LAST TIME, I ANNOUNCED THAT I was planning to give you a lecture, or a few lectures, on the conception of law [droit] and politics in Spinoza. In reading up a little on the question, however, I discovered that an excellent work on it has been out for several months now: Matheron’s doctoral thesis, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza.1 If I were to take on this question, I wouldn’t do much more than reproduce, basically, what Matheron has written. That’s why I thought it would be more helpful to talk to you about another subject, another author, and to submit a few, less common, reflections on Rousseau to you.
Changing programmes is, obviously, a high-handed procedure. Please accept my apologies, but I didn’t have much choice: I’m not as competent as all that. I can really only talk about subjects I know at least a little and, for many authors, that is not the case. It is the case, somewhat, for Rousseau. So, after talking to you about Machiavelli, I shall try to talk to you a little about Rousseau.
To talk about Rousseau after talking about Machiavelli is not just to change periods, since it means crossing two centuries of history and, in particular, two centuries of natural law philosophy, but it is also to change worlds. It is a matter not just of changing historical worlds, but of changing theoretical worlds too – of changing, quite precisely, the object of reflection and, still more, the form of reflection, the form of thought, the modality of thought. From that standpoint, in order to bring out these differences, however paradoxical the idea may seem, it is perhaps not without interest to compare Machiavelli’s world in thought to the natural law philosophers’ and Rousseau’s.
I think we can regard the following condition as determinant and as a distinguishing criterion: what is at issue, what is at stake and in question in Machiavelli as well as the natural law theorists is absolute monarchy as a form of realization of the nascent and the developed bourgeois nation – and thus as an objective referent common to their different histories. In Machiavelli, however, that same historical referent plays a role altogether incommensurable with its role in the natural law theorists. That is what makes their theoretical worlds different; for the absolute monarchy does not occupy the same place in them. The absolute monarchy does not have the same significance as object in them, and that is why their worlds are not the same. We could say that, like Pascal’s sea, which changes because of a rock,2 the political, theoretical, and philosophical worlds of Machiavelli and the natural law philosophers change because of a mode, because of the modality of existence of the object that absolute monarchy, absolute political power, comprises in their thought.
To mark this difference, we can say the following: Machiavelli’s world is one in which the absolute monarchy, the national state, exists not as a real, existent, instituted object, but as a political objective to be realized. For Machiavelli, in other words, national unity is not an accomplished fact, but a fact to be accomplished. We have already shown that Machiavelli’s thought in its entirety is geared to this task, the task of constituting a new state under a new prince in order to bring about national unity. We have also shown that, for defined political reasons, Machiavelli’s thought had to set itself the altogether unprecedented, radical theoretical task of thinking the conditions of possibility of the existence of that which does not yet exist: that is to say, the task of thinking radical beginning. For, since the initial political basis for national unity was nowhere in existence, it was necessary that it begin; it was necessary to create it. Thus it was necessary to think its absolute beginning; it was necessary to define the conditions of possibility of this absolute beginning. The consequence is that Machiavelli’s object, absolute monarchy, exists in the mode of the political objective, of a political objective. Machiavelli has to think this object under exceptional theoretical conditions that can be summed up as follows. On the one hand, he has to think the fact to be accomplished, he has to think in the fact to be accomplished, in the element of the fact to be accomplished, in the question of the fact to be accomplished. On the other hand – this comes down to the same thing – Machiavelli has to think the beginning as such, and he has to think in the beginning, in the element of the beginning, in the element of the question of the beginning, and so on. There you have the two decisive terms: the fact to be accomplished and the beginning.
Should we say that these two words are two concepts? I shall leave the question in abeyance and say that, even supposing that they are two concepts, these two words are in any case complementary; they define what might be called both the object and the form of Machiavelli’s thought, his specific form of thought. We may add that, in their conjunction, the fact to be accomplished and the beginning are played, in the musical sense of the word, if you like, as if they were the score of a silent philosophy, a philosophy that has not succeeded in expressing itself in philosophical form, the score of a philosophical beginning that has never taken place because no one has ever noted its existence. Thus it is no wonder that Machiavelli should have remained a stranger to all philosophy, to classical philosophy; it is no wonder that dominant and even dominated classical philosophy should have taken Machiavelli to be foreign to philosophy and left him out of account. For that matter, if we consider classical philosophy for a moment, has it ever, for its part, thought in the pair formed by the fact to be accomplished and the beginning? Has that philosophy ever attempted to think the fact to be accomplished and the beginning?
The situation of natural law philosophy is obviously completely different from the situation of Machiavelli’s not-yet-philosophy. Natural law philosophy is dominated by a completely different question. The reason is simple: in the world of these theorists, absolute monarchy or national unity was an accomplished fact – if not a wholly accomplished fact, then, at least, an irreversible fact on its way to being accomplished on perfectly well-known, perfectly well-defined political bases, the history of which shows that they were in the process of expanding sufficiently to accomplish their mission. And, from this simple fact, which still concerns the same referent, but in another mode, there results a first radical difference from Machiavelli.
These natural law theorists think in the accomplished fact; they think the accomplished fact. That, of course, does not prevent them from taking, in their theories, political positions on this accomplished fact of the absolute monarchy: for example, by declaring or demonstrating, like Hobbes, that they are absolutists (in other words, partisans of the monarchy, of the dictatorship of the absolute monarchy in the development of the first forms of bourgeois capitalism); or, like Locke, in a later phase, by declaring that they are liberals; or, like Rousseau, by declaring that they are democrats. At any event, the pros and cons with respect to the accomplished fact, as well as the ‘cons’ directed against certain forms of the ‘pro’ – all these positions observable in the history of natural law are adopted in the element of the accomplished fact. They have nothing to do with Machiavelli’s problematic of the fact to be accomplished.
All this has, consequently, nothing to do with Machiavelli’s question of questions, the question of the beginning. When natural law theory enters, Machiavelli exits; or, rather, we realize that he never made his entrance onto this scene. He was, always and for all time, somewhere else. Thus natural law philosophy thinks the accomplished fact and in the accomplished fact: its object and its form of thought will be determined, as I shall to try to show, in a way quite different from the way Machiavelli’s object is.
Natural philosophy’s object will be political power not as a task to be accomplished, not as a contingent relationship of being to nothingness, nor as event or beginning; rather, its object will be political power as existing, as existent [étant], and this object will be thought in the categories of the existent and the essence of the existent. Natural law philosophy accordingly discusses society, civil law and public law not in terms of chance occurrence and encounter, of event and advent, but in terms of existence and essence. It relates these essences (of natural law, civil law, and public law) to an originary essence, that of the natural law of the originary subject: man in the state of nature.
Whereas Machiavelli thinks in the fact to be accomplished and the beginning, natural law philosophy thinks in the accomplished fact and the origin. The origin, which I am opposing to the beginning here, is obviously altogether different from the beginning. The origin is not the event in which the beginning of a form of eternity supervenes on the ground [sur le fond] of a matter that is already present, always already present, but formless or formed differently. The origin belongs to a completely different mode [mode] of philosophical reference, a completely different world [monde] of philosophical reference. What is the origin? It is the manifestation of titles of legitimacy in the self-evidence of nature: the titles of legitimacy of the truth as well as the titles of legitimacy of every essence and, in particular, the titles of legitimacy of the essence of civil law and the essence of public law.
Why is this so in natural law philosophy? For a simple reason which, obviously, would call for a great deal of explanation, but which we can begin to state as follows: because the idea of the origin that identifies the origin with nature and makes nature self-evident for a subject of law – because this idea of the origin, in the form I have indicated, was then, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the form par excellence of philosophical thought. These terms must be taken in the strong sense: the form par excellence of philosophical thought, that is, the form of foundation, the form of justification, the form of legitimization of philosophical thought, of philosophical thought as founding, justifying, legitimatizing. If, in this period, natural law theorists thought in the origin, it is because the origin was the philosophical form of legitimization of the titles of every essence, and because these theorists had to proceed by way of this common form to justify their own divergent political positions with regard to their common object, absolute monarchy, which had, accordingly, become their common philosophical problem.
So it was that the problem of absolute monarchy became for all of them, pro or con, the philosophical problem of the origin of the state, setting out from the state of origin, the state of nature, and natural law: the problem, the transition from the state of nature to the nature of the state, which was resolved, as you know, by the social contract. I shall go no further for now; I would simply like to say that, in moving from Machiavelli to Rousseau, we change worlds. As we just saw, we change the object of reflection and, simultaneously, we change the form of philosophical thought.
—————
We know who Rousseau is. We know it officially, as it were. Why? Because he has been inscribed in the history of philosophy. And he has been inscribed in the history of philosophy by philosophy itself, which has thus inscribed him in its own history: for example, between Locke and Condillac on the one hand and Kant and Hegel on the other. Thus Rousseau occupies a well-defined place. This place has been accorded him on the basis of the observation of, and reflection on, a certain number of concepts which he put forward and which have been recognized as philosophy by the history of philosophy, by philosophy in its history: the concepts that Kant, for example, singled out in Rousseau.
I would like to try to show that, beyond this official recognition of Rousseau, this inscription of Rousseau in the history of philosophy, there exists an aspect of Rousseau, there exist words of Rousseau’s and arguments of Rousseau’s which, like Machiavelli’s – this is why the comparison does not seem to me to be entirely arbitrary – have practically remained a dead letter. To put it differently, there exist words in Rousseau, and perhaps concepts and arguments as well, which were not registered by philosophy in its history when philosophy drew up the accounts of its history or settled its accounts with its own history. The philosophy that has inscribed Rousseau in its history for one or another merit has drawn up its accounts, and its tallies are accurate – but with the figures it has registered. The drawback, or the boon, is that a few figures, a few words, a few concepts have been left out of account, have been neglected. I would like to try to sketch not an exhaustive inventory of these Rousseauesque words and concepts left out of account by the history of philosophy, but an inventory of just a handful of them.
To this end, I shall be focusing my lectures on the second Discourse, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men. To pose the problem, I shall set out from the following aporia or contradiction. With Rousseau, we are quite obviously (since I’ve already discussed Machiavelli on the one hand and natural law philosophy on the other) in the same problematic and the same basic concepts as those of the whole natural law school, that is, the same concepts we have found in Hobbes and Locke.3 There are doubtless differences between Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, but there were also differences between Locke and Hobbes, between Grotius and Pufendorf, between Burlamaqui and Locke; ultimately, the difference between Rousseau and his predecessors is no greater than the differences between his predecessors themselves. If we were able to speak of a thought common to his predecessors, we have to extend it to Rousseau as well: for the basis is plainly the same.
Let us put that more precisely. The form of thought which we see at work in Rousseau, and which commands everything, is the same form of thought as in his predecessors: it is the thought of the origin, the thought that has recourse to the origin. Rousseau very clearly says in several passages that we must go back to society’s origins to expose its foundations, that there can be no other way: this way is mandatory for everyone. He adds that this origin is man’s nature, man in the state of nature. He repeats, then, what his predecessors have said.
Here, for example, is a passage from the second Discourse: ‘this … study of original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principle of his duties, is also the only effective means for doing away with the host of difficulties that present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and countless other similar matters whose importance is equalled only by their obscurity.’4 Elsewhere, Rousseau writes: ‘about [the state of nature] we should … have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly’.5
The procedure is thus perfectly clear. It is essential to go back to the state of nature, the state of origin, in order to discover man’s nature there: only on this condition can we come to know natural right [droit], natural law [loi], the foundation of societies, civil law, political institutions, and the inequality that reigns among men in our present state. Thus the general form of philosophical discourse remains the same. And, in the general form of recourse to the origin, we see the same major categories of thought come into play in Rousseau as in all his predecessors, namely: the state of nature, the state of war, natural right, natural law, the social contract, sovereignty, civil law. This is the obligatory arsenal of this thought of the origin in the field of law.
These categories are grouped together under three basic moments of reflection that punctuate the manifestation of the essence of law. You know these three moments: the state of nature (the first moment), the social contract (the second moment), and the civil state (the third moment). In Rousseau, as in his predecessors, this originary genesis that sets out from the state of nature does not function like a historical genesis. Rather, in Rousseau, as in his predecessors, it functions like an analysis of essence grounded in the self-evidence of its original credentials, nature.
You may recall that Hobbes proposed to consider society as ‘dissolved’, as he puts it, in order to discern its original elements. Rousseau, for his part, calls on a different image: that of foundations buried in dust and sand. ‘Human institutions’, he writes, ‘appear at first glance founded on shifting sands. It is only on closer examination, only after clearing away the dust and sand surrounding the edifice, that we perceive the unshakeable base on which it has been built and learn to respect its foundations.’6 If we compare this image of the foundations, ‘after clearing away the dust and sand’, with several other passages in the second Discourse, in particular the famous lines in which Rousseau says that the state of nature may never have existed, it seems quite certain that, in Rousseau, the originary genesis is not a real genesis, a historical genesis, but is simply, as in his predecessors, an analysis of essence that takes the form of a genesis which is not historical, but theoretical. Why? In order to justify the determinations of this essence in its origin as the foundation of right.
There we have what strikes every reader of Rousseau. On this common ground, which leagues Rousseau with Hobbes, Locke, and the others, Rousseau is supposed, at best, to have elaborated certain variations of his own which distinguish him from his predecessors, yet are no more, in sum, than variations of one and the same invariant.7 In opposition to this view, which can be defended, but which can also be criticized, I would simply like to suggest one idea, just one, and then I would like to attempt to analyse and demonstrate it.
Here is my idea: this similarity that we have just noted in our turn, that we have just acknowledged, this similarity in fact conceals a profound difference. It is not a difference in themes, motifs, or variations, not a difference affecting only a handful of concepts, but one that goes much deeper: a difference in problematic and object. I believe, and shall try to show, that the classic problematic that I have just recalled is in fact worked on [travaillé] in Rousseau, obscurely worked on, worked on in a way that appears on the edges of consciousness but is not always conscious, worked on by an essential difference, worked on by a divergence in viewpoint, a divergence in thought. Where is this work performed? At several very precise points, I believe. How is this work performed? That is what we are going to try to find out.
Here, in outline, is how I plan to proceed. We shall first discern this difference at work, in a radical, contradictory form, in connection with the concept of the origin itself. That will be the first part of my discussion. We shall then go on to observe all its effects unfolding along with the dispositive of the moments of the genesis which brings about the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. That will be the second part of my discussion. I think I shall limit myself to the first part today.
Here, then, is the first part of this attempt at a demonstration. I shall call it the circle of the origin. What makes Rousseau resemble all the natural law philosophers is the fact that he thinks in the origin, as they do. We have established this once and for all and shall not go back to it. Yet what distinguishes Rousseau from them, radically, is that he is the only philosopher of the origin, the only one of all the natural law philosophers who think in the origin, to think the concept of the origin in its own right – to think it in the strong sense, that is, not just to use it, practise it, manipulate it, wield it, not just to think in the concept, but to think the concept in the strong sense, to confront it as an object, to confront the origin as object, to make it an object in order to think it, think it in the form of a concept. Of all the natural law philosophers, Rousseau is, then, the only one to do this, to think the concept of the origin as such. He is also the only one to propose, in one and the same movement of thought, a radical critique of it.
Here are the two passages of the second Discourse which are crucial in this regard. They occur at the beginning of the second Discourse.8
‘I have dwelt so long on the hypothesis of this [state of nature] (here is the crucial passage) because, having to overcome age-old errors and entrenched beliefs, I thought it necessary to dig down to the roots.’9 First passage.
Second passage: ‘Philosophers examining the foundations of society [that is, the natural law philosophers] have all felt the need to go back to the state of nature, but not one of them has managed to reach it.’10
I believe that, if we take these two affirmations of Rousseau’s seriously, we can already see a certain difference emerging. Rousseau affirms that he has had to combat ‘age-old errors and entrenched beliefs’, and these ‘age-old errors and entrenched beliefs’ are, precisely, the errors and beliefs of his predecessors from the natural law school – Hobbes’s and Locke’s errors, as we shall see.
Rousseau declares that those philosophers have clearly felt ‘the need to go back to the state of nature, but not one of them has managed to reach it’. If they have not, it is because they are stuck fast in ‘age-old errors’. As for him – he is the only one to have done this – he has resolved to go further, to go all the way; he has had ‘to dig down to the roots’ to get past the stage of ‘age-old errors’. For these ‘roots’ are the stage, the endpoint, that the philosophers, all the philosophers, have been unable to reach or not known how to reach. None of them has ever arrived at the state of nature. This sentence is rather stupefying, after all. Here, then, is the first contradiction. It is necessary to go back to the state of nature; all have felt that, yet no one has ever succeeded in doing it.
What does this contradiction mean? What does this sentence mean? What is the status of this contradiction? In what sense is there a contradiction? How can it be thought? Is it a subjective contradiction or an objective contradiction? A contingent contradiction or a necessary contradiction? What do these contradictory sentences refer us to? To answer these questions, we have to examine the examples that Rousseau adduces. In other words, we have to examine what Rousseau thinks of his predecessors, who, stuck fast in ‘age-old errors’, did not succeed in reaching the state of nature, although they sensed that one had to go all the way back to it.
We shall therefore have to examine the case of the natural law philosophers. We shall be obliged, therefore, to take on the task of examining what Rousseau denounces as the circle of their theory. First point, then: the theorists’ circle. The theorists are, basically, Hobbes, Locke, and all the other natural law philosophers.
In Rousseau’s view, these philosophers failed to reach the state of nature: they got stuck in errors en route. Why? Because they perpetrated a circle. What does this circle consist in? Immediately after the lines I just cited, about the philosophers who felt the need to go back to the state of nature, yet failed to reach it, Rousseau defines their mistake. Their mistake is that they never ceased presupposing what was in question. For example: ‘Some have not hesitated to assume that man in that state [the state of nature] possessed a notion of the just and unjust [this applies to Locke], without bothering to show that he must have had such a concept or that he would even find it useful.’11 Another quotation: ‘Others begin by giving [that is, by giving from the outset, hence in the state of nature] the strongest persons authority over the weaker ones, and straightaway [that is, from the state of nature on] introduced government without thinking of the time that had to elapse before the words “authority” and “government” could have any meaning for men.’12 (This is probably an allusion to Grotius.) Consequently, and this can be generalized, all these theorists supposed, that is, presupposed, that men in the state of nature had qualities, meanings, and significations which could in fact only come about under other conditions, long after the state of nature, in the civil state.
Let us spell out the meaning of this supposition, this presupposition. We can immediately take the example of Hobbes. Here is what Rousseau writes:
Hobbes clearly saw the flaw in all modern definitions of natural right [that is, moral definitions, which is what Rousseau has in mind here], but the conclusions he drew from his own definition show that his own concept of natural right is no less false … He introduc[ed] into savage man’s concern for his own survival the need to satisfy a host of passions that are the handiwork of society.13
That is, Hobbes ascribes what is a result of the history of social life to the state of nature.
Another example: Locke, whom Rousseau discusses under the same general heading as Hobbes in Note L to the second Discourse; he discusses them together. ‘Locke’s argument thus collapses, and all his dialectic has not saved him from the error committed by Hobbes and others. They had to explain a fact about the state of nature … and it did not occur to these philosophers to look back across the centuries of society.’14 That is, they remained in present-day society. And here is the argument that sums up all the others, that sums up this process in both senses of the word: the theorists’ thought process [procès] and the trial [procès] Rousseau subjects them to. Here is the sentence: ‘All these philosophers … have imported into the state of nature ideas they had taken from society. They talk of savage man and they depict civilized man.’15
The essence of the mistake of the philosophers of the state of nature thus consists in a supposition, which is itself a presupposition, which is itself a transference, a retrospective projection of the civil state (the present state of civil man, man as formed by society and history) onto the state of nature and natural man, both supposed to exist before history. As it operates in the theorists, recourse to the state of nature therefore appears as a circle. It is a circle from the standpoint of its determinations, since the state of nature is thought in the determinations of the civil state, since the theorists attribute to the man of the state of nature determinations which are meaningful only in society and can only be the determinations, passions, attributes, and faculties of men of the civil state (for example, reason, self-esteem, and so on).
This circle of the theorists is a circle from the standpoint of the form of thought, since the result – that is, the social state, the civil state – is projected onto the origin the better to produce the result, when the result has in fact already been projected onto, has already been presupposed in, the form of its origin. Thus the result very easily becomes the cause of itself, the legitimization of itself in the guise of the origin, since we have to do with nothing but a repetition here. The result exists in two forms: in the form of the result in civil society and in the form of the same result, but in the state of nature. The objective, function, and effect of this transposition is, quite simply, to legitimize what exists in the state of society by transposing its results to the state of nature, the state of origin.
It is impossible to say more forthrightly than Rousseau does that recourse to the origin is merely a veiled form of justifying what is, in the full sense of the word. Recourse to the origin is not just in the reactionary sense, if you like, but also in the most general sense, merely a veiled form of the justification of what is, whether it is the existing social state of the accomplished fact or the social state that one desires. In other words, Rousseau here sketches not just a critique of the justification of the accomplished fact, the reigning order, but also a critique of the utopianism that hopes to justify the future of the society it desires by projecting it onto the origins, by grounding it in the origins. Rousseau affirms: ‘writers begin by searching for the rules on which it would be appropriate for men to agree for the common welfare; and then they give the name “natural law” to this collection of rules’;16 and, naturally, natural law is projected onto the state of nature, onto the origin, which provides it with its foundations. For example – a different example this time, an apologist for the accomplished fact, Grotius, targeted in chapter 2 of book 1 of The Social Contract – as much sovereignty and submission is projected onto the state of nature as is needed to subject men in civil life to a king. A master–slave relationship is created in the state of nature which, when it is transposed to the civil state, makes it possible to justify the accomplished fact of absolute monarchy.
Let us leave the political and polemical applications of Rousseau’s thesis to one side. They call into question the political choices of the theorists of absolute monarchy in both its dictatorial phase – that is, Hobbes – and its liberal phase – that is, Locke. More generally, these theses of Rousseau’s call the idealism of Enlightenment philosophy into question, for what is Enlightenment philosophy? Rousseau discusses it in connection with philosophers in general, and he also discusses it in connection with Diderot. What is Enlightenment philosophy, if not the projection of the end [fin] of history, namely, reason, onto the origin? What matters for us, beyond these polemical objectives, is the theoretical significance of Rousseau’s critique of recourse to the origin.
For the first time, a philosopher who openly thinks in the origin faces up to the task of thinking the origin in its concept, and does so in order to denounce it in the guise of what we shall now call the false origin. In the process, however, Rousseau well and truly produces a critique of the concept of the origin. Recourse to the origin is denounced as a circular, speculary operation that comes into contradiction with its declared function. Philosophers rightly felt the need to have recourse to the state of nature and the state of origin, and to aspire to attain the true origin (which should make it possible to grasp the truth at its birth and in its nakedness), but they failed to arrive at the true state of nature, the true origin; they reached only a false origin. This false origin, that of the theorists and philosophers, is an imposture, because it is merely a transference of the result itself back onto the origin, because it is the imposture of the result declared to be the origin. This transference is not a simple mistake, the effect of which would be a sort of philosophical rubbish that is nil or negligible. Quite the contrary: it must be said that the reality of this transference, hence the reality of the false origin (Rousseau sketches a theory of it), is its function; it is the justification of the order one desires to see reign, or the justification of the reigning order, namely, the king.
But that is not all. Beneath this condemnation of the false origin, of its structure and function, we discover that its meaning is not quite the one we originally thought, that of being a purely theoretical genesis, a pure analysis of essence utterly foreign to a historical genesis. We discover that the political and theoretical function of recourse to the origin brings it into relation with real history, with the historical present, with our present state, in which theorists stage recourse to an ahistorical origin for reasons that are mandated by the present and are, consequently, historical through and through. Thus something comes into view behind this radical refutation, something that Rousseau necessarily takes into account, must necessarily take into account (in a certain way that has not yet been defined) and take seriously, something that must be called, provisionally, history.
We shall not, however, stop with the theorists’ circle in our reading of Rousseau; we shall go beyond this object to discuss another which accounts for it. That is to say – and this will be the second moment of our examination – we shall discover the reason for the theorists’ circle in the circle of denaturation or the circle of alienation.
The theorists’ circle is not a subjective aberration. It possesses an objective rationality. Thinking in the false origin is never anything but justification in thought for what is politically desirable or what exists. Rousseau, however, does not remain at the level of what could become a political psychologism. He asks the following question, or allows us to ask it, or compels us to ask it: Why does the theorists’ thinking necessarily take the form of a circle? Why are the theorists condemned to the false origin?
Rousseau answers: because they are subject to another circle that is not theoretical, but real – a universal circle, because they are themselves caught in, inscribed in, a universal circle from which they cannot escape. This circle is that of present-day, denatured, alienated society. Ultimately, it is the very essence of present-day society that is reflected in the theorists’ powerlessness to leave this circle, and in the fact that they repeat, in thought, this circle which society draws around them.
In other words, at the very moment when Rousseau might seem to succumb to the subjectivism of a political psychology, he eludes it. The theorists’ circle is not in their political will; rather, it is at the very basis of their political consciousness and in their theoretical consciousness, merely the realization and repetition of a completely different circle, which simultaneously dominates politics as well as its theoretical justification: the circle of man’s and present-day society’s social denaturation and social alienation. Why, ultimately, have the theorists proven unable to go back to the state of nature? Basically, because it is lost. Because nature is lost. Because there is no more nature. One can almost say that. I say ‘almost’, and we shall see why. There is no more nature.
The theorists’ mistake accordingly becomes, when it is thus referred to its ultimate condition, something like a pre-Kantian transcendental mistake, a mistake that is in some sense inevitable in the human condition. There is no lack of texts by Rousseau on this point. He asks why ‘it is no small undertaking to separate what is inborn from what is artificial in the present nature of man’.17 ‘How will man come to see himself as nature created him, through all the changes that must have been produced in his original constitution in the course of time and events, and how can we separate what he owes to his inborn resources from what circumstances and his advances have added to or changed in his primitive state?’18 He asks why ‘Diogenes could not find a man’, if not ‘because he searched among his contemporaries for a man from a time that no longer was’?19 Why do we find all these repeated questions in Rousseau, if not because, as he writes, the ‘paths that must have led man from the natural state to the civil state’ have been ‘lost and forgotten’? Because, he says, ‘man has changed [his] nature’. Because, he says, ‘original man [has] disappeared’.20 Because, as he puts it in a fragment titled ‘State of War’, nature has ‘disappeared everywhere’;21 or, again, because reason has ‘smother[ed] nature’.22
On this theme of a vanished, lost, smothered nature, we should refer to the most dramatic passage, which is at the same time the most accurate from the theoretical point of view: the passage at the beginning of the second Discourse in which the image of Glaucus appears. Here it is:
Like the statue of Glaucus so disfigured by time, the sea, and storms as to look less like a god than a wild beast, the human soul modified in society by innumerable constantly recurring causes – the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and a multitude of errors, changes that took place in the constitution of the body, the constant onslaught of the passions – has, as it were, so changed its appearance as to be nearly unrecognizable.23
Nature has one last chance; we shall see why. Let us simply note, in light of the handful of indications offered by the texts just cited, the reason for the loss and forgetting of nature. Why is nature lost, why is it forgotten? Why is there no more nature? This loss and forgetting are not sanctioned by the void and nothingness. If nature is lost, it is because we can no longer find it, find it in person. If nature is forgotten, it is because we can no longer recall it or call it back. In fact, nature is present, but in its loss and forgetting, in the form of loss and the form of forgetting. This form of loss and forgetting is the form of a cover-up [recouvrement]. Nature is covered over by the whole history of its modifications, by all the effects of its history. It is ‘disfigured’ – the word is Rousseau’s – by the whole history of its progress. It is, in a word – this is Rousseau’s key word – ‘denatured’ by the whole history of the loss of its nature. This is a term that we can translate into a terminology more familiar to us by saying that nature is alienated, that it no longer exists except in the other-than-itself, in its contrary, the social passions, and even in reason subject to the social passions. In short, nature is alienated in its real history, and the result of this alienation holds sway over the present-day world and the theorists who go looking for this lost origin.
Third point: after the circle of social alienation, the circle of the human sciences. I did not speak about the theorists by accident a moment ago. It is in setting out from this circle that we can find our way back to the natural law theorists’ mistake and, in general, to the sciences that promise knowledge of man. Rousseau discusses them under the name of ‘sciences’. It is not a question of mathematics. In question are, basically, the sciences that make it possible for us to know man, or ought to. Do these sciences not make it possible to leave the circle of alienation? The human sciences are not just caught in the circle of alienation; they are, in some sort, the higher form and ruse of this alienation, those that imagine they can escape it: ‘Since all the advances of the human race continually move it ever further from its primitive state’, Rousseau writes, ‘the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means for acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus, in a sense, it is by studying man that we have made ourselves incapable of knowing him.’24
Why ‘incapable of knowing him’? Because scientific books, far from acquainting us with original man, merely teach us, says Rousseau, to see men ‘as they have made themselves’;25 that is to say, the result again. This cause, however, is itself but an effect. It is not just the present-day object of the sciences that is denatured – men as they have made themselves. It is not just their present-day object that denatures the sciences, but their scientific nature as such, in so far as it is produced by exercising reason. Because reason is at work in the sciences, the sciences cannot but be denatured.
Unlike the philosophes, Rousseau has not projected reason onto the state of nature. Reason is not an originary faculty; Rousseau does not presuppose reason in the natural individual. On the contrary, he shows that reason is a product of human history, that it makes its appearance in the course of human history, and that its development is organically bound up with the development of the social passions on which it depends. The upshot is that reason cannot be pure; the upshot is that the maturation of reason in man coincides with man’s denaturation. The human sciences are therefore themselves trapped in covering-over, forgetting, denaturation: they belong to the genesis of denaturation. By definition, every human science is a forgetting of the origin, not just because it has lost what Rousseau calls the ‘pure movement’ ‘prior to all reflection’,26 but also because it has never been in a position to lose it, since it is a product of reason, since it was itself born of the loss of the origin. Science thus is, in a certain way, absolute forgetting, because it has been caught up, from its birth, in the forgetting that constituted it, because it was born only at a certain point in the process of the constitution of forgetting, in the process of the constitution of denaturation. The sciences accordingly belong to the circle of alienation by virtue not just of their object, but also of their essence, which inscribes them in denaturation, that is, in the lost origin.
Thus we have come back to our starting point. If the theorists have recourse to the false origin, this is not just an effect of their pure political subjectivity. In their circle, they simply reproduce, in the form of theoretical arguments expressing their political choices, the circle of the sciences and, more generally, that of reason, which is, in the last instance, the circle of the alienation of men from society. Thus we see the theorists’ arguments, their reason and their concepts, going round and round in the philosophical circle of the projection of the result onto its origin. They go round and round in theory, however, only because they cannot but go round and round in the circle of denaturation, of alienation. They cannot but go round and round there.
Why? Because their search for the origin is futile, because the origin is lost, because the human world itself has confined itself in its result, in generalized alienation and denaturation, and because the theorists cannot leave the circle of this objective result. The proof is that, when they think they have found the origin, they never find anything but the result again. This for two reasons: nature is absent from the circle; and reason cannot leave the circle because it belongs to it.
Let us take a break here, if you don’t mind.
Faced with this theory of the circle of the bad origin and what analysis of it has showed us, namely, the circle of human reason and, in the last instance, the circle of the alienation and denaturation of human history, we could give two possible interpretations. I shall present them to you schematically, in a few words.
On the first interpretation, which a Kantian might defend, only two terms would be singled out for attention in what has just been evoked: first, the circle of recourse to the origin and, second, the circle of reason. The circle of historical alienation would be left aside. On that condition, one could say that what is manifested in the circle of the origin is the circle of reason, and go on to argue that there is something like an anticipation of a transcendental theory of error in Rousseau. One could call this theory transcendental, because this error of reason is a necessary error: it is the necessary error of reason trying to go beyond its own limits. One could also call this theory transcendental because the content and form of this error could be put down to the paralogism of recourse to the origin. That is, recourse to the origin could be thought as a paralogism, as a result thought as its own origin – that is, as a paralogism of the unconditioned. Thus a Kantian could appropriate Rousseau’s argument in order to defend the idea that Rousseau anticipates a transcendental theory of error. However, if it is to be sustained, this interpretation obviously must, as I said, leave another term to one side, the third term: the alienation of human history.
If, now, we reintroduce this third term, we have three terms: we have recourse to the origin, we have the circle of reason, and we have the circle of alienation. If we take these three terms seriously, we can defend another interpretation. We can defend the idea that Rousseau presents us with two things: first, a general theory of the human sciences’ political determination, or the human sciences’ political dependency on the human and political world. The sciences are determined by the human and political world, and this political dependency of the human sciences takes a very precise form: that is, the human and political world in existence today reflects its own objectives in the human sciences in the form of these human sciences’ objects. To put it differently, the human sciences reflect, in the form of their objects, the political objectives of the world that determines them. Completely determined by this human world of denaturation and alienation, they have no object other than its objectives, reflected in them in the form of objects.
This is the first theory that Rousseau might be said to offer us in this conceptual ensemble. He might be said to offer us something else again. He might be said simultaneously to offer us a general theory of philosophical mystification, a general theory of philosophy in which philosophy would intervene simply in order to provide the established order or social reformers’ political projects with illusory theoretical credentials [titres de validité] – necessarily illusory, but socially necessary. On this reading, philosophy intervenes as a socially necessary mystification of thought by way of the origin; it intervenes as thought that functions at the origin in order to provide the established order or projects of social reform with illusory, yet socially necessary, credentials. There we have the second fairly coherent interpretation that might be formulated at the point we have reached.
However, we obviously must, in order to confer a certain coherency on this second hypothesis, leave aside the question as to how Rousseau, the individual named Rousseau, trapped in the social dependency that he himself discusses, can nevertheless pronounce a discourse on dependency. What is the status of Rousseau’s discourse with respect to his own general theory of the status of any possible discourse? How can Rousseau utter this discourse, if not because he himself has access to the true origin? At the same time, if this second interpretation is to hold up, we must leave the following question aside: How can knowledge of the true origin also escape philosophical mystification?
In other words, one asks the same question twice. How is it that Rousseau can escape the circles: firstly, the circle of society and the determination of every science by society; secondly, the circle of recourse to the origin, the circle of philosophical reason? How is it that Rousseau can escape these two circles? The fact is that he does, because he discusses them. By what right can he discuss them, if not because he has escaped them? If he has escaped them, how was he able to state the theory of the impossibility of escaping them?
In other words, we fall into the trap of what must now be called – fourth point – Rousseau’s circle. To try to extricate ourselves from this situation of the street-car in motion that goes nowhere, in which we have just spent a moment or two, we have exactly to recall the results we have attained; that is, we have to put our question in precise form. What is Rousseau’s position, what can Rousseau’s position be, after this radical denunciation of thinking by way of the origin? There we have the terms of the problem as they should be precisely summed up.
Firstly, it is imperative to go back to the origin (Rousseau thinks in the origin, no doubt about it), as the theorists have well understood. Secondly, it is necessary radically to reject the false origin that they have not been able to go beyond; they are caught in the stranglehold of a necessity that goes beyond them, they have been locked into a circle that he has gone beyond, since it was a circle that encompassed both human society and human reason: the circle of human denaturation, of human alienation. It follows, thirdly, that if it is necessary to go back to the origin, and if it is necessary radically to reject the false origin, one has to think a completely different origin, the true one, and gain access to it by completely different means, avoiding the trap of philosophical reason (since we have seen that there is an essential complicity between the false origin and the theoretical means that the philosophers employed in order to think it).
It is, then, necessary to think a completely different origin and gain access to it by completely different means. A completely different origin: that is, a state of nature, since it is necessary to go back to the state of nature, but one which cannot have, as its contents, a projection of the present social state, and which will not instate the result of the origin as the origin of the origin. And it will be necessary to gain access to the origin by means completely different from reason; no longer, that is, by means of ratiocinative reason [raison raisonnante], but by means of a different faculty, a different power.
The question that arises at the point we have now reached is obviously whether this undertaking is at all possible. In fact, for Rousseau, the question has already been resolved. To be able to utter the discourse which brings the circle of the theorists of the origin into relation with the alienation of reason and human society, and, quite simply, to be able to write, to pronounce, to utter the simple little word ‘denaturation’, to be able to construct the whole general theory that depends on it and commands the critique based on the theory of the bad origin, Rousseau himself must already be in nature and the good origin. It is obvious that he cannot utter all these discourses unless he already is in nature.
What matters to us is to know how he can be in nature and the good origin, to discover the path on which he is able to reach it. In other words, what matters to us is that his written theory, the theory written by Rousseau, authorizes this situation attained by Rousseau, this exceptional situation – that is, authorizes this solution, in other words, the fact that what is a solution for Rousseau is, for us, a problem that can be given this solution. It seemed to me that that was spelled out in his text, and the fact is that it is. The theory of denaturation and alienation – let me make it clear that the word ‘alienation’ in the sense in which I am using it is not Rousseau’s, only the word ‘denaturation’ is truly his – this theory of denaturation is not a theory of complete, absolute denaturation. It maintains rare ways out, narrow ways out, but it does maintain them. We might cite the text about Glaucus again: ‘the human soul has, as it were, so changed its appearance as to be nearly unrecognizable.’ This ‘nearly unrecognizable’, this nearly nothing, suffices to allow recognition of the unrecognizable, because it is only nearly unrecognizable, not absolutely unrecognizable.
This means that, under certain conditions and, above all, on the radical precondition of the critique of the false origin, it is possible to gain access to the true origin, to knowledge of natural man. This operation supposes a radical modification in both the object and the subject. ‘Radical modification’: those are not words tossed off lightly; ‘radical modification’ means that Rousseau must propose altogether novel solutions, solutions unprecedented in the history of natural law, unprecedented in both his predecessors and his contemporaries. And that is just what he does: he proposes such solutions.
In the object, Rousseau produces – that is to say, writes, puts down in writing, advances, thinks, reasons by means of, produces, advances – Rousseau advances a concept that is absolutely without precedent in the entire history of natural law philosophy. It is the decisive concept in the second Discourse. I mention it now; I shall have occasion to come back to it. It is the concept of the state of pure nature; not the state of nature, but the state of pure nature. We shall have occasion to discuss it. Here it is enough to know that this state of pure nature represents the ‘roots’ that Rousseau talks about: ‘down to the roots’, ‘dig down to the roots’, one has to go that far, and it is that far that Rousseau has gone and that the others were not capable of going; it is the point that the philosophers proved unable to reach when they wanted to have recourse to the state of nature, the point that Rousseau alone has proved capable of seeing, conceiving of, and stating, that of which he has provided the concept. In fact – and we can judge this by its results, which are considerable – it is the point on which everything is decided between the false origin and the true origin, the point or the radical line of demarcation; it is the ‘roots’, it is the state of pure nature. So much for the object.
As for the subject, albeit trapped in social denaturation and theoretical alienation, it must be in a position to accede to this concept of pure nature. Now we know what must be grasped by the subject, hence by any subject whatsoever, hence by Rousseau, hence by you and me: the state of pure nature. In the subject, then, one has to bring out, one has to produce, a new means that will make it possible to grasp this new object. Rousseau produces something novel here as well, something new, a faculty corresponding specifically to this discovery: no longer reason, but the heart.
Of course, the heart is better known than the state of pure nature, but we have to take due note of it anyway. What is the heart? The heart is direct, immediate access to nature; but, practically speaking, with respect to the problem to hand, it is the way out of the circle of ratiocinative reason. As Rousseau puts it, in fragments for which I have the references that I can give you: ‘The state of society, which imposes constraints on our natural inclinations, is nevertheless not capable of doing away with them; despite our prejudices and despite us, they continue to speak in the depth of our heart.’ Something still speaks in the depth of our hearts (this comes from a treatise on ‘The State of War’).27 ‘I have therefore abandoned reason and consulted nature, that is, the inner sentiment that governs my belief independently of my reason.’28 All these words are very important and call for comment. ‘I have abandoned reason and consulted nature’: that is, nature = an ‘inner sentiment that directs my belief independently of my reason’. In another letter, Rousseau writes: ‘this sentiment is that of nature itself’, and so on.
As far as the heart goes, there is, if you like, an entire literature on Rousseau and the heart, and so on. What interests us here is the theoretical significance of this faculty, this power; what interests us is to find out how it functions. It does not at all function in the mode of the heart; it is in fact an extremely precise faculty whose concept can be provided. In other words, the heart is not grasped by the heart; the heart can perfectly well be thought, because the essential feature of the heart in Rousseau is that it is a heart which thinks. It is a heart which guides reason, which directs reason. Formally, as we have just brought it into play here, the heart, the intervention of the heart, does not extricate us from the structure of thought by way of the origin, since it reproduces the dominant philosophical scheme of nature. It is nature as a form of manifestation of the rightful credentials of the essence in its self-evidence. Nature is what is visible, what is heard, and so on. That does not make for a radical change in the form of philosophical thought, since the theory of the heart in Rousseau reproduces the form of the originary subjectivity to which this originary nature is given as self-evident. This nature that is the originary self-evidence of the rightful credentials of every essence is originarily given as self-evident to an originary subjectivity that grasps it as such in its self-evident immediacy and its transparency and its very presence. This is, for example, the status of the Cartesian subject of the ego cogito, the status of the subject of eighteenth-century psychological empiricism, and so on. It is exactly the heart’s status in Rousseau: nature is transparency in its self-evidence.
Simply, what changes with the intervention of the heart in Rousseau is the name of this subjectivity. It is no longer reason, as was the case in the seventeenth and even the early eighteenth century; hence it is no longer the understanding, but the heart. What changes, in other words, is the form of manifestation of the originary self-evidence. I shall say that it is no longer light, but the voice. I am alluding to natural light: that is, nature is its own light, is itself light for consciousness, for the subject that will grasp it, for the originary subject that will grasp it, and so on. Reason is natural light, then, whereas Rousseau invokes the voice of nature, which is to say that self-evidence is that of a voice. It is no longer that of light and a gaze, but that of a voice and an ear.
Thus we shift from the identity of nature and reason in the form of light to another identity: the identity of nature and the heart in the form of the voice. Formally, then, we have the same structure of interiority, but we witness a displacement inside this structure of interiority, a displacement from reason to the heart and from light to the voice. This displacement from reason to the heart and from light to the voice is not the transition from one order to another that is independent of the first, as if the philosophers – in this case, Rousseau – had a series of pre-existing, independent concepts at their disposal in some speculative world, and could choose among them as need dictates. This displacement from reason to the heart and from light to the voice is a displacement that is determined not by Rousseau’s choices – I would like to try to show this – but by the concepts with regard to which this displacement is effected, against which Rousseau marks out his own position [se démarque]. This displacement is determined, in other words, by the concepts of reason and light. It is with regard to them that this displacement is carried out; they are the concepts that determine this displacement.
To put it differently, the heart and the voice do not have a meaning that is theirs by some inherent right. They do not have referents or correspond to external realities; their meaning is wholly internal to the world of philosophy. They take their philosophical meaning not from philosophical objects, but from their philosophical intervention. That is, the heart and the voice take their philosophical meaning from the determinate distance that they carve between themselves – they are what intervenes – and the concepts which (this is their effect) they drive to the back of the philosophical stage: the old concepts of reason and light.
The voice and the heart, however, do not have referents either, that is to say, are not the signifiers of objective signifieds any more than reason and light were. They are simply the philosophical mark of a philosophical demarcation, that is, of a critical distance taken from reason and light. This critical distance taken from reason and light is already crucial, because, for Rousseau, squarely in the middle of the eighteenth century, it signifies a demarcation from every existing construction of reason, from the idealism of reason, from reforming reason, from the philosophy of light and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Heart and voice thus signify a rejection of all the theories of the bad origin and, at the same time, the announcement of a theory of the good origin by way of an appeal to the heart, the sensitive nature of the heart, and so on. In other words, voice and heart, demarcated in this way from reason and light, are now another name for another form of presence, different from that of light and reason. This other form of presence has, however, its own efficacity. It produces a double effect.
For one thing, it makes lost nature immediately present in this denatured human world, for nature still speaks in the depth of the heart, and does so here and now, in the present. For another, it makes it possible to free oneself from the antinomies of the circle of denaturation and the circle of reason. For recourse to the heart, this transition, this demarcation, this intervention of the heart and the voice bring off the impossible feat of leaving the absolutely closed circle of denaturation. They bring off the impossible feat of escaping from the circle without leaving it – since one cannot leave it – by, quite simply, going back into the self to find, in the heart, nature outside the circle, which continues to speak in the heart. It is an escape by way of the inside; one leaves the circle by way of the inside. It is, then, to leave the circle and reach, beyond the whole history of denaturation, nature in its first state, the pure state of nature. Not to leave the circle, but, instead of leaving the circle, which is impossible, to go back into the self and, by way of this inner escape, to find the origin again: that is, to enter into contact with the object which is the object of the pure state of nature.
For the heart has a content, an object – the one I have discussed, the pure state of nature. It is here that the determination of the object through demarcation culminates, for, while the intervention of heart and voice is determined by their demarcation from reason and light, this intervention is not merely critical. At the same time, it has the effect of constituting a new philosophical object, which is likewise demarcated from the preceding object and will be the object of the heart and the voice: this object is, precisely, the true origin; is, precisely, the pure state of nature, which is absent from the philosophy of reason and light.
To sum up this whole argument, which was no doubt abstract and in any case heavy going, I would like to say the following. Throughout this philosophical operation, which turns on the intervention of the heart, the important thing is to see that we cannot think the significance of the intervention of the heart in Rousseau unless that intervention is correlated with the object of the heart, with that to which the heart is referred as to its correlate. That said, when we observe the phenomenon of philosophical substitution that is carried out under the unity of the self-evidence of nature, which replaces reason and light with heart and voice, we have to do with the three following moments:
Firstly, we have to do with a displacement in the self-evidence of nature, one that brings about the transition from the pair reason–light to the pair heart–voice. The form in which nature is given as self-evident to an originary subject is no longer the pair reason–light, no longer the light of reason, no longer reason as light; it is the heart as voice, it is the voice of the heart, it is the voice of nature, and so on. This is, then, the first displacement.
[Secondly,] this displacement is in fact a determinate demarcation that distantiates the old forms of philosophical thought in order to impose the new ones; it has meaning only in this distantiation. It is in relation to these distantiated old forms of thought, that is, reason–light, that heart–voice appear in the foreground and function correlatively; function, that is, as a repelling couple vis-à-vis the forms they drive to the back of the philosophical stage.
Thirdly, this demarcation between forms – the forms, be it recalled, of reason–light on the one hand and heart–voice on the other, and so on – has a stake which is not just the forms themselves, but a new philosophical object. By philosophical object, I mean an object internal to philosophy, a philosophical object that will take the place of the old philosophical object. This new philosophical object is the true origin, which will replace the false origin. More precisely, in a determinate way as far as our reflection is concerned, the state of pure nature will replace the state of nature as it appears in Hobbes or Locke. Indeed, Rousseau has the impression of – not only has the impression of, but concretely produces the impression of – not only produces the impression of, but concretely produces – original forms of thought and original objects. This is attested by, among other things, the fact that he is conscious of it, and will consciously think this object’s originality, as we shall see next time.