theory of language as social in distinction from natural phenomena unravel. Derrida is suggesting that science never escapes from metaphysics, or at least that the moment of foundation of a science is a moment in which metaphysical concepts become part of a scientific enterprise, and will be constantly repeated. The Bachelardian understanding itself has rather idealist tendencies in which the emergence of science is signified by the organisation of the discourse, rather than experimental testing of concepts in the empirical world. There is a double suggestion in Derrida about the status of Rousseau’s essay on language, first that it is an investigation of the way that ideas of language emerge from metaphysical ideas, such as those in the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic that Derrida writes were greatly appreciated by Rousseau (1982, 139) and secondly that it is part of the tendency to be challenged, the tendency to conceive of breaks which are themselves metaphysical and allow the continuation of metaphysical terms in science.

Another aspect is that the theory of the origin of languages has a double quality, as is explained twice, briefly in the Discourse and in more detail in the Essay. Rousseau claims in the draft preface to the Essay that it is work for the Discourse, but that he separated it from that context because of the difficulty of integrating it. Nevertheless there is some discussion of language in the Discourse, so that we have an account of language as part of the philosophy of history in that text, and as an autonomous sphere of inquiry. That perhaps confirms the ambiguity of the Discourse between an historical account of the origins of society and a more ahistorical account of social relations. There is the ambiguity that Husserl is concerned with in The Crisis of European Sciences, and associated essays, between the empirical-historical conditions of science and its ahistorical abstract theories. The ambiguity in Rousseau has rich epistemological implications, which are present in any debate about the relation between the content of science and its socio-historical context of creation, and should be understood as important to epistemological tradition.

What Derrida is suggesting, in his discussion of Rousseau, is that the knowledge of language is itself a knowledge of knowledge, that language is where there is knowledge and the concept of knowledge makes no sense without language. Language and knowledge do not just belong to consciousness for Derrida, as we have seen the genetic code is a kind of language for Derrida. One reason why the Derrida essay refers to the ‘Geneva Circle’ is that it is an essay about the circularity in interpretation, knowledge, and language, all of which are at stake in the discussion. The acknowledgements of Chomsky’s work is a way of putting that mixture of scientism and rationalism in the context of paradoxes of thought. Derrida’s account of Rousseau in the passage above, transforms him from a historical thinker engaged with social forces, in however a speculative and general manner, to a thinker who is concerned with a more internalist account of concepts and of language, with abstract conditions of possibility. Derrida’s overall argument is that such accounts are genuine contributions to knowledge, but taken up as an absolute foundation run into internal paradoxes and abstractions from materiality. Rousseau serves as the model ambiguous figure who repeats metaphysical assumptions and questions them, maybe often more than he realises. There is an oblique critique of Chomsky as a rationalist in discussing the difficulties of fitting Rousseau within the Cartesianism which Chomsky favours. These problems apply just as much to ‘empiricist’ philosophy and approaches to science, since the empiricist position is itself an abstraction and an idealisation. For Derrida, the materialism and the empiricism are not just matters of theories of reality and knowledge, they relate to the text itself as a physical object in tension with its ideational existence; and, most importantly from the point of view of commentary and interpretation, the text exists in tension between unity and fragments, structure and flow, idealisation and differences of meaning.

Derrida’s view of language is that he does not think it is possible to separate philosophy from the way we use language, uses that always push at the limits of any system, any set of rules, or any ways in which sentences or names can be attached to entities or states of affairs in the world. A view he expressed most succinctly, perhaps, in ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (in Derrida 1978) and could be considered as the central theme of Of Grammatology. The title Of Grammatology is itself an ironic comment on attempts at complete theories or a complete science of language, not that he is dismissing the value of linguistics and related work in other fields.

A large part of the argument is to emphasise that any philosophy of language is caught up in issues of how far the presupposition of language can be explained in language. His essay on J. L. Austin, ‘Signature Event Context’, argues that we can never finally fix the context with which to determine the meaning of words. As we have seen, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ (in 1982a) argues for the impossibility of explaining meaning in general, or the meaning of particular words, without resort to metaphor. Metaphor itself can only be explored with reference to metaphors. The discussion in ‘Signature Event Context’ refers to this in that the metaphors it suggests cannot be eliminated from discussion of communication and related terms.

Returning to the theme of metaphor, discussed above with regard to mimesis and representation, Derrida shows how he regards metaphor, and how the use of metaphor in Rousseau is particularly revealing, and that he even finds that Rousseau’s definition in Essay III, ‘That the first languages must have been figurative’, is his own:

Upon encountering others, a savage man will at first be afraid. His fright will make him see those men as taller and stronger than himself. He will give them the name Giants.[] After many experiences he will recognize that as those supposed Giants are neither taller not stronger than himself, their stature does not agree with the idea that he had first attached to the word Giant. He will therefore invent another name common to them and to him, such as the name man for example, and will leave that of Giant for the false object that had struck him during his illusion. That is how the figurative word arises before the proper word, when passion fascinates out eyes and the first idea it offers us is not the true one. (1998, 294–95)

The passage perhaps makes a transformed reference to the role of giants in Part II, Chapter III of Vico’s New Science, where the giants are all the men who survive universal floods, in an exposition with many parallels to Rousseau’s expositions of early human history in the Discourse, but particularly the Essay. Unlike in Vico, Rousseau’s giants are not physical giants, but just other humans who are regarded with fear. In this stage of human development, all humans regard each other with fear as giants relative to themselves, a naming based on imagination and the fear of death.

Derrida discusses the passage above from Rousseau in the ‘The Originary Metaphor’ section in Of Grammatology, Part IV.

That sign is metaphoric because it is false with regard to the object; it is metaphoric because it is indirect with regard to the affect: it is the sign of a sign, it expresses emotion only through another sign, through the representer of fear, namely through the false sign. It represents the affect literally only through representing a false representer. (1997a, 277)

The reference to ‘fear’ brings in the role of death, which is of importance to Derrida with regard to a Heideggerian Being-towards-death, and which enters his philosophy through the limitation that death places on communication, the possibility even in internal communication in consciousness that death can intervene in the originator before the communication reaches its target. He is alluding to the way that ‘giants’ stand for the possibility of death, and that as ‘giants’ are found to be humans, it is naming which is death in the sense that our identity is set up through what is not us. The name is an abstraction which identifies us, but in so doing is what exists after our death and separately from our lived existence. There is a negating function in naming, so that in learning my name, I learn that the conditions for identifying me as a unique individual are something external to me. It is these considerations on the proper name which get the most attention from Derrida, but common names, at least in the naming of humanity, get a similar treatment. There is something existentially disturbing in encountering something that is like me, but not me. Rousseau deals with that trauma through the myth of the natural human who encounters other humans and conceives them as a threat, as bigger, stronger and as what might bring death. The fear of destruction, and the attribution of monstrous properties to any counterpart of myself, is a metaphor of the individual relation to identification as part of a class of things, and is a metaphor of the individual relation with language.

Derrida uses another myth to explain the relation with language in Dissemination (1981), in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, which focuses on the dialogue Phaedrus. In this context, Derrida uses Socrates’ account of Egyptian myth to suggest the relation between writing and the god particularly associated with death, Thoth. Writing is presented in the Phaedrus through this myth, and other arguments as a death of speech, and of death as such, since speech is what comes directly from the soul, and is intimately associated with life. Rousseau’s Essay provides examples of language before humans in ants, bees, and beavers (Chapter II), and of writing, or some kind of non-speech, before language as speech. Rousseau then provides an ideal complement to Plato, who does not deliberately resist a belief in the existence of idealised meaning, but who subjects meaning in language, along with the role of speech, to a series of myths and imagined situations, where origin is dispersed, and is associated with the death and absence of the subject using language. Language in Rousseau begins as something dead by Plato’s standards, and is experienced through death, through the eroticism of the festival, and the awareness of time.

These ways of understanding language as existential and alienating, although Derrida tends to avoid the philosophical baggage of those terms, require metaphor in a way that more empirical and formal accounts of language do not; though, of course, metaphor along with fictional situations (e.g. ‘thought experiments’) and imagined histories (e.g. ‘just so’ stories) feature in such accounts. Part of this approach is that Derrida needs an account of metaphor, since he is writing discursive philosophy, however much linguistic playfulness and exploration of the margins of philosophical writing are a feature. The definition of metaphor does create a tension in Derrida between the definition and his use of metaphor, though the existence of such tension is not in any case a problem within Derrida’s conception of philosophy. His interest in metaphors can cause misunderstanding, as when he explores the metaphor of the-book-as-the-world in the first part of Of Grammatology, which gave rise to the misunderstanding that he was claiming that the book, in any form, was coming to an end, when he was writing more particularly about the end of the book, just as metaphor or microcosm of the world. The interest in Rousseau on metaphor complements the critical account of the metaphor as understood since Aristotle, the understanding of metaphor as what can be understood as an elaboration on the literal. Derrida’s close ‘deconstructive’ reading of Aristotle on metaphor, in ‘White Mythology’ (in Derrida 1982a), aims to show that the ‘literal’ explanations of metaphor are themselves metaphorical, including the word ‘metaphor’ itself when discussed with regard to its Greek etymology.

As indicated above, Derrida largely avoids a language of alienation and existence even when writing on death, the limits of language, and the limits of identity. The reasons are explained in ‘The Ends of Man’ (in 1982a), and they are to do with avoiding any kind of essence, telos, and privileged ontology of the human as a unique kind of Being, which never changes, and stands outside the empirical material world. The idea of alienation could be taken to presume a real human essence from which humans may become alienated; the idea of existence might be taken to assume an essential experience of human existence. The idea of ‘Man’ is itself an issue of naming, in which the name becomes the death of empirical humans, of any individual considering the nature of the human, so has the same status as ‘giant’, a name which never applies to the speaker except in death. In particular Derrida aims in that essay to avoid the teleological Spirit of Hegel, the transcendental nature of consciousness in Husserl, and the belonging of humans to Being in Heidegger. Derrida tries to distinguish those three philosophers from the most limited forms of humanism in which human consciousness is the limit of reality, thus distinguishing them from a naive metaphysical humanism, while still suggesting that they remain at a point where the name Man, in any context, is the name of something that is transcendent and one, rather than empirical and plural, and as such is caught up in metaphysics. Language, death, time, and desire, all have their place in showing the limits of human consciousness in Derrida’s analyses, and he often finds these aspects in Rousseau.

In historical context, what Derrida is most determined to avoid is Sartrean existentialism and humanist versions of Marxism, which he regards as too devoted to the human essence from which we are alienated, or a complete human consciousness which ensures transcendental inner freedom. In some degree, his suspicions in these matters follow on from his teachers Louis Althusser, the leading Marxist critic of philosophical humanism, and Michel Foucault, the leading philosopher of discursive and experiential limits. Despite what Derrida owes to Rousseau, the suspicion of the language of essence and alienation, consciousness and inner freedom, have Rousseau at their origin, and what Derrida is suspicious of is a way of reading Rousseau which could be said to stand behind the ‘humanist’ early Marx and Sartrean existentialism, which may be synthesised in Sartre’s own Marxist phase. The organisation of oppositions in Rousseau could also be said to be behind structuralism as it appears in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and which are discussed critically in Of Grammatology.

One way of thinking about Derrida’s reading of Rousseau is that it is Rousseau against Rousseau. Rousseau is implicitly opposed to Nietzsche through an identification with Heidegger, but Derrida shows the Nietzsche in Rousseau. This is very schematic and we should not see Derrida as simply for those he tends to use in radical criticism of metaphysics, such as Nietzsche (1979), or philosophical-literary figures like James Joyce (1989, 2013) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1981) against Heidegger or Husserl, or any of the figures Derrida takes as objects of critical commentary, like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss. Nietzsche does not escape from metaphysics in the patterns of his thought; and the thinkers just listed, in speaking of Being, transcendental consciousness, form, purpose, transcendence, spirit, the unconscious, language as a system, and anthropology as a system, are also encountering the limits of their more metaphysical assumptions, the contradiction and tensions of their thought, in the dedication they show to completing and elaborating their thought. They are no less thinkers of the end of metaphysics, in the sense of finding the limits of metaphysical system, and in the sense of trying to find ways of thinking which minimise at least some forms of metaphysical entanglement, than Nietzsche, though it may take readings informed by Nietzsche, Joyce, Mallarmé, and so on, to grasp their full engagement with metaphysics and their encounters with its limits. Rousseau’s position at the ‘origin’, or some set of origins of modern social science, political theory, aesthetics and self-reflections, gives him a very particular role in which all the more humanistic and metaphysical aspects of these fields are challenged by a reading of Rousseau, which emphasises death, language, metaphor, repetition, and uncertainty.

None of these claims of Derrida are meant to deny the possibility of practical communication or the value of linguistic, cognitive and philosophy of language approaches to rules and conditions of meaning in language. They do suggest that philosophy itself can never reach a state where it can stand back from, or rise above, the indeterminacies and metaphors of language, in discussing language. As ‘Signature Event Context’ suggests, language is always about its non-linguistic effects. Derrida finds the shift within Austin’s book of lectures from the performative-constative distinction to the perlocutionary-illocutionary-locutionary distinction as evidence of the ways in which breaking meaning into its components is an incompletable task. Again, there is no rejection of the organised and systematic study of language as a system, just the suggestion that there is always some excess, which is captured, to some degree, in the contextuality and poetics of language, its openness to invention and reinterpretation. The idea of excess is itself a major theme in Of Grammatology, under the name of the supplement which is what tries to contain excess over primary metaphysical terms. The last part of Of Grammatology is a discussion of supplementarity as the way in which what is excluded from the origin of language, that is any absence of completely present and determinate meaning, comes back in ‘supplementary’, secondary, and inferior terms, such as writing in order to have a complete articulation of what language is.

The interest of Rousseau for deconstruction can be found in many ways, but in the context of Of Grammatology, particularly in relation to language and writing systems. Language is originally speech for Rousseau, otherwise Homer’s epics would be a tissue of stupidities as Derrida notes Rousseau claiming. That is, no one could take the Iliad or the Odyssey seriously except as the products of oral tradition. On the other hand, writing is always there for Rousseau in the history of language; he explains that history with reference to alphabets, hieroglyphs, and marks. The physical gesture at the origin of language is more writing than speech. For Derrida, the reduction of language to speech over writing is a perpetual temptation of philosophy, in which the major examples are Plato (Derrida 1981, 1997a) and Rousseau. The underlying claim is that there is a perpetual temptation to reduce different possibilities of meaning to a unique ideal determinable meaning for any linguistic item, with speech normally thought of as the privileged essential part of language. That is all part of what metaphysics is.

In Derrida’s usage, ‘metaphysics’ means reduction to system and the search for ideas, which stand outside the uncertainties of time, materiality, and self-consciousness in thought, not just the overtly metaphysical systems and arguments in philosophy. Derrida claimed that time undermines the possibility of a pure moment of physical or ideation intuition, that materiality undermines the ideality of a pure moment of intuition, and that self-consciousness undermines the ideal grasp of something as a pure intuition.

Some years after his major writings on Rousseau, Derrida wrote an essay on ‘Telepathy’ (in Derrida 2007b), that is, communication directly between minds, as a possibility that emerges when discussing successful communication. Any ideal communication, in the most ideal sense of communication, must refer to the possibility of telepathy. The ‘essay’ is presented as a ‘letter’ in the style of the ‘Envois’ section of The Postcard (1987). Derrida’s point is not to argue for the likelihood of telepathy, though he refuses to explicitly commit himself on the question, but to use the idea of pure communication between minds without regard to physical distance or medium of communication, as a limit situation, which all ideas of pure or just successful communication rely on, even if they do not directly invoke it. ‘Envois’ is a series of supposed postcards, which deal amongst other things, with the apocalyptic implications of language that communicates perfectly, so that the acts resulting from an event in language are immediately present in the language event, and the intention behind the language event. Intention, language event, and consequent acts all fuse into one event. The idea of communication both presumes their fusion in the single event and the articulation of the event into these distinct aspects. An idealisation of the language event gives it the divine and apocalyptic qualities of actions immediately resulting from events, which were mentioned above in the discussion of the performative, as well as the message in the mind which comes directly and immediately from outside, something very suggestive of the divine and supernatural. Even the most sober discussion of language has these possibilities as ideal assumptions, what would happen in the most ideal communicative event. Theology, apocalyptic literature, and claims to the existence of telepathic communication, all play on these possibilities. Since these possibilities can never be completely excluded, when we discuss communication, we cannot completely eliminate possibilities of the divine word, apocalyptic collision between the material world and the ideal world, and the comparatively banal possibility of telepathic communication. None of this is about Derrida regarding any of these phenomena as likely, but is about why they have a fascination, which can never be eliminated and that arises from the nature of both communication and of the kind of thought which tries to capture what communication is.

The discussion of telepathy comes some years after Of Grammatology, but is very related to aspects of the discussion of Rousseau in that book. Rousseau demands an immediacy of language in the relation between intentions, words, and affects, which is expressed in the mockery of the talkative gestural Frenchman in comparison with the laconic Turk. It is also present in the Essay’s discussion (Chapter XX) of the speaker in the ancient public assembly, or the presumed power of Mohammed’s speech compared with the mere written text of the Koran. These situations are repetitions and displacements of the language God shared with Adam, the common language before the sons of Noah dispersed across the world (or the ancient Near East, in practice). The reappearance of such situations would be apocalyptic. Rousseau does not even demand the political revolution necessary to revive something like the ancient assembly, or Mohammed leading and legislating for the first Muslims; he just observes the decadence and likely political catastrophe of states where the government is dominated by private interests, and particular wills subordinate the general will.

The politics of language in Rousseau is something that Derrida builds upon in relation to Lévi-Strauss and the utopian political aspect of Rousseau that Derrida finds in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss’ rather literary work of anthropology on the ‘primitive’ Nambikwara of Brazil, as discussed in ‘The Violence of the Letter’ in Part II of Of Grammatology:

In this text Lévi-Strauss does not distinguish between hierarchisation and domination, between political authority and exploitation. The tone that pervades these reflections is of an anarchism that deliberately confounds law and oppression. The idea of law and positive right, though it is difficult to think them in their formality – where it is so general that ignorance of the Law is no defense, before the possibility of writing, is determined by Lévi-Strauss as constraint and enslavement. Political power can only be the custodian of an unjust power. A classical and coherent thesis, but here advanced as self-evident, without opening the least bit of critical dialogue with the holders of the other thesis, according to which the generality of the law is on the contrary the condition of liberty in the city. No dialogue, for example, with Rousseau who would no doubt have shuddered to see a self-proclaimed disciple define law. (1997a, 131)

Derrida recognises both difference from and continuity with Rousseau in Lévi-Strauss’ anarchistic anti-law and anti-hierarchy tendencies. Tendencies behind which we should recognise Montaigne’s perspective in Essays I. 31, ‘Of cannibals’, or his account of Lahonatan in II.37, ‘Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers’, affecting Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida, in the history of French thought.

In one aspect, Rousseau is the worst candidate to associate with a law-hating anarchism, which goes beyond standard political anarchism, which desires only those laws we have consented to in the most explicit, voluntary and localised way, as Rousseau is the great thinker of liberty emerging in the process by which a community gives law to itself, and a defended of the historical laws, institutions, and customs of a community, bringing in the other side of Montaigne running through the French thinkers here, the side that fears challenge to law however unjust, which accepts monarchy if never idealising it, the side seen in Essays III.7, ‘Of the Disadvantages of Greatness’, and III.13, ‘Of Experience’. The other aspect of Rousseau, the other force in a great tension of his thought, is the critique of any community and law from the point of view of nature, is seen in these comments on the Essay mingled with Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss 1976) still within ‘The Violence of the Letter’.

Self-presence, transparent proximity in the face-to-face of countenances and the immediate range of the voice, this determination of social authenticity is therefore classic: Rousseauistic, but already the inheritor of Platonism, it relates, we recall, to the Anarchistic and Libertarian protestations against Law, the Powers, and the State in general, and also with the dream of the nineteenth-century Utopian Socialisms, most specifically with the dream of Fourierism. In his laboratory, or rather in his studio, the anthropologist too uses this dream, as one weapon or instrument among others. Serving the same obstinate desire within which the anthropologist “always puts something of himself,” this tool must come to terms with other “means to hand.” For the anthropologist also desires to be Freudian, Marxist […]’. (1997a, 138)

The readings of Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss in Derrida, the harmonisation of them and the emphasis of differences, brings out an ethical and political tension between written law as oppressive, as denying nature, and speech as the place of liberty, liberty existing within the community where everyone’s voice can be heard by everyone else. That utopia of the talking community intersects with a Marxist belief in liberation from class structures and a Freudian belief in the talking cure, where desire can lose its alienated forms.

To some degree, Derrida refers to the intellectual atmosphere of Paris in his time as a student and academic, his own early adherence to Maoism and the widespread interest in combining Marx with Freud, and maybe Foucault’s resistance to all forms of institutionalisation already apparent in his History of Madness (2006). Derrida’s suggestion is that if the utopian possibilities of language are themselves based on an exclusion and suppression of the forces in language, then that utopia must be in question. There has always been law, there has alway been the non-natural in human society, there has always been non-spoken language, and trying to conceive of humans without them is to conceive of humans without community or language, or any development of natural faculties through society. From this point of view, Rousseau was right to think that liberty is conceived in language, since the existence of language is deeply interwoven with the existence of negotiable social institutions and laws, with the existence of community itself. Rousseau’s limitation is that he has difficulty in recognising that freedom is always a second birth because, like language, the moment of its institution is always a repetition of a previous moment. There can be re-examination of the past, but there is no perfect point of critique to be found in an ideal community of language, law and self-government, in the past or in the rationalisations made in the present, which in practice inform our vision of the past. Derrida helps show that the existence of political liberty is deeply bound up with this these layers of indeterminacy (Honig 1991), the impossibility of a flawless language and therefore of the flawless articulation of a pure community. Since the temptations of absolute community are always there, the language of politics must be a constant engagement with, and differentiation from, such limit situations.