LAST TIME, WE STOPPED at a precise point, the intervention of the heart. I put forward the hypothesis that, in the second Discourse, the heart has an object, and that this object has a name; Rousseau calls it ‘the pure state of nature’ or ‘the first state of nature’. I also told you that it was an object different from that of natural law philosophy.
Just as Rousseau tries to put another origin in place, to think another origin, so he produces another object corresponding to it. This object is, necessarily, an object that is thought. This object too will be thought by reflection and reasoning – in short, in the forms of the understanding, which means that recourse to the heart has nothing to do, in Rousseau, with an appeal to mystical feeling or the confusion of the Schwärmerei that Hegel was to condemn as the loss of philosophy and the loss of reason. What Rousseau calls for through the appeal to the heart is, in the quest for the good origin, the exercise of reason under the guidance of the heart; it is not the exclusion of reason, but the exercise of well-guided reason, well-guided under the guidance of the heart. More precisely, it is the exercise of reasoning and reflection in accordance with the principles of the heart, not vague, general principles, but extremely precise, extremely well-defined principles, those that are inscribed in the pure state of nature.
This allows us to declare the following two propositions equivalent: making the heart the first principle of reason is exactly the same as making the pure state of nature the first principle of the state of nature. I believe it can be shown that this division of the object into the object and the faculties is inscribed in the division of the concepts and the division of the text of Rousseau’s second Discourse. For, when we consider the place that the discourse on pure nature occupies in Rousseau’s text, we are struck by two traits.
This discourse stands, of course, at the beginning of the Discourse, because it is its first principle. At the same time, however, this discourse on the pure state of nature is, theoretically speaking, completely separate from the rest. This pure state of nature is an altogether unique state, because, without the natural accidents which eventually supervene – the cosmic accidents which overturn both the earth and the rhythm of nature, which modify the rhythm of the seasons, and so on – the state of pure nature would have remained in its pure state, that is, would have remained unchanged, endlessly repeating itself. This isolation is therefore a theoretical isolation that concerns not just the contents of the state of nature, but also its mode of existence and positing. For the state of pure nature is the origin itself, isolated as such, posited and thought as such. Its isolation is its purity made visible, made manifest. It is proof that the true origin has indeed been reached, since one can isolate it, at once in itself and from the rest, and since one can thus enable it to escape the fate of the false origin, which is the circle of the result cast back onto the origin.
This true origin is also isolated in another sense that is very important for us. After the pages of pure description that are devoted to it, in which Rousseau’s philosophical thought functions by ‘setting aside all the facts’,1 as he puts it, we see a form of reflection different from pure a priori deduction come into play, one that operates to define the state of pure nature. We see another form of reflection come into play: observation of the facts, combined in its turn with what Rousseau calls historical conjectures and hypotheses.2 That is, we see two forms of reasoning at work in the second Discourse:
• a purely abstract form, deduction, which bears on the state of pure nature;
• and another form that is partly concrete and partly hypothetical, which bears on observation of the facts, which combines them with conjectures and hypotheses, and concerns everything else.
This very sharp separation brings out the fact that while it is reason which is at work in the exposition of the later genesis, observing and reflecting reason, it was not this reason, not the same reason, which was at work in the exposition of the pure state of nature, where, if it was a different reason, it was that of the heart. In fact, one can argue that the state of pure nature is well and truly the exclusive object of the heart, on condition that ‘heart’ is taken to mean what I have said: reason guided by the principles of the heart. One can argue that the state of pure nature is well and truly the decisive point at which the heart intervenes, in so far as it is the heart which, firstly, posits its concept; secondly, posits its necessary existence; and, thirdly, posits its determinations.
First, the heart posits its concept. This is what distinguishes it from the reason of the natural law theorists, who, for reasons we now know, were incapable of ‘digging down to the roots’, as Rousseau says, hence incapable of reaching the concept of the state of nature in its purity, since they never thought in anything but impurity, in the false origin. Reason is the impurity of the concept: this was the circle of denaturation. The heart is the purity of the concept: this is the solution, at once necessary and impossible, that is discovered by following a new path. The fact that the heart must be pure to reach the purity of the concept of the origin will perhaps involve us in new aporias, but the fact is there: the concept of the state of pure nature, which is simply the pure concept of the state of nature, is posited by the heart, or by a reason in which the voice of the heart speaks. The heart posits its existence as well, and this positing too is pure. Why? Because the existence of the pure state of nature is not something observable, and it is not observable because this state has utterly vanished from the face of the earth, because nature is lost.
We can find traces of the savage state on earth. For example, we can observe the savage in the Caribbean, the archetypal savage, who occurs frequently in Rousseau’s work. Thus we can observe the oldest state of savagery; but, says Rousseau, this oldest state of savagery is very far removed from the state of pure nature. This state of savagery is already a form of denaturation. We can also find children in the woods who have been raised by animals, by wolves; everyone knows that the eighteenth century was very fond of discoveries of this kind.3 But, Rousseau says, these children are just animals; the proof is that their cries are animal cries. The origin has thus been lost for ever, and its existence is not observable; yet the discourse of loss can be pronounced only if its existence is first posited. To say that the origin has been lost, its existence must be posited. Observation, however, cannot posit the existence of the pure state of nature, since that state is not observable, nor can reason, since it does not possess its concept. Only the heart can.
This ‘state that no longer exists’, says Rousseau, ‘and perhaps never did [this phrase was most likely for the theologians] and probably never will, but about which we should nevertheless have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly’.4 It may well be asked whether the function of the disappearance of every trace of existence of this state of pure nature is not to isolate it in its purity, shielding it in advance from all possible observation this time so as to reserve it for positing by the heart. And if it has never existed – assuming that this reservation is not meant for the theologians – it is perhaps to preserve it from the danger of ever becoming an object of factual observation, leaving it for the heart in all its purity. This loss would in that case be not an empirical loss, but a de jure loss: since the state of nature can only be lost, can exist only in the form of loss, of present non-existence, its existence could be posited only in the form of a de jure non-observability; it could, that is, be posited only by the heart. We might add that the heart ultimately proves the attributes of the state of pure nature, the contents of this state.
Of course, the man of the state of pure nature has arms and legs like you and me, and the conformation of the man of today. This neutral personage is endowed, however, with precise determinations: independence, solitude, the immediacy of instinct, self-love, freedom, pity, absence of language, absence of reason, and so on. All these determinations are posited as originary, and neither observation nor reason play any role in this positing. It is hard to avoid hypothesizing, therefore, that the positing of the concept, existence, and contents of the state of nature is the heart’s specific domain. We will be convinced of this if we make the comparison with Rousseau’s subsequent exposition, with everything that follows this positing.
For, in what follows, from the state of savagery on, we have observable facts at our disposal, which, albeit few and far between, suffice to mark off the stages of the history of denaturation. It is here that we must, as Rousseau says, observe accurately and combine observation with reflection. And, together with factual observation, we now see the intervention of ratiocinative reason, conjectural reason, and the role of the hypotheses that contrast with the pure and simple positing of the pure state of nature. The role of hypothesis and conjecture is to propose likely explanations in order to connect the observable facts to each other and fill in the existing gaps in the long process of denaturation. ‘I have begun a few lines of reasoning and ventured a few guesses’, says Rousseau, ‘less in the hope of answering the question than for the purpose of clarifying it and reducing it to its true proportions …’ ‘Because the events I am about to describe might have happened in several ways, I admit my choice between these possibilities must be conjectural: but besides the fact that those conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable ones we can infer from the natures of things, [they] represent the only means we can have for discovering the truth.’5 I shall read you the rest in just a moment.
Conjectures and hypotheses, then, hence the exercise of reason, but under the dominance of the principles posited in the state of nature, pure nature; and, secondly, under conditions such that the conjectures, since they depend on these incontestable first principles, cannot lead to different conclusions. Here is what Rousseau says at the end of the text I just quoted: ‘[T]he conclusions I infer from them will not thus be conjectural, since, on the basis of the principles I have established [those of the state of pure nature], another system could not be devised without the same results and from which I could not draw the same conclusions.’6 If this is so, I believe we can defend the following theses.
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Recourse to the heart is not just a phrase in Rousseau; the heart is not just a psychological faculty brought to bear, in a modality specific to the heart-faculty, on objects that it shares with other faculties. In Rousseau, the heart is a philosophical power, the power that resolves the antinomies of reason and society, the power of the true origin, separate and pure, pure of all contamination by denaturation or the effect of denaturation: the circular projection of the result onto the origin. The power of the separate origin, and pure, the heart is, properly speaking, the power of the pure concept of origin; that is, the pure or separate positing of this concept; that is, the pure or separate positing of its object and the pure or separate positing of its determinations. This separation and this positing are observable in the second Discourse. We may add that the heart marks itself off from denatured reason in order to posit the pure concept of the origin in its separation. It does not do so, however, in order to flee reason; quite the contrary, it does so in order to save it by transforming it under its dominance, under its guidance, under the guidance of the principles of the heart. Reason is thus everywhere present in the demonstrations of the second Discourse, but it has freedom only under the principles of the state of pure nature and on the condition that state represents.
If, with these results in hand, we now turn back to our starting point, we can observe the following. Of all the philosophers who think in the origin, Rousseau is, we said, the only natural law philosopher to have confronted and upheld the idea of the origin, the idea of the concept of the origin in its structure and applications, and the only one to have subjected it to a radical critique. He conducts this critique, however, as a critique of the false origin alone and in the name of the true origin, in which he thinks and which he posits as concept, existence, and contents. Formally, then, we remain in the origin, and we may legitimately ask: What can the distinction between the false and the true origin really change in all of natural law philosophy? What can the distinction between the state of nature as Locke and Hobbes understood it and Rousseau’s state of pure nature really change in natural law philosophy? What is the isolation of the state of pure nature? What, when all is said and done, does the essential difference that manifests the difference between the natural light of reason and the natural voice of the heart come down to? What, in the final analysis, can this difference really change about the basic philosophical commonality embracing all the natural law philosophers who think in the origin, Rousseau included? Can the variation, in the form in which we observe it in Rousseau, of an invariant, namely, the idea of the origin, have the slightest effect on this invariant’s structure? Can this variation, in the form in which we observe it in Rousseau, have the slightest effect on the nature of the object that constitutes this invariant’s signified?
This is where the plot thickens. We should take note of the following. For the unique form of the origin that he finds in his predecessors and contemporaries, Rousseau substitutes two origins, the false and the true. Thus the origin is redoubled and a distance is opened up in it, a distance between the false origin, which is criticized, and the true origin, which is posited. It is the distance between the error of his contemporaries’ circularity – where the result is thought as its own cause in the origin – and the true in Rousseau, where the origin is thought as pure, that is, as separate from its result and utterly different from its result. To the circle of an originary specularity – which is simply a justification of accomplished fact and the form par excellence of the philosophy of the accomplished fact, of the philosophy that thinks in the accomplished fact – Rousseau thus opposes another, pure form of origin, one not compromised in its result, one so absolutely separate from its own result that we may even wonder whether it has a result that we can call its result. Rousseau opposes an origin as a different world, separated from our world by something like a distance or an abyss [abîme], an insurmountable distance: an origin whose purity and separation are reflected, or would be reflected, precisely, in this abyss.
Rousseau thus opposes and proposes an idea of the origin that is at the same time, by all necessity, an idea of radical separation, of radical purity – in short, an idea of the abyss. I use this word in order to draw particular philosophical resonances from it, but it is a word that Rousseau himself repeatedly uses. This idea that Rousseau proposes is no doubt hard to uphold, but it is an absolutely necessary idea, an idea that is absolutely necessary if Rousseau wants to think in the origin while also upholding his radical critique of the origin. If Rousseau wants simultaneously to maintain the imperative of the origin – outside which nothing about what has occurred, that is, about its loss, can be understood; nothing about what exists today: society, law, government, inequality, or human passions in the struggle for goods, prestige, and power – if Rousseau wants simultaneously to maintain this imperative and to reject the perpetual speculary play of the false origin, where the answer never does anything but precede itself in the form of the question, this poses a serious problem.
I mean simply this: the redoubling of the question of the origin has nothing of the redoubling of the shadows cast on the back wall of Plato’s cave by figures moving past in the sunlight. Although Rousseau’s intervention redoubles the origin, the true origin is not the false origin’s double, it is a completely different origin. The heart is not simply reason’s double, it is a completely different power. As far as the origin is concerned, we may say that the heart is the power of the completely other. The origin is not redoubled the way Hegel’s one divides into two. It is the completely other which divides the origin, and it is the intervention of this completely other, in other words, of the concept of purity, of the concept of separation, that is inscribed in the coupling of the true origin with separation or the abyss – if by this notion of separation or abyss we understand, simply, the void created by the radical separation of the pure and the impure, nature and the denatured, by their absolute non-identity, their void, a void which, if it is taken seriously, must be thought one way or another, that is to say, must manifest itself in thought.
For, for as long as it is not thought, this void, this purity, this separation that Rousseau requires, demands, calls for – this void remains problematic and we remain uncertain, not knowing whether Rousseau has given us nothing but words, that is, the expression ‘pure nature’ without a concept, or whether he has committed himself to [s’est engagé dans] the concept of pure nature, the concept of purity, the concept of separation. What is more, we do not know, if these words are indeed concepts, what the meaning comprised by these words, comprised by these concepts, is. To say that we do not know what their meaning may be is to say that we cannot anticipate these concepts’ theoretical or philosophical effects on the basis of what has been said so far. For if it is true that a philosophical concept’s meaning is its effects, we cannot anticipate these concepts’ philosophical or theoretical effects.
For instance, at the point we have now reached, if we ask ourselves the question – What is the meaning of the redoubling of the origin in Rousseau? – we have every reason to suppose that all Rousseau’s work on the concept of the origin may concern the concept of the origin alone, that is, a concept supposed to exist in itself somewhere, which Rousseau endeavoured to remodel in a certain way: a remodelling of a form of philosophical thought that would, in some sense, leave its object intact. In the case to hand, what the meaning of the accomplished fact of the essence of society, law, and the state would leave intact is the meaning of the grand categories in which this object’s conceptual genesis is thought in natural law philosophy: that is, the meaning of the state of nature, the meaning of the contract, the meaning of the civil state, and so on. For as long as it is not thought in its object, this concept of purity, separation, or the abyss puts us before the accomplished fact of the philosophy of the origin and of its object, and its object of the philosophy of law – that is, law and law alone.
In other words, the question that arises is whether it is merely a matter – to put things in simple terms – whether it is merely a matter, in Rousseau’s texts, the second Discourse and The Social Contract, of the object that is also in question in Hobbes and Locke. Is it a matter of the essence of government? Is it a matter of the essence of law? Is it a matter of the essence of social relations? Or is it a matter of something else?
I want to suggest that it is a matter of something else and that we can say so because it so happens that Rousseau thought this concept – of purity, separation, or the abyss, if you like – in its object. This idea is registered in Rousseau’s works in a certain number of passages of The Social Contract, but, above all, throughout the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The result of this idea of Rousseau’s is quite surprising. In other words, I would like to point out that the critique we have been following up to now, which I have explained in somewhat abstract fashion, perhaps, shows us that what is at stake in this redoubling of the notion of the origin is not a certain way of treating Hobbes’s and Locke’s objects. At stake is the appearance – in profile, perhaps, but the appearance in person nevertheless – of a new object.
That is what I meant to say in suggesting that the result of this thought of Rousseau’s – inasmuch as Rousseau did not merely utter words, but tried to think what he was saying – is really quite astonishing. In other words, the difference that goes to work on [travaille] the concept of the origin and distinguishes the false origin from the true origin in Rousseau opens up a new space for a new philosophical object. In other words, in this separation that Rousseau carries out before our eyes, which seems to bear only on already existing objects, there appears an object that did not exist before. It is this object that Rousseau proposes to us. We shall see what the meaning of this object is when we move on to the second moment of this lecture, which I announced last time. The first moment, you will recall, was the concept of the origin. The second point in this lecture could be entitled: ‘The moments of the genesis of the second Discourse and their theoretical effects’.
We are going to put the following two propositions, with which we are familiar by now, side by side. First: withdrawal of the circular origin and, consequently, the necessity of positing an altogether different, non-circular origin. We shall now write a second proposition, which will serve as the starting point for our exposition: the necessity, given this first proposition, of positing a genesis altogether different from the classical geneses of natural law philosophy, an altogether different genesis that sets out from the non-circular origin required by the first proposition.
In other words, in the genesis that is specifically Rousseau’s, we shall see emerging, as its effect, the difference between the origins. We shall see what is at issue in the difference between the origins, what is at stake there, emerging in preliminary form in the specificity of the genesis inscribed in the second Discourse, On the Origin of Inequality. For, in the second Discourse, Rousseau introduces something that is completely new, if we compare him with his predecessors. He introduces, if I may be allowed this paradoxical expression, a new, and quite disconcerting, structure of genesis.
Why disconcerting? Because it is completely different from his predecessors’ genesis. It has been said about the genesis which, in Hobbes and Locke, brings us from the state of nature to the civil state by means of the social contract that it is not a real genesis, that it is not a historical genesis, that it is merely a genesis of essence. I think this thesis is perfectly defensible and perfectly correct. It has further been said that Hobbes’s and Locke’s genesis introduces nothing new, nothing new other than a philosophical–juridical justification of the established order or the order to be established. Rousseau saw this perfectly well in his critique of the false origin. Everything is already present in the origin: the principles informing the end are already contained in the origin, as the result is already contained in the origin. That is why nothing happens in the genesis; it is not a historical genesis. And that is why it is merely a genesis of essence, why the genesis introduces nothing new, why it is linear and continuous.
We can very schematically verify this very general remark, borrowed from Rousseau, by observing that, in the guise of natural law, one and the same essence is at work from first to last in Locke and Hobbes – whether it is fear in Hobbes (we never leave it, from the state of war to the civil state under the sovereign’s power) or natural law in Locke (we never leave it, whether it is a question of the state of nature or of its weighted redistribution in the civil state). In Hobbes as well as in Locke, then, the genesis is nothing but a correction, a secondary rectification, or a redistribution of the elements, which are the elements of one and the same essence. We never leave the continuity of essence, and that is why we have to do with an analysis of essence alone. Ultimately, it may be said, the grand thesis of the philosophy of natural law is that one never leaves natural law; one remains in its essence from first to last, inasmuch as the real law and politics that we know are merely reflective modifications of it, the purpose of which is to eliminate the extreme disadvantages of the state of nature.
In the second Discourse, Rousseau confronts us with a genesis that is quite surprising, because it is completely different from this genesis of continuity. As a function of, precisely, the critique of the origin and the refusal to project the result onto the origin, Rousseau offers us a genesis whose schema I shall sketch here.
The genesis of natural law separated by the social contract, the genesis of the second Discourse, is constructed this way. It has four moments. The first moment is the state of pure nature, which is to say that it is the pure origin in its separation. Why? Because the state of pure nature would have reproduced itself endlessly if big cosmic accidents had not intervened, that is, the change of the seasons, the cataclysm of the oceans, and so on, which force men to come together. That is, men who were living in the state of dispersion, in the universal forest, the vast forest in which they were lost and separated from each other and in harmony with nature, find themselves forced by that same nature to group together; and, from that moment on, something new begins. There begins the second stage of the state of nature, which comprises three degrees. A first state begins, a first stage, in which, under the impact of external constraints, man’s faculties develop at the same time as they are denatured. This is the beginning of a long process that we might call a process of maturation and denaturation, which begins with the beginning of the state of non-pure nature and runs down to the social contract.
In this second phase of the state of nature, men begin to come together and to establish among themselves a certain number of complementary relations that are favoured by need, proximity in space, and mutual assistance: they begin to invent language, begin to invent reason, and so on. This development continues until the moment it reaches a kind of point of satisfaction, of maturation, the point at which it starts going round in circles, exactly as the primitive state of nature had gone round in circles. This is what Rousseau calls the state of the ‘youth of the world’;7 it is the state in which humanity would have preferred to come to a halt, if man had had the choice. This state of the youth of the world is a state in which there reigns what Rousseau calls ‘independent commerce’ [commerce indépendant].8
The expression ‘independent commerce’ has a very precise meaning. ‘Commerce’ means relations of men with one another. ‘Independent’ means relations of men with one another in which no man is subordinated to another. Each man’s life is independent; that is, a free, mutual relation of men with one another. At this point, things would have gone on indefinitely if a second historical accident of universal scope had not intervened. It was not, this time, the work of external physical nature alone; men no doubt had a part in it, although we do not know how. The result, in any case, was the invention of metallurgy.
The invention of metallurgy is the second big accident. ‘Accident’ should be taken to mean something which is not precipitated by previous developments, and which changes everything. Metallurgy makes the development of agriculture possible, and, from the moment that agriculture begins to develop, men gradually settle in the forests, or learn how to win ground from the forests. After a certain point, there are no more forests: all the forestland is converted into fields, men’s property. And, since the earth is round, men will now find no space in which to settle unless they fight those already occupying it, unless they engage in conflicts with those occupying the first tracts of land won from the forests. We then have the state of war.
The third circle, as you can see, sanctions the third phase of the state of nature. It is after the state of war that men, seeing the trials and tribulations to which they have been exposed, decide to conclude a social contract in order to establish the civil state in the society of men; they do so in the very special forms of the second Discourse, that is, on the initiative of the rich. You can see this quite extraordinary structure. First, a state of nature broken down into three stages; then a state of pure nature, completely isolated from the rest; then this state of nature, broken down into three phases, with the first two separated by natural accidents, and the second and third separated by another accident that is not simply natural, but is an accident nevertheless. Finally, the social contract intervenes to establish the civil state. Let us say that this structure of the state of genesis is quite surprising, compared with what natural law philosophy has bequeathed to us.
I believe we can say, at first glance, if you will, that what emerges from this schema is that, contrary to what we see in Hobbes or Locke, Rousseau’s schema shows us differences that are irreducible, essential modifications, modifications of the essence, discontinuities of essence, and leaps in the process. We may say, broadly speaking, the following: what happens at the end is not reducible to what happens at the start. This genesis is therefore discontinuous. If it is discontinuous, it can no longer be a simple analysis of essence. If it is no longer a simple analysis of essence, it is because it concerns a new object which it produces by its functioning, an object that has to do with something other than mere law, the theory of the essence of law or the essence of the political. It is an object that has to do with something that we must clearly call history.
We are going to examine this structure a little more closely. We shall see that, compared to the classic structures, it is literally dismembered. Where continuity held sway, what is imposed are particular forms of discontinuity. The genesis is punctuated by major, profound gaps, breaks, and hiatuses. Let us try to make all that a little more precise.
Firstly, what strikes us right away is that the state of nature is dismembered. Rather than one and the same essence unifying the state of nature, whether it is war and fear in Hobbes, or natural law and peace in Locke, we see the state of nature cut up into three discontinuous moments:
• pure nature;
• the state of nature down to the genesis of the world that we could call the state of peace;
• the state of nature down to the state of war that we could call the state of war.
Between each pair of states of the state of nature there is a discontinuity, the intervention of chance occurrences, hence of causes external to the internal process and bearing no relation to it whatsoever: interventions whose effect is to make it possible to leave the endless circle of repetition or reproduction of the endpoint previously reached. These are thus very special discontinuities, for the external causes, the chance occurrences that intervene between (1) and (2) or between (2) and (3) – these chance occurrences intervene at the very moment at which the process is caught in a circle, that is, reproduces itself on itself, goes round and round as if on a wheel. Thus the intervention of chance, of causes external to the process, presents itself as a contingent but necessary prohibition [sanction] of the circularity of a process of reproduction incapable of developing. The state of pure nature is incapable of leaving itself by itself; chance occurrences must intervene. The state of nature of peace, let us say, cannot leave itself by itself; a chance occurrence, the invention of metallurgy, has to intervene. In other words, there is coincidence, second-degree chance, between the intervention of chance and the situation in which chance intervenes. It is as if the situation of endless circularity required chance, because this situation cannot leave itself by itself.
Second remark: these circles – when things turn around themselves by themselves, reproduction that cannot leave itself – which coincide with the intervention of external causes are all, with one exception, results of a process, a genesis. All these circles – the circle of the state of peace, if you will, the youth of the world, the circle of the state of war – are the results of a previous process. But the circle of the state of pure nature, for its part, is not. It is a circle that has no past, that has no genesis, that is the result of nothing, that is its own positing in reproduction, in repetition, that is outside all history. Yet it is that setting out from which a genesis, albeit impossible, will become possible. This genesis, however, will be a discontinuous genesis, and this genesis will be a genesis whose cause is not contained in the state of pure nature. More exactly, it will be a genesis of which the state of pure nature, that is, the state of origin, is not the beginning. In other words, things begin [ça commence] after the origin.
What is perhaps still more striking, however, is not just that the state of nature is dismembered, but also that which advenes between the state of war and the civil state, between (3) and (4) – that which advenes at the moment of the contract. You will recall what we said about the civil contract in Hobbes and Locke: the matter is obviously very complicated, but we can nevertheless affirm that, in both of them, the contract, albeit a form that intervenes in order to reorganize a preceding state, is a form that stands in a continuity of essence with the preceding state. The contract intervenes in order to redistribute, to limit, natural law; but it is natural law which limits itself and redistributes itself. It might seem that this is the case in Rousseau too. Not at all. Beneath the seeming identity, we in fact discover a profound difference.
In what does this difference consist? In the fact that the effect of the contract in Rousseau is neither to limit natural law nor to redistribute forces deriving from natural law; the effect that the contract has in Rousseau is the constitution, a constitution, of a radically new reality. In Rousseau, the contract is constituent [constituant]. This is what Rousseau expresses by saying that it is necessary to ‘denature man’, an astonishing expression. Let me remind you that we are at the end of the process of denaturation, the process of denaturation that begins with (2) and ends at the end of (3). Thus we are at the moment of the social contract, the end of the process of denaturation, of the loss of original nature. And the contract must consist in denaturing man. ‘Good social institutions’, Rousseau says in Emile, ‘are those best fitted to make a man unnatural [dénaturer l’homme], to deprive him of his absolute existence and give him a relative existence … Plato only sought to purge man’s heart; Lycurgus has denatured it.’9 And, in The Social Contract, Rousseau declares that ‘one who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is capable of changing human nature, so to speak’.10
We could cite countless other passages, but what is important is the word ‘denatured’. If we keep it in mind, the arrangement of the schema that I’ve put on the blackboard will take on an additional meaning. For what happens between (3) and (4), between the state of war and the civil state, is well and truly a discontinuity that is of a very special type compared with other discontinuities; it is not the same kind of discontinuity. Rather, this type of discontinuity, which Rousseau calls a ‘denaturation’, must be related, if it is to be understood, to another discontinuity, the one between (1) [on the one hand] and (2) and (3) taken together [on the other]; that is, the discontinuity between the state of pure nature and all the rest of the process of the state of nature; that is, what happens in (2) and (3); that is, the process of denaturation.
If this is so, the leap, the constituent discontinuity of the social contract in Rousseau, is intelligible as denaturation only if it is a denaturation of the existing denaturation – in other words, alienation of the existing alienation, in other words, negation of the existing negation. I am using these terms deliberately; you will see why a little later. If, accordingly, this constituent discontinuity discontinuity stands out against the backdrop of the preceding result, the result of the process of denaturation inaugurated by the leap or discontinuity that brings about the shift from (1) to (2), and also by the discontinuity that brings about the shift from (2) to (3), then we see that what happens in (1), in the state of pure nature, is not just the condition for what happens in (2) and (3) (assuming that we have the two leaps or the two discontinuities that I pointed out to you), but also, beyond (2) and (3), by leaping over (2) and (3), over the whole of this genesis punctuated by the two discontinuities we just saw, that which happens in (1) is the origin of what happens in (4). That is, it is the raison d’être of what happens in the social contract, in which, at the end of the process of denaturation of the denaturation, originary nature finds itself restored, but on new bases. ‘To re-establish human nature again on new foundations’, as Rousseau says.
If all these remarks are well founded, they obviously entail a number of consequences. I would, however, like to point out to you right away that we have so far remained on a purely formal level; that is, we have observed these discontinuities as inscribed at that level. We have to go beyond these formal descriptions. That is, we have contented ourselves with describing a discontinuous genesis to bring out certain features of this discontinuous structure. We should not, however, forget that, just as the structure of the analysis of essence in Hobbes and Locke concerned philosophical objects and, through them, political objects – we should not forget that what Rousseau is putting into place also concerns objects: first of all, the objects of classical theory, that is, natural right, natural law, the state of nature, the state of war, the social contract, and so on.
What I would simply like to point out here – we will, I hope, soon see it more clearly, in detail – is the following. If the structure of the form of justification and presentation of the essence is changed – you can see the form it takes here in Rousseau – in other words, if the form of genesis is changed, if what had constituted it, that is, its continuous identity, is changed, and if genesis now appears as discontinuous (with specific discontinuities, different in each case), chances are good that the nature of the objects that this genesis is charged with sustaining, is charged with justifying, will find itself, if not turned topsy-turvy, then at least affected. And if we go a bit beyond formal description, we can in fact see that the simple formal dispositive that we have just examined has the following consequence: the classical categories of natural law become problematic and sometimes even unrecognizable.
I shall examine three points. First point: the state of pure nature. To begin with, I would like to justify this term, because I do not believe that it is commonly accepted; I would like to point out several passage in which Rousseau talks, in the second Discourse, about the first state of nature. Let us say that, on at least six or seven occasions, he uses the expression ‘state of pure nature’ or ‘pure state of nature’, distinguishing this state from other, later states, and so on. When he talks about the pure state of nature or first state of nature, it is always in order to distinguish it from later states, that is, in order to exhibit it in its separateness: ‘how far these peoples already are from the pure state of nature’.11 The state of nature in its purity, which Rousseau opposes to the state of nature into which the fruit of a state of excessive corruption, the state of despotism, falls,12 and so on. It is, I believe, easy to provide textual accreditation for the term.
On the basis of this dispositive of genesis, the status of the true origin represented by the state of pure nature becomes problematic and all but unrecognizable; that is, a natural law philosopher can, literally, no longer find his bearings in it.13 It is necessary to begin with this state of pure nature because it commands the whole critique of the old origin, and because it is its separation which initiates all the rearrangements of the classic, linear dispositive of the genesis. It is, in other words, the fact that this state was isolated at the outset which initiates the whole series of discontinuities and the strange form of the genesis. The state of pure nature, however, has a paradoxical status. Why? Because, firstly, the origin must be an origin; and, secondly, because, as we know, it must not contain the result itself in abstract form. Consequence: the origin must therefore be the non-result, that is, the negation of the result, that is, the radical absence [néant] of any result. Thus the state of pure nature will necessarily be, in Rousseau, the concrete figure of the radical absence of society, the radical absence of social relations, the radical absence of sociability, the radical absence of natural right, the radical absence of natural law, and so on. How is it possible to represent radical absence? Rousseau does in fact represent it: he endows it with a concrete figuration that might be called Gestaltung in the Hegelian sense. It is the realization of this negation.
Here I shall sketch a few of its general features. Rousseau represents man not as a man (at this point, this is the essential precaution he takes, one of the essential precautions, so as to eschew any projection of the result onto the origin), but as an animal: both less-than-animal, in the sense that man does not have certain faculties that animals do – in particular, crows, who have a language, whereas men in the state of pure nature do not speak – and also more-than-animal, in that man has, for example, an undifferentiated instinct: he can live on any kind of food, which is not true of animals, and so on. A man, then, in the animal state, living in dispersion and solitude – dispersion being one modality of solitude – living in the instantaneousness of the instant, the instant of need, the instant of life, the instant of sexual relations, the instant of death as well (he dies without noticing it, for example, and also lives without noticing it, at the limit) – encountering other men only by accident and in such a way that the encounter never establishes any lasting bond, for the other wanders off into the forest, so that one man never encounters another twice. The encounter is subject to the rule that ‘you will never encounter me twice, and every time you encounter me, you will lose sight of me’.
Behind all these concrete figurations, we discover the following: we discover that man, whom no rationality, sociability, need, or language brings close to other men (for nothing of all that exists) – we discover that this man can only live in this state of absolute solitude on one condition: the relationship he maintains with what Rousseau calls nature, which is obviously physical nature, or the relationship physical nature maintains with him. This nature is obviously quite special. It is at once a nature in which there are no seasons, for the weather is always fair: that is, a nature in no way hostile to man, and also a nature that offers him both sustenance, immediately, in easy reach (fruit; all he need do is stretch out his hand), and repose (the shade of a tree, or the refuge of a tree if he is pursued by wild animals, and so on).
This nature is, then, the forest. I believe one can say that the forest in the Rousseau of the second Discourse is a concept, not an object. The forest is the truth of the state of nature, the concept of the state of pure nature, the condition for realizing the solitude and the condition for realizing the non-society that define man. It is a nourishing, protective forest, full because it offers men all they need, instantaneously, immediately, without labour; yet it is simultaneously empty – above all empty, because it is a space without places. It is the infinite, empty space of dispersion and the simple encounter with no morrow. The forest is a space without place, a space without topos. This space of the forest is at once always present, in the form of nourishment and refuge, and always absent. It is the realization of the existence of the state of pure nature.
The important thing is that recourse to the forest is indispensable for Rousseau if he is concretely to figure this state of pure nature. In the nature of the forest, Rousseau has to look for and find the conditions of possibility for the existence of the state of pure nature. For, plainly, he must conceive of, must think, what the existence of non-social men with no social bond might be. When I told you that Rousseau thought separation, thought purity – here we are at the very heart of this question. What does it mean to think this separation? It means thinking non-sociability, the total absence of bonds among men, utter solitude. On what condition of possibility is this solitude possible? It clearly has to be thought: the concept of this condition of possibility is the forest, is nature, this nature in this form. Thus it is nature alone, that is to say, a certain disposition of nature, the forest plus the permanence of the seasons, or, rather, the absence of seasons, which makes it possible to think the state of pure nature.
However, a crucial consequence appears: the foregrounding of man’s relation to nature throughout the dispositive of the genesis, in order, precisely, to meet the requirements of Rousseau’s argument. Nature is introduced into the theory from the outset of the pure state of nature (I mean physical nature); it is introduced there as a substitute for society to make it possible to think a humanity in the zero state of society, the state of the radical absence of society. We may say that the forest is the society of non-society. And the nature introduced into Rousseau’s thought, into the genesis, by this theoretical requirement, will remain there and play a determining role there to the end.
This is one of the most surprising effects of the redoubling of the origin in Rousseau. Rejection of the circle, rejection of the projection of the result onto the origin – in other words, the refusal to grant any social character at all to the origin – prompt the appeal to physical nature as the solution to the problem of filling this void, of allowing this void to exist. The existence of radical absence [néant] is nature, is the forest. The fact that it has, of course, a mythical form in the state of pure nature does not matter much. What matters is that it is introduced into the system, and necessarily introduced there, as a substitute for that which the critique of the false origin has, in all rigour, expelled from it.
The fact remains that this state of pure nature, thought in this way as the radical absence of any social category, must be an origin, must be the good origin. It is a paradoxical situation: if it is an origin, it must be the origin of something, of the result; at the same time, however, it must not contain the least trace of this result. What can be done to resolve this problem? The fact is that Rousseau resolves it, using basically two means …14
To begin with, Rousseau attributes several different qualities to the man of the state of pure nature: four qualities, three of them positive, and another that is the quality of these qualities. The first three are self-love, freedom, and pity. The last, the quality of these qualities, is perfectibility. What is important in these four qualities is the pair self-love-pity, for this pair represents the virtual nucleus of the natural right of the future, of natural law, and of morality. Invoking the pair self-love-pity, which is a purely animal pair, since Rousseau says it is characteristic of animals as well as men, Rousseau rejects the classic thesis that identifies natural right and natural law with reason. Hence he wants to assign natural right a foundation prior to reason, which results from the development of human history – since reason itself results from the development of human history.
Rousseau accordingly posits the bad origin’s very opposite in the origin. That is, he puts the animal movements in it, which he will not discover again at the end, and, in particular, the heart in the form it takes in animal existence, namely pity. I do not subscribe to everything that is said about these subjects in the second Discourse, but it is interesting to see how Rousseau tries to cope with what he here imposes on himself – these two contradictory requirements.
We have to go further.
The essential feature of pity, which is the only relation to exist in the state of nature – compassion for one’s fellows – is a purely negative relation; it does not create a bond between men, who, moreover, do not encounter each other. It merely prevents them from harming each other if they should happen to meet. It is, I insist, a negative relation; thus, it is not sociability, social need, need for others – absolutely not; it is simply compassion, it is not harming others, not making a creature of one’s own kind suffer. It is therefore purely negative; this is how things would play out if men happened to meet.
I say ‘if they happened to meet’, for, in the state of nature, they practically never do. That is the most surprising paradox in Rousseau. The originary qualities that he attributes to men in the state of nature have practically no existence, no use, no meaning there. For example, the freedom that he attributes to man, along with the metaphysical qualities, has absolutely no existence in the state of nature; one does not at all see what role it could play there. It is simply there in abeyance [en attente], but it serves no purpose. Pity, in its turn, also has practically no existence there – practically none, because men practically never meet, or, at any event, never meet twice. Pity, too, is in abeyance. As for perfectibility, it has no occasion to come into play, since the essential feature of the state of nature in which perfectible men live is that it repeats itself, thus ruling out all progress.
We may therefore say that Rousseau resolves the paradox involved in having to think an origin separate from any result by attributing qualities to man which are, firstly, not social and, in particular, animal; and which are, secondly, theoretically or practically virtual, including the virtuality of these virtualities known as perfectibility – which is expressly said to be of no use in the state of pure nature, although it is attributed to men. In the state of pure nature, men have qualities that are of no use, but are simply there in abeyance, waiting to be reclaimed in the world of the social contract.
That is the first solution. The second solution, however, is much more imposing. It is the one in which Rousseau posits the origin and cuts it off from all genetic continuity of birth with its result: it is the utter powerlessness of the state of pure nature to develop. The origin is trapped in a circle, which I have depicted. It is the perfect adequation of man with nature; nature is good, and so on; men are very well off there; everything goes endlessly round and round, and nothing makes it possible to leave it. The origin cannot leave itself by the logic of its inner essence. The inner essence of the state of pure nature is the inability to develop on its own. The inner essence of the origin is therefore to be incapable of producing any result.
It is in this way that Rousseau does the most to guard against the origin of the result, against this little ‘of the’. He cuts. No development, no sequel, a state without sequel. At the limit, the origin is the origin of nothing. At the limit, it is posited in the form of negation as such. Here is what Rousseau says: ‘After showing that perfectibility, the social virtues, and other faculties that natural man received as potentialities could never have developed on their own, that to do so they needed the fortuitous convergence of several external causes that might never have arisen and without which man would forever have remained in his primitive condition’, and so on.15
I now come to the sequel. We who read Rousseau and discuss him know that this origin, which is an ‘origin of nothing’, is nonetheless the origin of present-day human society; we know, that is, that a result has taken place. It is the confrontation between this origin – of which the conditions of existence constitute the negation – and the result of this origin which is powerless to produce anything that will confer its meaning on the powerlessness of the origin and this having-taken-place, this result that has taken place. It therefore seems to me that the powerlessness of the origin is a rejection of linear genesis, that is, a rejection of the analysis of essence; but, for this reason, it is, in the structure of the origin, the inscription, in its radical separation from any result, the inscription of another idea: the idea of separation, that is to say (now we have made a little progress!), the idea of events foreign to the essence of the originary state, the idea of the having-taken-place: ‘to do so they needed the fortuitous convergence of several external causes that might never have arisen and without which man would forever have remained in his primitive condition’. The idea, in other words, not just of events, but of the contingency of events; in other words, the idea of advening, of taking place, and the idea, as well, of the necessity produced by these events. In short, a thought that inevitably revolves around – revolves around, and inevitably tends towards – something like history.
It is not, however, the state of pure nature alone, about which I have just said a word or two, that becomes problematic in Rousseau. All the master categories of natural law philosophy do too. Natural right and natural law, for example: it takes the whole material genesis of the state of nature to constitute them. They only begin to become effective at the end of state (2) and the beginning of state (3), before being engulfed by the state of war. To make their constitution possible, the external conditions allowing the virtual principle (which I mentioned earlier) of natural right to take form must be fulfilled; in other words, the conditions that allow pity to become morality.
Why external conditions? Why the intervention of these chance events? Because the internal conditions of the state of pure nature are powerless to bring about their development; because external nature in the form of the big cosmic accidents must force men to come together and become other in order to meet their needs and, accordingly, transform or begin to develop the first gestures of sociability among themselves.
Once the state of pure nature is posited as separate, thus lacking an internal logic of self-movement or self-development, the pre-social principles of natural right can develop only under the impact of external conditions. ‘Taking form’ – that pity should take form, and take the form of morality – ‘taking form’ means something very precise in Rousseau. It means inscription in forms produced and prescribed by external constraints. That is why these notional realities, such as natural right, natural law, or sociability, must appear problematic. The same holds for sociability, reason, language, and, as well, the state of war – so many problematic states or faculties.
What can ‘problematic’ mean here? Two things. Firstly, Rousseau calls into question the fact that these notions were taken for granted by natural law philosophy. Rousseau calls into question the fact that these notions were given in the self-evidence of presence for natural law philosophy, denouncing it in his denunciation of the circle of the origin. These notions are thus problematic in that first sense: they are called into question, they constitute problems. They are, however, problematic in another sense as well, one far more important for us. They are problematic because they pose a question completely different from the question of essence, the one that held our attention in this first remark. They pose a question that is the question of existence. Once the continuity of essence is interrupted, once the analysis of essence is abandoned, what becomes a question is existence itself, the conditions of existence of such-and-such a form of the essence.
What is problematic [la problématicité] is, therefore, the posing of the question of existence, of the forms of the advent, the forms of the taking-place, the forms of the irruption of existence. From this point on, the genesis becomes a real genesis, occurring in real time (even if the time that Rousseau is talking about is mythical): real phenomena that are materially distinct, materially distinguishable. At this point, new concepts appear in Rousseau’s discourse: concepts such as the concept of accident, the concept of contingency, the concept of event, the concept of the accumulation of causes, the concept of existence, and concepts in which we can think other concepts of Rousseau’s, such as constitution, irruption, and so on. However, throughout this process of questioning, of problematization, we see the determinant role of the physical nature that intervenes in the genesis. As in the case of the pure state of nature, physical nature has the role of creating the conditions of existence and apparition of the various forms that the origin is powerless to produce. This seems to me to be fundamental in Rousseau.
We can say, then, that the whole dialectic of human development is conditioned by the dialectic of men’s relationship to nature. Indeed, after the stable, nourishing, protective nature of the beginning, we see a catastrophic, chequered nature appear with the first big accidents, a nature hostile to men that produces three combined effects on them which will make it possible for them to begin to live together.
First effect: nature forces them to come together physically; it forces them to establish physical contact by assembling them. For example, Rousseau thinks that societies first emerged on islands after big catastrophes …16
Secondly, nature forces men to develop their qualities in order to satisfy their needs, inasmuch as the course of the seasons has changed and nature is no longer as generous as it was. Men have to work.
Thirdly, nature forces them to help each other in order to satisfy their needs.
It is from this gap between nature and men, this separation between nature and men – whereas, in the state of pure nature, there was no separation between nature and men – that there emerge, conjointly, the first forms of observation, reason, language, social exchanges, the passions, and so on. After a great deal of time has gone by, we observe a transformation of the nature of space; in certain clearings, huts appear – men go to work building huts. This is extremely important, because it is the introduction, the apparition, of topos in interior space, of place. Men now have a fixed place; place appears in this undifferentiated space, the place of huts. This is the moment corresponding to independent commerce and the youth of the world.
The same relationship to nature accompanies all the subsequent genesis from the third moment of the state of nature down to the state of war, after the discovery of metallurgy. The discovery of metallurgy makes possible agriculture and its development. The appropriation of land follows agriculture and changes everything, over two periods. In the first period, says Rousseau, there is still some forest left. That is, men have not appropriated everything; anyone wishing to settle down can settle in the forest. At this time, servitude does not reign among men.
In the second and final period, there is no forest left; it is in this moment that the state of war reigns, because, to appropriate land, proprietors have to eliminate other proprietors; because every man wants to protect himself against attack; because the state of war à la Hobbes, that is, a universal and preventive state, now reigns among men. In all this, however, the relationship to nature is extremely close, as you can see. I therefore think we can conclude that problematizing the notions of natural law philosophy entails, in Rousseau, among other things, the need to bring men’s relationship to nature into play as determinant, even if it is mythical, and, very precisely (since he describes it in these terms), the way men obtain their subsistence: the mode of production of men’s subsistence.
One more consequence remains to be drawn from the dispositive of the genesis based on the separate origin, the origin as separated, and the origin’s powerlessness to develop by itself. If the origin cannot develop by itself, it is because it is pure and separate. If it can develop only as an effect of external causes that disrupt its conditions of existence, and therefore its forms of existence, the inevitable conclusion is that this development can only be contradictory: it will indeed be the development of primitive man’s faculties, but under conditions that will denature them. Here we must be clear about what we mean: denaturation, in Rousseau, is not moral denaturation, a transition from goodness to evil, for example, from one quality to another, from one attribute to another, from one opposite to another. To be able to oppose one contrary to another, one has to be in a common element: one has to be, for example, in social life, to which goodness and evil belong. Denaturation, therefore, cannot be the transition from one opposite to another in the same element, because the development of the origin is, precisely, transition to another element. This is an important point. The transition to another element, that of men forced to live in close proximity, subject to need, and so on. Denaturation, then, is necessarily bound up with transition to another element, in which there exist the previous forms that are transported into it.
In itself, this other element – the various forms in which men come together, their enforced sociability as a function of their relationship to nature – is neither good nor bad. The forced precipitation of the originary element and man’s originary qualities into the other elements of the state of nature produces antagonistic effects of denaturation. The originary qualities can develop only on condition that they are deformed by this development. They are deformed by the element in which they develop. Gradually, they become unrecognizable, until they reach, at the end of the state of war, the state that is as sharply opposed as possible to the state of pure nature.
Here too, we have to do with a process that is completely different from the process of the genesis of essence as found in Hobbes or Locke, since we have to do with a process of real difference, a process of antagonistic development that takes the form of a process of denaturation or alienation. This denaturation is the separation of the origin from itself; it is the non-identity of identity; it is the developed contradiction of the origin as the other of its result in the result, as the other of the origin.
To conclude these reading notes on Rousseau, I would like to tell you how, as I see it, these ideas, which bear on or turn on history, present themselves in Rousseau. This is directly related to everything I have just told you. In the guise of a theory of natural law, and in the guise of a theory of the true origin, and thanks to the critical redoubling of the origin that we have witnessed, we see the emergence in Rousseau – I do not say that he does this deliberately; it happens, it takes place this way – we see the emergence in Rousseau of an idea that is quite foreign to natural law philosophy, that is not intended by that philosophy, that is not the intentional idea of a philosophy of natural law, and that may even be quite unintentional in Rousseau: the emergence of what I call an idea of history or ideas for a history, for the purpose of elaborating, going to work on, the concept of history, ideas for fashioning the concept of history. What I would like to point out in concluding is that, if we examine the matter at all closely, we do not have to do with a single body of ideas with which to elaborate the concept of history; we have to do with a double corpus, in other words, with a double idea for history, with a double idea about history.
We can range this duality of thought under a division that would, first, put what happens in the state of pure nature in relation with what happens in the civil state. In other words, let us put the state of pure nature and the state of the social contract in relation; that is, we put the origin and the end in Rousseau in relation, what must plainly be called the origin and the end, whatever the calamities that separate this origin from its end. We have, after all, reached the end and are in it; there is nothing to be done about it; and even if all that was contingency, that is just how it is now. We are in the end, and it is here that the social contract intervenes, which is the denaturation of man and the denaturation of the denaturation.
At this point, the process appears to be, from beginning to end, an antagonistic process, since it is a process of denaturation; at the same time, it is a teleological process, since the end is the origin restored. That is why we can say that Rousseau is the first theorist to have thought history in the category of the negation of the negation, the first to have thought the historical process as a process of antagonistic development in which nature is negated, the negation is negated, and originary nature is re-established on new foundations.
The theorist who expounded this thesis is Engels: you will find two pages in Engels in which he defends this thesis – I don’t have the time to read them to you – in Anti-Dühring. I’ll read you the end of the passage nevertheless:
Already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a line of thought which corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx’s Capital, but also, in details, a whole series of the same dialectical turns of speech as Marx used: processes which in their nature are antagonistic, contain a contradiction; transformation of one extreme into its opposite; and, finally, as the kernel of the whole thing, the negation of the negation.17
The negation of the negation is the whole of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
I think that this thesis can be put to polemical use, and I realize that it can perhaps be defended with respect to Rousseau. The comparison with Marx seems more suspect to me. As far as Rousseau is concerned, I would simply say this: this theory of alienation – if we were to take it seriously, simply by saying: nature at the origin, denaturation of the denaturation, hence restoration of nature in a new element – neglects, in Rousseau himself (I am talking about Rousseau alone, I am not talking about what one might say about him), a crucial theme, the theme of the conditions of existence of this process. We know that these conditions of existence are thought in Rousseau, broadly speaking, by means of the concept of physical nature and of man’s relations to nature. In other words, the radical interiority presupposed by the process of the negation of the negation or denaturation of the denaturation is contested in Rousseau himself by the following idea: that one must posit an exteriority in order to think the process of interiority. An idea of exteriority is required to make the process of pure interiority possible.
I shall not say anything more about this form of interpretation, this form of an idea for history. I would like to point to another idea that is present in Rousseau and that seems to me more important, more original. It too, perhaps, is an idea that no one has noticed, as I told you last time.
For my part, I would single out the following themes.
First, if we examine this whole genesis in Rousseau, we observe that there are beginnings without origin that take three forms in Rousseau. First, the accidents. We have said enough about them for you to see how the thing intervenes: absence of an internal dialectic of development, external accidents intervene and things take off, whereas, previously, they were on a treadmill. Second form of beginning without origin: the irruptions that come about in very odd phenomena that are circles, circles once again – but not the ones we have discussed so far. These circles are mentioned by Rousseau in connection with the problem of the origin of languages, the origin of reason, and the origin of inventions. Each time, in connection with these three very precise examples, which Rousseau examines, he elaborates an antimony and explains that the result is required to produce the result; that is, that knowledge of languages is required to establish languages, since men have to enter into an agreement to be able to agree on words – thus they have to talk to be able to talk. The same goes for reason, the same goes for inventions. The argument about inventions is a little subtler and more interesting. Rousseau says that men can invent something by chance or discover something by chance; however, as the state of society, the social fabric, is not sufficiently close-knit, sufficiently dense, such an invention would be forgotten almost as soon as it was invented, quite simply because it would not succeed in inserting itself into a system of practices that would preserve and develop it. Consequently, the inventions that society requires in order to develop require society in order to exist.
We have to do with a whole series of circles of this kind. Every time that Rousseau has to do with such circles – which are not at all the same circle as the one we have discussed in connection with the origin – he brings a solution to bear that can hardly be thought otherwise than in the form of an irruption. In other words, he does not know how, but things come to a stop, that is, the circle is broken and something happens which has a purchase on the event that ends up conferring existence – that is, the phenomenon ends up coming into existence, ends up attaining an existence that lasts. That is what I would call, if you like, irruption [surgissement]. In the majority of cases in which Rousseau presents phenomena that have a circular form of that kind – that is, it would have been necessary, and the like – we always have to do with an index of irruption.
The third type of phenomenon in Rousseau is what can be called ‘the creative nature of time’. ‘[N]o attentive reader can fail to be impressed by the formidable distance that separates these two states. He will see in this slow succession of things the solution to an infinity of moral and political problems that philosophers cannot unravel. He will understand that … the human race of one era is not the human race of another.’18 The slow succession of things, the infinite slowness of the centuries, the infinity of time is, for Rousseau, the solution to all sorts of problems he cannot resolve in any other way. In other words, time is endowed with a productive capacity, that is, it is capable of resolving the problems of circles in particular, and it is capable of serving as a substitute for accidents. In other words, from accidents to the productivity of time, you see a whole series of graduations that make it possible to think what we might call the event or the beginning of something.
The second category that seems important to me – it is not thought in these terms in Rousseau, but the thought is there – is the process by which every contingency of historical import is transformed into a necessity. We may say that this is the essence of history, or, rather, that what is historical is necessary and that what is necessary is contingency [du contingent] that has been transformed into necessity [en nécessaire]. This is true of all the accidents that we have observed; it is also true of all the irruptions in the circles; it is also true of the contract. Every time that an important historical element intervenes, there appears what we may call a new historical element, a new element in history. In other words, there is a transition between the different levels; we move from one level to another. Contingency is transformed into necessity, but the necessity created by a new contingency is not the same as the old one. There are differences in degree and level between the necessities.
The third important point seems to me to be the antagonistic development at the heart of necessity, on the condition I mentioned a moment ago, namely, that necessity is brought into relation with external conditions that are absolutely determinant. I would here add something related to what I just said: we may say that, for Rousseau, each phase of historical development sketched in the second Discourse has its own law of development, a law different from the other laws of development.
This position directly recalls an article by a Russian critic quoted by Marx in the second preface to Capital, a passage in which the critic says that Marx was the first thinker to maintain that each historical period is subject to a different law.19
The fourth point – here we enter extremely ticklish zones – is that, for Rousseau, not every development is self-resolving. In other words, there exist insoluble problems; there are circles (since there are always circles in Rousseau), but there are also circles without a solution. There are insoluble problems: we could say, paraphrasing a famous sentence, that humanity sometimes sets itself problems that it is unable to solve. That is very much in Rousseau’s spirit. If we try to put it in a somewhat more conceptual way, we may say that, for Rousseau, there exist external conditions for the resolution of contradictions; that is why there are contradictions without a solution. These external conditions for the solution of contradictions are essentially men’s relationship to nature.
Finally, last theme, if you will. It is – since we are talking about contradictions and solutions – the contract. The fact is that there exists a particular solution to this last contradiction, the contradiction of the alienation of the state of war. This solution is that of men’s intervention; it is that of the contract, which establishes a new element (once again, we change elements here, hence laws as well, since each element has its own law) – which establishes an element that is new not just with respect to the immediately preceding state, but even with respect to the state of origin.
This solution is interesting; I told you that it is a solution in which the contract is constituent [constituant], that is to say, that it establishes (it is not at all a contract – if we analyse it in detail, we realize that the legal form in fact simply masks a veritable mutation) a veritable change of regime, a veritable constitution. We could characterize this solution as one that establishes, in the form of the reprise, a new beginning of the origin.
It would be a question, this time, of a new necessity that hinges on human will. What is interesting, but obviously very hard to conceptualize, is Rousseau’s acute awareness of the extraordinarily precarious character of the social contract. It is, literally, a leap into the void, as we could show in a study or by citing certain passages. It is something which is not without affinities with the events that proceed from contingency, a certain contingency, events which occurred earlier, but take on another form here, since it is a question of a human contingency, that is, of a voluntary act on men’s part which involves a tremendous risk. A leap into the void, if you like, so much so that we can say that the whole edifice of the social contract is suspended over an abyss. (I am using this word deliberately, because it is in connection with the contract that Rousseau uses it.) It is in connection with the problem of the social contract that Rousseau says that there exist two abysses in philosophy: the problem of the union of the soul and the body, and the problem of the social contract.20 When we read the Contract and a series of other texts at the same time, we realize that Rousseau did not just have in mind that it could be a question of a theoretical abyss, but also a question of an extremely risky political enterprise.